262. Modi loses his majority, Sunak takes on the Treasury, and Welsh Labour in crisis

Where next for India after Modi loses his majority? How should Starmer have dealt with Sunak’s Labour tax claim? Is Rory going to vote Lib Dem on July 4th? Hear the answer to all these questions and more on today’s episode of The Rest Is Politics. This podcast was originally broadcast as a YouTube livestream on Wednesday evening. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP UK TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Election Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Assistant Producer: Fiona Douglas Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

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• 1:33Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. And with this election going on, it is certainly keeping us very, very, very busy. So another live podcast on YouTube, following the other one last night. And we'll also put it on our usual audio feed. I think we should apologize to those who say that they can't keep up. But it's important to meet the demand of so many people who keep telling us they want more of these lives, not less, fewer, rather. How I want to start though Rory is explaining that though I've said pretty much nothing apart from welcome. I have now taken forty two, forty three, forty four, forty five seconds to say it.

• 2:17Alastair Campbell?

  So is it too much to hope that we never, ever see that particular format ever, ever again?

• 2:25Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so can I, can I just say, well done. Um, can I just, yeah, so I think you've illustrated it well with your forty five seconds. Um, here's a way of stepping back at it. Many people listening to this podcast, I mean, I suppose most people will have to make judgments all the time. Judgments about who they want to work with, judgments about who they want to employ, judgments about who they want to trust. And would anybody, anybody think the best way to do it is to put two people up on podiums with a moderator? And make them speak for forty five seconds and shout over the top of each other. In other words, I just stepping back, kind of, if you were designing a system where your question was, Alistair,

• 3:11Rory Stewart?

  I'm going to try to be as objective as possible. I want as a voter to work out who's going to be the best prime minister for the country for the next five years. I really want a chance to assess these two candidates, look at them. I've probably got some criteria questions I want to answer in my head. Is there any way on earth, you would think the way to do it is to have these two piece people standing at podiums with a moderator and shouting at each other?

• 3:36Alastair Campbell?

  No, um, and I think, as we said last night, I, I don't, I think Keir Starmer went into it hoping not for it to be a shouting match, but just got drawn into it.

• 3:46Alastair Campbell?

  The more I've thought about it, we gave our instant reaction last night, the more I've thought about it, the more unsatisfactory I think the whole thing was.

• 3:55Alastair Campbell?

  You know, I, we, we say that we, we're fed up with politics as soundbites, but when the entire structure is a debate, is around the idea that all you're going to hear is a soundbite, then I think it just, it, it fails on every level. And of course, what's happened since then is that the issue, I mean, we said last night, Rishi Sunak had managed to land what he wanted to land, which was this two thousand pound tax claim, Labour will put your taxes up by two thousand pound. And I think, and I'm very pleased about this, it seems to have unraveled. And I thought it would because I thought he was quite careful with his words. But Claire Coutinho, this Coutinho this morning, and I think also something Jeremy

• 4:39Alastair Campbell?

  Hunt has been writing in the forward to a Conservative Party document, they have been saying that the £2,000 figure, they've been trying to give the impression that this was, as it were, the Treasury's analysis of Labour policy. And it was quite something. If you remember Simon McDonald, who was Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office?

• 4:59Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 4:59Alastair Campbell?

  He was a big part of bringing down Johnson because he said, I'm fed up of this, I'm not going to tell any more lies on his behalf. And he said Johnson's not been telling the truth.

• 5:07Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 5:08Alastair Campbell?

  And now James Bowler, who I know quite well from when he was working for Gordon Brown, James Bowler, who's now the head of the Treasury, replacing Tom Scholar, who was sacked by Liz Truss in Qua- Quating, he has come out and said that, no, they can't say this has been accosted by the Treasury because it's made assumptions that have been put there by political advisers. And you'll know this, Rory, from having worked in government. And I've done this, you know, and Gus O'Donnell did an amazing interview on the World at One, really angry. Gus doesn't get angry. Gus is a former Treasury civil servant, former head of the civil service. And he said he found this whole thing grubby. He said both parties have done it at times. And it's true. We would say to the Treasury or any other

• 5:52Alastair Campbell?

  department, let's say we wanted to build a road from Penrith to Carlisle. How much would that cost? Okay?

• 6:04Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 6:04Alastair Campbell?

  And they would go away and they'd do some costings and they'd come back. What they wouldn't necessarily know is that the reason we were asking that is because Rory Stewart had promised, as candidate for Penrith, that he was going to get a new road built from from Penrith to Carlisle.

• 6:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 6:19Alastair Campbell?

  You then get the costings. That's what they've done. They've asked for costings. They've given them the questions they want answered.

• 6:25Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 6:25Alastair Campbell?

  And and here's here's why I think we've got to be careful. Sorry, Rory, on you go.

• 6:29Rory Stewart?

  Just so quickly, just a sort of bit of context on this. I mean, one of the things that's really worrying, Mr. Bowler.

• 6:36Rory Stewart?

  Is that it's very likely, I mean, I think inevitable that we'll have a Labour government in five weeks' time. And he has to make it absolutely clear to the incoming Labour government that the civil service is impartial. I mean, he will be worried that the Labour Party, shocked by what happened last night, and it obviously caught Keir Starmer a bit off balance, he didn't have an easy answer to it, will be thinking that some conspiracy of the civil service will be thinking, you know, what on earth is going on? What are you doing providing costings to the Conservatives that they can use in a debate to crush us? So he immediately contacted Darren Jones, said these figures include costs beyond those provided by the civil service published online by the Treasury.

• 7:18Alastair Campbell?

  I think, to be fair, I think Darren Jones wrote to him.

• 7:21Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 7:22Alastair Campbell?

  Because I think the thing that, what he put out was the reply to Darren Jones.

• 7:25Rory Stewart?

  I agree that any costings derived from other sources or produced by other organisations should not be presented as having been produced by the civil service. The Treasury was not involved in the production or presentation of the Conservative Party's documents, Labour tax rises. So I think he's, he's really trying to say, wait, wait, wait, wait, you know, you're coming into office and you can rely on it and we're not part of a Tory plot.

• 7:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. The other thing, I've been, I've been pointing out in recent weeks though, and this is something Jeremy Hunt should have got a grip on, the Treasury press office, the Treasury official feed on social media has been putting out stuff with the words, the plan is working, stick with the plan. Now, that is a Conservative Party slogan. You cannot do that. You cannot do that. So I hope that this will put an end to it. James Bowler, but you see, the Tories have now doubled down. They're now saying, well, actually, we think we're being quite generous. We think they'll have to put taxes up even more. But I think that, you know, we, we've talked about this a lot. We should, by the way, say, we're getting loads of messages about Vaughan Gethin. We know about Vaughan Gethin, he's lost the vote, and we'll talk about that briefly in a moment. So you don't

• 8:31Alastair Campbell?

  need to keep telling us that Vaughan Gethin has lost his vote in the, in the Senate. But let me just say that. If you go back to when Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister.

• 8:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Alastair Campbell?

  He promised he would usher in a new era of integrity, professionalism and accountability. At his very, very, very first Prime Minister's Questions, he said that he as Chancellor had reinstated nurses' bursaries. He hadn't, he hadn't. He'd replaced them with something that was worth a lot less. He also said at his very first PMQs that they had, because of Brexit, they'd been able to have the fastest rollout of the vaccine, which has been completely debunked by everybody who was involved in that. I think he's lied quite a lot about Rwanda. I think he's lied about the cost. I think he's lied about his views on it.

• 9:19Rory Stewart?

  Well, yeah, I mean, so, so I, I'm, I'm not going to debate that, but I think your bigger point is a sort of more fundamental point, which is that really the Conservatives lost this election when Boris Johnson collapsed, Liz Truss blew up the economy. I mean, you just look at the statistics, we can see it. John Curtis pointed this out to both of us. The, the figures are pretty clear. That's when they lost this election, not, not really what's happened since. And, and Rishi's part of that. Rishi Sunak's very much part of that because, and, and this is an argument I had on Times Radio yesterday with a guy called Matt Shawley, who was saying to me, well, you know, Rory, why did you leave the Conservative Party in 2019?

• 10:02Rory Stewart?

  If you'd stuck around, you know, maybe you could have been the Prime Minister instead of Rishi Sunak. And I said that the decision of Rishi Sunak and a lot of these other key figures, you know, Oliver Dowden, Deputy Prime Minister, Robert Jenrick, all these people, to get behind Boris Johnson when they knew that he would be a terrible Prime Minister,

• 10:25Rory Stewart?

  for the MPs to support Liz Truss when they knew she would be a terrible Prime Minister. All of this stuff comes home to roost because what you're doing is you're putting power ahead of your principles. You're just giving up on being a serious party from 2019 onwards. And, and so Boris Johnson's collapse, Liz Truss's collapse are completely inevitable. And it's impossible for Rishi Sunak to turn this around because. They loom over the whole thing. Boris Johnson destroyed their moral credibility. Les Truss destroyed their economic credibility. He's got a terrible record. It's not winnable.

• 11:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but that's why I do think, we've said this so many times, Roy, I think his one chance was to signal genuine change. Now, maybe it was impossible. Maybe the factionalism that you've talked about a lot, these sort of seven tribes. But, you know, let's go back to another thing. The fact that he put Solo Braverman in the cabinet just a few days after she'd been sacked for trashing the ministerial code, shows that he doesn't care about the ministerial code. And I think there's something, I mean, listeners may or may not, listeners and viewers may not know, you're not allowed to call another politician a liar in Parliament. You get thrown out of Parliament. We saw that when Ian Blackford got thrown out and others. But today you've got Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Darren Jones, who you mentioned, Jonathan Ashworth, across the airwaves, saying, and I think, you know, with some justification,

• 11:48Alastair Campbell?

  that he got desperate last night and he told a lie. And I think, I don't know whether they already had this letter. I know Darren Jones did. I don't know whether Keir Starmer already knew that this had been rebutted by the Treasury. The Machiavellian me says, I wonder if he knew and he just sort of wanted to let him land this point so as they could produce. I don't think so because I still think the Tories, I think, and we're getting a lot of comments.

• 12:12Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I don't think, I don't think that would make sense. So let me just sort of.

• 12:14Alastair Campbell?

  No, I agree. I agree. I'm just throwing that out.

• 12:16Rory Stewart?

  Because actually, the fact that the polls suggest that people narrowly thought Rishi Sunak won is a bad thing for Starmer because most people watching debates, in my experience, go in with very strong prejudices. And given that we know that Labour's 20 points ahead in the polls, you'd expect by a 20-point lead, most people leading to be, watching to be pretty sympathetic towards Keir Starmer. And therefore, him to win that pretty comfortably without anyone watching, just on the sense that if you look at our thread on the right here, which people will be following, basically, you know, as I pointed out last night, if you've got a

• 12:57Rory Stewart?

  Twitter handle abolish the monarchy, you're going to think that, you know, Sunak did terribly and Starmer did well. And if you've got a Twitter.

• 13:03Alastair Campbell?

  Hold on a bit, hold on a bit.

• 13:05Rory Stewart?

  If you've got.

• 13:06Alastair Campbell?

  Keir Starmer does not want to abolish the monarchy. Are you suggesting Keir Starmer wants to abolish the monarchy?

• 13:12Rory Stewart?

  So basically, if you're, and I noticed this, you know, watching my friends, if you're on the left. You think Starmer won. If you're on the right, you think Sunak won. So the fact that against the polls, it seems from the YouGov poll that there's a 51-49 lead for Sunak means that even people who are sympathetic towards Starmer, not all of them, I mean, 49% still supported Starmer, but a lot of them were like, oh, that was not a great night for Starmer. Even if they think, as people are saying here, that Sunak was a petulant bully and all this kind of stuff, it was not great for Starmer. It wasn't great to see him not be able to respond to 2000.

• 13:53Alastair Campbell?

  David McCarthy has just pointed out that abolish the monarchy is not here to defend themselves. That is very funny. A couple of things there. First of all, there have been several polls today, and the one that we talked about last night was the initial one, literally instant from, I think it was YouGov.

• 14:10Rory Stewart?

  Sorry, I'm just interrupting once more because this is coming down the thread. You know, Charles George, you know, Starmer didn't win. The only thing I can remember from the debate is the 2,000 pound.

• 14:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but the Sun poll, for example, had Starmer winning 53 to 39. So anyway, the truth is, I think we both agreed it was a bit of a messy draw, and let's just, let's not worry about the polls on that. There is a poll that's coming out later, I believe, that shows that Reform have had quite a lift and are not far behind the Tories. There's a question, though, from Charlie George. I don't know if that's the footballer, but I'm sure you remember scoring a winning goal in a cup final, right? But he is saying to me, haven't you learned anything from the Brexit debate and the big red bus? They want you to be talking about this. But I think we have to talk about this because the truth is, unless we learn something from the big red bus, then our politics is in deep trouble.

• 15:00Alastair Campbell?

  What I really worry about from last night, what Sunak tried to do, is I think he confirmed himself as one of my three P leaders, populism, polarisation, post-truth. If we have people standing for Prime Minister who genuinely think, and then you have journalists saying, even journalists I really like and respect, I saw that Sophie Ridge on Sky, who I think is a, you know, good journalist, but she did something on social media saying, well, you know, might there be a danger here that this is actually quite a good move because everybody's going to be talking about it? I think once we start saying that, I'm not saying she's saying this, but once we start saying that lying is clever politics in a campaign, I think we're in real trouble. I think we're then going down the Trump route.

• 15:40Rory Stewart?

  So what's, let's just get back to the nub of this. So the nub of this is that Regardless of the exact numbers, and I'm absolutely with you that he pushed it far further and implied the Treasury had endorsed figures that he extracted largely from his special advisers, the nub of it was that he managed to land with the viewer the idea that Labour was going to cost you money. You know, he had this line, which I thought was quite a good line, where he said, if you're going to vote for Labour, start saving. And what Starmer needed to do, which I think should have been central to everything, because it's right

• 16:19Rory Stewart?

  in the core of Rachel Reeves, is just say, straight off, no, absolutely not. We have told you that that is not what we're going to do. We're not going to raise income taxes. We're not raising VAT. We're not doing this. And just reinforce Labour's fiscal credibility. Don't, don't, I mean, just undercut the whole thing by saying that's not our deal. And then turn around and say, and by the way, listen to these guys. Look at all the incredible unfunded things the Tories are offering.

• 16:48Alastair Campbell?

  Seventy one billion, yeah.

• 16:50Rory Stewart?

  I wouldn't get into this, because what's happening is that if you get into arguing about whether it's two thousand pounds extra, or one thousand pounds extra, or three thousand pounds this year, you're falling into that trap. You're accepting their assumption that Labour's putting up costs. What you should be saying is, we're not doing it. And actually, the Conservatives are doing it.

• 17:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but, but, yeah, but I think, I think the reason why I disagree with Charlie George about why this debate has to be had out, I think anybody who knew Boris Johnson, I knew him for years before he became a politician, you knew him before he became Prime Minister, anybody who'd ever had anything to do with him, knew that he was a liar. Sunak comes along after him, after the disaster of trust, and says he's going to be the new broom, integrity, professionalism, accountability. And I think therefore, I, I, I think it is entirely possible that Keir Starmer was actually genuinely taken aback. That Sunak went on this so hard and it took him a bit of time to realise this was

• 17:50Alastair Campbell?

  the entire strategy for the debate. Now, so tactically, that gave Sunak the tactical win. Strategically, I think it's a gift to Labour this, because this is the means by which he can now tie him, character wise, to Johnson and Trust.

• 18:08Rory Stewart?

  And also a gift, I would hope, if I'm right about this, to Labour, because it means that in every single interview, people are going to raise this question. And it's an opportunity, I think, not just to do what you're talking about. I think it's an opportunity to lay out their plans and say, we're fiscally responsible and this other lot aren't. And that's what I really think is the great opportunity. It's a chance for Labour to really put their economic programme forward.

• 18:34Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:35Rory Stewart?

  Can I just come back to your thing we began with, though?

• 18:39Alastair Campbell?

  By the way, two things. Abolish the monarchy says he's here and he's happy to be here. And the other thing is you're getting a lot of, somebody's actually pointed out that £2,000 is just two of your pots. Is that the pot behind you? Is that the pot?

• 18:53Rory Stewart?

  No, I can bring the pot up later. Bring the pot up later. Yeah, so just can I come back to the big thing? Let's imagine that we were in some weird world, able to have some influence on this. What might be a better way of, let's say that the job is to produce a format that allows the public to judge who might be a better prime minister. So here's one possibility, the way that, you know, traditional school debating competitions do it. You know, one of them gives a long speech, 20 minutes, the other one gives 20 minutes response, and then they both do closing speeches, more like you might in a courtroom. I mean, that's the way, we don't, for example, when we're trying to decide whether someone's

• 19:38Rory Stewart?

  guilty, we don't do it by making the two lawyers do 45 seconds each and jump back and forth between. When we're interviewing someone for a job, I guess we spend a good 20 minutes, half an hour on it, don't we? And we're not saying, give me four. So can you think of a format which might be a little bit more democratic and give people a better sense to judge these people?

• 19:56Alastair Campbell?

  Well, this is sort of, you know, slightly a vested interest speaking. I honestly believe...

• 20:04Alastair Campbell?

  Look at, remember the interview we did with Andy Street and Andy Burnham? You get two people from different parties, you try to get some of their own character and their life, and then you get them to talk about issues that they're both dealing with. So let's put it out there, Rishi, Keir, if you want to do a different sort of debate, let's have a three-hour Rest is Politics special.

• 20:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 20:27Alastair Campbell?

  Just the four of us.

• 20:30Rory Stewart?

  And we, no, maybe a bit more, but we can, we can sell it because we can, I mean, I think what we can be trusted on is to give people space and time. I just, I mean, listen, this is very self-serving, but I just got a, a nice, self-serving for both of us. I just got a nice email from somebody I really admire, who was watching the quasi-quoting thing, and that was a bit controversial, you know, our friend, Henry Porter came back and, you know, was all over Twitter saying we've been too kind to it.

• 20:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 20:56Rory Stewart?

  Too soft on, but somebody who'd read that went and watched it and said, you know, he watched it 2am in the morning, "I'm most firmly against Henry's view. Your courtesy with mild punchiness fitted the niche of this interview well." Niche, niche, niche. "I thought this interview provided a perfect example of a niche that you felt. There's nothing else quite like it. The first hour was simply excellent every way. Won't find such a good interview everywhere else. Alistair conveyed just the right tone." Down the line of courtesy. So I, I, I mean, I think in a way, and I, to be, I, I thought what worked with it is that nobody came out of it thinking quasi-quoting managed the economy well, right? Nobody came

• 21:40Rory Stewart?

  out of it thinking the guy was responsible, but we gave him space to essentially indict himself. I mean.

• 21:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I, I think, I think it would be, I mean, if you go back, if I go back to the, funnily enough, I was talking to the Financial Times this morning, who are doing a big piece about the way the countries change and the way that the media has changed and so forth. And, you know, I think it's some of the best things in history. And it's, you know, you've got to be careful about going backwards, but those old fashioned, you go back to, I think the Brian Waldens, the, the John Freedmans, the, the, the interviews where you, you really pin people, you give them time, you treat them with a certain amount of respect, but you don't expect them, you don't treat them like children. And so I think that could work.

• 22:30Alastair Campbell?

  I think the other thing that could work, you could do them, you could have a format that was, you had like an interview or maybe a panel of interviewers, two or three, and you had half an hour each with the two candidates separately.

• 22:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:46Rory Stewart?

  Who might, and your panel might be presumably relatively experienced interviews who'd put quite a lot of thought into this and they.

• 22:53Alastair Campbell?

  Andrew Neil.

• 22:54Rory Stewart?

  Like a job interview. They sit them down for 40 minutes and the three people between them.

• 22:58Alastair Campbell?

  You could have, you could have, if you were picking interviews from today, you know, Andrew Neil, Emily Maitlis, Kay Burley, and there's a lot of Victoria Derbyshire. There's lots and lots of good interviewers there. Or you had a mix. You had somebody from the world of business. You had somebody from the world of, of culture. You had somebody from the world of the military and you had three different people there who had half an hour, you knew what their particular interests were. And I think they'd find it, because the thing about political interviews now, you've done thousands of interviews, I've done thousands of interviews. Everybody knows how to handle these sort of silly questions about Gareth Southgate's, you know, blah, or, you know, hands up if and hands up not. It's, it's kind of, it's, it's

• 23:42Alastair Campbell?

  all past its sell by date. So I think, I think something, something much more serious, some, and I think the public are ready for it. I think that people.

• 23:52Rory Stewart?

  It's a nice idea from somebody, Jacob Mayhew. What if you had former PMs? Get Blair and Cameron, that's on the, on the, on the.

• 23:58Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's a bit hard when Cameron's the Foreign Secretary, Blair and Major.

• 24:01Rory Stewart?

  Okay. Yeah, yeah. Theresa May and Gordon Brown?

• 24:05Alastair Campbell?

  Or you got, or you got some.

• 24:06Rory Stewart?

  I mean, you imagine they actually might be able to ask some quite interesting questions. They've been prime minister.

• 24:11Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, absolutely. So there's somebody, Theo, saying, would the rest is politics host a debate? Yes, we would. Somebody suggesting Jonathan Pie. I think that might be a bit tricky. We'd have to be after the, after the, after the watershed on that one. So anyway, I, I think it's been an interesting day and, and I, I think that, I really think, I've been saying this for months now. I think there's never now been a better time to make something about the Nolan principles and standards in public life.

• 24:39Rory Stewart?

  Listen, would you please, what next time you're going for a walk with your dear friend, Kier Starb? And why won't he sign up to something I think is very simple? Every minister will serve a minimum of two years in their office, unless there's some crazy scandal.

• 24:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And we can, and we can claim that we can pray and aid. Mr. Wes Streeting says in the interview, I hope Kier Starb will make us all stick there for quite a long time.

• 25:06Rory Stewart?

  What's the problem with that? Why won't you just come out and say everybody will serve a minimum of two years?

• 25:10Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe he will, maybe, maybe, maybe we need to just find a way of making sure he's asked that question.

• 25:17Alastair Campbell?

  But, you know, I, so I think the, the one thing that has happened today is that whether he likes it or not, I think Sunak's character is on the ballot in a way that maybe it wasn't yesterday.

• 25:26Rory Stewart?

  No, no, no. Another thing that we're, we're, we're going to get on to, and we'll get on to India in a second, which has been just amazing. Really, really interesting because we talk a lot about populism and that, that's an amazing result. But just, I guess, a month ago, two months ago, we were saying, isn't this extraordinary?

• 25:46Rory Stewart?

  Great Britain now has a Hindu prime minister responsible for England. We have a Muslim first minister in Scotland and we have a black leader in Wales. And this is extraordinary and it now looks as though the entire thing.

• 26:08Rory Stewart?

  May have come crashing down that within five weeks' time, we're going to end up with three white men again. So what's going on in Wales?

• 26:14Alastair Campbell?

  Well, what's going on in Wales is that the opposition have got together, put down this motion of no confidence in Vaughan Gethin. We've talked about this issue before. It was about a donation that he took from somebody who'd been found guilty of environmental crime.

• 26:30Alastair Campbell?

  And he defended himself, took the money, kept the money, won the campaign, won it without a lot of support from his colleagues in the Senate. And he's lost the vote. I haven't seen the numbers because we were literally coming on air just as that happened. He said in advance that, I think they knew he was going to lose because some of his colleagues disappeared for the day. He needed every single Labour MP.

• 26:58Rory Stewart?

  And that was interesting. So he's got, I'm right, I think that he's got 30 Labour MPs, which is half.

• 27:04Alastair Campbell?

  Labour AMs, yeah.

• 27:06Rory Stewart?

  In the Senate.

• 27:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 27:07Rory Stewart?

  And two of them were sick, but one of them was somebody who'd already called for him to return the money.

• 27:14Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it's 2927 the vote.

• 27:17Rory Stewart?

  So I guess you might question, actually, even if they weren't sick, how motivated those two AMs really were to getting in behind Vaughan Gethin. So there's a problem, there's an underlying problem, that he seems to have angered quite a lot of people in the Labour Party. We talked a little bit about how he seemed to exploit trade union rules to.

• 27:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. I've just known, by the way, I've got Leighton Andrews and Chris Bryant shouting at me metaphorically in my head, it's MS, it changed from AM, then Assembly Member to Member of the Senate. So now that's what they're called, then people are now telling us that. Yeah, I think this is really tricky. It's obviously not perfect for Labour in the middle of an election campaign. The other thing that happened in the Welsh Assembly today, somebody sent me this thing, said, have you seen this? It was Mark Drakeford, his predecessor, making a really emotional speech about a change that the government in Wales was making to plans that he had been making to change the nature of the school year.

• 28:20Alastair Campbell?

  To give, to have fewer weeks of the summer holiday because his view is that it was so difficult for parents and kids from poorer families to get through these incredibly long.

• 28:32Rory Stewart?

  I think it's, I think it's true for all families today. I think these, I mean, as a parent of a seven year old and a nine year old, you're suddenly very, very conscious that these school holidays are of course very long and it's just not possible for parents in a world where usually two parents are working to be able to remotely spend the time with your kids during the holidays. And, and so I, I, I think it's difficult. I think it's very tough on teachers. I think it's going to be very expensive, but I'm afraid if I was only arguing it from the point of view of the interests of the pupils and the parents, I'm afraid you wouldn't have anything like this length of holidays, would you?

• 29:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, it's worth looking at. It was Mark Drakeford who, you know, some might have thought would just sort of slope off into the sunset. It was a really, really passionate speech. So just before Vaughan Gethin's losing this vote, you've got his predecessor essentially really laying into the government. So there's no point pretending this is good for Wales, good for Labour in.

• 29:38Rory Stewart?

  And do you think, I mean, I noticed there were a lot of Gethin's people being quoted saying, it doesn't matter if he loses a vote of no confidence, it's irrelevant, he's not going to go anywhere. That's a bit odd because I would have thought, you know, with our general line that this is about propriety, this is about respect, this is about no populism. I think you, you take losing a vote of no confidence very, very, very seriously. I suppose theoretically possible you stay, but, but my goodness, you better provide a pretty good example, reason why you're ignoring it.

• 30:10Alastair Campbell?

  That is probably a very, very good bridge into India because what you're talking about there is the loss of political authority. And so there's Narendra Modi and you and I, we've been proved wrong, just the same as lots of other people. Do you remember I told you a couple of weeks ago, I met somebody from the Indian High Commission and I said, you know, you don't have to worry about the election, it's, you know, it's going to be an absolute landslide. And he said, oh, I wouldn't be too sure. It's not going to be as close, it's not going to be as one sided as you think. So Modi's BJP has won 240 seats and that's 32 seats short of the 272 majority that you need. In 2019, he won 303 on his own. So he's now got to

• 30:51Alastair Campbell?

  rely upon the members of his alliance. These are other parties that are sort of signed up to much of the same policies. He got 36.5, his party got 36.57% of the votes, that's a drop. And what the Congress did, and I mean, this is a pretty amazing thing. So Congress, the main opposition party that's most closely associated with the Gandhi family, they only got, I think it was 99 themselves, but the alliance they put together, which was a real kind of, you know, communist and pro-business and all sorts of different parties, but they got 223. And

• 31:31Rory Stewart?

  232, 232.

• 31:33Alastair Campbell?

  232, sorry, I beg your pardon. And the, the, the, the big sort of, I think, big surprise that people are really sort of looking at closely is this vote in Uttar Pradesh.

• 31:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, just, just, just once more. I mean, so to take it right back, Modi came in in 2014 and when he came in, India had had coalition government for 21 years. People didn't get these overall majorities. And in 2014 and then in his next election, 2019, Modi got for the first time, these huge majorities, which allowed him to really control.

• 32:13Rory Stewart?

  Everything. And this time, he thought it was going to be even bigger. You know, he was saying he was going to push above four hundred. And we had every reason to think that might be true, because, as we've talked about, you know, he's been locking up key opponents, he's been freezing their campaign finances. You know, we've talked about his social media campaigns, we've talked about the way that he's got bits of judiciary on side. So it felt on the surface as though it might be a bit of a sort of repeat of what happened in Bangladesh, where effectively the ruling government rigged things so hard that it was going to be very, very difficult for anyone to come in.

• 32:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 32:52Rory Stewart?

  But but there's a counter narrative, which is beginning to become really interesting this year, and the test is going to be the European elections in June. We often talk about this as an age of populism, but actually, we've seen in Poland, the Law and Justice Party, which came in in twenty fifteen, which rigged everything in their favor, being defeated by Donald Tusk. We've seen with Erdogan in Turkey, massive losses in the city and town elections, right across the board, Istanbul, Ankara. So, and now in India, we've seen Modi dropping quite dramatically down. So it may be.

• 33:28Alastair Campbell?

  Well, his own majority, his own majority, as um, he won it by a hundred and fifty two thousand votes, his own seat, which is Varanasi. But it was it was not far off a half a million last time. So that's a huge one. And also, there's one, I don't know this place, you may know it, Tamil Nadu. It's a it's a state with this roughly the same population as Germany, eighty four million people. And the BJP won just one constituent, sorry, won no constituencies. And next door in Kerala, which has thirty five million, they won just one.

• 34:06Rory Stewart?

  Well, this this is a really interesting story, just quickly on this one, because I I I know a little bit about Tamil Nadu politics, because I I knew Jayalalita, who was the the chief minister there, who died in twenty sixteen, partly because some of my constituents called the Chennai Six were locked up in in Chennai, have been arrested, and I went out to see it.

• 34:27Rory Stewart?

  The politics of the states in India is often very, very different from national politics. And you have these phenomenon of these dominant chief ministers. Jai Lalita was a film star.

• 34:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 34:40Rory Stewart?

  And the person that is now absolutely central to Modi to putting his coalition together is a man called Chandrababu Naidu, who is from Andhra Pradesh and has just brought 16 seats as part of what's going to keep Modi in power. He again has his own local party, which is called the TDP, which is just an Andhra Pradesh party. That's a state around Hyderabad. And he, he again is the son-in-law of a huge actor who played gods, who played Shiva, who played Brahma, who played Vishnu and who was elected as the chief minister and he's his son-in-law. So there's a lot of different things going on.

• 35:24Rory Stewart?

  He also actually was imprisoned briefly for corruption, as was Jai Lalita. So this, this whole local story of chief ministers, many of whom are, to put it mildly, very, very colourful, some of whom have connections to huge film stars or with themselves huge film stars, some boiled up corruption, but who often have these very strong local parties. It's not, it's not like, it's not like Britain. It would be as though Starmer was having to put his coalition together with a sort of totally, you know, a Cumbrian independence party with some aged, you know, son-in-law of a retired film star delivering the Cumbrian votes behind him.

• 36:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. The other big, maybe this isn't surprising, maybe we just misread the whole thing. If you remember a few weeks ago, a few months ago now, we talked about this amazing ceremony that Modi led at the new temple, a new, on the site of a 16th century mosque. It was this extraordinary Hindu temple that had been built, a massive event, thousands of people, film stars, Bollywood stars, musicians, and they lost there. The place where Modi inaugurated the temple, which was one of the key moments in the build-up to the campaign, they, they lost there.

• 36:46Rory Stewart?

  In Iodya.

• 36:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 36:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 36:50Rory Stewart?

  Um, well, um, let's, I think we're coming towards the end. Uh, there was the odd moment. Uh, yeah. As, as Yassir Malik points out, that, that Modi declared himself appointed by God, which you, which you commented on, you, you commented on the fact that he's increasingly talking about his mother. That's talking a lot, a lot about his mother.

• 37:08Alastair Campbell?

  You know, you know, though, so in two, this thing about authority.

• 37:11Rory Stewart?

  Oh, that's right. Sorry. You told me that he, he had an insight that he, it wasn't just a virgin birth, that he was sort of, and he's sort of conceived in a way that neither the mother nor the father was biologically involved.

• 37:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I wonder whether this is just sort of very, very, it's the old story of hubris, believing your own propaganda, believing your own polls. Did you see on, I, I was, call me a sad, what, yeah, whatever. But I was actually watching NDTV last night and there was this thing amazing, this pollster.

• 37:41Rory Stewart?

  I'm interrupting Rishi Lakhani. He did not say he was appointed by God. That's a lie. We're going to get a massive argument between two Indians on this.

• 37:48Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 37:48Rory Stewart?

  On the comment thread.

• 37:49Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. Okay. Well, thank you for that, Rishi. Um, Rishi, uh, Rishi telling us we're lying. By the way, there's somebody has created a, a comment, a commenter called The Rest Is Pots, who keeps saying, talk about pots. We're not going to talk about pots.

• 38:03Rory Stewart?

  Our producer posted something saying that if they promised not to talk about pots, I'd show my pos at the end. But I guess they talk, they talk a lot about pots, so they don't get seen.

• 38:12Alastair Campbell?

  You can, you can talk, you can, if you want to. We could maybe save it for a, for a, a future event. But this point about, about authority. So Vaughan Gethin, Modi is not as powerful today as he was yesterday. That's a fact. Other world leaders will notice that. Um, but I'll tell you something, when Tony Blair won his third election in 2005, if you think about it, it was quite a good majority. It was a majority of that we, if we got it in 1997, would have been quite happy with it. But the truth is, he knew from that minute that he'd probably fought his last election, that his authority, his authority had waned. And, and I think political authority is one of those things that you can't.

• 38:53Alastair Campbell?

  You can't always measure it. And even if you win, as Modi says he has, and he is, he's going to be the prime minister, he's going to get a third term. Or if Tony, when he had got a majority, or Vaughan gets in today and his people are saying it doesn't matter, political authority is an intangible but unbelievably important currency.

• 39:16Rory Stewart?

  The Indian stock market yesterday dropped at one point by eight percent, by the end of the day by six percent, lost hundreds of billions of dollars, three hundred fifty, four hundred billion dollars of value. And that was because traders had bet hard, basically, on companies which are cronies of Modi.

• 39:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 39:38Rory Stewart?

  He's backed these kind of oligopolies where these, a handful of huge companies now dominate the Indian economy. And, and they then started unloading the stocks of these companies, you know, one of the, these key companies, its stocks collapsed by twenty percent.

• 39:53Alastair Campbell?

  Amazing. So as ever, lots of people made lots of money on it. The thing I was telling you about the pollster who was on television, I don't know whether this will ever happen to John Curtis or James Johnson, who does our polls or anybody else, but it's a guy called Pradeep Gupta, who is the chairman and managing director of a firm called Axis My India, who had been confidently doing polls suggesting that the BJP and their alliance were going to get somewhere between three hundred and sixty and over four hundred seats, which would have given them a super majority. And when the results came in, he was, he was live on television, just started crying hysterically. We should put it in the newsletter

• 40:36Alastair Campbell?

  because it was, it was a remarkable moment. So if we, if the pollsters have got this UK election wrong, we want them all to be live on the BBC or Sky, or even better, Channel Four, where the best analysis will be, crying. That's what we want to see.

• 40:54Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm, I, it's so difficult, isn't it? Because the polls are always wrong and our predictions aren't really worth much out there. I'm, you know, I'm, I don't, I don't want, I don't want Rishi Sunak to be re-elected. I mean, I think it's, I think they've, you know, I think they blew it 2019, they blew it with Johnson, they blew it with Trust. Somebody else needs to have a go.

• 41:16Alastair Campbell?

  So who are you going to vote for?

• 41:18Rory Stewart?

  Well, I, as I've been sort of thinking generally when I get in a muddle, I, I humiliate myself by voting for the Lib Dems. But the, um.

• 41:27Alastair Campbell?

  You're always, you're always so unpleasant about the Lib Dems.

• 41:29Rory Stewart?

  I know, I know, no, I know, and I, it's just some sort of self-loathing and guilt because that's sort of what, I, I go into the polling station, I'm like, I'm going to vote Labour, I'm going to vote Labour. And then I, like, my finger moves at the last moment and I sort of jump.

• 41:41Alastair Campbell?

  What's, um, who's second? Who's, what's your seat? Who's, what's the sort of lineup in your seat?

• 41:46Rory Stewart?

  Um, well, actually, it's very interesting. It's, Labour is only 600 votes behind this, this seat here in, in the part of London that I live in.

• 41:53Alastair Campbell?

  Well, surely, Roy, you've got, you've got to find out who's going to win. That's all you've got. I'll, I'll come along with you, I'll come along with you.

• 42:00Rory Stewart?

  But what I was.

• 42:00Alastair Campbell?

  This is a live podcast from the.

• 42:03Rory Stewart?

  What, what I was getting, what I was getting to is completely worth absolutely nothing as a prediction. But I think that that debate yesterday will have damaged Sunak, but I'm afraid it's also damaged Starmer. And I'm not sure that he's gonna, I think some people are gonna be a little underwhelmed. It wasn't quite the leader they were looking for. It wasn't quite the confidence they were looking for. I, I, I'm, I'm not so sure now that we're on track for a kind of record kind of 400, 450 seats.

• 42:36Alastair Campbell?

  No, well, I, as you know, I've never thought that it's going to be an absolute, I've never thought that Troy's going to completely meltdown. And I actually think, I tweeted yesterday on the back of the Indian result, Labour analysts, Labour strategists should look at that and say, don't believe the polls, don't believe the propaganda. The only thing I'd say about your point about Keir Starmer, and I'm going to give my friend Tom Borwin another plug for his book. Because I'll tell you the one thing that Keir Starmer does, which I don't think Rishi Sunak does very well. I think he'll go away and I think he'll be much, much, much better next time because I think he does learn very, very fast. I think, I think he has improved markedly as a political leader,

• 43:18Alastair Campbell?

  which is why he's in the position that he's in. So I'd be surprised and I hope, this is my hope, I hope we start to see less of the total Tory bashing. You can leave other people to do that. Do a bit of it, you've got to do it. And when Sunak's coming as aggressive as he was, of course, he's got to fight back. But I think more, this is my plan, more, this is what I'm going to do. And more, as I said last night, taking on those issues, like the private school thing, when he came out strong on that, when he came out strong on the ECHR, stand for things, be clear that you're standing for them. I think the public are absolutely ready for that. And I think he'd have gone away from that debate last night thinking, it was all right, people saying it was a draw, but I could have done better than that. And I think he'll do better next time. And I'm not sure, I just don't think Sunak learns from his mistakes because I think he's quite arrogant.

• 44:04Rory Stewart?

  Okay. Well, thank you very much, Alison. It's been great and look forward to, to, um, to seeing him very soon.

• 44:11Alastair Campbell?

  What are we going to do about the pots?

• 44:14Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think, I think people broke their, broke their word. I'm afraid we trusted them and then they filled the whole comment thread with comments about pots.

• 44:23Alastair Campbell?

  If we say that.

• 44:24Rory Stewart?

  And the producer said that we would show the pots if they promised to stop talking about pots. And as somebody who has a nine-year-old and a seven-year-old, I think you've just got to keep your rules. If you set a rule, you've got to stick to it.

• 44:37Alastair Campbell?

  I see. Maybe when Keir Starmer does the Nolan principles, you know, we should have one about the pots. The pots are, they're the key to integrity, professionalism. And somebody says, Rory is now going potty. Anyway, there we are. See you soon.

• 44:55Rory Stewart?

  See you soon. Bye bye.

• 45:04Speaker 03

  We are getting a statement from Number Ten on that flight. With three hundred and fifty passengers onboard.

• 45:13Speaker 04

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 45:21Speaker 05

  We assess, Prime Minister,

• 45:24Speaker 05

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• 45:27Speaker 06

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 45:29Speaker 07

  They took down a British passenger jet containing three hundred and fifty people.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself: you want to play, or not? You're the Prime Minister! You've done... NOTHING!

• 45:45Speaker 06

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today. Disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 45:56Speaker 08

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia.

• 46:01Speaker 06

  Yes.

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