39. Question Time: Clan Campbell vs. Clan Stewart, Tartan Trews, and Lindsay Hoyle

Join Alastair and Rory for the latest episode of TRIP: Question Time, where they answer your questions on the historical Scottish clashes between Clan Stewart and Clan Campbell, Rory’s tartan trousers, the performance of Lindsay Hoyle as Speaker, and labour shortages in the UK. Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair 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.

• 0:19Rory 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.

• 0:42Alastair 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?

• 0:49Rory 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.

• 1:05Speaker 02

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• 1:43Rory Stewart?

  Hello and welcome to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:48Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:49Rory Stewart?

  Now, I saw this morning, Alistair, that you were up as normal at 5 o'clock in the morning, reading through all the questions on Twitter, haranguing the Rest is Politics team for still being asleep. Well, I mean, it's extraordinary because you're meant to be on holiday. We all thought we were getting a break this week. Anyway, I'm sure in this activity, you've found some excellent questions. You went through the seven hundred questions. Where do you want to start?

• 2:10Alastair Campbell?

  I want to start with this fascinating one to both of us from Mario Brianto. Mario has found the evolution of our, that's you and me, mental health journeys since the podcast was launched absolutely fascinating.

• 2:25Alastair Campbell?

  Alistair, says Mario, seems to have found positive energy from the government day debacle, whereas Rory seems to have plummeted to despair. Who is propping up whom? Now, I don't actually feel that about either of us.

• 2:42Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think it's possible that there's an explanation of this. I mean, if, as you do, Alistair, you come from the Labour Party, you're going to necessarily be pretty cheered up by the Conservative government blowing itself up. And if, like me, you come from the Conservative Party, you're going to be pretty depressed and down on what's happening.

• 3:03Alastair Campbell?

  No, I'm very down about the state of politics generally, but I do have a lot of energy and the government does inspire me to kind of keep going at them. But I don't, I mean, you do keep banging on about a 10-year global recession, bingo, but I don't get the feeling that you're in a state of despair. I think you've still got hope in there somewhere.

• 3:21Rory Stewart?

  I do have hope and I realise that I'm overdoing it. I was thinking about this recently, actually. I was thinking that I have been very disobliging about Members of Parliament and I'm forgetting that actually there were some really kind of wonderful people. There were some people who were real exceptions, almost kind of saintly people in the House of Commons, who, unlike the rest of us, were not totally consumed with envy, ambition, backstabbing and horror. The sad thing, of course, is that they tended not to be the most successful ones. So they tended to be these kind of saintly figures on the back benches that everybody sort of kind of respected but also kind of pitied at the same time. It's a pretty noxious atmosphere.

• 3:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Now, one of the suggestions for rest of this party is bingo, came from a guy called Chris, who said that ought to be on there. Somebody asks a question, one of the other ones, so you get asked a question, the other one, that would be me, goes off at a tangent and then they forget to answer the question that was first asked. Now, I don't think we do that too often, but somebody has pointed out, this is unethical Tories, said, "I loved the shout out last week, but you didn't actually answer my question." Which was about the role of fifty five Tufton Street and why these suspiciously funded think tanks don't get exposed more and why we allow them in our democracy.

• 4:37Rory Stewart?

  Well, fifty five Tufton Street, for people who don't know, it's a little street just off the House Commons and it's where I believe the Taxpayers Alliance and other think tanks have been based.

• 4:47Alastair Campbell?

  Institute of Economic Affairs, all the right wing, all the sovereign individual people.

• 4:51Rory Stewart?

  And why are they not more exposed? Well, I guess they are. I think the problem is that it's pretty difficult. I don't know. I mean, you were a newspaper journalist. How easy do you think it is to get much interest out of editors on the questions of how the Taxpayers Alliance is funded if nobody's really heard about the Taxpayers Alliance?

• 5:09Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the only thing is, they do have a role in our democracy. They are very well funded. We talked last week about the whole influence of American money and American politics. I think they're a big part of that. And I can always remember when I was, you say I was a journalist, when I was on the Daily Mirror, I always used to get introduced as Alastair Campbell of the Labour supporting Daily Mirror. You never hear anybody described as so and so of the Tory supporting Dacre Rag Daily Mail. And you never hear anybody introduced as a taxpayer.

• 5:37Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think if you're reading an article in the New York Times, they would say the conservative leaning Daily Mail, definitely.

• 5:42Alastair Campbell?

  They might in the New York Times, but they don't on the BBC and they don't on, you know, most of our media.

• 5:47Rory Stewart?

  Does the BBC refer to the Mirror as Labour supporting and doesn't refer to the Mail or the Telegraph?

• 5:51Alastair Campbell?

  Generally, they refer to the Mirror as a Labour supporter or left leaning or the left wing Guardian.

• 5:56Rory Stewart?

  And they don't do that with the Telegraph or the Mail?

• 5:58Alastair Campbell?

  No, I don't think they do.

• 5:59Rory Stewart?

  Call them out on that.

• 6:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we just have, we just have. So I think they are to the right of the Tory Party, as it was under William Hague and when you were there, probably in the same place as the Tory Party now. But I don't think we, I think we treat them like they're independent arbiters, like they're a think tank. They're not. They're very, very politically motivated. They're a big part of Brexit and they're a big part of this whole.

• 6:20Rory Stewart?

  Well, a lot of these think tanks are. I mean, it doesn't matter whether they're from the left or the right, will come from very strong ideological positions. By definition, the people who join them are joining to try to push a particular view and they'll have very strong views. I mean, the point is that they're probably much less influential in Britain than they are, again, we keep talking about the US, than they are in the US. But they will have incredibly strong views on any number of things, depending on whether you're on the left or on the right. It will be very different views on Israel, Palestine, very different views on trade unions, very different views on austerity, et cetera. But you need think tanks desperately because one of the other things we talk about is the fact that the ministers and the politicians have zero time to think. So somebody's got to be out there generating some ideas and challenging the status quo.

• 7:01Alastair Campbell?

  I'm all in favor, I'm all in favor of new ideas, mate. Now, look, Caroline Baticharia says to me, ask Rory why he doesn't mention the podcast in his Twitter biography. For God's sake, Rory.

• 7:12Rory Stewart?

  Blimey, I've just been called out by her on the Twitter.

• 7:14Alastair Campbell?

  Do you not even mention it in your Twitter biography?

• 7:17Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, I don't mention anything in my Twitter biography. I mean, I.

• 7:19Alastair Campbell?

  Well, do you think you could put co-host with Alastair Campbell of The Rest Is Politics? And maybe even put something about Rest Is Politics Plus, I don't know.

• 7:26Rory Stewart?

  I didn't even say that I was a politician in my Twitter biography, but maybe I need to.

• 7:30Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, here's a great question, and I reckon we're both going to give the same answer to this. Dr Lee John Curley, I've just been to see Hamilton, the musical about an underrated founding father in the United States. Who do you think would be equivalent in recent UK politics? And I guess they're saying somebody who isn't necessarily seen as a huge historical figure now, but might be when they're writing musicals in 200 years.

• 7:52Rory Stewart?

  Wow, blimey, the Hamilton of contemporary British politics. How about Hilary Benn?

• 7:57Alastair Campbell?

  I'd love to be able to say so. I've got a horrible feeling that it's Nigel Farage.

• 8:01Rory Stewart?

  Nigel Farage, wow. But I don't think anyone, do they want to watch a musical about him? The point about Hamilton, I think, is that he was meant to be got a sort of distinguished, serious sort of guy.

• 8:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but the reason I say Nigel Farage is like colourful. He did make change, even though at the time he wasn't the one necessarily at the front line of the change. Why do you say Hilary Benn, by the way?

• 8:19Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think he even reminds me of Hamilton. I mean, they sort of almost look similar. Hilary Benn is rather sort of, I can imagine him as an 18th century founding father. I think he's got all the ingredients for that. Listen, I was going to have a go at you for Thor Bartlett, who very, very kindly has come in with a question saying, Alistair, if the mispronounced Lake Como deserves a mention, then surely you need to be corrected with Jan Ugr Fjortoft. And he points out that you are pronouncing Ugr as Ager or something, don't you?

• 8:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, that's true. I think there's something a bit pretentious about when. I am, as you know, I love foreign languages and I do speak French and I do speak German. But I think if I were to take a Norwegian name. Jan Aga Fjortoft.

• 9:04Rory Stewart?

  Well, you could just say Oga. I mean, you don't need to.

• 9:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and also Oga, Oga, Oga is such a sort of bad word in English, isn't it?

• 9:12Rory Stewart?

  Basically, you just didn't know how to pronounce his name, did you?

• 9:14Alastair Campbell?

  That's true. But Yan Aga, by the way, or Yan Oga, as you know and sister that we call him, he's a big fan of this podcast and he was very hurt that you'd never heard of him. Because he's been a big part of English football for many years.

• 9:25Rory Stewart?

  I know we've been talking a lot about different imaginings, social imaginings in Northern Ireland and the different ways in which unionists and republicans view history. So here's a question from James Marshall, which I think is fascinating and I really want to know the answers. He says, you both have Scottish clan names. How have traditionally the Stewart and Campbell clans got on? And I know very well what the Stewarts think about the Campbells, but I wondered whether you had any sense of what the Campbells thought about the Stewarts, whether you were even aware of us.

• 9:52Alastair Campbell?

  There's quite, there's quite a bad history.

• 9:54Rory Stewart?

  There is a bad history, isn't there?

• 9:55Alastair Campbell?

  It's not as bad as the Campbells and the McDonald's, but there is quite a bad history.

• 9:58Rory Stewart?

  And what's your, what's your sense of what you did? Because basically we've got you down as the baddies. Have you, did you get any narrative?

• 10:04Alastair Campbell?

  The Campbells is, the Campbells are seen as the baddies by everybody. That's mainly because the Glencoe massacre, in which the Campbells sort of went and were nice with the McDonald's and then butchered them, was such a kind of act of bloody revenge that that's gone down in, it's probably the most famous clan battle. But I think we had all sorts of troubles with the Stewarts. One of them, I couldn't, I couldn't remember what it was, but there was, there was a sort of, it wasn't, I think it was an individual Stewart that the Campbells decided had to be taken out.

• 10:34Rory Stewart?

  This was the Appen murder, wasn't it? Yeah. So I'm glad that you got, you, you were taught some of the stuff. I was a bit worried that coming from that Campbell perspective, maybe you were completely unaware of the horrors you perpetuated. So the answer, the answer, James, is my, my account of this is the Campbells were this kind of big dominant west coast clan and, you know, with deep Celtic roots, who were just incredibly politically able and ruthless, ended up controlling vast swathes of Scotland and took every opportunity.

• 11:01Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly as it should be. This is what all Campbell should be.

• 11:05Rory Stewart?

  Every opportunity, particularly to screw over the Stewarts, and they kept letting us down on every occasion. Every time when there was a chance to sort of stand up for the proper cause of, you know, the great Charles the First, Charles the Second, Bonnie Prince Charlie, any of the people they could have come in behind. They immediately allied, usually with the Protestants and often in effect, I'm sorry to say, with the English. So.

• 11:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think it's fair to say that the Campbell clan had a reputation for being utterly ruthless and at times a bit two-faced. But Rory, with all that stuff, you've walked right into a question I wasn't going to ask you from Dan Malloy.

• 11:41Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yes.

• 11:42Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, do you still have the tartan trousers you wore for the probation awards a few years ago?

• 11:49Rory Stewart?

  Good. Thank you, Dan, for remembering. Goodness, thank you for coming to the probation awards. Yeah. They're hunting Stewart tartan trews. Definitely. I've managed to tear their knees, so they're slightly dodgedy tied up at the knee. But yeah, I definitely, and I will wear them a lot. Not only in trues, I'm sometimes in a kilt, but you're right for the probation awards over in my trues.

• 12:07Alastair Campbell?

  All right, Rory, let's go in for a little break.

• 12:09Rory Stewart?

  Great.

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• 14:12Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to the Rest is Politics question time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 14:15Rory Stewart?

  And me Rory Stewart. Here's a question for you, Brian C. Can you cover the competence of Lindsay Hoyle? What is the process to remove him if enough MPs are not satisfied with his performance? Does the general public have a say? There we are.

• 14:28Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's perfectly obvious from that the questioner is not very happy with the performance of Lindsay Hoyle. One of the many ridiculous conventions in the House of Commons is this idea that the Speaker doesn't want to be the Speaker and they're very reluctantly dragged to the chair, but and there's an acclamation as they go there. But I guess where I defend Lindsay Hoyle is that his job is to defend the conventions of the House as they exist. I've had conversations with him about this. He knows I have very, very strong views that where Boris Johnson has been Prime Minister and he is so clearly a liar, that there have to be systems that can be used to bring that to attention as he lies.

• 15:11Alastair Campbell?

  Now Lindsay Hoyle, his basic position is that that is a matter for the House. It's not for him. The House has to decide its own, its own rules and therefore he does call out people who've called Johnson a liar. I think he's, I think it's a very difficult job. When you've got a rogue Prime Minister, I think John Boko did the job in a particular way, which some people loved and some people hated. And I think Lindsay Hoyle's tried to get a little bit back to being a bit more of a more conventional speaker. The trouble is, he's been doing it at some where we have a deep, we've had a deeply unconventional Prime Minister.

• 15:46Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think Lindsay Hoyle, I, people really like Lindsay Hoyle, or they did when I was in the House of Commons. He was a very, very personally popular man, right way across. And I believe he's also the son of an MP.

• 15:56Alastair Campbell?

  Doug Oyl, who was the chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, both of them, like you Rory, massive rugby league fans as well. We all know your love of rugby league.

• 16:06Rory Stewart?

  Now, go on. Rosa Wigley, wherever I go, shops and restaurants say they cannot operate their normal hours because they don't have enough staff. That's definitely, definitely true. I've seen a lot of that. Seems like the whole country has effectively half shut down because there are not enough people to fill our jobs. Do we either need to develop a programme to invite people in from other countries to join our labour market, or develop a system in which jobs are better allocated to those who are currently unemployed? So there are two things going on here. One of them is that a staggering number of people, I believe nearly a million people have left the labour market. And that seems to be partly driven through Covid. People, economists are still trying to understand it, but people have taken early retirements. A huge number of people have left the labour market, not actively looking for jobs now. And secondly, of course, as we see in the South England

• 16:51Rory Stewart?

  particularly, but in many, many other parts of Britain, a lot of jobs which used to be done by people from the European Union are no longer being done by them at all. What do you think about this?

• 17:01Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I, I, I saw the question, and you know, maybe this is Pavlov dog, but I immediately said, well, this is largely driven by Brexit. I think a huge, the hospitality sector is really, really struggling. When we were up in Scotland a few months ago, several of the hotels said that they were actually not able to run at full capacity because they didn't have the staff, because they'd lost all their Spaniards and Italians and Romanians and so forth. And I think until we admit to these realities, it's very, very hard to fix. And we still have, I mentioned yesterday, the Sunak video in sort of shredding the European Union legislation, until we admit that Brexit is having these consequences, how the hell can we fix them? And the point about, you know, getting those parts of the labour market back that we want,

• 17:46Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's going to be a lot harder because Britain is not seen as a welcoming country in the way that it was. And I also heard the other day, the British Dental Association saying that one of the reasons that we've running out of dentists is because we actually had a lot of dentists from the European Union. So we're not just talking about cleaners and hotel workers here, we're talking about the professions as well.

• 18:04Rory Stewart?

  Well, we also talked about the fact that there's likely to be a shortage, they reckon, within 10 years of 450,000 doctors and nurses and 450,000 people in the care sector.

• 18:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 18:14Rory Stewart?

  I've been looking a little bit at the Global Talent Visa, and I don't know whether this is right, but it seems to me that one of the problems there is that it's much easier to bring in somebody to work, for example, in a tech company, bringing in somebody with computer skills, than it is to bring in somebody to chop vegetables in a restaurant.

• 18:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 18:33Rory Stewart?

  And all of that builds up because I was talking to my friend Oz, who runs a restaurant in London, and he was saying that one of the reasons they can't retain chefs is that the chefs are getting completely worn down because they're having to do 15 jobs around the kitchen, which other people used to do to help them, and they don't have those people to help them anymore.

• 18:51Alastair Campbell?

  Hold on, when you said Oz, when you said Oz, this isn't Oswald's, is it?

• 18:53Rory Stewart?

  No, no, no, it's not, it's not Oswald's, actually.

• 18:56Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, Rory, you, I was, whoever wanted Eton on bingo was almost there, almost there with that one.

• 19:04Rory Stewart?

  No, it's a shout out to Oz, Oz has a restaurant in Sheppards Market.

• 19:10Alastair Campbell?

  Do you have shares in Oz, like you do in Taiwan Semiconductor?

• 19:12Rory Stewart?

  I wish that I could have, I have shares in Oz. This restaurant's called Kitty Fishers, if anybody ever wants to go to it. Now, somebody who has been worrying about the ULEZ in Heathrow, so Simon Skotsky, and he says Sadiq Khan made a manifesto commitment to expand the ULEZ into Heathrow Airport. Heathrow is the largest employer in the UK responsible for 114,000 jobs, many of whom are lower moderately paid. ULEZ means up to £12 every day to park with electric cars exempt. Workers will be forced to either pay that each day or make expensive lifestyle changes to accommodate. Is this fair? It's something that I, when I was running to be Mayor of London, I'm afraid, it's something I dreamt up, because actually putting an ultra-low emission zone around Heathrow. Would generate another three hundred and fifty million pounds a year, we calculated then,

• 19:58Rory Stewart?

  for the Mayor of London, which we could then spend on cleaning up air quality in the city and also getting some affordable housing going.

• 20:05Alastair Campbell?

  On what basis, sorry, on what basis would it raise so much money?

• 20:08Rory Stewart?

  Oh, because the number of people going in and out of Heathrow every day, both passengers flying and staff coming in and out, if they had to pay the twelve pound a day, would generate an incredible income.

• 20:18Alastair Campbell?

  But isn't part of the purpose, though, to get people to use public transport?

• 20:21Rory Stewart?

  Well, so there would be a hope that you'd reduce, but I'm afraid probably for Sadiq Khan, as honestly for me, one of the issues is raising money for things that really need to be done, like building decent affordable housing in London.

• 20:33Alastair Campbell?

  Interesting.

• 20:34Rory Stewart?

  It really is a reminder of something we've talked about a lot on the show, which is the way in which taxes, in this case, the tax on trying to improve air quality and reduce, reduce carbon emissions, fall on the very lowest paid and how much governments, well-intentioned governments, in this case, I think the Mayor of London being pretty well-intentioned, ends up imposing a lot of pain on people on low incomes, and that's one of the reasons why a lot of the current climate policies need to be rethought, because if we keep pushing ahead with them, we're going to end up, a lot of people, alienated.

• 21:02Alastair Campbell?

  We're back on that one again, but equally, if we carry on not doing some of the things that we need to do, we're going to end up without a planet to live in.

• 21:08Rory Stewart?

  That is true, that is true. Now, gone, back to you for another couple of final questions, because you've been up at this since five in the morning, and I feel that we're not giving you enough.

• 21:16Alastair Campbell?

  I did notice that we had quite a few questions this year, this week, about trans issues.

• 21:21Rory Stewart?

  Okay, go on then, give us, give us a trans question.

• 21:24Alastair Campbell?

  Harriet Rhodes, why are trans issues being used in the way that they are in culture wars? And then there was another question from somebody who said that they felt that this constant banging on by Sunak and Truss, this is Tom Coates, in their attacks, all the woke rubbish, as they call it, trans people are feeling very targeted.

• 21:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 21:44Alastair Campbell?

  Does it even go through their minds that that might be the effect of the way that they run these campaigns? It should.

• 21:50Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's, it's, and it's also, I'm sure it definitely should, it definitely should. I also think that these campaigns are very odd, I mean, stepping back, I, I think that my guess is that in Ten years' time, nobody will begin to understand what's going on and why people were obsessed with this. I definitely feel if you talk to anybody under the age of about twenty, they are very, very clear and very, very relaxed. Doesn't matter what social backgrounds, doesn't matter what part of the country they come from about trans issues. This is an issue that's catching people, I think, well, maybe I'm being unfair, but I think the demographic that's really wound up about this tends to be a more middle-aged elderly demographic.

• 22:30Alastair Campbell?

  Which is why I trust that Sunak are going on about it.

• 22:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 22:33Alastair Campbell?

  Sunak's thing about lefty lawyers as well. I mean, this idea that left-wing lawyers are the problem when it comes to issues like asylum and immigration, it's back to the lack of seriousness. But I think, look, trans people are amongst the most marginalized, they're marginalized on so many, many fronts. And I think their struggles are bad enough without politicians making it worse just to get a few rounds of applause from the golf club bores.

• 22:55Rory Stewart?

  It's also interesting how difficult it is to get into the issue. One of them, of course, incredibly angry, fractious issue where certainly on Twitter, you know, we've seen this with J K Rowling, but you see it across the board. Nothing gets people more angry and wound up. But quite difficult to get basic facts. I've never seen, I don't know whether you have, any estimate on how many trans people there are in the UK or whether anyone thinks they've got any way of finding out. I'm not even sure what sort of scale of population we're talking about.

• 23:23Alastair Campbell?

  Well, and it's obviously it's a minority and it's persecuted, but it's, you know, it's a minority, as these questions are saying, feels persecuted and feels more persecuted. I think you're right, though. I think when I look at, you know, my kids' generation, I think, I think they're just sort of, it's just part of virtually every school now, there's part of it, it's just part of the conversation, it's part of, you know, the way the world is changing. And I, I, I think that, I just wish our politics would reflect that a bit.

• 23:50Rory Stewart?

  I think it will very soon, but you're right.

• 23:52Alastair Campbell?

  Parody Boris, Parody Boris. Do you follow Parody Boris?

• 23:55Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yeah, I do follow Parody Boris, yeah. Has Parody Boris written in?

• 23:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he has written it. And he said, could somebody as incompetent as this trust have ever become Prime Minister if I hadn't have lowered the bar first?

• 24:05Rory Stewart?

  Oh, he's asking as Parody Boris.

• 24:08Alastair Campbell?

  As Parody Boris. And then somebody else was asking rather more seriously, why is there no talk of some of these people? This is FFS Sodak. Why are there no consequences for the fraud, the theft of public money and the mismanagement? If this was a CEO or a COO we're talking about, they'd be in jail by now. I can't feel that.

• 24:31Rory Stewart?

  Not sure about that. Not sure about that. I'd like to know what it is they're supposed to be in jail for. I think the legal, the courts work pretty well for politicians.

• 24:38Alastair Campbell?

  Misconduct in public office.

• 24:39Rory Stewart?

  Thank goodness in this country. I think one of the few things we've got is relatively clean, uncorrupt courts. So I do remain confident that if people commit crimes, it doesn't matter whether they're a businessperson or a politician, they can be convicted and sent to jail.

• 24:51Alastair Campbell?

  I think that's a very, I'm sorry, I think that's almost as naive, Rory, as that you accused Keir Starmer of being naive about the scale of the problems facing our politics and our constitution. And I agreed with you, but I think that is very naive.

• 25:04Rory Stewart?

  Oh, blimey.

• 25:04Alastair Campbell?

  Listen to, I'm going to give you another plug. Listen to the London Grad series by Tortoise. And I think you'll find that a lot of our public life has been successfully corrupted. I do not have, I do not have shares in Tortoise, Tom.

• 25:20Rory Stewart?

  All right. Well, I think we're coming to the end. Thank you all very, very much for listening to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

• 25:27Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. That's Alastair Campbell, who sings German ABBA songs, loves Elvis Presley, loves Burnley, loves his bike more than he loves Rory Stewart. And all of you who are playing bingo, I hope you enjoyed it.

• 25:39Rory Stewart?

  And this is Rory Stewart, who has now confessed that the very name Campbell troubles me a little bit.

• 26:42Speaker 10

  Champion of hurling grass and pollen everywhere. And in the blue corner, the challenger, extra strength, Attarday! Eye drops that work all day to prevent the release of histamines that cause itchy allergy eyes. And the winner by knockout is Attarday! Attarday, bring it on!