45. Question Time: BBC impartiality, books vs. newspapers, and Stewart spoofery

What shared regret do Rory and Alastair have about their time at university? Plus local journalism, bikes, John le Carré, musical instruments, rhetoric, and Rory's defence of Eton. Blackpool live show tickets: Saturday 8th October: wintergardensblackpool.co.uk/events/the-rest-is-politics-live/ 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: Tony Pastor 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/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

  Hello and welcome to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:47Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:49Alastair Campbell?

  Right, Rory, we had loads of questions last week about sleep. And we talked a bit about our reading. But I think we got a lot of people say they felt our recommendations were a bit heavy.

• 2:00Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 2:00Alastair Campbell?

  Somebody said, can we give them something a bit lighter? So I'm going to give, Billy Connolly's last book was absolutely fantastic. And also, talking of Connolly, after watching the Elvis film, which is wonderful, Fiona and I, on our drive through France, we listened to the Ray Connolly Elvis Presley biography, which is definitely worth a read. So give us something that's non philosophical Rory, not about world poverty and how to beat it.

• 2:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so I've been rereading John Le Carré, loving it, his smiley novels. And I particularly recommend for people who'd want to try one of them, The Honourable Schoolboy, which has got the most incredible descriptions of Hong Kong in the seventies, the end of the Americans in Vietnam, some unforgettable scenes in US airbases with drunken American colonels trying to justify the final flight from the Hanoi roof, sorry, the Saigon roof, people trying to navigate their way through that extraordinary moment in the seventies Cold War. And above all, Le Carré's incredible eye for details, the way in which someone wears

• 3:06Rory Stewart?

  their cuffs, the way they walk, patterns of speech, the way that he puts across the whole hypocrisy and horror of the British government through a single meeting with some cracked cups of coffee.

• 3:19Alastair Campbell?

  Very good. Hypocrisy and horror of working in the British government is something of which you feel very, very close to. Liz Cook, similar subject, I always enjoy hearing about what you're both reading, but where do you find the time to read in your lives? Do you read more now than earlier on in your careers? And I'm going to relate that to a question from George. I'm applying to university later this year. What were your university experiences? What did you learn? How important was your university experience to your future life? And my big regret about university is the fact that I didn't read many books while I was there. And I feel I've spent the whole of my life trying to catch up on books that I should have read when I had the time.

• 4:01Alastair Campbell?

  And because I feel I was, went to Keyes College, Cambridge, did languages, I did okay, but I, I kind of wasted a lot of my time at university and I do regret that.

• 4:11Rory Stewart?

  So I'm exactly the same. I, I mean, I thought my problem was that I had been stuck in this all male school. And so I spent my entire time at university trying to meet girls for the first time. But clearly you were able to waste your time at university without having that problem. So maybe it's the, maybe it's the universal problem. No, I didn't read any books. And one of the problems was that I spent my whole time being really panicked by the fact that if I was reading, I was supposed to be doing my reading list. And because I didn't want to get on with the reading list I'd been given, I never felt I could read books for fun. It was awful. So when I actually left university, there was this kind of rush of reading. I I moved as a diplomat to Indonesia and suddenly, for the first time, I was reading and actually reading quite serious books.

• 4:51Rory Stewart?

  I kind of loved reading Michel Foucault. I'd start reading Wittgenstein again. I'd start reading Russian literature again. All the stuff that I should have been doing at university.

• 5:01Alastair Campbell?

  I've noticed this with Tori, Rory, you never read books. You always reread them. You know, I read Wittgenstein again. It's like Trollope. You never, ever hear anybody say, I've just been reading Trollope. They're always rereading Trollope.

• 5:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I I'm with you on that. That's it's incredible pretentiousness. I think I think it's good to call me out on that.

• 5:18Alastair Campbell?

  I go through phases and we talked yesterday about how I've been a bit a bit gloomy of late. When I'm very down, I find it very hard to read. I I just can't concentrate long enough. Uh, but I find I find planes and I know we both travel too much, but I do find travelling a good place to read. And I do quite, I never used to do this, but I now don't feel guilty if I take half an hour an hour during the day to read a book that I'm particularly enjoying. And I have a motto, which is read books, not newspapers, because you're going to learn more.

• 5:47Rory Stewart?

  That's good. That's good. That's good. I mean, I do it. I'm, this is going to disgust you because you're going to accuse this. I suspect you're going to accuse me of this being a disgusting, lower, upper, middle class habit. But I I I read in the bath. I spend an hour and a half every day sitting in the bath, reading.

• 6:02Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, my God. Yeah, okay. I I I can't remember the last time I even had a bath. I think, uh, although was it was it Churchill who said, nobody ever had a good idea of the shower?

• 6:13Rory Stewart?

  That's good, isn't it? It's a good, it's a good, it's a good line, isn't it? It's a good line.

• 6:16Alastair Campbell?

  No, you're you're the one who's who's introduced the whole sort of Italian thing yet again. You always do it. You just can't stop yourself talking about the upper classes. Dr. Theo Philus Okenwald, Alistair, you slagging your feet is a very important part of your personality. But what do you think is the best part of Eton and the private sector for our society? And Rory, what do you think is the worst? I think that the facilities at Eton, as we described before, are extraordinary. And that is very good for the children who go to Eton, but it's not very good for society. So Rory, what's the worst thing about private schools?

• 6:50Rory Stewart?

  I think the worst thing probably is, and they are making a lot of effort on this. I got challenged by Eton for not defending it enough on this show, so I'm.

• 7:00Alastair Campbell?

  Are the Italians listening? Excellent.

• 7:02Rory Stewart?

  Italians listening, and they feel that I'm not making enough effort. So they want to put it on record that they are doing far, far more than they ever were in the past to reach out to state schools and to make sure that they provide support to them and.

• 7:16Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, well, let's just, let's just zone in. What does reach out mean? Well, they send them an email saying, we're here.

• 7:22Rory Stewart?

  No, I believe what's happening, I mean, I'm not an expert on this and they'll send me more if you really are interested in this. But I believe they're sponsoring schools, doing an enormous amount of exchanges with teachers and students. And I actually got an email from one of those schools saying, while you're battering Eton, do please thank them for the work they're doing on reaching out and supporting the state sector. So there we are, but I'm very happy to get more details on that later. What's the worst thing? I guess the worst thing is about what one thinks about entrenched privilege. So I mean, I disagree with you sometimes when you imply that everybody who goes to Eton is a sort of thick, rich twit who has nothing to contribute. I think.

• 7:59Alastair Campbell?

  I've never said that, never said that.

• 8:01Rory Stewart?

  I think the problem with Eton is more that it provides a really, really exceptional education, but it provides it to very, very few people. And the results, I think, are extraordinary. I mean, it does, you know, it's not an accident that it's produced a lot of famous writers, famous actors, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, John McCurry, who we were just talking about, taught at Eton, Aldous Huxley taught at Eton, George Orwell went to Eton, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's not about having amazing facilities. That's about what I guess people do in the classrooms.

• 8:32Alastair Campbell?

  Ashitha Vaz, what is a country you have never visited, which you would like to explore?

• 8:37Rory Stewart?

  Go on then, over to you.

• 8:39Alastair Campbell?

  I think North Korea.

• 8:40Rory Stewart?

  Oh, North Korea, blimey, you want to explore North Korea.

• 8:43Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I do think it's one of the few countries in the world where you, where you think this is going to be so different to anything else that I know. So I think that would be quite interesting.

• 8:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, for me, I don't know really anything at all about Latin America. I was very briefly in Chile on my way to the South Pole earlier this year, but otherwise I've not really touched foot in Latin America. And my fantasy when I retire would be to ride a horse the length of Chile or Argentina.

• 9:08Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, Rory, that's your next book. Once you've done the How Not to Be a Politician book. But I should say, by the way, if you read the draft of my new book, which I sent you closely, I did say in there that you were now vying with Alan Clark, my fellow former diarist, and possibly the Archbishop of Canterbury as my favourite old Italian. So it is, I don't say they're all thick, rich twits who offer nothing to the world.

• 9:32Rory Stewart?

  The awful truth is that Alan Clark was pretty thick and pretty much a twit and a pretty awful human being. I mean, a pretty reprehensible moral monster. Listen, here's a question from Joe Lake. Which artist, author, actor, painter, musician, et cetera, have you discovered in recent times, only to wish you'd welcomed them into your life much earlier?

• 9:54Alastair Campbell?

  They're both German.

• 9:56Rory Stewart?

  Oh, go on then.

• 9:57Alastair Campbell?

  Writer Charlotte Link, who writes these wonderful pot boilers, they're very good for my German, and German singer Helena Fischer. She's, this is not the, obviously the only attraction, she's incredibly good looking, she's got a beautiful voice, she puts on amazing shows, she did a show last month in Munich to 150,000 people. She's a superstar in Germany and of course, she mainly sings in German. She's a pop singer, probably not your sort Rory, but I think you might like her. Try her new album, it's called Rausch, which means addiction.

• 10:35Rory Stewart?

  Very, very good. My offering to people, I guess, is a bit naff and a bit obvious, but I used to be really into German expressionist paintings. So I used to like people like Max Beckmann, Oscar Kokoschka, Emil Nolder, but I'm now really into Matisse and I'm just completely hypnotised, particularly by those very, very simple colours, those sort of cutouts, blue and white figures, the dance, the Red Rum by Matisse, I've been looking at a lot. Is that because you have it hanging in your front room? Or? No, it's because I've got a book on my teeth. You don't have any originals on the wall? I do not yet have any originals on the wall, but of course, as this podcast becomes more successful, you know, who knows?

• 11:19Rory Stewart?

  I think probably time for a break. Why not?

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• 12:53Alastair Campbell?

  How about a latte?

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• 13:27Rory Stewart?

  So what's next?

• 13:29Alastair Campbell?

  We've got a lot of questions about Emily Maitlis' speech to the Edinburgh Festival.

• 13:32Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yes, go on then.

• 13:33Alastair Campbell?

  Julian Mitchell, is there a Tory bias on the board of the BBC? Peter McClintock, can we agree that Brexit was a disaster? Climate change is manmade and that's a fact, et cetera, et cetera. But I think the main thing that people were taking out of it was her essentially saying that the BBC had got this whole question of balance wrong, that it's like if one person says it's raining and the other person says it's dry, it's not raining. You have a debate about that as opposed to looking out the window and seeing whether it's raining. I think we talked before about the sort of, you know, one economist who said Brexit was good gets the same balance in the debate as 10,000 who say it was a disaster. But I thought it was a very, very good speech. I wish more people like the BBC had spoken out in those terms from within the BBC because

• 14:17Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's a legitimate thing to do. And I thought the BBC's response to her speech, I don't know if you saw the headline, but the headline was Emily Maitlis says that getting punished over what she said about Dominic Cummings was a bit weird. I mean, it was, it so missed the point, clearly deliberately. And I think calling Robbie Gibb an agent of the Tory party inside the BBC, I think that's perfectly legitimate.

• 14:39Rory Stewart?

  That's good, right? Well, it's, yeah, I mean, I think it's an impossible situation the BBC's put itself in, hasn't it? I mean, I remember during the Brexit debate, when I was absolutely convinced that both sides, the Brexit debate, had gone full on bonkers, was the moment at which I was doing a debate at the Oxford Union against Nigel Farage. And on the other side, Andrew Adonis, who was the great voice of the Remain second referendum campaign, and I heard Nigel Farage refer to the BBC as the Brussels Broadcasting Corporation. And then two minutes later, Andrew Adonis referred to it as the Brexit Broadcasting Corporation. And I then thought, my blimey, maybe the BBC's getting something right if they're both attacking it from both sides.

• 15:22Rory Stewart?

  So Andrew Papworth, nice question. You're often talking about podcasts about a lack of good foreign reporting, but I think it's also important to highlight there's a dearth of good quality local journalists and much closer at home. I know Alastair started his career at the Tavistock Times. So it'd be great to ask what lessons he learned in local journalism and how these influenced his later career.

• 15:40Alastair Campbell?

  On that, first of all, on the foreign stuff, we got the question last week about French podcasts. Quite a few people mentioned one that's called Politique. I think it's France Culture. So there's one who, the lady who was asking for some good French political podcasts. I do think that one of the things that's gone wrong with journalism generally is that there is not enough training on local papers. I trained on the Tavistock Times, that's where I met Fiona. And there is something extraordinary about being part of a local community and knowing that if you get something wrong, like you spell somebody's name wrong, you get their age wrong, or you misspell somebody's name who was attending the funeral at the church where you're meant to be putting all the Davs down, is that there is a very, very fair chance that they won't just write or phone, but they'll come into the office

• 16:25Alastair Campbell?

  and say, you spelt my name wrong. And it does give you this sort of discipline to try to get your facts accurate. And I do think there's something terrible about the death of so many local papers. I met a journalist recently who was on a salary which was not that much more than some of the salaries that were being paid on local papers back in the day when I was on them. I mean, it's really, really hard now to make a good living doing local journalism. And the influence of social media, the influence of the social media giants that is really driving out a lot of good local journalism. So I think there has to be more respect for local journalists and more understanding of the role local journalism plays.

• 17:04Rory Stewart?

  There was a lovely initiative, I think, to try to look at ways in which local journalism could be supported. I think there were efforts to push the BBC out more into the regions and provide more support for BBC regional reporting. That would talk about providing direct support for local newspapers. I mean, nothing is better for local democracy and accountability than a good local newspaper. In our case in Cumbria, the Cumberland and Westernland Herald was just wonderful. I had an editor called Colin Morn for nearly more than 20 years, who absolutely refused to dumb down or popularise. And for a very, very long time, by running a pretty traditional paper, there were many, many pages

• 17:46Rory Stewart?

  about the auction prices, fantastic stories on before and after shots of local primary schools 50 years ago and today picking up the same families. Great reporting from local parishes, but also some pretty tough challenges to me as an MP, stuff on local expenses scandals with my predecessor, attacking local companies for the Penrith Pong, exposing problems with the Penrith Master Plan. And he really held the standards high. And it had a circulation, loyal circulation, I think at one point of 40,000 people out of a area, really, of not much more

• 18:27Rory Stewart?

  than 60,000 households. So it was an amazing thing. What's happened to the Tavistock Times? I mean, I know it's owned by the Tyndale Group, which I think has about 200 local newspapers.

• 18:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it's still going. It's still going. And I, you know, occasionally have a look at it. And it was a proper local paper. And I think the thing about, Fiona used to cover Oakhampton, there was a sister paper, the Oakhampton Times, and because she had a driving licence and I didn't, she was sent off every week to Oakhampton. It was, it was a very, very, very local paper. I mean, you know, it's like, you know, I remember once when Tony Benn came, and Tony Benn was a huge figure at the time. And it was like, you know, politician visits Tavistock. It wasn't, it wasn't sort of bed radio. It was like Tavistock was the most important part of the fact that that he'd come there. And I was very, very lucky there because my first editor was a woman, Mary Richards, and her deputy was a woman, Pat Murray. And I'm not saying that some women

• 19:22Alastair Campbell?

  aren't interested in sport, but those two weren't. And so I basically was made sports editor on my first day in journalism. And as the sports editor, I gave myself a column. Campbell's Corner was born. And I, we had a great time. And it was, you do feel you're part of the community. And I think the other thing I learnt In direct answer to the question, is there is a story in every single person that you meet, and that might have been an excuse for my then developing alcoholism, because I used to sort of think that if I went to the pub, I would definitely find a story in somebody, and nine times out of 10, I did. So that gave me a sort of professional justification for.

• 20:02Rory Stewart?

  For your addiction, yeah. Charles Posniak's pulling me up here. He says, I'm a massive fan of the podcast, and I particularly enjoyed Rory's book recommendations, the most recent Question Time episode. However, Rory recommended Poor Economics and accredited the work solely to Abhijit Banerjee, forgetting his phenomenal co-author and wife Esther Duflo, with whom he won the Nobel Prize. And quite right to call me out, absolutely, Esther Duflo, Nobel Prize winner, extraordinary economist and co-author of that book. Many, many apologies.

• 20:35Alastair Campbell?

  John Klukas on another of your previous questions, he actually, you probably won't agree with me even answering this one. Alistair talks about, a lot about the love of his bike. Could he tell us more about his?

• 20:45Rory Stewart?

  Go on, tell us about your bike.

• 20:47Alastair Campbell?

  All right, I'll tell you about it. It's a Pinarello dogma.

• 20:51Rory Stewart?

  Pinarello dogma. So John, what are we to envisage? Some sort of fancy Italian racing bike, some skinny thing?

• 20:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but even better than that, because I've done in the past, I did some work with Team Sky, it was actually one of their cast offs.

• 21:06Rory Stewart?

  Oh, I see. So it's a really serious expensive bike. That's like a, it costs as much as my second hand car.

• 21:12Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and that's why Rory, it's not the only reason I love it. I love it because it's accompanied me up lots of different hills. But, you know, the way you talked about me in that Guardian interview, maybe, you know, maybe I can get you to love you, you know, almost as much as, certainly as much as the front wheel and the brakes, put it that way.

• 21:34Rory Stewart?

  Well, I hope it's famous for its brakes, otherwise I'm going to be offended again. Someone's going to write in saying the one thing on that bicycle that's really crap are the brakes and he just compares you to the brakes.

• 21:43Alastair Campbell?

  Now, Richard Cam was another one pulling us up. He said there were some dreadful puns in the last edition. Rory was talking about a water down rivers policy. I talked about putting an energy policy on ice. Was there some weird wordplay contest going on? I can assure there wasn't. But actually, when I listened back last week, the worst one that I said was I talked about Mick Lynch. What I liked about Mick Lynch is the way he's able to sit down and stand up against journalists.

• 22:11Rory Stewart?

  That's very good, isn't it? That's beautiful. So maybe we've got, maybe we have the makings of some sort of strange poetic metaphors in our head and language that we need to exploit. So here we are. We've got Kunal Patel. I like this one. Rory mentioned on Thursday's podcast that his adage regarding lost items should be on his gravestone. For anyone who hasn't got this, because it's my greatest insight of all time, it is where you think it is. What a brilliant way to prove the theory. And this is Kunal's suggestion for my gravestone. We sadly lost Rory, but he'll now forever be found where he was last seen.

• 22:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I don't know if I've told you before, but I was on some TV thing where I had to say, what would be your Piers Morgan's gravestone? I can't remember what I said, but he said that on my it would be, here lies Alastair Campbell again.

• 23:03Rory Stewart?

  Hey, very good.

• 23:06Alastair Campbell?

  Which I thought was quite, I thought was quite funny.

• 23:08Rory Stewart?

  That's very good.

• 23:09Alastair Campbell?

  Quote one on the arts?

• 23:10Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, we're running our time. So do the final stuff. Yeah.

• 23:13Alastair Campbell?

  Kim Nichols, I'm very concerned about the squeeze on arts in schools. How important was music in your school? Did you learn an instrument? And well, I learned the bagpipes as you did. Did you learn at school or did you learn in the family as it were?

• 23:27Rory Stewart?

  No, I learnt at school from pipe major Alec McDonald of First Battalion Scots Guards, Queen's Piper, who'd actually joined the Scots Guards in, get this, he'd joined the Scots Guards in 1919. So guy was born in 1900. Wrote, wrote a great, great tune, which maybe you can play us one day called Monte Cartarelto, which is in the Scots Guards pipe book.

• 23:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yep. That's the red and blue, the red and blue one.

• 23:54Rory Stewart?

  That's the red and blue one. Yep. Absolutely. You'll find it there, Alec McDonald's. In fact, you'll find a photograph of him, I think, in the front, depending which edition you got. Photograph him in the front of the book. I studied at school, a lot of instruments. I'm really, really bad at music, which is obviously what's one of the current themes in this podcast. So my loyal parents, my father loved music, loved singing. He and his brother, who was just a year younger than him, grew up in Kirim Yor in Angus. And in the twenties and thirties, their dad was away in India, didn't see their father. Their father, we talk about parents. My grandfather got leave once every four years to come back and see his family in Scotland. So four years would pass before he'd see them. And then he'd see them for a few weeks in the eye of the sky. And then he'd vanish again for four years again.

• 24:39Rory Stewart?

  But they would sing Schubert, Schubert Leader to each other. And one of the things that I was looking through my letters from my uncle who was killed, he was wounded at Alamein and killed in Sicily during Second World War. Both my father and his brother were in the Black Watch. And when he was in a hospital in Jerusalem, having been injured at Alamein, he was listening to German radio, listening to music being played in Berlin. And it was very striking. On the one hand, he was fighting Germans and was finally killed by Germans. But his love of German music, his belief in German culture never wavered. And almost the last things he was writing about in his letter was a recording of Beethoven that he'd just heard.

• 25:19Alastair Campbell?

  I do think the question though about the squeeze on it, I think, I mean, I went to a state school in Leicester where we had school plays, we had, you know, music that was being taught and so forth. And I think these have become for a lot of schools now luxuries that can only be done if parents are paying extra or if if the teachers are sort of prepared to do, go beyond and above. Whereas, you know, private sector, particularly the top private schools, of course, have extraordinary musical support and facilities. And I do think we underestimate the arts, not just as a cultural phenomenon, which one of the things that we do excel at, but also as an economic power as well. So

• 25:58Rory Stewart?

  I just want to say that, I mean, on the things taught in school, one of the things I've been really moved and impressed by is the importance of debating and public speaking training. So I was talking to a couple of guys, Patrick and James, who come from St Francis Xavier's College, which is the state school Liverpool. And they won a debating competition 2019 and they credited all to two teachers who gave up their evenings to running a debate club in their, in their school. And they credited with changing their lives. One of them got into Oxford off the back of it. The other one got, I think, into London University. But most importantly, they said that it was the first time in their whole school career where they were really challenged

• 26:40Rory Stewart?

  to think critically, examine arguments, develop confidence in speaking. And they were really encouraging me to both praise their teachers for the incredible work they put in, in after hours to make this happen, but also encourage other people to do public speaking stuff at schools.

• 26:57Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I totally agree with that. If I've written about that in the, in the book that you've read, where I talked about Scotland, where I am at the moment, I think one of the reasons that Scotland has historically produced perhaps a disproportionate number of really leading politicians down the generations is because of the, the stronger tradition of teaching of public speaking and debating in schools.

• 27:18Rory Stewart?

  It's very weird, isn't it? Because rhetoric was a central part of all educational systems for nearly 2000 years, ancient Greeks, ancient Romans, medieval education. And then sometime in the late 19th century, we began to be suspicious of it. Rhetoric became a dirty word. But actually, those earlier people would have said that what you've just said about, well, about everybody, about Lib Dem leaders, about Scotland, about these guys at Liverpool School, is a very, very ancient lesson, which is that we are speaking animals and training people in reasoning, speaking, arguing is really important for the way that we think and perform in the world.

• 27:56Alastair Campbell?

  Final question, Rory. Elizabeth Larno, do you think either of you will feature in Boris Johnson's resignation honours list?

• 28:03Rory Stewart?

  Oh, I think so, Alistair. I think we've got a very good chance. I would have thought a dukedom for you. And I'd quite like to be, you know, Marquess of the Borders, Earl of the March or something. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think he's going to pick us up. I think he's a guy, he's generous. He, you know, he reaches out. It's not as if he's going to give honours to Paul Deak or anyone like that. I think he's genuinely somebody who's going to reach out and be like, they held me to account. I believe in democracy. And Rory and Alistair, the people.

• 28:33Alastair Campbell?

  And on this moment of Stewart spoofery, we end this week's episode of Rest is Politics.

• 28:39Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

• 28:46Speaker 02

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• 28:49Speaker 03

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• 28:50Speaker 02

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 28:55Speaker 03

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• 29:02Speaker 04

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• 29:06Speaker 03

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• 29:10Speaker 04

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