Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 328. Could Russia interfere in the US election? About this episode Will the killing of the Hamas leader change the course of the war in Gaza? What is Labour’s plan for the NHS? Could Elon Musk be found guilty of buying votes? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in today's episode of The Rest Is Politics.
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Transcript 10,017 words · 14 speakers
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 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.
0:42 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?
0:49 Rory Stewart? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/restorspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restorspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
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2:08 Alastair Campbell? Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.
2:11 Rory Stewart? And with me Rory Stewart.
2:12 Alastair Campbell? And Rory, we're going to talk about America. I think it's what we call squeaky bum time. We're going to talk about Moldova and Georgia. That's three elections in which the Russians are busy interfering. We need to talk about your friend David Gork being appointed to a review of sentencing in the UK. And we should also touch on the Middle East, given some pretty dramatic developments last week. But first of all, you're in one of my favourite countries in the world, are you not?
2:37 Rory Stewart? I am. I'm in Melbourne and I'm following Alistair's footsteps. I'm on a speaking tour. So I'm on my way to Canberra and to Perth and to Sydney and Brisbane. And as I'm travelling around, I keep meeting people who've already met you.
2:50 Alastair Campbell? Oh.
2:50 Rory Stewart? Particularly a lot of politicians. And it's a really interesting engagement here. I mean, Australia, hopefully we can talk about it a bit next week, but there are so many things that are relevant about Australia. Obviously, a very different approach to immigration, an economy which has performed better since 2008 than most of the other democracies, the compulsory voting system, and also this preferential voting, which has allowed the emergence of the teal independents. So a lot of really interesting features for Australia, maybe to deal with next week. But meanwhile, over to you on the US.
3:20 Alastair Campbell? Let's start with the economy, because I just picked up The Economist and the front cover of The Economist this week is the American economy being, quote, "the envy of the world." And I'll just read you this little paragraph from the main editorial. "In 1990, America accounted for two-fifths of the GDP of the G7. Today, it makes up half. Output per person is now about 30% higher than in Western Europe and Canada, 60% higher than in Japan. Mississippi may be America's poorest state, but its hard-working residents earn, on average, more than Brits, Canadians or Germans." And the reason that sort of leapt out at me is because we keep hearing that one of the reasons why Kamala Harris is not right out ahead and why Donald
4:02 Alastair Campbell? Trump might still win is because he's making hay about the economy being weak. And yet you read this, you think, well, what is the disconnect between economic data and real people's experience?
4:13 Rory Stewart? It's getting worse because of course your friend Bill Clinton was very much part of this whole generation where it was all about the economy stupid. But I am always a bit suspicious of this because the the big macroeconomic data, GDP data, inflation data, often conceals how people on low incomes are actually experiencing things. So for example, in the US, even as inflation comes down, inflation has hit very hard, cheap goods more than expensive goods. So people shopping for basic groceries in Walmarts, paying for their gas, are feeling it more. There's also the sense that compared to where people were in the past, incomes have been stagnant. So you can see interviews with people pointing out that their daughters are
4:58 Rory Stewart? earning fifteen dollars an hour working in Walmart, and they were earning fifteen dollars an hour working in an automobile factory in Michigan in the late 1970s. I think that there is a possibility that the New York Times and The Economist will keep writing articles saying, well, we don't get it. The headline data is terrific. And that this doesn't really reflect what many Trump voters are experiencing. But anyway, back to you on that.
5:23 Alastair Campbell? The thing about Trump voters, friend and former colleague of mine, Peter Hyman, who worked with me in opposition and then in government, then he went off to be a head teacher, then he went back for Keir Starmer, and he's now he's engaged in this major project, trying to trying to work out how progressives can better tackle populism. So he is currently travelling around the United States, going to Donald Trump's rallies, and interviewing hundreds of people. He sent me a very funny picture of himself wearing a Make America Great Again hat, because he feels that's the the only way he has permission then to talk to these people. But he's interviewing dozens and dozens of these people. And he sent me a very alarming note about his experience, which started with the words, I think he will win. That is not an uncommon thing. I'm getting a lot of messages at the moment from people
6:05 Alastair Campbell? who are really, I said squeaky bum time, I think the Democrats really are getting quite nervous. Now, that's inevitable, this close, you get nervous unless you're 20 points ahead in the polls. But Peter makes the point, first of all, this underlines what you've just said. Inflation has been really, really bad for a lot of people and it's really damaged the Democrats because they've been in in power. Trump still gets marked up because he has this image as a billionaire businessman and the stuff about him going bankrupt seven times, it all just sort of adds to that sense of he's like, you know, he really gets the economy and she comes over as being a lot less interested. He says that all the kind of crazy stuff that he does, it's almost like it goes over their heads, they don't
6:49 Alastair Campbell? really care and they know that he's a liar, they know, I'm quoting him now, that he's an asshole, but there's something about him that they they forgive him. And also, the other thing that he says that's really interesting is that the the whole thing about there were no big wars when he was president and it seems like under Biden, we've got the Middle East, we've got Ukraine and why are we always at war? And so this sort of feeling that it didn't matter what he said or what he did, these people are going to vote for him. Now, these people are the people are going out to rallies. So that maybe is, I don't know, that that that sort of underlines their support for him. Peter's a very bright guy, he's very good at analysing opinion and he is definitely of the view that this has moved away a bit from Harris.
7:31 Rory Stewart? So there are, I think, two things. One is that we know, of course, that the the strong Trump base has remained unmoved and remains very fiercely for him. We also know that as we were discussing in a recent discussion for leading, which we're about to put out with Tim Snyder, he points out that there are many people who are just Republican voters and will continue to vote Republican even if Trump is the candidate, which is why we come down to this cliche that the whole thing depends on seven states and might even come down to a few 10,000 votes in Pennsylvania and why turnout becomes essential. I think it's very difficult for people to know anecdotally, on the basis of meeting people, what the result will be.
8:10 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, yeah.
8:10 Rory Stewart? Because you'll be very familiar with this. When, you know, any of elections that we've been involved in, you'll get people coming back from the doorstep, say, oh, that was terrible, you know, I've just come back and I've just met people voting for the other side, but it doesn't tell you very much, I mean, it can shock you, but it doesn't tell you very much. I remain confident that Kamala Harris is going to win and win by a comfortable Margin. And as I think I've said to you before, I believe this because I think what's happened is the polling agencies have panicked. And it's not surprising. They're all hovering around fifty fifty. They're hovering around fifty fifty because they like to be in a pack and fifty fifty is a pretty safe place to be. I think that the turnout assumptions on Trump don't make sense. I can't see young African American voters
8:50 Rory Stewart? who say they support Trump necessarily turning out to vote in the polls. And this is something that the mooch has pointed out, that he doesn't really have a ground game. He doesn't have what the Democrats have, which is three hundred thousand volunteers to actually get people to the polls. He's very dependent on his social media status and he certainly doesn't. The Republicans have no ground game at all in African American communities in central Michigan, because those were traditionally Democrat voters. So they simply didn't have any infrastructure there. But you're right, I'm increasingly a lonely voice on this. And The Economist and most of the American newspapers are now saying that Kamala Harris will win the popular vote. But it looks increasingly as though Trump is going to take the key states and win the presidency.
9:30 Alastair Campbell? I mean, I guess we're at that stage where it's probably best just to ignore everything because, as you say, we don't know. The polls have moved, they are so knife edge in these, in these swing states. There was a Washington Post analysis yesterday that said she was going to do really well and she's going to win big on the Electoral College. Others, which is saying the exact opposite. So I guess we're just at that stage now where the important thing is to try and work out what their closing messages are as they zone in on these, as you say, this very small number of swing states.
10:01 Rory Stewart? So she's changed her strategy and one of the changes is that she went out and she did Fox News interviews as talk about her doing more and more conservative podcasts. Having done a bit of a Keir Starmer Mingva strategy, she seems to be now getting out on the front foot. What was your sense of her Fox News interview, how that went? Tell us a bit about it first and then maybe give us a bit of an analysis.
10:21 Alastair Campbell? I thought it was good. I think you're right that there's been a slight change. And yesterday she was on the campaign trail with Liz Cheney, Republican daughter of the former Vice President Dick Cheney, who is, according to the mooch, is number one on Trump's post-election hit list if he wins.
10:37 Rory Stewart? Because Liz Cheney Was one of the few Republicans to come out very strongly for impeachment after January sixth and has been a very strong critic, yeah.
10:45 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. And also she did an event with Liz Cheney. She did three events through the course of the day, but one of them was with undecided voters, which I think is a good thing to do. I think actually not just being seen with your own people the whole time. The Fox News interview, I thought she did well. There was a lot of satire around it because the interviewer Brett Baer was like, you know, he was far more aggressive with her than he had been in Fox News or ever with Trump. But she was very calm, didn't sort of lose her rag in any way, pushed back pretty hard. I think she has stepped up, but I'll tell you the thing I do worry about is that, and she had this message, and I think this was a very deliberate message.
11:22 Alastair Campbell? My administration will not be a continuation of Joe Biden, which I understand why she's saying, but I think that there hasn't been much defence of the record and that's what's allowed Trump to sort of make this claim that the economy is not doing well, that people aren't better off than they were. At least you had a sense of her with a closing strategy. So far this week, all we've really got about from him is that he's obsessed with the size of Arnold Palmer's penis. That was a really, really weird one that he was just, and Arnold Palmer, the golfer, his family have come out and said he didn't like Trump at all. And then yesterday, this really weird visit to McDonald's where he got so triggered by the idea that she worked at McDonald's or says she did.
12:03 Alastair Campbell? He then says she didn't. So now he goes and works at McDonald's, but it turns out that the place was closed down. The people who, who were customers in quotes were all sort of vetted by the campaign. So they came along pretending to be totally surprised. Oh my God, Donald Trump serving at McDonald's.
12:19 Rory Stewart? It was, it was a fascinating one because I, I thought about it because I thought that I once tried to do this in, in Cumbria and certainly I was told by my local McDonald's franchise that I wouldn't be allowed to do it because I hadn't passed the, the food safety training. So I was very intrigued watching this, whether in fact McDonald's would permit him to operate the, the fryer.
12:37 Alastair Campbell? I guess it's just this thing about he likes just to be talked about.
12:39 Rory Stewart? Yes. And, and I, I think there's another point to this, which you've pointed out in the past, but which is really important, which is that all these trivial things, Arnold Palmer's. Penis or they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the pets, the people live there are very good ways of distracting from bigger allegations, for example, from one of his former most senior aides coming out saying that he believes that Donald Trump is being blackmailed by the Kremlin.
13:06 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
13:07 Rory Stewart? Is suddenly put on the same level as were the people getting the fries from him actors or were they real people. So it is literally this dead cat strategy again and again, even when it comes down to the triviality of him doing the cat stuff, that you you just can't distinguish with any of these people that sort of, well, they're firing chaff, aren't they?
13:25 Alastair Campbell? Just on the the Russian, the the compromat thing, which comes out of this Bob Woodward book. So he's quoting, or seems to be quoting, senior generals, people who are part of the military establishment, who are essentially saying that Donald Trump is kind of under some sort of weird influence with Putin. I can't for the life of me understand why the Harris campaign hasn't at some point persuaded these people to go out and do a big event, to do a press conference, to call in the world's media. If you put together all the people who worked for Trump, most of his cabinet, Mike Pence, ex chiefs of staff, people like Scaramucci who worked in his comms team, you put all these people together, just imagine the effect you could have, not just doing stuff on social media,
14:06 Alastair Campbell? but a massive press event, get the world in and have these people saying, this man is a threat to America, he's a threat to America.
14:13 Rory Stewart? You're absolutely right, and it would be very powerful, wouldn't it? You could almost actually summon his whole cabinet, because his whole cabinet has turned against him. You could have the whole cabinet with an empty pot at the end, and they could all talk frankly about what he'd been let to work for.
14:25 Alastair Campbell? Now, maybe they won't do it. Maybe Liz Cheney is the only one that's kind of, you know, got the guts to go and do it. I don't know.
14:31 Rory Stewart? On Russia, because I think this is a good way of moving on to Moldova and Georgia. But, you know, we we hear a lot about Russian election interference, and it's often quite nonspecific. But if people are interested, Microsoft Threat Analysis Centre.
14:47 Rory Stewart? Has released details, this is a September 17th report that I'm reading, on specific accounts from Russian bot farms. So there's something called Storm 1516, which is a Kremlin-aligned troll farm, which has put out videos depicting an attack which pretends to be Harris supporters attacking someone at a Trump rally. And then another uses an on-screen actor to claim that Harris was involved in a hit-and-run accident and was laundered through a website masquerading as a local San Francisco media outlet. So there's so much sort of strange conspiracy theory about this and it gets into the realm of watching Homeland. But it's worth, for people who are interested in the details, reading these Microsoft accounts
15:29 Rory Stewart? because they actually specify how these videos are created, who's creating them, and the fact that they're getting millions of views. And of course, some of this stuff, not those in particular, but other pretty implausible stories are of course circulated very easily by Elon Musk. So you'll often get millions of views on stuff that he's sharing and he's now relentlessly using his enormous platform on Twitter. This is why I think he's almost like a media baron from another age, using that platform to promote Trump again and again and again.
15:56 Alastair Campbell? And also promoting conspiracy theories, pushing fake stories about Harris, pushing fake websites, and also this incredible thing where he's giving out a million dollars a day to people who sign up to this super PAC thing that he's got on the First and the Second Amendments. And very, very hard to understand why that is not akin to buying votes.
16:18 Rory Stewart? Exactly. The point is the First and Second Amendments are code for supporting Trump's position. And so you're basically getting yourself involved in the Trump campaign and this lottery pays out to one person a day a million dollars. So there's now very serious attempts to challenge him for breaking electoral law for doing this, but this is, this is big money.
16:37 Alastair Campbell? Let's say that Trump narrowly wins in the Electoral College. And we know that if Harris wins, even if she wins big, Trump is going to challenge the result, refuse to accept it and provoke all sorts of trouble on the streets, et cetera. But let's just say Kamala Harris challenged that, a narrow Trump win, then this could become the Musk interference. And I notice he's now sort of trying to backtrack slightly and say he's actually, he sees this as making them ambassadors for his path, and that's why they need to be paid. It's like a salary. There must be lawyers all over this at the moment. And the thing about Musk, I think this is what happens with these sovereign individual types, is that they think they are above the law. So he probably won't even have sort of worked through whether there might be legal problems in what he's doing.
17:20 Rory Stewart? Before announcing that the whole thing is terrific, yeah.
17:22 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
17:22 Rory Stewart? I mean, I think it's an interesting transition, this question of Russian interference in the US election, which is relatively muted compared to what they have been doing in Moldova.
17:32 Alastair Campbell? Oh, my God, yeah.
17:32 Rory Stewart? So, brief reminder of what's just happened in Moldova. There's just been a referendum to, on accession to the EU, where a victory in the referendum means that an addendum to the constitution will commit Moldova to push ahead with its EU accession. And Moldova, December last year, end of last year, began its accession negotiations with the European Union, meaning that there are now a group of countries, Montenegro, Serbia, North Macedonia, Turkey, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and Bosnia, which are theoretically in accession negotiations to join the EU. It's leading then into an election, presidential election for Mayasandu,
18:12 Rory Stewart? the pro-EU leader of Moldova, and then parliamentary elections next year. Give us a bit of a sense of Mayasandu, because I believe you know her, and maybe a little bit about Moldova.
18:21 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. Well, Moldova, one of the smallest and poorest countries in Europe. She's very, very smart, very clever, from a banking, from a World Bank background, so would be very much put into the, the sort of globalist camp.
18:34 Rory Stewart? And looks a bit like Rachel Reeves.
18:36 Alastair Campbell? She does look a little bit like, yeah, an Eastern European version thereof. But she's in her early, early 50s. She founded this party, Party of Action and Solidarity. I don't know her well, but I've spoken to her a couple of times in relation to the campaign that she's been running. And I hadn't, when I first spoke to her, and she, she talked about the way that Russia was essentially trying to sort of, you know, take over the campaign of her opponents. I wonder whether there was a little bit of exaggeration or even paranoia about that, but this has been quite incredible. So in a country of just over 2 million people,
19:17 Alastair Campbell? they have spent, it's reckoned, about $100 million in trying to influence the outcome, both of the referendum and of her presidential election.
19:25 Rory Stewart? The Russians threw a oligarch called Elan Shaw, who's a Moldovan Russian oligarch, who's now, I think, in refuge in Moscow. Moldova, for people who can't imagine it on a map, is a sliver of territory between Romania and Ukraine. So in a sense, it's sheltered from Russia by Ukraine, from Russian tanks roding through.
19:47 Alastair Campbell? But it has this Transnistria, this sliver down the side, which essentially is a breakaway, where there are Russian troops present.
19:55 Rory Stewart? Exactly. And Transnistria, again, there are people in Moldova who speak Ukrainian, people who speak Russian, and people who speak Romanian. And the Transnistrian bit has tended to be more pro-Russian. There are genuinely pro-Russian factions within Moldova itself, which adds to the complication of the whole thing. Back over to you.
20:13 Alastair Campbell? The thing is that they reckon around about 130,000 Moldovans, that's about 10% of the turnout, essentially were bought. And it nearly worked. I mean, we talk about 52, 48 in the Brexit referendum being very, very close. The yes vote to change the constitution got literally just a fraction over 50%. Where I think it becomes much more difficult now, though, is that Mya Sandu won the first round. She topped the election first round with 41%. But her opponent is this guy, Alexander Stoyanoglu, who's a former prosecutor. And he is very much the Russian camp. And a lot of the smaller parties...
20:55 Alastair Campbell? Who have been eliminated in the first round are likely to come behind him rather than her. So it's not impossible, even with that 15% lead in the first round, it's not impossible in the second round, she could lose. And then, of course, you know, and she essentially is saying, she is absolutely clear that this has been criminal groups working with the Russians to try to buy the election. The BBC had a reporter out there who actually came across a woman who came out to the polling station and said, where do I pick up my money? Because she said she'd been promised money to vote and the guy who'd promised us miraculously disappeared. But she's incredibly brave, Mya Sandu. I mean, it's a tiny country, very,
21:38 Alastair Campbell? very poor, and she has absolutely been standing up against this relentless campaign run out of Moscow to basically to topola.
21:48 Rory Stewart? Which I guess brings us to the bigger strategic picture, which is that the European Union has a big strategic choice, opportunity, challenge in how to deal with many of these countries which are hovering on the edge of Russian influence. And to some extent, they've let down Moldova because they haven't provided enormous economic support. They haven't provided the economic stimulus that could have really allowed Mya Sandu to demonstrate real economic success in Moldova. It wouldn't be very expensive, actually, in a tiny country like that. My friend Gerhard Knauß, who I keep quoting from the SI, has been pushing for Moldova to be allowed into the single market, along with Ukraine and the Balkan
22:30 Rory Stewart? states, because EU accession is getting more and more complicated. So joining the EU fully getting more and more complicated. But it would be possible to grant them the four freedoms of the single market. That's free movement of goods, capital, services, and above all of people. That's people being able to move back and forwards. And that, there's precedent. That's what Finland, Sweden, and Austria got before they joined the European Union.
22:52 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but really, the politics then was so different and. And those countries were so so much more economically and democratically advanced. And by the way, Moldovans are leaving Moldova since Ukraine. They've been leaving in vast numbers. So I think politically that would be very, very, very difficult to do.
23:10 Rory Stewart? In effect, we've got free movement from Moldova and Ukraine at the moment. And as you say, a lot of these countries are quite small. I mean, the population movements will be quite small. But I agree with you, the politics unbelievably difficult. And this just comes down to is the confidence in Europe, is the leadership in Europe, and do they want to take these kind of risks with domestic voters and others in order to balance Russian influence?
23:32 Alastair Campbell? Just before we leave Moldova, just on that point, von der Leyen, the Commission President, has put forward this near two billion euro financing package recently. And they're going to be receiving tranches of the money every six months, conditional on making the changes necessary for accession. So I think belatedly, they are addressing that point.
23:51 Rory Stewart? Yeah, I think the European Union is in a very difficult situation because they're, of course, big anti-immigration moves, a lot of hostility, obviously, towards Turkey joining the EU largely because they don't, many countries don't want Turkish migrants coming in. But at the same time, a lot of people in Brussels understand that EU membership is the single biggest incentive they can offer to people to enter the more Western liberal democratic orbit and detach from Russia, which, again, as I say, just brings us to Georgia. So Georgia is a country on the other side of the Black Sea, so on the the northeast edge of of Turkey, the kind of top right of Turkey. And there, we are
24:31 Rory Stewart? also going into an election in which the Georgian Dream Party, which is the ruling party, which is financed and run basically by a man called Ivan Shvili, which is pro-Russian, is running a very anti-NATO campaign in which it's basically suggesting that the opposition will drag Georgia into some war. They show big posters of Mariupol in in Ukraine shattered and saying this is what Georgia will look like if these guys win. The likelihood from the polls, although we're all pretty sceptical of polls. Seems to be that the Georgian dream is likely to be defeated, but they again are up to real monstrous stuff.
25:12 Rory Stewart? So the the bodyguard of Yevgen Shvedya, a real sort of thug, has now been put in charge by the party of supervising the elections. And both parties are playing for EU accession, but the Georgian vision of EU accession from from the Georgian dream, from the pro-Russian party is, yes, we'll join the EU, provided the EU is much more like Viktor Orban's Hungary.
25:33 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, although there was an incredible pro-EU march in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, over the weekend. I mean, huge.
25:41 Rory Stewart? It was really dramatic, wasn't it? Yeah.
25:43 Alastair Campbell? And it's a country of just, you know, fewer than four million people. I mean, the Georgian dream, in a way, they try to, if I may quote the Richard Johnson, they try to have their cake and eat it. They sort of say that they're pro-EU and pro-NATO, but as you say, then they they apply all these these kind of conditions. And of course, they're also, where they're following Orban is also in relation to some of the stuff they've done on curbing LGBT rights, which is very much part of that kind of right-wing populist playbook. We talked before about these massive protests when they were bringing in this foreign agents bill, essentially to try and stop any media and NGOs with foreign funding from operating unless they were in support of of Georgian dream.
26:23 Alastair Campbell? And so you've got this billionaire, very pro-Russian, who's essentially in charge with a sort of placement Prime Minister, Kovačić. And, you know, he is driving a very different agenda to the one that maybe publicly has been put out to to candidates. And, you know, they've been in power now since 2012. So, I don't know, you say the polls suggest they're not going to win. I'm not sure. I think they probably will win. The support they're getting, again, through, you know, Russian financial support and political support is huge. And when you think about it, we still haven't got to the bottom of Russian interference in Brexit. We still haven't really got to the bottom of their interference in the Hillary Clinton-Trump election. I mean, they are all over these elections.
27:04 Alastair Campbell? And you had this situation this week where Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, under parliamentary privilege, naming people like Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson as Russian assets, paid Russian assets.
27:18 Alastair Campbell? So, you know, the idea that they're not interfering in democracies is for the birds.
27:24 Rory Stewart? It feels very existential for them, doesn't it? Because these are all former parts of the USSR, either on the western or the southern flank of Russia. The Baltic states obviously have left and joined the EU. But it's a fight, really, Ukraine is just one symbol of it. But we're seeing in Moldova and in Georgia, states that are hovering. And then we're seeing in Azerbaijan and Belarus, states that have gone full on autocratic. In the case of Belarus, full on autocratic, pro Moscow. In the case of Azerbaijan, full on autocratic, not really pro Moscow. But these places, we don't talk much about, and we should talk much more about. My sense is, I don't know whether you agree with this, is that in Berlin or in Paris,
28:07 Rory Stewart? people are much, much more focused on questions of what's happening in Georgia, what's happening in Moldova, what's happening in Belarus than we are in Britain.
28:14 Alastair Campbell? Oh, yeah, for sure, because we've isolated ourselves from the European Union through Brexit. But these countries, you gave the list of the ones in the east a few moments ago, that, you know, they see joining the European Union as the absolute goal. And yet what you have in Georgia is that it's part of the overall goal. But at the same time, they're trying to play both sides against each other. That's a very dangerous game for them to play, I think. Ultimately, Putin is somebody who you kind of got to make the choice. And, you know, it's interesting how not that long ago, the European Union, first of all, they granted the member status, then they froze the application because of some of the problems that were going on in Jordan politics. They then revisited the decision and they revived the application status.
28:58 Alastair Campbell? But they're on probation essentially, and they're on probation by both sides. So they're caught in a very, very difficult position. And this election is going to be absolutely fascinating is to see where it pans out.
29:10 Rory Stewart? This is also where EU leadership is key, isn't it? I mean, part of the problem is that Macron's popularity is so low, Scholz's popularity is low. So. Having the confidence in Europe to really make bold generous offers and follow through with economic packages to really encourage people to come on to move in a Western democratic direction away from Russia is tricky. And we're still, you know, just to finish this half maybe with a gloomy note, we've talked a bit about the risks that if Trump wins, if Putin were then to be given much more of a free hand in Kiev, you can very much imagine Serbia trying to do stuff in northern Kosovo and Republic of Serbia. You can imagine Azerbaijan reclaiming its ambitions to what it calls West Azerbaijan,
29:53 Rory Stewart? which is a bit of territory in Armenia. All of this stuff is connected and is very, very sensitive. When we think about domino effects, when we think about Russian Ukraine, we tend not to think through the micro details of what can happen in a lot of these states and what's at stake here.
30:08 Alastair Campbell? Well, the Moldova presidential election, the second round is November the 3rd, and the Georgian election is this upcoming Saturday, 26th of October. So a lot going on in Eastern Europe, watched carefully by the European Union and by Vlad in the Kremlin. Let's take a break.
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32:29 Rory Stewart? Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.
32:32 Alastair Campbell? And me, Alastair Campbell. And Rory, you mentioned one of your heroes in the answer before the break. But a couple more of your heroes have been very majorly in the news. First of all, not far from where you are. Your friend, King Charles, being subject to this lone protester calling him a genocidal conqueror of our lands. And then more importantly, David Gork, your number one hero, has now achieved something that you've been desperately trying to achieve, which is get a job with the Labour government.
33:00 Rory Stewart? He's amazing.
33:02 Alastair Campbell? So what do you say about the king, first of all? And then what do you say about David Gork?
33:06 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and a quick, quick plug for one of my third heroes, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who's on leading.
33:10 Alastair Campbell? Oh, he's one of mine too.
33:11 Rory Stewart? Leading this week. You kept referring to him as AOC, which keeps confusing me. I keep thinking that we've got Alexander Ocasio-Cortez on, but no, indeed it is the Archbishop of Canterbury. And actually, it's a wonderful, wonderful interview for people who want to go over to our leading channel because he's got an extraordinary simplicity and frankness in talking about a pretty traumatic elements of his childhood, about issues of his mental health, about his mother's alcoholism, but does it in a way that is completely lacking in kind of self pity and is just done with a lot of humility and straightforwardness. So that was a lovely, lovely interview.
33:44 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, and he's also, he's very, very interesting on the subject of God and faith, which I guess for the Archbishop of Canterbury, that's a sort of minimum qualification. But nonetheless, it's always interesting when you you talk to somebody who thinks about it as deeply as he does about his thoughts. Yeah, I is one of my all time favourites, I would say, and seems to be going down very, very well with our with our listeners. Now, what about the King and what about David Gork?
34:07 Rory Stewart? Well, quickly on the King. So as you say, I'm in Australia and the King is also in Australia and
34:12 Alastair Campbell? I bet you're meeting up, aren't you? You're meeting up.
34:16 Rory Stewart? You are. He's got better things to do than meet me when he's in Australia. He's got a lot of Australians to meet. No, I think that the tour has been very well received. It's on a smaller scale, I think, than a royal tour probably would have been forty, fifty years ago. But there's not much sense, at least amongst people I'm meeting, of strong republican sentiment. There have been crowds out to meet him. As you say, in the Canberra Parliament, there was a protest by a leading woman from the Aboriginal community who talked about historic wrongs. But other members of parliament then spoke out and said that they felt that she'd been impolite and were much more respectful. I think people have been struck by, certainly people around here anyway, that I've been talking to, struck by his energy. I mean, he's he has just been recovering from chemotherapy. Just how
35:00 Rory Stewart? much he is demonstrating again and again his affection for Australia. He spent a year here as a student, which he talks about a lot. And no, I feel I feel it's interesting that whereas republicanism probably would have been more of an issue here ten, fifteen years ago, it doesn't really feel like that. And there was a very, very warm article in the Australian newspaper yesterday by Alexander Downer.
35:21 Alastair Campbell? Oh, he's a right old right winger, he is.
35:23 Rory Stewart? It's a big, big royalist.
35:24 Alastair Campbell? He was one of the few Aussies who was in favour of Brexit. I went right off him then. Rory, I know you're obsessed with hair. Okay.
35:32 Rory Stewart? Yes.
35:32 Alastair Campbell? I do think if you can maybe drop your Fred and the King a message. I think he needs a little trim. He's gone very thin on top, but he needs a trim around the ears. It's just he's developing these curls. What's that all about?
35:43 Rory Stewart? Oh, well, goodness gracious me. Okay, well, there we are. I'm sure I can raise that. Now, David Gork, just quick explainer, has been put in charge of a review of sentencing. So David Gork was my boss when he was Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice. And he and I tried to push through a reform to abolish sentences for under six months for people who'd not been involved in violent crime. And that is because I was finding people in Bedford Prison, I found a man who'd been in prison something like seven times in a year, because people were getting sentences for a few days at a time, which was only long enough to disrupt their lives, lose them their housing, lose them the job if they had one, and then they were popped out in the street again.
36:27 Rory Stewart? And actually, these short sentences contributed to so much violence and instability and reoffending. So we tried hard to get rid of them, but in fact Boris Johnson got on the way, the Theresa May government fell, David and I left our positions and that reform didn't go through. So it's interesting that Labour's now appointed him to this role because it suggests they may be interested in bringing that back in again.
36:48 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think a combination of James Timson as the Prisons Minister, who is a very, you know, somebody who's got a track record of having a very rehabilitative approach to prisons, and David Gork, as you say, somebody who with you tried to change sentencing in a way that would see fewer people going to prison, that is a very, very clear direction of travel. And it coincides today, Roy, I don't know if you've picked up this where you are, but the government is going to be releasing another 1,100 prisoners early because of the current overcrowding. And these are mainly, I think, going to be coming from open prisons, so they've been maybe working more towards rehabilitation anyway.
37:29 Alastair Campbell? But it just shows you the extent to which there is an absolute crisis in our prison system.
37:35 Rory Stewart? And showing some courage on Labour's part, because I remember talking to the Shadow Team when Labour were in opposition and trying to encourage them to push ahead with this. And a few months ago, they were very reluctant to do it. They pointed out that it was one thing for David Gork and I to be pushing ahead with this under a Conservative government, because in a way Conservatives can be more liberal on prison because they're less likely to be criticised by the opposition. And they said that if Labour were to do it, they'd be accused of being weak on crime. And you can see this already, that a lot of the Tory leadership candidates have been majoring on the fact that people were released from prison who reoffended and then had to be put back in prison again. So I'm impressed that they've pushed ahead with that and that they've decided to do something liberal on that. And I hope they keep their nerve.
38:18 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, it's very interesting, this thing though, about how long a government has, as it were, to say, we're dealing with the mess that was left behind. I mean, I think on prisons, people get it. But I was at a conference the other day, I did two conferences in successive days at the same event. One was on health and one was in education. And I got the feeling that people are already, it's almost like they're already forgetting that Labour was only elected just over a hundred days ago. The sense of, you know, when are they going to get on with it? So like, West Streeting yesterday announcing there's going to be a 10-year plan for the health service, which I think you and I agree, it needs that sort of long-term approach. But much of the response was, well, you know, we can't wait 10 years, we've got to do this now, we're going to do it now.
38:59 Alastair Campbell? And I think that's going to get very, very hard, very, very soon. It's why I wish to God we'd get on with this budget and the spending review. And we could start to see some, some real signposting of where the money's going to go.
39:09 Rory Stewart? Yeah, I mean, you, you keep pointing this out, this four months delay to the budget, given the budget is critical to their narrative, is very dangerous. Just on the politics of this, they are going to spend political capital on this sentencing review. And I wondered whether that means that they have less appetite for taking risk on things like reform of the NHS, or whether you think that's, they're not incompatible.
39:31 Alastair Campbell? My sense of West Streeting is that he really is up for some pretty big reforms. So no, I don't, I don't think that's the problem. I think the problem is more in relation to the, the prisons issue. I think it's almost, it's like it's in its own separate category. It's just going to take two or three of these prisoners who've been released early to do something really terrible when they're out, for that then to sort of come back and hit them in the face. But they just have to keep explaining the reason why they're having to do this. So no, I don't see that as the problem. Um, now, shall we just briefly close off with the Middle East story? Because that was pretty dramatic stuff last week.
40:03 Rory Stewart? Obviously, the, the really big news this week is the killing of Yahia Sinwa, who was the head of Hamas and has been for more than a year the number one target of the Israeli mission. He was a man who came from a family originally displaced from Israel during the Nakba, during the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians at the time of the creation of the state of Israel. Grew up in a refugee camp, studied. In Gaza was arrested very early on, joined the armed operations in Gaza very early on, was held in Israeli prisons and established a lot of his networks and reputations in prisons. And this is very common. I mean, this was true with the IRA, wasn't it? That a lot of the key commanders created a lot of their networks and credibility when they were in prisons.
40:48 Alastair Campbell? He was in prison for 22 years.
40:50 Rory Stewart? It's a very, very long time.
40:51 Alastair Campbell? He's in prison for a long, long time.
40:53 Rory Stewart? And this was true also, the founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq also very much created through time in prisons. He was released in this famous hostage swap where a single Israeli soldier who had been captured was released in exchange for over a thousand Palestinian prisoners, of which Yahya Sinwar was one. And this is also important because this is in the back of the story of why particularly the right in Netanyahu's government are very reluctant to do hostage deals again because of this perception that terrorists were released. He was the mastermind of the October 7th attacks and therefore very much core terrorist. I mean, you know, he is, as it were, the Osama bin Laden of this whole setup. He was the guy that drove, planned and executed that attack.
41:36 Rory Stewart? Now, the question then that immediately struck everybody when he was killed is, is this potentially the moment where Netanyahu changes direction? Does he say, okay, I've now killed Hassan Nasrul and the Hezbollah commander. I've killed Yahya Sinwar, I've killed Ismail Haniyeh. Hezbollah leadership has been wiped out by these pager attacks and radio attacks. Mission accomplished and we're now going to move to a new stage. But of course, that is not what he's done, which raises a question. What is the end to this and what is it that he's keeping going, trying to do?
42:08 Alastair Campbell? When this happened and there was extraordinary footage of him sitting there in a sort of rubble, in a house, but it was kind of a house that was clearly sort of, you know, very badly damaged. And he's sitting in a chair and his hand looks like it's been severed. And he throws a stick or he throws a piece of wood or something at this drone camera. It was unbelievably dramatic. And then, of course, the body gets taken away by the Israelis. They do this DNA test, they confirm that it's him. Then Hamas confirms that it's him. And you did think. For a moment, maybe this is the point at which they can say, well, we said we were going to obliterate the leadership, we've now done that. Since when, actually, they've gone, it seems to me, in an opposite direction. They're actually maximizing it. There was
42:51 Alastair Campbell? a remarkable report on Channel 4 News last night of a gathering of settlers and Ben Gavir was there. And it was almost like they were, there was an interview with this guy who essentially was saying they want to move back into Gaza, they want to live in Gaza. And it's, you sort of had a sense of Netanyahu trapped by these forces, essentially he's got the international community on one side trying to do one thing, and this hard right, Ben Gavir and Smotrich in particular, essentially saying, no, you can't do anything until we've absolutely wiped these people out. And that sort of gives you the feeling of it's, it's impossible to see how this now ends, if that is the mindset that is, that is driving them, not to see that there may have been some possibility of trying to work
43:35 Alastair Campbell? towards a, a solution of the, of the current crisis.
43:39 Rory Stewart? I mean, the sense is, I guess, that Netanyahu must feel over the last few weeks that he's, as it were, on a roll.
43:45 Alastair Campbell? Well, he is on a roll. Militarily, they're on a roll, no doubt about that.
43:48 Rory Stewart? Absolutely. I mean, because the operations against Hezbollah were so successful and now, now the killing of, of Yahya Sinwar. But it seems to me this is the high point of the role. And, and that's why I think it's dangerous. There's something very strange about keeping pushing on, because what more can you achieve in this light? I mean, what, what's next? And I think the sense is that you could be doing, I suppose, one of two things. You could be trying to reinforce deterrence, in other words, saying, if people attack Israel, we hit them back very hard. That, I would have thought, has been amply achieved, if that's what they're trying to do. Nobody's in any doubt since October the 7th that Israel hits back very hard and kills a lot of people. The, the second idea
44:32 Rory Stewart? that by continuing, you're going to be able to lead to all the hostages coming back and all the Hamas remaining people involved in the attack being eliminated, that seems to make less sense to me, because I can't see a Unconditional surrender. I mean, it's almost as though Netanyahu is trying to suggest that it it'll be like the end of the Second World War, that you'll have some generals turning up and signing a bit of paper and saying, you know, you give up. It's not how terrorist organisations operate. And therefore, what's likely to happen is Israel will find itself conducting military operations week in, week out for the foreseeable future. Presumably through a US election, hoping for a Trump election. And what does that mean?
45:16 Rory Stewart? Well, then it feels a bit like the situation Israel got itself trapped in in Lebanon in the eighties and nineties.
45:22 Alastair Campbell? And also, the war aim, they said at the start, post-October 7, it was to eliminate Hamas leadership. But there will always be a new leadership. There will be no shortage of people who will want to step up and say that they are the leadership of Hamas. And likewise, when you you just have to look at, even though you, no foreign media allowed into Gaza, but you just have to see the pictures that are released by the IDF to understand that the place is being reduced to rubble. And the idea that there won't be people within that who think, do you know what? I'm now going to make it my life's aim to get revenge, to fight back against Israel. There will be a new generation of, and whether they'll be called Hamas or they'll be called something else.
46:05 Alastair Campbell? So I think at some point, there has to be the political leadership that says, okay, we've done what we set out to achieve militarily. Now we have to have some sort of political strategy. But it's very, when you watch that, you should take a look at that Channel 4 interview last night. When you see that sort of political force on the other side of the equation that Netanyahu is kind of the meat and the sandwich of, it's very, very hard to see how how Israel takes it forward from the strategy that they've been pursuing since October 7.
46:32 Rory Stewart? Yahis Sima's death has real operational significance. He clearly was very important in the running of Hamas. There are eyewitness accounts of him meeting the hostages. He was clearly very involved in the attempts to get ceasefire negotiations together, talking through intermediaries and even with US negotiators. And of course, when Ismail Haniya was killed in the inauguration in Tehran, he then took over a very centralised command of. Hamas. But I think there are two buts. One of them is that he will have been very aware that he was going to be killed sooner or later. These final moments suggest somebody who was becoming increasingly reckless. He was killed not in a tunnel far underground, but above
47:14 Rory Stewart? ground with only two or three people with him. I mean, the piecing together the accounts from the Israeli battalion, it appears that they went into a building above ground when an Israeli battalion was operating in that area, came out into the open when there were a lot of Israeli soldiers around, ran across an open space. He then went up into this building which you've described, threw a grenade, one of which exploded, an injured Israeli soldier, another one of which didn't explode, was then hit by a tank round. As you say, a drone went in, he covered his face, tried to throw the stick at the drone, presumably hoping he could disable the drones so they wouldn't recognize who he was, and then raised his head and was shot in the head by a sniper.
47:55 Rory Stewart? But that is a very, very strange exposed position for military commander to be in. And he's been saying for some months now that he was expecting to be killed. So I guess all I'd say from that is there will be some kind of succession plan in place. And just before I come back to you, I mean, it's also important to understand that Israel has not done very well in penetrating Hamas. It obviously understands Hezbollah very well. Its operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon were incredibly effective, and they had a lot of information of where Nasrallah was based, and they did these extraordinary things around pages and radios. But the failure to predict October the 7th, which had been planned for months, showed they had very little intelligence penetration of Hamas. They have, a few months ago, the IDF suggested they thought they'd killed
48:38 Rory Stewart? Yehudin when they clearly hadn't. And the fact that he was eventually killed basically by accident, by a relatively low level unit that caught him in the open reinforces the sense that we don't really know what is going on in Hamas and what happens when he leaves.
48:53 Alastair Campbell? I think the fact that he was killed, as you say, above ground. In the way that he was kind of fighting to the end, not heading away in the tunnels, which is what everybody had thought, sort of adds to the martyrdom, the hero status and all that within his own people. And that, I suspect, will further fuel the sense that there is a, there will be succession and there will be a new generation. So do they just keep wiping out the new leadership as they, as they replace them? Does that just become a kind of permanent, permanent war?
49:24 Rory Stewart? Which is the, the expression, isn't it? Mowing the grass, which Israeli intelligence and the IDF often use, which is that you just keep taking the leadership out.
49:32 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. My final point, Roy, just on the sort of state of devastation in Gaza. There was a United Nations assessment which reckons that two thirds of all structures, including two more than a quarter of a million housing units, have sustained at least some damage. And almost as many buildings have been destroyed or damaged in Gaza as in the whole of Ukraine after the first two years of the war with Russia. And that's a research project done using, studying satellite imaging. And remember that Gaza is tiny, tiny, it's less than half the size of Kiev. So, you know, you're talking about a scale of devastation that is, that is absolutely enormous.
50:11 Rory Stewart? And I think, you know, demonstrated, as you said, in that, that image of that building and that sofa, it's kind of very dramatic image of, of the, the streetscape of, of Gaza at the moment. Well, thank you, Alastair, for your time. And question time tomorrow, where we'll be able to get into many other parts of the world and many other issues. And thank you for your time today.
50:30 Alastair Campbell? See you soon. Bye.
50:46 Speaker 07 The Great Game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.
50:54 Speaker 08 We assess a Prime Minister with high confidence it was Russian.
51:00 Speaker 09 Holding the Russians accountable is World War Three.
51:02 Speaker 10 They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.
51:05 Speaker 07 Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not?
51:11 Alastair Campbell? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing.
51:18 Speaker 11 We would need to understand the policy context.
51:21 Speaker 07 All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.
51:29 Speaker 12 A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?
51:34 Speaker 07 Yes.
51:36 Speaker 09 New from Goldhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?
51:41 Speaker 13 You're my soldier, are you? Sergeant Tom MacDuff, Duffy!
51:45 Speaker 09 An audio drama journey like no other.
51:47 Speaker 13 Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.
51:51 Speaker 09 Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller.
51:54 Speaker 13 We have two types friendly KIA.
51:56 Speaker 09 Where Britain plays its strongest hand. He's the best. Against its strongest foe. Don't do it Duffy! Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.
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