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Transcript 8,281 words · 11 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Rory Stewart? The Rest Is Politics is powered by our friends at Fuse Energy.
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1:52 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve. And of course, the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're 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.
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3:19 Alastair Campbell? Welcome to the Rest is Politics question time with me, Alastair Campbell.
3:22 Rory Stewart? And with me, Rory Stewart. And my goodness, we got a lot of questions as always. Huge thank you to subscribers. So just to remind people, you can subscribe to the Rest is Politics Plus. It gives you early access to a lot of our recordings. It gives you early access to our live shows, but we're also increasingly putting out content, which is only available for Rest is Politics subscribers. So thank you for people who've come in, subscribers who are asking questions. Where would you like to start, Alistair?
3:49 Alastair Campbell? Rory, I think if there's one subject we got the most questions on, it's actually what we discussed on the main podcast, which is America and Europe. But let's just maybe go with a couple of those. Will Taylor, how dangerous is Europe to exclusion from Ukraine? Peace talks. JJ, what would it look like for the UK to move away from the US as its closest ally? Ian May, with the political disintegration of the EU, I'm not sure about that. Should the UK take the lead in creating a European military coalition to protect the continent against the threat from Russia?
4:24 Rory Stewart? Well, I think the first thing is that being allied with Europe is very different from being allied with the US because despite all the talk about a common defence and security policy, the truth is that European nations still pursue their own interests and you can see often very dramatic splits. Orban and Hungary famously won't go along with things, Poland will push very hard forward with initiatives which France might be resisting on particular issues. And basically what it means is that instead of getting one enormous economy, the US, which is 50% larger than the European economies and this enormous integrated military behind you, you're dependent on this very difficult coordination between European countries.
5:09 Rory Stewart? Now, there are other problems. I mean, of course, Europe isn't spending as much as the US in percentage terms or actual terms on defence, but even if it were, you have the massive problems, as you've talked about in the past, the amount that Greece spends on pensions on the armed forces, the fact that individual European countries often tend understandably to invest a great deal in frontline troops, but much less in the logistics, in the air picture and the coordination, which then has to be provided by the US. So there's really good reasons now. I mean, as Trump becomes more and more unreliable as a partner, as he begins to signal his departure from European values, his increasing love affair with people like Putin, there
5:53 Rory Stewart? will be more pressure, but it will be a very big transition.
5:58 Alastair Campbell? That's why I think we have to accept that the Trump first term message that NATO countries weren't spending enough on their own defence has been, I think, now finally heard, but I don't think anybody expected first time around that one of the reasons why Europe were getting its act together on defence finally was actually because it started to see America in a very difficult and negative light. And that, I think, is what has sparked this kind of... You know, elements of panic, I think, attached to it. And it'd be very, very interesting next week when Keir Starmer does meet Donald Trump and they talk about some of this stuff, is just to work out how Britain figures within it.
6:39 Rory Stewart? Well, so here's a question then. Peter Wright, presumably not the guy from the great spy scandal sent in Australia in the 1980s.
6:46 Alastair Campbell? Spy catcher.
6:48 Rory Stewart? On the last episode, you were bigging up a customs union. Whilst I agree completely, isn't that exactly what was put forward by Labour under Corbyn in 2019 and was roundly poo-pooed by many of your centrist listeners? What changed? Well, let me add to that. I was a big, big supporter of the customs union. And in fact, in a desperate attempt to try to get a soft Brexit through, managed to corral with my friend Alex Chalk and Ken Clark, 32 of our Conservative colleagues, and to go into the voting lobbies with Corbyn to try to get a customs union through. But the reason we didn't get it through was not in the end because of opposition from Brexiteers, it was because of opposition from hard remainers who still believed that they could trigger a second referendum.
7:32 Rory Stewart? And therefore, the problem for them with the customs union, and you know, I lost in the lobbies, people like Sam Gima, whose votes I needed. I also lost some of the more extreme Labour second referendum people because they sort of believed that destroying any Brexit deal, including a soft Brexit deal, would mean that they could stay in the European Union. Over to you.
7:52 Alastair Campbell? And that was a very nice, non-threatening, over to you, but basically I know that you blame, you blame people like me for this. So my Fiona was saying the other day that, you know, there might be a bit of a sort of revising of the, of the views of Jeremy Corbyn, because of course, she said, you know, he was always banging on about Israel, he was always banging on about America, he was always banging on about the customs union. I want to draw attention to a substack by Peter Kelner. Now, we know Peter best for being a pollster, but Peter has actually written a very, very good piece, which I'm sure he won't mind if we put it in the newsletter. And I think I'm going to ask the European to take a look at it as well.
8:34 Alastair Campbell? But essentially, he's been out talking to people, small businesses, the kind of people that we talked to last week that I mentioned, who were really wanting to see real change on this, on this reset. And he basically is just getting their story about what it is like. To be a small or medium sized business person who's dealing with this paperwork. And bear in mind, this is why Farage should never be allowed to forget, they promised that Brexit was going to get rid of, quotes Brussels Red Tape. He basically is talking to people who used to have one form that they filled in and now have three. He's talking to people who have seen their freight costs soaring.
9:18 Alastair Campbell? He's talking to people who often are seeing their exports facing double tariffs. And he's talking to people who have lost their goods in customs checks processes. And he's talking to people who've lost lots of staff because they've gone back. And he says this, I asked each of these business leaders what they would say if they could ask Keir Starmer one specific change when he seeks to reset UK EU relations. Their responses included, sign up to all EU standards so there is no need for customs delays, radically reduce the paperwork involved in trading across the channel, allow EU workers to come to Britain as easily as they did before Brexit, change the rules of origin system so that tariffs are never charged twice.
10:03 Alastair Campbell? So, you know, whether we're going to call it the customs union or not, that is the deal that somehow Keir Starmer has got to get out of Europe.
10:11 Rory Stewart? Yeah, absolutely.
10:12 Alastair Campbell? We don't disagree on this one, do we?
10:14 Rory Stewart? We don't, I think. We might have done back in 2019, but I don't think we disagree on it.
10:18 Alastair Campbell? We did, we did. We agreed then.
10:20 Rory Stewart? Don't think we disagree on it now.
10:22 Alastair Campbell? Disagreed then, but now we agree violently.
10:23 Rory Stewart? Got a good challenge from a guy called Richard Snowden. Watching Trump talk about USAID. I felt some similarities with the way Rory spoke about some aspects, the waste of money in DIFID, Department for International Development, while reading Politics on the Edge. Yet on the podcast last week, he was roundly criticizing the president's approach. Have I misinterpreted or are there not areas of agreement between Rory and Donald Trump? That government aid spending is frequently wasteful. It's a really, really good challenge and I got it from a lot of people. A lot of people said, hey Rory, go easy here. You know, you're very aware of just what nonsense was going on in international development in DIFID. You've been very clear about some of the madness in USAID. I got a friend of mine from Afghanistan called Benji writing to me saying, Rory, I
11:07 Rory Stewart? never thought I'd hear you become this kind of fool's throated defender of USAID in that way. I've had another friend saying, Rory, the whole point about the charities that you used to run, like GiveDirectly or Turquoise Mountain, is they were doing stuff that these big development agencies often didn't want to do. And it's true. So, I mean, I think this is part of the problem of polarization, which is, I don't know how you get the middle line. And the temptation is never to give an inch. But obviously, what I should have said is, look, of course, USAID did some terrible programs. DIFID actually often did some terrible programs. These aid agencies were far too expensive. The management costs were crazy. There were these Beltway bandits that took huge commissions on implementing.
11:51 Rory Stewart? But that doesn't mean we should have abolished DIFID. That doesn't mean you should have got rid of USAID. It means that you need to reform and improve the way in which they operate. And the problem is, of course, that, and maybe it's a little bit like our debate about a soft Brexit, it's awfully difficult to hit that middle ground and say, look, there's something terribly wrong with it, but I still think it's better than the alternatives. Making the argument for the lesser evil, saying, if I had to choose between no international development aid at all, or keeping DIFID and USAID intact, I'd keep them intact. But it's the same with Afghanistan. People set up this false choice. Do you either put in 150,000 troops, $150 billion a year, or do you do absolutely nothing? Well, the answer
12:35 Rory Stewart? is actually, you do smarter stuff in the middle. But there's not much room for that in the policy debate.
12:42 Alastair Campbell? Right, here's one from another member, Rory, called Sleekit Scotsman. How do you find Sleekit? Sort of a bit sneaky, a bit sneaky. Anyway, Sleekit Scotsman asked this question. In the next year, could you see America, China, India, and Russia breaking away from the United Nations, disbanding BRICS, and forming their own alternative Security architecture and economic structures to replace the UN.
13:10 Rory Stewart? I'm still fixated with we sleekit cowering timorous beastie or what's a panic. Et cetera. Yeah, go on. And you have a stab at that while I think about Robbie Burns.
13:20 Alastair Campbell? I don't think it's impossible that some sort of new structure would emerge because the United Nations is struggling and it's struggling because of the weight that's put upon it and the inter and the divisions that appear to me to be at times irreconcilable. America doesn't like the United Nations. America doesn't like any international institutions right now.
13:41 Rory Stewart? Yeah, my, my problem though is that the likelihood is that you end up not with a new structure, but you end up with nothing because the reason why the UN is crippled is that the US, China and India and Russia basically can't agree on things, or particularly US, China, Russia, Britain, France, Security Council can't agree on anything. And the point of these international institutions was supposed to be accepting rules, rules around state sovereignty, borders, peace. And so I can't quite see what this new institution that the sleekit Scotsman, and thank you sleekit Scotsman for being a member, is proposing because
14:23 Rory Stewart? we're losing all the things that the UN was supposed to be about. Above all, we're losing the shared values, shared principles, shared set of international law, which the UN was supposed to implement. And I can't see what the new body would come together on. What's more likely is you'd have a series of ad hoc meetings like Putin meeting Trump in Saudi Arabia where powers try to kind of cook things up over the head of smaller members. But that's exactly what international institutions were supposed to prevent.
14:50 Alastair Campbell? Before we leave sleekit Scotsman, which modern day politician do you think best suits the adjective sleekit?
14:57 Rory Stewart? Oh, my goodness. Gosh, that's good, isn't it? That's very good, very good. And he's Scots, too.
15:04 Alastair Campbell? Peter Mandelson.
15:05 Rory Stewart? Peter Mandelson, very sleek.
15:07 Alastair Campbell? Peter Mandelson, our new ambassador?
15:09 Rory Stewart? Very good.
15:09 Alastair Campbell? He's gonna have to be quite sleek, is that a very grizzly?
15:11 Rory Stewart? Maybe it's the language and the echoes that gives an impression of a seal smoothly going through, or in fact, one of those Scottish mythical beasts that change from a seal into a sort of beautiful woman, and then just as you fall in love with them, slip back into the water again.
15:26 Alastair Campbell? We do mean Machiavellian, don't we, really?
15:28 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and smooth and slippery. Okay. Conaishian: The Irish military budget is rising, and in the wake of the war in Ukraine, polls are showing that support for NATO membership are growing in the Republic. Do you think Ireland will seek NATO membership in the near future? Now, to remind people, this is to do with neutrality. So traditionally, there were certain countries that just didn't want to get involved in anything. And amongst them were Switzerland famously, Ireland. But Sweden and Finland were also examples of countries that remain neutral and didn't get involved in NATO. And famously, Ireland found itself, Republicans, in pretty awkward positions in relation to Nazi Germany during the Second World War. I don't want every Irish listener immediately writing in and
16:11 Rory Stewart? and relitigating the question of what exactly Ayman de Valera's position was in relation to Hitler and British ships.
16:17 Alastair Campbell? I just think that was, you talk about leading with, you talk about leading with your chin there, Rory.
16:21 Rory Stewart? Leading with your chin. But definitely, this question of neutrality is very fundamental to Irish identity. Do you think that there is a world in which it might follow Sweden and Finland into NATO?
16:31 Alastair Campbell? I don't know about that, but I'll tell you a couple of things, observations that come to mind. The first is that we've seen since the October the 7th that Ireland is very, very proud of its kind of pro-Palestinian position. It's hard to say that Ireland is neutral in the question of Palestine, Israel. And the other thing I think that's interesting is whether whether Ireland feels that it has that very special relationship with the United States. It was there with Clinton, and Clinton was hugely committed to the Northern Ireland peace process. George Bush, to be fair to him, kept, you know, plugging away at it as well.
17:11 Alastair Campbell? With Biden, it was, you know, when Biden was around, you know, he never ever stopped telling people how proud he was of his Irish roots. I don't know whether, within the, the context of Trump, I don't know how Ireland feels or how it felt first time around.
17:27 Rory Stewart? Is this not part of the question, Alastair, around smaller countries and how they deal with the US? And whether we're going to see a world in which countries are going to begin to coordinate their response? Because there's all this divide and rule, as you point out, when people are going after Canada, Denmark's not speaking up for Canada and when people are going after Denmark, vice versa. And I, I wonder what it's going to take to get people to really form a group? Because they'll always feel, won't they, a bit like Britain seems to feel at the moment, well, you know, maybe we can get a good deal here, we don't want to alienate him, we don't want... I'm a bit depressed by how few of my former colleagues in the Conservative Party and even in the Labour Party are actually coming out and calling out Trump for what he's doing,
18:10 Rory Stewart? given that Trump, in his second term, is such an existential threat to democracy in the US internationally, to the Middle East peace process, to Ukraine. Why are so few MPs coming out on the record attacking Trump?
18:27 Alastair Campbell? Well, it's worse than that. It's, I don't know if you saw that Kemi Badenoch was out making a speech, kind of echoing Vance's talking points on freedom of speech. We said when we talked to Mark Carney, I think all three of us were surprised that, given how close the UK is to Canada on all sorts of levels, how nobody has really, very few people have come out and, and called that out. I think it's a reflection of the fact that America is still the most powerful country in the world. They're treading very wearily while these few first steps get taken.
19:01 Rory Stewart? Just a footnote on that, which we touched on a little bit last week, is that Saudi unexpectedly came out very, very clearly against the US, almost immediately within 24 hours on Gaza, when you would have expected it to just keep quiet in the way that UAE and others did. So there are little chinks emerging of US allies beginning to come out more strongly, but it's still very muted.
19:23 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, and that, that hasn't stopped Donald Trump from saying, I'd like to have my meeting with Vladimir in Saudi Arabia. I just think that the one thing that Mark Carney was saying, which the Canadians have been emphasising, is that this guy doesn't respect weakness, you've got to be, you've got to be strong. Here's a really good question from Martin, where we did this one before going to a break, Rory. Should the US appoint an opposition leader, as there is in the UK and Australia? There does seem to be a real problem with the Democrats. Who do we look to for opposition to Trump on the Democrat side? It's not Kamala Harris, it's not Joe Biden, it's not the Obamas, it's not the Clintons, it's not the guys really in the House who seems to me are struggling to find their voice and find their footing.
20:07 Rory Stewart? The Republicans have often been better at it, haven't they? Because Newt Gingrich was a very central figure of opposition to Democratic administrations. And Trump, of course, acted as the major voice of the opposition to Biden. And as we've said, you can see Bernie Sanders putting out a lot of material, AOC putting out a lot of material, the Senator for Connecticut putting out a lot of material. But no, we're not getting that sense that there's certainly not any equivalent of Newt Gingrich, let alone Trump, coming out against him.
20:34 Alastair Campbell? Surely at some point as well, having lost the election the way they did and lost the popular vote and with all the kind of, I even heard Katie Kay and Anthony Scaramucci the other day talking about, you know, one day might California turn red, turn Republican. So there's clearly a big debate has to happen within the Democrat Party. How is that going to take place? Who is going to lead it? What is the outcome going to be? I mean, we're not in America, you are in America right now. Do you have a sense of that debate taking place?
21:06 Rory Stewart? I think Americans are shell shocked. I mean, it's, in the time after Trump's first election, there was an incredible flurry of really impressive articles and books pointing out what a threat Trump posed to the Constitution. So we interviewed on leading, for example, Tim Snyder, who wrote this book on tyranny, and has did a lot of stuff on how you spot fascism rising. And I think there are two things happening. One is the sense that people cannot quite believe that despite all the work that was done, despite January 6th, we don't talk enough about January 6th. I mean, January 6th was such a big thing, a
21:50 Rory Stewart? US president denying the result of an election, despite all the effort put into prosecuting him, despite the massive spend by many people, including Reid Hoffman, who we interviewed on leading behind Democrats, that it failed. And
22:07 Rory Stewart? I think people are just reeling. But the thing that I'm worried about, of course, is that the next step from reeling is that as Trump dismantles institutions, there's going to be an opposition in the US that is going to begin to feel more like feeding almost a civil war.
22:25 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. Okay, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back with more questions.
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23:59 Rory Stewart? Welcome back to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alastair Campbell. And here's a question from Jacob Dovcic. Alistair, how would you handle managing the grid in a multi-party coalition, which are common in countries with proportional representation? Is the control of the narrative and coordination of message really possible only when there's a single party government? Thanks.
24:23 Alastair Campbell? No, I think you can manage a grid. So a grid, for those who don't know, is the sort of, it's a mechanism by which you organise communication in any big organisation. And I suppose my closest experience that popped into my head, as you're reading the question out, was actually when I worked at NATO. That was a coalition where you obviously had, you had America, you had Britain, you had France, you had Germany, you had Turkey, you had Italy, you had all these different countries with different interests. And part of what I was trying to do was to manage the communications in a way that all of those different constituent parts felt that they were being involved properly, engaged properly,
25:06 Alastair Campbell? got their moments in the sun. And I think you had to do the same in a coalition government. I think that if I look at one of the reasons I think why the coalition government in Germany has struggled, it's because I don't think they were giving each other enough space to have the moment when they were pushing their agenda. To be fair to Cameron and Clegg, I think actually they managed it pretty well from a communications perspective. It's just that the whole austerity thing was a complete disaster for the country, as we agree, Rory.
25:37 Rory Stewart? You're presumably thinking all the time about the way in which social media changes all this. So if you were to, I mean, I don't know, let's say, a Labour candidate would come in, or even the Prime Minister would come and get advice around how you do communications grids, and would have said to you, but come on, Alistair, you did this back in the late 90s, in the world before Twitter and Facebook. How does Musk's X, how does TikTok, and you know, the way in which new populist politicians dominate that, change the way you do messaging? How would you answer that if somebody said, all that old stuff is part of an old world and social media's changed it all?
26:17 Alastair Campbell? I would say that you have to embrace the new world, but without throwing out the kind of strategic principles which underpin any communication strategy. So, for example, if I were a modern leader of a major country, I'd actually learn a few lessons from what Trump has been doing. What could the British equivalent be of an executive order? I'll tell you one thing I would do if I was Keir Starmer, Macron, Meerts when he comes in, if he comes in as Chancellor of Germany, I would do a podcast. I would have, whether it's weekly, whether it's fortnightly, you know, you can decide. But I would use that and that would go in the grid because I would make sure
26:58 Alastair Campbell? that whatever I was doing or saying on my podcast that week, the rest of the media are going to take note. I would use X. So sometimes, you know, like Musk did his interview with the AFD, Leader Alice Vidal, that got huge coverage in Germany. Now, you know, there's so many modern media stuff, so much modern media stuff you can do, but fit it in to the overall communication of your strategy over time, which is all that communications is.
27:27 Rory Stewart? Couple of other things on this. One of the things that's interesting about the American communication is that it's clearly revolves around people like Vance and Musk spending an enormous amount of time themselves on X. I mean, presumably when Vance was attacking me and saying that he disagreed with me about the Ordo, Amaris and Saint Augustine, that's not part of any grid, right? That's just Vance sitting up late at night thinking I'll slag off Rory and say he has a low IQ.
27:54 Alastair Campbell? The Pope came out for you though Rory. He didn't mention you by name, but he basically, he came out on your side of the argument.
28:01 Rory Stewart? Really interesting that because when I then tweeted out, now that, you know, the Spectator and The Telegraph were so pleased, Rory Stewart's an idiot, doesn't know anything about theology, J D Vance is a Catholic, he understands this stuff. But then the Pope comes out on my side of this argument against Vance. So I tweet out saying, well, now, now what do people think about Vance being this great expert on Catholic theology? When literally the Pope disagrees with him. And the answer, of course, from thousands of people is the Pope's wrong, the Pope's a communist. J D Vance is right. But just help me understand what's going on there. And would that be part of your strategy? Would you allow your deputy prime minister to be on Twitter, on X in that way?
28:44 Rory Stewart? I mean, obviously it's a world in which the whole cabinet is released to slag people off and troll them.
28:49 Alastair Campbell? I think you'd have to do it within a, within a, the understanding of a messaging framework. So what Vance was saying, it sort of does fit with the overall MAGA approach. His basic thing was saying that, you know, we should look after our own first. Well, that is America first. So he's using Christianity and his very, very narrow definition of it. We got loads of feedback on that, by the way. People saying they didn't respect his views on Christianity or Catholicism at all. But anyway, that's for them. But as long as it's within that broader framework, then yeah, I think that's what you do.
29:25 Rory Stewart? I guess also randomly attacking someone like me doesn't matter because it sits into the strategy of there is this out of touch elite that thinks it's smarter than it really is. So random attacks against random people is fine, provided it reinforces the basic message, which is we're the real people, here's the elite, we're standing up to them.
29:44 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, providing that it fits an overall message that you're pursuing, I think that's absolutely fine.
29:49 Rory Stewart? One more question for you on comms, because you didn't fully answer yesterday. I raised this question of David Cameron basically going to Pakistan to make a speech, which seemed to me its main objective was to land in the Times, rather than what influence it would have on the Pakistanis who were listening. Is that something that you can explain to me that sort of makes sense in a certain sense?
30:10 Alastair Campbell? It can do. Like, you know, you mentioned it yesterday in the context of Vance in Germany. Vance did an interview with the Wall Street Journal before he came to Germany, where he basically landed the message that he then delivered in Germany. So I think often you want to, you want to land the message in a specific place so that others will then alight upon it. It's why I'm afraid that, you know, people rightly go on about TikTok and social media, what have you. But if you can get the message that you're trying to land in three or four of our national newspapers, you're still going to be right central in the political debate where you want it.
30:53 Alastair Campbell? So that's why I don't buy this idea that social media has fundamentally changed strategic communication. Ultimately, it is about the message and you can still get that message out if it's properly thought through, strong, and you're clear about how you're getting it out there. And the truth is, we should just acknowledge the fact, Trump is very good at it. He's very good at the old communication and he's very good at the new communication. Now Rory, what about this one? Peter Judge, do you agree that we have all of the knowledge, resources, wealth and technology to create a wildly, wildly better world? Why is nobody making the case for that world?
31:27 Rory Stewart? Let's come in on this. Yes, many, many things have improved. We are living much longer, we have far fewer children dying young. But the truth of the matter with technology, at least as far as I'm concerned, is that the big technological advances that changed our lives were in the 20th century, not in the 21st century. That this thing, I'm holding up an iPhone, is of course really, really impressive and Google Maps is very helpful, but it doesn't begin to have the kind of transformative impact that steam had, coal had, the first aeroplanes and cars had, that the fridge had, that indoor plumbing has, that central heating has.
32:08 Alastair Campbell? Do you think so?
32:09 Rory Stewart? Yeah, I think the really, and this is actually one of the reasons people are frustrated. One of the reasons why people say...
32:14 Alastair Campbell? Do you think they're all greater than the phone?
32:15 Rory Stewart? Much greater. And I think the only people who disagree are the techno-optimists in Silicon Valley who think they've completely changed our lives. Famously, this great figure that, you know, computers are seen everywhere except in the productivity statistics. Those things that I mentioned, those kind of old bits, the first, second, third industrial revolutions, completely transformed GDP per capita, made European and American countries in the 50s, 60s and 70s grow at unbelievable unprecedented rates. My constituency in Cumbria, Penrith and the border, when Willie Whitehall took over, and Willie Whitehall was only my predecessor's predecessor, a third of the houses didn't have indoor lavatories and a quarter didn't have electricity.
32:57 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
32:58 Rory Stewart? So the change that you bring to someone's life with that is so much more than you bring with this funny little phone. And we're still struggling, maybe AI is this thing, but we're still struggling actually to find technological innovations that make that kind of change. Where the changes are happening are increasingly on things like health and life expectancy. But we're not seeing the optimism, and why are we not seeing the optimism? We're not seeing the optimism because people feel... Their jobs are stressful, they're working long hours. They feel they've got less freedom and independence their parents have. And these phones, in many ways, many, many of us would feel our lives were better if we weren't looking at them.
33:37 Alastair Campbell? Well, I totally agree with that.
33:38 Rory Stewart? You know, I just got off a plane yesterday, half the planes walking off staring at their phones, stumbling into everything, ignoring their children, going in the wrong direction. I mean, um, yeah, anyway, over to you. Are you a techno optimist?
33:50 Alastair Campbell? No, I'm not, because I think the, I think the, the tech bros have morphed into the sovereign individual about whom I've been warning for some time, ever since Jacob Rees-Mogg's dad wrote about it. Right, Julia, who is a member, the BBC has said that Rachel Reeves has not broken any laws, there's no evidence from her former employer that she breached any policy on expenses, yet they've run the story for the last three days. What does running stories based on allegations tell us about their values? Well, that sounds like an attack on the BBC. I've been away, so I've not followed it. I've followed this story in the past when it's been, they've been going on about it, but what is this story, Roy, about her CV and about how long she worked at the bank and all this? Can you shed light?
34:34 Rory Stewart? Yeah, two stories. So Rachel Reeves, obviously our Chancellor of the Exchequer. She had said on her CV that she had worked for 10 years for the Bank of England and that she'd been an economist at the Bank of England and at H-Boss, which is the bank she worked at. And what's happened since is that journalists have discovered that in fact she worked realistically more like five years at the Bank of England because she took a year off to go to the LSE. And that for many of those years, she wasn't an economist and at H-Boss, she was in a different department entirely, doing a lot on customer support. That's one set of allegations. And I think on that, they've argued back a little bit, but she's also changed her LinkedIn entries.
35:17 Rory Stewart? And I think the story at the back of that is the pressure on. Would be MPs to pretend they have more experience in the outside world than they really have, because a lot of these people are basically professional politicians who are starting running for seats quite early on in their careers. And it's interesting, she got away with it until she became Chancellor, and I imagine many, many of my former colleagues will have exaggerated what's on their CVs to sound more impressive, to make rather thin gruel seem like a more impressive stuff. The problem is not so much the slight exaggerations, the problem seems to be more just how vehemently they're denied.
35:58 Rory Stewart? So the other allegation is that she was investigated for not being entirely honest and reporting her expenses. Now, this very old story, 16 years ago, she was investigated around having bought a bottle of champagne on expenses, apparently it's a gift for someone, and the person said they didn't receive the gift. And the problem here, and this is something maybe you can come into, is that Number 11 and the press office denied it absolutely, so there was absolutely no truth in it, and then later had to retract. And she said, I'm sorry, I had no memory of the fact that I was investigated. And the man concerned says, complete bullshit, this must have been quite a big moment in her life, it's a pretty traumatic time when you're working for a company to be investigated.
36:40 Rory Stewart? Now, ultimately, I don't think she was sort of convicted of it, so it wasn't put on her record. But the problem seems to be, as usual, not so much the original claim, it's the kind of cover-ups that come along behind it.
36:53 Alastair Campbell? That is often, often the case, particularly with these stuff that, you know, gets thrown up at people from their past. I mean, look, in general, you know, be honest and straightforward about your, about your past as well as your present. I guess there is in most people who end up in top-flight politics, it's not something that they all sort of wake up aged 16 and think that's what I'm going to do. And I think you'd be very hard-pressed to find anybody who's not done stuff in their past as students or in the jobs market, whatever it might be. But the important point is the one you make, if and when the questions come, make sure your answers are right.
37:29 Rory Stewart? Let me defend her a little bit, maybe from my own experience, which is, I had a lot of stories when I first went into politics, describing me as an ex-soldier. And the reality is, I was a soldier, very, very briefly. I was a soldier between school and university on something called a short service limited commission.
37:46 Alastair Campbell? Very wise, as Gerry Adams said to you.
37:48 Rory Stewart? Very wise, exactly. It's very flattering for an MP to be described as a veteran or a soldier, just as it's very useful for a Chancellor of the Exchequer to be described as an economist at these big leading institutions and have the impression that you spent many years as an economist at these institutions. So you allow these things to happen in the press and you allow yourself to be introduced in. And it was actually Peter Hitchens, I think, who eventually challenged me on this and said, you've said you were briefly a soldier, but a better description would be very briefly a soldier, wouldn't it? And I immediately said, yes, I'll put very in front of briefly a soldier. But I do, so I do, I do sort of slightly feel, feel for Rachel Reeves there. And then, of course, the complication by
38:33 Rory Stewart? then explaining that I was supposed to go back into the army and then the Foreign Office bought me out of the army and I moved into the Foreign Office and I was in Iraq and Afghanistan with soldiers, but I wasn't a soldier, becomes too complicated to explain to anybody. So, anyway, so sympathy for on that.
38:49 Alastair Campbell? Can I just jump in on Peter Hitchens? He's an old colleague of mine. He and Fiona shared an office in the House of Commons for years when we were all in the lobby together. And Peter has got this absolute obsession that Tony Blair wasn't actually the Prime Minister, but that I was. That Tony Blair was my, my little front man. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't worry too much, Rory, but I think the thing about being a soldier, though, don't knock it too much, because that means in the House of Commons, when you're in the House of Commons, you could be called the right honourable and gallant. And that's a great thing.
39:22 Rory Stewart? It's a really good thing.
39:23 Alastair Campbell? Under the rules of the House of Commons, Rory, I don't care how short your commission is, you should be referred to as the right honourable and gallant member for Penrith of the Borders.
39:33 Rory Stewart? Yeah, absolutely.
39:36 Alastair Campbell? Right, last question, Mark Lynch.
39:37 Rory Stewart? Yes, for you. We hear you talk about serious books you're reading, but Harold Wilson loved Agatha Christie. JFK was an Ian Fleming fan. Does Alistair have a secret set of Lee Child first editions he turns to, while Rory dips into E.L. James when his wife's not watching? What are your fun reads?
39:56 Alastair Campbell? Well, first of all, Rory, you don't need to know how I know this.
40:00 Rory Stewart? Yes.
40:01 Alastair Campbell? You may know it as well, but E.L. James is a big fan of the podcast. I know that from fact.
40:07 Rory Stewart? This is Fifty Shades of Grey.
40:08 Alastair Campbell? That's the one. That's the one. She's a big, big fan of the podcast. I am a reg- I still read the Brunson or Wally.
40:18 Rory Stewart? Very good.
40:18 Alastair Campbell? Which are cartoons from the Sunday Post about life in Scotland. But I think if I have a guilty pleasure, it's Charlotte Link, who's a German writer. And I look, this is probably terribly insulting to her, but she's in that sort of, you know, she's in the with Geoffrey Archer and all that sort of, she's a real page turner. And I love her books. Lots of them, I think, have been translated into English. They definitely deserve to be. And lots of them are in fact set in Britain. But yeah, she's my guilty pleasure, Charlotte Link.
40:52 Rory Stewart? Here's a couple of guilty pleasures for me. So John Lawton, Then We Take Berlin, about Joe Wilderness. It's a spy story about a working class guy grows up in East End of London during the Blitz. His granddad is a cat burglar who gets recruited into MI6 and sent off to Berlin. A book I've been enjoying enormously by Michael Booth called The Almost Nearly Perfect People, which is about Denmark. He's married to a Dane. Hilariously funny book, in which he investigates the fundamental question, which is why Denmark is described as being the most happy people on earth, when he finds them frequently pretty miserable.
41:32 Alastair Campbell? Well, they were until Donald Trump came along and said he was going to take Greenland off them. They're not as happy now, are they? This is quite highbrow, lowbrow stuff, Rory.
41:41 Rory Stewart? Well, no, we're going to do a real guilty one. I absolutely love James Clavell's Shogun. And I want to apologize for that because there's a lot of sort of slightly dodgy scenes in Japanese bathhouses and weird bits of torture going on at the beginning. So there's a bit of Games and Throwing going in. But my goodness, as a portrait of- Japan in the late 16th, early 17th century, there's everything there. There's samurais, there's the tea ceremony, there's internecine warfare, there's politics, there's religion, and it's done on such an enormous scale. And Clavell was, I think, originally an Australian
42:24 Rory Stewart? who was in a Japanese prison war camp during the war in Singapore, and emerged from it both with a real sense of the capacity for sort of cruelty from the Japanese officers who were maltreating them during the war, but also an incredible admiration for Japanese courage, honour and the strangeness of Japanese society. So there we are, James Clavell's Shogun.
42:46 Alastair Campbell? Excellent. And I guess my final one, on the back of the interview we did with David McClosky about Syria and his work for the CIA, we started listening to Damascus Station. Now, I think you have to say, even though John Saw's former head of MIS6 said it was the best book about espionage you'd ever read, if you're talking about spy thrillers, I think you have to put those down as guilty pleasures. There's no such thing as a spy thriller that isn't ultimately a guilty pleasure. And I love the thing, I love the thing that David said in the interview, that the life of an intelligence officer was much closer to slow horses than James Bond, because slow horses is definitely a guilty pleasure.
43:27 Rory Stewart? Slow horses. And Shashana and I are watching the box set. The only one that really tends towards literature beautifully is, of course, John Le Carre. David McClosky, when we interviewed him, was talking about how these things are both doing glamorous stuff and also bureaucracies. But Le Carre really evokes the sense of mismatched filing cabinets, weird registries, people stabbing each other in the back, politicians getting into dodgy contracts with private security contractors. And in A Perfect Spy, I think.
44:02 Rory Stewart? Manages to do psychology, history. Yeah, that guy, David Cornwall, John Le Carre. I think is the one person who stretches spy literature out of guilty pleasure into real, real Nobel Prize winning stuff.
44:16 Alastair Campbell? Excellent. Well, thank you for that question, Mark. Maybe people should let us know what their guilty pleasure readings are. Perhaps it's some of, for some of you, it's Rory's book, Politics on the Edge. I was very chuffed that Mark Carney said that my book influenced him into deciding to go for it. I didn't know whether to believe that or not.
44:36 Rory Stewart? He's a very charming politician, you see. That's what's made him very difficult to know, isn't it? But it was definitely the right thing to say when you're being interviewed.
44:43 Alastair Campbell? I'll see you soon.
44:45 Rory Stewart? See you soon. Bye bye.
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