Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 355. How to start a campaign, Gisele Pelicot, and the biggest surprise of 2024 About this episode Why has the environment fallen off the political agenda? What events caught geopolitical experts off guard in 2024? And, what advice would Alastair give to anyone looking to start their own campaign?
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Transcript 8,505 words · 14 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 Alastair Campbell? And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.
0:19 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.
0:42 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?
0:49 Rory Stewart? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
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1:58 Rory Stewart? Welcome to The Rest is Politics Boxing Day Edition with me Rory Stewart.
2:03 Alastair Campbell? And me Alastair Campbell.
2:05 Rory Stewart? Boxing Day is when I travel up from London to Scotland. So I'll be up in Scotland for the next, the next week.
2:11 Alastair Campbell? No doubt like me doing it via a Burnley game. Is that your normal routine? No.
2:16 Rory Stewart? No, no, strangely not in my case. No, no, we should talk about Burnley at some point, but I think maybe this is a chance to sort of think bigger about what's been going on. And I guess the first question maybe to you is what surprised you most? In 2024 and maybe kind of remind people a little bit about what on earth 2024 was.
2:37 Alastair Campbell? Well, if you remember when we started talking about 2024, we said it was going to be the year of the elections, more people voting than any time in history. I guess the thing that surprised me a bit is the way the incumbency became a big problem in elections rather than what it often has been in history, which is an advantage. Every single party of government went backwards. That's a pretty amazing thing. First time since basically since data has been collectible.
3:06 Rory Stewart? And in the majority of cases lost, didn't they?
3:09 Alastair Campbell? And often lost, yeah. And even where they won, like the ANC in South Africa is still in government, but they're now part of a coalition. Modi was expected to get another huge win. He didn't. He went backwards quite considerably. And as you say, lots of the elections, you know, here in the UK, the Tory government fell. In America, the Democrats lost to Trump, et cetera, et cetera. I think though the thing that surprised me most, and this was going to be in the Christmas Day podcast when we talked about the most under discussed thing, the one that I had as my, my second choice, if you'd have said the same thing, it's I was going to make my first choice, was actually the way that climate change has gone right down the political agenda,
3:51 Alastair Campbell? which is incredibly worrying, very, very dangerous, but also testimony, I'm afraid, to the fact that the hard right do weaponize these issues incredibly well.
4:05 Alastair Campbell? And so I think that's been the surprise that so COP, for example, if we were to say to most of our listeners now, what do you remember from COP? Do you remember any of the big decisions? Do you remember any of the big moments? Any of the big speeches? I'm not sure they'd remember that much.
4:20 Rory Stewart? No, it's unbelievably startling also an opinion polling that whereas a couple of years ago, climate was very, very high on young people's agenda, it's now much lower. In fact, we began seeing this in some of our live events. We did a big event, you'll remember, in Methodist Central Hall in Westminster with about 5,000 schoolchildren. And that was a really early sign of the fact that for the first time for us, asking a group of young people whether climate was a priority, very few hands went up. And another sign of your point is that the people that should really have been making the moves, which are the G20, which are the 20 wealthiest countries in the world to emit 85% of the
5:03 Rory Stewart? world's carbon, did so little serious on this when the G20 met. And COP went down, what I'm afraid in the end is a very important issue, but in the end is a bit of a rabbit hole, which is the question of development assistance to emerging countries, rather than what on earth's to be done about the fact that we are so far off meeting Paris now. You remember Paris was going to try to hold global warming to one and a half degrees. We're now sailing through two degrees, sailing towards three degrees. Emissions are continuing to rise.
5:36 Alastair Campbell? And of course, you know, we said yesterday that the biggest event politically of the year was Donald Trump being the re-elected president. And this is Donald Trump, drill, baby, drill. This is Elon Musk, recycling is a waste of time, is his new kind of, you know, tweet of the moment. So, no, I think that that has been the surprise of the year. That issue has fallen in a way that is really alarming. And to be fair to Ed Miliband, and I guess a lot of criticism from lots of different people, inside and outside government, because some people think he's too much driving the green agenda, as it were, without necessarily being fully cognizant of some of the other consequences. But at least he's shown leadership on this still. And that's what's been missing is, if you go back to the Al Gore era, when
6:21 Alastair Campbell? Al Gore was kind of, you know, the big voice on climate, there's nobody has really replaced him.
6:26 Rory Stewart? No. Well, so surprise for me, I think, is the many, many ways in which the world did not behave in the way that geopolitical experts anticipated. And I think it's a really interesting way of wrapping up the year of the two of us having a chat, because I would argue that what happened in Syria, what happened in Israel, what happened in the US, and I could, you know, develop this more, but let's just focus on Syria, Israel and the US, was really surprising. And it showed 2024 to be quite different from the years that preceded it. And one of the reasons that we get things wrong is we understandably often think about
7:08 Rory Stewart? things like a straight line on a graph, the way things have been in the past, the way things will continue. Syria, most startling of all. I mean, obviously, for seven years, Bashar al-Assad had been sitting there in control of most of the country, and al-Jalani was the ruler of a tiny little city-state perched up on the Turkish border. And within just over a week, that regime collapsed and he's taken over the whole country. So that's a real no straight line example. But Israel, just to remind people of all the surprises there. So Netanyahu started the year as one of the most unpopular leaders imaginable, just clinging
7:49 Rory Stewart? to power because people didn't want to replace him in the middle of the Gaza War, and has turned that around to be a figure of considerable political power and popularity again in Israel. Hezbollah and Iran, our views of them are completely changed. You know, we started the year saying that Hezbollah was the most powerful non-state act from the world, 25,000 people under arms, over 100,000 missiles, including precision missiles, and the one group that Israel could not take on, and they've proved to fold like a paper tiger. Iran's much vaunted Russian air defence system turned out not to work. Its missile strikes never got through, and Iran has also folded like a paper tiger.
8:34 Rory Stewart? But I also think that we wouldn't have predicted that. Israel would have turned so much against the international rule-based system over the last year. We're ending the year with them having declared the Secretary General of the United Nations, persona non grata, rejected the authority of the International Criminal Court and closed their embassy in Dublin in Ireland because Ireland has had the temerity to try to speak up for these international courts. And that's before we get on to the US and on the US, but just let's right back to you. I guess the big things there are Trump demonstrated a new world of politics where you don't need a ground game anymore.
9:15 Rory Stewart? So he didn't have an office basically operating in Michigan when the Democrats had tens of thousands of volunteers out on the streets knocking on doors, little offices in every town. He did it on the back of social media and three-hour interviews on Joe Rogan. And we saw a version of that in the Romanian election where a completely unknown character suddenly flipped prominence off the back of TikTok and 60,000 fake Russian accounts. But he also demonstrated that he could get an astonishing proportion of the African-American and Hispanic vote coming over to him. And again, I don't think we would have predicted at the beginning of the year that the felony convictions would have absolutely no impact on him at all. Right, over to you.
9:58 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. You've reminded me of a conversation I had at one of the Christmas batches I went to where Stephen Fry was present, Rory.
10:05 Rory Stewart? Ah, yes.
10:06 Alastair Campbell? And he told me this story that he was in Australia at the same time as you and he's sitting on a plane flying from one Australian city to the next. And who should be plonked down next to him on the plane but Rory Stewart? And he told me that he was saying to you, he was very worried about the American election and you said, don't worry, it is absolutely nailed on for Kamala Harris. And he said he spent the next few weeks telling all of his friends, don't worry, calm down, it's going to fine. Some of them put money on it, Rory, because Stephen Fry was telling me, he spoke to this guy, he's really well informed, very plugged in. So there we are. That must have been your biggest surprise, given how confident you were.
10:47 Rory Stewart? Yeah, yeah.
10:48 Alastair Campbell? That Trump was not going to win. And you did look very shocked on the night. I think I sort of in my gut felt something was going very badly wrong in the last few days. And I'd spoken to some of the Democrat strategists who I could tell from the tone of their voice that were very, very anxious. But you you took it remarkably well. I'd have been very, very upset if I'd have been you.
11:09 Rory Stewart? Actually, I it's been really interesting getting something so publicly and magnificently wrong in a number of ways. One of them is that I've given an enormous number of right wing trolls on Twitter.
11:22 Alastair Campbell? Pleasure.
11:23 Rory Stewart? A lovely line, so much joy. So that I literally now, if I put out anything like on what the weather looks like out the window, or whether I had a good meal, there immediately I can get 900 replies saying, shut up, get off this platform. Nobody's going to listen to you again. Somebody who's wrong about absolutely everything. So it's become being wrong about Trump is wrong about everything.
11:47 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
11:47 Rory Stewart? The second thing, though, is that I found it quite nice, actually, because I find it very, very awkward being on a little pedestal and people sort of tripping around me as though I'm some sort of seer or secular saint. To have a massive public humiliation failure is gratifying. It makes me feel more normal, makes me feel more down to earth, makes me appreciate the podcast and those people who continue to listen to it and be nice to me more. So I think it's been really good for me.
12:16 Alastair Campbell? Well, we had your we had your wonderful sermon yesterday about hope. And as we're still on a religious theme, that was very lifer Brian. That was always look on the bright side, get good stuff out of bad, etc. Now here, personal highlight Rory, personal highlight of the year. Look, my political highlight was seeing the back of the Tories laboring with a big win. I spent the the entire election night with you in a Channel Four studio and I thoroughly enjoyed it. So that was great. The podcast personal highlight was probably getting Angela Merkel on, possibly as well, filling the O two. That was nice. But the personal highlight for me was probably seeing my daughter Grace fill the Hammersmith Apollo.
12:54 Rory Stewart? Amazing.
12:54 Alastair Campbell? And have two and a half thousand people. Sort of in convulsions of laughter as she talked about some pretty difficult things that have got on in her life. So that was probably the
13:05 Rory Stewart? Oh, wonderful. That is wonderful. Well, I've enjoyed the podcast a lot. And actually, in addition to the bits that you've mentioned, I was a bit skeptical about us doing the US electoral coverage. But I was very pleased we did it. I thought it was a lot of fun. I thought you chaired it well. I think Dominic Sandbrook worked well. I thought Marina Hyde and the mooch came in very well. And it was lovely to be able to do that coverage.
13:27 Alastair Campbell? Despite the outcome.
13:28 Rory Stewart? Despite the outcome. A personal highlight. I mean, again, it's difficult to avoid talking about children. So Ivo's now seven, Sasha's 10. They're, as you know, two lovely little boys. They have moments of lacking confidence, as I guess we all do. So the moments I remember are moments of them just displaying amazing kind of get up and go and courage. So Ivo, just when things are tough at school, he can just put a big smile on his face and come down and poke me. And Sasha, who's very shy of public speaking, I slightly pushed into reading the lesson in church. And he very sweetly said to me in the middle of the service,
14:11 Rory Stewart? he said, Thank you for making me do this. I think this is really great. And stood up and did it and looked up from his lesson and looked everyone in the eyes and spoke slowly and clearly. And it was lovely to see. So there we are.
14:23 Alastair Campbell? Oh, that's good. That's nice. That's nice. Now, we're on to books. I haven't been reading as much as I did last year, I don't think. But I've I mentioned my book of the year on the podcast we did not long before Christmas, which was this one Patriot, Alexa Navalny. And it really is the book of the year in so many ways, because he was murdered by the Russians in February, the book is out already, it's become a bestseller in different parts of the world. And it's just a fantastic read because he's such an amazing character. It's stuff that he's been writing about different stages of his life, at different stages of his life. And some of the most interesting and revealing bits are his diaries from inside prison. And of course, because we know the ending of the book, he dies,
15:08 Alastair Campbell? there's a kind of added tragic feel to it. But it's ultimately a very, very hopeful book. Basically, within it, he is saying, look, in the end, this guy Putin and his regime, they are so bad, they are gonna go, they're gonna go. And it may take longer than you think, but it's gonna happen. And I'm gonna be part of that. And of course, the other thing, I really enjoyed meeting his daughter in an event we did in Norway, and his wife Julia and his daughter Dasha, they are kind of, this book is kind of part of their fight and part of their story now. And so I think that's, that's my book of the year. The political domestic one, I'm gonna say this biography by a guy called Stephen Walker, who's a Northern
15:50 Alastair Campbell? Ireland journalist, and it's a biography of John Hume. John Hume, great man. And okay, you can say that he was a Nobel Prize winner because of the Northern Ireland peace process. But actually, I still don't think people fully understand outside Northern Ireland, what a huge figure in their history he is. And the other thing, Rory, that as you know, happens when we do this podcast, we get sent lots and lots of books. And often, they're annoying, and they lie in a pile by the bed, and you don't read them. But do you remember I said a while back, when we're talking about the farmers, there's a really good book called Who Owns Scotland? And I don't know why somebody's never written a book called Who Owns England? And this one was said to me by a guy called Guy Shrubsole, and it's absolutely
16:33 Alastair Campbell? brilliant. It's like, it's similar to the book Who Owns Scotland? But honestly, Rory, you cannot read this book and defend the establishment, the dukes, the extent to which land is used for tax dodging, the oligarchs, and the sort of new money, the old money. It's a brilliantly researched piece of writing. And then my non-political, well, this is actually very political, but my German book of the year is, and again, it didn't come out this year, but it's Berlin, 1936, 16 Tage im August, 16 Days in August. This has been translated into English. But it's a wonderful book about the Berlin Olympics and it's seen from all different perspectives of athletes, of people who are working there, of Hitler,
17:18 Alastair Campbell? of a woman who was obsessed with the idea that she wanted to kiss Hitler, of lots of Brits involved, Henry Shannon's in there, sort of weaving in and out, beautifully written, and it gives you a real feel for this sense of normality around the Olympics at a time when the abnormality of Hitler and his power was becoming ever more apparent. Brilliant book.
17:41 Rory Stewart? Oh, well lovely. Just following on from your point about Navalny, there's a lovely book that's just come out by Julian Evans called Odessa and Love and War. It's dark, sometimes quiet, fascinating. It begins with him as a travel writer turning up in Odessa, this city in Crimea, in the middle of a blackout, trying to find a host in an apartment, and is just shot through with personal connections with bringing alive the people and the landscape. But my book of the year, which people need to preorder, is a collection of essays by Norman Lewis. Do you remember Norman Lewis?
18:21 Alastair Campbell? I do.
18:22 Rory Stewart? Called A Quiet Evening. So Norman Lewis was a sort of legendary figure who continued travelling into his early nineties with a sort of strange background where he he never had enough money to go to university, he made money stealing umbrellas and selling them to try to finance his first trips. He was picked up by British intelligence during the war. And this book, which is published by Eland and brought together by a man called John Hat, a wonderful collection of essays. And John's got this lovely story. When John was a travel editor for a now defunct and not much lamented magazine called Harper's, which was like a kind of fashion magazine, he contacted Norman Lewis and said, Norman, you know, I'd like to get you to write a travel article for my magazine, you know,
19:07 Rory Stewart? which is mostly obviously advertising shoes and handbags. Where would you like to go? And Norman Lewis said, well, John, ideally, I would like to go somewhere where there is a vicious civil war, no running water, and if possible, a very virulent and uncurable form of malaria.
19:30 Alastair Campbell? So where did he go?
19:32 Rory Stewart? John, I think I had to negotiate him to go to some Italian island because he couldn't quite keep his job.
19:38 Alastair Campbell? Excellent. Oh, that sounds great. The publisher will be thrilled by that plug, I'm sure, especially if it's not out yet. Okay, what about best film of the year?
19:47 Rory Stewart? Well, the film that I'm really obsessed with is Alex Garland's film Civil War. And the reason why that matters, I don't know if you've heard about it, it's basically taken a sort of Balkan-style war or a Syrian-style war and put it in the United States. So suddenly there are checkpoints outside Washington. There's a weird technocratic president trying to hold the thing together while weird people take over. And the reason it matters is this, that when we look at Bosnia or when we look at Syria, it's very often the case, particularly as British people, we distance it. We think, well, it couldn't happen to us. We're good, well behaved, educated people. We forget that Syria was at peace for 800 years. We
20:28 Rory Stewart? forget how startling the Afghan Civil War were to Afghans who'd been at peace for nearly a century.
20:34 Alastair Campbell? We forget that Northern Ireland is just over the road.
20:36 Rory Stewart? Just over the road, exactly. So this brings it to kind of wonderful light by showing Pennsylvania breaking apart into conflict. Anyway, over to you.
20:45 Alastair Campbell? I'm going for a film that I think I mentioned when I saw it on the podcast, which is The Outrun. Saoirse Ronan playing an alcoholic. It's one of the most incredible portrayals of the descent into alcoholism. And yet it's somehow a very, very hopeful film as well, not least because of nature. And she goes back home to Orkney and it's a beautifully filmed, beautifully shot. She's an amazing actress.
21:11 Rory Stewart? Well, and that of course resonates a lot of themes in your life, doesn't it?
21:14 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
21:14 Rory Stewart? Yeah. I'm going to trip you into your best, this is sounding like one of these Sunday colour supplements, your best sort of box set or series on TV. And while I give you time to think, mine is a Netflix series called The Diplomat.
21:27 Alastair Campbell? Okay, I didn't see, but yeah, I've heard a lot about it.
21:29 Rory Stewart? You'd love it, Alistair, really love it. It's got a really cool quirky American ambassador in London and a British prime minister loosely modeled on Boris Johnson, who's attempting to, for the sake of the most ludicrous populist excuse, declare war on Iran. An elderly doddering American president and...
21:53 Rory Stewart? Just the most startling relationship between her and her husband, who's a sort of Richard Holbrook figure and who's deputy she used to be and is now, he's now like the wife of the ambassador. But he totally refuses to do what he's told and she's trying to manage her collapsing marriage and this guy that keeps trying to back into the limelight when she's meant to be the ambassador. So recommend it strongly. Over to you.
22:16 Alastair Campbell? There's a German box set, which I can't remember the name of, so that's pretty hopeless, which Fiona and I watched a while back, which was brilliant. I just cannot remember the title of it. I'm going to go for Say Nothing.
22:28 Rory Stewart? All right.
22:29 Alastair Campbell? Which is, and I've got a weird feeling that last year, my book of the year might have been Say Nothing.
22:34 Rory Stewart? Yes, that rings a bell.
22:35 Alastair Campbell? This book about the disappearance of Jean McComville in Northern Ireland. And Say Nothing, the series, which is based upon the book. But it's essentially the story of the IRA at the height of the troubles. Gerry Adams, a very, very large figure within it. And at the end of every episode, this thing comes up, says Gerry Adams denies having ever been a member of the IRA or having ever taken any part in any of the events that we've filmed, sort of thing. But it's for anybody who wants a kind of feel, a sense of what it might have been like to be either a perpetrator or a victim in the troubles in Northern Ireland. It's harrowing at times, but it's brilliantly done. So yeah, I'm going for Say Nothing.
23:20 Alastair Campbell? And if Fiona pops in with a coffee at any point, I can ask her to remember the name of the German one, but she may have gone out.
23:26 Rory Stewart? Okay, Al, so let's take a quick break on this Boxing Day special podcast episode.
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25:19 Speaker 08 Okay, now here's one for you. Best new place visited, home or abroad?
25:25 Alastair Campbell? I am going for Lake Annecy. And not necessarily because it is a beautiful area, but I'll tell you why I'm going for Lake Annecy, Rory.
25:33 Speaker 08 Remind us where Lake Annecy is.
25:35 Alastair Campbell? Well, it's in France, but quite near Switzerland.
25:37 Speaker 08 Right, okay.
25:38 Alastair Campbell? So we're talking kind of Alpine. It's beautiful. It is a very beautiful area, but there are other more beautiful areas of France.
25:44 Speaker 08 This is not where you gave yourself hypothermia swimming last year.
25:47 Alastair Campbell? No, that was Lake Geneva. That was Lake Geneva. Hypothermia was Lake Geneva. But it is a swimming, there is a swimming reason for this. The reason I'm choosing Lake Annecy is Fiona and I went for a swim there. We go around the place trying to find beautiful new swimming spots. You could swim out for I don't know how far and you could see the bottom of the water because it was so clean. And when you... Investigate why it is so clean. It is because they, the local authorities around Lake Annecy, are determined that it should be clean. And they do the things that you need to do to keep it clean. They measure, they track, they are very strict about, you know, the, how many boats can go on there.
26:31 Rory Stewart? And in addition, the Treasury would say they pay because it's not cost free. It's quite expensive keeping waterways clean.
26:38 Alastair Campbell? But listen, we will probably go back there at some point as tourists because we will, lots of people will listen to this or they might, who we talk to say, if you want to swim in amazing, clean, fresh water that will remind you what you think swimming in cold water in Britain should be like and used to be like, then go to Lake Annecy.
26:58 Rory Stewart? You've got to be careful doing this on a podcast. The problem is when you've got, you know, close to a million listeners coming in and they hear that stuff, things go very weird. My friend, Oz Milburn's the co-owner of a restaurant called Kitty Fishers in Mayfair, which is a lovely restaurant. But a Hong Kong Chinese TikToker went there and really enjoyed the steak and posted something. And since then, he's been back to back with young Hong Kong Chinese couples only ordering the steak filling his restaurant for years and years and years.
27:31 Alastair Campbell? What's wrong with that?
27:32 Rory Stewart? Well, I think nothing wrong with it in terms of the revenue for the restaurant, although I think he does say that they're not great ones for ordering a bottle of wine. But it also means the chef is totally limited or was limited to cooking steak because the TikToker would like steak.
27:45 Alastair Campbell? Steak, very topical in politics, really, because we learned that Kemba Badenoch quite often has steak delivered to her desk for lunch.
27:51 Rory Stewart? She doesn't like sandwiches. She doesn't believe sandwiches are food. Quite why Keir Starmer felt it necessary to respond to that, we'll have to get into in some other, in another world.
27:59 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. So what's your best new place? You've probably travelled a bit more than I have this year, I think.
28:03 Rory Stewart? Well, I have travelled a lot. I've been in Afghanistan this year, which was lovely. I mean, it sounds a strange thing to say, but it really was wonderful to go back. But my new place really was Australia, which I'd only visited very briefly before. And this time I had a proper trip. And as you know, because I've bored you and the listeners, I think Australia, in a world of pessimism and gloom. Is a shining exception. It is the only wealthy, mature democracy, western country in the world, which is in good shape. It's running astonishingly a budget surplus when France is dealing with a 6% deficit, Britain is buried under nearly 100% of GDP debt,
28:47 Rory Stewart? Italy's struggling to deal with its debt, America's achieved debt of such eye-watering trillions that nobody can even calculate in, they've got a budget surplus, they've got compulsory voting, they've got the single transferable vote system, they've got a good federal system, they, as you pointed out in yesterday's episode, they've got great politicians like Peter Malanowski, and they've got an amazing combination of some ways in which they're more old fashioned than Britain. Lovely manners, lovely straightforwardness, and in many ways incredibly more contemporary, incredible waterfronts in Brisbane, incredible waterfronts in Melbourne, astonishing food, and the best thing of all about Australia is unlike London, which for some reason I do not understand, has given up serving
29:32 Rory Stewart? dim sum on trolleys. You can still eat dim sum on trolleys all over Sydney.
29:36 Alastair Campbell? I did enjoy your falling in love with Australia, because I think, I think you thought I was always a bit over the top about Australia, and why I kept banging on about Australia, if I was a young man, I'd go and live in Australia and blah, blah, blah. But you did go over the top at times, Rory. I think you'd been there about four days, and you sent me a message saying, I think my next book is going to be Why the World Leads to People Who Like Australia.
29:58 Rory Stewart? That's the one.
29:59 Alastair Campbell? But what's funny, on my last trip to Australia, I was surprised about how much people were moaning about Australia. They were much monier, I think the world's got much monier.
30:07 Rory Stewart? It's fascinating that, isn't it? Because you go to these places, you're just like, objectively, this is amazing. And yet, everybody's like, no, it's not, it's rubbish. We often have that experience in Ireland, don't we? We go there and we go, look at this incredible economic transformation, your politicians seem much more grown up, your media seems much better. And of course, everyone's like, oh, no.
30:28 Alastair Campbell? Well, even though, even I was in, as you know, I was in Norway recently, and, you know, you think the economy's really doing pretty well, and everything's clean, and the hotels are nice, and the restaurants are nice, and people look so healthy, and... And yet you listen to them and then and the Jonas, the prime minister has just had a poll where they're way, way out of it. Yeah, I think politics is just tough everywhere, but I'm really glad you liked Australia. Maybe we should do a tour of Australia. I'm not sure Fiona would be very happy about that. Cultural event.
30:57 Rory Stewart? Oh, yes. Your cultural event of the year, Alistair. Over to you. Cultural event of the year.
31:00 Alastair Campbell? There are two. They're both French. One is the Olympics, which I went to, which were fantastic. But I think I'm going to narrowly give it to Notre Dame renovation. Is that a cultural event? I think it's quite cultural.
31:15 Rory Stewart? Yeah, I mean, that was incredible. I mean, and they also were on time and on budget, which has never been heard of in any infrastructure project.
31:21 Alastair Campbell? And using, you know, interesting, when we talked to Bill Clinton on leading and he said that, you know, the whole thing about philanthropy, it's about how you get private money to work with, public money to work with, this, that and the other. It was funded by some massive donations by big French businesses, but also by, you know, pretty old fashioned crowdfunding.
31:38 Rory Stewart? And also some very, very wealthy American philanthropists who stepped up as well.
31:42 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. The day itself was absolutely beautiful. And funny, this morning I had a message from a friend who's in Paris who sent me this picture. He said, where am I? And it was just a picture of a stained glass window. And I said, well, Notre Dame. And she said, it's just absolutely mind blowing. Because the truth is, recent visitors to Notre Dame, before the fire, it was amazing. But as you know, I was in St Paul's recently and I've not been to St Paul's that much in my life, but I would say that was on a par, certainly with Notre Dame of old, pre-fire.
32:17 Rory Stewart? Right.
32:18 Alastair Campbell? But I think a little bit like, do you remember when people often talk, say that the kind of rebirth of Manchester was in part driven by their reaction to the IRA bomb attack? I do think that something that we're back to the thing about your sermon of, you know, about getting good out of bad. And it's just what they've done is incredible. And I really do recommend people try and find the documentary that France did. In fact, the BBC should get it and find it and put it on because it's just an amazing, long documentary about how did they do it? And it's beautifully filmed with amazing interviews with extraordinary people. So yeah, I think Notre Dame is my winner.
32:55 Rory Stewart? It's also a very interesting contrast with how Britain responded to the destruction of so much after the Second World War. In Europe, in France partly, but most dramatically in Germany and Poland, the decision was often made to do this very difficult job of reconstructing what had been lost. Whereas the city of London, to its cost, actually became the victim for incredible, brutalist fantasies of planners, unscrupulous developers, idealistic architects who inflicted a huge amount of damage, as they did on Glasgow, as they did on Birmingham, as they did on Manchester.
33:36 Rory Stewart? And it's interesting that that story at Notre Dame, which moves you so much, is not the kind of story of 1950s Britain, where the story would have been, here's an amazing opportunity to take this great site and build a new brutalist Barbican on the île de France. But instead, they were, I believe I'm right, they were literally forging kind of medieval hatchets and axes and swords to get it right, wasn't it?
34:02 Speaker 08 Yeah, no, it's incredible, absolutely incredible. So what's your cultural event?
34:06 Rory Stewart? Cultural event of the year, so.
34:07 Speaker 08 Rory Stewart at the O2.
34:09 Rory Stewart? Rory Stewart, exactly. So museums, incredible things happened at the British Museum, which is that they have just received their biggest donation ever, which is many, many billions of pounds, which is something called the Percival David Collection of Chinese ceramics.
34:26 Speaker 08 Billions?
34:27 Rory Stewart? Yeah, it's worth literally billions. It's their biggest donation ever. And very few people ever see it. So you have to get to the back of the building and go right up the stairs, and there is this room of the greatest Chinese porcelain, I think, almost in the world, better almost than they have in Taiwan, or on a par with that.
34:45 Speaker 08 Pots, lots of pots.
34:46 Rory Stewart? Astonishing blue and white porcelain, yeah. And you can just stand and gaze at the perfection of this blue and white porcelain, plates, bowls, vases. So that's one thing, museums. Terms of plays, I talked about this extraordinary production, Waiting for Godot.
35:03 Speaker 08 Yeah.
35:04 Rory Stewart? Sold out, it's just closed. Sold out night after night, doing this very difficult Samuel Beckett play and doing it with such fervent confidence. And then food, Isakaya Supermarket of Dreams, which is on Holland Park Road. I went to, Shashana took me on Saturday night. They take a tuna, and if you haven't seen tuna, this thing is like eight feet long off the back of a van onto the Holland Park Road in front of you on ice, put it on a trolley, take it into the restaurant and then butcher it in front of you, serving you raw tuna sushi off this beast in the middle of a supermarket. So that's definitely something for people to look into.
35:46 Alastair Campbell? I should inform our listeners that my podcast co presenter appears to me to live off sushi and Pret bars.
35:56 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and Pret bars and Costa.
35:57 Alastair Campbell? Costa, you've slightly gone over to Costa, haven't you?
36:00 Rory Stewart? Yeah, yeah. If they ever wanted me to endorse them, I'd be very happy to endorse them on that.
36:06 Alastair Campbell? You just did.
36:06 Rory Stewart? Okay, campaigner of the year to you.
36:08 Alastair Campbell? I'm staying in France and I'm staying with my person of the year, Giselle Perico. I think it's an incredible story. You know, you were talking yesterday, in fact, on recent podcasts about where things that you just don't expect. And, you know, let's be frank, the way that the debate on rape and sexual assault is going to develop, we've talked about this in relation to men's attitudes to women and so forth. But if you think of it in a campaigning context, even if she didn't think of this, this is why I'm saying she's a campaigner, what was her goal? Well, her stated goal was to transfer the sense
36:46 Alastair Campbell? of shame that men put upon women by raping the woman onto the man. And, you know, hashtag not all men, as Grace always says when she's talking about these, these issues. But I think to do that required a depth of courage and commitment. And I just think she's been, just to watch the way she's conducted herself. I mean, just imagine, I listened to this amazing Der Spiegel, Achim Lied, and my favorite German podcast, they did a really long series on it, which I still haven't finished because I've followed it reasonably closely, but I haven't read that much. But they were doing things like through voices of actors, reading the interviews with the police. So just imagine where you're a woman.
37:31 Alastair Campbell? You think you've had this really happy marriage with this guy that you think you're going to spend the rest of your life with, and you're taken into a police station and the police say, start to ask you these really personal questions about your husband, about your private life and so forth, and then show you these pictures and film of you, the woman, being raped by a whole succession of men. It is, you know, people talk about, you know, moments when you feel your whole world collapsing. Well, that just must have been extraordinary. And for her then to have emerged with the dignity that she has and the, the sense of, I am determined that my truth is going to be told. And as a result,
38:14 Alastair Campbell? dozens of men in this, I guess the other reason why it maybe speaks to me so much, I, I cycle a lot around the area where this all happened. I, this place called Mazon, I know the place really quite well. When I went there last time I was in France on the bike and you go into, you think, you can't believe that this is a place where this happened and that so many men were involved. So she is absolutely my campaigner of the year.
38:38 Rory Stewart? Let's just finish on this. So campaigning is a really interesting thing because this is obviously, the rest is politics. And we often talk about it in terms of these grand leaders that we've interviewed this year, Bill Clinton, Angela Merkel. And people ask, how can you get involved? You know, Alasdair's book to be plugged, but what can I do? But campaigning is a different thing, isn't it? And that's about citizens radically altering policy. And I wonder whether with social media, we're getting in a world in which campaigning is easier or less easy?
39:08 Alastair Campbell? Both, I'd say.
39:09 Rory Stewart? Yeah. Four, five years ago, we would have been talking about Greta Thunberg and climate. But as you've pointed out, that sort of hasn't got much momentum. We've had interesting campaigns. You mentioned Kim Ledbita and her work around her sister dying. You've been really involved in campaigns around things like mental health. I've been on the edge of campaigns around prisons. Maybe to sort of finish on a thing without putting you too much on the spot, but have you got conclusions? If somebody came to you with a campaign, you know, let's say I deeply believed, I don't know, in reducing ultra-processed food in Britain, I thought it was really bad for you and I wanted to get rid of it. What is the classic advice you would give someone if they really wanted to launch a campaign on an issue? How do you think about it structurally?
39:53 Alastair Campbell? Uh, how do I think about it structurally? I mean, it would slightly depend on the issue, but I think some of the principles. One of them you talked about yesterday, which is the thing about you've just got to keep going. So you mentioned mental health. I sort of worry that we're slightly going backwards at the moment on mental health. Not as bad as climate change, but I think it's kind of, it's slipping down the agenda a bit. I'd like to see it further up. Look, you have to have passion. You have to believe in what you're trying to do. You have to be absolutely focused on the facts of the case that you're building. This is the bit that's made more difficult when you say, well, Trump won and all that. But I still think in campaigning, you've got to have killer facts. You've got to have killer arguments that are so compelling that people will come to them, they'll share a view. When we talked
40:38 Alastair Campbell? yesterday about my foreign politician of the year, Peter Manauskas. So he's a very interesting example of a politician campaigner, a bit like M. Ledbetter. He has got into that position, but maybe we should revisit him at some point to find out whether there was a campaign that led him into that place. So I think the other thing is you've got to work out who are the opinion formers and the policy drivers that will get your campaign to the place that you want it to be. So a lot of that will be about media. A lot of that will be how do you take your case to the media? So social media makes it easier because you have a platform, but you've still got to have really good content. You've got to have big arguments. Where I think social media makes it harder is there's so much
41:19 Alastair Campbell? stuff out there. So it's harder to get noticed in the campaign space. But I think being clear about what you're trying to do, clear how you're doing it, and absolutely infinitely varied in how you take that forward tactically. I think those are the principles.
41:34 Rory Stewart? Media's interesting, isn't it? And how, you know, even campaigns and things like our not favourite newspaper, the Daily Mail, have made a real difference. You know, I think they did a lot about rescuing Vietnamese orphans back in the day, changed the government's policy on that. Weirdly, they sometimes did campaigns which I found very contradictory. So when I was trying to put on a plastic bag tax as an environment minister, the Daily Mail was simultaneously running headlines saying, "Plastic bag chaos", and then a bit later claiming credit for the fact that they'd run an article by John Humphries to get rid of plastic bags.
42:12 Alastair Campbell? It was the Mail who won it. Can I say to all newspaper readers, whenever you see a news story where the first paragraph ends, dot, dot, dot, thanks to the sun, thanks to the Daily Express, what it probably means is that they once wrote an editorial saying, might it be an idea to do something?
42:29 Rory Stewart? Exactly. I think the Daily Mail on plastic bags is a good example of that. The thing that I often get, just to be serious for a second, that when campaigners come to see me, I'm often asking, and maybe this is not the right way to deal with an idealistic campaigner, is, you know, get into the mindset of the Treasury, get in the mindset of the ministers.
42:47 Alastair Campbell? Absolutely.
42:47 Rory Stewart? How are they going to think about this? What's their objection going to be? How are they going to rubbish you? How are they going to trivialise you? How are they going to say it's impossible, illegal, unaffordable?
42:56 Alastair Campbell? Totally. I'll give you an example. I mean, you know, my best new place, Lake Annecy, I think Fygel Sharkey, who's another one we talked to on leading, I think he has shown about some of those principles that I talked about. And he did, he got, he reached a point, yeah, it started as a media thing and a social media thing and documentaries and data and all that stuff. But eventually, what he did was he raised his voice so much and so effectively, that government kind of felt they had to engage with him. So that's what I mean about, you've got to be focused on where those quotes power people are. And look, a lot of campaigns don't necessarily require government intervention. There's an interesting campaign going up just the road where people don't want a new bus stop in a particular place. And, you know,
43:40 Alastair Campbell? it's really interesting to walk up and down, and every time I go by there, I see there's a new poster. It's a very, very localised campaign. So that's a different sort of campaign. The main thing is, I think you've got to really care, but you've got to be absolutely on the detail. You've got to know your stuff.
43:56 Rory Stewart? We haven't mentioned who's, I think, my campaigner of the year, although it feels like a fading story, which is Alan Bates around the post office.
44:03 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, yeah. I don't think that's a fading story. I think that's still very live.
44:05 Rory Stewart? Just the way that he modestly mastered the detail, kept plugging away.
44:11 Rory Stewart? Kept holding up the case of these postmasters who'd been so badly treated.
44:16 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, yeah.
44:17 Rory Stewart? Just the scale of establishment resistance, government resistance, company resistance, judicial resistance that he eventually broke through.
44:26 Alastair Campbell? Hmm, hmm.
44:27 Rory Stewart? Well, they all broke through, but I think he's a really good example of a sort of servant leader there.
44:32 Alastair Campbell? Well, Rory, have a lovely Boxing Day. I know that even though you're not going to the Burnley game, that you'll be checking in and probably watching Sky Sports to see how it's going, but.
44:41 Rory Stewart? Yeah, yeah. I mean, very, very, very good luck, Alistair, and I hope it works out for you.
44:45 Alastair Campbell? Whatever else you're doing, have a nice time.
44:48 Rory Stewart? Thank you. Happy Boxing Day. Bye bye.
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