4. Iraq, brave opposition, and powerful Chancellors

As Rory returns from a tour of Iraq with a landmine charity, what lessons can be learned from the country since the occupation, and how could they be applied to the current situation in Ukraine? Also, is Belarus getting off too lightly in terms of sanctions, can Britain become 'food independent' again, and what is the power dynamic between Prime Ministers and Chancellors of the Exchequer? Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Goalhanger Podcasts 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/risterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:43Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:46Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. And Rory, you've made it because last week, we used our first ever beep to beep out where you were heading to. And you've just got back from?

• 1:57Rory Stewart?

  Just got back from Iraq, so been in Baghdad and Mosul and to Crete with an amazing Scottish-British charity that clears minds, the Halo Trust, working on mind clearance.

• 2:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 2:08Rory Stewart?

  Anyway, quite a lot of this visit made me think about some of the parallels with parts of what Ukraine is going through at the moment, particularly Mosul, which... Is horrifying. I mean, that obviously was torn to pieces by ISIS and by bombs and looks a lot like the kinds of scenes we're seeing in Mariupol at the moment. And so what's what are you thinking about?

• 2:27Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I can't claim to have been to Baghdad, but I have been talking to the opposition in Belarus, who feel that the West is not targeting Lukashenko as robustly as they should be. So I think we can talk about Iraq and then we'll talk about Belarus and maybe talk a little bit about about the courage of opposition, not least Navalny having been sent down for another trumped up charge.

• 2:51Rory Stewart?

  So and I guess with big economic statement now coming from the Chancellor, maybe we could talk a little bit about the relationship between prime ministers and chancellors. Sure you might have something to say on that, Alastair?

• 3:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, having covered Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson, is that what you meant?

• 3:04Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I might have been meaning old Gordon Brown.

• 3:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, indeed. Well, look, let's um, why don't you first of all just tell us, it sounds fascinating what you've been doing, working with a charity, Clearing Minds, but I guess your broader impressions about how Iraq is right now.

• 3:18Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think the first thing is that it's it's very, very depressing. The first thing that I noticed arriving at the airport is that as you drive down the airport road, there is a monument in the middle of the highway, which is a car which was hit by an American drone. And all around it, and indeed through most of the entrance to the city, are these huge posters to this Iranian general, Gassim Soleimani, who was hit by a drone strike. And with him, pictures of this Iraqi militia leader, who was killed in the same drone strike, and big signs saying, American terrorism everywhere. There's simply no sign

• 4:00Rory Stewart?

  anywhere, and I I went down into the old city, I went out on the river, I travelled to different bits of Baghdad, no sign anywhere of this trillion dollar war and all the investment that the United States put in, except for these huge statements about American terrorism, and enormous posters of people who were attacking American and British soldiers.

• 4:20Alastair Campbell?

  So who's putting those up?

• 4:22Rory Stewart?

  They're put up by the government, so it's a government that's been dominated for the last few years by different sorts of Shia parties, and many of the people who are coming in and out of government are connected to the militias which were killing British and American soldiers. So it's, and a lot of it is backed by Iran. These are groups very, very closely connected to the Iranians. So there is a very, very strong sense in Baghdad of the very strong Iranian influence and the very strong links with people who were the enemies of the coalition in Iraq. And that extends all the way up to Mosul, because Mosul was a totally different part of the country, bit of the country that was traditionally Sunni, much closely, more closely associated with Saddam Hussein

• 5:07Rory Stewart?

  and the Baathists. But even there, the Shia militia have put these huge signs. And I was stopped by, I guess, or went through probably fifteen, twenty checkpoints on the drive up to Mosul, and many of them are not manned by Iraqi soldiers. They're manned by militia men, often in very sinister black uniforms with skulls on their shoulders.

• 5:28Alastair Campbell?

  So when you're talking to people, including those who celebrated and welcomed the fall of Saddam for obvious reasons, are they basically saying that they wish the invasion had never happened, they wish the change of government had never happened?

• 5:44Rory Stewart?

  I think by now they are completely traumatized. I mean, there are different sorts of things people would say. So some people would say they were pleased that Saddam went, and they remembered 2003 being quite good. Then there was the collapse of the civil war in sort of 2005, '06. Then they remember another reasonably good period, sort of 2008, '09, '10, and then they remember the ISIS takeover. And now just a country smashed to pieces from, sadly, from almost every direction. I mean, it's impossible really to believe this is one of the wealthiest, or in oil terms, one of the wealthiest oil-producing countries in the world, because the roads are smashed, the buildings are not repaired.

• 6:29Rory Stewart?

  In Mosul, which is the second-largest city, there's still only electricity four hours a day. So I think people are just bewildered.

• 6:37Alastair Campbell?

  And you were you were deputy governor for a period in the post invasion.

• 6:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 6:43Alastair Campbell?

  In in Mizzou.

• 6:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 6:46Alastair Campbell?

  Would you recognize, would you say it's now worse than it was then?

• 6:50Rory Stewart?

  I think it's similar. I mean, I think the sad thing is how little progress has been made. And and partly it's the way in which all of us, myself, my colleagues, my American colleagues approach things. I was standing on the river and an old Iraqi man pointed to a bridge across the river in Baghdad and said, that's what the British built us in the, I guess, the nineteen thirties. But the entire coalition occupation left us nothing. I mean, one of the strange things is although America and its allies were spending a hundred billion dollars a year, there's nothing that they've left behind. There are no hospitals or bridges or really anything much that you can point to

• 7:30Rory Stewart?

  as signs of investment. It all felt very, very short term, as though there was nothing sort of enduring left behind.

• 7:36Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that sort of goes to the what we were talking about last week in relation to Afghanistan. And in fact, you you pointed out in your book about your time in Iraq that it took several years before post Kosovo, post the conflict in Kosovo, post the conflict in Afghanistan, Bosnia was the same. It took years to get the place even functioning at a very, very basic level. What came through to me reading your book as well was that there's us in our case in London, Bush's case in Washington, you've got Paul Bremer as the kind of main guy, the main American guy post invasion in Baghdad.

• 8:16Alastair Campbell?

  And it wasn't just that you have this sense of a massive disconnect between the capitals and Baghdad. You had a sense of a massive disconnect between Bremer in Baghdad and you guys out in the field trying to make sense with what you were trying to trying to resolve.

• 8:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, no, you're completely right. And and I think it's it goes to the heart of not not just these big international interventions, not just Bosnia Kosovo, but actually even development projects. That it's countries are just so much more complicated than we can believe. And there was an idea at the end of the nineties that somehow the West knew how to fix failed states. In fact, people wrote books called fixing failed states. But if you think about our own country, just how complex a state is, a government is, a legal system is, people's culture of their respect for the government. And if you lay that on top of a country that's been living under Saddam Hussein for thirty years, you topple him and you unleash goodness knows what.

• 9:14Rory Stewart?

  I mean, the truth, of course, in Afghanistan and Iraq is that what ultimately has come out are these sorts of Islamist governments. In the case of Afghanistan, Taliban, and in the case of Iraq, these Shia militia-dominated governments. And it's, in both cases, what you've sort of seen is a world in which the alternative to a very authoritarian rule, which was in Iraq, obviously Saddam Hussein, and in Afghanistan, was the communist, turned out not really to be a sort of functioning liberal democracy at all, but a move back to, yeah, much more violent forms of religious rule.

• 9:55Alastair Campbell?

  You know, last week we were discussing intimidating politicians and we were both struggling to think of that better. The one I thought of afterwards actually is relevant to this conversation, and that's Dick Cheney. I found him very, very intimidating, Bush's vice president. And I remember a meeting at Camp David, where, in fact, it was one of the most extraordinary meetings I was ever at, because basically Bush had asked Tony to go there and try to help him persuade Dick Cheney that they should take the Iraq decision down the United Nations route, and that Bush should go back to the United Nations, give them a last chance, as it were, to agree that Saddam had to be tackled. And at one point, Bush wanted to talk about the anti-Americanism around the world.

• 10:40Alastair Campbell?

  And Bush, you know, I know he gets a very bad rep on lots of fronts, but he did understand that this anti-Americanism was real and it was a problem. And I said, well, do you know what I think the problem is? That every time you talk about democratization of places like Afghanistan or Iraq or anywhere else, people don't hear democracy, they hear Americanization. They think you're talking about the whole world being like America. And Cheney, who hadn't been saying much at all, he just sort of growled, saying, "We shouldn't talk about democracy." And I said, no, I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that when you say democratization, people don't hear that. And I think that the, the thing, I, I can defend what we did in Iraq,

• 11:22Alastair Campbell?

  and I can defend the way that Tony Blair and the cabinet handled that decision. But what I found very difficult to reconcile is this sense that the Americans, who were clearly the biggest part, the biggest partner in the whole thing, that post-invasion, they really hadn't thought it through. And I think we made assumptions about the extent to which they had planned. And that was, I guess, our mistake as well. And the aftermath led to, it didn't lead directly, you know, we, we underestimated the impact of all this, the stuff that was going to pour in, the terrorism, the sectarianism, et cetera. But I, I, for me, that's what kind of sometimes keeps me awake at night, is that, is that sense of not really having planned the aftermath.

• 12:03Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And I, I mean, I think the planning thing is very interesting, because of course, a lot of people say that about Afghanistan as well, that there wasn't a proper plan, there wasn't a proper strategy. But that sort of assumes that there could be a plan. My assumption is that these things were closer to Mission Impossible. I don't believe that somewhere, hidden in a filing cabinet, was a plan which, if only we'd followed it, would have somehow made everything okay. The, the longer I spent, the more it seemed to me, the idea that you could somehow plan for what was going to happen when you toppled a regime that had been in for 32 years and you find yourself in a country of 20 million people, all of whom from the beginning are going to have quite strong nationalist sentiments,

• 12:46Rory Stewart?

  are going to be pretty suspicious about what you're doing there, is probably itself a ruckus. What, I mean, and so what's, what, what sort of happened? Why do you think the culture at that time made people believe that it was possible to somehow plan for this? And that it would be possible to avoid the kind of things that we can see now?

• 13:08Alastair Campbell?

  Um, I think because the sense we had was that there would be, although, albeit that Saddam had his own, he, he had his support, he had his networks, he had his infrastructure. But that actually, I think we were possibly misled by that sense that there was this kind of, you know, euphoria that seemed to greet the fall.

• 13:30Alastair Campbell?

  And I think what we underestimated was the extent to which those forces were still reasonably strong and that other forces were then going to come in from outside and exploit the situation, some of whom you've said are now kind of effectively running the show again, the Iranian militia. So I think that, I think it was maybe, this goes back to a thing we talked about again last week in relation to how the West has dealt with Putin, is perhaps that sense of, you need hope, you need optimism, you need to believe that what you're doing is going to lead to progress, and that sometimes leads you to think that things are better than they are.

• 14:08Rory Stewart?

  And I guess one of the consequences of this is that people are going to be very reluctant to intervene again.

• 14:15Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that is, we've talked about that before, that, you know, I think you and I agree that failure to act in Syria is partly what's landed us where we are now in Ukraine.

• 14:25Rory Stewart?

  And I definitely feel that the sad, the tragedy, I mean, the many, many tragedies, but one of the tragedies is that Bosnia suggested that it might be possible to have interventions that could, for example, in Rwanda have prevented a genocide, that there might be a middle road that the international community working together couldn't fix failed states, but might be able to at least play a part in ending wars and bringing some modicum of peace. But these operations in Afghanistan, Iraq became so vast and exaggerated.

• 15:01Rory Stewart?

  The Mosul thing, just to finish on that, I think I just got a couple of points. One is just how impressive these mine action charities are. So Halo Trust, founded in Scotland, and has done extraordinary work in Cambodia, but they've been in the middle of the ISIS-controlled territories. I think they've taken to pieces something like 4,000 improvised explosive devices, these extraordinary horrible things which ISIS buried in walls, buried in the ground to try to hold on to the territory they'd taken.

• 15:34Rory Stewart?

  And actually, the courage of their Iraqi staff who are working their way slowly through trying to get these towns back. The second thing is just, it makes you realise what an amazing thing it was, the rebuilding of Europe after the war, when you look at Mosul and see that six years after ISIS has left, the centre of the city... Is craters, buildings with their roofs, it's sort of concrete moves half off.

• 16:00Rory Stewart?

  One wall of a whole building still standing with its interior windows, but nothing else, rubble everywhere.

• 16:06Rory Stewart?

  And you you can really sense what the effort that went in, I mean, not just in London, but I mean, even more dramatically, right the way across Central Europe and trying to to rebuild lives after the war and how tough it's going to be in Ukraine.

• 16:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I mean, did you, when you were sort of looking at scenes in Mosul, I don't know how you, how close you're able to follow what's been going on in Ukraine, but when you see the pictures of from Mariupol and and other places, actually, but that's the one that really seems to have sort of been the most dramatic and the most devastating. And you just think about the job ahead and whether the world is up for, again, back to the same point, staying the course, doing it for the long term.

• 16:47Rory Stewart?

  And and it's unbelievable, isn't it? And I I think one of the things that I've noticed in all these places is it it sounds a silly thing to say, but actually how important it is to take the time to rebuild these city centres in a way that respects people's cultural heritage, that there's a real temptation to think, okay, it's all been flattened and we'll go and we actually did a bit of this in the city of London after the war, just throw up concrete buildings as quickly as we can. Um, and actually, I understand why in Poland they decided to try to rebuild cities as they were. Because Mosul, this incredible medieval city has been smashed to pieces and UNESCO is carefully trying to go through restoring the mosque, restoring the minaret, restoring people's houses and and I think in Mariupol,

• 17:31Rory Stewart?

  rebuilding that great iconic theatre will be incredibly important for people's sense of pride in the sense that they've returned rather than just giving up, but but there'll be pressure because people will feel understandably, we're very short of cash, we've got to get going, we've got to get shelter up. Why are we wasting money, you know, rebuilding a theatre or an opera house? But

• 17:50Rory Stewart?

  Ten years later, twenty years later, people will be very, very grateful they did it.

• 17:53Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 17:54Rory Stewart?

  One of the things that you you mentioned at the beginning is that you've been talking to opposition leaders who were opposing Lukashenko, the Belarusian leader.

• 18:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 18:01Rory Stewart?

  What sense are you getting of what's happening in Belarus and what we what we might be doing there?

• 18:05Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the the opposition are genuinely worried and alarmed, I think, that because Putin has become this, for many parts of the world, this sort of total pariah, and also because he's he's become the central figure of this whole thing. I remember when Scholz did his speech in the Bundestag, he just talked about Putin's war, Putin's war, Putin's war. And their worry is actually that the role of Lukashenko as his, what they call his partner in crime, is being underplayed. And that that that is leading, for example, even though there have been sanctions put upon Belarus, and to be fair to our government, they've put some fresh ones on since the since the invasion. But they think, but the the opposition think that they're weaker.

• 18:48Alastair Campbell?

  And they think they underestimate as well the extent to which Lukashenko is in many ways an even worse dictator than than Putin. And I was talking to this guy Pavel Latushka, who's the leader of the kind of government in exile. He's exiled in Poland. And it's extraordinary, he's a former minister, he's a former ambassador, and he's now facing seven charges, one of which carries the death penalty as punishment. He's been labelled a terrorist, he's got relatives who've been thrown in jail back in Minsk. And he was, we were talking about the John John Major Gordon Brown last week, setting out the need for a process by which we can at least envisage war crimes trial against against Putin. And they were simply making the point that it's always about just about Putin.

• 19:31Alastair Campbell?

  But actually, Lukashenko is his partner in crime, they're joined at the hip, they've got to be treated in the same way. So that's that's the kind of basic point that they've been they've been making. When you talk to these guys, you feel so kind of inadequate because, you know, I think they've just got, we're talking about Navalny, and that that's level of courage. And you sometimes wonder, you know, would would we in our pampered British ways be able to sort of... Have that kind of courage and resilience. And so you end up saying, as I did, it's a little, well, there's not much I could do today, but would you like to write a piece for the New European? And of course, to them, they say, absolutely, that is exactly the sort of thing I want to do, because I want to get the message out, we can send that out to ambassadors and to to other media and so forth. So, but yeah, they're pretty, they're

• 20:14Alastair Campbell?

  pretty worried about what's happening. And they do think that Belarus is more actively involved in the in the war than is than is widely understood. And of course, I think it was on the news this morning that there's talk of Belarusian troops now being lined up to replace some of those who've been who've already fallen.

• 20:33Rory Stewart?

  It's, I mean, it's very much part of this whole sort of almost fascist narrative coming out of Moscow, isn't it?

• 20:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 20:39Rory Stewart?

  There was this extraordinary scene of this Russian crooner in the stadium singing a song. Yeah. And the song goes, Belarus is our home, Moldova is our home, Ukraine is our home, you know, all of this about Greater Russia.

• 20:54Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 20:55Rory Stewart?

  But it seems as though the the deal that's been struck between Belarus and Russia is is not ready for it to be incorporated, but it suits Putin better for it to be, or suits both of them better for it to be a semi-autonomous place.

• 21:07Alastair Campbell?

  Also, there was, Pavel was telling me that after the Crimea annexation, there were sanctions imposed on Russia, far greater than the sanctions that were imposed on, that had been imposed on Belarus. For example, there was a ban on seafood being being exported from the European Union to to to Russia. So, landlocked Belarus became a major importer of seafood.

• 21:33Rory Stewart?

  And exporter too, I think.

• 21:35Alastair Campbell?

  And then exported it to Russia.

• 21:37Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, amazing.

• 21:38Alastair Campbell?

  So they were saying that those kind of loopholes, unless you're as tough with Belarus as you are with Russia, those loopholes are going to exist and they're going to be exploited.

• 21:45Rory Stewart?

  So one of the things that obviously Belarus does a lot of is potash for fertilizer. And that that's the other thing that I think people are beginning to talk about more, but it's a very, very strange fundamental thing. We've understood now that how deeply we're dependent on oil and gas from Russia and the region.

• 22:01Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 22:01Rory Stewart?

  But we're only beginning to understand just how much the world is dependent on Russian and Ukrainian food.

• 22:07Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely. And fertilizer.

• 22:09Rory Stewart?

  And fertilizer. And how all those things come together. So you, I mean, and for some countries, it's unbelievable. I mean, I think, I believe, places like Egypt, Bangladesh get 60% of their wheat. Coming in from Russia and Ukraine.

• 22:22Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I have to be honest, I had no idea until this whole thing started that a third of the world's wheat comes out of Russia and Ukraine. And sunflower, they've already started to ration sunflower oil in supermarkets in Spain and Italy. It's something like eighty percent of our sunflower is coming out of Russia and Ukraine.

• 22:41Rory Stewart?

  And then you get these extraordinary spillover effects, which you wouldn't anticipate. So suddenly farmers in Latin America are now reducing the amount of fertilizer they're putting on grass and are expecting to have thinner cows at the end of the year. And all of this is happening when there's a global food crisis. So at the same time, people are, nine million people on the edge of starvation in Afghanistan, people on the edge of starvation in Yemen, and of course, we've recently had famines in Somalia and South Sudan. So it's, and at the same time, and this I suppose is the most uncomfortable thing. I remember when I was the DEFRA minister, farmers in Britain would often say, you're pushing too hard in taking land out of production. You've got to think about food security.

• 23:23Rory Stewart?

  There's a reason why we subsidised food after the Second World War, which is that we need to produce some of our own food in case we were in a world in which we couldn't import all the food we wanted. And I have to admit that I absolutely bought into the conventional story of the time. All the civil servants said it, all the ministers said it, which is, no, no, no, this question of food security is a thing of the past. We're not going to be back in a world in which we're going to suddenly be doing Atlantic convoys of wheat in from the United States. And as a result, I checked the figures, but it's something like, that we've gone from something like twelve million acres under cultivation in Britain down to nine million acres. And the farmers, of course, in Colombia, there were good reasons for it.

• 24:04Rory Stewart?

  A lot of this was about bringing nature back, restoring natural landscapes. But farmers are just heartbroken because land that they'd been paid to drain, they were now being paid to stop up those field drains and re-flood their land. They were finding, you know, they were reducing their stocking numbers down to having only one sheep in three acres and saying all the time, there's going to be a time when you'll want to be able to produce food.

• 24:28Alastair Campbell?

  Well, interestingly, Minet Batters, who's the head of the National Farmers Union, who I think is very impressive, but I saw her this week, she was making the point that yes, of course, there's got to be action against Russia and these sanctions are the, if you like, the weapon of choice, but that is going to have an impact, a massive impact on our farmers in relation to fertilizer costs, in relation to fuel costs and in relation to food security. And on your nature point, I don't know if you're aware of this, Rory, but the European Commission is apparently delaying action that was going to be announced this week in relation to two things. One was legally binding targets on nature and

• 25:10Alastair Campbell?

  the reclaiming, if you like, of land. And secondly, on use of certain pesticides that were going to be outlawed, which are now that. So that's all being delayed. So they they say they remain committed to sustainable farming, but given what's happening in Ukraine, given the impact on food supply and food security across the European Union. So I think we're only just really waking up. Oil and gas people have got that, as you say, immediately. But the food, if anything, I think is going to be even more serious.

• 25:38Rory Stewart?

  And one of one of the fundamental problems, I guess, is that what we've often done in our environmental policies is to outsource the problem. So we feel good about ourselves because we're not burning coal, but we end up buying goods from China where they're burning the coal. We feel good about ourselves that we're not wrecking our landscape, doing intensive wheat production, and then we're just buying the wheat from Russia, which is destroying its landscape, doing intensive wheat production. So I think we relied on this globalized world. We relied on being able to outsource our environmental footprint to other people because what we were basically doing is talking about our production of carbon or our production of, you know, fertilizers and runoffs and pollutants, not our consumption,

• 26:23Rory Stewart?

  right? We never focused on the fact that we were consuming all this stuff and other people were destroying their landscapes in order to feed us. And this is going to be a very, very difficult wake up call. And I can feel, you know, already talking to you, a lot of my friends who are environmental campaigners are going to be very troubled by this whole conversation. They're also going to be troubled by the fact that inevitably people are going to start burning coal as part of the response, short term response to how we get off the reliance. And I think we're going to move back into a world in Britain in which we are going to have to think about

• 26:56Rory Stewart?

  more food production and how we balance it with nature. And we can't simply embrace rewilding as being a simple solution. If we're in a world in which people in Britain obviously will end up in food poverty. But people in other parts of the world are going to end up literally starving. I mean, as we know in Afghanistan, people are literally selling their organs because they can't feed their children.

• 27:19Alastair Campbell?

  But you're already seeing it. Boris Johnson's about to make a big tip towards nuclear. I'm not saying that's the right thing or the wrong thing, but it just underlines that there's change. Shell have just announced that a field that they were not going to explore, they now are.

• 27:34Alastair Campbell?

  And fun enough, I saw a tweet the other day from Gary Lineker,

• 27:40Alastair Campbell?

  who just made the point, this was in relation to the devastation across Ukraine. How can one man have ended up having so much power over so many different lives? And but this is, these are all, they're not all just consequences and our standard of our cost of living crisis. I hate the way that Johnson is trying to pitch it all against Ukraine, given that so much of it is a result of a decade of conservative policy. However, Putin's actions are now having a massive impact on all of our lives.

• 28:11Rory Stewart?

  And that's why, obviously, a lot of my friends are, particularly here in the Middle East, are very troubled that we talk so much about Ukraine and say, it challenged me to say there's an element of racism here. You know, why were you not talking more about Syria? Why are you not talking more about Afghanistan? Why are you talking about Ukraine? But one of the reasons why this has been such a body blow is that we Are beginning to realise now that wars in Syria, wars in Afghanistan, did not directly affect the energy and food security of Europe. And until 1989, of course, the Cold War created a system where basically our states were insulated from Russia, right? We we found other ways of supplying our energy and food, which were not deeply dependent

• 28:56Rory Stewart?

  on Russia. Since eighty nine, in ways that we haven't begun to imagine, and it's happened very, very quickly, really just in the last twenty five years, this global world has made us so dependent. And this is part of the reason why Putin remains quite confident that he's going to be able to get away with it. Because the more you follow through all the details, the consequences, the more difficult things that you and I deeply believe in, like sanctions, appear.

• 29:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. All right, Roy, well, that's all been a bit heavy. Moderately, moderately to extremely depressing. And because this podcast, by the way, Roy, is doing so well, and has been number one at Apple charts all week, apparently we have to take breaks so that they can run adverts. So we'll have a little break and then we'll come back and talk about chancellors and prime ministers.

• 29:40Rory Stewart?

  Great.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 29:51Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 29:57Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You start, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 30:04Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 30:06Speaker 03

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• 31:11Alastair Campbell?

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• 31:15Alastair Campbell?

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• 31:38Speaker 07

  Have you ever wondered how movements start? I'm Ashley C. Ford, host of Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast about joy and justice. This season, we're talking to unexpected progressive heroes who found purpose in unexpected places. People like Marley Diaz, making sure every kid sees themselves in books. Kyle Mestes, a native skateboarder, building a movement for kids nationwide. Joy Aladakun, whose music moves from protest to daily commute. Find out how they started something bigger than themselves and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

• 32:16Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell. Alistair, last week, we were talking about speaking truth to power. And slightly to my surprise, because I see you as a pretty outspoken individual, you didn't come up with a particularly striking example of speaking truth to power. But then I've been reading your diaries and I've just come across one with a good Putin reference. So Friday, October 11th, Moscow. Tony Blair spent several hours one-on-one with Putin. For the photo call later, Tony Blair was wearing what I can only call an Afghan hippie coat. I said there was no way he could wear that. Mochni Bura, the protection officer, had a fairly ordinary looking sheepskin and I suggested they swap. "This is ridiculous", Cherie said, "just ignore him".

• 33:02Rory Stewart?

  I said my job was to stop him looking ridiculous and try to get the press focused on real issues and not his bloody clothes. So I said if he walked out in that, they'd fall about and we'd have endless blather about his coat rather than the substance. Putin was looking on a bit bemused and Tony Blair a bit embarrassed. Tony Blair said, "He doesn't like my coat very much". Putin smiled and nodded in a way that made me think he thought I was right not to.

• 33:27Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 33:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and then as I remember it, Tony then tried on Moni, the protection officer's coat, and it didn't fit perfectly, but it was better than the thing that he was wearing. So they swapped, and Moni, who was one of my favourite coppers, he put on Tony's Afghan hippie coat and went into an immediate impersonation of Elvis doing Return to Center.

• 33:54Rory Stewart?

  How does this work with him? Does Putin have any sense of humour at all when this is all going on?

• 33:58Alastair Campbell?

  He had a glint in his eye because he could see. I mean, look, there's no doubt at all, he believed I was right. I can't describe this coat to you. And also, Cherie called me a fascist for trying to get him to take it off, because I think she'd bought it for him, but it was like, it was like, almost down to his ankles. It was sort of, it had these stripes of fake fur on it. And it was just utterly absurd. And I promise you, if he'd have walked out with Putin wearing that coat, Putin, of course, was just wearing a suit with a kind of smart black coat on top of it. He might even have had a hat, I can't remember. No, I don't think he did have a hat. But if Tony had walked out. But there is one picture, I don't know whether, are brilliant.

• 34:40Alastair Campbell?

  And by the way, the guy who's been doing our social media films illustrating these is just deserves a pay rise, because he seems to find pictures for everything. There was one picture where you can see Moni in the background in the Afghan hippie coat.

• 34:53Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that's beautiful. That's Vasco doing this stuff, doing these amazing images.

• 34:58Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, Roy, if you're gonna, if you're gonna just land, if you're just gonna land my book on me. And by the way, the one I said last week was, it was about Iraq that I was trying to speak about. I, as you know, I've been reading your book about Iraq and said, do you keep a diary, by the way?

• 35:15Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I try to keep diary. I've stopped. I'm not, not, not well disciplined like you, but I was writing stuff down.

• 35:20Alastair Campbell?

  No, because the detail in your book is, I'm thinking this guy definitely keeps a diary. It does underline though, what a kind of, quite a scary position you were in in that job. And that comes through in the book, you're, you know, the, you're always a little bit on edge.

• 35:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's, I mean, I, I feel this and I, I felt, obviously, it's been a long time now, maybe twenty five, thirty years since I started working in these places. And friends of mine who continued working in Afghanistan or Iraq, you do get a sense as time goes on after ten or fifteen years, that they have been living on the edge all the time. And that sense of being in a permanent state of emergency is very, very wearing.

• 35:55Alastair Campbell?

  But it's also what some people like, isn't it? Some people who work in these, that's what they like.

• 35:58Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, but I think you do come close to a sort of, people do come close to a sort of nervous breakdown because you can't quite live on that kind of edge. And actually, I, I wanted to sort of come back to that for a second, on a sort of slightly more serious note, because presumably in doing your job at Number Ten was also like that. It was permanent emergency, permanent crisis, twenty four seven. And that must have been shattering. It's just not good for you, is it?

• 36:23Alastair Campbell?

  No, it's not good for you at all. And I think what comes through in my diaries is, and it's one of the reasons probably why eventually I left and haven't really gone back in the same way, is that it did have a, I think, pretty profound effect on my mental health. And I, and fun enough, I go swimming every morning at the Lido around the corner with Fiona. And there's a guy there called Jim Down, who's, he, he works in intensive care. And he's actually written a couple of really good books during Covid. But he's, he read my diaries recently and he said, he basically said two things. One, he thinks Fiona must be a saint to have lived with me, but also just that this must have been just doing such profound damage to the insides of my head. So, yeah, I think, I think it is a bit like that.

• 37:03Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think it's a, I'm talking of damaging the insides of heads and intense people. We're just coming up now to the Chancellor's Statement. And obviously, right at the heart of this whole book is the relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. And I know that in a way that they're both friends of yours and you feel a kind of loyalty towards both of them, but. Give us a sense of this, I mean, why did Gordon Brown matter so much? What is it about the position of Chancellor that somehow means that it's almost the only person in the Cabinet that they feel they can't fire? It's the only person in the Cabinet really with an independent voice?

• 37:37Alastair Campbell?

  I think the Chancellor can be fired and Chancellors have been fired. But I mean, I think bizarrely, both Tony and I, at different points, without knowing the other one was doing it, made exactly the same point about Gordon, which is that he was brilliant and impossible. And Tony used to say, if he was just impossible, that's easy, you get rid of him. If he's just brilliant, that is perfection, okay? But if you're brilliant and impossible, if you're impossible but brilliant, that makes it difficult. And Tony, I think to his credit, a lot of people at different times said, look, this relationship is not working, Gordon's, you know, causing a lot of grief and causing a lot of friction and so forth.

• 38:19Alastair Campbell?

  And of course Gordon's side would say that we were doing that and round and round and round it went. But if I go back over the record of the New Labour Government, I think a lot of the best stuff that we did was when they were working together and sometimes when they were working not in the most cooperative and friendly kind of way. But I do think as well, your point about the Treasury, you know this from your time in government, the Treasury is the most important single department because there's no big government decision that isn't ultimately about money. And if you have a Chancellor like Gordon Brown, who is incredibly intellectually lively and restless and, you know, has his own sort of sense of his own agenda, then that gives

• 39:04Alastair Campbell?

  him even more power. I think, funnily enough, the only relationship I can think of, number 10, number 11, that didn't sort of go that conventional way that most of them go, was Cameron and Osborne. And I think, to be honest, I think it's because both of them actually, the politics were always more interesting to them than the economics.

• 39:22Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, although it is true that in that relationship too, I was very struck by just how much power Osborne had and the, often the sense that...

• 39:33Rory Stewart?

  If you wanted to get something done, you needed to get to him, not David Cameron. For example, I mean, even small things. When I wanted to try to get rural broadband rolled out or mobile mass built, you'd sit in the tea room with George Osborne. And I would emerge with a hundred and fifty million pound mobile life infrastructure project, which would allow these things. You built around which you could never get out of the department that was responsible for broadband because they couldn't make up. They couldn't find a hundred and fifty million pounds down the bottom of sofa.

• 39:59Alastair Campbell?

  Well, essentially, I was I was involved in a mental health campaign with Andrew Mitchell. Your fellow former Secretary of State for International Development, Norman Lamb, who was the Lib Dem. Mental Health Minister in the Coalition and we did the same approach. We were trying to get more money for mental health and we actually we just targeted Osborne. And we ended up getting six hundred million quid in the spending review.

• 40:19Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it was and I thought that's one of the things, I mean, he's a very, very complicated figure, obviously. And, you know, didn't didn't do, didn't do, didn't do my careers any favors, but. He was somebody who, if he was captivated by an idea, felt that he could make it happen, wanted to try to make it happen. I was, do you think that was true with Gordon Brown or was he a different sort of personality? Would you have been able to charm him in the tea room into putting money into mental health or would he? Less so, right?

• 40:52Alastair Campbell?

  No, Gordon, Gordon, I'll tell you what Gordon's brilliance as a politician was. He was very good at making other people think that they had an idea. That they were then pressing him to do, but he wanted to do it all along. He's a very, very canny sort of guy. No, Gordon was somebody, I think, who Gordon, Gordon was a great campaign. He loved campaigns.

• 41:16Alastair Campbell?

  And he and I don't mean that just in terms of political campaigns, like, you know, debt write off, trying to get the world to write off debt. That to Gordon was like a big idea that he wanted to build the alliances, build the arguments and so forth. So no, Gordon was somebody you could definitely approach.

• 41:31Rory Stewart?

  Just something that's really interested me. I mean, he was a kind of child prodigy, wasn't he? He was sort of the most brilliant student that had ever been at his university and he got like this incredible first. And then he was Chancellor of his university in his twenties and.

• 41:44Alastair Campbell?

  Rector, yeah.

• 41:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, rector. So and he was an incredibly big figure in the Labour Party, much, much bigger than Tony Blair, I guess, when they both came into Parliament. Much more experienced.

• 41:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, when I was a journalist.

• 41:59Alastair Campbell?

  Funny, I used to help Gordon with this. He had a weekly column in the Daily Record and it was paid of my life. The night before deadline, he was there, I haven't written my column, I haven't written my column. What do you think I should write about? And I knew what he meant was, you know, will you help me write it? And I was, I was probably closer to Gordon at first than to Tony. And also, if you'd have, I've often said this, if you'd have had a poll of Labour members and Labour MPs the night before John Smith died, saying, if John Smith died tomorrow, who would be the Labour leader? It would have been a landslide for Gordon Brown. It was only the actual event, the reality of the moment, that had people saying, hmm, do you know what?

• 42:41Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe it should be Tony. And then by the time, you know, the end of that first day, when the day that John Smith died, it was kind of, you were talking to people who would definitely have said the day before, it'll be Gordon, who was suddenly saying, think it should be Tony. And I think that was, to be absolutely frank, I think that was the cause of the of the difficulties that then transpired. Some of them were about policy, but I think a lot of them were just about that sense of, you know, Tony suddenly emerged in the way that he did.

• 43:09Rory Stewart?

  And could people see at the time that Gordon Brown wasn't necessarily the greatest sort of delegator? That his intensity, his seriousness might mean for quite a sort of introverted, grumpy thing. I mean, do people worry about that when they're trying to select a Labour leader? Are they thinking, is this guy going to be comfortable running a big, complex government? You know, would they weigh Tony up against Gordon on that?

• 43:34Alastair Campbell?

  I think there was, I think there was a sense of, in 94, when John Smith died, I think there was a sense, and we're coming up to the 25th anniversary, I can't believe it's so long ago, of the first win in 97. So 28 years since John died. And I think that there was a sense that Tony was just maybe more rounded. But also, that Gordon was kind of perfect to be Chancellor.

• 43:59Alastair Campbell?

  And he was, I don't care what the Tories say about the gold and all the other stuff. Gordon was a terrific Chancellor. And he just, you know, he did, he used the power that he had to the Treasury to do big things.

• 44:12Rory Stewart?

  But I was just wondering, what you're reading is of the Johnson-Sunak relationship? And what do you think's going on there?

• 44:17Alastair Campbell?

  It's very hard to read. I mean, I think the big difference between Johnson and Tony Blair is that Tony Blair was a very serious politician. I don't believe that Johnson is. I think, there was a very interesting little vignette at the weekend while you were away. When Johnson made this utterly ridiculous, apparently Michael Gove put him up to it. But this utterly ridiculous speech where he said that, you know, he equated the Ukrainians' defence of their own country with the Brits voting for Brexit. I mean, it was just so offensive on so many levels to so many people. And Sunak was on the TV the next day, in advance of the Spring Statement. And he could, you could see how uncomfortable he was.

• 44:57Alastair Campbell?

  And it was like the Jimmy Savile thing, you know, when, when Johnson sort of tried to smear Keir Starmer over Jimmy Savile and Sunak did the rounds and he said, well, I wouldn't have used those words. And he was at it again, and he actually said something extraordinary. He said, I wouldn't have used, they played him the clip on the Sophie Ridge Show on Sky. They played him the Johnson clip. And he said, well, I wouldn't have used those words and Boris Johnson didn't use those words. Well, we just saw him using them. What the hell are you talking about? And, and I think what that says to me is that he's, I don't know, he obviously does have ambition. He probably does think that Johnson's a bit of a joke. He's not a stupid guy, Sunak, is my sense of him. And yet, because he's the Prime Minister and Sunak's the Chancellor, he sort of has to go along with stuff.

• 45:41Alastair Campbell?

  I think one of the worst things is not just Sunak's relationship. All of them have to go out and defend all this rubbish. Sajid Javid was doing it yesterday.

• 45:49Rory Stewart?

  And Boris seems to demand a very extreme level of defence. I mean, you get the sense that often Number 10 are angry with Rishi Sunak, that he's not more. Sort of exaggerate in his defence. What they really like is the sort of style of defence that you see coming from Jacob Rees-Mogg and that you see from coming from Nadine Dorries.

• 46:06Alastair Campbell?

  Nadine Dorries, yeah, who I mean, just looks at him. I mean, he's sort of puppy dog eyes every time he speaks. And of course, this is what makes, gives me pause for thought. I mean, I look at Johnson, I think you feel the same and think, how can anybody find him remotely politically or personally attractive in any way?

• 46:23Alastair Campbell?

  But that's when you have to sort of stand back and say, well, some people do, therefore you have to try to analyse that. But I think for Sunak, Sunak's obviously, strikes me as he's quite a serious guy, he's quite a detailed guy.

• 46:36Alastair Campbell?

  I think he's very thin skinned, is my sense, very prickly. I think he's really struggling to find a voice in this whole cost of living crisis. And when he talks about feeling your pain, I mean, I don't think people buy that when he has his £300 coffee cup and his, you know, his endlessly fashionable hoodies and his incredibly wealthy wife and his incredibly sort of numerous homes around the place. Do you know him, by the way? Do you have?

• 47:00Rory Stewart?

  I do know him a bit. I do know him a bit. You're talking to me, incidentally, in what looks like a pretty fashionable hoodie, Alistair, at the moment. I can see you on Zoom in a fashionable hoodie.

• 47:08Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I can actually tell you my hoodie. If you look there, it's.

• 47:11Rory Stewart?

  You're asking again, it's Ramona of the Year.

• 47:13Alastair Campbell?

  Ramona of the Year. It was awarded to me by the Vote Leave campaign.

• 47:16Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yeah, blimey. So Rishi Sunak came into Parliament five years after me. I saw quite a lot of him because weirdly, Rishi, myself and John McDonnell all worked next to each other in the library. John McDonnell and I shared a table in the House of Commons library and Rishi was just across the way. And I used to chat to him a lot. I mean, I began, I guess, disagreements with him, just being completely appalled that he'd come out so strongly for Brexit. I couldn't quite believe that he'd, he'd made that call.

• 47:47Alastair Campbell?

  He is a true believer. He's a sovereign individual true believer.

• 47:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, I think, because he, I sensed at the time that he felt that he was taking a real risk with his career. He knew that this was going to really annoy Cameron Mostyn. And that if they won the campaign, he'd be in trouble. And he was nervous about that, but he stuck to it.

• 48:04Alastair Campbell?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:05Rory Stewart?

  And of course, in a way, it was political genius because he became Chancellor more quickly than almost, I think, anybody. I've I don't have the records, but I'd reckon in probably two hundred years, or since it's Pitt the Younger or somebody. The idea of becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer within, I think it was four years of entering Parliament.

• 48:22Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 48:22Rory Stewart?

  Is unbelievable, right? I mean, Gordon Brown had gotten eighty three, wasn't Chancellor till ninety seven.

• 48:27Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 48:27Rory Stewart?

  Um, so, and of course, he came out very strongly for Boris, and that was the second. I mean, if you're just analyzing, I don't like to analyze people like this, but if you're just thinking about pure Machiavellian political gambles. He made two enormous gambles that really paid off for him.

• 48:43Alastair Campbell?

  Well, and also, they, they, I mean, the Tory party in that, in the Johnson campaign. I mean, they used him almost like he was the, he was the second voice in the campaign.

• 48:53Rory Stewart?

  Because he's so unusual, because he's somebody who you would entirely expect. And that's why I was so sort of surprised that he endorsed Boris so strongly.

• 49:00Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 49:01Rory Stewart?

  Because I'd always had him down as this, you know, quiet, thoughtful, quite argumentative. I mean, he is, he's, he's a sort of real kind of, you get a sense of somebody who was a real schoolboy debaser.

• 49:10Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 49:11Rory Stewart?

  Um, so you can have a really long, I remember trying to, uh, we were.

• 49:15Alastair Campbell?

  He was, he was Winchester, wasn't he? Was he Winchester or Marlborough?

• 49:18Rory Stewart?

  That's right, yeah. But my, my classic one with him is, is going in, I discovered as Prisons Minister that we had people in prison for not paying their TV licence and not paying their council tax. And it seemed to me completely absurd, right? As, as we said last week, it's more expensive than someone at prison that is sending them to Eton. And it really screws them up and we have overcrowded prisons. So we shouldn't be putting people in prison for not paying the TV licence. And I went into this meeting with him where he was representing his department. I think he was speaking up for people being in prison for not paying their council tax. And I thought, okay, I know Rishi well, we sit there with John McDonnell in the library and I'll be able to charm him out of this. He defended his government line minute in, minute out, for an hour with the civil servants

• 50:02Rory Stewart?

  looking on adoringly, making what I thought were the silliest arguments I've ever heard in my life. And I kept saying, Rishi, can we stop arguing? Just think about it. So step back. Cannot make sense to put people in jail for not paying their TV licence and not paying their council tax. But he wasn't going to step back. He had his line, he'd been given it by the civil servants and he was going to argue it all the way.

• 50:22Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, I, I, I want to hear more about this little threesome in the library. Was John McDonnell a lot chuntering at the period?

• 50:30Rory Stewart?

  He's pretty grumpy, John McDonnell. He's got a very, very smart leather briefcase, though, I noticed. It always had to. He's a very elegantly sort of turned out guy. But no, I never really managed to charm John McDonnell, any more than I really managed to charm Rishi, I guess. Listen, questions. We've had a lot of questions in from listeners and I wanted to get you going on a question that came in from this guy called Ben. Let me just pull it up. So Ben says, in Bernard Donoghue's diaries, he writes that Jim Callaghan thought that only Alastair Campbell of Blair's inner crowd was really Labour. Did Alistair feel that was true and that he had to protect the Labour tradition?

• 51:07Alastair Campbell?

  Wow. We should probably explain Bernard Donoghue was an adviser to the then Labour Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan. He's almost as fanatic a diarist as I am and you are.

• 51:20Alastair Campbell?

  Funny enough, Jim, I knew that was Jim Callaghan's view. And I can tell you as well that Jim Callaghan, who actually was an old family friend of my in-laws, going way, way, way, way back. And I know for a fact, because he told me, that he was, he was really quite pissed off that Tony saw Maggie Thatcher after being elected before he'd seen him. And it wasn't a sort of status thing. I think he just thought it was, he thought this whole sort of thing of reaching out to the Tories was going too far. And he did say to me, he says that, you know, I'm quite worried about the sort of politics of some of the people around Tony. I think all the people around Tony were, were basically New Labour.

• 52:02Alastair Campbell?

  Um, and, and, and maybe sometimes I was a bit of a bridge to some of the more old Labour.

• 52:09Rory Stewart?

  Well, we're picking up a bit of that, aren't we, in the conversation last week where you said that, for example, you would abolish private schools and Tony would never have considered abolishing private schools. In that sense, you were reaching more back. So I guess that was Michael Foot's manifesto.

• 52:21Alastair Campbell?

  By the way, Rory, lots of people were commenting last week, I don't know if you noticed, saying they, they shared my worry about you. You kept, every time we talked about Eton, you wanted to talk about prisons. And you did it again a minute ago. You talked about these places ruining people's lives. So I think we're going to win you over eventually. Uh, listen, there's a question. Does that answer the question? I think it answers the question reasonably, reasonably diplomatically. Um, now, listen, we had the tank. We had the guy, the tank last week. This one is from, called Chris Crack the Whip on Twitter. And he's obviously obsessed with whips because he says, I think this is meant for you because you've been an MP and I haven't. Could you talk about your experience with and the future of party whips?

• 53:02Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's, it's a very, very strange thing. So it's right at the heart of the system. Um, they are the kind of septic tank of Parliament or the sort of what hidden wiring system of Parliament. They're the, they, they see themselves the stuff that makes it all work. And

• 53:21Rory Stewart?

  the public, and I think, I guess, myself as a relatively, um, yeah, uh, you know, wanted to be an independent minded MP, can see the, the downside of them a lot because obviously what they're doing is they're whipping you in behind the government vote all the time. And they're unbelievably effective at it. I mean, people don't understand. I, I tried to explain to the public that when often constituents would say, why did you vote with a party whip? You know, it's no excuse that these amazing things that often get attacked on Twitter. I thought Rory Stewart was a good guy and then I looked at his voting record, right? The point about the voting record is that.

• 54:03Rory Stewart?

  MPs, doesn't matter their Labour, doesn't matter their Conservative, are voting with the three-line whip almost all the time.

• 54:08Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 54:09Rory Stewart?

  Even the most rebellious MPs, the most crazy MPs will rebel maybe five percent of the time and they're considered complete lunatics. Right. It's the sort of Jeremy Corbyn level of rebellion.

• 54:20Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 54:22Rory Stewart?

  Um, for somebody like me, a three-line whip means you will vote with the government on this, or you will be kicked out of the party. And I experienced this twice. I experienced this because I got very het up with a deal that Cameron was cooking up with the Lib Dems where he was going to abolish the House of Lords in exchange for redrawing the constituency boundaries, because he believed that the Conservatives would win a majority in the next election if they withdrew constituency boundaries. And I thought this was the most horrible way of rethinking our constitution for the worst possible reasons, the worst possible way.

• 54:54Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he wasn't very, he wasn't very good at major constitutional change, was he?

• 54:57Rory Stewart?

  Uh, no, no. And there was a lot of belief and weird stuff. But anyway, um, I dug my heels in, wrote very politely to the whips, et cetera, and found myself on the day of the vote outside the lobby and George Osborne said to me, this is 2012, "I'm going to promote you in a week's time, but if you walk in through that door into the no lobby, you're not going to be promoted for the rest of this parliament." That was, so I walked in and obviously I wasn't promoted for the rest of the parliament. And George Osborne was very pleased with this and kept reminding me of this over the five-year period, that the reason I wasn't promoted is that I had voted against you. And the next time I rebelled was obviously over Brexit, at which point I was thrown out of the party, uh, and lost my seat, you know, lost my whole life and career, et cetera.

• 55:41Rory Stewart?

  So I think that's the first thing that is difficult to understand is that people imagine that they sort of look at the voting record and they think that MPs are sitting there day after day individually choosing what they're voting on.

• 55:52Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 55:53Rory Stewart?

  The decision to rebel against your party is a really, really big deal and you do it maybe once or twice.

• 56:01Rory Stewart?

  When you're really prepared to blow your career up.

• 56:04Alastair Campbell?

  We should, there are probably people, even though imagining most of our listeners are pretty plugged into politics, otherwise they wouldn't necessarily want to hear us two going on. But the three line whip thing, is that, that's about the lines written under, when you get the note about next week's business.

• 56:20Rory Stewart?

  So traditionally.

• 56:21Alastair Campbell?

  Three lines underlined.

• 56:22Rory Stewart?

  Three lines underneath, yeah. Although all that's gone out the window because you now get your whip.

• 56:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 56:27Rory Stewart?

  Telephone and everything seems to be a three line whip. There don't seem to be any one or two line whips anymore. But I suppose just to finish this sort of story about whips. In favour of the whips, what they would say is that the public have voted for a government. They voted for a manifesto.

• 56:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 56:43Rory Stewart?

  And the public expect the government to deliver that manifesto. And it's not good enough for each individual MP to make up their mind on every single vote, exactly how they feel. Otherwise, the public would have no predictability at all, right? They'd vote for a party and they wouldn't get any business done. So, but my goodness, that is an impossible thing to explain to angry constituents.

• 57:04Alastair Campbell?

  I think also.

• 57:04Rory Stewart?

  What on earth are you doing voting on that?

• 57:05Alastair Campbell?

  No, I also think members of the public don't necessarily always understand that if you're a member of the government, a minister or a whip, then it's effectively a resignation offence not to support the government.

• 57:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, if you don't vote for the government, you resign. Yeah, that's right. And so you're having to decide, do you want to be a member of this government? Do you want to be a member of the party or not? It's not that you're going into each vote, make up your mind. And the sad thing about that, which we almost never talk about, but is of course the guilty secret of parliament, is that as a result, the vast majority of MPs barely bother to find out what they're voting on. Unless it's something that's been really brought to their attention by a constituent or a lobby group, people are filing in and out of the lobbies, could be voting seven times in a day. And if you say to them, what are we voting on? I notice this young MP, they'd have to glance up at the screen and go, um, the academies bill, second reading. And if you said, okay, what is the academies bill, second reading? They'd whop you round the head for being a cheeky bugger.

• 58:03Alastair Campbell?

  And they wouldn't have read the whips notes on it either. And I see, then you end up situations like you had on Monday night this week, where Labour bring forward something that would actually help to deal with this wretched situation of P and O firing and rehiring sort of cheap labour. And Natalie Elfe, did you see the Dover MP who, she went down to join. She went down to join the demonstration against P and O. And there she was, joining in with the cries of shame on you, shame on you, not realising that they were being directed at her and eventually sort of scuttling away. But she, last night, there she is in the lobby. So that kind of thing, she's going to get absolutely savage for that, I would have thought.

• 58:46Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, but both, and of course, both parties do it. I mean, it's very, very partisan. They just won't vote, even if what the other side is proposing is pretty sensible. It's very, very rare that they'll ever vote for it. So the question, question coming in, and it was this one from David by email. It's delighted to see Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe and Anusha Ashuri return home and be reunited with their families this week. I wonder, though, why now has the government paid our debt to Iran? I can't help but think it's related to our wider political aims.

• 59:19Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, what do you think about that?

• 59:22Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think actually what's happened is that Liz Truss has come in and said, enough of this. We owe them £400 million and we've got British citizens tied up. And we're going to pay it sometime, so we might as well get it done.

• 59:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think another factor might be Biden, the fact that Trump just would not have countenanced doing anything that the Iranians could possibly project as a good thing for them. So that may have helped it change as well. The thing that's really kind of troubled me about this story is that, and I thought Jeremy Hunt spoke well about this today. Yesterday, you would have been tied up, you won't have seen this, but Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe and her husband did a press conference. And the husband said that he wanted to thank the Foreign Secretary for the role that she played, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And in a very nice, very quite gentle, very charming way, Nazanin said, look, I love him dearly, but I'm not going to endorse that statement.

• 1:00:21Alastair Campbell?

  I want to know why it's taken so long. There've been so many Foreign Secretaries that have made so many false promises, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Within no time, trending on Twitter was send her back.

• 1:00:34Alastair Campbell?

  And all these people, and what is said to me is that if you don't conform to the sort of, you know, media narrative that says, you know, we've got you back and Foreign Secretary Liz Insta-trust has posed nicely for pictures with you and you have to be grateful. And people just want to forget that Boris Johnson did make it worse. He did make it worse by saying that she'd been teaching journalists when actually she'd just been there on holiday. And that sort of sloppiness. And then, and then you saw the stuff yesterday, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, where Philip Barton, who I really like, is one of my favorite civil servants of our time, but because we have an amoral government, was having to shift so horribly

• 1:01:18Alastair Campbell?

  in his chair about the lies that Johnson's told about getting the animals out of Afghanistan. So I just, I just felt this whole thing, you know, you, you, it's as if you're not allowed actually to say what you think. These right wing people are going about freedom of speech. I'd be bloody angry if I was her. I thought she was amazingly calm, considering.

• 1:01:36Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, she spent six years in M in jail, unable to see your husband, your children.

• 1:01:41Alastair Campbell?

  Incredible.

• 1:01:41Rory Stewart?

  And of course, the solution to the problem was there all along. And so that's what she must think.

• 1:01:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Rory Stewart?

  That, that in a way, look, you can understand why some people in the British and American government thought we shouldn't be blackmailed into sending money to the Iranians because they've taken one of our people hostage. But if you're going to do it, you might as well do it quickly. There's nothing to be gained for anybody by stringing the thing on for six years.

• 1:02:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but I do think with, with Trump there, it was probably a lot harder than it maybe was with Biden. Well, listen, we've run, we've gone around the block. We've talked about lots and lots and lots of things. I think you probably need to go and have a kip. You're looking a bit knackered to me after your little trip. And we'll speak again next week. Thanks to everybody for listening.

• 1:02:23Rory Stewart?

  Thank you, Arthur. Bye.

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd, causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:02:40Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:02:46Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You start, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:02:50Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:02:53Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:02:54Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 and a middle without parent.