165: Question Time: Populism in Portugal, texting David Cameron, and a challenger to Trump?

Is Portugal the exception to the populist wave? Are reshuffle rumours ever to be trusted? How possible is a one-nation Tory revival? Listen as Rory and Alastair answer all these questions and more on this week’s episode of Question Time. 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. 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 Creve and of course the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

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

• 1:06Speaker 02

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• 1:56Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:01Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. And Rory, I want to start with an apology to our listeners. When we get things wrong, we always admitted it. And I don't know why I said this because I knew even after I said it, it was wrong. But anyway, this is from somebody called Anonimus. Anonimus? Oh, anonymous. I see. Ah, very, very funny. Anonimus says, "You were very poorly informed about the Police Service Northern Ireland data breach. The release of the data was in response to a freedom of information request. It was not due to a cyber attack. It reportedly went through five separate checks before being posted. It should not have been so easy, as you suggest. It may not have been an accident." Anonimus also goes on to point out, "It's Catholic members of the PSNI who are at risk of the result of this breach,

• 2:44Alastair Campbell?

  as they're considered by some on the far-right nationalist side as treacherous for having joined the force previously infamous as the RUC." Second part of that question, fairly loaded, Anne. What's really strange Rory, after we recorded it, I realised I'd said that and I knew it was absolute bollocks, but I forgot to phone the production and tell them. So there we are. It went through.

• 3:03Rory Stewart?

  Just on this one. So I mean, the BBC's reported on this. So essentially, there were two breaches. The first breach happened when data was made public in error in response to an FOI request and appeared online for three hours last Tuesday. And then a second data breach involving the theft of a spreadsheet with the names of 200 officers and staff emerged the following day. And that, as she says, is not a cyber breach. That was actually the theft of a police issue laptop and radio from a private vehicle. But it's somebody, a second person has just been arrested by Northern Ireland Police. So they're taking it very seriously. But it's a reminder to all of us because if you read too quickly these stories, it says a major data breach. One's immediate assumption is that it's a cyber attack, not that somebody's releasing it in response to a freedom of information.

• 3:45Alastair Campbell?

  No, but I knew because I remember thinking at the time, who on earth would have released that as an FOI? So anyway, slap wrist for me and I'm blaming the heat. Now, the next one is you. Populism in Portugal. Tome Ribeiro, Gomez. Rory teases with the Portuguese exception to the populist way. But you ended up not going into it on the podcast. The populist Chega party has grown rapidly over its short existence. And indeed, it has, Rory. It's now the third political force. And I sort of knew that when you said it, and I thought, maybe he knows more than I do here. But, you know, they're going into the European elections and they're currently at thirteen point two percent, which isn't bad for a, you know, smaller party.

• 4:26Alastair Campbell?

  They've got twelve seats in parliament and even though they've got none in the European Parliament, on that voting, they gained three or four seats of Portugal's share in the European Parliament. And they are pretty right wing. I mean, they've got similar white supremacists, slightly neo-Nazi roots.

• 4:43Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's definitely true. They do have this party, but Portugal has had a different history to other European countries. And I don't want to overdo it, but I think that you can make a case that Portugal's been a really remarkable example of moderation.

• 4:56Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 4:56Rory Stewart?

  You presumably are cheered up by the fact that the two main parties are the Socialist Party and the Social Democratic Party.

• 5:02Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely. As far as he's done pretty well, I mean, you know, so, yeah, they're a rare success story on the more progressive side.

• 5:11Rory Stewart?

  It's worth looking at them. Maybe you should look at them a bit more. So obviously Gutierrez, who's the UN Secretary General, was their leader. Antonio Costa and now, but people often sort of think about them as though they're just a sort of subset of Spain. But in fact, their historical experience is a bit different. Yes, like Spain, they were under a dictatorship to the early seventies, but it wasn't a dictatorship that, like Franco's, it wasn't one that tried to crush kind of national identities. It didn't have quite the extreme brutality of Franco. They had a much more dramatic transition out of dictatorship. Spain, there were a lot of issues that weren't dealt with in the seventies that continue to haunt. And you see this through moving Franco's body and stuff. Unlike Spain, they didn't grow into this huge housing bubble.

• 5:54Rory Stewart?

  And Spain, of course, has massive automobile industry, wind manufacturing, tourism on one of the largest scales in the world. Whereas Portugal is still very much doing things like manufacturing cork, manufacturing shoes. They're also different because traditionally, a bit like Ireland, which I guess is maybe a comparable economy in terms of size and. Scale until it started to grow so quickly. The problem in Portugal wasn't immigration, it was immigration. Portuguese leaving to go to other countries, the way that people do from places like Romania or Albania. So there wasn't the same underlying stuff. And finally, I think in the financial crisis, Spain ended up with nearly 50% youth unemployment. And I think their general unemployment rate shot up to nearly twice that of Portugal's.

• 6:35Rory Stewart?

  So maybe there haven't been quite the same drivers in Portugal in terms of the 2008 financial crisis, immigration and other things. I mean, they still obviously inherit the problems with social media. They did go through a brutal situation, the financial crisis, their debt. But maybe that's part of the reason why they've tended to be more moderate and more centrist in their politics since the seventies.

• 6:55Alastair Campbell?

  Costa is now in his third term, which is pretty rare for any leader these days. But there have been quite a lot of scandals and resignations in recent months in this third term. I think he's lost double figures now. He's lost ministers and secretaries of state, which is almost Boris Johnson level. And partly to do with some issues of corruption and also past conduct. But, you know, I think that you're broadly right, that we're talking about a pretty successful progressive government. We should thank our eagle eared Portuguese listener for pointing out that we didn't go back to something that we said we were going to. So thanks for that.

• 7:33Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Okay, next question coming in from Sidhata Khare. What are your predictions for the Republican primaries? Any thoughts on the Reagan oriented Vivek Ramaswamy?

• 7:43Alastair Campbell?

  Is this the guy that everybody's talking about with the big money coming behind?

• 7:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so Vivek Ramaswamy is very, very young. I think he's in his late 30s. He is famously kind of fast, eloquent talker. He is an extreme isolationist. He seems to want to have America to have almost nothing to do with the world at all. He's, I think, said that if America manages to get independent with semiconductors, then there's no point in defending Taiwan at all. And as Ron DeSantis loses some of his momentum and energy, people are beginning to focus more on Vivek Ramaswamy.

• 8:15Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I don't know much about him at all, so I'm bowing to your superior knowledge on that one. Look, I feel that unless these legal cases against Trump really do him, I think he's going to be the candidate. It's not that long ago, people were talking about Ron DeSantis as being the great white hope. As you said yesterday, he's virtually vanished. I see Trump's not turning up for the first debate. Chris Christie had a wonderful, wonderful put down on him about that, basically saying that he was both useless and a coward. So there are some sort of voices coming out telling the truth about Trump.

• 8:47Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 8:48Alastair Campbell?

  James Thompson, in light of GCSE and A level results, in your well travelled and worldly opinions, which education systems from which country is the most fit for purpose and effective? How should we measure success in schools? We had quite a lot of questions about education this week. Jack Harris, seeing as the Education Secretary has admitted that A levels and by extension exams are pointless in the long term, I was wondering if you could define the point of education. I don't think she was quite saying that. She did say something, I think, rather odd for an Education Secretary on the day that exams were coming out. She said in 10 years' time, nobody will care. I think that is a very odd message an Education Secretary put out there.

• 9:26Rory Stewart?

  Well, I'd defend her for a second because I think one of our questioners actually defended her, didn't they? It is true that by the time you're 10 years into the workplace, people don't pay any attention to what your A levels were.

• 9:35Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but is that the sensible thing to say on the day that kids are sweating over their exams? I just thought it was a very, very odd thing to say.

• 9:41Rory Stewart?

  Okay, even though it's true.

• 9:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's true in some regards, but you still have to go in, particularly in the modern world, people having to apply for jobs for most of their lives. So I think it does matter. So it's partially true, but I thought it was a very glib and silly thing to say on the day that, you know, everybody's getting the exams. On the main point, let me just say, the countries which overwhelmingly top virtually every

• 10:07Alastair Campbell?

  Big global education survey you see are Canada, Finland, South Korea. And I'll tell you the one that's coming up big time on the rails is Estonia. And they're all different, but I, if I can think of three things that I think they really drive through their system. One is no segregation, whether that's by class, whether that's by private public, whether that's by grammar. They all tend to want to go to the same schools. The second thing, which I think is the most important, is that they really value teachers. And that is not just reflected in pay. And the other thing is that those teachers are not on a totally constant treadmill of exams and inspection. And the third thing is there's some strong system of local oversight. And I think there are things that we weakened.

• 10:52Rory Stewart?

  Tell us a little about the local oversight. So it's not all done from the centre, it's more devolved down to the local authority?

• 10:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, the local authorities have real power. They're properly funded from the centre, but then there's real local oversight of, of, of schools. And I think that we have got our system much more centralised than it used to be. But I think this point about teachers is fundamental. You know, we do seem to have had over the last few years in particular, a sense of government and the educational sort of authorities being at war with teachers. And I just think it's not the way to go. Teachers have got to be valued in a way that at the moment they're not. So I think that's the answer to James's question. Those countries which value their teachers make everybody feel ownership of the schools that they go to. I think Canada and Finland in particular, I don't know about South Korea, but Canada and Finland, there is virtually no private education market at all. Because they know that they can go to good schools.

• 11:42Alastair Campbell?

  Every knows they can go to good state schools.

• 11:43Rory Stewart?

  So there's no point paying a lot of money if you can get a good education anyway. Yeah, I agree with you. So what did politics teach you about yourself? Amy Gandon, what did you most learn about your own character during your time in politics? What positive and what negative traits did it bring out in you?

• 11:58Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, Lord.

• 11:59Rory Stewart?

  And any more of one than the other?

• 12:01Alastair Campbell?

  It definitely brought out my obsessiveness. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I think there were times where it was good and there were times where it was bad. I think it definitely played into my sense of tribalism. Although you would argue I still have a lot of that, I can tell you I have a lot less than I used to. I think it made me quite intolerant at times. I think it made me, I often, and I still have this, I often will analyse something and see a problem so clearly that I just cannot understand why people don't, other people don't see it the same way. And that is always a mistake in politics. What about you?

• 12:36Rory Stewart?

  So I found politics very, very damaging, very damaging for my kind of body, mind and soul. I think it's a world that doesn't really encourage stepping back and having the space for critical thinking. But I also learnt the flip side of that, which is I learnt my weakness, which is too much of a tendency to get into the details of things. I became a better minister when I was able to really boil down my thinking to a simple position, a clear, simple position. And initially I sort of slightly despised that. But I realised that actually it was moments when I was able to say, for example, in prisons, "I will resign unless I bring violence down in a year." A simple statement like that really gave me the kind of entry point into doing the kind of things that I wanted.

• 13:21Rory Stewart?

  So it's a very, very strange profession though. I think it's, it's not just social media. I think the whole emphasis on campaigning, the whole style of political argument pushes against what we need, which is careful, thoughtful policy analysis. So I found it very, very difficult.

• 13:37Alastair Campbell?

  But in a way, you're saying that that was because that is your character and your character didn't change. And that's why you found it difficult. So that's maybe not a bad thing.

• 13:45Rory Stewart?

  No, I think parts of my character probably did change. I probably became a bit more fragile, a bit more insecure, a bit more needy. I mean, after five years on the back benches, I began to notice to my eternal shame that I was sending kind of creepy texts to David Cameron congratulating him on his latest speech in the hope that he might promote me.

• 14:05Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, right. Okay, I see. Okay. So that is not you.

• 14:11Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that I did not think was me. No, I went in thinking I was a pretty kind of independent, secure figure. And I sort of stood up to Cameron and I disagreed and I rebelled, you know, big vote about the House of Lords. And I tried to chart my own course. And then as the years rolled on, and I found myself stuck in the horror of the back benches, I began to discover this a more creepy ambition emerging, which made me pretty ashamed of myself.

• 14:35Alastair Campbell?

  My book has been about trying to get people involved in politics. I hope you don't sort of go around the country, as Willie Wiley used to say, stirring up apathy.

• 14:43Rory Stewart?

  Stirring up apathy.

• 14:45Alastair Campbell?

  He used to say that was, he used to say that was his job was to go around the country, stirring up apathy.

• 14:50Rory Stewart?

  My, my great theory is that the way to change is to make people stare really hard at the problem, be brutally honest in their analysis of the problem. And that's actually the way to make things improve.

• 15:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, I hope you're right. Here we are. This is also really about politics and how it's Edward Gautier, I've just reread, obviously a Tory rereads books, Marie Le Conde's great book about gossip at Westminster. To what extent do you think gossip is a good or bad part of Westminster? How much did it factor into your daily roles there?

• 15:20Rory Stewart?

  I mean, the place was just full of gossip. It was really, really disturbing. One of the things that made me sad is highly intelligent colleagues and, you know, whatever you thought of them, people like Quasi Quarting had a big brain, but it was impossible to get them to be serious. It was impossible to get them to sit down and talk in detail about policy. The whole culture of the thing was about offhand jokes, gossip, sitting in the tea rooms, looking at the newspapers, seeing which scandal had hit another colleague, gossiping about who was being promoted and who was going down there. And the culture of the journalists too, the lobby was basically not really about taking ideas seriously or the integrity of individuals seriously. It was all about who's up and who's down. What was your experience?

• 16:00Alastair Campbell?

  I absolutely hate gossip. I don't really see that as gossip. What I hate, and there's a lot of it in politics. Is when stories develop about people and nobody knows whether they're true or not and no but nobody really cares because it's just gossip. Now, I fell victim to some of those. I remember this story went, I think, have I told you this story about a story went around that I was having this affair with the Tory MPs secretary?

• 16:25Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 16:25Alastair Campbell?

  And it went, it was like everywhere. It was like, you know, and I sort of started to see people looking at me differently and wink and all that sort of stuff. And it was like, and I saw, I said, do I say anything or don't I? And, you know, it was completely untrue. Now, I didn't, I had loads of stuff thrown at me all the time. So it didn't really bother me that much, but it bothered the woman a lot. And she, I think, found it very, very difficult to deal with it. And then there's other sorts of gossip. I often think about Leon Britton, the stories that went around about him that were just truly horrible. And you used to hear people saying, well, you know, no smoke without fire, no smoke without fire. But it was gossip.

• 17:02Rory Stewart?

  No, no, it's completely horrible. So I had the same. So I had a story that was put in the newspapers and was reported in the newspapers from a spreadsheet put out on the sexual misdemeanors of Conservative MPs. And my name was listed with the name of my parliamentary assistant. So it said Rory Stewart, and then the name of the parliamentary assistant, I'll repeat her name on this, but Rory Stewart asked his assistant to do odd things. Literally, I have no idea what this was. I mean, maybe she had complained to someone in the canteen that I'd asked her to go out and get sushi or something, but the implication was clearly some kind of weird sexual activity. And of course, I was, you know, I was a married man, I had kids, and for her, unbelievably shaming and embarrassing to have her name out. And I was being attacked at the same time as she is Dominic

• 17:46Rory Stewart?

  Raab. And I said to the Conservatives at the time, I'm going to go out and challenge this. I'm going to go straight in the media and say this is complete nonsense. I'm going to put it out at Twitter statement. And I was under huge pressure from the media operation, number 10, to do nothing.

• 17:59Alastair Campbell?

  I can see that.

• 18:00Rory Stewart?

  Why?

• 18:01Alastair Campbell?

  Well, because, because what happens is that if you do it, Then every else would be expected to do it. And of course, they can only do it if it's not true. That would be the thing. That would be the thinking. So the ones that said, you know, so and so, and so and so, you know, you can't walk by him without him pinching your ass. And I remember the document, by the way.

• 18:20Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, you remember the document, yeah.

• 18:21Alastair Campbell?

  You'll be pleased to know that I don't remember you being in it because they were far worse offenders. And I guess even I at something like that would would look at that and think I'd I'd immediately see political advantage. And that's again, something that's wrong with politics as opposed to, oh shit, this could happen to us.

• 18:37Rory Stewart?

  So the fascinating thing is how disingenuous the press team were. They didn't say to me what I'm sure is true, that that was the reason they were doing it. They said, oh, no, no, you'll cause yourself more trouble if you put out a statement. It'll just it'll just make more of a story. I put out a statement. I completely ignored them, put out a statement on my website, put out a statement on Twitter, killed the story instantly. Nobody mentioned me again. Everybody else continued to be in a morass of problems and allegations because some of these allegations you say were true.

• 19:01Alastair Campbell?

  Were true.

• 19:02Rory Stewart?

  But it was a real kind of reminder of the weirdness of completely unfair, humiliating gossip. And then your own party preventing you from getting out and clearing up. And I completely agree with you. Everybody reading that would have been like, well, no smoke without a fire. I mean, really, would you say that about Rory if he hadn't done something weird? It can't actually be that he's asking to go out and get sushi, right? And it's named her name. So she had to put out a statement as well, saying, you know, Rory, I promise did not do anything weird to me. But did I pressure her to put out that statement? I mean, you know, once you start it, where does it end?

• 19:35Alastair Campbell?

  The thing about gossip that is so corrosive. And of course, it's so tempting in politics. If you can get a rumor going that, you know, somebody's up to no good, or you get a rumor going that you know is going to affect them psychologically, or affect their private life, affect their home life, or whatever, is so tempting to do. Now, I think I'm, you know, I was pretty good because I do hate it. I really do hate it. But I've got to be honest, there were there probably were times when if there was a rumor flying around, you sort of let it fly, I guess. But it's pretty horrible.

• 20:07Rory Stewart?

  It is horrible. It is. It's horrible stuff.

• 20:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Right, Rory, let's have a quick break.

• 20:14Speaker 02

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• 21:30Alastair Campbell?

  Now here we are, Rory. Question for Rory, this is from Holly and the EV. Can you envisage yourself being part of a one nation Tory revival following a Conservative loss in next year's general election? Question for both of us, is a one nation Tory revival even possible in today's Conservative Party?

• 21:47Rory Stewart?

  This is something I think about every day. If I felt that a one nation revival was possible in the Conservative Party, I would be standing for election at the next election. But honestly, I don't. I don't recognise my own party at the moment. I fear that when they come out of the next election, they will be taken over by Suella Braverman or someone on the right. And that if somebody like me were to stand again and try to lead the Conservative Party back to the centre ground, I would find myself in a very weird, isolated position. I'd feel like Mitt Romney trying to challenge the Republican Party or Liz Cheney. That actually the party is now seized by Conservative Party members who are very,

• 22:28Rory Stewart?

  very far to the right of people like me and are deeply suspicious, see us as traitors, see us as remainers.

• 22:35Alastair Campbell?

  Would you get selected in Penrith?

• 22:36Rory Stewart?

  Interesting question. I don't know. I didn't stand. So, so you said, why do we never do good news? And you've found good news in Guatemala, where an anti-corruption candidate's won. But he's an interesting case as somebody who got, I think, 11% of the vote in the first round, made it through the second round of the presidential election one. I think that if I had run to be mayor of London as an independent this year, I might have had a hope under the old electoral system, because it used to be like the French presidential system. If I could come second to Sadiq Khan, first round ahead of the Tory, I'd be able to win possibly in the second round. But that's been changed back to a first past the post system. And one of the problems, I think, of our current system is that our parties have quite a sclerotic grip. And I feel that it would be pretty

• 23:21Rory Stewart?

  difficult, difficult to win as an independent anywhere. Maybe Penrith would have been different, but pretty difficult in most places to win any kind of Conservative association at the moment.

• 23:30Alastair Campbell?

  But if you say, right, so let's take this guy in Guatemala, Bernardo Arribalo. So as you say, he starts from a low base and he ends up winning. And he does it on a absolutely on an anti-corruption state of politics. Look at the hell of us. We've got to clean this up. And he wins. So what you're doing in a way is you're saying, okay, the Tories are going to lose, you think. Somebody like Suella Braverman is going to come in. Therefore, there's no place for me, okay, and for your sort of politics. But what that means is that the Conservative Party just keeps going in the same direction. Is there not a case for people like you, David Gork, et cetera, trying to get back in so that eventually the penny drops and the Conservative Party goes back to being something more sane and sensible, or morphs into something completely different?

• 24:15Rory Stewart?

  There's a total case for it. But if you put it in the American example, it would be, it feels to me a bit like saying to a Republican, why don't you get in and try to turn the Republican Party away from Trump? And when you put it in those terms, it seems kind of absurd. It doesn't seem credible that Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney are going to turn that machine around. And I Don't get how you do it. I mean, David Galk and I tried, I obviously ran for the leadership, trying to imagine a different type of Conservative Party, and we ended up just being thrown out of the party, thrown out of Parliament. So I, I think it's pretty tough. I think it's possible that if they go through an experience like they did in 97, where, you know, they lurched to the right eventually under Ian Duncan Smith and came back towards the centre, then somebody like me

• 24:59Rory Stewart?

  could reengage and maybe be part of a broader movement with a team that could try to make the case for One Nation Conservatism again. But it feels pretty bleak. And to be honest, I'm not getting very friendly signals. You know, I don't, I'm not in a world in which number 10 is reaching out to people like me.

• 25:14Alastair Campbell?

  No, I can, I can see that. Now, can I ask you a question where you have to defend me?

• 25:19Rory Stewart?

  Yes, delighted to do that.

• 25:21Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you're gonna do, you defend me whatever I do.

• 25:23Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, whatever you've done, I'll always defend you.

• 25:25Alastair Campbell?

  Shaun Dexter says this, "I'm just getting over seeing red mist during Alastair's dogmatic rant during the small boats discussion." Well, no, it wasn't a discussion at all, was it? Rory was trying to explore a new idea for addressing the problem, and Alastair bumping his gums was not really adding value. Sure, I do love the phrase bumping his gums. But I wasn't unreasonable, was I?

• 25:49Rory Stewart?

  No, I think you had a very, very passionate case you wanted to make, and you wanted to keep the focus on your central point, which is that you thought the government was being outrageous on this issue, and you want to land a point that you thought I wasn't accepting or listening to, which is you wanted me to acknowledge that Rishi Sunak and his government are turning the small boats issue purely into political weaponisation.

• 26:12Alastair Campbell?

  So we were disagreeing agreeably.

• 26:14Rory Stewart?

  And you thought that I was trying to change the subject on to the rights and wrongs of immigration and asylum policy. And in fact, actually, there was an interesting email from one of your defenders that you forwarded to me, who took exactly the opposite view. Obviously, I'm extremely pleased by the man with the bumping the gums, because although I signed up to defend you, I'm obviously more on my side than yours. But here's the other side of the argument. "Finally, some feeling even anger from Alastair on small boats. Of course, it ended in agreeable disagreement, because that is the nature of the trip beast, albeit highly enjoyable, sometimes education, occasionally even riveting. Rory just doesn't seem able to not defend the government at the same time as castigating them."

• 26:52Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent.

• 26:53Rory Stewart?

  Incidentally, some thoughts on very good. Am I the only one who finds it intensely irritating every time the words are spoken? So I conclude it's to do with the fact that Rory's found a way of stopping the conversation every time his small c conservative argument is on the threshold of being ripped to shreds. It doesn't help my mood. This is clearly straight out of the Etonian debating society playbook, a tactic which Alice seems to fall for each time.

• 27:15Alastair Campbell?

  Who was this wonderful person?

• 27:17Rory Stewart?

  Well, you forwarded on to me.

• 27:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, I know, but it was his name. We have to give this person the name.

• 27:22Rory Stewart?

  Steve Tall, 53.

• 27:24Alastair Campbell?

  Good old Steve.

• 27:25Rory Stewart?

  Good old Steve.

• 27:26Alastair Campbell?

  Let's be honest, you do do that with very good, don't you?

• 27:29Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 27:29Alastair Campbell?

  You do.

• 27:30Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 27:31Alastair Campbell?

  Whenever I'm really getting steamed up, you just go, very good and move on.

• 27:35Rory Stewart?

  Very good. So let's, uh, let's move on.

• 27:39Alastair Campbell?

  All right. Well, this one, James Ferguson, do Rory and Alice to think outdoor residential learning should be part of our curriculum for young people? And is there a chance of it happening with the emergence of outdoor education bills by Liz Smith, who I think is a Tory in Scotland?

• 27:55Rory Stewart?

  Wonderful Tory in Scotland. I actually often see her climbing Monrose.

• 27:59Alastair Campbell?

  Sam Rollins in Wales and Tim Farron in Westminster.

• 28:02Rory Stewart?

  Tim Farron, my neighbour in Cumbria, who's a great fell runner.

• 28:05Alastair Campbell?

  Have we got three outdoor education bills coming forward in the Welsh, Scottish and UK parliaments? I think outdoor residential learning is bloody brilliant.

• 28:15Rory Stewart?

  There's actually quite a good system that's been set up for this with some cross party support, which it'd be interesting to see whether governments will continue to support, which is national citizen service, which at the core of which is basically outward bound. And it's targeted particularly at getting mixed groups of people, many of them from deprived backgrounds. It's an option to go out, spend a few weeks, learning personal life skills, good for the economy of the Lake District, because it often seems to happen around places like Ullswater. But of course, it is expensive. And I think the challenge for anyone running an education policy is how do you balance the very, very good things? I mean, it's amazing what people get from that experience. If you've not done it before, it's genuinely life changing. But of course, you know, it can cost hundreds of millions of pounds a year to fund it properly. And there's so many other demands in education.

• 28:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but you know, they found millions and millions and millions and millions to give to their mates on Covid, didn't they?

• 29:03Rory Stewart?

  That's right. All they got to do is shake that money tree a bit more.

• 29:08Rory Stewart?

  Con, here's a question for you. You'll like this one because it won't make you remotely defensive. There's no way at all this question will irritate you at all.

• 29:14Alastair Campbell?

  Here we go. Okay.

• 29:16Rory Stewart?

  Mason Gladys, how much damage is the perception that Peter Mandelson is heavily influencing Starmer's strategy doing to Labour's election prospects?

• 29:26Alastair Campbell?

  Well, not at all defensively. In my experience, when people talk about a perception, they're talking about something that has been created by enemies who can't quite find the truth for themselves. In other words, Mason Gladys doesn't know that Peter Mandelson is influencing Starmer's strategy or not. May occasionally read it in newspapers, probably quite hostile to Keir Starmer. So that's my answer to that question.

• 29:54Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 29:54Alastair Campbell?

  Not at all defensive.

• 29:55Rory Stewart?

  No, that was good. That was calm. That was cool. Yep.

• 29:57Alastair Campbell?

  My question is from Phil Davis. As you are both exceptional linguists, flattery will get you everywhere, everywhere, Phil, would you ever consider learning Welsh? I actually speak a bit of Welsh, you know?

• 30:07Rory Stewart?

  Do you? Go on, give us a bit of Welsh.

• 30:09Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I speak what I call traffic Welsh.

• 30:11Rory Stewart?

  Go on, give us a bit of traffic Welsh then.

• 30:13Alastair Campbell?

  Well, araf. Do you know what araf means?

• 30:15Rory Stewart?

  No, what does araf mean?

• 30:16Alastair Campbell?

  I'll give you a clue. Just before you're going around a bend, you'll often see the word araf written on the road. What do you think it means?

• 30:23Rory Stewart?

  Slow down? Slow down?

• 30:24Alastair Campbell?

  Slow, slow. Headlu? I don't know what pronunciation is like, but headlu, do you know headlu?

• 30:29Rory Stewart?

  No, what's that?

• 30:30Alastair Campbell?

  You see headlu a lot. That's police. Guas anethau?

• 30:33Rory Stewart?

  Go on then.

• 30:35Alastair Campbell?

  Service station.

• 30:36Rory Stewart?

  Very good. I'd love to learn more Welsh. I mean, it was, it's important to me because it was the language of Cymru. I mean, obviously the word Cymru is Cymru. It's for the Welsh nation. And one of the things that really offends me about signage in southern Scotland at the moment is it's in Gaelic. It says felte gau alba, which is completely bizarre because nobody in southern Scotland ever spoke Irish Scottish Gaelic. It's complete historical nonsense. What they spoke was Welsh Gaelic. So in fact, the sign should say crisu i cymru.

• 31:08Alastair Campbell?

  Or you could have both. Rory, I think you're slightly missing the point here.

• 31:12Rory Stewart?

  What am I missing a point about?

• 31:13Alastair Campbell?

  Well, because very few people speak Gaelic in southern Scotland. In the borders.

• 31:18Rory Stewart?

  Historically, nobody ever did. It was not a Gaelic speaking part of the country.

• 31:21Alastair Campbell?

  There are a few schools there now. But anyway, what is doing is a bit like the Welsh do. They want to be proud of having their own language. I think you're making it quite a small part of a history. Now, there may be a massive outcry against me saying that.

• 31:36Rory Stewart?

  Yet there will be a huge outcry because people will point out, Ihenogled, the Old North, was this enormous Welsh civilization dominating southern Scotland and northern England. And that's where the Gdodden comes from and the famous Welsh lullaby, which is all about Derwent water.

• 31:51Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, God, you can't put this all on. Look, you're talking about a flag and a three words on a border, Rory. As you cross the border, you can't have this whole bloody story there. Here's a question for you. How many letters are there in the Welsh alphabet?

• 32:02Rory Stewart?

  Oh, I don't know. What's the answer to that?

• 32:04Alastair Campbell?

  Twenty nine.

• 32:05Rory Stewart?

  Twenty nine. What are the letters that we don't have?

• 32:07Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know. And they've got seven vowels.

• 32:09Rory Stewart?

  Oh, gosh. Well, I mean, we should interview another Welsh MP. One of the things I loved, it's a naff thing to say, but I loved walking into the cloakrooms of the House of Commons and hearing the Welsh MPs talk to each other.

• 32:20Alastair Campbell?

  Speaking Welsh, yeah.

• 32:22Rory Stewart?

  Okay, here we are. Anna Currie, do you think the September Cabinet reshuffle is still on? Do you have any predictions?

• 32:28Alastair Campbell?

  I used to hate reshuffle speculation stories. We had a couple of ministers who were given like dozens of different jobs, depending which paper you read. My advice to all of our listeners and any story about reshuffles, don't believe it because even if it's true, they probably don't know that it's true.

• 32:43Rory Stewart?

  And is it ambitious MPs leaking out their own names? I mean, is it basically people close to journalists saying, I, this trust or whoever, am likely to be getting a job?

• 32:51Alastair Campbell?

  No, I think it's more, there'll be a bit of that, but I think it's more that, by the way, I think we can rule that out. But I think it's more, we're going back to the point earlier about the discussion about gossip, is that journalists go out for lunch with ministers and they all sort of talk up a few people, talk down a few people, say things like, God almighty, you should see Soonak's eyes rolling every time Theresa Coffee opens her mouth. And, oh, okay. And I honestly do think some of it is based on stuff as basic and simple and useless and stupid as that. The worst thing about reshuffle stories, two things. The first is the ministers think they're real. So when it says, you know, Downing Street think that so and so is actually really useless, Downing Street thinks that so and so is absolutely brilliant. That minister reads it and thinks, oh, that must be true.

• 33:34Alastair Campbell?

  When nine times out of 10 it won't be, it will have just been made up or kind of, you know, dressed up, flamed up with the sort of the touch of the Downing Street bit. And the other thing it does is it really kind of undermines the effectiveness of a minister inside a department where people sit around thinking, well, they're not going to be here very long. We don't have to worry about them too much. So it's not very good for good government.

• 33:54Rory Stewart?

  Well, I was really struck by how good people like Liz Truss and Priti Patel were in the early Cameron eras at making sure that they saw a lot of journalists and that their names were always in the centre of these conversations. And weirdly, Number 10 responded positively to that. I remember Number 10 saying, well, you know, one of the reasons we're promoting them is they're such good media performers. And actually, Liz Truss and Priti Patel are not particularly exceptional media performers, I wouldn't have thought.

• 34:16Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'd say Liz Truss is exceptionally bad.

• 34:18Rory Stewart?

  But that was the line. And the line was really created by her proximity to journalists. Right, last question from you.

• 34:25Alastair Campbell?

  My last question is from James, and it's for you, Rory. What amazing story do you have regarding governance and sustainability that really brought out the key fundamentals of governments while maintaining high levels of sustainability?

• 34:37Rory Stewart?

  Blimey, that's good. That's, I hope, a joke question on the fact that I keep grumbling about the words governance and sustainability. Because I think the point that we're getting out of that is that you can cut that question about nine different ways, because sustainability could mean environmental sustainability, financial sustainability. I mean, the whole thing is, drives me around the room. But a more serious answer question is the only thing I ever did in that era, which I was remotely proud of, was introducing the plastic bag tax. I put 5p on your plastic bags, which reduced the number of plastic bags by some billions.

• 35:05Alastair Campbell?

  Well done. Just on the words thing, though, are there any words outside politics that you hate? If I were to tell you, for example, that I, if somebody says the word portion anywhere near me, it's like polystyrene on glass.

• 35:17Rory Stewart?

  It's a weird word, isn't it? It's got a nasty feeling, hasn't it?

• 35:19Alastair Campbell?

  I hate it. But are there any words like that that you don't like?

• 35:21Rory Stewart?

  No, but then you're more musical than me. But I can see that's a very unpleasant word, the P O R T I O N word.

• 35:27Alastair Campbell?

  I've got, I've got quite a lot of words that I don't like being said near me, but that's probably number one. Portion actually does something physically to me.

• 35:34Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I can sense that. I can feel that. Right. Well, I'll try to avoid that word.

• 35:38Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, well, I'm off to learn my Welsh Gaelic so that I can put a bit of graffiti on the, on the sign as I drive through Scotland, coming to see you.

• 35:46Rory Stewart?

  Very good. All right.

• 35:47Alastair Campbell?

  All the best.

• 35:48Rory Stewart?

  Speak soon. Bye bye.

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