Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 344. Question Time: Should MPs vote with their conscience or constituents? About this episode Is there anything wrong with being an isolationist government? How far has ‘woke’ been weaponised by the far-right? Will Rory ever go on reality TV?
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Transcript 9,086 words · 12 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.
1:05 Speaker 02 I get so many headaches every month.
1:08 Speaker 03 It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.
1:13 Speaker 04 Botox on a botulinum toxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton Syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.
1:58 Speaker 03 Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.
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2:28 Rory Stewart? Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.
2:31 Alastair Campbell? And me Alastair Campbell. Right Rory, here's one. Richard Mendelson, with regard to free votes in Parliament, such as the assisted dying bill, do you think an MP whose conscience tells them to vote against the bill should do so, even if 70% of the public, I presume in their constituency, support the bill? That is, should they go with their conscience, or should they canvass views and represent their constituency? And sorry to relentlessly plug leading, but we should point out that Kim Ledbita, who's the MP taking this private members bill on assisted dying through Parliament, is this week's interview. So what did you, did you ever have an issue like that Rory, where you felt that what you believed was fundamentally at odds with your constituents, and yet you followed your own path?
3:14 Rory Stewart? Yes, I mean, let's take Brexit, for example. The majority of my constituents in Cumbria voted for Brexit. I supported Remain. After the vote, the majority of them either wanted a second referendum, or they wanted a hard Brexit, and I pushed for a customs union soft Brexit.
3:28 Alastair Campbell? Right.
3:29 Rory Stewart? But another big example of this is when we abolished capital punishment in the UK. It was the MPs that did it. 70% of the British public was against abolishing capital punishment. So the point is that members of Parliament are representatives, they're not delegates. And if you wanted a system that simply reflected the opinion of the public, there's a very straightforward way of doing this. You just hold a referendum on assisted dying. But if you're going to do it through Parliament, yes, you've absolutely got to believe, difficult though it is to believe, that members of Parliament have more time on their hands to scrutinize the legislation and allow their brains, their consciences, to operate. And if you don't like what they've done, you can always boot them out at the next election.
4:08 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. With this sort of passage of a few days since we talked to Kim Ledbita, what are your reflections, both on the issues and also what you think is going to happen in Parliament?
4:17 Rory Stewart? I think she's absolutely right to point to the horrible suffering that some people go through towards the end of life. And she's right to question what that life is like. And she's right to assert that people should have some autonomy or choice over their destiny. On the other hand, she's putting a lot of faith in bureaucratic systems to be able to weigh up people's decisions. And I remain very anxious about the fact that if this were an option, you would feel under subconscious moral pressure to free up your family's budget, relieve them of pressure of time. I mean, every old person I know, I mean, I don't want to overdo this, is always saying, I don't want to be a bother. I don't want to be a bother. Please don't, you know, go out of
4:59 Rory Stewart? your way to do this for me. And I'm afraid you really need to improve massively adult social care, palliative care, and not make it a financial burden on people before you introduce this sort of legislation. Because otherwise, if social care is crippling expensive, you're stacking things in a way that I'm afraid might make someone feel, particularly when they're feeling weak and fragile and a bit depressed, that they don't want to be a burden. I think that's heartbreaking. And I think it's also challenges something very fundamental in the way we traditionally do medicine and the Hippocratic Oath. And I think there is a difference between the way we do things at the moment, which is that if somebody wants, we can withdraw interventions which prolong their life, is a little bit different from asking a professional.
5:44 Alastair Campbell? To end on that, yeah. I was, I was pretty persuaded because of the safeguards that she, that she set out. I can't read the debate at all in terms of where I think parliamentary opinion is, because there are so many new MPs whose views I just don't know. So I don't know where it's going to go. But it's, I think she's right, by the way, that I think it's a good thing that we're having a debate that relates to the subject of death, because I think as a country, we are terrible about talking about death compared to, to some others. Rory, here's a good one. Josh Harrison, global versus domestic priorities. How do you think the UK government should handle global versus local political priorities in the modern climate?
6:22 Rory Stewart? Oh, well, let me let me flip that back to you. So I guess it's probably always been true that the voting public focus more on doorstep issues than they do on international issues. Nevertheless, countries like the US and UK have often had quite bold expansive foreign policies, invested quite a lot in their diplomats in long term defence, prime ministers and presidents do a lot of international stuff. So what happens if you are in number 10 and you're looking at the polls and you're interested in winning the next election? How do you manage that question of the fact that voters will tend to be focused much more on domestic issues? And how do you create the space for thinking hard about a strategy globally?
7:04 Alastair Campbell? You have to do both and you have to make the you have to link them. You have to make the link between them. So, as you know, I'm in Norway today. Here's a question for you, Rory.
7:13 Rory Stewart? Yep.
7:13 Alastair Campbell? When was the last time a British prime minister visited Norway, a serving British prime minister visited Norway?
7:20 Rory Stewart? I have absolutely no idea. Tell me.
7:22 Alastair Campbell? Would you think it'd be reasonably recently?
7:26 Rory Stewart? Well, I've just discovered that no American president has visited sub Saharan Africa since Obama. And I've just discovered that basically until Theresa May, British prime ministers had barely visited Africa, and I guess have barely visited since. So if nobody's going to the over 40 countries in Africa, my suspicion is it's been a long time since they've been to Norway.
7:45 Alastair Campbell? Well, it was it was Margaret Thatcher in 1986.
7:49 Rory Stewart? Well, that's shocking. That's shocking because that's a very quick flight. And as you say, 30% of our energy is coming from Norway.
7:55 Alastair Campbell? I know Tony came here several times after he stopped being prime minister when he was doing the Middle East peace envoy job because Norway, as we said yesterday, has always been a part of that. But anyway, Keir Starmer, it seems, is coming here now. And I think there are very good reasons to do that. One is the energy issue that you just talked about. The second is, I think that the there are really important strategic and defence issues. In a sense, you have to constantly be explaining to people why this is such an important part. Of your job. As you get near an election, you probably have to kind of dial it down a bit. But I think in the modern age, if you think of where Britain is strategically at the moment, particularly with Trump back in power, we're going to face some really difficult kind of challenges
8:39 Alastair Campbell? of statecraft relating to relations with America, relations with Europe, to the the growth mission that we have, how do we repair the damage of Brexit, all that stuff. So I think it's foolish for us to think that because a prime minister goes abroad a lot, somehow that means they're not focusing on the UK. Where you've got to really, really, really watch it is when international crisis comes along on top of that. And people actually start to think that's what you're in the job for. You're actually more interested in the kind of abroad than home. That's where it gets tricky. And it's part of the job of modern government, much, much, much more so than I'd say even back in the days, pre-social media, pre the international institutions. I think today more than ever, we talked about these international
9:24 Alastair Campbell? institutions weakening. I think today more than ever, foreign policy is a very, very big part of your business.
9:29 Rory Stewart? And if in my, I mean, in my most gloomy moments, it feels to me like we have some of the elements that run up to the First World War, that many of the warning lights are now flashing very, very badly and are flashing much harder than they were eight years ago when Trump first came in. So that really does require people to care about global security and understand difficult things like how Ukraine or Baltic might ultimately be important for British security.
9:56 Alastair Campbell? Well, here's another really interesting observation from Angela Merkel's book. She says, "I don't know whether Putin would have invaded Ukraine regardless of the pandemic, but it certainly didn't help that the pandemic prevented leaders from meeting face to face." I thought that was an interesting observation.
10:16 Rory Stewart? Yeah, absolutely.
10:18 Alastair Campbell? Those meetings, you know, they really do matter. Being able to develop relationships, being able to speak face to face rather than, you know, like us now through a screen or on the telephone where you're not sure about, you know, who's listening and all that stuff. It's really important in diplomacy.
10:34 Rory Stewart? We also underestimate the importance of time. And one of the problems that democratic leaders have is they flip over so quickly, whereas the autocratic leaders are there almost indefinitely. So one of the reasons actually our king is quite helpful is that he's the only person that has these very deep longstanding relationships, for example, with the monarchies in Saudi Arabia or UAE or Qatar, which go back, you know, forty, fifty years. I mean, he's known some of these people when they were kids and they knew him when he was kids. But it's also true that one of the problems in Europe is that the longest serving member of the European Union leader is Viktor Orban. And that's what frees him up to go prancing around Georgia, championing populist pro Putin governments. As we go into next year,
11:18 Rory Stewart? we'll be in a world in which Macron's gone, Schultz has gone. The leaders of the major economies in Europe will be very, very new in their jobs and simply won't have those depths of relationship. And Xi Jinping's been in twelve years now.
11:33 Alastair Campbell? And he's in for life.
11:34 Rory Stewart? Vladimir Putin was coming in when you were in office, right?
11:38 Alastair Campbell? He was coming in right at the start. So he'd been around all of this century and a bit more.
11:43 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
11:43 Alastair Campbell? He had his little interregnum where he pretended to be the prime minister rather than president. Merkel's book, by the way, when you get around to reading it, that's another, sorry to ping it again, but that's what you said there is really interesting because she talks about a lot of the conversations she had with Putin. One of the early ones, he said to her that one of the differences that he liked between America and Russia is that in America you're limited to two terms, whereas in Russia you're just limited to two consecutive terms.
12:12 Alastair Campbell? This was long before he sort of floated this idea that I'll be prime minister for a few years. By the way, Roy, this event I'm doing in Oslo tonight, also on the panel, is Navalny's daughter.
12:24 Rory Stewart? Oh, yes.
12:25 Alastair Campbell? My, I met her last night. God, is she impressive. Twenty-three. So impressive. That is some family.
12:33 Rory Stewart? Okay, Anissa, quick break, then back with more questions.
12:36 Speaker 02 I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine, fifteen or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.
12:44 Speaker 04 Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.
13:29 Speaker 03 Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.
13:36 Speaker 05 A payday candy bar is miles and miles of peanuts. Salty, crunchy peanuts, sweet, sweet caramel, raving you up with every bite. Enjoy the tasty journey, my friend. Payday Peanut Caramel Bar.
13:52 Speaker 06 The best part of waking up? A full cup of Folgers coffee and music on full blast.
14:18 Speaker 06 Shop Folgers K-Cup Pods and more at your nearest retailer.
14:27 Rory Stewart? So Alistair, as you know, we're powered by Fuse Energy, which is a green energy company.
14:33 Alastair Campbell? And a reminder that Fuse are offering a Black Friday deal. Switch to Fuse before the 3rd of December. Receive £30 credit off your next bill when signing up to their fixed. Tariff.
14:42 Rory Stewart? And their tariffs are already ninety pounds cheaper than the new fixed price cap. So trip listeners will save a hundred and twenty pounds by switching during this week. Act fast as this is a limited time offer. Download the app now, use the referral code POLITICS after signing up. Learn more at getfuse.com/politics. That's G E T F U S E dot com forward slash politics. Given that we're talking about green energy, I think that's a good segue into COP, which has just come to an end.
15:11 Alastair Campbell? Ed, what are your views on the deal agreed at COP and the various protests such as the walkout by the Alliance of Small Island States? I mean, you'd be hard pressed to say it was a great triumph, wouldn't you?
15:22 Rory Stewart? You definitely would. I mean, climate paradoxically is getting less and less coverage. And you talked about this a little bit in yesterday's podcast, where you mentioned that Justin Trudeau had found that climate has gone from being the number one issue in Canadian politics to hardly rating at all. And when we talk about Donald Trump, you know, it's very tempting to talk about the rise of populism and Ukraine and the Middle East. And often we neglect to mention climate. And of course, the climate catastrophe continues massively apace. So let's step back for a moment and just before we get on to what happened in this COP, which was in Baku in Azerbaijan. The fundamental framework of the way in which we're dealing with this looks increasingly creaky. This goes all the way back to the Paris Agreement.
16:04 Rory Stewart? And if you remember what happened at Paris is that countries got together, discovered that we were well off track to stop a two degree rise in mean temperature and decided to deal with this by setting an even more ambitious target of keeping warming down to one point five degrees centigrade. This was a pretty bizarre decision, given that we were already off track. And of course, the truth is that this year, twenty twenty four, we've already hit the one and a half degree warming. And we're well off target to meet the two degrees. In fact, since Paris, every single year, carbon in the atmosphere have gone up by two parts per million. In other words, the only one big fact that you need to remember is that it's carbon equivalents in the atmosphere, which are going to drive the warming.
16:47 Rory Stewart? And we just keep adding carbon equivalents to the atmosphere every year. At a totally steady rate, there's been no slowdown in its increase despite all the progress that's been made on green energy because we just consume more and more energy. So even if we're making more and more renewable energy, the amount of energy from fossil fuels continues to go up. And there again, I think the other fact, just before I turn back to you on COP, is that Britain and Europe are a smaller and smaller part of this. So our emissions are less than 5% of global emissions. And as Europe largely transitions out of coal, countries like China, but also India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, continue to burn coal and emit at an enormous rate, China probably emitting nearly five times the rates of Europe. Okay, over to you.
17:31 Alastair Campbell? Two things to say. The first is the point about falling down the agenda. I mean, the start of COP seemed to me to get a lot of attention globally. And the end of COP got quite a lot of attention. I would say that previous COPs, there has been sustained global interest whilst the negotiations have been taking place. And it seems to me that was another indication of how this has fallen down the agenda. One of the reasons I think it's fallen down the agenda, we talk about a lot about right wing populism, is because the right wing populists have been have been downplaying it, pushing it down the agenda. And of course, when you have Donald Trump coming in and it still sort of hangs to the view that climate change is a hoax and a scam,
18:11 Alastair Campbell? then that inevitably leads to perhaps further downgrading of an issue. And the second issue is the the scale of the deal that was done that was reached at the end. So they basically agreed to 300 billion to help developing countries. And that was way, way, way, way, way short of what those countries had wanted. There's a larger target of 1.3 trillion dollars a year, but most of that's got to come from private sources. So there you're basically talking about something that you you cannot remotely guarantee. So a lot of the smaller nations and some of the countries that were, you know, frankly see climate change as an existential threat,
18:52 Alastair Campbell? they talked about this agreement being something of an illusion. Even the bit that the the parties had agreed to doesn't necessarily deliver remotely on the objective. That was set for the for the COP.
19:03 Rory Stewart? We have interviewed three people on leading who I think are really worth listening to if people want to get different perspectives on this. Christina Figueres, who was the Costa Rican who helped put together this whole COP process, which we're currently criticizing. Kate Rayworth, who points out that growth itself, which is completely central to every political debate in every country and keeps our health services going, is directly correlated with carbon emissions and screwing up our environment. And actually believes that to get stay within our planetary boundaries, we need to challenge the religion of growth. And thirdly, Dieter Helm, who points out pretty brutally that increasingly we are making no difference, that everything is going in the wrong direction, the world is frying, and that the policy interventions we've done are just not having the impact that people fantasized about.
19:48 Rory Stewart? So let's get back to Figueres's basic setup and what you've just described. Fundamentally, what's happening is that I think more than 10,000 people are gathering at these COPs. And there's a huge attempt to get every country in the world together. And a lot of the focus is on climate justice and moving money to less developed countries. I would argue that if your basic aim is to stop global warming, this is completely the wrong way to set about it. You would be much better just focusing on the G20. The G20 emits 75 or 80% of full global emissions. If we were actually serious about this, instead of the whole thing being a ridiculous talking shop,
20:28 Rory Stewart? the G20 would have put in another couple of days in its meeting and really focused on trying to crack this. I'm afraid that we are slightly fiddling while Rome's burned. And actually, a lot of the stuff that we're talking about moving to less developed nations would be better done through international development budgets, while the G20 focused on cracking its emissions.
20:45 Alastair Campbell? Hmm, interesting. As you said that, though, I was thinking of the countries most affected. You essentially say, right, we cut you out of the process. We let the big guys take over. We let the big guys do it.
20:55 Rory Stewart? Well, I think the politics is very tricky, but I think what you would say is we will provide very generous support to the poorest countries, but they're not the ones that are emitting. And we'd provide that support through traditional development mechanisms. What we're trying to do is we're sort of buying off the countries that are affected, but we're not cutting the emissions. And even worse, you know, this is one of the few ways that Trump's correct. We're not getting China and Saudi Arabia to pay.
21:20 Alastair Campbell? Well, Saudi Arabia were absolutely critical in. Watering down the communicate at the end as well in relation to fossil fuels for fairly obvious reasons. So yeah, I need to think about that. I think that's really, I think it's an interesting thought, but I just think that will make it worse. And also, you've got to remember, this is, this is the United Nations process. So for the United Nations suddenly to say, this is going to be driven by the big guys, little guys, you just wait, we'll, you know, we'll work it out for you. That's difficult.
21:49 Rory Stewart? But it depends how much of a crisis you think it is. And the world is literally
21:53 Alastair Campbell? I think it's massive.
21:54 Rory Stewart? frying, and we're on the edge of massive global tipping points.
21:59 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
21:59 Rory Stewart? Where all these things that we've talked about, you know, ice sheets, current changes, wind currents are all inbound unless we crack this. So at that point, if it's a real crisis, let's focus on the people that are emitting 80% of the global emissions, which is the G20.
22:14 Alastair Campbell? This relates to the discussion we had on the May podcast about whether the international bodies that we've got are up to the task of meeting the challenges that we face. And I mentioned Angela Merkel saying that when Trump came in and they knew he was going to take a very different approach, that they tried to adapt to that. But in her book, she's very, very, very, very dispirited. She actually ends the chapter on climate by saying, you know, as to whether the world is ready to make the decisions that it needs to make for our survival, not so sure. So yeah, very, very disappointing, very disappointing.
22:49 Rory Stewart? And then solutions. I mean, this is, Dieter Helm lays this out more detail in our interview with him. But what he proposes in that leading interview is that we should be taxing carbon consumption, not carbon production. What he basically points out is that with carbon, as with a lot of environmental things, we push them out of Europe and pat ourselves on the back. And then we continue to import the products back in from other countries who are doing damage to our environment. So an example in Cumbria, you know, we talk about rewilding, we remove sheep from the landscape because we don't want to damage our precious nature. But we don't reduce our consumption of lamb, we just push the problem to New Zealand. So the sheep can destroy nature in New Zealand, right? Copper production, we don't want to do any copper production. One of the reasons China controls critical minerals and rare earths has this huge geostrategic advantage.
23:34 Rory Stewart? Is that in the US and in Europe, we don't want to bear the environmental cost of mining or processing any of these minerals because there are huge slag heaps, there's water pollution, there's air pollution. So we get China to do all that and then we just import their products back into ourselves and put them back. But the most dramatic one of all is we've deindustrialised, we're no longer burning coal, we're no longer manufacturing anything, but the carbon is still being emitted to make the products that we're using. So Dieter Helm would say that there needs to be a carbon import tax. If soybeans are coming into the UK from Brazilian rainforests, if steel's coming to the UK, at the import level, you pay the carbon tax, or you prove that the carbon tax has been paid in Kenya or Africa or wherever, or China or wherever the
24:18 Rory Stewart? stuff comes from. And governments are desperate for tax revenue, we know that, and this is a much more useful form of tax revenue than putting up employers' national insurance.
24:26 Alastair Campbell? Well, fourth leading interview, we should mention in relation to this, because it was a big part of that interview too, was Bill Gates, who, if you remember, was much, much, much more optimistic about the climate struggle than you or I were. I wonder whether he still feels that now, but yeah.
24:44 Rory Stewart? Let's go on to a sort of slightly more domestic issue, but it's important, even if we don't talk about it much. So, Robert, can Rory and Alistair explain for listeners how hereditary peers are elected to serve in the House of Lords and what are Rory and Alistair's alternatives to the current Lord's system? So hereditary peers were elected under Tony Blair, he reduced the number of hereditary peers down to 90, and then they had little elections within the hereditary peers for who they came. That's all a bit irrelevant. Hereditary peers, obviously, for international listeners, mean people who've not been appointed as life peers, but have inherited it from their dads, mostly, and in very few cases, from their mums. And that system's now ending. Keir Starmer doesn't want any more hereditarys in.
25:24 Alastair Campbell? Quite right.
25:24 Rory Stewart? I got in real trouble from the Lord's Speaker, who I think is an ex-Labor politician.
25:30 Alastair Campbell? John McFaul.
25:31 Rory Stewart? John McFaul, yeah.
25:31 Alastair Campbell? He's a very good man.
25:33 Rory Stewart? Took me aside and said, I was very upset about what she said about the House of Lords, you must come in and have a cup of coffee with me so I can explain all the good work we've done. I'm in trouble because I'd said that actually the hereditary peers were the last. Bit of the House of Lords that made any sense to me because at least they were traditional inheritance from eight hundred years ago.
25:49 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I can see why John would like that.
25:51 Rory Stewart? He was really, really upset about that. Seriously on House of Lords, I mean, my view is that if we want to keep the body now, now that it's no longer got this eight hundred year continuity going, we should make it basically a crossbench house. In other words, have an appointed house with people from different sectors, industries, nurses, trade union leaders, judges, doctors, professors, soldiers, spymasters, diplomats, business people, whatever you want, and allow it to operate as a counterpoint to the House of Commons. Don't increase its power. Don't make it elected. If it's elected, you'll get gridlock because they'll say we're just as elected as you are and we have the same legitimacy as you are. Let them continue to do the reviewing of legislation
26:32 Rory Stewart? and not make it a retirement home for mid-level politicians, says he, just defending all his colleagues in the House of Lords.
26:40 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I can see why John, John Beaufort.
26:43 Rory Stewart? What was his position and was he one of the leading members of a Labour Cabinet, Alistair?
26:48 Alastair Campbell? He was a very, very, very good Treasury Minister as part of Gordon's team. No, he was good. John Beaufort was a very, very serious guy. I won't have a word said against John Beaufort, right? You're, you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna really upset my tribal button here. No, I think he's a very good guy, but he knows that I have very, very strong views about the House of Lords. It's funny, I go in for a cup of tea with him every now and then, but not because he summons me, because he knows that he's got no chance of persuading me about the greatness of the, of the House of Lords. But if you're gonna have a House of Lords, I don't mind him being the Lord's Speaker. I think he's a very good, very, very good thing. Now, Roy, talking of very good things, I wanted to ask this question from David from Belfast. Do you have any stories about Ken Reid during your time in government? This is for me. He was huge for
27:30 Alastair Campbell? for coverage of the Good Friday Agreement and that was a huge reason that I became interested in politics.
27:35 Rory Stewart? Tell us who Ken Reid is.
27:36 Alastair Campbell? Well, Ken Reid was a journalist for UTV, Ulster Television. And I think I've said to you before that that period of the Good Friday Agreement, the media, who are often a complete nightmare, and they could be a complete nightmare in relation to Ireland as well. I remember in particular two journalists by the name of Johnson and Gove, who were constantly trying just to sort of write stories and columns that sort of upended the whole thing. But Ken Reid, who died last week, was one of those guys who really, really, really made an important contribution because they were so determined to kind of get it right. And not get it right, getting it right didn't mean reporting what we said the whole time,
28:19 Alastair Campbell? but they went to real air to sort of, you know, genuinely try to find out what was going on and understood when things might just tip into a, into a bad place. And it's been really sad for Northern Ireland journalists because you had Stephen Grimson at the BBC and now Ken from UTV who both had very, very serious illnesses and both now gone. So, yeah, lots of good memories. And the other good memory for Ken Reid, I've never quite understood this about people in Northern Ireland, is their passions for English football clubs is sometimes way bigger than the people who live in the, in the towns and cities where the clubs play. But he was a massive Everton fan.
28:55 Rory Stewart? Did, did you come across Burnley fans on your travels?
28:59 Alastair Campbell? Oh, there's loads of Burnley fans in Northern Ireland. Because I'm sure you know, Roy, that we've, we had a, a rich heritage of, our most famous player, Jimmy McElroy, came from Northern Ireland. You know that, Rory?
29:10 Rory Stewart? I did not, did not know that. So there we are.
29:12 Alastair Campbell? And how much stick have you had through the week from calling Holland's most famous football club Ajax?
29:17 Rory Stewart? Well, not, not, I, I actually got a number of people contacting me from Israel saying that you're a massive hypocrite and you didn't know how to pronounce the name of the Israeli team.
29:26 Alastair Campbell? Maccabi Tel Aviv?
29:27 Rory Stewart? Yeah, they say it's Maccabi Tel Aviv.
29:29 Alastair Campbell? Okay, Maccabi. Yeah, yeah, that's probably true. And I ought to know that because, yeah, I should know that.
29:35 Rory Stewart? Yeah, so there we are. Got you back. I wasn't gonna, I wasn't gonna raise it.
29:39 Alastair Campbell? I still think Ajax.
29:41 Rory Stewart? Well, that's, that's what it's called after, right? He's called after the Greek hero Ajax, isn't it? It just happens that the Dutch pronounce it Ajax, don't they? It's, but it's the name Ajax.
29:51 Alastair Campbell? Anybody, anybody who's followed football. It's just those that it's called Ajax. I mean, nobody calls it.
29:56 Rory Stewart? I'll believe that. I'll totally believe that. I totally believe that. I don't know because I don't follow football. So while we're on this, I can't resist a plug for our new sister show. The Rest Is Classified: Looking at Intelligence Operations. And of course, its first episode is on Operation Ajax, the attempt to overthrow the Iranian regime of the CIA and SIS.
30:13 Alastair Campbell? The attempt to win the Dutch Football League.
30:15 Rory Stewart? 1952. All right. Okay. Brad, regarding the rise of isolationism we're seeing, you both seem to agree this is bad. Intuitively, I agree, but why is it bad? We often criticize leaders like Trump for their isolationist tendencies. On the other hand, we also wag our fingers if domestic prices rise due to an overreliance on other nations. Is there an argument that each country should sustain its own population's basic needs? So Brad seems to be talking about two different things. He's talking about what we would call isolationism, which is just not getting involved in the international security system, not getting involved in Ukraine or Taiwan or the Middle East, and protectionism, which is about producing your own food and not really importing from other people. Both of them are bad in different ways and both of them pretty dangerous.
30:58 Rory Stewart? On the protectionism side, what tends to happen is that putting up you to tariff barriers and trying to produce all your own stuff massively drives up prices for consumers and makes you very uncompetitive because you've got no real interest to compete with the rest of the world. And countryside North Korea that have tried to create those kind of closed systems have found themselves in massive economic problems. Just look at the difference between North Korea and South Korea. Unbelievable. Same population, same country. Fast forward over 70 years. Bad economic policies mean North Korea is one of the poorest countries in the world. South Korea is one of the richest. On the isolation point, I think this is even more serious, but it's quite difficult to explain. After the Second World War, we set up the United Nations because people realized in the midst of the First and Second World Wars that you desperately needed international cooperation.
31:43 Rory Stewart? People needed to act together if new Hitlers emerged, if new invasions happened. As we move away from that, what we're going to find, and I'm afraid this is what's happening with Trump now coming in at this particular moment, it's more dangerous than it was eight years ago when he was last elected. He's coming into a situation in which Israel is conducting operations in Gaza and has invaded South Korea. Lebanon and is threatening to hit the head of the octopus in Iran, in which Putin is pushing into Ukraine and is making explicit threats against Moldova and the Baltic States, in which northern Kosovo could be annexed to Serbia, Republica Serbska bi konačna Serbia, in which Azerbaijan is likely to have another chew at Armenia, in which Sudan is spilling into civil war.
32:26 Rory Stewart? And the problem is that as America and Britain and France retreat, it's not that they're replaced by lovely indigenous national forces. What's happened in the Sahel, where there have been these six coups, is that you get Russian Wagner mercenaries and Chinese private security companies coming in as the French and American troops remove. In Sudan, what you get is UAE, Egypt, and in Somalia and Libya, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi, beginning to play in these spaces. And as this accelerates, strong leaders looking around the world, and everybody's got a claim on their neighboring territory, either because there's something historical, so Orban will often
33:04 Rory Stewart? put up maps of Greater Hungary, use flags of Greater Hungary, or because they just want to help themselves to some useful resources next door or give something for their military to do. Anyway, over to you.
33:14 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I sent you a speech by Frans Timmerman, who's a very well-known Dutch politician, was big in the European Commission and is now the leader of the opposition, the Labour Opposition in the Netherlands. And he did the Churchill lecture in Zurich. And so he reread Churchill's famous Zurich speech. And he said, what a delight it is to rediscover his expression of enlarged patriotism and common citizenship as fundamental principles of our common European destiny. And I think that what the nationalists do is that what they've somehow managed to do is to elide it with patriotism, whereas in fact, real patriotism often will be about expressing your
33:56 Alastair Campbell? Love your country by your understanding of how much you benefit from internationalism. And I think that goes to the heart and it's a really interesting speech. He's got lots of interesting things about.
34:07 Rory Stewart? Really recommend it. Thank you. Just, I mean, just a couple of lines from it and then come back to you again, just to encourage people to read this Timman speech, which we'll share in the links. So one of the lines I loved is, we have to be clear about it. Our democracies are not self-executing. They're also not irreversible. In fact, they're being attacked from within and without as we speak. But if we don't see the signs, hear the alarming words, feel the impending danger, we in fact prepare the path for the powers who want to overthrow democracy. And the second line that I thought was good, which is also reflected by Timothy Snyder, one of our recent leading interviews. Autocrats are always very clear about their goals. You should not only take them seriously, but literally as well. Putin's plans to first consolidate and then restore the Russian empire,
34:51 Rory Stewart? his obvious imperial ambitions, were clear from the outset because he didn't hide them. He spoke about them openly. The historic mistake of the West was to take them seriously, but not literally. So, um, yes, really recommend it.
35:01 Alastair Campbell? The other one, which I think relates to the question we had. He says this, the success of the national populists is the failure of the rest of us, whether we are from the left or the right. We have left the pitch to those who play to our darker angels and neglected to play to our better angels. We have to rekindle critical thinking, rekindle knowledge of our history. We have to avoid the trap of relativism that seems so modern, yet is a road to nowhere. The truth or morality never lies in the middle. There is right, there is wrong. We have to spell it out, never back down. Otherwise, never again becomes a hollow phrase. He absolutely goes for Orban. He absolutely goes for Trump. I mean, God, if he won the next election, he'd be in his first meeting with Trump.
35:44 Alastair Campbell? And he also says of this new American government, the government of billionaires, by billionaires, for billionaires. It's a really, really, really good speech. So, but it really, it sort of answers the question. Even North Korea right now has to, it has to take account of its relations with other countries. We all do. So I think we're back to this point about the national and international being very, very, very closely linked.
36:07 Rory Stewart? One from me, Liz Underhill, from the US elections and listening to the mooch on the rest of this politics, a lot of talk about this being the end of woke. To me, being woke is just about caring for people, respecting how they might describe themselves and fit into society. But it does seem to have been weaponized by the far right. What do Rory and Alice think about the future of wokeness and the impact to the US election? Alice, I mean, you've spoken a lot about this. I do think it's a real vulnerability. One of the problems is that although Liz is absolutely right, that foundationally, the idea is to care for people and respect how they might describe themselves and fit into society. And there's been huge progress on the way that we think about diversity and vulnerable groups. It's also true that some of this has really alienated people.
36:49 Rory Stewart? And some of it occasionally seems grotesque and absurd, which is why the far right is always able to exploit it because it does. And this is something, I guess, that your friend Peter Hyman, who's been traveling around, has been very conscious of. Anyway, over to you.
37:03 Alastair Campbell? I think the way that the word woke has been weaponized into this sort of right wing and sometimes left wing populist political campaigning is pretty disturbing.
37:14 Rory Stewart? Sorry, just to push it a little bit, am I not right that some of your friends in Labour, including potentially people right at the heart of Number 10 and people like Peter Hyman, also think it might be a bit of a mistake for Labour to lean too much into these kinds of issues, that they actually alienate people?
37:29 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, totally. Absolutely, yeah. No, look, if, and by the way, I get the very, very strong sense that the current Labour government is, has got a pretty clear strategy on that. You've not really heard that much from the Labour government about the issues that are defined as woke. My point, where I completely agree with Liz, is that the origin of woke was to be alert to injustice in the world. Well, the minute we stop being alert to injustice in the world is a bad, bad, bad day for the world. So we have to stay alert to injustice. What I guess, where it's been weaponized is over the stuff that people are able to say is kind of over the top. But if you look at this new guy, the guy that Trump wants to be his Defence Secretary, okay, so says one of the first things he's going to do is stop women being in.
38:12 Alastair Campbell? Positions of combat because that's woke. Why is that woke when you can have women who are perfectly capable of doing the same job as a man, albeit in a different way? So I think it's what that's where I mean it where it gets weaponized and it gets divorced from from reality. But listen, left of center parties are going to have to be very, very careful because there's no doubt at all. One of the reasons the right are doing so well is because they've managed to turn LGBT, DEI, all that stuff. They've managed to turn it into something that is good for them politically and bad for the left politically. Now, so the left has to be smart and clever about how you deal with the issues without allowing the right to play that game. My last question, Rory, talking of reality, this question is from Sophie.
38:57 Alastair Campbell? I recently saw Jacob Rees-Mogg talking about his reality TV show. I would love to know your thoughts on this and about politicians on reality TV, entertainment shows as a whole. Would you ever do them? So go on, Rory, when are we going to see the Stuarts at home?
39:13 Rory Stewart? Yeah, at home with the Stuarts. I mean, it is amazing. I was talking to Krishnan Gurumurti, who went on, what's the dancing show called?
39:20 Alastair Campbell? Strictly Come Dancing.
39:21 Rory Stewart? Strictly Come Dancing, yeah.
39:22 Alastair Campbell? Strictly Come Ajax.
39:24 Rory Stewart? Strictly Come Ajax, exactly. I'd be really good as a kind of judge in about nineteen sixty eight, wouldn't I?
39:30 Alastair Campbell? Opportunity dogs, you'd be great on that.
39:32 Rory Stewart? Exactly, that's right. I think that he found it was absolutely astonishing. He suddenly became unbelievably famous overnight. And it's true, you know, I'm aware in a very small way, even doing this podcast with you, how much better known I've become than when I was a cabinet minister or running for the leadership. So there's a real temptation in this. And of course, Donald Trump is a real sign that somebody's built a massive career on becoming a TV celebrity. And a lot of the people, they were thinking of running against him. Oprah, The Rock were celebrities. Schwarzenegger took took the governorship of California on the basis of, you know, being a muscly Hollywood lead. So you can see the temptation and you can see why Matt Hancock bizarrely decided to go on these things.
40:16 Rory Stewart? And I am often approached by these things like, have I got news for you? And there are various other ones going. Which basically seem to be comic panel shows somewhere between imitation, whatever, none of whose names I can really remember. Along with pitches for me to go into the jungle. People seemed quite interesting, putting me in the jungle in different ways.
40:34 Alastair Campbell? I've turned down a lot of money for that one, Roy, a lot.
40:36 Rory Stewart? Jungle, yeah, yeah. And it is a lot of money.
40:38 Alastair Campbell? What about, what about the last leg? Would you do the last leg? I've done the last leg a couple of times.
40:41 Rory Stewart? That's another one that's, that's, that's, I think, has reached out to me. No, I, I'm so far saying no, because I've still got this pathetic thing, which I ask myself, which is, would Tony Blair do this? And presumably the answer is no, he wouldn't.
40:53 Alastair Campbell? Oh, it's a very good, uh, uh, Tony Blair, listen, Tony Blair did, you know, I'm a bothered with Catherine Tate. Tony Blair might do the last leg. I, um, your tribal button that you'd used on tour, that, that came from, from the last leg. Cause I gave them the idea for when they'd do the leg. Every time he said something they didn't agree, just hit the button. No, I think the last leg you get is funny and they take the Mickey, but you get the chance to make serious points.
41:18 Rory Stewart? Well, I'm doing question time this week, which is a more venerable thing.
41:21 Alastair Campbell? That's good. I'm doing it the week after.
41:23 Rory Stewart? There we are. They get us two weeks in a row.
41:25 Alastair Campbell? Excellent.
41:26 Rory Stewart? We're beginning to get to a stage where it's almost sounding as though it's de rigueur to go on these kinds of shows. If you really want to mobilize the populace, it certainly did no harm to Trump or Boris Johnson, did it?
41:35 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I, I don't know. So Krishnan Gurumurthy is an interesting example. I, when he did that thing, and when it was announced that he was going on it, he said to me, I don't know if it's true, but he said that he got so many messages from people saying, you know, well done, this is going to be great, blah, blah, blah. And he said, the only one that was total killjoy was from me. Because they, Krishnan, why are you doing this? This is really not good. This is not good for your reputation. It's not good for the reputation of Channel Four and news. But actually, he's not just identified as that. So I guess he's sort of, I would argue, he kind of got away with it. And I know he said it was an amazing experience and he enjoyed it, he loved it.
42:18 Alastair Campbell? The only reality TV stuff I've done that defines reality TV. I did The Apprentice for Comic Relief, which ended with Piers Morgan. It was down to me or Piers Morgan to get fired and thankfully Piers got fired again, as I said. Soccer Aid, I guess, was a form of reality TV, but I'm sorry.
42:34 Rory Stewart? That's your famous Maradona moment.
42:35 Alastair Campbell? Exactly. If you're going to get the chance to play with Maradona, I mean, I would have done, I would have. If they'd have said, if you do strictly, you can play with Maradona in front of 72,000 at Old Trafford. I might have done it, but no, I've turned down everything. I've got a whole file of really stupid TV ideas, but no, I don't think it's good. And listen, Rhys Mog, it will make him more of a character. He's already a big character. Will it help his comeback? It might. I think it'll just make him look incredibly out of touch, which, you know, he already is.
43:03 Rory Stewart? But Rhys Mog partly made himself, I think, through Have I Got News For You? I mean, I remember this, you know, David Cameron really didn't want him to become a member of Parliament, understandably, because he thought the last thing the Conservative Party needed was Jacob Rhys Mog representing them. And Conservative central office will be groaning at the thought of this reality TV show. But it was on things like Have I Got News For You that people really got to see Jacob Rhys Mog. I mean, that's part of how he got into the cabinet off the back of that stuff.
43:28 Alastair Campbell? But if you think of, you think of all the new, the young new MPs who've come in, right? Now, okay, you've got one or two, Georgia Gould, Hamish Faulkner, who've gone straight into the government. But there'll be lots of different people on the back benches who, you know, be quite interesting, quite talented, what have you. But I worry that the way that our political media landscape has developed, they're only going to get known if they get involved in scandal, do or say something stupid or they do this sort of TV stuff. I'd like to get back to a politics where politicians could get known because they're making serious, thoughtful contributions to public debate. To be fair, Kim Ledbetter, yeah, good, good example of somebody who's, who is doing just that.
44:08 Alastair Campbell? I just worry this idea that, you know, it's like with Keir Starmer, you know, well, maybe if he showed a bit more of a human side and all this more. No, you know, you want your politicians to be. Serious and, you know, thoughtful.
44:20 Rory Stewart? Yeah, well, if they're going to go down that route, then they've got to deliver. I think they need really good policies. They need to be really bold in getting stuff done. So what doesn't work is not having the charisma, not having the sense of humor and not delivering. If you're going to go for the serious thing, my goodness, you're going to be have to be judged by results.
44:38 Alastair Campbell? Good. Well, I think we've done enough.
44:39 Rory Stewart? Very good. And for more on Jacob Rees-Mogg, we point you towards The Rest Is Entertainment, which we'll be covering it in detail in the coming week.
44:46 Alastair Campbell? In detail.
44:47 Rory Stewart? In detail.
44:48 Alastair Campbell? What detail is there?
44:49 Rory Stewart? Well, you'll find out when you listen to The Rest Is Entertainment. Okay, thank you, guys, very much. Bye bye.
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