Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 358. Question Time: Political translators, Boris Johnson, and politicians to watch in 2025 About this episode What are Rory and Alastair's funny translation stories? Could Boris Johnson ever have a comeback? And are there any politicians to watch out for in 2025?
Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in today's Question Time.
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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 Creve and of course the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN and it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.
0:42 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think, are you not already 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/rusthispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rusthispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
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1:35 Speaker 03 Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.
1:46 Speaker 04 Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.
1:52 Speaker 05 What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.
1:56 Speaker 04 With great power comes great deniability.
1:59 Speaker 05 I'm not the first man.
2:00 Speaker 04 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.
2:13 Alastair Campbell? Welcome to the Rest is Politics question time with me, Alastair Campbell.
2:17 Rory Stewart? And with me Rory Stewart.
2:18 Alastair Campbell? First of the new year. So let's start off with something for the new year. Politicians to watch, asks Amy. Are there any politicians we should be watching out for in 2025, either in the UK or abroad? Well, some of them we've already mentioned. I can confidently predict, it says he not always sure, but fairly sure on this, Friedrich Merz will be the next Chancellor of Germany and Pierre Polievre, it looks like he's pretty nailed on to be the Prime Minister of Canada. So that's two more G7 leaders on the right who will become pretty well known around the world.
2:55 Rory Stewart? Yes, I think in the UK, people should keep their eyes on Kemi Badenoch because I think the jury's out. She's just in at the moment. Is she going to be able to do something which is very difficult, which is take a shattered, defeated party that's gone to one of its worst defeats ever with the Reform Party and Nigel Farage with a lot of momentum and media coverage. Is she going to be able to craft the narrative, find the space for the Conservative Party and be able to position it? So that would be my question in the UK. Internationally, the big question is who are the Democrats going to throw up? Who's going to have a decent chance of a run against the Republicans next time round? And I remain very, very interested in Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania,
3:39 Rory Stewart? Gretchen Whitner, the governor of Michigan. I tend to be somebody who thinks that the decision to go with the Californian was part of the problem. So I'd like to see people who are able to speak particularly to white working class voters in the Rust Belt as part of winning back that election. And I think that if you look at the fall from Biden to Kamala Harris in turnout, it really does seem as though that was one of the big points of weakness, that he was able to tickle the Rust Belt in the way that she wasn't.
4:06 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I think at this stage of the rise of Barack Obama.
4:12 Alastair Campbell? Although he would have been a very well-known figure in the political systems of the United States and different parts of the world, I don't think people would have been predicting him at this stage. So it may be somebody emerges that we don't know that well. I'll tell you somebody who I find very interesting and I think has a real sense of him is Hakeem Jeffries.
4:33 Rory Stewart? Yes.
4:34 Alastair Campbell? And likewise, you know, that guy we spoke to in New York on the 90th election, Richie Torres. So I wonder if there are politicians that aren't that well-known that will emerge. But listen, the Democrats right now are in a mess. The friends that I talked to are sort of working for the Democrats say it is really, really, really difficult, very, very depressing. You get the sense that Biden and Harris, who are there for another three weeks, nearly three weeks, aren't getting on for fairly obvious reasons. And that the whole thing is just going to have to be rebuilt and there's going to be a lot of regrouping going on. And I guess one thing they should maybe do is listen to the interview that we did with Bill Clinton, because I think he's somebody who, you know, when we were doing our New Year's resolutions yesterday, afterwards, I thought, ah, do you
5:18 Alastair Campbell? know what? Maybe one of my New Year's resolutions should be to try better to understand what the appeal is of somebody like Trump, what the appeal was of somebody like Johnson, what the appeal is of somebody like Farage. Because I think sometimes I'm so divorced from their politics. But actually, I think we, people like me on the sort of more progressive side of politics, have to do a better job of genuinely understanding what it is.
5:45 Rory Stewart? Well, this is something we talked about, I think, on the Boxing Day episode, which is I'm very interested in this because I genuinely think there are many things that you can understand and can communicate to there. I think you've got instincts for different bits of the country, you've got instincts for young men, you've got instincts for communication. So even if it kind of revolts you, I think you're actually quite well positioned to get yourself into the mindset of working out what's going on here and how you could craft a message which pushed for the policies you believed in, but in a language and a tone and with an energy that could appeal to young men.
6:23 Alastair Campbell? That is my New Year's resolution. I'm going to start to think about that as a serious project. Now, remember this one, translators Luke Walter. I was listening to your fabulous interview with former German Chancellor Angela Merkel on leading. Her translator was excellent and it got me thinking about political translators in general. How does the vetting process work when choosing a translator? Are there multiple translators to verify correct syntax or tone? Do comical delays occur while translation verification takes place between nations? And do either of you have any tales to tell? I'm glad that people noticed how good the interpreter was because it's a woman that I've talked about on the podcast before, Dorit Kaltenbach, who was the interpreter
7:06 Alastair Campbell? for the German government for Helmut Kohl, for Gerhard Schröder, then for Merkel. They run a sort of service. So they work for, they're not political people at all. They work for all the chancellors as it were. And she is brilliant. She is absolutely brilliant because she gets toned, she gets intonation. The thing about vetting is very interesting because of course, there was a guy I've talked about before called Tony Bishop, who was the British government interpreter for Russia, fluent Russian speaker. And he translated for prime ministers from Stalin to Putin. And he was reckoned to be absolutely brilliant, a bit like Dorothy, he would, he would do the sort of the nuance, the detail. You also have to have amazing technical knowledge. If you think about when the whole nuclear
7:49 Alastair Campbell? disarmament talks were going on, you need interpreters who are absolutely on top of all of the detail. So they do have to be vetted because they are often listening to the very, very private conversations between leaders where there's literally nobody else there. So yes, they're vetted, they're vetted in the same way as senior civil servants and possibly even spooks might be. I don't know about the multiple translation to verify syntax or tone, but I do have a vivid memory of, you know, one of the, the great losses of 2024, John Prescott. I do have a vivid memory of John once being at a European summit and I, and he was in very John Prescott mode. And I just remember the look of sheer
8:34 Alastair Campbell? exasperation on the faces of the interpreters who just could not keep up. And a lot of them, I think, just didn't understand what he was saying.
8:42 Rory Stewart? I obviously spent a lot of my life as a diplomat, particularly when I was in Iraq, where I was spending probably seven, eight hours a day talking through translators because although I Can understand Farsi and speak a bit of Farsi. My Arabic is basically non-existent. So I'm sitting there for eight, nine hours a day. And it's a very odd experience because this was the world for me of real domination by the kind of jargon of the international community, which was then translated into formal Arabic. So you would hear again and again, your Arab interlocutors using these very formal phrases for the international community, which comes out as Al Mujtama Al Daali or Security Al
9:26 Rory Stewart? Aman or Civil Society, Al Mujtama Al Madani or Al Hukuk, which is rights. And you just have this sort of sense of these endless phrases tumbling over your head as very distinguished Iranian trained clerics, who of course are used to giving sermons, speak to you in this very, very elaborate, formal rhetorical style about the future shape of Iraqi society, while you're nodding your head and trying to work out when you can pop in and say to the translator, yes, but can you please ask him, will he hand over his weapons?
10:02 Alastair Campbell? Did you, did you see recently the photograph of Donald Trump, who was having a conversation, I presume with Maloney, I don't know. But there was a picture of the English Italian interpreter behind him as she was translating him, saying that the United States have been allies with Italy back to the days of ancient Rome.
10:23 Rory Stewart? Wonderful.
10:25 Alastair Campbell? Of course, she had to translate it, even though she knew it was a sort of complete idiocy. This wonderful picture of this woman looking, have I really said this? And I'll tell you the other thing, I've got a huge respect for, for interpreters and translators. One, because when you get to that sort of Tony Bishop, the Russian guy, Dorothy Calhoun, but when you get to that level, you are at the top of your game. You are an absolutely brilliant interpreter, but also it's incredibly tiring. You say you're involved in eight hours of discussions. Speaking is tiring.
10:58 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
10:58 Alastair Campbell? You know, because your voice is a muscle and they're having to both speak. And interpret and understand and get the mood and get the tone. It's an exhausting job.
11:10 Rory Stewart? And of course, most of us on the ground do not have translators of that level and quality. So I had a lovely translator who was an American who'd been deployed, but he was a Moroccan and he spoke Moroccan Arabic. He didn't speak Iraqi Arabic and Moroccan Arabic and Iraqi Arabic are unbelievably different. So I frequently was having to interrupt him and say, I don't think you've quite got that right. I don't think you, let's try this again. And I try to say it more simply. I'm going to give you my, my favorite, and for my father, who used to be a diplomat. He was traveling during the Malayan Emergency with General Templar in a jeep. And there had been an attack by communist insurgents on British troops in a village. So Templar roars up in the jeep, jumps out with his translator and he says to villagers,
11:54 Rory Stewart? "You are a bunch of bastards, but let me tell you, I can be a bastard too." And the translator says, "The general says that none of you have fathers or mothers, but do not worry, he doesn't either."
12:10 Alastair Campbell? Similar amount to that was when Tony was doing a press conference with Lionel Jospin, who was at the time the French Prime Minister. And Tony did one of his sort of throat clearing, I'll be nice about this guy because I'm always nice about everybody when I'm starting the conversation with them. And he said something to the effect of that, you know, he was a big admirer of Lionel in lots of different ways. And we then saw the French journalists who were getting this translated in French sort of collapse because this was interpreted them as, he had a great desire for Lionel in many different positions.
12:45 Alastair Campbell? A good interpreter is worth his or her weight in gold. Right, one for you, Ray, go on.
12:50 Rory Stewart? Oh, well, that's a nice one for you, maybe less global, but I understand, Alice, that he started his newspaper career in the historic Devon market towns from Jack M of Tavistock, my hometown. What, Jack M asks, does Alistair remember of his time at the Tavistock Times? And has been back since. So just to remind people of your biography, you grew up as the son of a vet in Keithley, right, in Yorkshire, and you then moved to Nottingham, is that right?
13:18 Alastair Campbell? Leicester.
13:18 Rory Stewart? And then you go to Cambridge University and then you somehow end up in Devon. Talk us through what's going on here and what did you learn? Are you one of those old hacks who weeps with nostalgic memories of the all wonderful early days as a local reporter?
13:32 Alastair Campbell? I certainly do say to anybody who wants to be a journalist, and this is why it's such a tragedy that so many local papers are dying because of the sort of, you know, Facebook behemoth and the social media explosion, et cetera, is that local papers are an amazing training for any journalist. So Tavistock, I was a trainee journalist on the Daily Mirror. The Daily Mirror owned these West of England newspapers and that's where I met Fiona.
13:56 Rory Stewart? What was Fiona doing? Was she also a journalist for the Tavistock Times?
13:58 Alastair Campbell? She was a trainee journalist. We were on the same training scheme.
14:00 Rory Stewart? No.
14:01 Alastair Campbell? We were very, you know, very different backgrounds. She's lived in London all her life. She got glamorous and.
14:06 Rory Stewart? She's definitely more glamorous than you. She's still definitely more glamorous than you.
14:09 Alastair Campbell? I think so, yeah. It was a bit of a coup de foudre. We moved in with each other like, you know, within days.
14:15 Rory Stewart? Amazing.
14:16 Alastair Campbell? So we moved into this place in Whatchurch Road in Tavistock. I've got really, really fond memories of Tavistock. It was a fantastic training, very small team. My editor and deputy editor, when we arrived, were both women, weren't at all interested in sport. I said, I'm interested in sport. Why don't I do all the sports pages? I'll be sports editor. So day one of my newspaper career, I was sports editor and I said, the first thing I did, I'll make myself a sports columnist. So I wrote a column from the first day of my journalistic career. It usually takes, you know, a few years to get to that. And the other thing was just, I've always had this view, there is a story in any person you meet. Okay. So people could say sleepy market town, you know, I don't know what the population
15:01 Alastair Campbell? is today, but it's a pretty small place. And maybe this was just a sort of justification for my, what was clearly becoming a drink problem. I used to justify going to the pub at lunchtime every day and having a few times because I'd always find somebody who would have a story that you'd get at the Tavistock Times. Things like funerals, you know, getting, getting a name wrong.
15:22 Alastair Campbell? And then somebody, they wouldn't just phone and complain, they'd come into the office and say, look, I just, and they wouldn't necessarily be angry, but they say, look, just in that funeral, actually, you spelt one of the children's names wrong. And so it's a great sort of level of the fact of being in the community, so close in the community. And then the other thing that that was great was that all of the national newspapers then had guys who who covered that area. So they all had somebody, the national newspaper, somebody who was the West Country reporter. And the Daily Mirror was a guy called Jeff Lakeman, who became quite a mentor to both me and Fiona. But it meant that we were also sort of stories that we were getting, we were selling them to the national newspapers and
16:04 Alastair Campbell? building connections and building contacts. So, you know, I've got nothing but fond memories of Tavistock.
16:08 Rory Stewart? Just a serious point to wrap that up. I mean, I think we've talked about it before, but the loss of local newspapers is a massive problem. And it's happened so fast. I had this amazing newspaper called the Cumberland and Westmont Herald, which was the absolute centre of my constituency. Still edited today by a woman called Emily Atherton, and it's just wonderful because every week is doing the stories from the funerals, the photographs of primary schools in the 1950s, bringing the stories, the auction marts and the agricultural fairs, but it's also providing an opportunity to really hold the local Member of Parliament accountable for the very, very local issues.
16:44 Alastair Campbell? And the councillors.
16:45 Rory Stewart? And the councillors can give you a chance to communicate on what you're doing.
16:47 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
16:48 Rory Stewart? I'm still absolutely staggered by this fact that I've mentioned before, but I I'm going to reemphasise, which is that the Evening Standard, when I was running as an independent mayor of London, only in 2019, had almost a million subscribers. And by the time it went online and basically shut a few months ago, it collapsed down to 200,000. That's happened in just five years. So there is this precipitate collapse, partly because they're just not getting the advertising revenue, because basically, Google and Facebook can target much more accurately the ad to exactly, you know, the 27 year old woman that's interested in workout equipment in a way that you can't guarantee by just putting an ad in the newspaper. But this really means that our democracy suffers, right?
17:33 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, we've talked a fair bit about the whole sort of Musk Farage thing. That's why even without financial donation, just getting his take and his advice on how technically that works and how you do that sort of stuff. Is of itself of huge help to anybody who's who's involved in this sort of new form of campaigning. Maybe this relates to this question from Sam Clark. Would you agree that we're not so much in an age of post-truth as we are in an age simply where truth as an objective standard of correctness has no bearing on what people choose to believe?
18:06 Rory Stewart? I think that's really important. And I think without sounding postmodern, people are increasingly into the view of your truth, my truth. And that's very convenient for populists because it means that the best defence that Trump has, if you call him a liar, is well, everybody's a liar. And if you say that's not true, he says they're all spouting nonsense anyway. Now, that means that the stuff that you did, which was famously all about evidence-based policy, doesn't really work in a world where nobody actually believes there is any evidence. How are you supposed to discuss whether climate change is or isn't happening? And
18:46 Rory Stewart? that's partly because somehow we're not getting across the difference between uncertainty and no truth. What do I mean by that? I mean that in climate change in particular, the fact that climate scientists are being honest and saying, there are a number of scenarios here, we're not exactly sure what's going to happen. Most of the scenarios are very, very bad. At some point, there's going to be a catastrophic tipping point, but we can't tell you exactly where it's going to be because these feedback loops are too complex. And instead of people listening to that, they're saying, oh, well, the guy just told me he doesn't know what's happening anyway. So we might as well continue to fry the planet.
19:24 Alastair Campbell? Or worse, people people say, he's lying, net zero's costing you money, and you shouldn't listen to people like this. You should listen to me, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, whoever it might be, because I'm telling you that you will be better off if you ignore the climate hoax. So it's unbelievably dangerous. Another question on this, Rory, Ben Robinson, I'm really fascinated by the rise of populism, anti-establishment politics. It's obviously been successful in the US and Europe. It feels like it's on the rise in Australia, where I live. Can you please recommend some books to help better understand populism and its effect on democracies around the world? Before we do the books, Rory, did you get that feeling when you were in Australia? Because I got the feeling that you had a really kind of
20:05 Alastair Campbell? A very sort of rose tinted view, as I often do, but I have been conscious of the populist side of politics getting a great attraction in Australia in the recent years.
20:15 Rory Stewart? I think that Australia is very lucky. I mean, it's very unusual because of its compulsory voting system. It does force people not just to mobilise a small base. You can't really win an election with just 33% of the vote. They had an experiment famously with populism with this woman Pauline Hanson, who turned out to be a pretty catastrophic and incompetent party leader and politician. And so, look, obviously in Australia, there can be a pretty rough, direct form of political rhetoric. But no, I think it's the country that seems to be escaping it more than almost anybody. But what do you think about populism in Australia?
20:51 Alastair Campbell? Well, I just worry because I think that Dutton, the leader of the Tory party, the Liberals, is a pretty populist politician. I think he's one of the reasons why Albanese as Prime Minister is finding it maybe harder than he thought he was going to. So just thinking of books, we've talked a lot about Moise Naim, his book, The Revenge of Power, definitely worth reading on this. If you speak German, there's a wonderful book called Populism für Anfänger, Populism for Beginners, which I really enjoyed. I'm going to plug one of our fellow podcasters. I think if you read Tom Holland's Dominion, The Making of the Western Mind, I think you get a sense of where some of this stuff comes from. Jan
21:35 Alastair Campbell? Werner Müller, What is Populism? Sort of bit of a classic.
21:40 Rory Stewart? Jan Werner Müller is brilliant. People are interested in the sort of technical analysis of what populism is. And he very much emphasises that it's about people saying that we are speaking for the people. So even if they haven't got a majority of the vote, we are the real people and our opponents are not. And all the dangers that come with that, because if you were speaking for the real people. And your opposition are not real people. That then justifies really dangerous constitutional changes, attacking the rule of law, embedding yourself in power. The other person is Kas Mudah, who's written a really good book called Populism, a very short introduction, if people want a quick glimpse of that.
22:21 Alastair Campbell? Somebody else that we talked on leading last year, Anne Applebaum. Her book Autocracy, Inc. is essentially about how the populace have become as powerful as they have. And her book is about dictatorship.
22:32 Rory Stewart? Tim Snyder as well. He produced a wonderful lecture at Yale on something called sadopopulism, which you wrote about in The New European.
22:41 Alastair Campbell? No, I wrote about it in But What Can I Do, Rory? Another very good book about populism, which I wasn't going to mention, but you've now attempted to be into it. Anyway, listen, the reason why there are so many books about populism is because it is such a big thing. And I think the international bestseller that we want is What Are the Best Ways to Defeat Populism?, which goes back to the challenge that you've set me for 2025. Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd.
23:07 Speaker 03 Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.
23:13 Speaker 04 Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.
23:19 Speaker 05 What would happen if I stopped moving? You stall, you freeze in there, that's what.
23:23 Speaker 04 With great power comes great deniability.
23:26 Speaker 05 I'm not the first then.
23:28 Speaker 04 Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.
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24:33 Alastair Campbell? Okay, well, listen, this is one that we sort of touched on yesterday, but let's dig in a bit. Lilly, what are the unlikely things that may happen after the shock of the American election? I want to ask, what are the unknown unknowns, unlikely things which might happen in 2025?
24:47 Rory Stewart? This is the business of all the intelligence and security apparatuses of all these countries around the world, trying to guess what those things are. And what they learn, of course, is international politics, a bit like trying to predict the weather. We miss things again and again. Most of the big stories of the last three years were not predicted. This is so important to understand that nobody would have predicted what Israel has done in Gaza and Lebanon. In fact, nobody would have predicted Hamas's assault. Nobody would have predicted the collapse of Hezbollah in Iran. People failed to predict Putin walking on Kiev. People failed to predict this victory in Syria.
25:23 Alastair Campbell? Hold on, Laurie, none of them came out of nowhere, though.
25:25 Rory Stewart? No, you can always, after the event, trace back. But what's so striking is that if you'd asked those governments, just to illustrate, so the ex-head of the British Intelligence Service, two weeks before Putin walks on Kiev, said that wasn't going to happen.
25:39 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, it's true.
25:41 Rory Stewart? Jake Sullivan, the US National Security Advisor, said that the Middle East had never been more peaceful one week before October the 7th. I mean, these are just illustrations of a very, very common phenomenon, right? And again, I don't think any Syria expert is claiming that they saw what happened in 10 days in Syria. And of course, I saw people get the Taliban taking over Afghanistan completely wrong. The assumption was that the US would leave and it would be months before the Taliban took over, whereas in fact, they were in Kabul in a matter of days. So that's just a preface to saying what I'm about to say is likely to prove total nonsense. But let's think about things that people don't think about. And this is why it's quite fun sometimes for intelligence agencies to actually get a novelist to think about this, because they're better able to be imaginative.
26:25 Rory Stewart? So I talked about a dirty nuclear bomb. I didn't explain that very much, but it remains the case that after the fall of the Soviet Union, dozens of small, hand-sized nuclear satchels were in the Soviet arsenals, and they've gone missing. Nobody knows where they are.
26:45 Rory Stewart? And you can make one actually pretty easily. And there's been some really good work talking about this. And it's actually pretty astonishing that in the last 30 years, we haven't seen somebody walk into the middle of one of our cities and set off a dirty nuclear bomb.
26:59 Alastair Campbell? This isn't a very happy start to the year.
27:01 Rory Stewart? Not a happy year.
27:02 Alastair Campbell? Out of nowhere, you brought up a subject that nobody has been talking about, which will be terrifying our listeners.
27:08 Rory Stewart? Very good, thank you. Climate change. Again, you know, we talked about this, that we don't know when the tipping points could happen. The general assumption is they are going to happen more slowly than we think, but they could also happen more quickly because climate works in a very, very odd way. So you could see very strange things happening to the Arctic ice sheet much quicker than you think. Because we're getting very, very close to these tipping point moments. So there's another thing to scare scare the wits out of you.
27:34 Alastair Campbell? I'm going to go the other way on climate. I I think 2025, is this a known unknown? It's not an unknown known, but it's something I cannot say with confidence at all. But I think 2025 will be the year when there is a backlash to the backlash against being serious about climate change. It will require leadership, but it will also require people to make clear. And also, can I please beg any journalists, any media people who are listening? Can we stop covering these wild, extreme weather events as though they're just interesting kind of catastrophes and mini catastrophes? And use them as opportunities to try to explain to the public around the world
28:19 Alastair Campbell? how this is part of this bigger picture that we're trying to ignore?
28:22 Rory Stewart? Yes, I don't want to be one of these false climate predictors. It's extremely unlikely that we will see the massive tipping point in the Arctic. But summer sea ice has been declining about 12, 13% per decade since the 1970s. Even with aggressive emission cuts, we could find ourselves getting there sooner than we think. Here's a final one. I think we haven't thought enough about Africa. We often talk about the fact that Africa is the big story in terms of demography, probably 40% of the world's population by the edge of the century. Africa is also where most of the rare earths and critical minerals, which are necessary for the energy transformation are coming from. Africa is where we saw those six military coups. Africa is where America and France and Britain are very much on the back foot.
29:05 Rory Stewart? China's got military companies now, private military companies in 16 states. Russia's got them in thirty three. What we're seeing in Sudan may sadly just be a sign of as US aid is cut. So Ron Paul, Elon Musk tweeting that there should be no US development aid. Now, the US currently provides ninety five percent of all the humanitarian assistance going into the Horn of Africa for drought. That's hundreds of thousands of people being saved from starvation. I literally stood in feeding stations in Somalia and saw USAID providing food which saved one baby with another baby dead in its mother's arms because it hadn't eaten for two weeks.
29:46 Rory Stewart? So I think this could well be the year where we wake up not just to security threats like dirty nuclear bombs and North Korea flinging stuff around and new Islamist movements spreading through the Middle East, but it also could be a year of tragedy for Africa.
30:01 Alastair Campbell? Okay, let's try and cheer ourselves up a bit for a final question. How about this one? Matthew David Morissette, did the timing of the death of Queen Elizabeth two days after the installation of Lister save Britain from a Boris Johnson comeback? Seems to me that Boris were to give his Elizabeth the Great speech in front of Downing Street with every news outlet covering it, that would have given him enough of a boost to get back into office.
30:25 Rory Stewart? Very interesting. Talk about people with counterfactuals. That's very interesting. So if he'd just hung around for another two weeks, he could have tried to find the moment. I mean, that, of course, is presumably what he was thinking. That's why even with fifty two ministers resigning, he was clutching on with his fingernails to the brass front of Downing Street.
30:43 Alastair Campbell? We know that he doesn't have any sort of morals, but do you think he was sitting there hoping the Queen died?
30:48 Rory Stewart? I think he was just hoping something would come up. I think he's a chancer who just thinks if I can just hang on another few days, something's going to come up. I don't know what it is. And that's very much how Netanyahu behaves, isn't it? I mean, these guys just stick in it, hoping something will come up. I think it was a mistake for him to resign from parliament, actually. I think he probably regrets that now.
31:09 Alastair Campbell? He was going to get kicked out.
31:11 Rory Stewart? I was interested in that decision. Knowing Johnson, you'd probably take the risk, sit in there, try to blag your way through, challenge the parliamentary committees. Run again in the next election. I think he's probably sitting there gnawing away and seeing Trump's comeback, seeing Farage's comeback and wondering whether he didn't miss a shot.
31:31 Alastair Campbell? I know there'll be a part of him that because partly because of Trump and also because he sees himself as Churchill, de Gaulle, great sort of, you know, grand om kind of thing, that there'll be sort of some comeback. I really do think he's a totally busted flush and somebody needs to tell him to stop doing these ridiculous sort of little pieces to camera where he looks like he just sort of, you know, fallen off a bench or something.
31:52 Rory Stewart? He's auditioning for Waiting for Godot, I thought.
31:55 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, maybe he should try acting.
31:57 Rory Stewart? Ben Whishaw, who's playing a kind of fantastic kind of homeless tramp, is about a step down from his performance at Theodor O'Hara Hall Market and this could be the job.
32:05 Alastair Campbell? This trust, I mean, she'll be remembered in history. I think it will be just for that sort of economic blip. People won't remember that she was the prime minister. I think they would have done if it had been a significant prime minister, but I don't think they will remember the fact that she was the prime minister. Anyway, Matthew, thank you for that.
32:21 Rory Stewart? Thank you. I thought it was a really, really interesting observation and it's a good observation, isn't it? Because it is amazing how moments can turn things around. But it's also interesting, as you've pointed out, how a very successful Olympics and the reopening of Notre Dame have not managed to turn around Macron's fortunes.
32:36 Alastair Campbell? No. Although, back to our interview with Bill Clinton on leading just before Christmas, his absolute convinced stance that James Comey reopening the email investigation with a few days to go in the campaign cost Hillary the election. I mean, just imagine if she had won back in 2016, I think we can say that Trump would have been done.
32:59 Rory Stewart? Can I just finish on this? Because it's just something that's been bugging me and it's a sort of slightly grander point, but I just want to throw it at you. I think that the Democrats should not overreact to Trump's victory in this sense. I think that Biden fundamentally was on the right path with his economic reforms. I think the Inflation Reduction Act was good. I think he was beginning to generate infrastructure and jobs for ordinary Americans. I think that the mistake was that he's stuck in office too long and Kamala Harris didn't have enough time to get going and maybe she was slightly the wrong Californian. African American woman demographic. But I think it would be a mistake for the Democrats to totally rip up their policy
33:41 Rory Stewart? platform and pretend to themselves that the way to win the next election is to either ape Trump or go too far in the Bernie Sanders direction. I think Biden had a sense of what America needs, which is, above all, decent living standards and rising wages for the people at the bottom end. And I think the way to win this next one, I just want to try this on you, is a bit like Attlee coming in after Churchill, the end of the Second World War, which is, you got the sense the British people had had enough of charisma and grand stakes narrative. And they wanted to build a welfare state and sort out living standards and create basic things for ordinary British people. And that could be the narrative for the Democrats to get back.
34:26 Alastair Campbell? That is the narrative, certainly, that helped Keir Starmer beat the Conservatives. Let's get serious again. Let's stop all the nonsense, stop all the lying, blah, blah, blah, blah. I guess the bigger question is whether Trumpism is about Trump or whether there is something that endures beyond Trump to the Republican Party's advantage. And I feel that the current MAGA movement is so much about Trump. It's a question of what legacy he leaves. And I don't think he's the sort of guy who thinks about legacy. He's very much about him in the moment. But the most important that the Democrats have got to do, I think they do have to have a pretty fundamental debate about who and what they are.
35:08 Alastair Campbell? I think the identity stuff ultimately did do a lot of damage, for all the good it might have done along the way.
35:14 Rory Stewart? Can I just come in quickly on that and then back to you? Because on the identity stuff, I was talking to an American Democratic voter who said that one of the ways in which Americans picked up on the emphasis on DEI was through their children. And I saw this actually when we were living in Connecticut. In the early part of the Biden presidency and our children were in school. It was very striking how often six year old Sasha would return from school, having spent the whole week studying George Floyd or studying Rosa Parks or talking about social injustice. And I picked up from parents at the time, people saying, this is fine, but I want my six year old to be focusing more on learning to read and write.
35:56 Rory Stewart? And there's an enormous amount of this stuff coming. And I suppose what I'm getting at is that, you know, I said to her, but actually Kamala Harris wasn't talking much about cultural diversity stuff during the election. She was talking about incomes for middle classes. We saw that in that Chicago conference. It was quite straightforward. It was quite focused on cost of living. The response to me was, yes, but you're underestimating how much people experienced it and were troubled by it in schools and workplaces and how that helped Trump.
36:22 Alastair Campbell? Interesting. Yeah. I watched just before Christmas, Justin Trudeau did a speech, which was to a party audience and he was getting an amazing kind of rolling ovation for it, being clapped every line. It reminded me a little bit of the DNC of where the stuff that was really pressing their buttons was about the DEI stuff. And it was about, you know, we're going to stand up against this and stand up against that. And it was stuff that I believe in. But as I watched him, I thought, God, this feels very Kamala against Trump. And then I watched Polievra basically saying, if Israel took out Iran, wouldn't
37:06 Alastair Campbell? that be great? Kind of thing. It was almost like watching a mirror of what we'd seen in the American debate. Okay, Rory, well, I was hoping that our final question would cheer people up, but I fear it's done the opposite. But
37:18 Rory Stewart? I think, I think your Tavistock answer, that glimpse of you and Fiona, those happy days in an apartment in Tavistock, I think that can cheer people up.
37:25 Alastair Campbell? It's possible to find yourself sent to a little sleepy market town and meet the women of your dreams and be together almost half a century later.
37:37 Rory Stewart? No, we like that. We like that. Let's finish on that. All right. Happy New Year.
37:41 Alastair Campbell? Take care.
37:45 Speaker 03 Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig
37:49 Speaker 04 on October 2nd.
37:50 Speaker 03 Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.
37:55 Speaker 04 Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Ravenette.
38:02 Speaker 05 What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze in there, that's what.
38:06 Speaker 04 With great power comes great deniability.
38:09 Speaker 05 I'm not the first daddy.
38:11 Speaker 04 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.
38:16 Speaker 08 Espolon Tequila. It arrives in a cloud of feathers with a cry to wake the dead. Espolon Tequila. Balanced, delicious. Perfect for nights out, nights in, and people who like to drink tequila. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth. Then hold on tight. 100% agave, 0% eagle. Espolon Tequila. For a real margarita, ride the rooster.
38:40 Speaker 04 Espolon Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Compaia America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.
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