246. What Britain thinks: Is the monarchy our greatest soft power asset?

Are UK voters becoming increasingly comfortable with authoritarianism? Why is Thatcher the only past PM currently viewed as 'strong' by the public? What's the secret to achieving visibility as a politician? Join Rory and Alastair for their second polling special, brought to you in collaboration with JL Partners. To get the full polling in your inbox, sign up to TRIP Plus at therestispolitics.com TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP ELECTION TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Election Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Assistant Producer: Fiona Douglas Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. 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.

• 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/risterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 1:38Speaker 05

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• 2:14Speaker 03

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• 2:28Alastair Campbell?

  Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Politics, me Alastair Campbell.

• 2:30Rory Stewart?

  And me Rory Stewart.

• 2:31Alastair Campbell?

  Now, we normally do our Question Time episode now, but we've just had the results back from our second The Rest Is Politics poll, brought to you by JL Partners. We've noted down lots of your ideas and some of the issues that Rory and I have been discussing on the podcast over the last month, and we've polled them with the public to help inform our discussions.

• 2:49Rory Stewart?

  And I'm really proud of this poll because it's a monthly tracker poll that we're going to be running exclusively all the way through to the election. And unlike other polls, this is much more nuanced and detailed. It allows us to help shape by listeners to really follow some very interesting detailed questions through to the election. And at the end of this, we'll get on to Question Time.

• 3:13Alastair Campbell?

  So if you'd like to see the poll results in full, including lots of different graphics and some really depressing word clouds, we send them out to our members in the newsletter form, so just go to therestispolitics.com to sign up.

• 3:25Rory Stewart?

  Right then, Alistair. So what struck you as a veteran poll reader about this poll?

• 3:31Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, some of it unexpected, some of it expected. I think we should, I'm going to start with the fact that I asked them to ask what sources of news and political debate people trust, and television and radio are still top.

• 3:47Rory Stewart?

  And that was a great question, wasn't it?

• 3:49Alastair Campbell?

  Was it?

• 3:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I thought it was a really good question, Alistair, because I thought, you know, the, what comes through from this is you can see is there's a big difference that you can tell on the relationship between the media and how you vote. So people who get most of their news from television are roughly representative of the general population in terms of the way they vote. But people who get most of their information from newspapers tend to be more right wing. And astonishingly, people who get most of their information from social media and podcasts tend to be more left wing.

• 4:16Alastair Campbell?

  But also fascinating, I thought, was that people trust opinion polls less than they trust newspapers even, and they don't trust newspapers very much. So we should have that caveat in front of everything that we say. That being said.

• 4:30Rory Stewart?

  And it's a big problem for the polling industry because it's obviously how they make their money. And. They're very defensive about this, but the public basically has a sense that opinion polls miscalled Brexit, miscalled the 2015 election, miscalled the 2017 election.

• 4:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 4:46Rory Stewart?

  Mist called Hillary Clinton against Trump, et cetera.

• 4:48Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely. So I think we should always be careful with polls. They are snapshots. They are not necessarily. They talk about this thing about the margin of error, but a lot of the polls were well outside the margin of error in some of those that you've mentioned.

• 5:01Rory Stewart?

  Although equally, what's the alternative? And the alternative presumably is what used to exist 100 years ago, which is politicians going around saying, well, I felt on the doorstep or I feel in my water, it's all going to be fine.

• 5:12Alastair Campbell?

  So I guess on the state of the parties, they're pretty much where they were last time. In terms of the popularity of the leaders, Sunak is still well behind Keir Starmer on virtually every positive leadership attribute. There has been a little bit of hardening of support for their very, very hard line on immigration. I was surprised to see that actually every demographic virtually broadly supports a very hard line on immigration, including the Rwanda policy, which and again, it emphasizes that you've got to be careful about being in your own bubble. Most of the people I deal with, most of the people I meet absolutely despise the whole thing, hate it. And yet the public broadly, not massively, but broadly support it.

• 5:56Rory Stewart?

  And I guess this is something that in your professional life in politics, you needed to be aware of all the time. It's something that opinion polls and focus groups can do, which is question the bubble. Did you have any memories when you were in government from when a focus group or an opinion poll made you stop and think, whoa, that's quite interesting. The public is actually in a slightly different position from where we might have thought they were on something.

• 6:16Alastair Campbell?

  We talked about the Macron interview in The Economist on the on the main podcast and he had this line that, you know, politics is not about following polls. Politics is about ideas and it's about leadership. And I believe that as well. But I think one of the reasons why. Brexit happened was that we were a little slow to see the extent to which all of these things were coming together, immigration, Europe, the general sort of anti-foreigner sentiment. Now, I don't know if we could have done more, but I definitely was conscious when I used to attend focus groups, Philip Gould would do the groups, I would sit in the background and hide and watch them and nearly always leave depressed because this stuff would keep coming back. Now, you could report that back.

• 7:00Rory Stewart?

  And also presumably you were often finding that messages that you'd hoped had got through had not got through.

• 7:04Alastair Campbell?

  Oh my God, oh my God. I'll never forget, right back in the day, going to a focus group after Tony had become leader and somebody said, I'm not sure about Labour, I think they picked the wrong leader. And so I'm sitting there thinking, obviously somebody who likes Gordon Brown. So Philip said, who do you think they should have picked? And he said, well, I quite like Ian Lang. Now, one, how did he know?

• 7:32Rory Stewart?

  Can you remind people who Ian Lang was?

• 7:33Alastair Campbell?

  I think I'll have to because not many people will know. Ian Lang was the Secretary of State, the Tory Secretary of State for Scotland. So this was a focus group in Watford. And he'd obviously just seen him on telly and thought, I quite like him. And so you think, God almighty, Tony and Gordon have been out there day after day after day. But the other thing that's interesting in this poll is this question of visibility. So people are asked whether they've been conscious, aware of, and they were given four names, Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Nigel Farage, Ed Davey. Rishi Sunak is by a long way the most visible. Twenty-five percent say they've seen him a lot. Thirty-nine percent say they've seen him quite a bit. Twenty-three percent, not very much. Thirteen percent, not at all. In

• 8:18Alastair Campbell?

  other words, they've not been conscious of Rishi Sunak on their telephones, on their televisions, in their newspapers. Keir Starmer, a lot, thirteen percent, that's half of Sunak. Quite a lot, pretty much the same. Not very much, thirty-four percent, sixteen percent, nothing. Nigel Farage, a lot, four percent, nothing. Sixteen percent, quite a bit. Forty-four percent, not very much. Thirty-six percent, not at all. So you and I probably think, because we see what he does on social media, we know that he's doing GB News, probably think Farage is very, very visible. He's not visible at all. Ed Davey, a lot, two percent.

• 8:51Rory Stewart?

  A celeb damn leader, yeah.

• 8:53Alastair Campbell?

  You even feel the need to revive people. Quite a bit, eleven percent. Not very much, forty five percent. Nothing, not at all, forty two percent. So this visibility issue is, and I saw, we don't have this polling, but I saw some polling recently, a survey of asking people to recognise politicians from pictures. And if you take out Sunak, Johnson, Starmer, a very, very small number, you're into very, very, very low numbers, including for senior cabinet ministers and senior shadow.

• 9:25Rory Stewart?

  I remember this slightly humiliating thing when I was running to be mayor of London, that it turned out that barely fifty percent of people in London had any idea who I was. So the whole thing was pretty much a disaster from the beginning.

• 9:35Alastair Campbell?

  Despite Rory Walks.

• 9:36Rory Stewart?

  Despite Rory.

• 9:37Alastair Campbell?

  And Rory sleeps and Rory stays at your flat.

• 9:39Rory Stewart?

  What happened is that you'll have seven candidates listed as independent, and if they don't know your name, there's no way you're going to get a vote at all, right? You might even forget about fifty percent of those. This question on visibility, it is something one notices. I guess I noticed it a lot with David Cameron. He would seem to be on the telly all the time.

• 9:56Alastair Campbell?

  All the time.

• 9:56Rory Stewart?

  Rishi Sunak clearly tries to be on the telly all the time.

• 9:59Alastair Campbell?

  He is on, he's on the telly every day.

• 10:01Rory Stewart?

  Right. And how does he achieve that? How do you persuade Telly to put you on every day?

• 10:05Alastair Campbell?

  Well, how do you persuade him? I talked to somebody recently who used to work for him, and I said, does Sunak think he's really good at this? I said, what do you mean? He said, well, the fact that he's on the telly communicating every single day says to me, because I don't think he's very good at it, right? I think he's quite irritating in his manner, he's very petulant, but he must think he's good at it, otherwise he wouldn't do it every day. And this guy says, no, he actually hates it, and he has to be persuaded.

• 10:31Rory Stewart?

  So his team are saying it's really important you're on every day.

• 10:34Alastair Campbell?

  You've got, well, you've got to be out there all the time.

• 10:37Rory Stewart?

  And would you have given him that advice? Because it's a bit difficult, right? On the one hand. Visibility. On the other hand, you're saying that actually he may not be that great at it, so you might not want him out every day.

• 10:46Alastair Campbell?

  I think he, I think sometimes he's better than other times, but I think the problem is that he, we're going to be putting out soon this interview with Mr. Tarkas, the Greek Prime Minister, who's kind of quite similar to Sunak in some ways, background in finance and very well educated, all that stuff. But he, his communication style, I felt, and admittedly it was a long interview, so maybe he's not like this on short clips on TV, but he was very thoughtful, very reflective, whereas I always feel with Sunak, and this was, this was borne out to me by this guy that I talked to, he said, what happens is we persuade him to go out, we tell him what to say, he rehearses it, he memorizes it, he goes and does it. But you feel that when he's doing it.

• 11:25Rory Stewart?

  And this is the fault, isn't it, of actually something which you were unfairly blamed for bringing into British politics and got actually much worse after you left politics, which is this memorizing lines, which Liz Truss was a great expert. I remember when I used to go on Question Time, you'd do these sort of four hour briefings where you were almost made to memorize line after line after line after line. And when you said to the people who were briefing you, what does this line mean, or what happens if people ask you, you know, the next question, they didn't really have an answer to it. So, and, and I think you, you may be right there. Maybe what you're saying is Rishi Sunak needs to get out every day, but what he should have done is lent into the fact that he is actually a very educated, thoughtful person, and just let him give more complicated, rounded answers.

• 12:08Rory Stewart?

  You know, delivering the kind of really efficient soundbite may work in certain contexts, but you've got to match it to the individual. And if the individual's not that type of personality, there's no point trying.

• 12:19Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe we should go into these really depressing word clouds, where we're, we're asked, we asked, again, this was, I asked this one, the only prime minister in recent times who gets, well, Tony Blair gets charismatic.

• 12:34Alastair Campbell?

  And Margaret Thatcher gets strong, but Tony Blair also gets weak, which I think is a bit odd, liar. So he gets a lot of negative ones. Gordon gets universally negative. John Major gets universally negative.

• 12:46Rory Stewart?

  Yes, sorry, just to summarize these word clouds, you know, what people think of them. The main thing, everybody except Tony Blair and Boris Johnson basically gets weak and incompetent. Weak and incompetent is just repeated. Gordon Brown, they public perceive as weak. John Major, they perceive as weak. Theresa May, David Cameron, Rishi Sunak, all perceived as weak. Tony Blair isn't perceived as weak and incompetent, but he's perceived as dishonest. And Boris Johnson isn't perceived as weak, he's perceived as dishonest. So it's a really kind of tragic situation. It seems the British public has a choice between two things. They either get someone who's weak, or they get someone who they think is dishonest. But it reinforces how I think frozen politics feels, that the public senses

• 13:29Rory Stewart?

  that nothing changes, that politicians come, politicians go, and the system is so rigid and the problems are so deep, you know, productivity's stagnant, public services are screwed, the country's bankrupt, and there's nothing really that anyone can do, which is why this question of being strong keeps coming back again and again, because what they're looking for is somebody who's going to break through that. And the danger of that, of course, is that you end up voting for populists, you end up voting for, you know, people like Boris Johnson, who pretend they're going to break through, and then the public say they're lies.

• 14:06Alastair Campbell?

  It's looking at these, just to explain to people how these word clouds work. So you ask lots of people to give you a word, and then the cloud will put the word that comes up most at the centre. So for David Cameron, it's posh, surrounded by bad, weak and useless. For John Major, it's grey, surrounded by boring and weak. For Thatcher, it's strong, surrounded by iron and evil. And then, I've got to say, Sunak's is the worst, I think, because he's got three very big words and a fourth smaller word. He's got weak, rich and posh, and he's got incompetent. Liz Truss has got a massive useless. So what that says is that people said that way more than everything else. Theresa May has

• 14:50Alastair Campbell?

  got weak and useless. Boris Johnson's got liar, idiot and funny.

• 14:56Alastair Campbell?

  And clown as a fourth one. So and and and I think I said Gordon Brown had nothing positive. Actually, he does. He's got Scottish. Scottish is his second word. So that is a very positive word.

• 15:07Rory Stewart?

  You and I assume that's that's positive in the word cloud.

• 15:10Alastair Campbell?

  But I do. I take that as a big positive. But I think this, you know, we again, this is something we've talked about. A lot of the people we've interviewed on leading, it's a real problem this because whatever you think of them is, you know, you and I both frankly despise Boris Johnson, don't really rate Liz Truss, but you have a lot of respect for Theresa May. I have some respect for Theresa May. I have a lot of respect and time for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. And I think this general utter negativity about all politicians is a real problem. And it's not just in in the UK. I was reading yesterday in in a German newspaper about a real spike in physical attacks on politicians in Germany at the moment. Now, and we've had two murders, of course. So I think we do have to be careful about this.

• 15:55Rory Stewart?

  Nazi place here out this week, whose husband was violently attacked.

• 15:59Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 15:59Rory Stewart?

  And one of the themes over the time we've been doing this podcast is just how many political leaders are resigning in their prime. Seen it with leaders of Ireland, leaders in New Zealand, all during the time that we've that we've been doing this. Connected this another one that we we put into this week is this theme that we've explored quite a lot on the podcast over the last couple of years, which is a sense that voters are getting more authoritarian. And this poll suggests that voters on left and right are not that concerned about freedom of speech. They seem to be surprisingly comfortable with the idea of

• 16:38Rory Stewart?

  the police shutting down demonstrations and movements on both sides. Now, and that really puts the emphasis on how incredibly important it is that we have leaders. In Europe and the US who hold for democratic values because public opinion gives them more space to be authoritarian than any of us would be comfortable with.

• 17:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Rory Stewart?

  So a little tribute also to Tom Lubbock, who was a professor at Oxford and then became part of this polling company and James Johnson, who brought us together. One thing that they would probably say is because this is a monthly tracker, it allows us to detect very small movements out of the surface, which is difficult in four weeks to know whether they're representative, but they may be early signs of something. And one of the things that shifted over a month is that Rishi Sunak's position is slightly strengthening on getting things done. And Starmer's visibility and this reputation around getting things done is slightly, slightly weakening. And there's been a bit of a rise over the last four weeks

• 17:46Rory Stewart?

  in, as you said, in the public's focus on immigration.

• 17:51Alastair Campbell?

  I presume that's because of the passing of the Rwanda Bill.

• 17:53Rory Stewart?

  Passing Rwanda and a slight, slight decline in focus on the economy. So I guess if you were trying to make the case for why things may be slightly tilting back in the Conservatives' favour. I mean, not in any way that they're going to win an election. I remain absolutely convinced that Labour's going to win a stonking majority. But possibly a lot of the things that troubled you and me, his announcements on benefits, passing the Rwanda Bill, some of his sort of punchier statements over the last three, four weeks, may have slightly strengthened Rishi Sunak's position compared to where he was.

• 18:27Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm hmm. A few, a few sort of specific issues. I'm very pleased to say there is a considerable majority of support for compulsory voting. There is considerable support for assisted dying to be made legal. Sixty-two percent yes, seventeen percent no. The rest either neither or don't know. I was very interested in the, as you know, I'm very interested in the whole sort of thing about soft power. So we asked people, we gave people a list of things that could represent soft power and asked them to order them in merit. If you take all voters, the monarchy comes number one, you'll be pleased to know.

• 18:59Rory Stewart?

  Extremely pleased to know. And actually, it still comes very high even with Labour voters.

• 19:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, just behind it is the NHS. And so they're the top two. Then come the English language and the BBC. Universities in education, the Premier League, courts and the rule of law, and the first sort of cultural figure, if you cultural individual, as it were, is Shakespeare.

• 19:19Rory Stewart?

  Not David Attenborough.

• 19:20Alastair Campbell?

  Not, he wasn't in the list. And then if you go down, the countryside comes quite high, London comes high, the Beatles are in there, Adele's in there.

• 19:27Rory Stewart?

  It's not, well, it's not, in a way, that's, some of it's not very surprising. But I think the monarchy is a little surprising, isn't it? You wouldn't, you wouldn't necessarily.

• 19:36Alastair Campbell?

  Current Labour voters, the NHS comes top.

• 19:38Rory Stewart?

  The monarchy a high second.

• 19:40Alastair Campbell?

  The monarchy a high second. The current Liberal Democrat, the monarchy comes top, the NHS a high second. Surprisingly low, I thought, I thought the fashion industry might do better, that's right down the bottom. Adele struggles, she was the only sort of current singer we put in there, the Beatles do a lot better. But I thought that was interesting that the monarchy was right up there. So we asked people whether broadly they were sympathetic to Israel or Palestine. Now, I know it's particularly in the current climate, that's a pretty polarising question to ask. Neither and don't know were considerably ahead. But for those who did choose, then it was a narrow plurality for Palestine with 18 to 34 year

• 20:23Alastair Campbell?

  olds, the most sure that Palestine was the one, the side that, as it were, should be supportive.

• 20:29Rory Stewart?

  Final one from me. In terms of visions of Keir Starmer, slightly reinforces something that we're seeing in focus groups as well, which is a sense that, that somebody in one of the focus groups that you run by, by Tom and James, said of Starmer that they think he paints by numbers. And what I think they mean by that is that they get a sense that he's being very methodical in moving for the election, but he doesn't really have the passion for things. So, again, it's an encouragement maybe for him to take a little risk and find some issues that he's really identified with and cares about, even if they're a little bit unpopular. So he could take a strong line. On the environment, he could take a strong line, you know, maybe on supporting transgender

• 21:14Rory Stewart?

  issues against the Conservatives, but just to show that there's something that he really cares about and is identified with.

• 21:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, no, I think that is a bit that at the moment is missing. I think if you, there are some policies, but I think the level of public awareness where people say, I'm voting Labour because, and I think they need to really, really, really step better. Let's just close by this. This polling actually suggests the public is better informed about a lot of things than most polls do, because most polls show incredible misunderstanding of the facts of our own country. So the public think that 26% of the population earn more than £50,000 a year, okay? The actual number is 34, so that's not bad. Twenty, the public think that 25% of the population are pensioners, it is actually 19. They think that 25% of

• 22:02Alastair Campbell?

  the population are ethnic minorities, it's 18. They think 20% of the population are university graduates, it's 37.

• 22:09Rory Stewart?

  Oh, well, that's fair. That's the biggest discrepancy, isn't it?

• 22:12Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, there's a really big one to come, really big one to come. 20% of the population receive universal credit, it's actually nine, so there's a doubling of that. And that's about the whole kind of welfare scrounger debate, that's our right wing press at play and the Farage's of this world, bullshitting. They think that 15% of the population live in London, it's 13. They think that 15% of the population is an immigrant, and the actual number is 15%. So they're bang on with that one. They think 12% of the population is LGBT plus.

• 22:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 22:43Alastair Campbell?

  Is three.

• 22:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Alastair Campbell?

  They think 10% of the population earn more than £100,000 a year, is eight. And here's the one that's way off. They think that 5% of the population died from Covid.

• 22:54Rory Stewart?

  Which would be about 3 million people.

• 22:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it's, it's actually 0.03%.

• 22:59Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 22:59Alastair Campbell?

  But that's pretty good. A lot of polls you see are way off kilter. So this seems to be a pretty well-informed cohort.

• 23:06Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's good, it's good, it's good. I mean, it's really important for a democracy, that broadly speaking. The public share a conception of where the country is and where we are because it means the policy decisions are more sensible. But it also brings into, I mean, one of the things I was actually that I was beginning to think about as a cliche that I might tease a little bit that comes out of those figures is people saying, I'm the first generation in my family to go to university. And people often say it as though it makes them unique. But thirty seven percent of the population now go to university. And when my mother went to university in the 50s.

• 23:41Alastair Campbell?

  Well, no, it's thirty seven percent are graduates.

• 23:43Rory Stewart?

  Well, so thirty seven percent are now graduates, right?

• 23:45Alastair Campbell?

  So the problem is actually there are more.

• 23:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, nearly fifty percent.

• 23:48Alastair Campbell?

  Of that generation.

• 23:49Rory Stewart?

  And if you go back to my mother, right, I think when she went to university, it would be less than one percent of the population. So in fact, almost everybody who goes to university will be the first generation of their family to go to university. It's not necessarily something that makes you unique.

• 24:01Alastair Campbell?

  Great. Okay, well, thanks for the poll, JL Partners. We'll now have a quick break and come back with fewer questions than usual because we've already given you half an hour of our fascinating analysis of our fascinating polling. We'll be back in a minute.

• 24:14Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

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• 26:05Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to the Rest is Politics polling special. Now going to take probably fewer of your questions than normal because we've done half an hour of the polling. So Rory, here's one to quick off with. Andrea with a lovely little grave accent on the second day. What were your respective best and worst days in all your time in politics and government?

• 26:23Rory Stewart?

  Oh, my Lord.

• 26:25Alastair Campbell?

  I can give you my best and my worst.

• 26:26Rory Stewart?

  Go on then.

• 26:26Alastair Campbell?

  Well, best Good Friday agreement coming together. Worst David Kelly body being found.

• 26:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My worst was when I'd given an interview to the Scottish Sun.

• 26:40Alastair Campbell?

  This is about the string.

• 26:41Rory Stewart?

  I'd said, I'd said that there was some, I managed to produce the phrase, there are some pretty primitive areas in my constituency with people.

• 26:50Alastair Campbell?

  Holding their trousers up with twine.

• 26:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah. And hence the only more and then months later, this story appeared saying that I despise my constituents. All they're all primitives and people calling for me to resign. And I felt so ashamed because I thought I'd completely broken trust with my constituents. And I'd sort of fallen into central casting Tory MP horror. And it was the thing that I think where I first really experienced without being too silly, but it's serious mental distress and really thought, briefly thought about killing myself, which is the only time I've ever done that in my life.

• 27:22Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, God.

• 27:23Rory Stewart?

  Anyway, so that was, that was that. And it's an interesting thing, isn't it? Because presumably the journalists who were running the story about this guy thinks his constituents hold their trousers up with twine, would to some extent having a laugh. They weren't really expecting me to be considering killing myself. So this is what it's.

• 27:38Alastair Campbell?

  So, but when you say you thought about killing yourself.

• 27:40Rory Stewart?

  I was walking down the street and. Central London and I became, thought about hanging myself from, there was a particular one of this old fashioned lamp place with a crossbar, thought I'd hang myself from it.

• 27:51Alastair Campbell?

  What, there and then?

• 27:52Rory Stewart?

  Later that evening, yeah, I had an idea. Um, anyway, so that's, that's.

• 27:57Alastair Campbell?

  The, the moment passed quickly.

• 27:58Rory Stewart?

  The moment passed pretty, pretty quickly.

• 28:00Alastair Campbell?

  But it just shows you how, you know, we, we talk about the, the impact of abuse and stuff. I mean, if that one story had that effect on you, God, that's horrific.

• 28:11Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 28:11Alastair Campbell?

  And the best?

• 28:12Rory Stewart?

  Best thing in politics.

• 28:13Alastair Campbell?

  The best day?

• 28:15Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, probably at the height of my campaign for leadership, where I really felt we were getting a bit of a national movement going for a soft Brexit against Boris Johnson, mobilizing a whole new demographic for the Conservative Party. We did a, did an event on the South Bank, thousands of people. It was politics as I really kind of imagined it, being out in really big crowds, taking risk, doing exciting politics. I thought suddenly sort of I could see an opportunity for a different, for a different kind of politics in Britain. So I guess that's probably my best day.

• 28:46Alastair Campbell?

  This is a question from an MP by the name of Theo Clark, MP for Stafford, says, I would love to hear your thoughts on my, that's her, current national inquiry on birth trauma. After receiving over fourteen hundred submissions and forty four oral testimonies, our cross party report will be launched on the thirteenth of May with headline recommendations to the government on how to improve aftercare for mothers in the UK. And as I understand it, Theo Clark herself suffered a third degree tear in childbirth and had to have life-saving surgery and said that the aftercare for her and the baby was not very, very good. And since being public about it, it's been bombarded with people having similar stories.

• 29:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So Theo Clark, actually is a, an MP who initially I came across because she volunteered on my campaigns when she was a young. Party activist and she's an example of something that we don't talk about that much on the show, but is the way in which backbenchers can really make the running on particular issues. And she may be able to do this around the issue of birth trauma. So one in three women find some aspects of their birth experience traumatic. Eighty four percent of women who experienced tears during birth did not receive enough information about birth injuries ahead of time. And there are some pretty terrifying submissions. You know, an Indian woman was told that by a hospital that nobody noticed she was hemorrhaging because of her skin colour. Another woman was told to be more to be more careful when

• 30:13Rory Stewart?

  she was bleeding on the floor. Another was told by a midwife, if we gave pain relief to everyone, it would bankrupt the NHS. So anyway, a good issue to raise. And are there other issues that you came across of backbench MPs leading campaigns on things that you thought made a real difference?

• 30:27Alastair Campbell?

  Well, not just backbench MPs. I mean, I wrote in the, but what can I do about Gina Martin, who got the upskirting bill turned into law within a year because a Lib Dem MP, Vera Hoppe, has picked it up and said, I'm going to run with that.

• 30:42Rory Stewart?

  And I remember that. I remember that going through and.

• 30:43Alastair Campbell?

  And I think that's a great example of a member of the public feeling strongly about it, an MP picking it up and getting it into law. What I was asked the other day, who was the, I was in a school and somebody said, tell us some MPs that we might not have ever heard of, but that you think were were great people. And I told them about Bob Hughes, who was the MP, an Aberdeen MP, but was chairman of the anti apartheid movement. We talked about South Africa yesterday, and who I think if Mandela had had written down the kind of the top 20 people around the world that had sort of, Bob would have been right up there. So it's amazing what what an individual MP can do.

• 31:22Rory Stewart?

  This week also, Frank Field has died, who I think we should pay a little bit of tribute to, very, very unusual iconic figure for maybe younger listeners who are not aware. He was a Labour MP who took a particular interest in social welfare policy, took some pretty brave positions on social welfare policy and managed to. Do some things which were unpopular with people, but people never really questioned his good faith and his commitment. He's somebody who became also a Labour MP that Conservatives also grew to respect and admire. He did become a sort of national treasure, a sort of unusual in an MP, a slightly saintly figure. Give us a bit of a sense, you knew him quite well, didn't you, for a long time?

• 32:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I mean Frank was actually a very close friend of me and Fiona for a long, long time, but we slightly fell out when he became a minister.

• 32:13Rory Stewart?

  And tell us a bit about him and how you first knew him.

• 32:16Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I knew him as a journalist when I was on The Mirror. He was, you know, for a paper like The Mirror that was particularly interested in issues of poverty and inequality and communities that were being, you know, really, really struggling, Frank represented those people. He was a Merseyside MP, child poverty was kind of his background, and he was a, he was a great campaigner, he was a great campaigner. So from a, from that perspective, as a journalist.

• 32:43Rory Stewart?

  And a great campaigner in a sense, he could really, a bit like we're talking about with Bertrand, but more so really put a subject in the public eye and really...

• 32:50Alastair Campbell?

  And have ideas and be able to explain them. And as you say, had a kind of moral authority and integrity that nobody doubted. And I think that what happened when he became a minister, and if you remember, famously Tony Blair said he was appointed to the Social Security Department to think the unthinkable on welfare reform. But then what happened was that Frank, I think, is somebody who was much more suited to the role that we've just been talking about, being the one who's holding the feet to the fire of those in power, campaigning, raising issues, getting them into the agenda. I think he found being a minister much, much more difficult.

• 33:27Rory Stewart?

  And this was because of having to follow the party line or the administration running several servants?

• 33:32Alastair Campbell?

  I think it was that, so I remember when it came to the welfare reform stuff at one point, Harry Harman was Secretary of State, Frank was a minister, and there was a gap between what he wanted to do...

• 33:47Alastair Campbell?

  And his ability to translate that into policy and legislation. It just became very, very difficult. And I think he I think he started to resent us then.

• 33:59Rory Stewart?

  So struggling with the fact that he had ideals and ambitions and he was being asked to compromise and water down his ideas a bit?

• 34:04Alastair Campbell?

  Um, or make them more practical. Um, he would say watering down, we would have said make them more practical. So it became very, very difficult and.

• 34:12Rory Stewart?

  And sadly, you then found the kind of person on the political consulting, and this friend of yours, you began to drift apart from a bit because he slightly blamed you as being part of a machine.

• 34:21Alastair Campbell?

  I think so, yeah. And I think also, so when I was a journalist, I saw him very, very regularly. He would come around for dinner quite a lot and we'd talk a lot. And then, of course, I think I became a different person in a way. I think I became a lot harder. So I think, I think, yeah, we do, we definitely, we were less, much less friendly in the in the later years. And and I think it was a direct result of having had these sort of quite difficult clashes.

• 34:46Rory Stewart?

  And what do you think, looking back, made him into such an unusual national treasure? One of the few MPs that the kind of kind of educated man on the street would be like, oh, yeah, Frank Field, he's he's a good person. He's a good example of an honourable MP.

• 34:59Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think because he was, I don't think you can get that unless you are. And I think he had a real, he had a moral core. And I think that that sort of over time emanated. But I do, I do think he, I think sometimes, you know this in politics, some people are more made out to be producing the ideas, having the passion, being on top of the facts, and then you maybe need other parts of the team that are going to turn those into practical legislative change.

• 35:27Rory Stewart?

  Here's one from Stockley. What are the changes that have happened to the Togo constitution? How have the opposition politicians and civil society groups reacted? So over to you, your special subject, Togo, testing you a bit there?

• 35:38Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's one of the many, many elections that have been taking place this year. And this one was on the 29th of April, so just a few days ago. But ahead of it. The government decided to get a constitutional change so that the president does not have to be directly elected. The president can be effectively chosen by the parliament, a parliament which was going to, hey presto, have a landslide win. So it now means that they've had the president, he's called Gnasigbe with acute accent, Gnasigbe, and his dad was president before him. So it

• 36:18Alastair Campbell?

  might now means that a father and son, he's been president for a few terms already, father and son have been president since 1967.

• 36:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And just to remind people, Togo is a country in West Africa.

• 36:31Alastair Campbell?

  It's about the same population as Scotland, I think.

• 36:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah. It's one of smaller countries and it's a little reminiscent in some ways in terms of family dynastics of Gabon, where the Ali Bongo family dominated since the 60s. But of course, in the case of Gabon, there was a coup d'etat that toppled that family. And it's an interesting, you know, Togo is something to watch because there's been huge changes. We've talked about it. Nearly seven coup d'etat and collapsed governments across Sahel, mostly in Francophone Africa. So Togo is something to keep watching as the years go forward. Will it get the economic performance? Will it be able to tackle corruption? Will the government be legitimate for this kind of dynastic inheritance?

• 37:10Alastair Campbell?

  Well, his dad ran the country for 40 years. And what this constitutional change means is that he won't have to obey the two-term limit because they've essentially got rid of the terms and now the parliament chooses. So I don't think we can pretend it's the most democratic move. But thank you, Stockley, for that excellent question about one of the many important elections happening this year. What about this one from A Conway? Please can you talk about Richard Tice? And please explain to your listeners that Reform is a private company and tell us where and how they are funded. It is all very, very odd. It's like the Wilders thing in Holland, isn't it?

• 37:46Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, exactly. So a lot of these populist parties started a playbook where instead of registering as a political party, which involves a lot of disclosure implications in terms of funding and membership and all this sort of thing. Nigel Farage, I think, started this move in Britain originally. And Herdt Wilders, the right wing populist in the Netherlands, does it too. He's like the sole shareholder of their party, isn't he? Exactly. You can set up a proto party where you're basically the only member and therefore your members don't have any power. They can't. It's not like the Conservative Party where, you know, members can vote for Liz Truss against Rishi Sunak, whatever. It just doesn't happen. Right. And it also means that you don't have, in many jurisdictions, particularly in the Netherlands,

• 38:30Rory Stewart?

  to disclose where your funding comes from. This is, you know, this, and, you know, of course, it's really relevant. We were talking about South Africa a couple of days ago. Real questions about where some of the funding is coming from for some South African parties. Are the Iranians backing particular individuals? There were Russian oligarchs giving money to the ANC. But when it gets to party site reform, more difficult to get questions of disclosure and where one lot of money ends and another lot of money begins. What do you think of Richard Tice as a sort of performer, which of course is all these populists are? They're basically just performers. So people who haven't, it's probably not actually a household name. When we look at our polling that we've done earlier in this episode, I think you'd find actually not that

• 39:11Rory Stewart?

  many people know Richard Tice. He is, he looks like a kind of matinee idol. He's a very sort of well put together, good looking, beautifully dressed guy who made a lot of money, I think, in property. Would that be right? Hmm. His partner is Isabel Ock Shot, who is this journalist. Famously loyal. Yeah, who, who leaked the WhatsApps that she was given by Matt Hancock in relation to COVID when she's meant to be writing a. Did she also do the book about David Cameron and the pig? That's right. Yep, absolutely. So a great historian, great historical figure as well. One of the things that will be making Richard Tice nervous again in our polling is the polling suggested if Farage was to come back as the head of that party.

• 39:53Rory Stewart?

  He'd probably increased the vote of that party by about third, probably eleven to seventeen points, taking votes equally from Labour voters and Conservative voters.

• 40:02Alastair Campbell?

  I'm beginning to read and hear and see that the Reform Party is getting very pissed off with Farage's sort of teasing and, you know, will he, won't he? I mean, I don't, I know Farage reasonably well, I've met Richard Tice a few times. In fact, Rory, it's just popped into my head, Richard Tice was in the Pret a Monje at Westminster when I had the initial meeting about whether to do a podcast.

• 40:25Rory Stewart?

  My goodness.

• 40:26Alastair Campbell?

  So there you go.

• 40:27Rory Stewart?

  There we are.

• 40:27Alastair Campbell?

  And he was with one of those awful right wing people.

• 40:29Rory Stewart?

  I did my major negotiation with the Prison Officers' Union in the Pret a Monje in Westminster. So there was about to be a massive strike, all the prison officers are going to go on strike, which is a real problem in prisons, because you imagine, because then the governors have to serve the meals, and it's basically about two days before you have to call in the army. And, uh, yeah, the key bit of the negotiation was me sitting in the Pret a Monje in Westminster.

• 40:50Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there you go. I do, I do keep hearing that Tyson Farage really don't get on, so that's not very healthy. I was disgusted by some of Farage's stuff on social media. There was, there was a Muslim councillor got elected in Burnley and there was this sort of celebration in the street and somebody was on a horse and somebody was banging a drum and he just, the thing, you know, this is our England in 2024, is this really the country that we want?

• 41:16Rory Stewart?

  I rather like people on horses with drums.

• 41:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and also he's got a new buzzword, he's moved on from Brexit and net zero, it's now sectarianism, this is the new Farage sort of bandwagon.

• 41:26Rory Stewart?

  Tom, last month, my then fiance, now wife, congratulations, Tom, got me tickets to see you in the O2, but the real gift is she's agreed to come too. She, like many people, is not interested in politics, finding either dull or depressing. What can I say to get her excited about politics and watching you live? So what's in store for those people who've been lucky enough to get tickets for the O2?

• 41:47Alastair Campbell?

  We're not going to give it all away now, are we? With the fact that, you know, the Beatles are going to, oh, I shouldn't say that. Well, the most important thing is that you, she comes with an open mind and the idea that maybe politics isn't as bad as are the people who are polled said. Maybe, final one for me, Roy, from Bluebird 01819, which sounds like one of those bots, but I don't think it is. With it being World Press Freedom Day yesterday, please can you talk about the dangers journalists are facing across the world? I think there is something, I was actually watching Al Jazeera last night when this news broke about Hamas accepting the ceasefire deal being negotiated by Egypt and Qatar. And lots of pictures of people celebrating on the streets of Gaza.

• 42:32Alastair Campbell?

  And I thought Al Jazeera's coverage was incredibly balanced and measured. And I thought, and coming across the bottom was Netanyahu bans all Al Jazeera journalists from the region, and I just, from Israel. And I just think we underestimate, I think, in these times of war, and listen, I'm often critical of the media and I'm often critical of individual journalists, but those people who are trying to shine a light on war, on conflict, on inequality, on corruption, you know, they deserve our support. And the truth is that there are more journalists being arrested and more journalists being killed than any time in my lifetime.

• 43:11Rory Stewart?

  And I think there's people directly killed. So we covered the killing of the Al Jazeera correspondent in Jerusalem and then the police attacking her funeral, the Israeli police attacking her funeral. There have been incredible deaths of family members of Al Jazeera correspondents in Gaza. The Al Jazeera Arabic bureau chief in Gaza has lost, I think, his wife, his son, his daughter, his grandson, 22 family members of another Al Jazeera correspondent. My particular friend who's relevant to this is, I was a friend of Mary Colvin's, who I, you know, loved being with in Baghdad, spent a lot of time together in a hotel in Iraq. We were together in Afghanistan, together in Libya.

• 43:53Rory Stewart?

  And then she was killed, of course, in Syria and was just the most extraordinary. I mean, so funny, so, I mean, she was always noticing things. I remember in the hotel in Baghdad, she was the one person who picked up that the man playing the piano in the bar had been the head of the Iraqi National Orchestra and was now reduced to kind of playing feeling. She was the person who... Picks up that my taxi driver in Tripoli after the fall of Gaddafi, she made friends with, and I couldn't understand why. And then he became prime minister six months later, and she was the only person who had his number. So, and, and she, she, she was killed. So I get very, very worried about my friend Anthony Lloyd, who is often right in the front line with the Times and I think takes the most astonishing risks.

• 44:37Alastair Campbell?

  There's some conviction reports here, but I'm, I'm reading one that 97 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war began on October the 7th. And another one from the down to earth organisation, 44 environmental journalists have been murdered in the last 15 years. That's from a UN report. And that's about exposing and reporting on.

• 44:58Rory Stewart?

  Terrifying and killing of conservationists in Tanzania, in Iran. I mean, yeah, really terrifying stuff. Good. Well, tribute to journalists to finish and tribute to, we've done a little bit, I think, for, for the journalist charity, tribute to Rory Peck Foundation, which does work on war correspondents, standing up also for freelancers, because one of the other problems is it can be very, very exposed. You have very little support institutionally if you're a freelancer.

• 45:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. So Rory, off to your retreat. Enjoy. Can't think of anything worse myself, but I, I, you're obviously looking forward to it. You weren't even able to hear me and David Cork.

• 45:34Rory Stewart?

  No, I literally won't be able to hear or see anything. The only thing that worries me is that I'm actually about to rush off to the dentist for major dental surgery. So I'll probably spend the next 11 days not concentrating on my immortal soul, but worrying about toothache.

• 45:46Alastair Campbell?

  Are they going to take a tooth out?

• 45:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I've got a tooth coming right out. I mean, the full tooth, not just the

• 45:50Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, it's a great feeling, honestly. You do feel old when they bring, you start bringing your teeth out, but it's a great feeling where the pain goes.

• 45:56Rory Stewart?

  Thank you very much.

• 45:57Alastair Campbell?

  Well, have a good dental appointment and have a good retreat.

• 45:59Rory Stewart?

  Thank you.

• 46:00Alastair Campbell?

  Bye.

• 46:00Rory Stewart?

  Bye.

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