108. Hancock’s humiliation and the end for Johnson

More than 100,000 WhatsApp messages have been leaked to the Daily Telegraph revealing private conversations between senior politicians and government officials during the height of the pandemic. But what do they tell us about the people leading our country, and how will Hancock recover from this? Rory and Alastair discuss this scandal, plus reflect on the news of Kier Starmer's new Chief of Staff appointment, the legacy of Live Aid in raising awareness of world poverty, and the new documentary about Shamima Begum and her battle for citizenship. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, 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. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:06Speaker 02

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• 1:40Alastair Campbell?

  Hello. Welcome to another episode of The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:43Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart. And Alistair, I thought you were going to be sitting in a nightclub in Soho, but you seem to be back at your home.

• 1:51Alastair Campbell?

  I'm back home. Yeah, the Soho studio was not tempting enough. I'm doing this from home. And you are in Malawi, and by the sounds of it, with not very pleasant weather.

• 2:02Rory Stewart?

  It's an unbelievable tropical thunderstorm. Although, when I checked into this hotel, I was told that I'm in the very bedroom in which your friend Tony Blair stays when he comes to Malawi, which makes me feel very privileged. But it is an incredible tropical thunderstorm. I mean, you might be able to hear at the back of the podcast, but the heavens have opened, and it is just crashing down. And I hope that doesn't interfere too much with the internet. Now, you wanted to start us off on a number of things. Quick thing, though, firstly, which is, we managed to sell out Harrogate, which was exciting, very, very exciting. And although apologies to people who didn't get tickets, middle of May, many apologies. Some people got on, I think, one minute after the ticket sales opened and couldn't get tickets.

• 2:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 2:41Rory Stewart?

  But the good news is, I think, that we're going to be doing some other things in other parts of the country.

• 2:46Alastair Campbell?

  We will doubtless be doing that. And I think also, I, the other day, I was up in Scotland at Stirling University, I was doing a lecture, the Andrew John Williamson Memorial Lecture, which you had done before, and so had other luminaries, such as Joe Grimmond. Remember Joe Grimmond?

• 3:04Rory Stewart?

  Oh, Joe Grimmond, great liberal figure, yeah.

• 3:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, Nicholas Sturgeon, Malcolm Rifkin, Charles Kennedy, George Robertson, Paddy Ashdown, Edward Heath, Geoffrey Howe.

• 3:12Rory Stewart?

  Goodness.

• 3:12Alastair Campbell?

  You and I are now on that illustrious list. But anyway, the point I was going to make was, it was chaired by Jim Nochtie, the journalist and broadcaster. I was sitting next to his wife, the writer, Elida Updale, at the dinner. And she said she has listened to every episode of our podcast, sometimes more than once. And she enjoys them best when there is no gap. She loved the emergency podcast, and she doesn't like it when we record early, and it's a few days before it comes out. So I think we should tell her that because of your and my logistical issues through the week, we are doing this today, Sunday. So, sorry, Ellie, it will be a few days' gap. But for that reason, we're going to look at a few timeless things in the second half, including, I know, Rory, you want to

• 3:55Alastair Campbell?

  talk about global poverty, and I want to talk about Shamima Begum, having watched the BBC documentary this week.

• 4:01Rory Stewart?

  Right, but what we can't avoid starting with is your favourite man, the former Health Secretary and star of I'm a Celebrity, Matt Hancock, whose WhatsApps messages totaling over a hundred thousand WhatsApp messages. Somebody tried to calculate how many WhatsApp messages that meant he'd sent a day, sent during the Covid crisis, have now been leaked by his ghostwriter Isabel Oakshott to the Daily Telegraph. So what was your first sense of them?

• 4:26Alastair Campbell?

  My first sense of that was what on earth was he doing trusting Isabel Oakshott with his telephone and with all of his WhatsApp messages? Isabel Oakshott, just to remind people, she's a journalist whose track record includes the going to jail of Christopher Hune when he was a minister in the Coalition Cabinet and his wife Vicky Price also going to jail.

• 4:47Rory Stewart?

  And just to remind people about that very quickly, so Chris Hune had been speeding and got a penalty notice from a camera and persuaded his wife, Vicky Price, who was a senior civil servant, to take the points for him so he wouldn't lose his licence. Isabel Oakshott revealed this story, Hune resigned and ended up going to jail for eight months. And then, as you said, Vicky Price herself also ended up going to jail.

• 5:12Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and she revealed it by essentially being a friend of Vicky Price. She got close to Vicky Price, got the story, away she goes. She also was Kim Darakman when he was Ambassador, UK Ambassador in America. She did that big story about he saying rather rude things about Donald Trump. And also, what was the other one she did with Michael Ashcroft? I don't think I can repeat this one because I'm very sensitive.

• 5:39Rory Stewart?

  So Kim Darak, who was our ambassador in Washington, she produced these emails that he'd written about Trump. So he had to resign. And then she wrote a book with Michael Ashcroft about David Cameron, which revealed that David Cameron, she claimed, had sexually assaulted a pig while at Oxford University. So as you say, Isabel Oakshott has got an enormous number of scoops to her name, but including having effectively forced one Cabinet Minister to go to jail and the UK Ambassador to the United States to have to resign. And this was the person to whom Matt Hancock handed over his WhatsApps with an even stranger thing, which is that... She said that she was going to write his whole book for free and he would have

• 6:21Rory Stewart?

  known also that she was an incredibly strong opponent of his lockdown policy and had been criticizing it openly on Twitter for almost three years. So it's a very, very odd decision for him to to think that somebody's going to want to work with you for free and not take any advantage at all, particularly when you knew or ought to have known something about her views.

• 6:42Alastair Campbell?

  And her modus operandi. And I know we shouldn't sort of necessarily judge people by who their bedtime partners are, but the fact that she's also living with the Richard Tice, the head of Reform, the UKIP replacement. I mean, there are so many alarm bells there that if you've got the slightest judgment, I just cannot see how he gets there. So when he comes out and starts saying it's a terrible betrayal of trust, well, yeah, but kind of what did you expect? I must confess, Rory, I've not bought The Daily Telegraph for decades. I can't remember the last time I bought The Daily Telegraph, but I have, you know, I'm afraid I have gone out the last three or four days and I have put my buddy over the couch and said, yes. And it's because partly because I just, you know, yes, it's shocking and there's lots

• 7:25Alastair Campbell?

  of new stuff in there, but actually it sort of just confirms what we know. Johnson's hopeless on detail, doesn't really take anything too seriously. All of them just constantly in this sea of never ending messaging about what the line is and who's saying what and who's up and who's down. And it's all, anybody who wants to think that this government is just a kind of chaotic shit show, then the Isabel Oakshott messages, WhatsApp messages definitely shows it. But you you know her a bit. I mean, I'll be honest, every dealing I've ever had with her, I wouldn't trust her an inch, but you kind of know her a bit better.

• 8:01Rory Stewart?

  I do know her and I'm quite fond of her. She started reporting on Parliament pretty much as I came down into Parliament in 2010. She'd been a correspondent in Edinburgh before, so we had a Scottish connection. I've always found her, actually personally dealing with her, partly because we have a kind of friendship, has been quite responsible and relatively, I think, honourable in If I say to her, this is something that I'd like you to keep in confidence, she does say. She obviously comes from a very, very different political spectrum from me. You know, I'm a Remainer, she's a Brexiteer. I was calling for a very, very early lockdown. She was against it. So we come from very different places, but I'm quite fond of her.

• 8:43Rory Stewart?

  But I do think even someone like me, who's a friend of his, Bells, would say that she's a very, very tough and ruthless journalist when she wants to be. And I thought it was extraordinary that Matt Hancock wants to do this.

• 8:54Alastair Campbell?

  What's the biggest confidence that she is in possession of that you told her, Rory?

• 9:00Rory Stewart?

  Well, luckily you don't know because she's discreet.

• 9:05Alastair Campbell?

  Ah, well, we know she's not, don't we?

• 9:08Rory Stewart?

  One of the things I'm looking forward to, though, is for us to begin to see a little bit more, if we can, of these WhatsApp messages going back to February. And it's a total treasure trove for a future historian. Because if you want to get a sense of the personalities of the key people in Boris Johnson's Downing Street, there's nothing like it. You can see their weird tones of voice. You can see their rivalries. They slag off Gavin Williamson's haircut and where he goes on holiday. They make jokes at the expense of Dominic Cummings. Cummings then makes jokes at the expense of Hancock. In fact, the wonderful thing that we haven't quite yet got, and I think he claims that he's deleted them, hasn't he? Is Boris Johnson's own complete store of WhatsApp messages.

• 9:52Rory Stewart?

  In which I'm sure he's saying opposite things to everybody. I'm sure he's saying to Hancock that Cummings is a whatever. And saying the reverse in the other direction. So I'm sorry that we haven't quite got all of Boris Johnson's WhatsApp messages, but what a court it is. And horrifying for somebody like me who was brought up in a more traditional civil service to see how the decision making is happening. Because the decision making ought to be happening around formal cabinet tables. There should be a morning meeting every morning on Covid where the Prime Minister, the Health Secretary and the key scientific advisers are going through the evidence, the daily facts and the decisions, and it should be properly minuted and followed up, instead of which what you've got.

• 10:33Rory Stewart?

  In August, so this is six months into the Covid disaster, Boris Johnson picking up a copy of the Financial Times, saying to everyone, "Oh, I just read in the Financial Times that actually the mortality rate's only 0.04%," and the response is an incredible waste of time. Simon Case, who's the Cabinet Secretary, meant to be running the entire government, then wastes his time, presumably leaving meetings to do it, to send little sort of creepy messages flattering the Prime Minister and trying gently to point out that he's wrong. Chief Scientific Advisor has to come in, the Chief Medical Advisor comes in, the Chief of Staff comes in, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, basically pointing out that the Prime Minister, six months into Covid, still doesn't know the

• 11:14Rory Stewart?

  difference between 0.04% and 4%. In other words, he's a factor of 100 times off.

• 11:20Alastair Campbell?

  To be fair to Dominic Cummings, he does point out the utter innumeracy of the then Prime Minister. There is the odd flash of humour coming through this thing. I actually think that Hancock has the best line in the whole 100,000 messages of those we've seen so far, when he talks about Cummings and says, "His insight is as bad as his eyesight." I think that was quite, that was moderately funny. But I think that what I find incredible is that it's not just that there's the sort of informality and the, as you say, the kind of sycophancy of some of the officials and the sort of never-ending kind of worry about how things are seen and the sense of crisis and chaos and panic. Also, they ought to

• 12:00Alastair Campbell?

  at least have part of their mind thinking. Anything I say, or write, or do in the middle of a crisis like this, at some point, may be required to be put out there for public scrutiny and public examination. And you just get the sense of them not being very serious. The more I look at this, though, the happier I am that Tony Blair never had a mobile phone. That was one of the best things we ever did, was just to understand, there's no such thing as a safe phone call, there's no such thing as a safe message. So just, you know, rely on proper systems.

• 12:32Rory Stewart?

  Well, my goodness. And also the sense that these are all men, and it's a very kind of matey, testosterone-driven conversation, where they're very kind of, they're sort of showing off, they're like kids showing off. They're sort of insulting about teachers, insulting about police officers, insulting about colleagues.

• 12:51Alastair Campbell?

  The exchanges between Williamson, Gavin Williamson, who was then the Education Secretary in Hancock, on the teachers were just awful. Bunch of arses, you know, why don't they ever wanna work? It's sort of complete contempt for everybody else. And in the batch that's out today, Hancock complaining about, is it Jeremy Farah, the scientist? And, you know, this guy, can't we sack him? Can't we get him off the radio? Why does he keep pontificating? It's all this sort of, I don't know, it's just chest beating and it's, it's awful. It's awful. And I think that what it shows, you have the contrast between, if you go back to the blogs and the articles I was writing at the time that they were doing these daily press conferences, and I kept saying, you know, this is an absolute shambles and they don't know how to communicate and there's no sense of strategy. And of course,

• 13:36Alastair Campbell?

  most of the media were giving them benefit of the doubt, partly because they're a Tory government and we've got a biased Tory media, but also because, you know, people felt, well, they're in a crisis, give them the benefit of the doubt. I think what this stuff does is just show they don't deserve any benefit of the doubt whatsoever. This was an absolute shambles. And the egos, honestly, you've got this whole thing. So you've got the middle of a pandemic and Matt Hancock has this long discussion about whether he should get himself photographed in the surf with his shirt off. And another one about, you know, when he's sort of jumping a fence and he's, fuck, I look good. I mean, just grow up.

• 14:13Rory Stewart?

  It's very weird, isn't it? I, I, I'm gonna be very interested if they get round to publishing the WhatsApps from February and early March in 2020, because that was the really critical time. That's when COVID first arrived in Britain. And you remember, it had hit Italy two weeks before it hit Britain. So there was every reason for the government to be acting and they were very, very slow to act. And I think we know now that that's because Boris Johnson instinctively wanted, in his words, to take it on the chin. And that's when they were playing around with ideas like herd immunity and whether you could just let it go through the population before they really took on board. I think that the impact that that would have, not just on the elderly, but on the NHS. And it was an amazing revelation for me because I was very, very early out at the end of February, saying that we should

• 14:58Rory Stewart?

  do an immediate lockdown and try to get ahead of the game before it, before it hit us. And I was so struck, and for some reason, the WhatsApp messages and text messages on my phone from Matt Hancock seemed to have disappeared, but I've recorded some of them and they. You're absolutely right. They show somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and thin-skinned criticism. And I found as, you know, at that stage, I wasn't any longer in the cabinet. I wasn't even a member of parliament anymore. But the amount of anxiety they put into trying to fight against me, they tried to rubbish my suggestion that we should bear masks, for example, and I ended up in a weird world where, when they should have been concentrating on managing the pandemic, I had the cabinet secretary calling

• 15:43Rory Stewart?

  me later on a Sunday evening, I had Chris Witty spending an hour on the phone with me, I had Matt Hancock sending message after message. And I imagine the same probably was true for Jeremy Farrar, and probably Piers Morgan, and probably anybody else that they were worried was interrupting the narrative they were trying to get across.

• 16:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, actually, Piers Morgan, his name pops up a few times in these messages, including when he gets COVID. And there's this discussion, an advisor saying to Hancock, send him a nice message and, you know, be the big guy in this. I mean, it's just, the whole thing's pathetic. And, you know, the other thing I think is interesting about this is that, as you said, The Telegraph has a very anti-lockdown agenda, Isabel Oakeshott, the journalist, has a very anti-lockdown agenda. But actually, I think as a result of that, they are deliberately missing some of the, or downplaying some of the far bigger stories and scandals that are in here. I think, for example, the fact that Hancock's saying that, you know, he and Sunak are obviously at odds the whole time during this period, but him saying that

• 16:45Alastair Campbell?

  Sunak's eat-out-to-help-out strategy is causing a real spike in the places where it's been happening, but we're keeping it out of the media, I think that's a bit of a scandal. And then there's the other thing where he says that, you know, he calls it Sunak's eat-out-to-get-the-virus-out-and-about strategy. I mean, again, just a sort of glib throwaway line, which I think if you're in a sort of setting of black humour, which you sometimes get in a crisis, fair enough, you'll get a bit of that. But the sense you get of this, these exchanges, is that's the sort of manner of these people all the time.

• 17:18Rory Stewart?

  I mean, there's two problems. There's the lack of seriousness from Boris Johnson and his immediate gang around him. I'm sorry, by which I mean the politicians, that the sort of political culture lacking seriousness, a kind of trivialising superficial political culture. And then there's the story of how the British government itself does and doesn't react to crisis and how much certainly in February and March, it's struggling to get onto a crisis footing. How, you know, there's, there's some brilliant, actually, if somebody wants to read it, we'll put it in the newsletter this week, but there's a fantastic sort of slightly tongue in cheek, but quite darkly funny analysis by the ex-head

• 18:00Rory Stewart?

  of MI5, the security service, or sorry, maybe he's the head of the, head of GCHQ. Anyway, one of our great spy chiefs has written an analysis of how crisis handling goes wrong in Britain, taking Covid as his, his launching pad. And he looks at things you can see in those WhatsApp messages, classic psychological problems, group think, optimism bias, reluctance to take responsibility, hoping the whole problem's going to go away, all of that. I mean, I, I think, you know, as a treasure trove historians, I think this WhatsApp stuff is incredible because it's as though somebody has almost put a bug into number 10. It's, I've never seen anything like it really on a British equivalent to the Watergate tapes.

• 18:40Alastair Campbell?

  But it's all driven, that all of those characteristics that you outlined there, they're driven by Johnson's personality. If you have somebody at the top who's fundamentally unserious, then it means that the serious people, like Chris Witty, like Patrick Vallance, who seem to me to be trying to deal with this in a serious grown up way, but who are ultimately, as you say, beholden to their political masters and probably a bit careful about how they express themselves. But it means that they are struggling all the time. They're, they're, they're essentially always trying to catch up because they're being driven by political considerations. And, you know, we should probably talk a little bit about Keir Starmer and hiring Sue Gray. But I'll tell you one thing, if I was Keir Starmer and serious

• 19:23Alastair Campbell?

  about running a serious government, if I win the election, I wouldn't have Simon Case anywhere near the damn place. I mean, he comes out of this really badly.

• 19:30Rory Stewart?

  But let's, let's just touch on that briefly because I know you want to go on to Boris Johnson misleading Parliament over parties. But the other big news at the beginning of the week is that Sue Gray, who was a very, very senior civil servant, led on a lot of the government ethics. Appointments was actually somebody who David Cameron and George Osborne were very complimentary about, Theresa May was very complimentary about. She was a really, Sue Gray was a very central figure in the civil service when I was a minister. And of course, was behind the Sue Gray report, which was this report that exposed Boris Johnson's partying and was actually directly contributed towards his resignation, has now announced that

• 20:10Rory Stewart?

  she's going to become Keir Starmer's Chief of Staff. And there has been a lot of back and forth on that. And I'd be interested in one thing, actually, before we get on to the rights and wrongs of it. One of the things that struck me about it is that it was quite poorly timed from Labour's point of view, because it was announced at exactly the moment that this report on Boris Johnson misleading Parliament over parties came out, which allowed the Tories to say, oh, well, you know, this shows if Sue Gray is joining Labour, that the whole thing was a Labour stitch up. And even if that was a completely unfair claim, it absorbed quite a lot of media time and attention for a couple of days. Would it not have been better for them to hold back that announcement for another week?

• 20:56Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, I don't think they, as it were, announced it. I think it was something that just sort of spilled out because enough people knew about it. And obviously, because it was true, they couldn't deny it. So I don't think this was, as it were, I don't think this is when they announced it at all. I don't think that was the plan. So I don't know the background to any discussions that Keir has had with Sue Gray. I happen to think it's a very, very smart appointment, because I think Sue, she's somebody I've known for a long, long time. She's very, very smart. She's incredibly hardworking. She knows how the machine works. She is actually, I think, somebody of really deep integrity. I really believe that. When she was in charge of the report, and bear in mind, Roy, the only reason she was doing that investigation.

• 21:38Alastair Campbell?

  I think she was doing it very reluctantly. I don't think she saw it as a as fair to her, actually, that she was put in the position. But it was because Simon Case had to recuse himself, because he was originally going to be the one doing the the investigation, had to recuse himself after admitting that he'd been at one of these these lockdown parties that of which there were clearly many. I can absolutely guarantee Sue Gray wouldn't have been any of them, because I just think she would have known the difference between right and wrong. But my point is that when she was in charge of that process, because I do know her quite well, I was endlessly trying to sort of find out what she was up to and who she was interviewing, who she wasn't, how bad it was going to be, whether it was the end for Johnson, et cetera.

• 22:20Alastair Campbell?

  But even with me, that she knows pretty well, and I've worked with very closely all the time when I was in Downing Street, not a peep, that she's just very, very professional, diligent, hardworking. But I think, I wonder if one of the reasons why she's decided ultimately she is going to try and help Keir Starmer is because she just reached the end of her tether in terms of dealing with the sort of governance that we've been seeing in these WhatsApp messages and the sort of governance that we're seeing with Johnson. You know, she was having to try to be Jeremy Hayward having gone, because he was, you know, sadly had died. Simon Case, I think, without really not having the respect of the civil service, massive amount of pressure put on Sue.

• 23:03Alastair Campbell?

  And I think she's probably just decided, look, Keir Starmer looks to me like he might be a serious prime minister and I can hopefully help him.

• 23:09Rory Stewart?

  I I mean, I I sympathise with all of that and I think, you know, anyone would be so revolted and dismayed by working for Boris Johnson's government. I do think, though, that it's tricky.

• 23:20Alastair Campbell?

  The timing, the timing is awful, there's no doubt about that.

• 23:22Rory Stewart?

  And and a very senior civil servant and civil servants are really supposed to be apolitical. And I'm I'm surprised. I think she could have. Waited and she could almost have been expected to be made the Jeremy Hayward by Keir Starmer when he came in, rather than joining him in a political capacity.

• 23:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but I do think it's, if you remember when we were in opposition, one of the reasons that Tony Blair hired Jonathan Powell as his chief of staff is because he had that direct experience of government.

• 23:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 23:51Alastair Campbell?

  And I think actually that, look, I agree, I think it should be a terrific Cabinet Secretary. But you do need people as well who are not focused on the campaign, but who are actually focused on thinking about the transition to government. Jonathan Powell didn't really get that sucked into the campaign. He was focused on policy and on government, on changes that we wanted to make as soon as we got in. So I think, I think once this blows over, I'm really hoping that Sue doesn't take fright at all the attention she's getting, because I know she hates being the centre of attention and she loathed it when every Tory MP and minister saying, we have to wait for Sue Gray, wait for Sue Gray. It's very funny as well, Rory, I don't know if you've seen any of the clips of Boris Johnson's main fan club members, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries,

• 24:33Alastair Campbell?

  who have been sort of, you know, slagging her off and she's this and she's that and what have you. And lots of people have been putting together on social media the clips when they were waiting for Sue Gray, when she was a woman of impeccable integrity and nobody should, could ever doubt her credentials as a proper civil servant and da, da, da, da. So I'm afraid what we're seeing is that the Johnson lot, just as ever, trying to have their, have their cake and eat it.

• 24:55Rory Stewart?

  I'm loving your Jacob Rees-Mogg imitation. I'd never heard that before. That's particularly, it's very, very good. Yeah. No, that was really good. I was very impressed by it. Listen, very quickly, before we go to the break, tell us a bit about what the Privileges Committee has done on Boris Johnson and party hate. Should we care about it? Is there anything new? What's the story there?

• 25:14Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, I think what's interesting about it is that, because Harriet Harman's chairing it, Chris Bryant recused himself because he's such a very loud critic of Boris Johnson, has been for a long time. Harry Harman's chairing it, but it's Tory dominated, four Tory MPs, two Labour, I think, one SNP. But what's interesting to me is that they've set out really where they are in the process, ahead of interviewing Boris Johnson, I think on March the 20th. And what it goes through the whole process is a pretty damning report for Johnson. The fact that people like Bernard Jenkin has put his name to it, I think is quite revealing. And we're back to our friend, Mr WhatsApp or Mrs WhatsApp. Lots of WhatsApp messages

• 25:54Alastair Campbell?

  that they've seen of Johnson's staff basically really struggling to see how they can defend what has happened. There's one that says, you know, this blows a gaping hole in the Prime Minister's defence. They've listed a whole list of incidents and moments where, quotes, "he may have misled Parliament", which is sort of polite code for lied to Parliament, which is a kind of, you know, end of the road for him if they conclude with that. So I think that strikes me that's where they're going. Johnson is clearly with these ridiculously being paid for by the taxpayer, these expensive lawyers he's got. He is clearly going to say that unless somebody specifically said to him, and they have the evidence of that, which of course they won't have because it all seems to have been verbal and WhatsApp,

• 26:39Alastair Campbell?

  you know, "this is a breach of the law, this is a breach of the guidelines". But the pictures, the new pictures that have been exposed, you just have to look at them to see that he's breaking the guidelines. So I think he's done for, I think he's finished and the sooner he's out of our lives, the better.

• 26:52Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Well, that's a very encouraging note on which to go to our break.

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• 29:19Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart. And me Alastair Campbell. And Alastair is being incredibly patient. I'm seeing more of Alastair, the father, the patient father than I am of the famous figure that inspired a whole series of comedies in the 1990s. He's putting up with the fact that I'm speaking from Malawi at the moment, where there's a massive tropical thunderstorm going on that keeps knocking out our internet. But that brings me to something that I did want to talk about, which is global poverty. Malawi is one of the very, very poorest countries in the world. And it's a country where despite $16 billion worth of international development spend on this country in the last 15 years, the percentage of people in extreme poverty has barely moved at all.

• 30:03Rory Stewart?

  And in some parts of Africa, Liberia, for example, the number of people in extreme poverty is actually greater than it was a few years ago, percentage of people. And across Africa as a whole, we've gone from 170 million people living in extreme poverty in 1980 to 470 million people living in extreme poverty today. And by extreme poverty, we mean people living below the World Bank poverty line of $2.15 a day. And in many cases, a long, long way below that. I mean, I came across a woman on the Rwanda Burundi border recently on a trip, who the only cash she was getting was $3 a month to live on. The rest of it was just basically begging scraps from her neighbours and trying to eke out a living from a tiny scrap of ground in front of her house, looking after three

• 30:46Rory Stewart?

  grandchildren. Now, the reason I'm talking about that isn't though just that I'm in Malawi. It's that I wanted to talk a little bit about why we don't talk more about global poverty. And I wanted to just refer that back, of course, to the great moment of Live Aid and the moment where that that big movement to make poverty history really started. And maybe even since you're the musical one of this duo, bring in some of your memories of that event.

• 31:13Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'd love to do that. I, as you know, I love music and love to talk about music. But just on, before we get into that, and we were talking briefly there about the whole, our government's mismanagement of the pandemic. I was reading the other day that the estimation is that people in extreme poverty has risen, the number has risen by 70 million as a result of the pandemic.

• 31:34Rory Stewart?

  It's just horrifying because it's that the economies of many of the poorest countries were dependent on tourism and that collapsed.

• 31:41Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 31:42Rory Stewart?

  But there's other things too. It's that people, and not just have become more poor, but they couldn't get into hospitals and died in large numbers. And it's also very sadly, many countries, one of them, you know, Uganda, for example, is one of many countries where effectively the schools were basically closed for two years. So some of the very poorest people in the world who struggle to get education anyway, who have lost two years of education in the last three years. And the impacts on this are going to be seen, you know, these are long-term impacts to remove from hundreds of millions of people, two years of their education is a very, very serious long-term impact.

• 32:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. I'm going to direct anybody who's interested in extreme poverty to what I consider to be one of the best websites in the world. And I discovered, Roy, you give directly is actually mentioned on it, but the website is ourworldanddata.org. I don't know if you're aware of that one.

• 32:34Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 32:34Alastair Campbell?

  And you can put any, you can put any country in the world in. And I actually, because you told me you were going to be in Malawi, I put Malawi in. And the figures are incredible. The percentage of people living on less than a dollar a day, 23%, less than 2.15, $2.15 a day, 70%, less than $3.65, 89%, less than $6.85, 97%, less than $10 a day, 99.11%, less than $20 a day, 99.91%. So you're talking about, if we talk about inequality between nations as opposed to within nations, the UK figure, the figure

• 33:17Alastair Campbell?

  for UK on less than $20 a day is 9.96. You look at somewhere like India, 95% of the people living in India are living on less than $30 a day. And there's some wonderful, I really do recommend people have a look at this. They've got some incredible graphics. And it's a guy called, you may know this guy, Max Roser, who's a German guy, but he's at Oxford University. Who's put this, been partly responsible, putting this thing together. It's got some of the most extraordinary graphics where you can literally go country by country around the world to see comparable stats on extreme poverty. And it's, you know, it's terrifying because it is, you keep saying Africa is where the really bad stuff is, and this, this absolutely brings that home.

• 34:00Rory Stewart?

  It is, it is. And, and the, the big story for people who don't, don't follow this day to day is that there was incredible progress, particularly in China, where seven or eight hundred million people have been taken out of extreme poverty since nineteen eighty. Huge progress in India and also in Bangladesh. I mean, when I was born, Bangladesh was referred to openly as the basket case. It was, uh, people thought that Bangladesh was never going to be able to get off its feet. And actually Bangladesh is well on its way to becoming a middle income country and has made huge progress in reducing poverty. Countries like Morocco, huge progress too. But in sub Saharan Africa, the, the situation is very, very bleak across that whole region. Almost half the population, well, forty percent of the population is still in extreme poverty.

• 34:44Rory Stewart?

  And, and we're talking here about, you, you, you mentioned in, in Malawi that about seventy percent of people are under two dollars fifteen a day. Two dollars fifteen is what the World Bank calculates. You really need to meet the most basic basics in your life. Put a bit of food on the table, have some basic shelter, get the most minimal access to education and health. And seventy percent of people are not meeting that, that level yet. So I'm, I'm keen, you're, you're very kindly offered to come with me to Malawi and I'd, I'd love to, to bring you here because one, one of the reasons I'm so excited about Give Directly and the cash movement is that giving people a transfer of cash to get them on their feet is probably the most cost effective, transformative thing.

• 35:27Rory Stewart?

  It's extraordinary and we talk about cash, but it's not really cash. It's what you do with the cash. It's the way that it transforms suddenly.

• 35:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 35:34Rory Stewart?

  The kind of house you're living in, your kid's ability to go to school, the food you can put on the table, your ability to invest in a small business and be better off in twelve or fifteen years' time from a one-time transfer.

• 35:44Alastair Campbell?

  The, the other thing that, um, our world in data does, it, they have a, as well as having lots of kind of interactive maps and lots and lots and lots of data, more data than you can kind of handle, but it's, it's very, very well presented. But they also have some deep dive essays. It's in one of those that I saw there was a reference to. Max Rose is supporting your charity GiveDirectly, but he also makes the big point that ultimately we do have to help these economies grow. You can't, we can't just, it's not just about charity in this. We have to help these economies grow.

• 36:14Rory Stewart?

  So just quickly on that one, I mean, I think it's probably about three things. I think it's about governments and corruption, having a governing culture that's really dedicated to development. It's about the right kind of investments in public infrastructure, roads, bridges, dams, schools, hospitals. But it's also about including the extreme poor in that story because some of these countries have had economic growth without really bringing the extreme poor with them. And that, I think, is where NGOs and cash support is probably most powerful, where international development support can be most powerful, is getting the extreme poor into that growth.

• 36:47Alastair Campbell?

  So Live Aid.

• 36:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, Live Aid. Tell us about that.

• 36:51Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I covered Live Aid for the Daily Mirror, July the 13th, 1985. So I would have been, what, 28? That was a year, I was probably drinking a lot because it was a year ahead of my kind of massive breakdown. I don't know if journalists do this anymore because they're also sort of digital, but when Fiona and I were young journalists, we have these hundreds of these, dozens of these cuttings books and I dug them out. I, so I don't know if you, we've got the cameras off, but I'm looking now at the Daily Mirror souvenir issue. We did a whole wraparound. We even got rid of the sports pages, a whole wraparound. It just says, "The world rocked with love." There's a picture of Mick Jagger and Tina Turner performing, a picture of a young woman at Wembley and a young woman

• 37:36Alastair Campbell?

  at Philadelphia. Because I don't know if you remember, there were, there were two, Live Aid started at midday at Wembley in front of 72,000 people. And then a few hours later, the concert then opened at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. And that went on until four in the morning our time. And you had most of the big names in rock music. It was actually Boy George's idea initially.

• 38:01Alastair Campbell?

  Bob Geldof had put together that amazing Do They Know It's Christmas, got loads of stars together. And Boy George was performing at Wembley Arena at Christmas time in 1984. And there were a few other stars there and he got a few of them up on stage and they kind of did the song. And then he phoned Bob Geldof and said, listen, why don't you do this? And Bob Geldof, who I've had a lot of dealings with in lots of different, different guises, once he gets an idea, he just goes for it. You know, I, I, I can't pretend to that I've got many actual memories of it, but the ones that I do have, I remember Status Quo kicking it off with Rockin' All Over The World. I remember Paul McCartney having trouble with his microphone. I think he was one of the few who had real sort of tech

• 38:42Alastair Campbell?

  issues. I remember that. You know, he had Queen. Queen's set, by the way, was voted the best ever live performance in 2005. Years later, it was considered the best ever live performance. Elton John sang with, with George Michael. Bob Geldof sang his famous song, you know, Don't Like Mondays. Queen, I do remember Queen. They were absolutely incredible. Phil Collins did both venues. He, he played at Wembley. He then got a helicopter to Heathrow. He got on Concorde, landed and got another helicopter to Philadelphia and he picked up Cher. Cher was on the plane and she didn't know it was happening. He took her down and she performed as well. So Phil Collins performed at, at both. They reckon it raised about

• 39:27Alastair Campbell?

  150 million in the, in the immediate aftermath. But I think the big point, as you say, it absolutely put development on the map. And the other guy we should give a big shout out when we're talking about Live Aid is the BBC journalist, Michael Burke, because it was his report in Ethiopia that set this whole ball rolling. And you, you know, you, you talk about events and reports that can change the world. I would argue that Michael Burke's report changed the world. And I think Live Aid did as well.

• 39:54Rory Stewart?

  It's amazing, isn't it? And, and I think credit also to Bono, who's been a huge guiding force in, in the whole drive on this for, for 30 years now.

• 40:02Alastair Campbell?

  Bono performed at Wembley, but at that stage, he wasn't the kind of mega star that he is now. And he wasn't, he wasn't, nor was he the mega figure in the development world that he is now. So Live Aid, again, I think was a really big moment for him.

• 40:17Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's, I mean, the sad thing is though, that poverty, which was the central issue. In the eighties and was a central issue when you and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were getting ready for the for the big G eight summit, two thousand and five Gleneagles, which was all about debt relief and poverty. And there was a big commission on Africa that was set up. And you remember the Sustainable Development Goals, which put Sustainable Development Goal number one of the United Nations is about

• 40:47Alastair Campbell?

  Number one, yeah.

• 40:48Rory Stewart?

  Ending extreme poverty. But that has faded out of sight. And for somebody like me who's working on this, it's very frustrating. And it's partly that there are other very serious crises that we're facing. So climate change, of course, which but of course, as I keep trying to point out to people, you can't think about climate change separate from poverty. It's tempting to because a lot of the solutions to carbon emissions are not in poor countries because the poorest countries aren't the big emitters. That's why a lot of the money from the UN is actually being invested in China and Indonesia and more middle income countries. But the people who suffer from it are the extreme poor. And climate change is going to add hundreds of millions more people in extreme poverty

• 41:30Rory Stewart?

  around the world. And yet, the sad thing is, it's so often when I talk to people now around the world, they say, Oh, I'm not really interested in poverty anymore. I'm more interested in climate, or I'm more interested in artificial intelligence, or I'm more interested in global health. And I think it's partly that there's a sort of sense of despair. We've got to restore people's hope. We've got to restore their confidence that it can be tackled. And that's why I'm a real believer in some of the things which are now happening across Africa, where we are beginning to demonstrate that we can end extreme poverty in our lifetime.

• 42:03Alastair Campbell?

  Now, the other thing I'd point to on this Max Rose's website, this Our World in Data, is that there is a lot of progress on there. And there's a lot of good news. And they do some really interesting case studies over time. Of how change is made. But look, in the end, this is why political leadership is so important. You know, you mentioned Tony and Gordon. When Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were in office, this issue really, really mattered. And that meant that they took it to other governments as well. And so you need the big countries with political leaders who say, we are going to do this stuff. And that's why, but you and I both, we bang on probably too much about how much we despise Boris Johnson. But one of the reasons is, you know, getting rid of DIFIT and giving up on the 0.7%

• 42:46Alastair Campbell?

  of GDP on international aid and development for purely political reasons, without any regard to the long term consequence. I just think it's immoral.

• 42:55Rory Stewart?

  100%.

• 42:56Alastair Campbell?

  I think that you're right that it's gone backwards, but and you're right that it's partly because we've got all these other challenges. But that's why you do need political leaders to step up and, you know, hopefully, we pressed Keir Starmer, we pressed David Lammy, hopefully a new Labour government, if we get one, will actually take this issue more seriously.

• 43:16Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, on that also, I think there's also something which is to really be blunt with the conscience of the left and say, if you care deeply about inequality in Britain, and I think the progressive movement does care deeply about inequality in Britain, your care, your compassion should not stop at your national borders. You should care

• 43:38Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 43:38Rory Stewart?

  deeply, deeply about people in extreme poverty all around the world and not see that as a sort of separate issue.

• 43:44Alastair Campbell?

  We talked recently to Bernie Sanders and he was raging about the billionaire class and said, there's no reason for anybody to be so wealthy as a Musk or a Murdoch or a Bezos, whoever it might be. We've just been there talking about the millions and billions of people who are living on incomes that you and I and most people that we know would find unimaginable. And yet we're living alongside or in the same country, in the same part of the world as. People who could do so much. I mean, to be fair to Bill Gates, I think he does do a lot with his money. But the wealthy of the world could do so much. But ultimately, I think it takes governments to have the guts to say,

• 44:23Alastair Campbell?

  look, we actually need to start having a much more progressive tax system. We have to start understanding we have responsibilities to each other. And that that includes countries that are that are poorer than us. Otherwise, we just kind of go round and round and round in circles.

• 44:36Rory Stewart?

  Well, one of the odd things about billionaires, and I I do speak to quite a lot of them when I'm trying to fundraise for for poverty in Africa, is the number of people who say that they've signed up for this giving pledge. So they've signed up to give away the vast majority of their money during their lives, but they're not doing it. They haven't started doing it. They keep putting it off. And they're generating, as you can imagine, if you're worth ten billion dollars, you're generating just an interest payments every year, the most colossal sum of money. And yet they are often saying that the reason they're not spending is they claim that there's nothing out there valuable which can absorb their money. And and that's where I think.

• 45:13Alastair Campbell?

  So they buy so they buy Premier League football clubs instead.

• 45:15Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. That actually, in a very straightforward sense, if you can't think of anything else to do with your money, five hundred dollars given to somebody in extreme poverty can transform their lives. And if you're worth billions, you can do that many, many thousands of times over.

• 45:30Alastair Campbell?

  The Live Aid model, by the way, Rory, was ahead of its time because they sought to give directly. There was lots of people tried to say that lots of it was siphoned off by the Mungustu regime in Ethiopia. But actually, Brian Bader, who was our ambassador for a long period out there, he actually said that the evidence of that was pretty flimsy. So what was great about Live Aid was was the the combination of the fundraising, very important, but much bigger, I think, was the political message, and also the fact that it was one of the greatest musical events of all time. It was also at the time the biggest and most complicated outside broadcast that anybody ever tried.

• 46:08Alastair Campbell?

  And the the the other, there's a list, there's a very, there's a quite a funny list of of the notable absentees, the ones who either couldn't get involved and want to get involved and now regret it. But Bruce Springsteen, for example, wasn't there. A Boy George, even though he played such a role in getting off the ground, he didn't think he was big enough, uh, which I think is really, really sad. Annie Lennox, Cliff Richard. But the four tops were there, Rory, and I'm sure like me, you're a massive Four Tops fan.

• 46:34Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's move on. But but one of the things when we get Bob Geldof on on the podcast to talk to him, I'd love to explore a little bit more his claim that this all finished in 2005 with his Live Aid conference and why he thinks that actually the age of rock and roll has ended, the world has changed, and why he thinks it's not possible to do that kind of thing again in the same way and have the same impact. But I suspect you wanted to tell us a little bit about Shamima Begum and this and this BBC documentary that you've been watching. But make sure that you remind readers who should readers listeners who Shamima Begum is before you tell us about BBC documentary.

• 47:12Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I reckon most of our listeners will have heard of Shamima Begum. If you haven't seen the BBC documentary by a guy called Josh Baker, I strongly recommend it.

• 47:24Rory Stewart?

  Just before you tell us about documentary, Shamima Begum was a 15 year old in Bethnal Green who went off to join ISIS. And she arrived in on the Syria Iraq border. She married an ISIS fighter. She travelled with two other girls from Bethnal Green. And she was then found after the defeat of ISIS by a Times journalist called Anthony Lloyd, who interviewed her in a refugee camp in Syria, or an ISIS detention camp in Syria. And she then had her British citizenship stripped off her by the then Home Secretary, Sajid Javid. And there's then been a series of court cases. The Court of Appeal said that she should get her citizenship back. And then the Supreme Court decided that the Home Secretary had

• 48:06Rory Stewart?

  acted lawfully. She shouldn't get her citizenship back. And another thing called SaAC, which is a secret tribunal that looks at terrorists and security cases, has also confirmed that decision. Anyway, you then watched the documentary. Over to you.

• 48:18Alastair Campbell?

  That was a very, very good explanation, far better than I would have done. The final bit to add to that, in terms of the process of her case, is just this week, Jonathan Hall, who is the Casey, sorry, I nearly said QC, who's the independent reviewer on terrorism legislation. He said that he thinks she should be brought back. He apparently 400 people have come back. There has been no successful attack by what is called a returner. And he also makes the point that women are far less likely to commit acts of terrorism. Now, what I what I saw in the documentary, and it's a really interesting piece of film because it's very largely based on interviews with her by this guy Josh Baker.

• 49:03Alastair Campbell?

  But also with a lot of people involved in the story. It tells the story in a in a really kind of quite compelling way. Lots of CCTV footage of her departure, interviews with people that were involved at the time. Some politicians involved, Tim Lawton is very, very critical of her and thinks that the government's made the right decision. Interviews with her husband, who's in jail. But the story of her, so she leaves at age 15, as you say. Part of that, you know, Bangladeshi community in Bethnal Green. Growing up in Britain with a very different sort of background in terms of her family culture. Not clear really how the radicalisation begins, but she gets there. She marries within 10 days.

• 49:47Alastair Campbell?

  She has three children, all of whom die. There is a very kind of, it's not entirely clear what she actually does for ISIS. Her argument would be that, for example, she's accused of making suicide bomb vests. She denies that completely. She says she was most of the time just kept at home because she was a, she became a kind of ISIS bride. Her husband was jailed at one point. He was out as a fighter. He's Dutch, but a convert to Islam. The witnesses that were that I found the most compelling, apart from her, she's an extraordinary interview. And when I say compelling, I mean, it's just you can't take your eyes off her in terms of the way she speaks. She she reminded me, well, she brought to mind people that I've.

• 50:31Alastair Campbell?

  You know, seen in different parts of periods of my life, people who've been trained to resist interrogation. She she she's got a very, very clear way of speaking. And you find yourself one minute thinking, oh, I really believe this woman. And the next minute you think I'm being manipulated. It's it's it's like a kind of you get drawn into trying to make these judgments. But Anthony Lloyd, the journalist you mentioned, I found him very, very convincing. And I think he reached the conclusion that ultimately, this isn't just a story about her joining ISIS. It's a story of what her life was like in Britain. It's a story of then what she got up to. But she is actually British, and that she ought to be brought back, and she ought to face British justice. She's obviously

• 51:16Alastair Campbell?

  admitted that she joined a terrorist organization. She's denied doing some of the things that she's been accused of. But I think that for Sajid Javid, to say that she should essentially spend the rest of her life stateless, the British government argue that she has Bangladeshi status as well, but the Bangladeshi say she doesn't. So, you know, she's stateless. And I just think she should, you know, she should be brought back. And if she's a risk, if she she'd obviously go to jail because she's admitted joining a terrorist organization. But I just think that the way she's just left there now to rot, I think is wrong.

• 51:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? I mean, I remember it all very, very strongly because I was I was in government at the time. And I mean, firstly, that whole ISIS phenomenon was beyond imagining. I mean, suddenly, out of nowhere, I think you remember in in June 2014, a few ISIS fighters, few hundred people in pickups defeated three divisions of the Iraqi army. So tens of thousands of men captured Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, and created a new state.

• 52:22Rory Stewart?

  Between Syria and Iraq, this enormous territory ruled in the most horrifying way. And what I remember thinking at the time was just how diverse these people were who were going to join ISIS. There were poor people from Yemen and Morocco, there were middle class people from Cardiff, there were people from Denmark, there were people from France. I mean, it was the most incredible collection of people and it was unbelievably cruel and horrible. You'll remember the rape and the murder of these minorities, you'll remember them.

• 52:54Alastair Campbell?

  Beheadings.

• 52:54Rory Stewart?

  Beheadings, the flinging of people who were gay out of buildings, there was, I mean, and the sense of these incredibly unpleasant young men and women, many of them European, who were sort of living out a kind of video game lifestyle, charging up and down on these large pickup trucks with heavy machine guns and sending weird messages on social media. A lot of this was driven by the way they portrayed themselves on social media. They developed their own music systems. I mean, it was, it was a completely bizarre phenomenon of which Shamima Begum was clearly a central part. She was very attracted by a lot of this. You know, she's on record saying she didn't regret the bombing in Manchester. And into

• 53:35Rory Stewart?

  the middle of this comes this other fascinating character who somebody should be writing much more about, who's my friend Anthony Lloyd, who I, I've seen all over the world. I knew him in Afghanistan, I knew him in Iraq, I was with him in Libya. He's an ex-British soldier and he is an incredibly courageous, committed journalist, but he has also struggled with mental health issues. He takes risks like I cannot believe. I mean, I saw him in Libya, go down streets on the front lines where no other journalist would go, his whole car being shot up by bullets, barely making it out of life. I mean, he's an extraordinary figure and, and it's, you know, we're very lucky that Anthony's still with us, the way that he's, he's lived his life over the last few years.

• 54:16Alastair Campbell?

  Well, his, his interview is, is a very significant, I think compelling, an important part of the. Of the programme and you sort of see him, he tells a story about how he found her, the conversations that he had, he's kept the tapes of those conversations and they play some of those tapes. But he reaches that conclusion that, you know, ultimately she went there as a child. And she is British and, you know, lots of people may not want to like to confront that truth. But how she got radicalised and the mistakes that were made, some of the, they go into some of the sort of mistakes in, in terms of what happened at the school, because one of her school friends had gone ahead.

• 54:55Alastair Campbell?

  And then letters were sent to these girls and she, she, the, the letters were sent to the girls, but of course they didn't get through to the parents. And there was no sort of follow up on that. There's, there's all sorts of threads to this. But it's a, it's one of those films that I sat and watched and, you know, at the end of it, I kind of didn't quite know what I thought. But that's why I found Anthony Lloyd's interview. Ultimately, I think I thought what he ended up thinking, uh, which is that she clearly got involved in something she's never got involved in. She had a horrible time when she was there. I mean, basically she, she got married with this guy, this Dutch guy who was really creepy. And she married him, had three children. They all, they're all born, they all went to full birth and they were born as, as children, but then they died.

• 55:40Alastair Campbell?

  Including one of them, three days was born, three days after Anthony Lloyd found her. And so it's a horrible story on so many levels. And I just think that when you, you hear him talking about it, he, as you say, a proper journalist who's really gone into it in depth and really thought about it. As opposed to the people who make all the noise, the ones that Sajid Javid was probably listening to. And Javid, there's an interview where he basically says, look, if you knew what I knew, you wouldn't even think about allowing her back. Well, if that's the case, share it with the public.

• 56:10Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's, I mean, I think we, we, yeah, we, we're coming to an end, but I mean, I think this is where, if we want to touch this again, where this special tribunal, the Saac tribunal comes in, because they hear secret information.

• 56:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 56:20Rory Stewart?

  Which can't be released and, and they of course confirm Sajid Javid's decision. But anyway. Thank you. And I will make sure when I get back to somewhere where I can watch the BBC, it's very frustrating being abroad. You can't watch these BBC shows. I look forward to watching it very much indeed and look forward to talking soon.

• 56:36Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

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• 57:27Speaker 09

  Espolone Tequila. Balanced. Delicious. 100% agave, 0% ego. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth. For a real margarita, ride the rooster.

• 57:37Speaker 08

  Espolone Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Compaq America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.