264. Rishi Sunak’s defining moment

Could Farage engineer a reverse takeover of the Tory Party? Why has Emmanuel Macron called a snap election? Are Labour losing votes to the Greens? Join Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell for the latest episode of The Rest Is Politics, where they answer all these questions and more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP UK TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Election Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Assistant Producer: Fiona Douglas Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 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 with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:31Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. And a reminder that on election night, July the 4th, we will be on Channel 4 with Krishnaguram Murthy, with Emily Maitlis, with Gary Gibbon, with lots and lots of different guests coming in through the night to give you the best coverage and the best analysis of the general election.

• 2:50Rory Stewart?

  We'll be on air from 9.50pm on the 4th of July to 9am the next day. So you can go to bed, we won't be able to, and wake up with us. There'll be inserts from the much-loved Gogglebox cast throughout the night and a live studio audience, plus reporters at key counts throughout the night while we put in the coffees.

• 3:07Alastair Campbell?

  So it is a promise, you will get the best analysis of the night, all night, from Rory, me and the team.

• 3:14Rory Stewart?

  So with that to look forward to, let's get into the show this week. We will be looking at D-Day.

• 3:19Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 3:19Rory Stewart?

  What does this mean for Rishi Sunak? Israel and Netanyahu's flailing coalition? And the EU election results and Macron's snap decision to call an election in France?

• 3:29Alastair Campbell?

  Did you do another surprise when you heard that one?

• 3:33Rory Stewart?

  It's unbelievable.

• 3:33Alastair Campbell?

  We'll come to that, we'll come to that, we'll come to that. Let's start in France though, and Rishi Sunak's trip to Normandy. I think this is utterly defining, and I think it will go down in history as the worst election own-goal of all time.

• 3:52Rory Stewart?

  So just pause for a second. So I remember you said that immediately, as soon as you saw it, you were like, okay Rory, normally I think it's complacent to call an election, but this time I think this guy screwed it, Labour's going to win. And since then, four or five days have passed, we got a little bit more distance from this event. I did an event in Edinburgh last night where I asked the audience three things, you know, do you think it had a major impact, minor impact, no impact at all? And basically, the room was evenly divided between major impact and minor impact. Nobody thought it had no impact.

• 4:23Alastair Campbell?

  Right, interesting.

• 4:24Rory Stewart?

  And our opinion polls so far don't show a very dramatic jump against Rishi Sunak, despite the event. Let me just sort of start with one question. What do you think went wrong? I mean, how did he make the decision in the first place?

• 4:38Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I was talking to somebody who, until recently, was working with him. Okay. Who said that he's very, very, once he's got a schedule, he's very hard to move off the schedule.

• 4:49Rory Stewart?

  So he likes his schedule?

• 4:50Alastair Campbell?

  He likes to have a schedule, he likes to have a spreadsheet, he likes to say at five past he's doing this, at thirty five past he's doing this.

• 4:56Rory Stewart?

  Are you a bit like that?

• 4:57Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, I can be a bit like that, yeah, yeah, but I'm also very flexible and I've also got political judgment. But the thing is, if you're, even in an election campaign, when he maybe doesn't have all the civil servants in the same way, but you've got political advisers, and I just can't imagine how there wasn't somebody who said, including David Cameron, by the way, I mean, Cameron should have, I think, you know, Cameron ended up doing the pictures with Biden, Macron and Trump.

• 5:21Rory Stewart?

  Can I just, can I just, just on a second on that one, because I, I know that someone on Cameron's team has leaked to Tim Shipman that.

• 5:27Alastair Campbell?

  Cameron tried to stop him.

• 5:29Rory Stewart?

  But is it not possible, says he cheekily, that Cameron said, don't worry about it, I've got this, it'll be fine, I'm very happy to be in the photo op.

• 5:37Alastair Campbell?

  Do you mean like, do you mean like Penny Ward said to him, I think I should do the TV debate and I should say that you've completely divorced it all up?

• 5:43Rory Stewart?

  I've, I've got the sword and the coronation, I'll do that.

• 5:46Alastair Campbell?

  Possibly, possibly.

• 5:47Rory Stewart?

  Because you, you can sort of imagine Cameron thinking, well, this is rather good, you know, I get to be with all these heads of state, I get to preside, I get to be prime minister again. And Rishi Sunak is quite deferential to David Cameron, so is it possible that?

• 5:59Alastair Campbell?

  It's possible, it's possible. Honestly, I was, I was talking to Tony Blair the other day, if that, I mean, he would not have done it, first of all, right? And I would not have let him, okay? But let's just imagine that he'd had a rush of blood to the head and said, I've got to get back to London to do a TV interview, and I'd have said, great idea, Tony, and we were heading for the plane. I guarantee one of our coppers, or one of our secretaries, or one of our duty clerks would have said, hold on over there, guys. A copper would have taken me aside and said, Alistair, you can't let him do this, just out of a sort of sense of national pride and belonging.

• 6:34Rory Stewart?

  What was it about this ITV interview which people thought was important? And make the case for the ITV interview, because it was a week before it was going to be released, why was it considered to be important?

• 6:41Alastair Campbell?

  I can't make the case, I think it goes back to this thing about, it was in the schedule.

• 6:44Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 6:45Alastair Campbell?

  So, look, everybody knows, anybody who's ever had anything to do with a, a major commemoration, which this was, eighty years after D-Day, anybody who's ever had anything to do with something that involves the American president.

• 6:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 6:57Alastair Campbell?

  Everything is, is timed down to the second.

• 7:01Alastair Campbell?

  And so that will have been minutely planned. Now, you wouldn't expect Rishi Sunak to be involved remotely in the specific planning of the timing. You will expect that somebody will have put a note in front of him and said, this is what's happening. This is what you have to do. This is when you arrive. This is when you leave.

• 7:16Rory Stewart?

  Okay, well, here we are. I thought you were about to say something which may be part of the story, which is these commemorations are very, very, very long. So if you're Rishi Sunak and you're thinking, oh my God, I haven't known six weeks of the election. I'm somebody who's used to being in six places once in a single day. Maybe he's sitting there saying, seriously, I've got to be there at eight. I've got to be there at nine. I've got to be there at this. Then the, then I've got to do this and that.

• 7:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. So he may have said, he may have said, can't we just do the British bit?

• 7:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 7:41Alastair Campbell?

  But even as you say those words, think about it. So what, D-Day was just about the Brits?

• 7:46Rory Stewart?

  Right, right, right.

• 7:47Alastair Campbell?

  And do you know one of the things that really upset me yesterday?

• 7:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 7:50Alastair Campbell?

  So we're recording on Monday. Yesterday, Sunday, was watching Joe Biden with Macron in France, continuing to commemorate D-Day. Anybody watching from outside would have thought, well, just must have just been an American thing, where the Brits are even kind of involved. And I think that hurts our soft power. I think it hurts our sense of self.

• 8:10Rory Stewart?

  Well, here's, here's another cheeky thought. It suggests to me that he really doesn't remotely believe he can win. Because if I remotely believed I could win, I would want to have the chance to spend time with Biden and Macron. I would want to spend time with them because I'd want to be having conversations in the margins while you're waiting for the photograph about policy issues that you want to fix after the election. These are very important relationships. Not often you get to spend an hour with an American president, right?

• 8:36Alastair Campbell?

  But if you don't think you can win and you're in a campaign, why rush back to the campaign? Why not have a nice day out in Normandy? I mean, I cannot get my head around it.

• 8:44Rory Stewart?

  Do you not agree that along with insulting veterans and missing the photo opportunities is that actually it's incredibly, you know, fantastic opportunity to spend time with three or four of the most powerful men in the world?

• 8:56Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 8:57Rory Stewart?

  Thrash stuff up, talk about issues, talk about the future.

• 9:00Alastair Campbell?

  And, and also genuinely. And this is where I think, I do think Keir Starmer got it right. There was a very interesting moment where he was being doorstepped by the British media and they were asking him questions. They were desperately trying to lure him into saying something political. And he just kept saying, this is not the place, this is not the time, this is all about the veterans and so forth. And I just think that says, there's a sort of basic understanding there, which Sunak seems not to have about what the role of the Prime Minister is in that. The role of the Prime Minister sometimes, and look, I am absolutely convinced there's not a Prime Minister who's ever lived who didn't sometimes find this a bit irritating that you have to do this stuff. But sometimes your job is literally just to represent the country at an event. That's it. No politics, nothing.

• 9:44Rory Stewart?

  I've been doing all these live events and people ask me what my proudest moments as a politician were. And for me, some of my strongest memories are marching in the Remembrance Day parade with veterans in Penrith with my little boy holding my hand. And I went with my father to the 70th, so 10 years ago commemoration, because he was a D-Day veteran. And I got these lovely photographs of him with his Black Watch red hackle on, stumbling through a wheat field with his medals on his chest. And then the French mayor of a little local town which they had liberated and who, you know, wasn't even born, actually was from a Polish family that was still in Poland in 1941, put on

• 10:23Rory Stewart?

  this wonderful welcome and insisted on singing a very complicated Bach cantata with my father. My father couldn't really hear, so the whole music was kind of all mucked up. But it was the most kind of moving, comical, kind of wonderful revelation. And I think also, one of the things that would have appealed to you about him is that he was very blunt about the screw ups. I mean, you know, he was very proud of what they'd done, but his brother was killed in the war. He was badly wounded because an idiotic company commander insisted he stood in the middle of a field when Germans were firing tank shells at him. And there was no sort of suggestion that he wasn't prepared to also have a go at the generals, have a go at the politicians. Anyway, all of that made me think that it's very, very

• 11:06Rory Stewart?

  odd that Rishi Sunak wouldn't have actually rather kind of enjoyed it. I mean, maybe this is your point, that actually, actually could be a very rather moving, interesting, lovely day to spend.

• 11:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but then, you see, I wonder, I mean, Nigel Farage, needless to say, went completely over the top and tried to kind of weaponize it in his usual way.

• 11:24Rory Stewart?

  And drove around in a jeep.

• 11:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he did all that, but I mean, when he said that Sunak, he doesn't understand our culture.

• 11:29Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 11:30Alastair Campbell?

  And I think we know what he was playing at with that. But I think there is something, just the way Sunak talks about things, that I don't know whether he just doesn't feel a situation, doesn't feel history and that sort of thing. And I even thought when he did come back and he did that interview with Sam Coates on on Sky. And yet again, he'd learnt the line and he'd be basically, he was told, you've got to say that, you know, on reflection, looking back, yes, it was probably mistaken. I wish I'd say it was the day for the veterans. He then said, and somebody did a mashup where they they played the three clips alongside each other, where he literally was saying the same words in the same interview three times. We saw the same with the Tory chairman, Richard Holden, yesterday, where he did an interview with John Craig.

• 12:12Alastair Campbell?

  And it's now become a kind of meme on the internet because his answer to every question was Emily Thornbury. Because they were trying to sort of exploit something Emily Thornbury had said about schools. So he was asking about, you know, why isn't, where's Sunak today? Well, Emily Thornbury. And it's it's just, there's a whole thing with mastermind where the answer to every question is Emily Thornbury. But it's this thing about, he he can't seem to adapt. And so having made this terrible mistake, and I think belatedly recognizing it's a terrible mistake. His reaction is, I think, has been wrong as well. He's basically hidden away. And you can't hide away in a camp.

• 12:46Rory Stewart?

  Okay, let's let's fast forward to that then. So let's imagine, and as you say, you'd say under your watch it wouldn't happen, but let's imagine for whatever bizarre reason, the policeman didn't stop you getting onto the plane.

• 12:56Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 12:57Rory Stewart?

  And your prime minister had screwed up magnificently in this fashion.

• 13:03Rory Stewart?

  What's the best possible advice you could give them to try to emerge from this kind of hole?

• 13:07Alastair Campbell?

  You've either got to have a genuine reason. Which he didn't, or you do have to, eventually they did the right thing, which was to apologize. Once you've apologized though, you've got to front it up, I think. And fronting it up does not mean a three clip pulled interview with Sam Coates.

• 13:22Rory Stewart?

  So you go and you do the mayor corpor and you allow Emily May or whoever to just hammer you hard.

• 13:27Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, absolutely. And then you go out and then you do another couple of visits and you get hammered again. And eventually they say, well, at least he's stood up to it and he's fronted up and he's moved on.

• 13:36Rory Stewart?

  But you do the potential one hour painful eating humble pie with somebody asking you again and again and you.

• 13:42Alastair Campbell?

  Might not be an hour, but you certainly, you certainly don't hide away. And if you are hiding away, you don't sort of, you don't kind of put out these other terrible people who just can't do it. So look, you know, who did we have on the airwaves today? Chris Philp. How many people who are listening even know who he is? Who at central office is saying, right, the best way to help us through today is Chris Philp? It just, it doesn't, it's not computing. So that says to me, have the other big figures given up?

• 14:08Rory Stewart?

  Well, there's something very odd that they're not using the cabinet. So presumably you'd want to potentially put out David Cameron as one of your voices. You might want to put out James Cleverly, you might want to put out Jeremy Hunt. I guess Jeremy Hunt hasn't featured much in the campaign.

• 14:20Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I wonder whether he's really, really worried about his seat. I don't know.

• 14:22Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 14:23Alastair Campbell?

  Hardly anybody's featured. The only people who really featured, you had Badnok out talking about equality. I mean, the front page of the Times today is Braverman talking about we should welcome Farage into the Conservative Party. There's been no sense of this being a kind of team effort. When they did education last week, it was again, it was Damien Hines, it was a middle ranking minister. So there's, what I have a sense of is a, is a campaign infrastructure. And I mean, I don't know if it's true or not, but you read that they're really struggling to, to raise money. So they've got 15 million quid out of this Frank Hester guy who basically said that he thought Diane Abbott should be shot. There seems to be.

• 15:00Rory Stewart?

  And I don't know what's happened to that money because they don't seem to be funny. Can I just, you've, you've put us on money and it's been a fascinating thing in terms of social media spend, which is there had been initial reporting from The Guardian and others, which seemed to suggest, you know, the Tories have got this cunning plan on social media and a lot of money. But the FT finally today got the full figures out of. Facebook and Labour have been killing the Conservatives on social media spend. I mean, the data is incredible. And this again leads me to my surprise hypothesis, right? Which is, it feels as though Labour were much more ready for that election call than the Conservatives. I mean, you know, one example we've talked about is Labour had its candidates in place. Conservatives did not have their candidates in place.

• 15:40Rory Stewart?

  But secondly, almost immediately, a hundred and sixty five individual Labour candidates spent an extraordinary amount of money, I can't remember what the money was, but yeah, a hundred and fifty thousand pounds immediately on breaking a general election that's been called. That obviously been prepared weeks in advance, but they got it straight out.

• 15:57Alastair Campbell?

  To be fair to Labour, they've been keeping on a kind of election footing for some weeks and months now. They kept building up the idea it was going to be in May, even though deep down they didn't believe it. But it was to keep them all ready for it. The only thing I'd say about the funding is that if you go back both to the Brexit referendum and the twenty nineteen campaign, the really big money on social media went in in the last few days.

• 16:19Rory Stewart?

  Got you.

• 16:19Alastair Campbell?

  So maybe the Conservatives' plan has been to wait for an absolute blitz.

• 16:24Rory Stewart?

  There was definitely a very interesting moment because Labour spotted and used this opportunity, which is the gap between the moment when the election is announced and the moment when Parliament's dissolved, which is when the electoral funding cuts in. And you can see an incredible graph for their social media spend. They spent the last three days before Parliament dissolved, about three quarters of a million pounds. And the Conservatives are spending barely a third of that.

• 16:47Alastair Campbell?

  Wow.

• 16:48Rory Stewart?

  It's extraordinary. And it's partly because Labour is having to spend more because the people they're targeting cost more. Young people, you have to pay more to get ads to.

• 16:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 16:59Rory Stewart?

  People over sixty five, there's not huge demand on Facebook and Twitter for ads to them, so.

• 17:03Alastair Campbell?

  Now Rory, what did I say to you a few weeks ago that I would give you? I said I would give you the first two copies of my book, your children.

• 17:11Rory Stewart?

  So we've got Why Politics Matters.

• 17:12Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 17:13Rory Stewart?

  And we've got Alastair Campbell Talks Politics, Alastair Campbell, Why Politics Matters, Little Experts.

• 17:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 17:17Rory Stewart?

  Well, there we are, thank you very much.

• 17:18Alastair Campbell?

  Your boys.

• 17:19Rory Stewart?

  Oh, thank you.

• 17:21Alastair Campbell?

  And I want your boys to get all their friends to read it.

• 17:24Rory Stewart?

  Oh.

• 17:24Alastair Campbell?

  And I've said in the other one, I hope this makes you more positive about politics than your dad's book.

• 17:29Rory Stewart?

  Hope you enjoy this, so you can be a little bit more positive about politics.

• 17:34Rory Stewart?

  Good luck, very good.

• 17:35Alastair Campbell?

  So, Rory, Lib Dem manifesto, I'm sure you've read every word.

• 17:38Rory Stewart?

  Every single word.

• 17:39Alastair Campbell?

  What was your favourite word?

• 17:40Rory Stewart?

  Terrific stuff, Chessington Park.

• 17:44Alastair Campbell?

  I liked the fact, do you remember when we had Ed Davey on leading?

• 17:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 17:47Alastair Campbell?

  And we said, look, for God's sake, Europe, nobody's talking about Europe, but at least sort of signaled that you want to get back in the single market. It's in there.

• 17:54Rory Stewart?

  That's very good.

• 17:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 17:55Rory Stewart?

  Well, thank goodness, but why leave it till the last moment, rather than make it the thing that you build the momentum of your campaign over six months?

• 18:01Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe, maybe because they recognise that, perhaps they don't want to make it a big deal.

• 18:08Rory Stewart?

  All right, not a big deal.

• 18:09Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know.

• 18:10Rory Stewart?

  We're going to hide it in the manifesto.

• 18:12Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, I have got no idea why nobody is talking about Brexit. I still think it was one of the most shameful things of that first debate, that the B word was not even mentioned by anybody at any point.

• 18:24Rory Stewart?

  I mean, it's really weird. It's as though the Lib Dems have hidden it in a manifesto that I'm afraid most of our viewers will not have read and will not really have been reported. So people barely have noticed this has happened.

• 18:35Alastair Campbell?

  I think it'll get a bit of coverage. Their main thing was health, you know, really was making a big thing about health and social care. And by the way, I think the strategy that you've been taking the mick out of ever since this campaign started, I think it's been quite clever, the way they've done it. He's got himself noticed a bit more than he would have done with all his stunts and the rest of it. He then did that film with his son, which was really genuinely moving and millions of people watched it and used that as a lever to say care, social care and healthcare is our number one issue. I think they've had it quite well.

• 19:07Rory Stewart?

  I think the video with the son was, as you say, very moving and there's a very good link between that and talking about care.

• 19:14Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, if anybody didn't see it, this was where Ed Davey, their first election broadcast was actually a profile of Ed Davey and his relationship with his son in relation to the issue about care.

• 19:24Rory Stewart?

  We found that when we interviewed him on leading, which is that the bit that people responded to most was him talking about his son much more than his policies or anything else.

• 19:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. So are you still a little bit underwhelmed by the policy agenda?

• 19:35Rory Stewart?

  I am very sad that they haven't set out a big national policy agenda, but I do think that they did much better with that election video and him talking honestly about his son connecting to care than he did falling off paddle boards or going down water slides.

• 19:50Alastair Campbell?

  He did say at the event, he says, right, I'm off to go on a roller coaster. So he's obviously, they've decided to own this idea that he's the one putting a bit of fun into it.

• 19:59Rory Stewart?

  He's a really fun chap, yeah. The problem is it doesn't really kind of sit with his personality, but anyway, that's a different problem.

• 20:05Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but he probably maybe just thinks he's by comparison.

• 20:07Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:08Alastair Campbell?

  What about Labour then?

• 20:10Rory Stewart?

  Well, Labour, so I think first thing is that I saw your old colleague George Robertson this morning in Edinburgh, and he was saying to me that it's very striking in election campaign how things come out of nowhere and hit you. And he gave an example of how we didn't predict at the beginning of this, that, you know, Rishi Sunak was going to be hit by the D-Day debacle, you know, we didn't predict the £2,000 tax controversy. But as he was talking about all the things that had hit the Conservatives, or he didn't predict that Farage was going to come back as the leader of the party and how much difference. But Labour, oddly, hasn't had moments quite like that. I mean, it doesn't feel as though there's been anything so major that they've thrown their campaign off course in the way that Conservatives have.

• 20:50Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I guess the only thing that's got close would be the £2,000 thing. Interestingly, our latest poll, which we'll put in the newsletter, suggests that people don't believe the attack. And yet it has maybe unsettled some people about Labour's relationship with tax. But I guess, no, I suppose it's the other thing that had the capacity to go there was the Angela Rayner tax story. But that got cleared up and has been moved out of the way.

• 21:16Rory Stewart?

  That was cleared up sort of almost before the election.

• 21:18Alastair Campbell?

  But by the way, what that says to me with, you know, almost a month to go.

• 21:22Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 21:23Alastair Campbell?

  There's no way in the world there won't be something.

• 21:24Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 21:25Alastair Campbell?

  That comes along. And George is right about that, there will be something. But I think what happens is when a narrative develops, it means that the things that play into that narrative are likely to get picked up. And at the moment, the narrative is Sunak can't do anything right.

• 21:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 21:40Alastair Campbell?

  So.

• 21:41Rory Stewart?

  And that's been true since the rain.

• 21:43Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 21:43Rory Stewart?

  From the launch of the campaign.

• 21:44Alastair Campbell?

  And things can only get better and everything else. So that is a classic, fairly small example, but I think sort of speaks to this. A candidate yesterday had a go at a Labour candidate, saying, you know, are we ever going to see them back in the constituency? Are they still in France? Turns out this guy was a former para who'd been doing a parachute jump. To raise money for a veterans charity. So Jonny Mercer, your close friend, the Veterans Minister, has to come out and basically say, defend the Labour candidate against this Tory who's sort of, you know, trying to do him in. So I think it's that, that things, things go wrong when they go wrong. But listen, it can turn around.

• 22:25Alastair Campbell?

  The reason I sent you the message after the D-Day thing and said I thought it was fatal is because I think it played into everything that people are starting to say. But that doesn't mean, it doesn't mean that things cannot turn around and Labour should be absolutely warriors against complacency.

• 22:41Rory Stewart?

  Another thing I think that helps Labour is the reemergence of Nigel Farage. I know you tend to say, listen, the guy's a bit of a media darling bloviator who we shouldn't pay much attention to, but it is fatal for the Conservatives because the Conservative policy was to lurch right. They were chasing reform votes. They looked at the kind of opinion polls we've been seeing. We talked a bit about this if you go back to our news.

• 23:04Alastair Campbell?

  They're still doing it.

• 23:05Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Go back to Newsweek three weeks ago. It's all about trying to get those votes out of reform. The problem is what has happened is that Farage's reemergence has done a jujitsu on them and destroyed the whole strategy because everything is about emphasizing issues like immigration, which now the majority of 2019 Conservative voters prefer Farage and Reform on immigration than the Conservatives. So they've basically provided the perfect media platform for Farage and Reform. And, you know, unfortunately, this D-Day thing helps Farage and Reform immensely. Again, the debate which we both watched on Friday, which was, for listeners who are not following every in and out of this, this was the.

• 23:47Alastair Campbell?

  Seven Way.

• 23:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it was the debate which didn't have the party leaders. Instead it had Angela Rayner, it had Penny Mordaunt.

• 23:55Alastair Campbell?

  Then it had the other party.

• 23:56Rory Stewart?

  It had the other parties.

• 23:57Alastair Campbell?

  Well, no, Daisy Cooper for the Lib Dems.

• 23:58Rory Stewart?

  Daisy Cooper for the Lib Dems and Nigel Farage. And again, Farage. Will have driven your blood pressure up, but for his particular voter, and I can assure you for the kind of right wing conservatives who are the core of my constituency.

• 24:12Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, he was on the money, yeah.

• 24:13Rory Stewart?

  They would have absolutely loved it. Everything he said and what he's doing is brilliant. I mean, what he does is he just says the emperor has no clothes. These guys are never going to make their 2030 targets on net zero. He's probably right. These guys have got no control over immigration. He's probably right.

• 24:30Alastair Campbell?

  Are you going to vote Reform?

• 24:31Rory Stewart?

  I'm not going to vote Reform, no. I'm definitely not going to vote Reform because I guess my punchline is this is why it was so stupid of the Conservatives to run a far right campaign instead of what they should have been doing, which is focusing on regaining votes in the centre, being a moderate sensible party and trying to eat in there. The problem is they've got it so much in their head now that this was a campaign on the right, they will see come the election that they've lost all those right wing votes to Farage and they will draw exactly the wrong conclusion instead of thinking, wait a second, we had the wrong strategy from the beginning. They will convince themselves, if only we'd gone further to the right, maybe we would have got Farage. And now we're into this big question, which I think sums up the whole question for the Conservatives. Farage said yesterday, there is no longer a question.

• 25:16Rory Stewart?

  Keir Starmer is going to win the election. So my question for you, the voters, is who do you want to be the opposition to Starmer? Do you want me or do you want the Conservatives? And this is where someone like me in the centre is like, the answer has to be a sensible, credible, decent opposition composed of thoughtful Conservatives.

• 25:33Alastair Campbell?

  Your agent Tory?

• 25:34Rory Stewart?

  Not a bunch of crazy, crazy, it's not going to be up my vote.

• 25:37Alastair Campbell?

  So I mentioned the Swella Bravman in the Times today and you've got Robert Buckland, who's a more moderate Conservative, saying no way should we have Farage back in the Conservative Party. You had the aforementioned Chris Phil sort of running around in circles, trying not to answer the question. But I think there's a problem for Labour in this as well, by the way, because my worry for Labour in this is that if the debate about the future of the Conservative Party is already, as it were, post-defeat, I think, given we're all already in our problems with registration and turnout and apathy, there's a real danger that people who don't vote, not because they necessarily want the Tories back or don't want Labour, but they just think, well, there's no point in voting because everybody else is voting. I think that's a real problem for Labour.

• 26:19Rory Stewart?

  Which was a problem potentially for Theresa May.

• 26:20Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 26:21Rory Stewart?

  And some people think that one of the problems in 2017 is that everyone thought she was going to win.

• 26:24Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, it was. Yeah. So that's why this is quite a dangerous thing for Labour, and it's obviously dangerous for the Conservatives, dangerous to the point of being existential.

• 26:33Rory Stewart?

  Well, they could find themselves in a position where Farage does so much damage to them that it begins to look as though they're no longer the credible second force in British politics.

• 26:41Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. And he's now, with the help of the Sunday Express yesterday, which has always been one of his kind of favourite vehicles, he's now saying that they will be the real opposition and he'll do a sort of reverse takeover on the Tory party. But I think, once you have an election where people start to think, and I've been really worried this weekend, I was at the Rugby League Cup final, and loads of people were saying, oh, can't wait to see the back of the Tories, can't wait to see the back of the Tories, but the mood was, there's no point worrying about Labour, and it's just not so, you have to worry. And the other thing that comes through in our poll, not massively, but there is without doubt a little bit of bleeding from Labour to the Greens. And I think that's driven by several things.

• 27:22Alastair Campbell?

  One is Gaza, the other is this sense that Labour aren't bold, radical enough, but the other is, well, it doesn't matter if I vote Green because Labour are going to win anyway. Once you start to think you can vote for somebody else because the team you actually want to win has already won, that's a very, very dangerous mood to get into.

• 27:39Rory Stewart?

  Maybe as the final bit of the segment, I think let's again step back and get away from the personalities into the policy. And we remain with the kind of big, central elephant in the room, which is that all these parties have said they're not going to borrow any more. In fact, they've all said they're going to reduce the amount of debt within five years. And there are only, literally only, two ways in which they can do that. They can cut spending or they can raise taxes. Labour's not going to cut.

• 28:06Alastair Campbell?

  Or they can get lucky with the economy. That's about the only other one.

• 28:09Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that's, I mean, even that isn't quite going to get them out of the hole because our finances are now in an unbelievable situation.

• 28:18Rory Stewart?

  Our joint hero, Paul Johnson, writing today in the

• 28:20Alastair Campbell?

  I've never said he's a hero.

• 28:22Rory Stewart?

  Well, I'm

• 28:22Alastair Campbell?

  The most respected Paul Johnson of the Institute of Fiscal Studies.

• 28:27Rory Stewart?

  Points out that since 2019, we have found ourselves spending an extra £140 billion a year on things like health benefits, care, mental health and other things, which doesn't look like it's coming down any time soon.

• 28:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 28:43Rory Stewart?

  We're going to stay up at 80, 90 billion, a lot of money. So that means that if Labour doesn't want to cut spending, and I don't think they will want to cut spending, they're going to have to tax. And the question is, where is the tax going to come from? This would be true of the Conservatives too, but I just don't think the Conservatives are going to win the election. So let me put it on record, this is not an attack on Labour and it's an attack on both these parties, right? The Conservatives also are being completely fiscally irresponsible. But given that it's Labour that's likely to get in, what are they going to tax? And they've ruled out the four biggest taxes in the country that produce most of the money. They've ruled out income tax, they've ruled out national insurance, they've ruled out corporate tax. So where's it going to come from?

• 29:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 29:18Rory Stewart?

  And the answer is, I don't know, is it going to be a health and social care levy? Is it going to be some sort of environmental tax? Is it going to be something on capital gains tax? It's got to come from somewhere, some money's got to come in.

• 29:30Alastair Campbell?

  You're looking at me, Roy, as though I might know the answer. You're going to have to wait for the manifesto, don't you? I think you're probably going to have to wait for the first budget, to be absolutely frank. Now, I think there is something that's slightly alarming about the sense of the backdrop to the debate is the country's in a real mess. Massive change required, but we're still at that stage, pre the Labour and Tory manifestos. We've got the Tories coming tomorrow, Labour on Thursday. I hope that once those documents are out there, we start to engage in a much more productive and positive debate about the future of the country. And Labour have always said, you know, they're going to bide their time, get to the campaign, get into the campaign. That's when the alternative starts to come.

• 30:10Alastair Campbell?

  If I was Labour reflecting on the first debate, and we both thought at the time, bit of a no score draw, didn't really change much of the fundamentals. If there's one thing I think Labour should take from that first debate, I met a lot of people in the subsequent news, said they were disappointed they didn't get enough of a cent. So what Labour would do, that's got to become the focus now for Labour. You know, yes, they keep attacking the Tories, fair enough, you've got to do that. But the Tories are doing so much damage to themselves. It opens the door for Labour to be much more, this is now about us, here's what we're going to do. And I hope when the manifesto comes out and that happens.

• 30:44Rory Stewart?

  And that's also because, as we've said in the past, that it is very, very helpful if you're going to do bold things to have it in your manifesto because it gives you some legitimacy.

• 30:53Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, you have to. Okay, we'll take a quick break now and then when we come back, we'll talk about the European Union elections, Macron's massive gamble and also Israel Gaza.

• 31:02Rory Stewart?

  See you soon.

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• 32:53Alastair Campbell?

  So, Europe, la France.

• 32:57Rory Stewart?

  So, two big things, obviously, for people concentrating. But there's the results of the European elections, which we're going to get into, where, as we predicted, the far-right populist parties have done quite well in some countries.

• 33:12Alastair Campbell?

  Not as well as they wanted to.

• 33:14Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, we can go into the details there. But in the big countries, France and Germany, they've done very well.

• 33:20Alastair Campbell?

  In Germany, though, not as well as they wanted to. They've actually fallen from where they were a few months ago with all these scandals. But, yeah, they've come second.

• 33:28Rory Stewart?

  Ahead of Chancellor.

• 33:30Alastair Campbell?

  Ahead of Chancellor Scholz's party, yeah. I'm not pretending it's been good for the years. Yeah, but I think the fact that Ursula von der Leyen, who I think a week ago was probably thinking her future was really in some peril, that sort of coalition that she's part of in the centre-right actually has held up. The centre has held. They will be able, the Social Democrats and the Conservatives, the moderate Conservatives, will be able to kind of put together some sort of coalition, which probably ensures that she carries on as the Commission President. And France is something of an outlier.

• 34:10Alastair Campbell?

  So Le Pen's party, Bardella's party, Rassemblement National, getting 32%, that is a bit of an outlier compared with the rest of it. AFD below 20 in Germany.

• 34:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, let's just quickly go through the results. So, France, Le Pen gets 32%, Macron, the president's party, gets 15%. In Germany, as you say, the centre-right leads. But the AFD, which is this far-right Nazi associated with some of their leaders, German party.

• 34:39Alastair Campbell?

  So right-wing, even Le Pen won't touch them.

• 34:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, comes in second, and Chancellor Scholz's party comes in third. And the Greens collapsed down from 21% in 2019.

• 34:48Alastair Campbell?

  All three members of the governing coalition did badly.

• 34:51Rory Stewart?

  In Italy, Giorgia Maloney gets 28%, runs a big campaign, very much using her Roman accent, a lot of social media moments. Last time she was campaigning with melons, now she's campaigning with cherries. She's using a great deal of jokes about her accent. So, now, that's important, because before we get on to the other countries.

• 35:15Rory Stewart?

  The European Parliament is done basically by population. So Germany has ninety six seats, which is the same as Hungary, the Netherlands, Belgium and Greece combined, right? So you're absolutely right, we're going to go on to the fact that the far right didn't do as well as maybe expected in Belgium, the Nordic countries. But in the big ones, France, Germany, Italy, far-right populism is flourishing.

• 35:44Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, absolutely. No, I think that's fair. And I think it means that when it comes to, for example, the other jobs that have to get handed out, assuming Van der Leyen does get the top job, that there will be a lot of change in terms of the other senior positions and the commissioners and so forth. But I think if I were trying to look for the kind of anti-populist perspective on this, I think that, for example, Tusk in Poland, one?

• 36:13Rory Stewart?

  Tusk, but narrowly, thirty seven to thirty five. So law and justice is not ruled out.

• 36:18Alastair Campbell?

  No, and also there was an even more extreme party came third. But what I mean, and then Wilders, although Wilders has now got, his party in Holland has got some seats, they didn't win. So they led in the general election but didn't win in this one.

• 36:33Rory Stewart?

  Narrowly defeated again, Timon's on twenty one, Wilders on seventeen. So a lot of this is more knife-edge, it's not a clear victory for one way or another.

• 36:41Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Portugal, Chega, we talked about Chega a while back, they did, I think they got nearly twenty percent in the general election, they're down to ten. So my point is, I think the general sense was going to be the far-right are on the march everywhere.

• 36:53Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 36:54Alastair Campbell?

  And I think France and Germany and Italy notwithstanding, and don't forget Salvini in Italy, he's, you know, because Maloney has basically eaten into a lot of his support, he's faded slightly. So look, I'm not pretending it's a really filthy bed of roses for the sort of anti-populist, but it's not as bad as people expect.

• 37:12Rory Stewart?

  Well, maybe the way to think about it for listeners is there are sort of three categories. There are the countries where the far-right populists have triumphed.

• 37:21Rory Stewart?

  France, Italy. And although Hungary, there's been a bit of a drop, still by far the largest number of votes have gone to Alban and Hungary.

• 37:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, although the guy who came second has come out of nowhere to get to thirty percent, which is quite a big thing. And he's focused absolutely as a kind of anti-Arban campaign.

• 37:36Rory Stewart?

  But so there are places where they've won, France, Italy, Hungary. There are places where they've come second and caused a bit of an upset. Germany, places where they've come second, where they haven't created so much of an upset, but where it's still a real reminder that they're a considerable force. Netherlands.

• 37:55Alastair Campbell?

  Belgium.

• 37:56Rory Stewart?

  Belgium and Poland.

• 38:01Rory Stewart?

  I forgot Austria, actually, is an example of the first category.

• 38:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, because Austria is the one where I think everybody thought that the far right were going to win there.

• 38:09Rory Stewart?

  Then there's the the counter examples. So Greece, and if people haven't listened to our interview on leading, that's a really interesting example, because there you have somebody who seems to be straight out of a kind of Blair Cameron playbook, a kind of socially liberal, economically conservative guy, doing well. And the only opposition to him is not from far right populists, it's Syriza on the left.

• 38:32Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 38:33Rory Stewart?

  Coming second.

• 38:34Alastair Campbell?

  He, by the way, I think if von der Leyen had been pushed out, was going to be one of the two candidates for her job, Mitsotakis. And I think the other thing that's really interesting, we'll come on to talk about Macron's gambit. But I think was, because there was some talk that Macron was kind of slightly losing the plot with von der Leyen, he's going to be so tied up now with his election, with his Olympics, that I think maybe that is another reason why von der Leyen is probably safe now. So Mitsotakis is probably staying in Athens.

• 39:03Rory Stewart?

  Final reminder, because we talk about Spain quite a lot, because there have been these controversies around, you know, was the Prime Minister going to step down, what's his, you know, what's his wife been up to corruption charges. Spain again has remained relatively moderate, centre right, centre left dominating in the European election results. And Vox, you know, added a few seats.

• 39:23Alastair Campbell?

  But not, but not again.

• 39:24Rory Stewart?

  Per day must disappear, but small, down at the bottom. Now, this then brings us to just a quick reminder on on these different groups that you have in the European Parliament. So there are the kind of big four groups, European People's Party, Socialists and Democrats, Renew, which is the kind of liberal Macron party.

• 39:40Alastair Campbell?

  Macron, yeah.

• 39:40Rory Stewart?

  And the Green Bloc.

• 39:43Rory Stewart?

  And then you have these far-right populist groups. So you've got Maloney's group, which is called ECR, and you've got Le Pen's group, which has got Galt Wilders in it, which is called ID, and Orban floating around trying to decide which one of these to join.

• 39:56Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 39:56Rory Stewart?

  Just a reminder for kind of real political nerds, people remember that David Cameron made himself very, very unpopular by leaving the European People's Party.

• 40:05Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 40:06Rory Stewart?

  And joining this ECR, which is the Maloney party.

• 40:08Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 40:08Rory Stewart?

  So briefly, that was a party which the British Conservatives remembered of when Orban was still sitting in the EPP.

• 40:14Alastair Campbell?

  Incredible, isn't it? Absolutely incredible. That was, I think, when Angela Merkel decided that maybe your old prime minister was not an homme sérieux.

• 40:24Rory Stewart?

  Now, all of this has now led to the next thing, which I think is just beyond imagining, which is Emmanuel Macron responding to this result has suddenly decided he's going to call an election, a very, very quick election, a three-week election, is that right?

• 40:41Alastair Campbell?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:41Rory Stewart?

  For the Assembly.

• 40:42Alastair Campbell?

  It's in two parts, though.

• 40:43Rory Stewart?

  And my take on this, for what it's worth, I may be completely wrong, is that he's lost the plot and that this is an absolute repeat of

• 40:51Alastair Campbell?

  Sunak.

• 40:52Rory Stewart?

  Humza Yousaf and Rishi Sunak. It's these young men who suddenly get into their head, they're going to be bold, show initiative, surprise everybody, leaving their entire party thinking, what on earth have you just done?

• 41:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. There's something in that. There's something in that. Can I try and explain why I think he might have done it?

• 41:11Alastair Campbell?

  I think he thought he was definitely going to be forced into an early election anyway, because the way the party... So people need to understand, they have a very different system. They have a president who sits atop, and then they have a parliament, which is elected after the president is chosen. And it is not unusual for the president to be of a different party to the government.

• 41:34Rory Stewart?

  As in the US.

• 41:35Alastair Campbell?

  Correct.

• 41:35Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 41:36Alastair Campbell?

  So he basically, I think he had a number in his head. I think he thought if the National Front, the RN, Le Pen's lot, if they go above such and such a threshold, probably would have been 40%, then too risky.

• 41:53Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 41:53Alastair Campbell?

  Okay? If he goes below...

• 41:57Alastair Campbell?

  Eighteen twenty? We've got to call it on. Because if, otherwise he can't govern. He won't be able to get anything through the National Assembly. Now.

• 42:08Rory Stewart?

  He won't, he won't give you anything because the numbers don't work for him at the moment?

• 42:11Alastair Campbell?

  Because, because at the moment, the numbers aren't working. And because as they bring it, let's imagine a budget, that when they do the budget, let's imagine that he loses a few votes. Entirely possible. And I think that's what they're thinking, that they were losing control of the National Assembly already.

• 42:23Rory Stewart?

  I think the risk of the whole thing.

• 42:25Alastair Campbell?

  The risk is huge.

• 42:26Rory Stewart?

  The risk is huge because at least at the moment, he's just about able to operate with the National Assembly. Right? The risk is he's going to come out and lose the whole thing. And remember, he's going into an election where his main opponent has just got more than double the number of votes that he's got.

• 42:42Alastair Campbell?

  I agree.

• 42:42Rory Stewart?

  I mean, how on earth does he think that this is the time to call an election?

• 42:46Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I know there are a lot of people, including in his own team and government, who are probably thinking that.

• 42:51Rory Stewart?

  Including his prime minister.

• 42:52Alastair Campbell?

  Who are thinking that.

• 42:52Rory Stewart?

  His prime minister's on the record saying he's lost the plot.

• 42:55Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I know there were these out words. What, I'm, I'm trying to explain why I think he's doing it. So he, I think he knows their, his own party is going to lose seats. He knows that Le Pen's party are going to gain seats. I think he thinks two things. One, having the election, a domestic election, where the turnout is normally about twenty five percent higher than it's been for this European election, means that more of the people who stayed away will come to him. That's a risk, okay? But that's, I think, part of the thinking. Second part of the thinking is that some of the arguments that he tried to get into the European elections, about Ukraine, about Le Pen and Putin, about the environment, about the future of Europe, about the economy,

• 43:40Alastair Campbell?

  he thinks in a domestic election, you'll be able to get those arguments going.

• 43:44Rory Stewart?

  Because he's only got three weeks to do it. If he failed, if he failed to land it yesterday, how's he gonna land it in three weeks' time?

• 43:50Alastair Campbell?

  Because I think what he did yesterday, in a way, it's the, it's the opposite. Fiona said this last night with the news break, so always the opposite of the Mingvar strategy. He's basically saying, I'm going to confront the country with this and I'm going to do it. And this is bold, but I think, I think he then wants to force the other parties. To do one of two things, either if the National Front do get to a position where they form a government, that puts them on the spot running up to the next presidential elections. And if you go back to this back in ninety seven, I think it was, when we were first in power, you had this, and it's a very different thing, but it's, there are similarities. Sheerak president, Jospin became the prime minister, with different parties, cohabitation.

• 44:32Alastair Campbell?

  And Jospin being prime minister was thought that will be the perfect setting for him then to become the president. He got wiped out. So, put them into government, show they can't do it, or the other thing, it is a risk, it's a risk. Or the other thing, that he forces the other parties to do a serious coalition with him.

• 44:51Rory Stewart?

  The, the, the risk of-

• 44:52Alastair Campbell?

  You're not listening to that.

• 44:53Rory Stewart?

  What I'm listening to, I'm listening to it, but what I'm, what's worrying me about your strategy is-

• 44:57Alastair Campbell?

  It's not my strategy.

• 44:58Rory Stewart?

  That you seem to be endorsing a strategy that has two totally different outcomes. I mean, is the idea to put them in office, because they can't perform in office?

• 45:07Alastair Campbell?

  No, that's a possible consequence. I think what he, what he thinks-

• 45:11Rory Stewart?

  It sounds a bit muddled. I mean, when somebody, when somebody says, I've had this brilliant idea, because either, you know, I'm going to put them in office and that's going to be terrible for them, or I'm not going to put them in office and that's going to be terrible for them. I mean, they're not in office now, why is that not terrible for them?

• 45:24Alastair Campbell?

  Well, because the reason that's damaging to him though, and the French body politic, is that they've been able to operate, always, a bit like Farage here, just as a sort of, you know, campaign group. Whereas this is actually saying, okay, country, do you really want these people in government now?

• 45:41Rory Stewart?

  But what we've seen with Trump, is that even when these people in government, well actually, we see it with Maloney, you, you have one of two possibilities. There's the Trump scenario, which is they get into government, govern very badly, but a lot of their supporters don't care.

• 45:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 45:54Rory Stewart?

  Or you have the Maloney scenario, where they come into government and they turn out to perform much better than you anticipated, and you're wiped out.

• 45:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. And, and that is, that, look, I'm not denying, it's a huge risk.

• 46:04Rory Stewart?

  I know I shouldn't bet, because we're three weeks out, but I, I'm going to go on the record confidently saying, this is going to go down as a catastrophic decision.

• 46:12Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 46:13Rory Stewart?

  And in three and a half weeks' time, we're going to look at Macron thinking-

• 46:16Alastair Campbell?

  What on earth did you do?

• 46:17Rory Stewart?

  What on earth did you do?

• 46:18Alastair Campbell?

  That may be true.

• 46:19Rory Stewart?

  And, and it's going to be exactly like Rishi Sunak and Humus Youssef, it's young men being macho, thinking, I'm going to take a big risk, I'm going to jump off the cruise ship, and it never ends well.

• 46:29Alastair Campbell?

  Do, so are you saying, and do you think Jordan Bardella, this young handsome twenty eight year old, will be prime minister within a month? Because that's the outcome. Otherwise, it'll be a coalition involving possibly the left, possibly the Greens, possibly Les Républicains, but they didn't do very well. So I think he's basically-

• 46:50Rory Stewart?

  And Les Républicains also said they won't go into coalition with Macron.

• 46:53Alastair Campbell?

  I think what he's doing is basically is breaking the vase, but he's hopeful that he will be have more flexibility in where to put the glue after it's fallen on the floor.

• 47:06Rory Stewart?

  Brilliant, brilliant. Thank you.

• 47:09Alastair Campbell?

  There we are.

• 47:10Rory Stewart?

  So, in Israel, Benny Gantz, who is a very senior former general, who was not part of Netanyahu's coalition, but who joined after the October 7th attack to show a sense of national unity, has resigned, along with Gadi Eisenkot, another very senior general, from this war cabinet arrangement. He'd set a deadline. He'd said that unless Netanyahu came up with a sensible strategy, both for the war and for the post-conflict reconstruction, he was going to be out, he was going to be out at the beginning of June.

• 47:50Rory Stewart?

  He delayed it because he was aware there was this huge hostage rescue operation about to take place.

• 47:58Rory Stewart?

  And he's now announced that he's leaving.

• 48:01Alastair Campbell?

  And taken with him Eisenkot, who was not a full member of the war cabinet, but was attended it. So I think we said at the time, when he threatened to resign in the past, that it wouldn't be as devastating as Netanyahu losing the Ben-Gavir and Smotrich, the two figures on the hard right. But Benny Gantz is a very, very, very significant figure in Israel.

• 48:24Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 48:25Alastair Campbell?

  Military background, he was there in part because he's pretty well respected across the spectrum. So even though it doesn't topple Netanyahu, it's another very, very big brick taken out of the wall.

• 48:37Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, the math still works for Netanyahu. He's still got 64 out of 120 seats in the Knesset, which is enough to govern. But he is very, very unpopular. Everybody's waiting for him to trigger an election. Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot are these two very senior Israeli generals who were brought in after October the 7th to provide a bit of military ballast and a bit of cross-party agreement around the war council. Benny Gantz represents, I suppose, a sort of broadly centre, centre-right party called Blue and White, which, you know, in the old days of 1990s Israeli politics would have been seen as quite right-wing, but in the current way that Israeli politics has been reorganised now seems more kind of centrist left.

• 49:20Rory Stewart?

  You shouldn't, you know, if you're looking at Israel from the point of view of this conflict, on the one hand Benny Gantz is breaking with Netanyahu by saying he thinks that this strategy doesn't work, that it's not returning the hostages. He is supposed to have played, although, you know, we're not in the inside of this, but the story is he played a very important part in stopping Smotrich from Ben-Gavir, pushing Netanyahu to invade South Lebanon. And this, this remains a big, big story because there are extremist parts of the Israeli government who believe that the biggest threat to Israel is not Hamas, but it's Hezbollah, which is this Iranian-backed group in South Lebanon, and still think Israel should be invading South Lebanon.

• 50:05Rory Stewart?

  Benny Gantz apparently was the voice that counselled against that. On the other hand, he seems to have supported the attacks on Rafa, which was breaking with Biden's red lines.

• 50:15Alastair Campbell?

  When the hostages were released the other day, so four hostages released, still lots left and an assumption that quite a few of them are dead. And sort of this outpouring of kind of euphoria across Israel and these shots of Netanyahu meeting the hostages and their families and hugging them and singing and dancing and all that stuff. And the footage of the death and mayhem that was caused in the pursuit of getting those hostages out was just... I mean, as horrible as anything I've seen during the high, during the entire thing. I mean, it was utterly horrific. So, and I know you can't play a numbers game, but four hostages,

• 50:56Alastair Campbell?

  two hundred and seventy four people dead, um, according to the Health Ministry.

• 51:01Rory Stewart?

  The hostages issue really reunifies Israeli public opinion because the fracture in Israeli politics has been often about the hostages. And some of the strongest critics of Netanyahu have been the hostages' families and people trying to get the hostages back. And the biggest criticism of Netanyahu's military strategy has been it's not bringing back the hostages. So getting those hostages back will have been a big, big boon. I think it's also a reminder of Hamas and what they did.

• 51:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 51:36Rory Stewart?

  Their brutality, their massacres, and the fact that they are still keeping all these hostages. It's also pushing against what Joe Biden was trying to do, because the basis of this plan that Biden announced, which he said was an Israeli plan and which had been negotiated in Paris with the head of Israeli intelligence, was about the returning of the women and the elderly in return for Israel ceasing operations in Rafah, followed by the return of all the hostages, combined with a total withdrawal and then reconstruction. So this is Netanyahu's signalling he's not going there. He's going to go after them, military means.

• 52:15Alastair Campbell?

  A few years ago, I did some work with the Israeli Labour Party when the leader was Isaac Herzog, who is the current president.

• 52:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 52:22Alastair Campbell?

  And I was talking yesterday to somebody who I worked with during that period, who I think has kind of had a bit of a fallout with the whole lot of them. But he was saying that he thinks the entire momentum now is towards an election. So on the one hand, people, yes, are desperate to get all the hostages out, desperate for this war to end, desperate for Hamas to be defeated. But there is a very, very, very large momentum, including people who've worked with Netanyahu in the past, now actually just want to drive this as fast as they can to an election. And I think that's part of Gantz's thinking. I guess the danger moment for Netanyahu comes whenever these forces on the right feel

• 53:07Alastair Campbell?

  that they're in a strong position as opposed to, I don't know where they feel right now. So I think that although the Gantz move is not fatal, I think it's very, very undermining of Netanyahu.

• 53:20Rory Stewart?

  So, Alastair, we had the privilege of interviewing Ehud Olmert, the previous Israeli prime minister, who was almost the last stage of an attempt to put together a two-state solution and a peace process that collapsed when his political career blew up. I thought he was such an interesting guy. I mean, if people have a chance maybe to listen to our interview as a way of trying to hear a very thoughtful, highly experienced Israeli politician who started in the same party as Netanyahu, you know, came from the Israeli right, trying to work his way through these options and the moral choices involved, I thought that was a really, really powerful voice.

• 54:01Alastair Campbell?

  So, that's it for today. This is going out on Tuesday morning. I think we're going to be doing another live podcast on Wednesday after the next TV debate between the leaders. And we've also got a few interviews already in the bag, both the main parties. I know you don't want to interview Nigel Farage, Roy, but I've got a bid into him as well. I think we can't ignore him, even though we might want to.

• 54:27Rory Stewart?

  It seems a little hypocritical, I don't know. And I think the manifesto one, listen, I'm really looking forward to that because that is a chance for us to do what we keep talking about, which is be serious about policy.

• 54:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, so to find out when we're doing live streams, emergency pods and all the rest of it, just go to our social media and it'll be there.

• 54:45Rory Stewart?

  And look forward to seeing a great deal of you this week as we come in again and again following the ins and outs of this election and politics worldwide.

• 54:54Alastair Campbell?

  Well, and isn't it marvellous, Roy, that after the fallout of the European elections, I am just by an amazing coincidence going to be in Germany on Friday?

• 55:02Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 55:03Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 55:04Rory Stewart?

  Well, come back and tell us about...

• 55:06Alastair Campbell?

  I will, that's the reason I'm going.

• 55:08Rory Stewart?

  Whether it will really feel like a defeat to the AfD or whether they're feeling a bit sort of...

• 55:12Alastair Campbell?

  I think I'm more concerned about whether it will be defeat of Scotland, but yeah, okay, we'll do.

• 55:16Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Bye.

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