Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 158. Sunak's net zero culture war, Africa's 'coup belt', and a new strategy for the German far-right About this episode Why are Rishi Sunak and other politicians of the right looking to weaponise net zero? How should the international community respond to the rising number of coups across the Sahel? Can elections now been won through the sheer power of social media manipulation?
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 Alastair 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.
0:19 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creef. 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.
0:42 Alastair 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?
0:49 Rory 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.
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1:56 Alastair Campbell? Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.
1:59 Rory Stewart? And with me, Rory Stewart.
2:01 Alastair Campbell? Now Rory, we're going to be talking in the second half about the seventh coup in Africa since 2020, this one in Niger.
2:11 Alastair Campbell? We're also going to talk about the problems in Sweden in particular and also Denmark, where there's been this coran burning going on, which has led to all sorts of difficulties for Sweden and to a lesser extent for Denmark. But we're going to kick off with ULEZ, but also you've been digging into this a little bit. So just tell us what you've found in relation to the campaign against the ultra-low emissions zone extension.
2:38 Rory Stewart? Absolutely. So we've talked a lot about populism, polarisation, post-truth, and we've talked a little bit about the way in which new social media coincides with that. So obviously, there's no coincidence that the Arab Spring takes off in 2011, once Facebook and Twitter's going. And we can talk about that a little bit, actually, also in the way that coups are spreading across Africa, there's a bit of a social media story there, too. We've seen social media playing a role in the election of Donald Trump in 2016. We've seen it play a role in Brexit. But it's only recently that really clear, proper methodology is beginning to be shared with the public on how this actually works. And a friend of mine called Emma Skyes shared some research from Valant, which has looked
3:23 Rory Stewart? at the ULEZ campaign.
3:25 Alastair Campbell? What is Valant, Rory?
3:27 Rory Stewart? So Valant is a research organisation that focuses, it seems, on social media manipulation. And they've done a particular study around the creation of new Twitter accounts in the campaign in London, which led to the Conservatives holding Uxbridge, which was a campaign about ultra-low emissions zone. So again, just very, very quickly to remind people, this was Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, trying to extend new taxes on people with polluting vehicles out to the edge of London. And the objective of that was to stop air pollution and help climate. And it's been very, very unpopular, particularly with people who felt that a lot of their incomes was going to have to go into paying these taxes on their cars.
4:08 Rory Stewart? So what's very interesting, though, in this study is that what they found is the way in which this is done. And I want to pause for a second before I get into the granularity of it and maybe push the conversation back to you a little bit. Because I first came across this when I was running to be mayor of London. I don't mean the ULEZ issue, I did come across that, but I mean this emergence of a new type of political campaign consultant, offering to win elections by manipulating social media.
4:41 Alastair Campbell? Yep.
4:42 Rory Stewart? I had two quite significant companies come to see me in my house in London, overseas companies, saying to me, if I employed them at very, very considerable cost, it was going to be hundreds of thousands of pounds a month, they would win the London election for me by manipulating social media. And they would say things like, we have worked with, you know, thirty countries across the world, we've just won an election in a former Soviet republic, we've just done something in the Middle East. One of these companies claimed to be associated with people who were ex-Israeli intelligence and special forces officials. They showed me ad campaigns that they'd run in the past, and they claimed to be able to manipulate TikTok, Facebook, Twitter.
5:27 Rory Stewart? They said they'd done it recently in an election in Eastern Europe. And if I was going to hire them, they'd be able to do that for me. So let me just pause that. And obviously spoiler, I was slightly horrified by this suggestion and did not proceed with these companies.
5:41 Alastair Campbell? Presumably, presumably you'd have been limited. Well, you wouldn't have been able to do it legally, because were there costs, were there spending limits on the London mayoral campaign?
5:51 Rory Stewart? No, very weirdly, there were no spending limits on the London mayoral campaign. It's very odd. It's unlike a normal British MP campaign.
6:00 Alastair Campbell? So you could have done it?
6:01 Rory Stewart? Yeah, could have done it, almost limitless. The question was, could you raise the money? So you would have to raise many, many millions, that would be the first constraint. And to put that in context, Labour and the Conservatives were probably spending four, five million each on the London mayoral election, although they don't disclose that money properly. So for an independent, you'd have to raise that money. You'd have to deal with the very significant reputational risk if it ever came out. But I guess if you were really desperate to win it, it would have been pretty appealing, pretty tempting to have these people offering that they could win it for you by doing the stuff, that if you pay them a few hundred thousand a month, they can bring it through.
6:39 Alastair Campbell? I do get the feeling, based on some of his recent utterances, that Rishi Sunak is definitely desperate to win.
6:46 Alastair Campbell? And they've made a couple of changes as well about some of the, aren't they raising the limits on spending that you can, that you can have for campaigns before having to declare them. So I think there, I, I wonder whether Rishi Sunak might be a tad more ruthless than you, Rory, and, and perhaps take some of these people under his wing. Listen, I've worked in, I've worked in, in campaigns in different parts of the world. And the first thing to say is, I am, as you know, I'm not a big tech person. I probably should be. I give a very good impression of being quite good at social media, but I don't think I am at all. And on this kind of manipulative side, I simply don't understand how it works. So we can get on to discussing, discussion based on this, that what you've
7:29 Alastair Campbell? looked at in relation to ULEZ. The first thing I'd say is around the world, there are companies which specialize in persuading politicians and leaders of campaigns that they could help them. They've almost always worked with Mossad and the special forces somewhere in the world.
7:46 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
7:46 Alastair Campbell? They always will give you some sort of amazing explanation as to why they can do things that other people can't. But of course, if you think back to Brexit, it's not impossible to make the case that Cambridge Analytica swung it, you know, a fairly narrow win. Likewise, I think in some of these elections in less established democracies, where they don't necessarily have the limits on spending, and some of the codes of conduct are perhaps a little bit less strict than we might like them to be, then I think it is possible to make the case that a very, very effective aggressive social media campaign can be the difference to a candidate. So I, I think you were probably right to, to turn
8:29 Alastair Campbell? them down. However, I do think that there's, that there is something in what they're saying. And what, what it seems to me from, I've, I've read the things you discovered from, from Ballant. And what it seems to be, am I, am I right in this, is that they essentially are creating accounts which project a certain worldview. And this is what they did in relation to ULEZ. And then they have all this amplification that they can do.
8:54 Rory Stewart? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, so let me just come out and say, and, and let me sort of put on the record that. I have absolutely no reason to think that Rishi Sunak is hiring a bunch of dubious ex-special forces to do social media manipulation. That would be a pretty big story if that came out. I think I was just making a more general case that you can see how tempting this must be to politicians.
9:17 Alastair Campbell? He's got some pretty ruthless Aussies on the payroll.
9:21 Rory Stewart? Now, so back to the Ule's case. What seems to happen is that there is about 10% of it, and this is obviously critical, of genuine, authentic accounts of people who are really wound up about Ule's. And these seem to, and these have been properly checked out, and these seem to be real people with proper profile pictures. You can trace them down, and, and there's no doubt they're real people. The trick, though, is that since November 2021, nine times as many accounts were created, which appear to be fake accounts. And the purpose of those fake accounts is to amplify, as you say, what's said by the, the real people. In fact, often, these fake accounts are not really generating much material themselves.
10:06 Rory Stewart? A lot of what they're doing is simply retweeting what's done by the first accounts. But to be powerful, they have to outwit the Twitter algorithm. And, and just as, you know, people will be familiar with this, if you want to get your ads high up on Google, you have to understand how the Google algorithm works. And if you want to really break Twitter, you have to work out how the Twitter algorithm works.
10:29 Alastair Campbell? I noticed you were calling it Twitter, not X.
10:31 Rory Stewart? Not X.
10:32 Alastair Campbell? You're refusing, you're refusing to go with the Elon Musk rename. I'm going to call it Twitter. I'm not calling it X. I mean, how can you claim a letter to yourself? Bugger off, mate.
10:42 Rory Stewart? So how, first, I think, interesting thing in, in the Valence study is how do you identify, and this is useful for all of us when we're looking at our own Twitter accounts. How do you identify something that is a fake account? And the answer is, you want to look for one that's newly registered. You want to look for one that has a very high number of retweets, not much original content. You want to try to see something that's almost solely focused on a single issue. So it's a bit of a giveaway if they're almost entirely focused, in this case, on Ule's, or if they're totally focused on the Russian case around Ukraine. And finally, you want to look at the fact that they're often using fake profile pictures stolen from other people. They can be made quite easily, these accounts.
11:25 Rory Stewart? In fact, one of these companies linked to Israel, which there was a great Guardian article on in February 2023, which we can share on our exclusive newsletter. And it goes out every Friday. And if you're not signed up, then go to therestispolitics.com. And this week we'll also be showing some video footage from Africa. And this particular company sat down with undercover journalists and showed them how to create these accounts. And you could do them in a few seconds. He sits there and he says, effectively, you can get 1,000 fake accounts for 31 pounds, it seems. And he just shows you how you do it. You just sit there and you say, okay, do you want a man or a woman? Which country do you want them to be from? Pick up a post, a photograph, create a little strap line, create a little name, boom, you've got your account. And they can do this.
12:08 Rory Stewart? There's a, there's a piece of software called Ames, where companies can create 30,000 accounts across LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter at a time, and then operate them all remotely.
12:21 Alastair Campbell? And when you say operate them remotely, presumably that, once you're into that, that doesn't involve human beings at all. This is all being done by automated software?
12:30 Rory Stewart? Well, I think you could often have one human being maybe directing four or 5,000 accounts pretty easily. And one of the ways in which you get Twitter to promote your products is by getting fake followers. So one lot follows another lot. And that gives Twitter the impression that this is a really great account that's taking off. The giveaway with a lot of bots in the past has been you have sort of one or two followers is usually a sign that there's something a bit dubious about it. But these things can generate hundreds of followers quite quickly.
13:01 Alastair Campbell? Well, has your friend Emma been able to assess who has been willing to pay large sums of money in this particular campaign? Is it possible to trace it back to the, I don't know, the oil and gas industry, or to the Tory party, or to Tufton Street, or whoever it might be?
13:20 Rory Stewart? No, so far, the research has been very careful to say that they estimate that this campaign around ULEZ will have cost about 160,000 pounds, a considerable sum of money, almost certainly paid to a company like these companies that I've referred to. Contracting one of those companies to do it, probably costs a bit more actually, to be honest. A hundred and sixty thousand sounds to me like a bit of a bargain, given the sorts of money these companies were asking for from me when they were bidding me, although they may have seen me as a bit of a sucker. But as they say, they are only studying Twitter. They haven't looked at Facebook, which is notoriously actually much more prevalent, this kind of abuse on Facebook. So the actual scale of this campaign on ULEZ could well have been a much, much bigger half a million, million dollar campaign.
14:05 Rory Stewart? And they're saying they don't know what was happening on the other platforms and they have no idea where the money was coming from or who was paid to do it.
14:12 Alastair Campbell? And meanwhile, Sadiq Khan won his case in the High Court against Tory councils that were trying to block the expansion of ULEZ. And also meanwhile, following on from the Oxbridge by-election and the row that there's been about ULEZ, Rishi Sunak seems to be going off on a remarkable kind of anti-environmental, he defines it as pro-motorist, latest plank of his campaign strategy, talking about reviewing twenty mile an hour speed limits near schools, talking about reviewing low-traffic neighbourhoods, being photographed, I found
14:56 Alastair Campbell? this one a bit bizarre, of all the things he could do this time, being photographed at the wheel of Margaret Thatcher's Rover, and saying that only the Tories were pro-motorist, that Labour hates the motorist. And the other thing, he goes on about, I'm on the side of the motorist, but the other thing Labour should be saying, well, you may be on the side of the motorist, you say, but you're not on the side of the motorcar industry because your beloved Brexit has frankly wiped it out. So Rory, you're a Tory-ish, what is going on with this one?
15:25 Rory Stewart? Well, I think clearly they have concluded from Oxbridge that there are votes in being on the side of motorists. And I think this is partly about a strategy about trying to keep a blue-collar, working-class Conservative voters on side. Those are the people who are most affected by this ULEZ stuff. That will be the people living in outer London who have Older cars who are on low incomes and who are struggling to work out where they're going to get twelve pounds fifty a day extra to pay for driving their existing cars. I think it's one of the reasons why Labour has been very, very shy about coming strongly behind Sadiq Khan's policy. They clearly feel the stress of this.
16:08 Rory Stewart? And they're putting Labour in a very, very difficult position because it's going to be difficult for Sadiq Khan to say, I absolutely agree with the Tories, I'm on the side of the motorists, but equally, it's going to be very, very difficult for them to risk alienating those voters by sounding like they're out of touch. And this, I think, you know, brings us on to what's happening across Europe, because if you look at the alternative for Deutschland, the right wing party that's just polling twenty percent at the moment in Germany, a lot of that has been about attacking the environmental policies of people like Angela Merkel, as well as her immigration policies. And this relates to the sort of bigger thing that we've been talking about for the last few weeks, which is that unfortunately, the way that environmental policies have been done in Europe are regressive. They have the biggest impact on
16:53 Rory Stewart? the poor, because the poor pay the largest proportion of their budgets for their fuel, for motoring or their fuel for heating their homes. So one of the things that people like you and me who care about the environment, but also care about equality have to crack, is how do you get environmental policies in place that don't find their biggest burden falling on the extreme poor?
17:13 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I mean, I think that just before we leave, Sunak and the kind of politics of this, because the other thing that's happened this morning, just before we started recording, Sunak doing a visit to Scotland and saying that they're going to allow another hundred exploratory licenses for oil and gas in the North Sea, Labour having had a pretty strong line against. Now, first of all, is he now just doing everything as a sort of political positioning against Labour? And is that actually clever politics for somebody who is, one, trying to show that they're a bit different to what went before? And secondly, in a country that feels pretty much like it's in a mess.
17:54 Alastair Campbell? And I'm not convinced by that. In fact, I did, when I was looking for your wedding ring in Buxton last week.
17:59 Rory Stewart? Thank you for that.
18:00 Alastair Campbell? A pleasure. I'm sorry I failed. Ian Dale was my interlocutor. And Ian, I think is a, you know, people know is is sort of broadly a Tory, probably well to the right of you, I would say.
18:12 Rory Stewart? Yeah, he was my opponent in the Bracknell election. We stood against each other for for selection. We were both beaten by a man called Philip Lee, who was the local doctor.
18:20 Alastair Campbell? Who's now a Liberal Democrat.
18:22 Rory Stewart? Now a Liberal Democrat, exactly.
18:24 Alastair Campbell? So he's to the left of you, you're to the right of him, and then Ian Dale's even to the right of both of you. But I said to Ian, this, we were talking about this, O'Leary's, and we were talking about some of the culture issues that Sunak seems to be wanting to dive into. And I was saying, look, is the fact now that they're so kind of scared of their record, they don't really have much of a plan for the future. So this, so he's going to focus on these cultural issues and trans and, you know, kick back on the environmental agenda. And Ian said something very interesting. He said, well, look, they might be trying that. But if they do, they're going to lose people like me. And I thought that was very interesting because it does strike me that that Sunak is really trying to hit
19:09 Alastair Campbell? what I would identify as, as, you know, the cultural issues as opposed to a proper big agenda for the future.
19:16 Rory Stewart? Yeah, well, I mean, I think I think that's right. And I think you can see it. Tim Montgomery, who's also well to the right of me, is another Conservative commentator, was very disturbed by Rishi Sunak's tweet in which he seemed to be comparing Labour to criminal gangs and their support on immigration.
19:30 Alastair Campbell? Oh, yeah, that was pretty grim. That was on a par with the posters that you really hated that Labour did.
19:34 Rory Stewart? Exactly. So I I think there's there's a, I think that there is a real concern about that. Where, of course, the Conservatives are right, is this is going to be an election that, as I think we both agree, a pocketbook election, it's going to be fought around the economy. And Labour needs to be very careful not to sound as though it's pursuing environmental policies which are going to stop growth.
19:56 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
19:56 Rory Stewart? Which which is why, you know, it may be smart. For Rishi Sunak to focus on oil and gas exploration in Scotland because it's a huge part of the Scottish economy. It's absolutely the key to constituencies like Aberdeen where oil and gas is a massive employer. And it's not just a massive employer in Aberdeen. It's also all the export of Scottish skills in oil and gas around the world. So I mean, to repeat the point, I mean, I would like to see one of these parties say, we are going to make the very difficult decision of transferring exactly the same amount of cash or even more to the people who are having to pay this ULEZ so that it encourages them to swap vehicles to save money. But they're not actually out of pocket if they choose to stick with the vehicle they currently have. But that will be massively expensive.
20:41 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, although if there's one issue in the politics, not just of the UK, but of every country in the world, where you think it's sort of crying out for somebody to show real leadership, and leadership being about all of us having to do certain things we find difficult, then I think this is one of them. And the other thing is, I mean, I know I'm mildly obsessed with Brexit and the politics of Brexit. But I think the other reason why I think Labour have been wrong to be shy about calling out mistakes of Brexit is because now we see the same people who brought us Brexit, who campaigned hardest for Brexit, are now the loudest voices calling for us to slow down on net zero. Just this
21:22 Alastair Campbell? week, Farage, Duncan Smith, David Davis, Rees-Mogg, the same people who, I think, led the fight for something which I think most people now realize is pretty much, you know, damaging our country, are now the exact same people using the exact same campaign methods to try to weaponize their word, the climate. And I think that's just so irresponsible that we should call it out more.
21:51 Rory Stewart? Final thing, just before we leave the subject. This Ule's abuse of Twitter, it matters much more than just for the Oxbridge by-election because as AI begins to play into this space, artificial intelligence will make this kind of manipulation much, much easier and will define the US election. So what we're seeing here, you know, is my explaining a relatively clunky analog attempt to manually create a few thousand Twitter accounts to amplify some statements around a by-election. But AI can take this to a scale where the qualitative difference is absolutely unbelievable. And the, the, these companies are offering many services beyond this.
22:34 Rory Stewart? I mean, the, the Guardian investigation, which we'll share, has these companies using fake accounts on Amazon to buy sex toys and deliver them to politicians' homes in order to destroy their marriages with their wives. They're breaking into people's Telegram accounts. So one trick is to send a Telegram message, apparently from the leader of your party, saying, I promise you the role of Foreign Secretary in my new administration, and then send it to 15 other MPs at the same time to totally discredit the, the reputation of the leader, et cetera, et cetera. This is, and, and all of this can be done so easily. There's something called an SS7 vulnerability in the global communication system that allows these people to get into things like Telegram that people thought were safe.
23:17 Rory Stewart? Anyway, enough about that, but just worth returning to again and again because the next elections are going to be more and more about this.
23:23 Alastair Campbell? No, and as you say, particularly with, I mean, I, I'd like to think some of our politicians might look at this and think this could be a problem for our democracy as a whole. But I think all too many politicians, unlike you, when you had the people coming to see you to go for London Mayor, will be very, very, very tempted to use anything that gives them a competitive advantage, which won't be exposed until after the event. That's the other thing. A lot of this stuff people do in campaigns.
23:49 Rory Stewart? And of course, one of the problems with the modern world is that there is a sort of vicious cycle here because we may wind up in a world in which the politicians who refuse to use this stuff don't get elected, the politicians who do use this stuff. And that changes the whole culture.
24:02 Alastair Campbell? And just just very briefly on on what's happening in Europe, because there is a lot going on at the moment. I I was following the AFD, the Alternative for Deutschland. They had their kind of annual conference.
24:12 Rory Stewart? God, that must have been a fun thing to follow. Blimey.
24:14 Alastair Campbell? Well, well, it's it's sort of interesting and, you know, and they had a huge banner behind, which was essentially saying, given how much we've achieved in the last 10 years, think about how much we can achieve in the next. They've only been going 10 years. They're now into 20% polling.
24:29 Rory Stewart? So and ahead of the social democrats, not far behind.
24:33 Alastair Campbell? They're only behind, the only party they're behind is the is the the CDU, the Christian Democrats.
24:39 Rory Stewart? So it would be, and just to give British listeners a sort of equivalent, that presumably would be a bit like UKIP or the Brexit Party, overtaking Labour and being just behind the Conservatives.
24:49 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, absolutely.
24:50 Rory Stewart? Presumably, actually, they are a bit worse than UKIP or Brexit Party. I mean, because they've got a a history with much stranger kind of neo-Nazi stuff in the background, right?
24:59 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but they've they've done the same thing that Le Pen has done and Maloney's done and and UKIP tried to do of sort of decontaminate themselves of the worst elements. And they've actually moved off. It's interesting when we talk about this environmental stuff. They still bang on about migration a lot. But they're also part of this debate about environmental change being a thing for the elite. We've seen something similar in Holland, which, frankly, is giving the impression at the moment of being virtually ungovernable. But there, a sort of out of nowhere, this farmers' party has emerged and become, you know, very significant in the debate, again focused on the environment. But what's been interesting in Germany in recent days is that Merz, who's Angela Merkel's
25:43 Alastair Campbell? successor as leader of the CDU, obviously now in opposition. And they've got this thing called the firewall. They talk about a firewall between them and the AFD. They'll never have anything to do with the AFD. And he did an interview on television last weekend where he sort of suggested that when it came to local politics, it could be very, very different. And people are seeing this as the first chink in the firewall. And of course, it's it's very, very difficult because how do you? If you're, let's just imagine the next election in Germany becomes where the obvious thing becomes an alliance between the CDU and the AFD. How do you kind of handle that unless you have been absolutely clear as Merkel was the whole way through, we will never have anything to do with them?
26:28 Rory Stewart? And there's a huge history of this, isn't there? There's a great book on populism by Jan Wernher Muller from Princeton. And he has the conventional wisdom, which is what you must not do is form alliances with these people or start imitating their policies because that only strengthens them.
26:48 Alastair Campbell? Yep.
26:49 Rory Stewart? But unfortunately, as they get stronger and stronger, it's more and more difficult to hold that line. I mean, that, of course, was the line that people, the conclusion people took from the 1930s, which was that parties were too willing to work with the Nazi party, too willing to think, oh, well, we'll cooperate them on a bit of a local level, we can do a bit of a coalition there. And by doing so, just gave more legitimacy and space to these parties going forward. But Jan Wernher Muller also points out that there's another paradox, which is if you try to completely ignore them and refuse to even debate them or argue with them, that causes another problem, which is that their support base just strengthens their sense of an elite against the people, et cetera.
27:27 Alastair Campbell? Absolutely, absolutely. And that's the argument that's been running ever since. But what was interesting, watching the AFD conference, was that it was a sort of weird mixture of them looking confident because of this situation in the polls, but they also looked like they were doing their hard right version of the Ming-Voss strategy of, you know, we don't want people to really know what we're about, let's just sort of... So all they talk about is kind of really political tactics. And the environment has become the latest area for them to operate, this sort of, you know, we represent the people against the elite, which of course, all populism is founded in that prism.
28:04 Rory Stewart? Well, I think maybe this is the thing to, just as we go to the break, to finish on, because a lot of this, from Ulez and Twitter through to the AFD, is about the growing problems with making the argument for net zero and climate change in Europe and the United States. And the way in which a combination of collapse of international cooperation around these kinds of issues, the kind of cooperation we have with the Paris climate talks, combined with increasing populism at home and rising crisis, cost of living crisis at home. Is producing a huge headwind against what were already pretty inadequate attempts to deal with rising global temperatures.
28:41 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, absolutely. Well, anyway, you'll be pleased to know, Roy, that because I know you've had a few critical things to say about Siddiq Khan on the podcast down the last few months, but he sent us a message after our last podcast where we both supported him on ULEZ, thanking us for that. I congratulated him on his win in the High Court and I said, "Keep going with the green crap," I said, to which he replied, "We call it saving the planet and saving children's lives." I thought that was a nice way to put it. Take that, Cameron.
29:15 Rory Stewart? Very good.
29:16 Alastair Campbell? Right, let's have a break.
29:17 Rory Stewart? Thank you.
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30:35 Alastair Campbell? Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.
30:38 Rory Stewart? And with me, Rory Stewart.
30:40 Alastair Campbell? Now Rory, your friend Yuval Noah Harari, I listened to it in the car with Fiona, coming back from seeing some friends earlier today, and she was sort of just vituperative, not about him, by the way, but about what's going on in Israel, and sort of saying, this is kind of, this is worse than anything I even realised was going on, and why aren't people more exercised about this? And I do think that, given normally Israel gets way more coverage in our debate than other countries of a similar size, the scale of this perhaps isn't yet fully understood.
31:16 Rory Stewart? 100%. And I thought, I mean, I really encourage people to listen to it. So Yuval Noah Harari, famous public intellectual, wrote this book called Sapiens that many, many people will have read.
31:27 Alastair Campbell? 25 million people.
31:28 Rory Stewart? 25 million copies, yeah. And actually, a fantastic children's book that we've been reading to our kids too, called Unstoppable Us, which is a lovely, lovely introduction to human prehistory and other things. But he's become an activist around Israel, and it's, I thought it was a wonderful, kind of passionate, well, one of the interviews, I think, that was most striking. I loved the Paul Nurse one, which we did last week, which people who haven't listened to should definitely listen to. But I definitely think this is one of the most powerful purely political interviews that we've done. And then next week, we'll get into some of his broader ideas.
32:02 Alastair Campbell? Well, the first episode's out now. The second episode will be out on Monday, August the 7th. And if you can't wait until next Monday to hear that part of our exchange, you can listen right now by going to therestispolitics.com. Shall we go to Niger?
32:17 Rory Stewart? Yes. I mean, and let's just do the transition maybe into this, which is to say that, you know, we've been talking in the first half about the way in which prices, cost of living, climate are having these profound impacts on European politics, and particularly creating new forms of right wing politics. The AfD in Germany, backlash is now happening in Britain. But of course, all of this is much, much more profound in Sub-Saharan Africa. As we frequently remind listeners, Sub-Saharan Africa has gone from 170 million people living in extreme poverty, by which we mean people living on under $2.15 a day. That's people who can't meet their basic necessities, can't put regular meals on the
33:00 Rory Stewart? table, to 470 million people today. And of course, those are people who are far more affected by changes in fuel or food prices than anyone can begin to imagine, and in Kenya. For example, wheat prices are up 30%, sugar prices are up 60%. And this has been exploited politically, partly by people associated with Ruyler Odinga, who was the opposition leader in Kenya, in a whole series of riots and demonstrations in which more than 30 people have been killed. And it's also been coinciding with William Ruto, the president, trying to double the fuel tax, and also trying to get national debt under control, which is a story partly
33:42 Rory Stewart? linked to China, $64 billion of national debt, three times what it was a few years ago. So I'm just starting with Kenya, because Kenya is often seen as one of the great success stories, a more moderate, lower-middle-income country. But things look much, much worse when we move up towards the Sahel, which is that band of territory on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean, right there across the Red Sea, where there's been a coup in Niger, and which over to you.
34:12 Alastair Campbell? Well, just on that broader point from west to east, I think it was the New York Times did a map, and they shaded in the countries that have had a coup of some sort in recent times, and it goes literally from west coast to east coast in a single band. Guinea. Mali, Burkina Faso, now Niger, Chad and Sudan. And this one is, I don't know, I don't know what to make of this because you've got, so let just to tell people what happened if they haven't followed this. The elected president, Mohamed Bazoum, he was the first elected president to follow another elected president in the country's history.
34:56 Rory Stewart? First democratic transition.
34:58 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, exactly. The first, the first peaceful democratic transition since independence in 1960, independence from France. Now, the reason why, and I'm in France at the moment, and the reason why this is causing quite a lot of concern in France is because we talked about on a previous podcast about Mali, where there was a coup there and where the Wagner group had been very much to the fore. And the French were forced to move some of the troops that they had there, who were involved in the counter-terrorism strategy in the entire region, move them into Niger. And they now have been coming under something of an attack.
35:42 Alastair Campbell? The French embassy in the capital was attacked. Macron has been forced to make some pretty strong statements about what will happen if any French nationals get killed. And meanwhile, we've had the usual round, and I don't say that in a dismissive way, but there is a bit of a pattern to this. The United States have condemned this coup, the European Union has condemned the coup. And the thing was, was announced, as these things often are, with a group of men in military camouflage uniform.
36:19 Rory Stewart? Which, which incidentally subscribers can see on our newsletter. There's a great, great clip where you can see the, the man in the air force uniform reading out the coup and behind him, the presidential guard, all in their green uniforms, which we will share with, share with readers.
36:32 Alastair Campbell? And it was a very short statement. He said this: "We, the defence and security forces united within the National Council for the safeguard of the homeland," you've got to love a National Council for the safeguard of the homeland, "have decided to put an end to the regime you know. This follows the continuing deterioration of the security situation and poor economic and social governance." So, we now have a guy, the president, who is basically locked up in his own palace for the time being, while they decide what to do with him. And this guy, Chiarni, who was the head of the presidential guard, in other words, in charge of the president's
37:10 Alastair Campbell? security overall, he now has declared himself to be the leader. And meanwhile, lots of threats, lots of talks of sanctions, lots of very, very important people like Antony Blinken, like President Macron, saying that this has to be reversed. But we've sort of seen something of a pattern in some of these earlier coups that we've seen. You have a military takeover, the borders close, men in uniform go in front of the cameras and say there's been a change. The African Union has an emergency meeting and it condemns. Then you have sanctions, then you have the EU and you have the US stepping in. Then you have a change to diplomatic relations. And then eventually, the world moves on,
37:53 Alastair Campbell? sanctions get lifted, and the countries which stopped the relations rebuild them.
37:56 Rory Stewart? And along the way, the French get kicked out, and generally, the Wagner Group comes in. So Prigozhin has come out and praised the coup in Niger, and is already offering the Wagner Group to go in and support. And this just comes off the fact that we're just four days, as we're recording this, off a conference held in St Petersburg where Vladimir Putin was hosting African leaders, and announced that he's shipping tens of thousands of tonnes of free grain to Burkina Faso, where there's been a coup, Mali, where there's been a coup, Eritrea and Zimbabwe, which are basically autocracies, and the Central African Republic, where, as we said, the Wagner Group has a statue in the central square. So, and Prigozhin has reappeared.
38:38 Alastair Campbell? Where they're currently holding a referendum to allow their favoured president to stay on for another eight years.
38:44 Rory Stewart? Absolutely. And Prigozhin, who was the guy that led this mutiny, has now reappeared on the margins of this conference, doing interviews and meeting African leaders.
38:54 Alastair Campbell? He was photographed with some of the African leaders. So he doesn't, I mean, Putin threatened all sorts of punishment to those who led the Aborted march on Moscow, but he seems to be carrying on as per.
39:08 Rory Stewart? Well, let's let me just take up your question of this theme of these coups and try to remind people a little bit of the sort of big broad pattern. So all these countries, as you said, are in the Sahel, this huge band of territory on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, and it's a banner territory famous for incredible sunlight and heat. I mean, it barely has any winter to speak of. It's an area that had a very strong population of nomadic pastoralists, people like the Tuareg, moving around with camels. It's a zone dominated particularly on the western side by France. These were French colonies. And it's a zone which has been brutally
39:50 Rory Stewart? affected by droughts and more recently, climate change and by huge population growth. So Niger, which is where the recent coup has happened, the average number of children born by a woman in Niger at the moment is seven. And these are mostly countries, most of the countries we're talking about here, with the exception of Sudan, are countries with populations between sort of 15, 25 million people, but growing unbelievably fast. So if you're having seven children, the numbers by 2050, 2070 are staggering in countries that have very, very little fertile ground to support those populations. And what's happened here? Well,
40:26 Alastair Campbell? Niger is 25 million, isn't it?
40:28 Rory Stewart? Niger is the biggest at 25 million, below Sudan at 45. Mali is at 21 or 22, Chad's at about 17, Guinea's at about 13 and a half million. And the forecast, the population is 70 million by 2050 in Niger. So it's going to go from 25 million, which is, you know, about a third the size of the UK, just above a third the size of the UK, to being larger than the UK population within 25 years.
40:54 Alastair Campbell? Another reason. Creating the conditions for something like a coup, massive economic pressure already, and real problems with unemployment.
41:04 Rory Stewart? Huge problems with unemployment, huge problems with standoffs often between these nomadic populations and the more settled populations. So one of the things going on in Sudan, for example, which we've discussed on the podcast before, people remember there are two figures in Sudan, there's Burhan, who comes from this, who's the general who comes from a settled community in the Nile, sort of more upper-middle-class family, and against him, Hermeti, who was a camel trader with the Janjaweed militia, who very much represents that other aspect of these sort of semi-nomadic peoples. And the same is true of a lot of these Sahel countries. Sometimes it's a trade-off between nomads and settled population, sometimes between Muslim and Christian populations, but a lot of it is a fight over land at a time when climate
41:48 Rory Stewart? change is causing more and more pressure. So very quickly, a lot of these countries democratized along with a lot of Africa through the 1990s, and then things began to go wrong. And they're basically triggered by the Arab Spring and the intervention in Libya. So as Libya collapses, and that was an intervention in 2011, weapons start flowing south. Gaddafi had enormous weapons supplies, he was employing a lot of Tuareg from Mali and Libya, they floated back home. Mali began to break apart. The French in 2013 set up a huge operation where they ended up eventually with four and a half thousand French troops on the ground, trying to fight a counter-terrorism campaign against these sort of Al Qaeda, ISIS elements in Mali.
42:32 Rory Stewart? And at that stage, these other countries were still relatively stable. So if you were talking about these countries back then, the cliche would have been Burkina Faso is a very peaceful place where not very much happens. Niger was meant to be recently, you know, one of the great democratic hopes where French and American troops were and where the president was getting an award from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for the stuff on gender. Chad was meant to have this very strong, effective, reliable military. And gradually, since 2013, over the last 10 years, the whole thing has begun to fall apart. So Burkina Faso, for example, went from being this sort of beacon of stability, went from zero attacks in 2013 to 516 terrorist attacks in 2020, as the French operations and the
43:17 Rory Stewart? Malian operations began to push the terrorists into surrounding areas. And then the president himself was killed in an attack which he was doing with French troops in Chad and there was a coup d'etat and his son took over. And all these different countries began to fall in different ways. The only exceptions really to me is Guinea where there has been less of this sort of insurgent attack. It seems to have been more a coup d'etat against a slightly incompetent president. But the common theme is all these African militaries talk to each other and it's spreading like wildfire. And as you say, it's spread now all the way across the continent through the whole Sahel region.
43:58 Alastair Campbell? And at a time of, we talked about this before, rising Russian and Chinese influence and perhaps declining American influence, even though America still obviously is a big player in some of these countries. But I just wonder whether Nigeria is a bigger force in this than we might realise. So Niger is landlocked and if you look at the borders it has Libya, as you say, to the north east, Chad to the east, Nigeria to the south, Benin and Burkina Faso, Mali and Algeria. That's quite a collection of neighbours. And Nigeria is, represents roughly two thirds, almost two thirds of the economy of the whole region.
44:41 Alastair Campbell? And Bola Tanubu, the newly elected president, is giving an indication of wanting to be much more robust on the foreign policy front and has spoken out in the past, I know that things can change, but has spoken out against military dictatorships. And I wonder whether Nigeria is the one that's going to have to step up in this. Because I was talking to some people in the French government yesterday who was saying, well, their hope is that actually this particular coup can be reversed, that these putchists will be turfed out. Now, I don't quite see how that's going to happen of its own accord, but I wonder whether Nigeria is the key to making it happen.
45:19 Rory Stewart? Well, there's definitely an attempt, isn't there? So Bola Tanubu, who runs, has just taken over ECOWAS, which is the sort of regional grouping dealing with West Africa, has threatened military action. It'd be very interesting to see whether that's followed through. And of course, there's huge sanctions being threatened by the US and the EU and others. So the US had 1,100 troops in Niger, this country where the coup's just happened, a massive drone base that costs hundreds of millions. The French had troops there, as you said. The EU had pledged to give Niger 1.3 billion euros to try to get it away from oil, and it's been a very important part for the migration conversations because many, many of the migrants flowing into Europe across the Mediterranean are coming from countryside Niger. So the European Union's been trying to put together these
46:04 Rory Stewart? very generous development packages across that region. When I was the Africa Minister 2016 and I was writing the UK's new Africa strategy, which I think is still on the books as the UK's Africa strategy, our major shift was to try to shift more towards the Sahel, which is this region. We were opening a couple new embassies in the Sahel to try to concentrate more on what had traditionally been a French area. But I also would like to sort of remind us that, you remember when I was saying that Mali had been a great defeat for the French, we got a very, very defensive aggressive response from one of your friends in France who got in touch and said, no, no, this is outrageous. The French have triumphed in Mali. How can Rory suggest otherwise? Unfortunately, it's been repeated again and again. The
46:48 Rory Stewart? French have now been humiliated in Mali, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, in Chad, and now in Niger. That whole Sahelian Francophone Africa is now full of people, and most recently in Niger, literally attacking the French embassy. You can see online people attacking the classic embassy front, their security place with stones going through the front door and Russian flags going up, not because the Russians are behind this, but because Russian flags have become the great symbol of anti-Western move and a huge humiliation also. We don't talk about this enough, but for the US.
47:22 Alastair Campbell? One of the people who is trying to resist the coup was making the point that the Russians have been part of the exploitation of the territory before this in terms of sort of trying to get the mood going. So, you know, I think we shouldn't overstate the influence of Russia, but nor should we should we understate it. But what we can be clear about Is that in all of these countries that we've talked about in that region, you have variably problems with Boko Haram, particularly in Chad. You have problems with ISIS and Al Qaeda, particularly in Mali and Burkina Faso. And, you know, the the the French have been a very, very important part of that security operation, which becomes much more difficult if, as per their leaving Mali,
48:05 Alastair Campbell? you are no longer able to run the same operations that you've been running relatively successfully in recent years. So it is a massive challenge for them and for the Americans and for the United Nations.
48:16 Rory Stewart? And I guess there is a question on how successful these things really were. So the Sahel had 1% of global deaths from terrorism in 2007. By 2022, it had 43% of all global deaths from terrorism. It's become the great global epicenter. And even as the French tried to suppress in Mali, and the Americans got very, very much involved, so there's something called the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Partnership with a lot of US troops, a lot of it undeclared. The the US has been fighting 13 African countries since 2013. And actually, the sum total of the result of what the French and the Americans has been doing has not been to get terrorism under control in those countries. Terrorism is now spreading ever more widely. And violence in every form is just developing in different ways.
48:59 Rory Stewart? So we haven't talked much about the Central African Republic, which is where the Wagner Group is, but there you've got Muslim fighters from the north, Christian fighters from the south, forming their own coalition. And a third of all the residents in the whole country have been displaced. And in Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, basically, the military doesn't control their own territory. It's all run by these sort of self-defense militias. So I'm a bit skeptical about the French claims that this has been a great success, even in counterterrorism terms.
49:28 Alastair Campbell? Well, all of which plays into, particularly if if what you're saying about the United States is right, it will play into those who are arguing for further disengagement from places like this. Well, actually, what we probably need, I would have thought, is more engagement.
49:42 Rory Stewart? 100%, that that's the paradoxical truth.
49:46 Rory Stewart? This is actually happening partly not because the world is engaging too much, but because the world is not engaging enough. There's a very, very clear relationship between the collapse of international institutions, populism, isolationism in Europe and the US, less and less international development money, and increasing violence, military coup, discrediting of democracy across the world. So to turn this around, paradoxically, we need stronger global structures, more involvement, not less.
50:13 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. While you were talking, I just looked up the point about the birth rate.
50:18 Rory Stewart? Are you Googling?
50:20 Alastair Campbell? No, I wasn't Googling. I was looking at the research papers that I'd been reading earlier. Is that okay?
50:25 Rory Stewart? Well, I don't know. This seems a bit tricky, having been telling me off for Googling all the time.
50:29 Alastair Campbell? No, I'm not. I'm giving you factual support for what you said earlier because it's very dramatic. Forty nine point two percent of the population in Niger is under fifteen. Two point seven percent of the population is over sixty five. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? When you compare that to...
50:48 Rory Stewart? It's completely amazing, particularly when you set it against countries like Japan, Spain, Italy, Russia, where they're getting older and older and older.
50:57 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, yeah. Okay, Rory. Well, look, we said at the top we were going to talk about Sweden and Kramburning, but we've almost done an hour on Ule's and Niger. So shall we do? We have actually had quite a lot of questions about Sweden. Shall we do that as part of question time and say goodbye for now?
51:15 Rory Stewart? Great. Let's do that tomorrow.
51:16 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. See you soon.
51:18 Rory Stewart? Bye bye.
Previous 157. Question Time: Knocking over Liz Truss, Oxbridge dominance, and life under the Taliban Next 159. Question Time: Sweden's Quran-burning crisis, Farage vs. the banks, and what is 'the establishment'? Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
