557. Can Burnham Deliver Britain's Biggest Change in Generations?

Can Andy Burnham, in a single term or less, fix problems like social care that are generations in the making? Is his new push for vocational education a long-overdue fix for Britain's broken skills system, or a betrayal of the working-class kids who have the most to gain from a rigorous academic education? As wildfires tear through France and Spain, have we already passed the climate and nature tipping point? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. __________ Enjoy Rory and Alastair’s interview with Kristrún Frostadóttir, Prime Minister of Iceland, by searching ‘Leading’ on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. 🌏 Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! Get an exclusive NordVPN deal + 4 months extra here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics. It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee! __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, Caroline Kaye Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Chris Sawyer General Manager: Tom Whiter 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.

• 0:01Alastair Campbell?

  Can Andy Burnham in a single term overcome problems that he says have been generations in the making? So we're into week two of the Burnham era and the steady flow continues, whether big policy objectives like reforming social care or the smaller policy tweaks on rates, bus fares, electricity bills and the like. This new prime minister is clearly not lacking in energy, activity or ambition. Also, he's opened the door to Number 10 North, he's met with President Zelensky and he's established a very different communication strategy to Keir Starmer with social media central to it. And when the New York Times fashion editor is sent to analyse your outfits, I think we can say you're making your mark. So far, so good then. And with Nigel Farage locked in a by-election battle with a bin and Reform UK struggling

• 0:44Alastair Campbell?

  with a host of financial scandals, Labour have moved ahead in the polls. But announcements are the easy part, delivery is much harder. And when you're promising the biggest change in 40 years, you're setting high expectations. Today, Andy Burnham has announced a whole new vision for education. Is this the sort of reform that could defy voters' cynicism and really change the country for the long term? That's the agenda for the Rest is Politics today.

• 1:12Rory Stewart?

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• 1:14Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:25Rory Stewart?

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• 1:59Alastair Campbell?

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• 2:14Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 2:16Alastair 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.

• 2:29Rory 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 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.

• 2:53Alastair 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?

• 2:59Rory 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/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics and the link is in the episode description.

• 3:15Speaker 02

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• 3:54Alastair Campbell?

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

• 3:57Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart.

• 3:58Alastair Campbell?

  He has sort of, I mean, I hate that cliche, hit the ground running, but he's kind of has hit the ground running. Every time you turn on the TV, Andy Burnham this, Andy Burnham that, newspapers keep leading on Andy Burnham, something new. What have you made of it so far?

• 4:09Rory Stewart?

  Two big things. I think one is it's lovely to see somebody who's a much more fluent communicator. I watched the Laura Kunberg Panorama interview and was very struck with the way that he dealt much more comfortably than Starmer would have done with challenges around, you know, his conversations with Trump and stuff. I mean, it's not rocket science, but Burnham has developed a much more easy way of sitting in his chair and not sounding like he's a sort of reading from a teleprompter. So I think that's great. I think that the bigger issue, I suppose, and he can get a long way on communication. I mean, I think a lot of the people that we've interviewed and we've liked on leading have just been great communicators and let's hope that he's able to get a bit of that energy that we got from Iceland or we got from Greece or we got from Spain or we get from Canada.

• 4:52Rory Stewart?

  The second thing, I guess, is dealing with the more fundamental problems in the country. And maybe we've got to the time now that we want to really think about what the big changes would be, what the governing changes would be. So maybe this is a chance to talk about devolution, chance to talk about adult social care, chance to talk, I know you wanted to talk about vocational education, but the kind of big policy changes that Burnham wants to bring and maybe a little bit about what he isn't talking about yet. What struck you on the policy side?

• 5:20Alastair Campbell?

  Just first of all, on your point about the communication, I was struck, you mentioned some of the people we had on leading, I was struck by something that Jeremy Hunt, the former Tory Chancellor and Foreign Secretary said, do you remember he said he wanted Keir Starmer to succeed, he felt it was important for the country that he did, and we don't want him to be like Donald Trump in terms of lying and bullying and intimidation, but he could actually learn a lot from the way that Donald Trump communicates, being in the conversation all the time. And I think Andy Burnham's decided he is going to be in the conversation all the time. I think on the policy side of things, I spent most of yesterday afternoon, about four hours in a studio talking to Steve Rotherham for a mini series that we're going

• 6:02Alastair Campbell?

  to be doing called Becoming Burnham, The Making of Andy Burnham, as it were.

• 6:06Rory Stewart?

  Remind us a little bit about who Steve Rotherham is and this book that he wrote with Andy Burnham.

• 6:10Alastair Campbell?

  Steve Rotherham is the co-author of a book, Head North, he's the mayor of Liverpool City Region, very, very close to Andy Burnham. They left Westminster together, they became mayors together, they've worked together very, very closely, not least on some of the policy agenda, but also when Boris Johnson was trying to divide and rule them in Covid, here's more for Liverpool, less for Manchester, they were having none of it, they're very much a team. But what was interesting, talking to him and indeed reading Head North, which I know you've done recently as well, was how a lot of what Andy Burnham is saying now, social care is a good example, vocational education is another good example, he's been saying it for a long, long time. He first proposed major reform of social care when he was Health Secretary in 2009.

• 6:53Alastair Campbell?

  It didn't happen, we've had 22 reviews of social care. None of that seems to have deterred him, saying, I can be the guy to do this. So there's a thread. And then I think it's the same on education. I have to say that my principal advisor on education policy, Fiona Miller, was really, really happy this morning because this review that he's doing social care today and he's basically done a piece, I think it's in the Times today, about education. But he's signalling a change that Fiona and others, and with my support, have been arguing for, for a long, long, long time. He did it in Manchester with this thing called MBACK, Manchester Baccalaurate, and it's all

• 7:35Alastair Campbell?

  about trying to raise the status of technical and vocational education and get greater links between education and the real world of employment and business. So it fits very much with the Alan Milburn agenda on a million young people not in education, employment or training. So I think, and here's one Rory, as you know, I don't like criticizing my old boss, but I think one of the first things that Lucy Powell, the new Education Secretary, could do is just dust off a report written 22 years ago by Mike Tomlinson, who's the former Chief Inspector of Schools. When David Miliband was Schools Minister and a brilliant Schools Minister at that, he

• 8:17Alastair Campbell?

  commissioned Mike Tomlinson to do a review of the issues that Andy Burnham is talking about now. And maybe David and Mike were just ahead of their time. I'd left at this point, it was 2004, I left in 2003, I think if I'd stayed, I'd have maybe fought quite hard because it basically got shelved. I think Tony was obviously weakened by Iraq, he was weakened by the Tories were starting to make the running a little bit, Cameron was making the running on education and the right wing press were into this, any change is dumbing down, smashing the gold standard, et cetera. You know, and obviously the world's moved on in 22 years, but a lot of what Mike Tomlinson talked about is so, so relevant to what Andy Burnham's trying to do now.

• 8:58Rory Stewart?

  Maybe it's a way of structuring the conversation, why don't we dive a little bit more deeply into this big question of vocational education and what kind of education system we want in Britain? And then maybe after the break, we can return to the other two really big subjects, I feel, which is devolution and adult social care. Digging into this question of vocational training, I guess the backstory to this is that Britain has become aware that it's not very good at vocational training. I mean, there are a few pockets of difference, but basically we look with envy traditionally at places like Germany or in a very different way, Switzerland, which seem to be much, much better at doing vocational training.

• 9:43Rory Stewart?

  And Ken Baker, who you famously love for his great test on local council elections, is always encouraging me to, he's now, I guess, about 90, to talk about his university technical colleges. There was a big drive even under the Cameron government, people like Nick Bolles very involved in trying to drive ahead with these new apprenticeship levies and ways that you could get companies more involved and helping people to work. There's the much, much older conversation about when we had a tripartite system of grammar schools, Secretary of Moderns, and whether that was supposed to be a vocational route. But broadly speaking, in Britain, I think the problem is that we have very, very good, very traditional, almost sort of 19th century education and actually GOV ratcheted that

• 10:28Rory Stewart?

  up. We do do quite well on numeracy, literacy, we have a lot of people going to university, our universities are very well respected around the world and we've built a whole series of sectors around elite university education. So that is pharmaceuticals, deep drug discovery, AI, high-end law, finance, all of which are generally graduate routes. But we haven't built what exists very strongly in places like Germany and Switzerland, which is well-respected, well-paid, skilled work for people not going down an academic route. Okay, over to you there because you've thought about this much more than me and Fiona thinks about this a lot.

• 11:08Alastair Campbell?

  You mentioned Ken Baker there and you say that I, I think love overstates it, but I certainly respected his political acumen when he managed to manipulate the median to thinking that one good council election win meant that the Tories had done really well. I was on a podcast recently for something called The Careers in Enterprise Company. And I was on with a young woman called Riley, who came from a very working class background in the North East. And she said that going to a technical college as set up by Ken Baker had completely transformed her life. And she also said that a lot of what the careers enterprise company tries to do is to develop, is to get more kids, particularly from underprivileged backgrounds,

• 11:53Alastair Campbell?

  into proper work experience programmes. And interestingly, in what Andy Burnham's talking about today, work experience is a big part of that. So I think there's a, you know, Ken Baker, I think, is one of those Tories who's got a proper legacy from the Thatcher era. But just to go back to Mike Tomlinson and his review, and it does feel to me like, I said on Social Care, Andy Burnham's been talking about the same things for so long. And Mike Tomlinson, I just had a quick reread of his report. And look, it would have to be updated because, you know, AI didn't exist, all sorts of other things didn't exist. But what he's basically saying is that we have to bridge this gap between academic and vocational learning and have a single framework.

• 12:38Alastair Campbell?

  And I think that if you think at a time when something like 10% of kids are actively not participating in school, don't want to go to school, Covid obviously made this so, so, so much, much worse. We can't just blame the kids and the parents for that. There's something about the way we're teaching kids that is deterring them as well. And, you know, what's the thing you hear from kids when you do go into school? So, well, I don't see what this has got to do with what I'm going to do in the future. I think he and Lucy Powell are going to have a hell of a fight with the Department of Education. The Home Office used to be the one that was seen by ministers as, you know, they try and stop you from doing anything kind of radical. I think the Department of Education is slightly taking over that mantle. So there's got to be a big change in mindset and probably change in personnel there as well.

• 13:24Alastair Campbell?

  Because this is a huge cultural change. And I think what Michael Gove did, Michael Gove, whatever we think of him, was a very, very powerful minister. And he packed a place full of people who share his agenda. And his agenda is basically, you know, kids from poor backgrounds like he was from, or, you know, fairly tough backgrounds like he was, you know, their future has to be in academic education. And lots of kids don't want that.

• 13:49Rory Stewart?

  Gove's case would be that most of the very most prestigious, best paid jobs that exist in our economy, the most productive jobs, the jobs at the frontier, require a university education.

• 14:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 14:03Rory Stewart?

  And he would also point out that wealthy parents, when they're choosing what to do with their kids, put them through a pretty traditional academic education. So if you're a wealthy person with all the money in the world and you're trying to work out what to do best for your kid, you're generally not putting them through a vocational route. You're trying to get them into university because I guess the parents believe that teaching them pretty traditional stuff, getting their maths good, getting their literacy good, getting them good GCSEs, good A levels, getting them into a good university is the path to, you know, work in tech or work in private equity or work in a law firm. Or, or, or in general, maybe the parent would say, just open up choices for them.

• 14:46Rory Stewart?

  They might choose to become a teacher, they might choose to become a carpenter, but they want to give them those options. So Gove's argument would be partly a class argument. He would say, as you say, he came from quite a poor, tough background. He was adopted in Aberdeen and he would say, he was very, very lucky that he was not in an environment where teachers said, well, you know, that's not really for you. But he was allowed to go to Oxford and he was able to do all these things. And I guess you might make the argument, not in your generation, but maybe for you over two generations. I mean, you got to Cambridge and you've had an amazing life. So the question, I guess, that Gove would pose is, how do you know when a, let's say, a 12, 13 year old says,

• 15:28Rory Stewart?

  look, this isn't for me, I don't want to keep doing maths, this literacy is boring, I want to just go and get a normal job? Are they underestimating themselves? Are they just responding to poor teaching? Could they be pushed harder and actually be grateful for it when they're older? Are people sort of giving up on them and putting them through a vocational route? And, and, and that what it's doing is creating a sort of deeper class division between the elite who are pushing ahead to universities and kind of worker bees who are just at 12, 13, everybody gives up on them and says, well, why didn't you go and do something else?

• 16:02Alastair Campbell?

  You see, I, I think it's, I think it's the opposite of that. I think we already have a sense of two tier and that this might be a way to address it. Because Tomlinson, and I'm, I'm sure that if, if Andy Burnham goes down a similar modern route for this, it will be the same. Maths, English and ICT were, were part of the baseline for all students. It was a mandatory baseline for all students.

• 16:26Rory Stewart?

  So you try to keep standards, standards high on that. You wouldn't say that people could opt out of maths. You'd push them to keep improving their maths skills, even if they didn't want to.

• 16:33Alastair Campbell?

  Correct. And I think a lot of the change in this has come, by the way, from the fact that we, you know, kids used to be able to leave school at 16 and now they're going on to 80. And it's, I think, a lot of them in those two years where maybe they would have gone off to be, you know, you were saying, electrician, carpenters, whatever. So that's the first thing. But then what you also do is you, you recognise and build into the system of marking of the diploma that you get at the end of this, work experience, what you do within the family. So many, a lot of the problem with the, the kids that Alan Milburn talks about, so many kids these days are carers. And also the, you know, volunteering and, and then specific projects that you do. So what you don't have is such a focus on a single exam

• 17:15Alastair Campbell?

  or a single set of exams that is going to set your future for the rest of your life. And by the way, I still think that it is important to try to develop and grow the people and the sorts of backgrounds those people come from that can go to university. But I think what, where, where I think Andy's absolutely speaking to something is the feeling that if you don't go to university, you are somehow a bit of a second class citizen. And I just think that's where you create the, the sense of two tier. So I think something that brings these two together, academic and vocational, that both are respected, that both are seen as valuable. And, you know, a lot of the universities weren't necessarily like this, some of them will. And I think the other thing, or your big thing, AI.

• 17:56Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, this is the other thing that's just, I think, forcing people to, to recognise the need for change in, in so many levels of education. I think we've got to change the way they're inspected. I don't know if I told you, I went to a school recently, I was talking to a, you know, a head teacher I know quite well, who had just been through the Ofsted process. And he said it, it came very close to breaking him. And he also said that in the run up to it, he's conscious of the fact, you're not really focused on educating the kids. You're focused on meeting this unbelievably rigorous, and it should be rigorous, but quite narrowly focused assessment of what this school does and how it does it. So I think all of these things should be up for, up for grabs.

• 18:41Alastair Campbell?

  And that's why I think, and related to Milburn's thing. And, you know, what did Alan Milburn show with his neat review? He showed that if you've got a good political mind and a big brain and you dig in and you do the research, you can start a debate going in the country.

• 18:54Rory Stewart?

  Tell us a little bit about, more about neat review. I think many listeners weren't really focused on the outcome of that neat review and what it concluded and why it was interesting for you.

• 19:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it hasn't yet concluded. It's in two parts. What Alan Milburn has written is an analysis of how we have got to a place where a million kids, a million young people are not in education, employment or training. I must give a shout out to the, the young woman I mentioned, Riley, on the podcast. She said, I don't like the phrase neat, we should call it leet. We're looking for employment, education and training. And then we rocked it around and said, what about deet? Desperate, we're desperate for employment, education and training. So Alan Milburn has done the analysis. He's got a big debate going on about how big the problem is. And then he's coming down, I think in September, in the autumn with policy solutions. And I think what he's done really effectively, and this plays into it,

• 19:44Alastair Campbell?

  is set expectations for big change in a policy approach as well.

• 19:48Rory Stewart?

  Next question from me. One of the things I noticed in Cumbria, where vocational training was very important. We, we were not a big graduate economy. But when people talked about vocational training, they were obsessed particularly with very specialised engineering vocational training suitable for the jobs on the Cumbria and West Coast. Working, for example, in BAE systems, the defence contractor, building submarines at Barrow or working on the West Coast in the nuclear industry. But the vast majority of people in Cumbria do not work in those sectors. And, and in fact, those sectors often produce quite high paid, but relatively low employment around places like Barrow with many people without jobs.

• 20:32Rory Stewart?

  Most people in East Cumbria, where I was based, were working in tourism, hospitality, care, retail. And there wasn't much focus on how you did good vocational training for the vast majority of the jobs. It's like 85% of the jobs, particularly for people who are non-graduates. Then I spent a few months living in Switzerland. And in Switzerland, that is what vocational training is a great deal about. It isn't about a weird sort of 1950s obsession that everybody needs to work in a high-tech factory.

• 21:10Rory Stewart?

  In Switzerland, you have a three-year company-linked proper programme on hospitality or on care. So let's say, I mean, it's a link to our care competition, you would spend three years learning how to be a really good carer. And every company would have proper trainers, curriculum, follow-up. Something like 60% of Swiss students go into vocational tasks. So, you know, I've got a friend who's a mountain guide, his daughter is going to become a, she, her ambition since she was 11 is to become an assistant in a dentist. She wants to become a, work at the front, front desk of a dentist, and she's now getting the back, backing to do that. And the result is, in Switzerland, partly through collective

• 21:55Rory Stewart?

  bargaining, you have people who are earning decent wages, who have pretty secure jobs, who have a pretty high level of training. And these jobs, which in Britain maybe don't have that kind of income, social capital, in places like Switzerland, to some extent Germany, you get it with, I mean, often you get in a taxi in Germany, you get a sense this is kind of guy earning a decent income, he's driving his Mercedes. So that, that's what I'm not seeing enough of in Britain. I'm seeing a lot of sort of nostalgia about, you know, maybe we could train people to work on building submarines. I'm not seeing much conversation about the jobs that most people are actually going to do and how we provide proper training for that.

• 22:34Alastair Campbell?

  What you've just described, I hope, is what he has in mind. So it was interesting today, Pat McFadden, who I think is a great guy.

• 22:43Rory Stewart?

  And just a quick reminder on Pat McFadden, because that's an interesting appointment, and he was in trouble with Meliband and his history. And because he's quite an interesting example of one side of the Burnham thing. We often talk about it as very self-left and progressive, but Pat McFadden has a reputation of actually being quite more fiscally responsible. Sorry, over to you on Pat McFadden.

• 23:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, so Pat McFadden, who stayed in his job at welfare, but he was on the radio this morning and on the television, doing the media rounds, talking about this vocational education. And there's two things I'd say. I mean, Pat, who I love dearly, I think he's a great guy, and he's been a friend for a very, very long time. But he can sometimes, you know, make you feel that your puppy's just died. You know, he can be a little bit, he can be a little bit dad about these. What was extraordinary about the interview I heard him do with Justin Webb on the Today Programme this morning? There was a, a power and a passion and an energy in his voice that sometimes isn't there. And I think it's, and, and he was speaking, your point about, he was saying, I'm speaking to you from Derby, because I'm

• 23:41Alastair Campbell?

  at the Alstom rail building place. And what I'm talking about is making sure that kids in Derby and the schools in Derby, they have the connections, da, da, da. You're absolutely right. So that's an obvious one. Okay. There are certain places that have got particular business connections, and it's absolutely sensible that schools and colleges build into that. But what you're saying is something, this has to go national, this has to go nationwide and take account of all sectors. And interestingly, we talked about some of this last week about the Treasury and devolution. And we, we have, you know, Gus O'Donnell phoned me up after our, our conversation, and he said, you know, he agreed with a lot of what both of us said. But he, he made the point that, for example, you were talking about

• 24:22Alastair Campbell?

  Cumbria, and we'd been talking a lot about Manchester. And he said, it's just a fact that entrepreneurs are more likely to gravitate towards places of population and places of entrepreneurial activity. So therefore, your point about agriculture, hospitality, tourism, the care sector, this is what I mean about changing the mindset about how we think about these things. So if you were thinking about, you, what you said, if you were thinking about vocational training, these are the sorts of jobs we think about, the guy who's building a railway carriage to export to wherever. But actually, building people who understand, want to work in, want to develop, want to develop as business people as well

• 25:03Alastair Campbell?

  as just carers, that's the kind of vision that I think he's trying to set out.

• 25:08Rory Stewart?

  Well, this, this is one of the things that I, I didn't do very successfully, but I'm struggling with all the way through that, that book, Middleland, because I'm trying to describe in Cumbria the fact that there's a tension between two different things. One is a very understandable obsession with frontier companies, high-end productivity, high-tech manufacturing, the big growth sectors, the economy. And then the reality, which is the vast majority of people in Britain, 85% of people in Britain, are working in service sectors which are not part of that. And they're, they have many other things going on in their lives. I mean, you know, I'm talking to you from Creve at the moment, and I was trying to think about the economy of Creve. So I went on a park run on Saturday, which

• 25:50Rory Stewart?

  was lovely, well, like 100 people, and there were 11 people volunteering on the park run. I then went to get a bicycle for the kids, and it's a man not taking a wage, repairing, he's a retired school teacher, repairing bicycles. Now, these people are not part of the frontier, cutting-edge, productive economy, they're not generating the kinds of returns on capital that the Treasury is looking for. And yet, they are the entire bedrock of Creve, right? They are keeping the whole thing going. They're making it this lovely place, which allows things like the park run, which have incredible benefits for people. I'm sort of trying to speak not just for Creve or Cumbria, but I guess I'd

• 26:31Rory Stewart?

  also be speaking for coastal towns, a lot of East Anglia. So, and, and that's where a proper Swiss system is really exciting and interesting. Because it's not doing what Germany sometimes looks like it's doing, which making a big bet on everybody's going to work in Volkswagen, and then suddenly working out.

• 26:49Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that's not going very well right now.

• 26:51Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. That your energy costs are too high, and the combustion engine isn't working, trying to competition, and then there isn't a job. It's really thinking, how do you, across, I think in Switzerland, 230 different sectors, provide proper support so that you have people saying, I'm actually very proud to be an assistant on the desk in a dental place, or a mountain guide, or work in care. Or actually, you notice this when you go into retail in Switzerland, go into a swatch shop, people are very, very proud about their professional skills, on how they work with a customer, et cetera. And so, so that may not be, you know, you, the, the point that you were making about where the most productive bits are, which may be London or Manchester Leeds conurbation.

• 27:35Rory Stewart?

  But it is very important for equality, for dignity, for self-respect, for incomes, that you build up that whole sector, even if it's not the bit that excites the Treasury.

• 27:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Just, you, just, you mentioned the park run. I remember Pat McFadden telling me that one of his proudest achievements was the growth of the Wolverhampton Park Run. He's, he's, he's a regular, a regular park runner. But I think this, this point about it being local, I mean, we're going to talk about devolution later, but I think this is something that can't just be left to the big businesses in the big cities. This is about, you know, when, when Fiona and I are in France, okay, and let's say you need to call out a plumber, or an electrician, they nearly always come with an apprentice. It's just built into the mindset of French culture that if you're a small business person, you can hire somebody that you take on at a, you know, a reasonable wage for somebody who's

• 28:28Alastair Campbell?

  entering the labour market, and they are your apprentice. Again, on apprenticeships, I think we often think of big employers. But in a sense, what we need to think about is a, is a mindset, is, is, you know, could we all, could you and I take on an apprentice podcaster, you know, George Osborne, or John Sople, something like that?

• 28:48Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. Train up George, yeah. But, but exactly. But I think that the final thing I'd say before the break is that if you wanted to really make Britain have something more like a Swiss system, it's a lot of energy, it's a lot of time, and it's a lot of money. Because you're starting from where we are. And I don't know, it, I think it would cost you billions of pounds more a year initially. You, you could get it back, but it'd probably be 15, 20 years. Small companies, including very small companies, would have to begin to think about how they think about training, supporting, the way in which schools work has to change from the age of probably 11 onwards. They have to start introducing people to different businesses, giving them time to go in and do work placements, develop

• 29:33Rory Stewart?

  a sense of where they want to. I think it's got to be the right thing to do, it's got to be the right thing to do. But I'd be interested maybe in, well, maybe we should get Fiona on, talk about what actually needs to happen, how much it would cost, what the priorities are to make schools and businesses go more in that direction, and whether she's talking about a Swiss model or something else.

• 29:53Alastair Campbell?

  I can't remember what timeline Tomlinson had in his report in 2004, but it's a long, this is a long-term project. This is not something that's going to be tweaked overnight. And that's why I think it's, it's actually quite exciting that he's thinking in these big, long terms. And so, and I think this is something that is going to go with the grain of what a lot of people in schools think, teachers and head teachers. I think it's going to go in the, within the grain of a lot of what parents think. I think it will help kids think, oh, yeah, maybe I would enjoy school more than I seem to do at the moment. I thought you were going to push back a lot harder from the, the kind of, you know, very traditional education point of view. So I think even somebody like you can

• 30:35Alastair Campbell?

  be persuaded that this is a good way to go. But I think you're right, that it's not straightforward, it's not easy, and it won't be cheap.

• 30:41Rory Stewart?

  And I think the pushback that I didn't give, and it took me a bit of time to get there, is that I think vocational training's greatest strength is giving, if it works well, like in Switzerland, dignified, well-paid work to the majority of people, including, as you say, 10% of people who aren't in the workforce at all. And that's a different argument from the idea that this is going to necessarily guarantee GDP growth, frontier companies, much of which is inevitably going to come from the university graduates who are driving the things that are driving the British economy, which are, you know, pharma,

• 31:21Rory Stewart?

  AI, tech, banking. So I, I think, again, and maybe this is where Burnham's saying he's trying to challenge economic models is important. We're saying that vocational training matters because we care about people's dignity, we care about their self-respect. We're not just saying it matters because it's going to generate more GDP growth. It may be that the American economy grows faster without having good vocational training.

• 31:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 31:47Rory Stewart?

  But the cost of that is you end up with a lot of people at the bottom of American society in a miserable situation.

• 31:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll take a break, and then we'll come back and talk social care and devolution.

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• 33:33Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 33:35Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. So Rory, we talked about his big idea or his big plans for reform on vocational education. And then of course, he also said, quote, "If social care is not reformed, the NHS is going to collapse." Well, that says, "Social care has to be reformed." And as I said earlier, he's been talking about this for almost 20 years.

• 33:57Rory Stewart?

  I mean, in a very weird way, the first thing that I noticed is that this social care and devolution stuff was what I came up with when I was trying to work out what I really believed in as I was running for leadership against Boris Johnson. And I thought, well, this is a bit odd. Why in 2019, as a Tory candidate, was I saying, "The number one big thing we need to do," and the story is basically that the NHS was a great revolution, but it was never completed because we never worked out what to do with the poor elderly who are seen, you know, in Cumbria 15 minutes a day by carers and who are imposing, living often very, very difficult lives, but also imposing huge costs on the, on the system. And my second thing was devolution, you know, give power down to local levels.

• 34:41Rory Stewart?

  So how did a Tory and a Labour person end up in the same place? And I, I thought there were two things that struck me. One was, maybe it's his Manchester side. So I think in terms of my story, it would be my experience working on the ground in Afghanistan and seeing the nonsense being produced from the capital cities or working on the ground in Cumbria and seeing the nonsense being produced from Whitehall. But the second thing is, my strongest memory on thinking about prisons and adult social care is your friend, Tessa Jau. And I remember Tessa Jau saying that the big question in politics is, would you put your mother in this hospital? Would you put your mother in this prison? Would you put your mother in this situation in care? And I think that is the great question in politics.

• 35:26Rory Stewart?

  And then of course, I remember that Andy Burnham began as the assistant to Tessa Jau. So maybe there's a great Tessa Jau story here. So that was the first thing. And then I thought, okay, here's two questions for you coming out of that. One is, if I was being self-critical, maybe the reason we come up with this is that they are obvious problems in the country, but they're things that are particularly appealing to somebody who's an insurgent outside, trying to run against the establishment. And that when you get inside, it may turn out to be very different. And the second criticism you might make of us is, we're spending a lot of time talking about the vulnerable. So it could be adult social care, could be the homeless. You know, you've just done this great piece on homelessness in the newsletter.

• 36:10Rory Stewart?

  In my case, it could be prisons. But what are Andy Burnham and I not talking about? You might say, we're not talking that much about how we're generating the economic growth and the money to fund this whole thing. Okay, back over to you.

• 36:21Alastair Campbell?

  That's interesting that you sort of see it in that light. And so in a way, you as a conservative, coming to the same policy attitude, mindset as Andy, who's clearly not a conservative and is, you know, pretty left of center. Very interesting as well, how he made an appeal, an approach to the opposition parties. And Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, her response was that she was happy to sit down and discuss this and happy they proposed as long as they don't involve changes to tax or extra borrowing, which is a way of saying.

• 36:52Rory Stewart?

  Which is heartbreaking because you can't, you can't achieve it. And remember that this attempt to solve adult social care was actually what Theresa May tried to make the middle of her campaign against Jeremy Corbyn. And then Corbyn branded it a death tax and basically killed her reelection attempt. The problem always comes down to the funding. And it's awful that when the Tories are trying to do it, Labour says, "We're going to oppose the funding." And then when Labour tries to do it, Tories says, "We're going to oppose the funding." And of course, Burnham is going to hope that he managed to do what he didn't manage to do, is that he has political skills that maybe Theresa May or others didn't have to reach across the aisles. But sadly, maybe the other parties are just not going to let you do that.

• 37:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. I mean, he said he was going to put whatever political capital I have into fixing broken social care. Well, the political capital required in this is going to be huge. But it's interesting how, and you know, I discussed this with Steve Rotherham for this series we're doing on how Burnham was developed. And Steve Rotherham is somebody who, in the book, you remember this, he refused to shake Boris Johnson's hand. He talks openly about how his mother didn't like him saying, using the word hate, but he hated Thatcher. This is a guy who really burdens passionately against the Conservatives. But he said, even he, as Liverpool mayor, like Andy in Manchester, have had to develop a different approach to politics. And it was quite interesting when the social care plan, in quotes, because there's not much detail yet, was announced.

• 38:16Alastair Campbell?

  Kemi Badenoch said that, so she was trying to get the tone quite nice, but then whack, no more money. Reform, I think it was Jen Rick just came out and did a sort of, you know, classic, I don't even, can't even remember what he said, but it was just, you know, up with this, we will not put. But the Lib Dems were very interesting. They were basically quite warm, quite positive, let's see the detail, but, you know. So he's definitely trying to get a different sort of political debate going. And I mentioned in the first half, you know, 22 reviews we've had. The most famous was the Dillnot review. I mean, which, you know, the Dillnot review, virtually everybody thought, this is a really good piece of work, we should do this. But it fell apart.

• 38:51Rory Stewart?

  And that was basically Theresa May's proposal. Just, just remind people, one of the central ideas there is that, look, it's going to cost a lot to fund, at least in the short term. The hope is that if you look after the elderly properly at home, they don't have to go to hospital and that will save a huge amount of money. But in the short term, it costs money. So the idea was you were going to fund it by saying, after somebody dies, you can recoup some of the money from the value of their home. Not while they're alive. Not while they're alive, but they retain their home. But after they die, the government recoups some of the value of their home. And actually, so in some ways, it's a sort of wealth tax. It's got some of the elements of wealth tax. It's combining the fact that a lot of money is tied up in property and the government's

• 39:36Rory Stewart?

  facing huge costs. And I suppose the idea is, if you're putting a lot of money into looking after an elderly person, it's costing you a lot of money. To recoup that money after they die, yes, the sad thing is that's at the expense of their children, but it's going to help finance the system. Now, here's another challenge. Theresa May was killed by Corbyn saying death tax and returned without a majority in Parliament. Andy Burnham has an enormous majority. And if he adds the Lib Dems to it, another 70 seats, he can do almost whatever he wants. He doesn't need the cross-party stuff in the way that Theresa May did, who had a minority government. So maybe this is the litmus test for his government. If he's saying he's going to fix it, this is probably the one chance to fix it.

• 40:20Rory Stewart?

  Nobody's going to have a majority like this again in British politics.

• 40:23Alastair Campbell?

  Well, so you, so you think he could do this even before the next election?

• 40:26Rory Stewart?

  He'd have to. It's his only chance to do it, I'm afraid. If he doesn't start doing it in the next few weeks, it's never going to happen. And then sadly, we're going to say, Andy Burnham was a nice guy who said the right things and we all agree, but he didn't manage to do anything.

• 40:40Alastair Campbell?

  On the BBC News last night, they, they, they put up clips of every prime minister in his camera and saying they're going to do this.

• 40:46Rory Stewart?

  But he's got the majority to do it. I mean, this is, this is the one chance to do something like this.

• 40:51Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he has said he's going to speed forward the Louise Casey report. Louise Casey's got this commission that's looking at these issues again. Well, look, it shows he's thinking big. I was going through, before doing this thing with Steve Rotherham, I was going through all my diaries of all the references to Andy Burnham. And it was quite funny actually to see though, there was quite a lot of me saying, Andy, you've got to get some decent suits. Because he's, but there's also one point, when Ed Miliband lost the election and was stepping down, and it was the second time that Andy Burnham stood for the leadership. And I was talking to Ed and he said, he thought Andy was a good show. This of course is when Jeremy Corbyn won, but he said he thought Andy was a good shout because at least he thinks in big ideas.

• 41:35Alastair Campbell?

  Now then, he was probably thinking of devolution, social care, education and what have you. So he is thinking these big ideas. So you say he's got a big majority to do it, but at the same time, even with a big majority, he's gears stammerfounded, you have to be able to take the public with you at the same time. And, you know, so how he develops the arguments in a way that doesn't kill him in the way that it killed Theresa May, as you say, that's the tricky bit, but at least he's starting.

• 42:01Rory Stewart?

  So Theresa May managed to do it as a manifesto commitment in an election, which she then effectively lost. He's got, I guess, nearly three years in which he can try to get stuff through. The Labour Party, the Members of Parliament Labour Party, combined with the Lib Dems, there's not going to be enough rebels against a massive change to adult social care to stop him getting the legislation through.

• 42:24Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 42:25Rory Stewart?

  So there is literally nothing stopping him in parliamentary terms from doing it.

• 42:29Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe this, maybe this is where he implements his, removing the whip, removing the whip system.

• 42:35Rory Stewart?

  Yes, it's going to be unpopular with the public, but you just have to believe that in three years' time, people are beginning to see the benefits of this.

• 42:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, they're seeing the direction. I think they have to see the direction.

• 42:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, remember that, I mean, famously Thatcher did things that were very, very unpopular with the public, but then were not undone. An example that we had was gay marriage. So when I voted for gay marriage, it was incredibly unpopular with my local association. People were very angry with me. Fast forward, nobody's undoing that.

• 43:05Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 43:05Rory Stewart?

  And I think the same would be true of Adolf Soschek. If he pushed through, it's going to be very expensive and it's going to get him into trouble in his fiscal rules, but he can do it. He can absolutely do it. He must do it. It would be awful if he says, I'm waiting for, you know, Dame Louise Casey to produce a review and then I'll put it in the manifesto for the next election. There's never going to be a majority like this again. The one thing we know from all our look at these opinion polls is the days of big majorities are over in British politics. So this is the last chance to fix it.

• 43:35Alastair Campbell?

  Very interesting, yeah. Well, look, I think it's, I think this is why people are feeling a sense of greater optimism that there was and greater hope that there was because we're talking about big things. He doesn't feel defensive about it. I didn't see the panorama, but you know, you said you watched it and he sounds to me like he wasn't defensive.

• 43:51Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 43:52Alastair Campbell?

  The other point, maybe this is the useful way to flip to devolution. The other point that Gus made when he phoned me up, he said he thought we were a bit harsh on the Green Book. This is the thing that assesses, he says, actually, it's been rewritten twice in recent years. And he said, the problem is, the Green Book's not used. He said, if the Green Book process had been applied to HS2, it would never have happened. So, and but he also said, he, this is, Gus is a Treasury man, right? So he's maybe, but he's also, Gus is a great guy and he actually thinks in very, you know, innovative, modern ways. He says he doesn't accept that the Treasury is going to automatically be against devolution.

• 44:33Alastair Campbell?

  What he's, what they'll be against, he said, is the risk of local authorities being able to run what he calls spectacular missions which go broke. And he also said, another really interesting point you made when you and I were both saying, you know, you want more encumbrery and we need more local, this, that, the other. He said, you know, the more local you can get, the better. But very rare will be the place that will put their hands up and say, yeah, we'd love to have a prison built here. Or, you know, yeah, we totally accept Health Secretary that, you know, we need to close down some of these small hospitals. Can we close down ours, please? You know, you have to have a national overlay. So anyway, it's interesting that he, I thought he made some really, really important points.

• 45:16Rory Stewart?

  On government and getting stuff done, I wondered whether the key thing now for Andy Burnham isn't working out what the two questions that every civil servant and minister asks themselves when looking at a policy to think, what would the Prime Minister want? So let's say it was Margaret Thatcher, maybe the question would have been, can the market do this? And I wonder whether for him, the questions aren't firstly, the Tessa Jau question, you know, would I put my mother in this institution? The second question on devolution might be, is there something that could be done at a lower level? Is there something that needs to be done at the centre? But really getting those two questions up in light so that everybody through the whole system knows what those questions are going to be central. Maybe I haven't quite got the questions right.

• 46:01Alastair Campbell?

  No, I know what you mean. I know what you mean. Just a couple, just on Tessa, by the way, we talked, I talked to Steve Rotherham about Tessa. I made the point, and I think this is right, and Steve agreed with this, that Andy, as it were, doing his political apprenticeship with Tessa meant that his first real experience of Westminster was alongside a politician for whom empathy and kindness and liking people were fundamental. There was no faking how much he was interested in people, how much he was genuinely empathetic about other people. And Andy's definitely witnessed that. Just as then he goes on and as PPS to David Blunkie, he witnesses extraordinary work ethic and extraordinary drive, extraordinary determination. So I think he's somebody who's learned from these things as he's gone.

• 46:43Alastair Campbell?

  And then the test that you're describing is what the Europeans love to call subsidiarity, which is, you know, do it at the most local level that is humanly possible. So you don't need Andy Burnham to decide when your bins get collected. You couldn't have Camden Council having its own navy. It's like, that has to be national. And then, of course, it's international when you get to the level of NATO. So, and I think that is the best way to think of this. If you go through all of the jobs that you did in government, if we're being honest with ourselves, did we really operate subsidiarity? No, we didn't. We're the most central, one of the most centralized countries in the world.

• 47:20Rory Stewart?

  Then the question is, can the minister resist the temptation when a crisis happens to pull all the power back into the centre and say, I'm going to fix it from the centre? So maybe Andy Burnham needs to almost say from the get-go, by the way, things are going to go wrong and I'm not going to bring it back to the centre. When these kinds of things go wrong, I'm going to allow the local councils to fix it. Maybe also, this is a horrible word, capacity building, but maybe also there needs to be a recognition that some local authorities are stronger than others. Maybe Manchester is not the model all through the country. So maybe I'm going to choose five or 10 authorities which I'm going to really invest in building up their capacity, along with giving them the power, the tax raising

• 48:05Rory Stewart?

  power, etc.

• 48:06Alastair Campbell?

  That's similar to what's happened with schools where, you know, weaker schools learning from better schools, not least by, you know, giving heads who are in charge of several. So maybe you build up kind of, you know, different relationships between councils as well. Look, I think this, I think this stuff's really, really exciting. And the point you made there about relationships as well, sorry to sort of, well, no, I'm not sorry actually, because I think it's going to be really interesting, this Steve Rotherham giving his analysis of how Andy Burnham's become the Prime Minister. But Steve was making the point, when he was the Mayor of Liverpool City Region, and Liverpool got City of Culture, Andy Burnham was the Secretary of State for Culture. And he said, what he, you could imagine, let's say when Boris Johnson was Mayor of London, Boris Johnson

• 48:50Alastair Campbell?

  saw it as part of his, him, self-obsessed, a bit of a narcissist, his job in the Olympics, particularly once it was up and running, was to make it as much about him as he could. Okay? I'm not saying he didn't have a role, and his people didn't have a role in making the whole thing come together. He did. But there were so many people involved in that that had they wanted to, could have gone out and said, oh, I did that, I did that. Steve said that what all Andy Burnham cared about as Secretary of State for Culture, who was going to Liverpool virtually every week, was actually, is this thing running properly? Is this thing happening well? And was perfectly happy that Liverpool and the key figures in Liverpool were, as it were, getting all the credit. So I think that sort of sense of the relationship between centre and local, centre and regional, I think that's what

• 49:35Alastair Campbell?

  we have to kind of rethink. And I do think there are, Europe and Scotland, I do think there are lessons in all this for Scotland at the moment as well. Because I think one of the downsides, I think there's been a lot of upside to devolution, but one of the downsides is actually that so much of the power has flowed to the centre in Scotland. So the power is in, is in holy root. And I think a lot of Scottish local towns, cities and authorities feel weakened by it all.

• 50:00Rory Stewart?

  That's the final thing then, maybe before we close. You know France very well, and we are now looking at these completely horrifying wildfires. The reporting, I think there's been good bits of reporting, but the basic news reporting just keeps reiterating 250,000 people evacuated, fire getting near Bordeaux. From the outside, it strikes me, there's a couple of quite interesting things. One of them is that a lot of the stuff that's on fire is this Atlantic forest planted by Napoleon III. It's commercially managed forest that's felled every 20, 30 years that was on previously wasted. And the second thing, I think, I guess it's interesting, is the whole culture of France and the way in which firefighting operates there, the kind of pride of the fire services, their professionalism,

• 50:44Rory Stewart?

  and presumably fights within France about how much of this forest should be kept, how much revenue it generates, how much it's cleared, etc. Anyway, over to you on the wildfires.

• 50:54Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I found the whole thing absolutely horrific this week. Both France and Spain, and Scotland and England to a lesser extent, and the Cairngorms, these fires were going for a long time. Canada, truly horrific, the fires. One of the most moving things I saw was an interview with a Spanish firefighter who looked charred and sweating and exhausted. And he just looked into the camera and said, anybody who doesn't think the climate crisis is real, come and do this. You come and try and do this job. I really, really do hope. And we've seen straws in the wind. I thought, I don't normally say nice things about columns in the Daily Telegraph. Tim Stanley wrote a piece in the Daily Telegraph yesterday saying, the right needs to wake up and realise this is a real issue. Stop politicising it,

• 51:36Alastair Campbell?

  stop weaponising it. So I think that's the first thing. You know, I've watched so much of this coverage, including on French television. And even on French television, it's about the weather, it's about the fires, it's about the story, it's about the evacuations. The big story has to be the climate crisis. And so I think that's the first thing I would say. The second thing, I think, in relation to both France and Spain, you know, I love the Tour de France. I was watching the end of the Tour de France on Sunday, going through the streets of Paris. And it was just amazing. It's huge crowds, incredible passion, incredible atmosphere. And I think in the two or three hours I watched it, I think there was one mention of, you know, meanwhile, we should have a thought for the people down in the South West. It's sort of, I think there's not the kind of national sense of urgency

• 52:19Alastair Campbell?

  and emergency about it. But the truth is, let's be frank, Rory, we're going to get this year after year after year. And I, last year, when we were, when Fiona and I were at our place in France, we had forest fires there, two years ago now. And we're in a pretty isolated place, but the sight of them rolling through a forest is absolutely terrifying. And we did, we see all these Canadaires, these planes coming along and dropping this stuff, and then they go off and they pick up another load and they come back and dropping it. But it's terrifying. It's absolutely terrifying to watch. Now, they've actually responded to that, where all the forest got wiped out. They're replanting them, but they're replanting them with quite large gaps between trees. I hope this is wake-up time. I hope this is wake-up time.

• 53:01Rory Stewart?

  It's the two things, isn't it? It's the, the rise in mean temperatures, you know, so this, everybody's watching, what's the temperature going to be in France today and how firmable that makes everything. And then there's the second question, in the shorter term, of land management, you know, how you plant these things, what kind of things you're planting, how big the fire breaks are that you create, how you balance very different objectives. I mean, is this forest there for the timber industry? Is it there for biodiversity? Is it there for carbon capture? And, and actually, there's a lot more disagreement there than we're really acknowledging. As a policy area, you will find the firefighters, the environmentalists, the forestry industry, all in pretty big tension. I mean, we like

• 53:43Rory Stewart?

  to believe that in politics, there's that, you know, a right answer that pleases everybody. Actually, it can be pretty tough. You could say in some cases, we're going to create big fire breaks, or we're going to fell these forests, or we're not going to allow this kind of tree to be planted in the future. And that isn't necessarily always the most biodiverse, wild, natural solution. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. But these are really difficult debates, which have to happen at the same time as addressing climate change. Because the climate change question is a 20, 30 year question. This is a next year question.

• 54:17Alastair Campbell?

  I was wondering whether your friend, His Majesty the King, might think about doing a joint visit with his Spanish counterpart to, what about that?

• 54:26Rory Stewart?

  Very good, very good, very good. That will feed that in. That's very good.

• 54:29Alastair Campbell?

  I think, but, but, but I, I do, it is, it is terrifying. It's terrifying to think that they'll get it eventually under control. The places where our fires were, I mean, I was out there a few weeks ago down the bike. And it's, it's still, you're still looking at charred landscape. And what you've seen just on, just outside Bordeaux and just outside Madrid, I mean, it's going to take years and years to recover from this. It's all very well for people to say, well, we're just going to have to get used to this. Yeah, fair enough. But, you know, when we talked to Daniel Ergerson, the climate commissioner, he was actually saying, we might already be beyond the tipping point. We don't know. And once we are beyond that tipping point, people are going to say, we have to do everything we can to stop this. And we might all end up saying, well, maybe we were just a bit late.

• 55:12Alastair Campbell?

  If anybody hasn't yet signed up to listen to Caroline Lucas's series on the climate, honestly, it could not be more timely. She's done a series of absolutely brilliant interviews of people who really, really know this stuff. And it's interesting to watch Caroline because she's not, you know, she's so passionate about this herself, but actually she's very, she's just teasing out the argument. She's not sort of evangelizing herself.

• 55:36Rory Stewart?

  She's wonderful. I mean, I, I, I mean, I, I was thinking about, when you were talking about Tessa Jal, how actually just very natural and non-tribal she was and how easy she was to work with as somebody from a different party. The same is true for Caroline. I think these are proper thoughtful, empathetic people. For Caroline, sign up at therestispolitics.com. It's a mini-series on climate, but of course, one of many, many mini-series we're creating. Because Alice has also been talking about the Steve Rotherham one, and you can pick up on some of our past ones on AI, or one that I'm about to do on existential risks. So check out restorspolitics.com and start with Caroline Lucas.

• 56:13Alastair Campbell?

  You better make sure climate's the big one, Rory.

• 56:16Rory Stewart?

  I don't think sure climate's the big one. All right. Well, thank you very much, Alice. So look forward to regrouping for question time.

• 56:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And we're going to talk about India. We're going to talk about this new deal on nukes and the enrichment of uranium with, between America and Saudi Arabia. We're going to talk about AI and data centers and much else beside. And we probably, we should probably reflect very briefly on Donald Trump's utterly insane speech to the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

• 56:42Rory Stewart?

  Very good. So more international question time too. We've done a lot on Andy Burnham over the last few weeks. So next episode will be quite international. Looking forward to it very much.

• 56:50Alastair Campbell?

  See you then. Bye.

• 56:51Rory Stewart?

  Bye.

• 57:48Speaker 08

  Hi, everybody. It's Dominic Sambrook here from The Rest is History. And we are here to tell you about our thrilling new series on the blood-soaked climax of the French Revolution, The Reign of Terror.

• 58:01Rory Stewart?

  So the French Revolution is one of the most significant episodes in the whole of world history. It essentially lays the foundations for contemporary politics as we know it. But it is also unbelievably dramatic. We'll be discussing the murder of the firebrand Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub. We will be going to the guillotine with Marie Antoinette.

• 58:25Speaker 08

  And in our final episode, we will be telling the story of the extraordinary and grotesque downfall of one of the chief architects of the terror, one of the most evil men in history, some would say, Maximilien Krubesbier.

• 58:41Rory Stewart?

  So if you want to hear this epic series, search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts.