199. Question Time: Why the infected blood scandal still haunts today’s politics

How uncomfortable are the left with Starmer’s praise of Margaret Thatcher? Does Sunak’s stance on legal migration undermine British universities? What’s next for George Santos? Join Alastair and Rory as they answer all these questions and more on this week’s Question Time. 📱Protect your tech valuables with our exclusive 20% off discount at http://uk.mous.co/TRIP 🎒 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. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

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• 2:28Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:32Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell.

• 2:33Rory Stewart?

  Very good. What would you like to begin with?

• 2:36Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you've mentioned once or twice this American politician, George Santos. Leo Lerner, what's next for George Santos? I suspect another Botox operation.

• 2:44Rory Stewart?

  I mean, absolutely unbelievable. I mean, we talked about George Santos because he first came to our attention through his amazing claims about his own personal biography, his educational record, which turned out to be totally fictitious. He is now facing the most astonishing array of different types of criminal charges, many of them to do with abusing campaign financing money. But this is part of a much bigger story. I mean, we talk about corruption, and if anybody's listening who's up for this, a book on corruption is desperately needed. It's very difficult to read good stuff on how corruption works in different countries because this is also, at the same time, Robert Menendez, who we've talked about, who's the Democrat senator from New Jersey, found with gold bars in his house.

• 3:27Rory Stewart?

  We've talked a little bit about some of the scandals around Rhode Island, where the mayor was a famously corrupt official, some of the scandals around Florida in the early 1980s when the FBI did stings. So there's that American corruption. I remember saying to you that one of the great things in the FBI sting in the early 80s was they were trying to soft soap and say, you know, could I incentivize you in some way, Senator? And the senator said, no need to do that. I'm as bent as they come. Tell us a little bit what you think.

• 3:53Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Santos is the first, I think, is the first American politician who's been kicked out of Congress, not for treason of some sort. The fact that as many Republicans voted to kick him out, as was the case, is pretty stunning. And I watched a little bit on the news of him being chased down the street by the media. And I did, honestly, I'd never noticed the Botox thing, but you mentioned it in a previous podcast. I've never seen a face quite like it. He has not got a single line of any sort on his face.

• 4:18Rory Stewart?

  It's amazing. When it works, though, it's really impressive.

• 4:20Alastair Campbell?

  Is it?

• 4:21Rory Stewart?

  I'm very jealous. I was sitting with someone who was a year ahead of me at university. I was looking at this incredible, he's a very wealthy man, but his face just, and I kept looking and looking and looking. I just couldn't find anything.

• 4:30Alastair Campbell?

  But don't you think it's weird? I just couldn't imagine having a face like that. I wouldn't want a face like that.

• 4:34Rory Stewart?

  Well, the problem is it can begin to go wrong. I mean, with Putin, it begins to look a bit bizarre, doesn't it, as the years go on?

• 4:39Alastair Campbell?

  I remember Eve Pollard, who is my editor at the Sunday Mirror, she said, the thing to remember is you get old. You either look old or weird.

• 4:45Rory Stewart?

  Ah.

• 4:45Alastair Campbell?

  Very good observation.

• 4:46Rory Stewart?

  That's a very good.

• 4:47Alastair Campbell?

  And I think Santos looks very, very weird.

• 4:49Rory Stewart?

  Finally, though, on this corruption point.

• 4:51Alastair Campbell?

  Well, why don't you write that book?

• 4:52Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think it's a really good book. I mean, I'd love to get into it. So somebody was saying to me, something very interesting about the difference between corruption in Nigeria and corruption in China and corruption in the Gulf. So he said, in the Gulf, you have to hire a prince and it's a standard one percent commission. In China, when you're getting a contract, you pay 10% commission, but it doesn't affect your likelihood of getting the contract because the Chinese officials are really held to account for delivery. So they choose the best contract they think is going to deliver on time and on budget and then take the 10% commission.

• 5:25Alastair Campbell?

  You know that Xi Jinping, having had his big crackdown on corruption, I don't know where I saw this, but the average weight and the waist size of Chinese civil servants has diminished.

• 5:35Rory Stewart?

  Since there's anti-corruption.

• 5:36Alastair Campbell?

  Since the anti-corruption drive, because they're not as fat as they used to be.

• 5:39Rory Stewart?

  Meanwhile, in Nigeria, the problem is partly complete, and this is a lesson maybe for British politics. No realism at all about the targets they set. They will set, every government comes in promising to almost sort of triple the country's growth in the next four years. And that's one of the reasons why the corruption goes along with no performance at all. The objectives are so unrealistic that there's no incentive for any of the senior civil servants or ministers to actually get anyone who's going to deliver anything, because nothing that could be delivered could ever meet the nonsense that they're spouting.

• 6:11Alastair Campbell?

  This is a neat bridge to a question from Fedrus. What is the likelihood of anyone being held criminally liable for negligence in the handling of the COVID pandemic? Is it possible families could bring a civil case against key individuals? Now, the reason I say that's a bridge is I do think there has been a considerable corruption in the handling of COVID contracts. I don't know whether the inquiry is specifically looking into those. I know the National Crime Agency are looking at it to some of these big contracts. We've got the Richard Johnson up for two days towards the end of the week. Have you been able to follow much of the COVID inquiry?

• 6:41Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's fascinating, absolutely fascinating. Because I was dealing with that government at the time.

• 6:48Alastair Campbell?

  You got mentioned a lot by Michael Gove. He kept saying Rory Stewart said this and Rory Stewart said that.

• 6:53Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so so Michael Gove's line was, yeah, Rory Stewart was right, but he wasn't as early on it as he claimed. Actually, I was saying things much earlier than he's given me credit for. But the the main reason I'm a bit cross about this is the pressure I came under from that government, including WhatsApps from Matt Hancock and others to basically tell me to shut up and stop saying what I was saying. Now they're all coming out saying we accept that we should have locked down earlier.

• 7:17Alastair Campbell?

  Or in his case, they're saying that they were advocating it.

• 7:20Rory Stewart?

  Many of them who at the time were attacking me for what now saying, oh, no, no, they were pushing for the same thing I was pushing for. That didn't feel like it. It felt like they were putting huge pressure on me and sending in people to see me to try to convince me not to say what I was saying.

• 7:31Alastair Campbell?

  My favourite tweet of the inquiry so far was, I don't know if you watched Michael Gove giving evidence, but somebody said, the inquiry judge in QC will be waking up this morning to discover that Michael Gove is still on his last answer. It was one of the most loquacious performances I've ever seen, and he was so clearly irritating them.

• 7:49Rory Stewart?

  And they kept saying, shorter answers, please. And he kept saying, yes, well, I understand.

• 7:53Alastair Campbell?

  I have to explain the context. So the serious point from Fedras, do you think it is possible that families will bring civil case against key individuals?

• 8:00Rory Stewart?

  I think that there's big legal problems in being able to do that in Britain. I don't think you can bring civil cases against the government in that way. I think you'd have to do it not against individuals, it would have to be government negligence.

• 8:10Alastair Campbell?

  But there's there's somebody who keeps trying to get something called hashtag M I P O trending on Twitter, which is misconduct in public office. Would that be a criminal thing?

• 8:18Rory Stewart?

  I don't know how that would work. Um, there's a very good question that we've had. This leads us on to the biggest example of government liability that we're struggling with at the moment, which is contaminated blood.

• 8:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 8:29Rory Stewart?

  Unbelievably horrible tragedy where back in the nineteen eighties, over thirty thousand people were injected with contaminated blood and given HIV and different forms of hepatitis. Over three hundred children were infected with HIV and where the government has just faced the defeat. And that's the most sort of extreme injustice and by a bit like Hillsborough, it takes so long. I mean, this was the early nineteen eighties. I asked a question in the House of Commons in March twenty fifteen, which is now eight and a half years ago to David Cameron and PMQs, asking for fair treatment for people and pushing ahead with what was then the Penrose Report, Lord Penrose's report on this.

• 9:09Rory Stewart?

  And David Cameron seemed to promise me in March twenty fifteen that the government was going to provide compensation adequately for all these people. And here we are eight years later, and I can absolutely understand why Conservative MPs rebelled against the government and have pushed to get this done.

• 9:24Alastair Campbell?

  Last night in the Commons was their first defeat on a whip vote since Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister. I was talking to a member of the Shadow Cabinet recently, who said that the worry is that the sums of money that are going to have to be used to settle all this are so large that the government is deliberately trying to just keep this thing ticking over until after the next election, so that it doesn't go into their

• 9:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 9:50Alastair Campbell?

  already pretty bad economic figures.

• 9:51Rory Stewart?

  They've already, I think, committed to giving a hundred thousand pounds each as a provisional thing to four thousand effective people. And the maths on that, obviously, is that's four hundred million pounds just for that. So as they push for broader compensation, it's going to move into the billions. And it was the same when I came in Equitable Life, people with Equitable Life lost a lot of money. And again, the government is stuck in this thing, which I think governments are often stuck in, and you may have been stuck in at times, which is balancing their sense of moral obligation towards people who've been badly treated with the Treasury, saying, where on earth are we supposed to find these billions of pounds?

• 10:24Alastair Campbell?

  It was interesting yesterday, I think it was Lucy Fraser, the Culture Secretary, was asked about it. And just yet again, hiding behind process, well, let's wait for this inquiry, let's wait for this inquiry, let's see where it all pans out. So what the people who are campaigning on this seem to be saying is they're just trying to drag it out.

• 10:39Rory Stewart?

  Because as far as I remember, the inquiry, when I was asked this question in March twenty fifteen.

• 10:42Alastair Campbell?

  The basic facts are known.

• 10:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, the big report from Penrose was published in twenty fifteen.

• 10:46Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely. The big facts have been known for a long time. And now it's all about the process and they're just dragging it out and dragging it out. What about Michael Gove then? Noah Ricketts, can you explain the role Michael Gove has played in the thirteen years of Tory government? He's always at the centre of power, never in a top job. The media, left and right, seem to enjoy him and perceive him as capable. He seems to be an independent actor in each of these governments.

• 11:10Rory Stewart?

  So Michael Gove is firstly very clever, very articulate, in person very, very polite, courteous to colleagues. I mean, he's extraordinary in the House of Commons lobby. He's the one person who anybody has a complaint goes up to will always listen very thoughtfully. I paid tribute to him a bit in the book because he was the only person who ever did a proper handover with me. When I became Prisons Minister, he went out of his way to see me, get out his Rolodex, share all the names and introductions, give me advice on what he was trying to achieve. But he's also somebody who is seen as very, very ambitious, stabbed Boris Johnson in the back when Boris Johnson was running for leadership first time against Theresa May, ran for the leadership himself, I was running against me, and I found that

• 11:52Rory Stewart?

  I was caught up in some pretty eccentric moves by Michael Gove, where he'd say, Rory, I really want to, you know, be part of a team with you, ambiguous about whether that was a team with him leading or me leading. And then he would then produce a front page story in The Times attacking me and then get Times journalists into photographs, meeting, one words with meetings, etc. So I think he's somebody who every Prime Minister accepts is a very, very effective, if sometimes controversial, very controversial when he was Education Secretary, quite popular when he was Justice Secretary and Environment Secretary, where he embraced much more progressive causes. Effective, but people sort of see him as dangerous and uncontrollable and therefore are keeping him out of the top office's estate to date.

• 12:35Alastair Campbell?

  I think the point that Noah makes about him seeming to be popular with the media, he's very, very close to Rupert Murdoch.

• 12:42Rory Stewart?

  He was a Times columnist, wasn't he?

• 12:44Alastair Campbell?

  He was. He was a Times columnist who wrote all sorts of crazy things at the time. The point you make about the Justice Secretary is interesting because when he was Justice Secretary, shortly before he was moved out, I can't remember why that reshuffle happened, but there was quite a big reshuffle, but like a couple of weeks beforehand, he asked me to do a review of mental health in prisons, which I thought was quite interesting that he would have somebody like me go in and... You know.

• 13:05Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, he's reaching out to potential critics. He's bringing them into the tent. Yeah.

• 13:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I was in two minds because I wondered whether that he was doing it for the politics as opposed to because he wanted actually to do anything about mental health in prisons. But he is, I think his great success is in media manipulation and getting the media to kind of run his line the whole time. It's interesting. Here's a quiz question for you, Rory. Which three members of the Conservative Party have spent the most time as a cabinet minister since 2010? I'm indebted to the other Rory in my life for telling me this one.

• 13:37Rory Stewart?

  Well, Michael Gove presumably because he was only out for a very, very short time. He was right in there from 2010. Jeremy Hunt's been in there a very long time.

• 13:45Alastair Campbell?

  He's number three.

• 13:46Rory Stewart?

  Okay, and number two, wow.

• 13:48Alastair Campbell?

  Number two, I'll give you a clue, is somebody that you think was promoted far too early and went on.

• 13:53Rory Stewart?

  Could it be Liz Truss?

• 13:54Alastair Campbell?

  It's Liz Truss. Well done. Three out of three.

• 13:56Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Gosh, but Liz Truss didn't get in till 2014, so that's interesting. I mean, Gove fascinating because given the number of prime ministers we've had and the number of reshuffles we've had, you would have thought one of them would have thought, okay, I'm going to give him one of the big offices of state. He's always wanted to be Chancellor of the Exchequer.

• 14:12Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 14:12Rory Stewart?

  And it's fascinating that he's never quite made it.

• 14:14Alastair Campbell?

  Never got there. Yeah, yeah. But I think that comes down to this sort of trust thing. Can you really trust him? They've all had a bit of a sort of, they've all felt the knife a little bit at times, haven't they?

• 14:23Rory Stewart?

  A lean and hungry look. So Simon, has Starmer just lost the election by giving the nod to Thatcher?

• 14:29Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 14:31Rory Stewart?

  It was an interesting thing that. We talked about it in the main pod. So he wrote this piece of Sunday Telegraph, presumably quite deliberately putting in Thatcher. And he would have done it to reassure swing Tory voters. Is that right?

• 14:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 14:44Rory Stewart?

  Or what's the message? I mean, if you were advising, what was he trying to do there?

• 14:46Alastair Campbell?

  He was trying to signal to broadly Tory supporting audience that Labour could be trusted on the economy.

• 14:53Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 14:53Alastair Campbell?

  That was the main point of the piece, I think. Trailing the speech to the resolution foundation where he was saying that they weren't going to turn on the spending taps. And also, I think, trying to signal that he was going to be a big radical force of change. So if you actually read what he said about Thatcher, he didn't praise her. He simply made a statement, I think a statement of fact, that she was a radical reforming prime minister who unleashed on.

• 15:16Rory Stewart?

  But it's made some people very, very angry.

• 15:17Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 15:18Rory Stewart?

  Two Labour MPs have come out publicly saying this is an absolute outrage.

• 15:22Alastair Campbell?

  And of course, on top of the, you know, the attack he's come under from the left on Israel, Gaza. Humza Yousaf came straight out, Scottish First Minister. So I think it was deliberate. Would he have welcomed them actually taking from that whole piece this half line in a sentence about Thatcher, Atlee and Blair? A front page headline that says Starmer praises Thatcher. The reason The Telegraph put that there was because they knew that would cause him a problem.

• 15:44Rory Stewart?

  But he chose to write for The Telegraph.

• 15:46Alastair Campbell?

  He chose to write for The Telegraph, yeah, absolutely. And in the same way as Wes Streeting, who's currently in Australia looking at their health system. I saw he had something in The Telegraph, so they're obviously deliberately reaching out to Tories. And it's not stupid to do that because ultimately, I mean, this is the sort of goal and rule of elections. You have to get people voting for you who haven't voted for you before.

• 16:04Rory Stewart?

  So would you do it again?

• 16:05Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think I would. I think you've got to be careful. There was a very wonderful guy called David Bradshaw, who worked for me at The Mirror and then in Downing Street. And he used to draft and ghost a lot of Tony Blair's articles. And there were so many of them. So for example, if we had a budget or a Queen's speech, we would target every local paper in the country and have a sort of slightly tailored article. And every year, this was the game that was being played. So at one point at the National Press Awards, Tony Blair was Freelance Journalist of the Year.

• 16:34Alastair Campbell?

  So that is the David Bradshaw. So I think there's a sort of slight diminution returned to them. But yeah, listen, you mustn't be frightened of trying to take your message to places where normally you wouldn't get heard. So I would definitely do it again. Whether on balance it served the full purpose, I think in the context of what followed the next day, because he did have a pretty big speech which got reasonable coverage, live on the TV. So I think on balance it was okay, but I don't think they'd have actually wanted that as the headline.

• 17:00Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 17:01Alastair Campbell?

  There's another one here on Keir, which I think is perhaps more significant. Arthur Broadbent, thoughts on whether Starmer refusing to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and attempts to woo the Tories by praising Thatcher could lose him Scotland. I do think the Gaza situation is more serious for Labour than this Thatcher kerfuffle, which will die pretty quickly, I think. Labour lost pretty heavily.

• 17:25Alastair Campbell?

  A council by-election recently in Highgate to the Greens with a big, big swing. And also, there was, on the same day, I think, in Newham, a former Labour councillor who'd resigned to become an independent in protest over Gaza won massively. And I think it's not just about the issue. We don't need to rehearse all the things we've said before about where people feel they are on this sort of pro-Israel, pro-Palestine argument and how well informed they are and all that. But there's no doubt it has cut through at an emotional level to a lot of people who really are quite angry at this. Now, I think the worst thing Keir could do now is to kind of, as it were, back down from the position that he's taken. But I think it is going to, the longer this conflict goes on, and it's going to go on

• 18:07Alastair Campbell?

  for a while, I think, and it's going to carry on being particularly horrible. I think there is, you know, the Labour Party politics on this are quite tense.

• 18:15Rory Stewart?

  And there's a problem, isn't there? Which is, in a very polarised age, where most of the votes are still on the extremes, the votes are kind of U shape, where there aren't many votes in the centre and there are a lot of votes on the left and the right. Starmer is pursuing a centrist policy which appeals deeply to you and me and is absolutely the way that Tony Blair won his elections and what Cameron did in 2010. But what Cameron found is that having tacked to the centre in 2010, he then found himself with real problems on his right and he had to then start doing things to placate the right, which is part of the reasons he granted the Brexit referendum. And I wonder whether Starmer isn't going to find himself naturally drawn back towards having to do things for the left. I mean, there's a question here from someone called Caroline. Is the Labour Party really still Labour?

• 18:59Rory Stewart?

  Or has the Tory swing to the right and Starmer's interest in snapping up Tory voters meant that the electorate now has a choice between two Conservative parties? Now, obviously neither you or I think that he's suddenly become a Tory, but the fact that she's asking that presumably is a sign that there are bits of the left of the Labour Party that are beginning to get pretty uncomfortable.

• 19:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and yet, again, he did this at the Resolution Foundation. Whenever they're sort of challenged on specifics in relation to tax, the non-doms, tax on the non-doms, which you could say was a pretty Labour progressive thing to do, and then this change in the tax regime on private schools as well, which is something we never did. Here is definitely Labour, but I think what he's trying to do is to signal that that should not mean that people need to fear some kind of crazy economics coming in. I also think that he's being realistic in a way. I mean, obviously, Labour governments historically want to spend more on public services and our record on health and education in particular in the new Labour years was pretty stellar, I would say. But at the same time, he's been completely realistic about the mess he's going to inherit, if I can

• 20:00Alastair Campbell?

  coin a phrase from George Osborne.

• 20:02Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's see him embrace the Resolution Foundation's economic policies.

• 20:05Alastair Campbell?

  Or turn it into a strategy.

• 20:07Rory Stewart?

  Would be really great, yeah.

• 20:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, because the thing about the Resolution Foundation thing, it's not a budget, it's not saying this is, but it's signalling, it's signalling the directions and the big themes that you need to address. And I think that's what we're missing from our politics.

• 20:19Rory Stewart?

  And I also just, people listening often ask us whether they should become politicians. I think Torsten Bell, who's the chief executive, is really the, one of the big brains behind this report, was thinking about becoming a member of parliament.

• 20:29Alastair Campbell?

  I think he still is, and he ought to be able to fly into a seat, in my view. And Torsten's a very, very clever guy. He actually worked for Alistair Darling and for Ed Miliband.

• 20:38Rory Stewart?

  So he obviously wants to be a Labour MP and would like someday to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, but paradoxically, I think this is a rare example of a report which probably has more influence than most junior ministers could ever achieve.

• 20:51Alastair Campbell?

  Provided the politicians.

• 20:52Rory Stewart?

  Actually follow through on it.

• 20:53Alastair Campbell?

  Embrace it.

• 20:54Rory Stewart?

  Because three years of work into something like that is something that no politician can actually ever do. You can't do that kind of thinking when you're a politician.

• 21:00Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, Rory, loads of more questions. Let's have a quick break.

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• 22:54Rory Stewart?

  Father Mark Leiden Smith, who actually I know a little bit and who is a Catholic priest in a very, very deprived constituency in northeast of England. And I went to see him in his food bank, in fact. So he's asked, have either of you ever worn a tie or badge or item of clothing that you knew would be picked up on camera to make a subtle or not so subtle point?

• 23:16Alastair Campbell?

  I wonder what this refers to.

• 23:17Rory Stewart?

  I wonder what it refers to. And this is a chance to actually say that in the end, all these wearing, how many different Burnley ties do you have?

• 23:23Alastair Campbell?

  Thirty-one.

• 23:24Rory Stewart?

  Was vindicated this weekend with what on Saturday?

• 23:26Alastair Campbell?

  Five nil win against Sheffield United. And where are we going tonight, Rory?

• 23:30Rory Stewart?

  Where are you going tonight?

• 23:30Alastair Campbell?

  We're going to Wolverhampton Wanderers away.

• 23:32Rory Stewart?

  But now, can you explain? I thought you'd lost basically every match this season. You've just won five, five. Has it suddenly been turned around? Have you found some new amazing medicine?

• 23:41Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Sheffield United aren't the strongest team. No, we just clicked on Saturday. It was a wonderful day. I do wear Burnley ties. I also wear, I wear red ties or Burnley ties, basically. So it's not that subtle, is it?

• 23:53Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 23:53Alastair Campbell?

  And although I will make a repeat of my plea to Gordon Brown. I spoke to Gordon the weekend about Alistair's death and Glenys's death. But I really do want my tie back, Gordon, the one that you took off me. Because it was the only red tie in the building.

• 24:06Rory Stewart?

  He's lost it.

• 24:07Alastair Campbell?

  I suspect he has. Now, here's one. James Robinson.

• 24:10Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 24:10Alastair Campbell?

  What do you make of the referendum in Venezuela on support for annexing two thirds of neighbouring Guyana? Is this a genuine threat that needs to be taken seriously or just for domestic Venezuelan politics? How involved should Britain be in supporting Guyana?

• 24:24Rory Stewart?

  I mean, on the surface, it's very, very worrying indeed. I mean, we know Venezuela is an extremely radical revolutionary state. We know that it is in the midst of a profound economic crisis with refugees flooding across the borders into other countries. And countries like that that start holding referendums on annexing chunks of neighbouring states. It feels very, very bad. It feels like Putin's Crimea. Now, it may be that the realities of Latin American politics are quite different. And whether the Venezuelan military would actually pull it off or want to. But on the surface, it's very worrying indeed. What do you think?

• 24:54Alastair Campbell?

  I think I'm right in saying that should Labour come into power, David Lammy will be Foreign Secretary and his parents are from Guyana.

• 25:02Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 25:03Alastair Campbell?

  And he goes there a lot. So I think he will definitely be watching this very, very, very closely. It does feel that they're essentially trying, a bit like Putin with his sort of phony referenda. He's trying to stake a claim through what they will present as a legitimate vote. But it is quite clear that the population that is being targeted in this place, Essequibo, don't want it. So it's one to watch. It's one to watch. I suspect it is more about domestic politics. But these things have a habit then have been driven to a reality you can't prevent.

• 25:36Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 25:36Alastair Campbell?

  So Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy, I'm sure will be on the case should he become Foreign Secretary David Lammy.

• 25:43Rory Stewart?

  Nada. With Cameron back, what do you think were his main failings with Libya? So I'll.

• 25:47Alastair Campbell?

  Definitely one for you because you've written about them.

• 25:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah. Start that. I mean, I think the really big failing was having got into a situation where China and Russia were prepared at the Security Council at least not to veto what Britain, France and the US were doing in Libya. Because they supported the idea of a no-fly zone and stopping Gaddafi's massacre of people in Benghazi. Cameron was then pushing. To go much, much further, to turn that resolution of no fly zone into a full blown intervention. And by doing so, really broke that fragile consensus that existed with China and Russia at the time, which was very precious. And which quite quickly led into the world we have today, where we are back into a full Cold War standoff.

• 26:29Rory Stewart?

  I also think that, you know, I, again, not really making Cameron very happy. I drove into Libya through the border while the fighting was taking place and got to Tripoli on the day Gaddafi fell. And I was very struck immediately that there were pickup trucks rolling through the streets from Misrata, from Surt, with men with heavy machine guns. There was a lot of euphoria and I kept saying to all the journalists, and actually John Lee Anderson of The New Yorker, very kindly reminded me of this sort of five years later, this looks really messy and horrible. Really looks like this whole place about to disintegrate. I flew back to Paris where David Cameron agreed to see me. I think a bit grumpily because he wasn't very pleased about my going to Libya in the first place.

• 27:11Rory Stewart?

  But I was never really able to get over the sense that I thought this whole place at that stage felt like it was falling apart. And I never quite trusted us to get the balance right between under intervening and over intervening, either doing absolutely nothing and letting chaos spread, or going for a full scale Iraq style occupation, which would have been completely horrible in the other direction.

• 27:32Alastair Campbell?

  He's certainly putting the hours in, Cameron, he's putting the air miles in. He's been to Ukraine, he's been to the Middle East, he was at COP, I think he's now in the States.

• 27:41Rory Stewart?

  All of which is important because he's in the House Lords, he doesn't have to vote in the House Congress, he doesn't have to go to his constituency.

• 27:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Yeah, so he can, he can get around. I mean, I guess a part of it feels a little bit performative, I don't mean that insultingly, it's just that, you know, he's establishing himself in this new role. And the Ukraine situation feels very, very perilous at the moment. The big debate happening in the United States at the moment seems to be whether they can sustain the level of military support that the Ukrainians say they need. And of course, Vladimir is sitting there waiting for Donald.

• 28:13Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's partly about money, isn't it? As you said, that, well, fifty billion dollars held up in the US. Orban threatening to block in the EU.

• 28:20Alastair Campbell?

  Vildas in the same place.

• 28:22Rory Stewart?

  Their money coming through. And while you were giving that, just reminding us about Ukraine, I also owe a little apology. I think I'm probably being not reflective enough on Libya because I was more optimistic about our ability later, having had that first horror with militias. I remember later thinking, actually, maybe this is doable. Maybe there are lessons from Bosnia and Kosovo. And I was wrong about that. I think the ideas that I came up with for how I thought we could take Bosnia and Kosovo and improve things in Libya were probably completely unrealistic. So in that sense, I'm maybe being too brutal on.

• 28:54Alastair Campbell?

  Just on Kosovo, by the way, I think we've got Albin Kuti, the Kosovan prime minister, coming up on leading fairly soon, so that'll be interesting. Now, here's one from somebody called Genetics Papers.

• 29:03Rory Stewart?

  Genetics Papers.

• 29:03Alastair Campbell?

  Genetics Papers, interesting name. Rory has talked before about the benefits of citizen assemblies, which sound very interesting. I'm wondering what his thoughts are. Well, I'm in Chile recently, where it seems perhaps a similar method was used to design the new constitution, but it didn't go well.

• 29:17Rory Stewart?

  So we had this, just a bit of background on that. Firstly, on Chile, Boric came in, promising a new constitution. New constitution was developed partly through something that felt a bit like citizen assembly and was then rejected in referendum. I think that citizen assemblies are the most exciting single thing that's facing democracies around the world. I think as we keep reporting on this podcast, democracies are crumbling in a lot of ways. Institutions are being undermined. It's a crisis of democracy in the world. You can see, actually, the number of democracies declining and even those that remain are weakening. Citizens assemblies, which is like setting up a jury of demographically represented ordinary citizens to sit in a body and discuss things in detail, are so effective.

• 30:00Rory Stewart?

  They totally transform the debate around abortion in Ireland. And I would actually like to go one stage further. I would like to challenge Keir Starmer to set up a third house, a citizens' assembly third chamber.

• 30:11Alastair Campbell?

  Increase.

• 30:12Rory Stewart?

  It doesn't need to increase, could be in Carlisle, could even be in London. But this third chamber would have the power, and this is an idea that I've stolen from a friend of mine who's an Australian academic, to debate what the House of Commons is debating. And if they come for a different conclusion, force them to have a second vote by secret ballot on the same subject. And I think you would find that it would be a wonderful way.

• 30:33Alastair Campbell?

  A lot of angry whips.

• 30:34Rory Stewart?

  A wonderful way of bringing a bit more political participation, democracy, rebuilding our institutions.

• 30:40Alastair Campbell?

  Interesting, interesting. Now, here's one from India, and I think that's India, the name, not India, the country. And flatters his or her way into being picked. I'm in your top two percent of listeners on Spotify, by the way. So she's now got the question in. Do you think that the Prime Minister's attitude of countering legal migration might cause Indian, Chinese international students to go to study in the USA and Australia, who are passing laws to make it easier for international students to come and work, and thereby undermine British universities who rely on international student tuition?

• 31:13Rory Stewart?

  Well, presumably this is the trade off that the government's perpetually making. On the one hand, they want to get the greatest talent in the world coming to Britain. On the other hand, they had over a million people come to the United Kingdom last year. So it's a good question.

• 31:25Alastair Campbell?

  It's a very good question.

• 31:26Rory Stewart?

  But whether you're Conservative or Labour, I mean, you can't have it both ways. You can't both be the most open country in the world to bringing international talent in and be trying to stop.

• 31:34Alastair Campbell?

  But that is why, to go back to the discussion that we had on the main podcast about the Resolution Foundation report. What is the big goal? So if you say we want to maintain British universities as being amongst the best in the world, and they require the financing that goes with that, you are going to have to keep having foreign students coming in. If you want to deliver a health service fit for the 21st century, it is going to have staffing, which is going to require people who are not earning thirty eight thousand pounds to come here. And they're only going to come here if they can bring their families.

• 32:05Rory Stewart?

  I couldn't agree more.

• 32:07Alastair Campbell?

  And I was. So that's where there's no big strategy.

• 32:08Rory Stewart?

  I was up in Carlisle last week at the University of Cumbria. And it's really impressive, the diversity of students that University of Cumbria is bringing, particularly to their other campuses. I was there at their awards ceremony and it was just. Really moving and wonderful seeing very, very bright people from all over the world, proud to be getting a University of Cambridgeshire degree. So I, I think it's such a strength of the UK.

• 32:30Alastair Campbell?

  Um, well, there's a question here from Kieran Yard. It links to this. One thing to get international clout. If you were Prime Minister, what one thing would you do to give the UK more clout on the world stage? Increased defence spending, question mark, green superpower, question mark. Sadly, goes on to say, you cannot say rejoin the EU. I think I would go for building on the strengths that we have and becoming a kind of recognised cultural superpower. And I think that's possible. I think we're almost there.

• 33:01Rory Stewart?

  We're absolutely almost there. One, one relatively cheap thing we could do is invest very, very heavily in the BBC World Service. I mean, you, we talk a lot about how we're all watching out of Zira for its high quality reporting. The BBC has lost a massive trick over the last 15 years when it could have become, given that everyone wants to learn English, the dominant English language medium way of getting the news to the whole world. And we could really be doing that.

• 33:24Alastair Campbell?

  But this is yet another great British superpower institution that this government has deliberately consistently undermined.

• 33:31Rory Stewart?

  So final.

• 33:31Alastair Campbell?

  And they're doing it again.

• 33:32Rory Stewart?

  Final question for me, question from Clem, what's going on with Rwanda? So on that, I think very interesting. The government has been negotiating very hard with the Rwandan government to try to continue its policies of moving migrants who arrive in boats to Rwanda. The Rwandan government has pushed back quite hard and said that it, for reasons of state sovereignty, would not accept some British court deciding what it can do. They've come up with a compromise where the Rwandans might set up a special tribunal, which could include judges from other parts of the Commonwealth to rule on asylum claims in Rwanda. The Home Secretary, as you pointed out in the last podcast, just arrived in Rwanda and we'll see what happens there. But it could be very interesting because Britain isn't the only country in Europe looking at doing this.

• 34:15Rory Stewart?

  Many others are also looking at whether it's possible to do. And the key is, and this is where I think it's going to go wrong. I can support the idea of deterring people crossing in boats, provided you make a proper ethical commitment to receive a set number of asylum seekers every year, shared as a fair burden across Europe and the United States. I think Keir Starmer is beginning to push towards that. He'd been talking about returning people to France, but accepting a certain number of asylum seekers. It's the and bit which is so important.

• 34:44Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, so we've now had three Home Secretaries of. Been to Rwanda, banged the drum for Rwanda. I think we're up to £150 million so far.

• 34:55Rory Stewart?

  Rwanda's done very well out of this.

• 34:57Alastair Campbell?

  Rwanda's done very well and probably do even better today. I think they're gonna

• 34:59Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Alastair Campbell?

  They're gonna take another 15 million for the next stage of this process and not a single person has gone. I think the government's got themselves into a complete mess on this by making this into such a big thing. Rishi Sunak, by making stop the boats one of his five priorities for the country, has elevated it in terms of the time and commitment that they're having to put into this.

• 35:18Rory Stewart?

  Presumably as a communications director, you would have said, you better be pretty sure you can stop the boats before you make it one of your five commitments.

• 35:24Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think it's worse than that. I think they, you know, I've often said that populism isn't about solving the problem, it's about exploiting it. I actually bumped into somebody-

• 35:31Rory Stewart?

  Wait, wait, wait, no, but that, that works when you're in opposition. When you're in government, saying one of my five commitments is stopping the boats, then failing to stop the boats, that's a big problem there.

• 35:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but listen, we saw yesterday, honestly, look at the front pages today, Rory. James Cleverly stood up in the House of Commons. Now, you've got today, The Times, which these days is becoming like a sort of glorified Daily Mail, five-point plan to cut immigration. The Express and the Mail, immigration, immigrant, it will be cut by 300,000. They just churn out these promises again and again and again. And-

• 35:58Rory Stewart?

  But, but they are, they are nearly 20 points behind the polls.

• 36:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, I know that.

• 36:01Rory Stewart?

  The technique works best if you're in opposition. It doesn't work very well when you're in charge.

• 36:05Alastair Campbell?

  My point is, they think this can work because they can get into a campaign and then suddenly they, they think something will change. Now, let me just say this. That polling I mentioned from Stan Greenberg, in one of the most interesting things was that people aren't believing these big promises that they're making because they've seen the same promises being made so often. They'd be far better, I think, coming out and saying, do you know what, we've underestimated how hard this is. Instead of what they do is they, they make up a new plan and, and look what's happening today. It's already unraveling. You've even got the Daily Telegraph saying this thing about 38,000 and families not being able to come together. It's unraveling within a day because it's not thought through.

• 36:46Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So, so I think that's the other thing. Don't promise to do something that you don't think you can do. But secondly, really make sure that you've done your homework and put a bit more time. I mean, obviously, they're responding to pressures within their own party. They want to signal they're being tough. But presumably, you needed a process to make sure that actually things were going to be feasible and doable, even when people are really pressuring you, get an announcement out, get an announcement out. And sometimes they weren't. Like, the hoodies going to the cash machine was not really very feasible, was it?

• 37:16Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 37:16Rory Stewart?

  No. And what just give.

• 37:19Alastair Campbell?

  No, it wasn't hoodies. Hoodies weren't mentioned. You're confusing David Cameron's hug hoodie with my ridiculous line that I wrote into a Tony Blair speech that became known as cash point justice.

• 37:29Rory Stewart?

  Cash point justice.

• 37:30Alastair Campbell?

  Stupid idea, dropped on birth.

• 37:32Rory Stewart?

  And.

• 37:32Alastair Campbell?

  Fine, nobody got hurt.

• 37:34Rory Stewart?

  And the point there is.

• 37:35Alastair Campbell?

  And we admitted it stupid straight away.

• 37:37Rory Stewart?

  But how did, how does these things happen? It's just that you're in a rush to get something eye catching to a speech and you haven't quite had the time for the civil service to go through and dot all the.

• 37:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, or I think, no, I think in that one, it was a big, big, big important speech in a university in Germany, I think it was. And it was actually a really heavyweight, serious speech, but it kind of didn't have anything for domestic consumption. And so we had this sort of mini brainstorm and away we went. Stupid idea. But I think what's happening with this is that they're on to about the 15th stupid idea because they can't unravel from the original one, which is to say, this is the big thing. And I've got to be honest, I, I think this stop the boats thing. I mean, I'm not saying it's not, you know, a problem. Of course it's a problem. But it, the idea that it's one of the five most important things facing this country is a nonsense. And so they're being pressured. If you go through all the big things that have gone wrong for this country in recent

• 38:31Alastair Campbell?

  years, Brexit being the biggest one, it's all been about Conservative Party politics. And they cannot get away from this habit of it's all about managing the Conservative Party.

• 38:40Rory Stewart?

  Well, that's because they have a very, very fragile, divided party.

• 38:43Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that's why they deserve to go.

• 38:44Rory Stewart?

  That's why democratic politics.

• 38:46Alastair Campbell?

  Why they deserve to go.

• 38:47Rory Stewart?

  Well, there we are. On, on, on, on that great note, Alastair, let's end.

• 38:51Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the unsurprising view that I think the Conservatives should go.

• 38:55Rory Stewart?

  We will, we will end up.

• 38:56Alastair Campbell?

  Question time. Lovely to talk to you as ever.

• 38:58Rory Stewart?

  Thank you.

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