Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 346. The Battle for Syria About this episode Who are the Syrian rebels who have attacked Aleppo? Will Keir Starmer's reset be enough to convince the public? Why is the French government on the brink of collapse?
Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all this and more in today's episode of The Rest Is Politics.
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Transcript 9,439 words · 10 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/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
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2:12 Rory Stewart? Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.
2:16 Alastair Campbell? And me Alastair Campbell and lots to talk about today Rory. We've got a big speech from Keir Starmer coming on Thursday, which must not be called a relaunch. We are going to talk a lot about Syria, big, big, big events going on there. We've got some criticism over the last couple of weeks because we hadn't talked much about the Irish general election. So now that we've had it, we will talk about that. And it's actually really interesting what's happening there. They're sort of slightly bucking the trend on this incumbency theme. And then finally, government in real trouble in Paris. So a lot to get through. Let's kick off with the UK, where I don't know if you've just seen the news. We're recording this Monday afternoon Rory. Sir Chris Wormall, the new Cabinet Secretary, who I think when we were in was a kind of fairly junior civil servant to education.
3:01 Alastair Campbell? Then went on to be a permanent secretary under Gove, I think it was. And I see Dominic Cummings just put out a pretty scorieating analysis. And then at health during Covid and much else besides. Did you have anything to do with Chris Wormall?
3:16 Rory Stewart? Yes, I mean, I didn't deal with him very closely because I wasn't in his departments. But for what it's worth, he had a very, very strong reputation. One of the things that his Cabinet Ministers said about him is he had very good political antennae, which doesn't mean he was political, but it means that unusually for a permanent secretary, he would anticipate some of the political issues. So he'd turn up, he'd produce the options and he'd say, you may want to take into account this risk. You might want to remember that. I think on the positive side, he was seen as somebody who worked morning, noon and night. Really, really hardworking, very, very serious. Obviously, as Conservatives, given that he was the permanent secretary in Gove's era,
3:57 Rory Stewart? people think that he helped to put through some pretty radical reforms there in education. Although I'd be interested to see what Dominic Cummings' objection is.
4:05 Alastair Campbell? Well, he basically says he's, I mean, to give it, so the coming shorthand is that he's sort of part of the old blob, who is not a reformer, who will get in the way of any real radical change. Now, that usually means with Dominic Cummings is that I had a few rows with him because they thought my mad ideas were pretty mad. But I don't know, I mean, I don't know enough about him to know whether he is a big reforming figure. I actually think Labour should have got rid of Simon Case on day one. I think that that should have been a very significant signal of intent. It is an important position, but the most important thing is the direction that he's given. Cabinet secretaries can be given directions. And that's why, you know, I think probably the more important event this week will be this speech that Keir Starmer was making on Thursday, which is,
4:48 Alastair Campbell? you know, it's getting a lot of coverage. They're calling it a plan for change, which I kind of always thought manifestos were a plan for change. So maybe it's a sort of tacit admission that the manifesto in the first few months haven't quite landed in the way they want.
4:59 Rory Stewart? Yeah, I mean, maybe just final comments on Sir Chris Wilmold. So just to remind people, Cabinet Secretary obviously is the civil servant that runs everything, you know, he is the Sir Humphrey of all the Sir Humphreys. We've interviewed Cabinet Secretaries and I hope we can interview a few more, but to remind people on leading, they can listen to the interview we did with Gus O'Donnell, talking about how central this role is.
5:19 Alastair Campbell? He was on the panel to choose the shortlist that went to Keir Starmer.
5:22 Rory Stewart? Great. And in some ways, you know, as you say, they take direction, but they are certainly more important than most Cabinet Ministers. So on the plus side, I think he was warmly liked by most of the ministers that worked with him that I knew. I guess if you were going to grumble a couple of things, he presided over education and health for the last 12 years. So a lot of the problems in education and health, of course, were caused by the politicians. So it's difficult disentangling what was the politicians' fault, what's the system's fault. But definitely you might say education and health are not necessarily shining examples of success, and that's what he's been doing for the last 12 years. Secondly, he's, I think, a great domestic implementer, but he's never been in any of the inverted commas, great offices of state.
6:05 Rory Stewart? So often these Cabinet Secretaries have been in the Treasury, or I think Sir Richard Wilson, who came from the Home Office, not being in the Foreign Office. So he doesn't have the sort of intel- Security, foreign affairs, treasury background. He's an appointment, I think, for government that I guess sees itself as being primarily about domestic implementation. Anyway, over to you with the speech because you presumably have seen, which we, I certainly haven't, some glimpse of what's coming.
6:32 Alastair Campbell? No, I have not seen the speech, Rory. That was a very unsubtle way of trying to suggest that I'm way closer in in the new Labour, the new new Labour machine than is actually the case.
6:45 Alastair Campbell? But I was aware of the briefing going all over the weekend. I think essentially trying to get back to this sense of what the government is for, the missions and the overall purpose of the government. I mean, I've been, I've been interested, you and I have done a few things together in recent weeks. And, you know, there is a fairly negative mood out there at the moment. And also at the, at the football, I went to see Burnley at Stoke at the weekend. And, you know, normally when I go to the football, I'm not getting much grief by the way of politics. People tend to leave me alone on that front. So there was a little bit of grumbling this week.
7:15 Rory Stewart? What are they grumbling about? What sort of things?
7:17 Alastair Campbell? Well, there was one guy who said, I voted Labour, I was really excited about it. I really thought this was going to be so different. And, and he actually said, I can't get over the winter fuel thing. I can't believe that was the first thing they did. I can't get over that. There was another guy who was just sort of saying, oh, he actually said, it's just all a bit, you know, I'm not sure. Now, I still think, and we've seen this in the business audience who've been out, I still think there's goodwill. I still think there is a desire for them to do well. I guess this speech, I don't know whether it is, it will be impossible with the speeches doing on Thursday. Also to do what I was suggesting, come out of the new year with the big growth plan. But it seems to me what they're saying this is about is setting milestones on each of the big missions by which the government can be judged as it's go.
8:01 Rory Stewart? Remind us what these missions are.
8:02 Alastair Campbell? Rory, you know full well what they are. Gross.
8:07 Alastair Campbell? Growth, fastest growing economy, the G7, which I think is a way overly bold and ambitious. I think they should maybe trim the wings of that one, just to be a little, grow the economy would be good. Get the waiting list down, safer streets, green energy and the aspiration, you know, smash the glass ceiling. And I think that the reason why this relates to the appointment of a new cabinet secretary. And Peter Hyman, who you met in New York and we got him on the podcast to talk about this project he's doing about populism. He had a piece in the New Statesman this week, saying that the civil service has to fundamentally change mindset if it's going to deliver on these missions. Because so much of it is not about departmental silo.
8:49 Alastair Campbell? It's about how the government can deliver much more effectively across the piece. And so that is, that is a new way of thinking. The thing about milestones, I was thinking about this the other day in relation to what's just happened in America with Trump winning and Biden losing. It is extraordinary when you look at the data in the American economy in the cold light of day. It's pretty damned impressive what the economic data is. Now, what that says is that in the modern age, even delivery is not enough. So even if Labour do get the economy growing pretty well, even if they do get the waiting list down. There is such a added difficulty, I think, in the modern age in being the incumbent. Now, we're going to talk about Ireland later, where, as I said in the introduction, most incumbent governments have really, really suffered.
9:32 Alastair Campbell? And I think we'll continue to do so for some time. I think it's becoming a new thing. So Labour's got to do more than just kind of deliver. They actually got to give a much clearer sense of what they're in power for, who they're in power for, and what the big things are that they want to change.
9:49 Rory Stewart? So what they're in power for, who they're in power for, and what are the big things they need to change? So second one, I guess, is the easiest. They're presumably on the side of people who want to break that ceiling. Go on, I'm going to give you a stab at that. Give me a stab at those three things, what they might say.
10:03 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think in terms of who they're for, the message in the election was working people. I think that's a little bit exclusive. I think one of the reasons the budget got into difficulty is because of the focus on national insurance as the biggest tax raising measure. And of course, that was seen as a hit on employers. And of course, employers, aspirational employers are also working people. I think they're better off in the divide that they've also used, which we use, which Jeremy Corbyn used, which they have also used, which is about the many, not the few, because that then takes you into inequality.
10:38 Rory Stewart? Very good. So who are they for? They're for the many, not the few. What are they for?
10:42 Alastair Campbell? I think what they're for is, I mean, the missions are fine, but the missions are the means by which they intend to make this a fairer, stronger, richer country.
10:54 Rory Stewart? Got you. And greener.
10:55 Alastair Campbell? To be fair, the missions do add up. I mean, the mission, you know, growing the economy, you need to do that. Sorting the health service, because it's not fair that so many people languish on waiting lists. Class ceiling is about, you know, skills and education and apprenticeships and all that. And also about anybody being able to make a go of their life.
11:10 Rory Stewart? But it's odd that it's odd they haven't produced the fairer, stronger, greener slogan, or whatever the slogan would be, that trips off the tongue quite, have they?
11:19 Alastair Campbell? Well, they had their main, if you go back to the election, insofar as there was a sort of single word that was on the lectern the whole time, it was, it was change. Okay?
11:28 Rory Stewart? Okay. But that doesn't quite work now, does it? It's not so easy when you're in government.
11:32 Alastair Campbell? No. And I think that, you know, like today, we've got Yvette Cooper talking about immigration. You've got this thing coming with Keir later in the week. I think the fact that they're still having to kind of set the frame means that I think they've probably acknowledged that the first few months didn't go really as well as they would have hoped. Not all their fault, you know, riots and just the sheer weight of international stuff that Keir Starmer had to do. I don't know why people hate the word relaunch so much, but they, they don't want this to be seen as a relaunch. They want it to see it as part of a sort of seamless threat. But I think they do need to be seen to be moving through the gears. And also, I think, to go back to my people at the football, by the way, they weren't all like that. There were some who, there were one or two saying, two young kids, by the way, really cheered me up, Roy. They were both from
12:15 Alastair Campbell? Burnley, both currently in higher education, both saying they loved the podcast, and they were still hanging on. On to the idea this is just so much better government than the last one and people should stop whinging and get behind them. But but I'd say the majority mood of those that raised it with me were quite negative, as have been the ones that we've been talking to in the business community.
12:33 Rory Stewart? Let me just give you one small thing that I'm worried about. Morgan McSweeney, at least according to the Sunday Times, a big article by Tim Shipman, is trying to make sure that every one of these five missions becomes much more simple and straightforward. And the claim in the article is that he's going to make the NHS come down to the single indicator of reducing waiting lists. And I think that is trouble brewing between Morgan McSweeney waiting lists and the idea of actually genuine reform of the NHS. Because if you think about what West Streeting was talking about, which is going from analog to digital and from cure to prevention and from hospitals to frontline. That basically means shifting resources from hospitals forward to the frontline.
13:17 Rory Stewart? And what Wales found when Labour did this in Wales and Wales is sort of, we just, we're talking about this on leading with the first minister of Wales. Wales is seven years into this journey. They would say that they have managed to go down that journey. They've changed things a lot, but the cost has been increasing waiting lists. If you make the target reducing waiting lists, what will happen is the resources will be dragged into the hospitals to try to drive those waiting lists down. And it's very much, I'm afraid, dealing with the symptoms, not not the root cause. So so I'm just putting a marker down as something that I think is going to be a big problem for West Streeting.
13:51 Alastair Campbell? The only thing I'd say about that is, I mean, I always get a bit heebie jeebie when particularly Sunday newspaper articles are all about how decisions get made. And it's all about the people behind the scenes and and all that stuff. There's no, but listen, don't get me wrong, Morgan McSweeney is a very important figure in the Keir Starmer operation. But when you're talking about the core purpose of a government and the priorities of a government, they have got to be coming very, very clearly from the top. It's got to be clear to the machine. And and I would imagine that when Keir Starmer gathers the cabinet together with the new cabinet secretary, that to me is an opportunity for him to say to the cabinet. This is how the way how we're going to change the way that we operate. Because it seems to me that partly because Simon Case has not really been functioning
14:35 Alastair Campbell? fully or not been fully trusted, I think that there's been a problem in that relationship. That's got to be fixed. We then had the whole Morgan McSweeney, Sue Gray thing, which has been fixed in that, you know, Morgan is still there, Sue Gray's not, and other people have been brought in. But ultimately, if you're driving something as difficult and complicated as a government machine, it's got to be coming from the top the whole time. That's why I think this speech is quite important, but it can't just be the same as the other ones.
15:00 Rory Stewart? Last question for you. One of the big ideas out there on how to grow the economy, and it was in an article by John Kingsman in a Sam Friedman substat recently, is that you really need to unleash planning in the Oxford Cambridge corridor, get enormous number of buildings built there, really get behind those big, fast-growing tech hubs, create a kind of triangle Oxford, Cambridge, London. Now, that's an idea that's been around and was around when I was in government, and we didn't do it partly because people were worried about building on in nice areas between Oxford and Cambridge, but more importantly, because people thought that was going to be difficult with the narrative of levelling up. Because basically what you're doing there is you're saying London, Oxford, Cambridge,
15:43 Rory Stewart? these are the fastest growing bits of our economy, we're going to reinforce success and get behind them. Given the Conservative government never quite mustered the political will to do that, do you think Labour is likely to, or are they going to feel the same pressures from Redwall voters not to be seen to be making Oxford and Cambridge central to their growth plan?
15:59 Alastair Campbell? Well, put it this way, if that was all that they did, it would be a problem. But that has to be, I read John King's piece, we talked about it a little bit last week. It has to be part of a much, much bigger plan for growth, where you're doing similar things in different parts of the country, north, south, east, west. And I think we do, I think that's what's been lacking a little bit. It's not that the government isn't doing lots of stuff, they are doing lots of stuff, but it's kind of the kind of energy that you get from big projects, big themes, big messages that sort of, you know, keep being dropped out into the public, into the public arena. I had a very interesting last, meeting last week with a guy who's a Is a business guy, he's involved in this project to essentially to feed big
16:42 Alastair Campbell? parts of our our grid, energy grid, with power generated in different parts of Africa.
16:48 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
16:48 Alastair Campbell? Really, really interesting, very innovative.
16:51 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
16:51 Alastair Campbell? British people doing some pretty big dramatic things. And it's not necessarily something, by the way, that's going to cost government loads and loads of money, but government obviously would need to need to get engaged in it. And I think we just need a little bit more of that sense of big project, big purpose, big idea. At the moment, it still feels that they're they're quite defensive. Stuff keeps getting thrown at them. They bat it off, they move on to the next thing. So that's why I think this speech is important, but I still I still think the new year, the new year's message should be 2025 is the year of growth. This is the plan for growth. And it's like a big, big, big document that goes through all the different bits in all the different sectors and all different parts of the country, saying this is where it's coming from. Now, should we talk about Syria, Rory?
17:34 Alastair Campbell? Um, I guess for all sorts of reasons, Syria has sort of gone, there was a time when it was like the number one issue on the news around the world. And partly, I guess, because Assad, with Putin's help, saw off the civil war to a great extent, also because the media can't get in there. It's sort of has disappeared. And then suddenly we wake up one day and Aleppo, which we used to talk about all the time, is we're talking about it again. So Rory, given that Syria has sort of gone down the agenda, certainly in terms of sort of global media in recent months, why don't you just remind us of the history and the context of what we're dealing with?
18:07 Rory Stewart? Okay, so Damascus, capital of Syria, oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. So Syria is right there at the heart of civilization. Literally, you go to Damascus, you get an ancient pagan temple with a Roman temple on top of it, with a Christian church on top of that, a mosque on top of that. Comes into the modern world as part of this enormous thing called the Ottoman Empire, you know, which originally people remember includes Greece, Serbia, Bosnia, Egypt, Iraq. First World War ends, the Ottoman Empire is broken apart and a Sykes-Picot agreement gets going. So Sykes, British, Pico, French, and they draw a line dividing some Ottoman provinces and the right hand side. They call Iraq and they give to the British largely because the oil around Mosul.
18:49 Alastair Campbell? This is the Sykes-Picot Agreement that Anthony Scaramucci explained to Donald Trump through having a conversation about the film starring Peter O'Toole, Lawrence of Arabia.
19:00 Rory Stewart? Absolutely, Lawrence of Arabia, right in the heart of this whole story. On the other side, you've got this thing called Lebanon, which is chopped off on the western bit of the Syrian coast because it has some more pro-French Catholic Christians in it. And then the middle bit is left of Syria. Fast forward, after the Second World War, coming into the 60s, Arab nationalism rising. This means the replacement of old monarchies and not the replacement of monarchies in the way that we might expect today by more radical Islamist groups, but by basically military autocrats and dictators, people like Saddam Hussein, or in the case of Syria, a man called Hafas al-Assad, who takes over at 1970. And he comes in and he rules the
19:42 Rory Stewart? country for about 30 years and then hands over to his son. And his son is a British doctor, married to a British citizen. Initially, people are quite optimistic. Arab Spring happens, 2010, 2011. Syria erupts in protest. It looks for three years as though Bashar al-Assad is going to be toppled. And, you know, Obama's drawing red lines, he's using chemical weapons, there are barrel bombs. And I don't want to, sorry, I'm sounding a bit maybe glib about this. 480,000 people are killed in Syria. 12 million people are displaced. I mean, this is on a level far above Sudan or what's happening in Gaza and Lebanon at the moment, one of the largest wars in the post-war period.
20:23 Rory Stewart? And then in 2014, two states intervene. Iran, through their Hezbollah militia, prop up his infantry, and Russia basically give him an air force. He recaptures Aleppo. And for the last four years, the front lines have been pretty stable, not easy to understand, but stable. And basically, the story is, he controls the most populated western bit of the country around Damascus and Yehudaleppo. Up in the northwest bit were what used to be the Free Syrian Army, but increasingly were Al Qaeda affiliate groups. Turkey Occupied a sliver on the border. American backed Kurdish resistance had taken everything east of the Euphrates. So this huge patch of Syria. And then there are bits of Islamic State sits like that for four years.
21:08 Rory Stewart? And then suddenly, over the weekend, it becomes apparent that things are going wrong for the Syrian regime. And and two things have gone wrong. The Russians, increasingly distracted by Ukraine, no longer concentrating. And Israel has just smashed up Hezbollah, which were the absolute foundations of Bashar al-Assad's support. This is the pager attacks, the radio attacks, the killing of Nasrullah, the attacks on Lebanon. That's the same Hezbollah. So as Hezbollah has fled back to Lebanon, Syrian regime becomes much more fragile. Meanwhile, the Syrians had failed really to make friends with the region or with Turkey. And there's an explosion where suddenly, within about forty eight hours, these Al Qaeda, originally a Qaeda affiliate forces up in the northwest, explode south, recapture Aleppo and are now on the edge of Hamas.
21:53 Rory Stewart? You know, hundreds of miles south and have taken this huge sway of the territory, leaving us now on the verge of another Syrian civil war.
21:59 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, and I guess the only bit I would add to that in the middle of that. And maybe it's because to this day, I still get such a lot of grief over Iraq. Is the part of the story you briefly mentioned about Obama. I think the point at which Putin decided to get involved, to the extent that he did get involved and is still involved. It's although, as you say, they're distracted by Ukraine, they are still, they are currently bombing lots of Syrian rebels. But when you mentioned Obama's red lines and of course Obama said, if Assad uses chemical weapons against his own people, that's a red line, we will not let him cross it. And of course, partly because the British Parliament couldn't deliver on Cameron's promise to Obama that we would help. The whole thing got dropped. Putin sensed real weakness, moved in and has never really fully moved out.
22:45 Alastair Campbell? But as you say, what's happened now is, and you know, looking at some of the stuff online. So this group called, they're called Hayat Tahir al-Sham. And they're sort of, they're a kind of rebranded, modernized version of Al Qaeda. They're trying to sort of, they're trying to jettison some of their more jihadist kind of elements and also some of their rhetoric. But I think they were genuinely surprised by how quickly they were able to carry out the operation that they put together. Added to which, I don't know whether this is symbolic or whether it was coincidental or whether it was deliberate. Assad was in Moscow as it happened. Gets on his private jet and flees back and as he's on the way, he's talking to Iran, he's talking to Iraq, he's talking to the Emiratis. He's basically saying, look, you
23:30 Alastair Campbell? know, we've got these massive terrorist attacks, we need your help. Now, the Russians are helping, but I heard a very interesting interview. I was in Oslo last week, as you know, with Alex Younger, the former head of MI6, and he was on the media this morning, and he was clearly struggling to decide which of these two he kind of loathed the most. The Assad regime, or this kind of al-Qaeda shoot-off.
23:53 Rory Stewart? There's a good test of this, which Robert Ford, who was the great American expert on the region, poses, which is which of these groups are the refugees fleeing from and which are the people prepared to come back to. And on those terms, this new Islamist group wins hands down. Bashar al-Assad's regime has collapsed because it is a gangster organisation, which, as we've discussed previously in the podcast, has largely maintained itself by manufacturing and supplying amphetamines into the Middle East. It's one of the reasons why the Saudis have not been very sympathetic towards it. It's had an odd relationship with its neighbours. So, Israel, traditionally, the regime talks as though it's a great enemy of Israel, but in effect ceded the Golan Heights to Israel, which creates a very, very
24:38 Rory Stewart? odd situation where, to some extent, Israel hasn't been that keen on Bashar al-Assad's regime falling. But on the other hand, Bashar al-Assad's regime is propped up by Iran and Hezbollah. That's just kind of one example. Then you've got the Turks. So, the Turks are very anxious about two things. They're very anxious about the fact that there are millions of Syrian refugees still in Turkey. And I talked to you from Gaziantep in southern Turkey just after the earthquakes. And there, you can see Syrian refugees very much under pressure, treated as second-class citizens, and the Turks desperate for them to return home. Turkey also very keen not to allow Kurdish groups to reassemble along the Syrian border, because that's the PKK, that's terrorist attacks against Turkey from their point of
25:19 Rory Stewart? view. So, Turkey, and probably Qatar with them, have got behind these groups and will be hoping now that Syrian refugees will return back to northern Syria. But the Turks also have been caught off balance. You're right. I mean, nobody expected this speed of advance. It's just sort of a third of the country's been lost in the space of two days. So, actually, what's actually happened is Kurdish groups have moved into some of these cities, which is exactly what the Turks would not have wanted.
25:45 Alastair Campbell? I mentioned their rebranding, this HTS as they're called, and even losing their name and making themselves letters is part of rebranding. But they're calling this Operation Repelling the Aggression, which, you know, when you think how normally they try to sort of dramatize and lionize these sort of military attacks, I think Operation Repelling the Aggression. It's been interesting to watch the stories of people who are, say, they are going home, they are able to go home for the first time since Assad really turned nasty. We should make clear, by the way, Rory, you said earlier, British doctor. I think you meant British trained.
26:19 Rory Stewart? Very good. Thank you. I think his wife was British.
26:21 Alastair Campbell? His wife was British, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And there was a, there was a period when she was being kind of rebranded and she was appearing on covers of Vogue magazine as a kind of cuddly first lady of the Middle East and all very, very glamorized. But he is a truly, truly, truly bad man.
26:36 Rory Stewart? Truly, truly bad man. I mean, unbelievable regime for torture, murder, chemical weapons, et cetera. Another very serious point here, people didn't predict this, the Syrian watchers didn't predict this. I mean, I am the world's living example of a really bad prediction with my Kamala Harris prediction.
26:51 Alastair Campbell? I wasn't going to raise that, Rory, but do you know that we were, we were lampooned on the Friday night Radio 4 comedy show at the weekend? And I've got to say, you got it slightly worse than I did.
27:02 Rory Stewart? I should do. But the point is that geopolitical predictions, and this is why one's got to be honest with the audience about this, are like trying to predict the weather. It's okay a few days out, but get a few weeks out, you get it wrong. Very few people in talking about the regional conflict have come up and said the result of what Israel is doing in Lebanon is going to be the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria. Instead of which, eyes were on Lebanon, eyes were on Iran, eyes were on the Houthis in Yemen. And now suddenly, it looks as though we're collapsing into another Syrian civil war, when four days ago, nobody thought it was going to happen and the front lines hadn't moved in four years. So
27:43 Rory Stewart? the fragility of this, now, let's now push that further. What are we now not talking about? Well, we're not now talking about what might happen in Western Iraq, because remember that Daesh, the Islamic State, was Pushed from Iraq into Syria, created a little caliphate in eastern Syria, and then pushed back and recaptured Mosul. And the reason why the Americans have been funding these Kurdish fighters, and the Brits too, supporting them a bit, in the northeast, is precisely because those were the people that were being used to fight the Islamic State and Daesh. So just a little reminder, I mean, Sykes, Pico, and these countries with incredibly diverse populations. If you were to actually draw a map of Syria, even today, even with all the horrible displacement of 12 million people,
28:26 Rory Stewart? you find Kurds, Sunni and Shia Kurds, you find Oriental Christians, Catholic Christians, Orthodox Christians, Alawites, Druze, Sunni Muslims, and actually even a small Armenian community on the Euphrates River.
28:40 Alastair Campbell? I wonder how people are going to... I mean, it's impossible for us to know what Syrian people actually think of Assad, because it really is genuine dictatorship, no free media, et cetera. But I wonder if the fact that he has not really changed, he's just kind of pocketed all the wins, pocketed all the kind of bad stuff that he does, and thinks he's just going to be there like all dictators do forever. But you don't get the sense, talking to people who kind of know Syria, that his support has been growing. On the contrary, his support has probably been falling. So when stuff like this happens, those who are kind of maybe quiet most of the time, suddenly will come out and get engaged and get involved. Added to which, even though they've done a few normalization of relationships in the region, it doesn't seem to have led to any greater prosperity for people.
29:24 Alastair Campbell? And meanwhile, to what extent is Putin going to be in this for the long haul, whilst he is genuinely focused, and you said distracted, but absolutely focused on Ukraine? So I suspect Assad is feeling a little bit more vulnerable than we maybe think from the dictator image.
29:42 Rory Stewart? Yeah, really interesting. I mean, we talk a bit about local language media. There's a post which we can share by a Saudi analyst called Hisham Al-Ghanim, which was sent to me by a really great former British ambassador, who I'm not sure wants to be quoted on the show. And the great thing about the modern world is you can literally just press the translate button at the bottom of his tweet. What you're getting there is exactly what you said. Which is the Saudi saying, the Arab League opened its arms, Turkey tried to open its arms to Bashar al-Assad, and he responded by doing nothing on helping to return refugees, kept producing these illegal amphetamines, kept playing around with Hezbollah and destabilising the region.
30:21 Rory Stewart? And in essence, time's up. But meanwhile, as you've pointed out, the UAE, so that's Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Egypt have come in behind the dictator Bashar al-Assad. So you've got another little proxy war. We talk about proxy wars in Somalia and Sudan and Libya. Here's another one where Turkey and potentially Qatar are on one side and UAE and Egypt are on the other, and Iran and Russia are playing, and America's up there with the Kurds. I mean, this is the world that Trump's inheriting. And it's a very different world from the world he inherited in 2016, when actually the Middle East was comparatively peaceful again, and where even Ukraine was comparatively peaceful.
31:00 Alastair Campbell? Well, Alex Younger's successor, the current holder of the chief of MI6 post, Richard Moore, he did a speech this week alongside his French counterpart, where, I think I'm paraphrasing correctly, he said that the world is more dangerous than he's ever known it. And you're right, this one, people did not see this coming in the way that it's happening. And you're also right that the potential either for the, this group, this group of jihadis trying to pretend they're not, if they actually go back to their kind of jihadi past, whether Russia actually does say, sod it, we're in this for the big time, and he says to us, you're going to have to use your chemical weapons again. Or, as you say, you get this war between the Turkish-backed groups and the Kurdish groups. I mean, it's going to be very, very volatile. It's not simple.
31:40 Rory Stewart? And remember, the other thing is migration. It was the Syria crisis that drove a million refugees into Jordan, a million into Lebanon, three million into Turkey, and ultimately ended up with a million Syrians turning up in Germany. And as a result of that, the rise of far-right populism, the undermining of the liberal global order, et cetera. So this is the very same Syria we're looking at again.
32:02 Alastair Campbell? Okay, let's take a break.
32:05 Speaker 03 Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.
32:08 Speaker 04 On October 2nd.
32:09 Speaker 03 Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.
32:14 Speaker 04 Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.
32:21 Speaker 05 What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you freeze in there, that's what.
32:26 Speaker 04 With great power comes great deniability.
32:29 Speaker 05 I'm not the first then.
32:30 Speaker 04 Digger. See the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Under middle adult parent.
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33:26 Speaker 09 Espolon Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Compaia America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.
33:37 Alastair Campbell? Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.
33:40 Rory Stewart? And with me, Rory Stewart. Now, Alistair, you are a particular expert, after I've been bollocking on about Syria, on Ireland and France, which are right in the news at the moment. I've just come back from Dublin, but without much great wisdom to impart. Tell me about your sense of Ireland.
33:55 Alastair Campbell? Well, first of all, before we get into Ireland, tenuous link, let's plug Chris Patton, our current leading interview. The Ireland connection is the fact that he said his proudest achievement was his role modernizing the police service in Northern Ireland. But it's a very interesting interview for all sorts of other reasons as well. I found what he was saying about Hong Kong, both then and now, very, very interesting. So that's in our leading channel now. So Ireland, we've talked in this year of elections about how the incumbent parties are getting whacked everywhere. But it looks like, it looks like the Irish may be sort of slightly bucking the trend.
34:31 Alastair Campbell? They've got a very interesting electoral system. So let's just give the first preference vote stuff. You've got these two parties, the two biermoths of Irish politics are Fine Gael, who had the current Taoiseach Prime Minister, Simon Harris, Fine Foyle, and they are both just over 20%. Fine Foyle ahead, 21.9, Fine Gael 20.8. Sinn Féin, who did remarkably well last time round, they look to be doing a little bit less well. They're on 19%. So what it looks like is that there will probably be another coalition between Fine Foyle and Fine Gael. Now, the reason why Irish politics is so, it is so different to other European democracies,
35:13 Alastair Campbell? because if you were to say to somebody, what's the difference between these two parties? We keep hearing it's Fine Foyle and Fine Gael.
35:19 Rory Stewart? I was about to ask you exactly that. What is the difference between these two parties?
35:23 Alastair Campbell? Right. And the answer is that to understand the difference, and in fact, to understand all three of these parties, you've got to go back to the civil war in Ireland over 100 years ago. Okay?
35:36 Rory Stewart? What?
35:36 Alastair Campbell? Yes, because the two parties, Fine Foyle and Fine Gael, essentially emerged out of a split out of the original Sinn Féin party.
35:47 Rory Stewart? So they're, they're three fragments of Sinn Féin?
35:49 Alastair Campbell? Well, it's even more complicated than that. So Sinn Féin was founded by a man called Arthur Griffith, and they were really kind of influential in the civil war.
35:59 Rory Stewart? And sorry, just for simple minded people, I mean, influential in the civil war, because of course Sinn Féin are fighting the republican cause at a time when Ireland was part of the United Kingdom.
36:09 Alastair Campbell? The empire.
36:10 Rory Stewart? Yeah. And they are fighting for freedom. Yeah.
36:12 Alastair Campbell? Correct. And what happened was, there was then the 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty. Okay? And that allowed Ireland to create its own government, but it would still have the King as head of state. Okay? So Fine Gael is the, what emerged that supported that agreement. Fine Foyle, they formed specially to continue the fight for an Irish republic and to get Ireland freed from the British Empire. Okay. And even though Ireland then did become a republic in nineteen forty nine, the two parties continue to exist and they've existed ever since. And one or the other, in some form or other,
36:54 Alastair Campbell? been in power ever since. And why it gets really confusing is that they don't really disagree about that much.
37:00 Rory Stewart? And then Sinn Féin, which you pointed out as the parent of these parties, then reemerges in Irish politics, wins the popular vote, but also turns out to be in a way that the other two parties aren't very, very significant to Northern Irish politics.
37:14 Alastair Campbell? What you say about that is the modern Sinn Féin really came into being in the early seventies, originally mainly active in Northern Ireland, very closely linked with the provisional IRA. And of course, when we did the Good Friday Agreement, that was all about Sinn Féin separating itself from the violence. It's since then, as you say, become the largest party in Northern Ireland and has been growing in popularity in the Republic. But as, you know, frankly, I think this election, they would have to say is something of a stalling.
37:42 Rory Stewart? So Sinn Féin, having won the popular vote last time, but then been locked out because these other two parties went into coalition, then had a surge of popularity. There was a moment where they were up at almost thirty percent. And then they dived down again, did really badly in local elections. And so in our narrative about incumbents being damaged and populists on the rise, Sinn Féin seemed to be a little bit of an example of this, going back a few months. But but then its popularity collapsed again.
38:09 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think this may be related because the other, the other really interesting story out of this election, because there's an often forgotten third party in the coalition that existed recently, and that was the Green Party. And they have all but been wiped out. They've been left with one TD, one Member of the Irish Parliament. And I wonder if that is all part of this stuff that we talked about last week in relation to Justin Trudeau in Canada, that we've seen in German elections, that the kind of anti, anti-green agenda has hit Sinn Féin. I think immigration has played quite a big part in this. Although those, those candidates who fought very, very hard as anti-immigration didn't do terribly well. So what it's, I think what it's saying, I mean, turnout's a problem. It's the lowest. Turn out in a century, under sixty percent.
38:53 Alastair Campbell? But the fact is, most Europeans who are following all these elections going on at the moment, they'll be looking at it and thinking, my God, you guys seem to have done quite a good job.
39:02 Rory Stewart? Yeah, not least because the one headline that keeps coming up is they managed to prevent the, in inverted commas, alleged crime boss, Mr Hutch, the monk.
39:12 Alastair Campbell? Jerry the Monk Hutch.
39:14 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
39:15 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I think that that would have been a bit of a problem because there's a danger that would have become the kind of the big news out of this this election. I think what will happen is they'll probably end up doing a similar deal to the last time. You take the top job for a couple of years and I'll take it for a couple of years.
39:31 Rory Stewart? I mean, you know, you know so much more about this than I do, but I was just talking to a former minister as we were starting and he was saying that one of the problems is that if the party in the lead gets a lead of, let's say, ten seats, they may try to kick up and say, we don't want to have a rotating leader, a rotating Tischuk. And then I suppose a slight question about how they paper it together, the independents. Can I push you though on to your friend, Monsieur Barnier, the new or relatively new Prime Minister of France, who came in after Macron's slightly catastrophic triggering of a snap election, who's been trying to get a budget through and deal with the fact that the French situation looks pretty bad in terms of its debt, it's breaching all the EU rules and it really needs to reduce its spending, get its deficit under control.
40:13 Rory Stewart? But he's facing a parliament where they failed, obviously, to secure a proper majority, where Marine Le Pen has quite a lot of influence. So over to you on what's happening in France.
40:21 Alastair Campbell? Well, just before we started talking, Barnier invoked this article in the constitution, which allows him to get through big changes without parliament having a vote. Now, that says to me that the negotiations he was having with Marine Le Pen had reached the end of the road. She demanded quite a lot of concessions. There was a very big one, which he gave to her very, very quickly, which was reversing his idea of putting up tax on electricity. But he's got to find sixty billion euro of mixture of tax rises and spending cuts.
40:52 Alastair Campbell? The bond markets, which did so much damage to the UK economy under Liz Truss, and then the Greek economy when they were having their economic crisis, they are looking at this with mounting alarm. He's trying to get down, they're heading for a budget deficit. And bear in mind, the European rules are you can't have more than 3% of your GDP being a deficit. And they're heading towards 6.1%. The proposals he's making will get it down to around 5%. Le Pen is, on the one hand, very conscious of the power that she has. On the other hand, you know, while it might seem obvious, why wouldn't you just bring down the government? She also doesn't necessarily want to get to the blame, or any of the blame, for the massive economic consequences that there would be,
41:33 Alastair Campbell? including the likelihood of, you know, soaring interest rates as we had here. You know, it's not as easy for her as people might think. There is also some talk, I think this is probably overblown, that if the government does fall, and just where we are, so he's done the constitutional thing, that means the left are going to bring forward a vote of no confidence, and it is now likelier that Le Pen will vote for it. If both left and Le Pen vote for the motion of no confidence, the government will fall. There is some talk that that would lead to Macron falling ahead of his time.
42:05 Rory Stewart? Does that then immediately trigger an election or not?
42:07 Alastair Campbell? No, because one of the many reasons, Rory, that you were right to ward against this move that Macron made is that under their constitution, they can't have another election within a year of the last one. So it's basically just a mess. And it's a mess that it's very, very hard to see how they get out of it. I think the debate, the big debate will be on Wednesday, so we should know more by the end of the week.
42:28 Rory Stewart? Again, set the scale of this, I mean, France is, along with Germany, the huge European economy. I suppose Italy just a bit behind, so maybe 15% of European GDP. And if we're looking at putting together a coalition of countries to take up the slack in Ukraine if Trump were to pull the plug, you'd be looking hard at countries like France. I mean, you'd be hoping France would be contributing 7, 8 billion euros a year, but at a time when they're trying to cut 60 billion euros, feels pretty tough, doesn't it?
42:56 Alastair Campbell? And Le Pen is doing that sort of classic populist thing of saying, well, you know, you can get the money by getting rid of all overseas aid, or sending all migrants home, or stopping giving migrants any healthcare, which, you know, would not cover 60 billion euros, no way. So Barnier, who is a, I think has done a pretty good job to To kind of steady the ship and to get it this far, but it's looking very, very, very difficult.
43:22 Rory Stewart? And who people can listen to on our interview on Leading.
43:25 Alastair Campbell? Indeed.
43:26 Rory Stewart? And if we got very exciting leading interview coming up, are we allowed to reveal it yet? Or is that just going to go out when we're?
43:31 Alastair Campbell? Rory, do you actually listen to the podcast?
43:33 Rory Stewart? Oh, we did reveal it, didn't we? We revealed it last week.
43:35 Alastair Campbell? Revealed it twice. I think we've double revealed that the ex chancellor Angela Merkel.
43:41 Rory Stewart? Coming up.
43:42 Alastair Campbell? We'll be seeing her very, very soon. And I'm pleased to say, I mean, I think she's done an interview, she did an interview a while back with Kati Adler of the BBC, who's a very good Deutsch sprecher. But I think we're the only other ones that she's doing, which is very, very nice. I wanted to do it in German, but you barred me. You say you you can just about cope with the interpretation in one ear through one voice, but you're not having two. I'm very upset. By the way, we've been so negative about France. I think we should just mention the extraordinary beauty of the revamped Notre Dame Cathedral.
44:13 Rory Stewart? And what an amazing achievement in time. I mean, there's us struggling to build a Leeds Manchester line. They've got that done in under five years, haven't they?
44:20 Alastair Campbell? The BBC did a wonderful thing where they had a, you can put your curse or whatever it's called onto the middle of the screen and you can, they've done these wonderful before and after. If you go in the middle, you'll see what it was like before and what it's like now. And I mean, the craftsmanship and the, when you saw Macron making that speech, apparently that audience was just the people who'd worked on the project and they filled the whole of the nave and out into the pews and absolutely brilliant. It just shows that, isn't it? That when they put their mind to it, they can do something like that, just like they do with the Olympics. And yet their politics seems to be in an absolute state of total petrol.
44:51 Rory Stewart? And this is a bit of a bit of an issue, isn't it? Just to be a little bit sort of grand again. So Trump's taking over. We're really looking to Britain, France, Germany, Italy to step up because I guess they are the last remaining champions, maybe you leave Italy out of this, of liberal democracy, open borders, rule based international order, all this kind of stuff. And yet, a lot of what we're saying on the other bits of the podcast are politics peeling pretty fragile, weak and inward looking in a lot of the European countries because of their own domestic problems.
45:31 Rory Stewart? It doesn't feel like a time when Europe and the UK is going to be trying to influence the course of events in Syria. And goodness knows what this is going to mean for, we're also speaking at a time when there's, we'll talk a bit more about this in our next podcast, Question Time, where there's demonstrations now happening in Georgia, which is a European candidate member state, which just elected a pro Putin government in what seemed like a pretty dubious election. So there are all these opportunities for Europe in the Western Balkans with Serbia and Kosovo and Bosnia and also with the Caucasus to try to stabilize the world. But it doesn't feel to me with what you're saying about France and what you were saying last week about Germany, as though we're really likely to feel that kind of confidence. Maybe new German government?
46:15 Rory Stewart? Do you think maybe if Schulte steps down and a new chancellor comes in, they could get a bit more lead in their pencil?
46:20 Alastair Campbell? Well, he won't, he's not going to step down. He's going to face the election. Obviously, he's, he's gone off to see Zelensky today. I think he was quite stung by some of the things that was said about his last intervention. Okay, Rory, well, let's talk about all this and more on Question Time.
46:36 Rory Stewart? Very good. Bye bye. Thanks.
46:42 Speaker 03 Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.
46:51 Speaker 04 Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.
46:58 Speaker 05 What would happen if I stopped drilling? You start, you freeze to death, that's what.
47:03 Speaker 04 With great power comes great deniability.
47:06 Speaker 05 I'm not the first man.
47:07 Speaker 04 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 out of 10 without parent.
47:12 Speaker 08 Espolon Tequila. It arrives in a cloud of feathers with a cry to wake the dead. Espolon Tequila. Balanced, delicious, perfect for nights out, nights in, and people who like to drink tequila. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth. Then hold on tight. 100% agave, 0% eagle. Espolon Tequila. For a real margarita. Ride the rooster.
47:36 Speaker 09 Espolon Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Compaia America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.
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