Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 464. Labour’s Tax Timebomb, Climate Backsliding, and Sudan’s Forgotten War About this episode Is this the Budget that breaks Labour, or can Reeves walk the tightrope? Why does the general public increasingly think we’re overreacting to climate breakdown? Why aren’t Elon Musk’s provocations of a civil war in Britain being challenged more by mainstream politicians?
Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more.
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Transcript 11,120 words · 9 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Rory Stewart? What she's done is she's signaled before the budget that she's thinking of putting up taxes.
0:05 Alastair Campbell? They are preparing to break a manifesto commitment, so they really are going to have to win a big argument about why they had to do it.
0:10 Rory Stewart? They're screwed at the moment, anyway. Kier Sarm's net popularity ratings almost couldn't be worse.
0:14 Alastair Campbell? If Labour were to slide away from being a global leader on climate change, I think that politically would be a mistake. The politicisation and the weaponisation of it by the right, Farage, Trump, et cetera, it's got some traction within the political debate. Look at what happened in Jamaica last week.
0:29 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
0:29 Alastair Campbell? Uninsurable. They're talking about somewhere between eight and 20 billion pounds worth of damage.
0:33 Rory Stewart? Absolutely.
0:35 Alastair Campbell? This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. Now, more and more drivers are moving to electric as the economic and environmental arguments get much harder to ignore.
0:43 Rory Stewart? And the real benefit of an electric car comes when you can charge affordably at home. Saves time, saves money, difference between a late night queue on the motorway and stepping outside in the morning to a car that's already full.
0:54 Alastair Campbell? And Fuse makes that shift very, very simple. It's already the fastest growing energy provider in the UK. They go further, installing affordable smart EV chargers and linking them directly to their smart EV tariff.
1:06 Rory Stewart? Which means the charger in your driveway is synced to the cheapest hours of the day, so every charge costs less. Think of it as having an economist in the garage, but one who finally earns their keep.
1:17 Alastair Campbell? Fuse is not just supplying power, they're setting you up properly, charger installed, tariff aligned, everything in place.
1:24 Rory Stewart? Switch to Fuse today. Make driving electric cheaper. Find out more at fuseenergy.com/politics.
1:37 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
1:39 Alastair Campbell? And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed... Managed to watch it. There you go.
1:51 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve. And of course, the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying. If you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.
2:15 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think you're not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this. Or should I say Fiona Fiona managed to do this?
2:22 Rory Stewart? I 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.
2:38 Speaker 02 This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. For 125 years, Nordstrom has been part of your story. The stylist who found the perfect outfit for your big interview. The first pair of walking shoes for your one year old. The tomato soup you shared with your sister at the cafe. These are the moments that make Nordstrom, Nordstrom, big or small. We're here for all of it, celebrating 125 years with new moments still ahead. Discover it all in Nordstrom stores and at nordstrom.com.
3:15 Rory Stewart? Welcome to the Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.
3:17 Alastair Campbell? And me, Alastair Campbell. And we're going to talk very briefly about Rachel Reeves' speech, which she just made in Downing Street. But beyond that, we're going to look at two huge issues, the climate crisis and the war in Sudan. But also, I think time to ask the question whether the world cares as much as it did. Nine years ago today, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change came into effect, November the 4th, 2016. And then, I would argue, the climate debate looked like it was all moving in one direction. And fast forward today, and we've got this COP summit in Brazil. And people are even asking whether it should happen. So we'll talk about that. And then Sudan, both of us want to talk about Sudan. And again, just over 20 years ago, mass killings in Darfur. And it led to marches around the world.
4:03 Alastair Campbell? George Bush, as American president, saying it was a priority for his government.
4:06 Rory Stewart? And another George.
4:07 Alastair Campbell? George Clooney, leading protest. What's going on there now is, I would argue, a lot worse. And yet it seems barely to be on the political and media radar. So we'll come to that, but let's briefly talk about Rachel Reeves and the upcoming budget.
4:23 Rory Stewart? Yeah, well, let me start with a question on that. So it it seems to me that what she's done is she signaled before the budget that she's thinking of putting up taxes, but she isn't answering the big question for someone like me, which is, is she going to put up VAT, National Insurance Corporation Tax, Income Tax, the kind of big taxes which they ruled out in their manifesto and which for I think someone like me or Dan Needle or even kind of Paul Johnson would say, if you were sensible about the economy and you weren't tied into a manifesto, those are the taxes you should put up. They're the broadest based taxes. They're the ones that generate 70% of the revenue of the government. They're probably the fairest, most stable way of raising revenue without scaring investors. But she's not actually answering that sentimental question. So what's the point of making the speech?
5:08 Alastair Campbell? I guess you would call pitch rolling.
5:10 Rory Stewart? And what is pitch rolling when you're not really telling us what the pitch is?
5:13 Alastair Campbell? Well, because pitch rolling is, I think it goes from cricket. So you've got, you've got the ashes coming up, Rory.
5:19 Rory Stewart? Right.
5:19 Alastair Campbell? And the test matches will be played on different pitches around Australia.
5:23 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
5:23 Alastair Campbell? And they roll the pitch.
5:25 Rory Stewart? And Priti Patel, who was my boss, kept talking about this all the time. Every meeting she'd say, we've got to roll the pitch. And literally neither I nor any of the civil servants ever had any idea what she was talking about.
5:33 Alastair Campbell? What she meant was to prepare the public for what's coming.
5:35 Rory Stewart? Okay.
5:35 Alastair Campbell? Or to prepare the political landscape. But what I think is going on is that, so they've come in on manifesto promises that we've talked about before, the tax ones, single market, customs union, boxing themselves in slightly.
5:47 Rory Stewart? And and sorry, just just to remind people, that's ruling out the single market, ruling out the customs union, ruling out the tax crisis.
5:54 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
5:54 Rory Stewart? Which I thought was a bit of a mistake. You thought might have been necessary to get to win the election. That was.
6:00 Alastair Campbell? I don't know. I think they could have done. But anyway, they did.
6:02 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
6:02 Alastair Campbell? So then, in they come for the first budget, they've, they've rolled the pitch there by talking about the black hole, mess left by the Tories worse than we expected. They've raised taxes to fill it and they've been very, very clear, that's it, not coming back for more. What I think today, this morning's event was about was saying, I'm afraid we may have to come back for more. She talked about productivity being worse than they expected it to be. And she also talked about her absolute determination to get on top of debt. One in 10 pounds of public money is going on servicing huge levels of debt. Proud that they're bringing waitlist down, but they have to keep going and so on and so on and so forth. So she was essentially giving the framing for the budget. I didn't watch the whole of the press conference, but every question that I saw was about, hold
6:46 Alastair Campbell? on a minute. So you're, you can no longer say you're absolutely committed to keeping those taxes down. Therefore, you are preparing to break a manifesto commitment. And she just used it really to repeat the framing message. So I suspect the papers in the morning and the media today will be full of, she is preparing to break one of, if not more, the manifesto commitments.
7:07 Rory Stewart? Two quick questions. Number one, do you think they've already made their mind up? Or one of the things you do when you roll the pictures, you're actually floating it and you're spending the next week working out whether you're going to break your manifesto commitment, depending on the press reaction?
7:19 Alastair Campbell? Well, there is definitely a debate going on, but I suspect the debate has been settled. Interesting, when we talked about this last week, if you remember last week, we talked mainly about domestic stuff, which is why today we're going to talk mainly international. But last week, I got a message from Harriet Harman, who had also been talking about this. And she said she was really shocked by how relaxed you and I seemed to be about saying they're going to break one of their manifesto promises. I was simply saying what I think they're going to do. Where I think she's got a point is that if you think about the big thing in politics right now, trust. We don't trust our politicians. They are, if they do put up one of the big three taxes that they said they wouldn't, they are then going to have that right up to general election. So they really are going to have to win a big argument about why they had to do it, if that's happening.
8:01 Rory Stewart? Well, we don't have Harriet in the studio, but if I was going to disagree agreeably with Harriet, I would say that they're screwed at the moment anyway. Keir Starmer's net popularity ratings, minus fifty-two, almost couldn't be worse. His only hope of actually winning the next election is to get the economy growing. And if you have to make this very difficult choice between being criticised at the next election for breaking your manifesto promise, but with a growing economy. Or keeping a manifesto promise, but going into the next election with more and more wealthy people having left the country, investment down, economy not performing, but you're saying, well, I kept my manifesto promise, but I kept it by going increasingly overtaxing the top
8:42 Rory Stewart? one, top 0.1%, and not putting in broad-based taxes, so raising a few billion by putting more and more pressure on the wealthiest people and driving them out of the country. I think that would be the bad move. I think the working backwards, the big picture question for him is can he demonstrate by the next election, above all, that cost of living's coming down, but also ideally productivity's going up, growth's coming up, and people will forgive a broken manifesto commitment if the government's performing well, and they won't be at all impressed by poor performance and them saying, but we kept our manifesto.
9:12 Alastair Campbell? Okay, well, listen, we're going to come, the budget's on November the 26th, and, you know, it will become, without doubt, one of the seminal events of this parliament.
9:19 Rory Stewart? And I think one of the interesting questions that we'll get to now, because we're about to get on to energy and climate, is the way in which very rigid promises and targets become something which work maybe in an election and then become very problematic for you afterwards. So I was heartbroken that they decided to rule out customs union, for example, going into the election, European Union Customs Union. I thought it was very, very sad that they ruled out those tax rises, when it seemed to me pretty clear that they were much too over-optimistic on growth and that they weren't going to be able to cut the welfare bill in the way that they wanted, because the Labour Party wouldn't let them do that, and they should have had the political sense to see that, they should have known their party well enough to see that. And now we're getting on to the story of Ed Miliband,
10:03 Rory Stewart? where again, doubling down on net zero by 2030 targets on getting rid of petrol and diesel vehicles, which in the current polling, I think only 18% of the public actually even believe these targets are going to be met. Out of the professional community, I think it's even smaller numbers.
10:18 Alastair Campbell? Well, I've been looking at loads of polling on this, and, but first of all, you know, I still think there is a substantial proportion of the population that understands climate change is a real threat, the climate crisis is real, the politicisation and the weaponisation of it by the right, Farage, Trump, et cetera. It's got some traction within the political debate, but I still think the public are broadly behind all this stuff. Let me just tell you, though, I read last week, this thing called, it's called the Lancet Countdown. Tracking progress on health and climate change. And this was established at the same time as the Paris Agreement, sort of keep track on the health implications of climate change. And it's pretty terrifying. It's pretty terrifying. Heat related deaths are
11:01 Alastair Campbell? up twenty three percent since the nineties, four hundred and forty six thousand a year between twenty twelve and twenty one. Two point five million deaths every year attributable to the air pollution that comes from continued burning of fossil fuels. Air pollution from wildfire smoke linked to one hundred and fifty four thousand deaths. These are all new records within this, within this sphere. Productivity, we talked about in relation to this. Heat exposure, I don't know how they work these things out, but this is a serious piece of Lancet work, right? Six hundred and thirty nine billion potential hours of lost labour productivity. There's a really interesting section on sleep, how much sleep we are losing because of going through an extraordinary number of hot weather days where it becomes really, really difficult to sleep. And meanwhile, then they go through
11:45 Alastair Campbell? the whole thing of food and diet and, and all that stuff. The one that really leapt out me worryingly, fifteen out of eighty seven countries, which are responsible for ninety three percent of global CO two emissions, spent more on net fossil fuel subsidies than their national health budgets. So it's not just that we're, the politics are going in a really odd place, but also that the reality of whether we are weaning ourselves off fossil fuel, that stat suggests we're not going nearly as fast as we should.
12:15 Rory Stewart? Yeah. So I may, maybe, maybe I think that's the really big important point to learn before we get on to what the UK is doing about it, which is that we're failing. Despite all the razzmatazz about cops, and as you say, there's a cop about to happen, which barely anyone's paying any attention to. This is an issue, obviously, you and I care passionately about. And I'd encourage listeners to get into what we're doing on leading on this. We did a great interview, you remember, with Cristiano Figueres, the great Costa Rican who set up the COP process. We did that great interview with probably, I think, Britain's smartest energy economist, Dieter Helm, done an interview also with Emma Pinchback from the Climate Change Committee.
12:55 Alastair Campbell? And we had that two party with Edmund Rand. So yeah, no, I think we've got to keep talking about this because it is slightly going down the agenda.
13:01 Rory Stewart? Fundamentally, the world was getting about eighty percent of its energy from fossil fuels twenty years ago, and it's getting about eighty percent of its energy from fossil fuels today. Now, that sounds weird to people because we all know that there's been a massive explosion renewables, but the fact is just as the massive explosion renewables happens, massive explosion in fossil fuels.
13:19 Alastair Campbell? Because the demand is greater.
13:20 Rory Stewart? Yeah, exactly.
13:21 Alastair Campbell? Because data centers are driving it even further.
13:23 Rory Stewart? Absolutely. And and the big driver unfortunately is GDP growth. As people become wealthier, they consume more and more energy. Second thing is we're going to miss this one point five degree target by country mile. We're well on course to miss the two degree global warming target by country mile.
13:40 Alastair Campbell? With catastrophic consequences.
13:41 Rory Stewart? With catastrophic consequences, it's likely to be two and a half, three percent. So there are two things have to happen at the same time. One of them is reducing carbon emissions. To try to make sure it's held at two, two and a half percent, not three, three and a half percent. But the second thing is a massive amount of energy now has to go into adaptation. Because we've lost the one and a half percent, so we just have to assume, and and I was talking to Claire Perry, who was the Conservative Energy Secretary. And she, I thought, made an interesting point, which is that water is the cutting edge of the climate crisis, both lack of water and too much water, too much water flooding. Lack of water, obviously drought.
14:18 Alastair Campbell? And also, these data centers use masses of water.
14:20 Rory Stewart? Absolutely, and massive amounts of electricity. And then that's another paradox you just raised with data centers, which is. One of the problems that Ed Meliband faces, and in fact, all countries face around the world, is that in order to go cleaner. We are pushing for more and more electrification. So for example, drive an electric vehicle instead of driving a fossil fuel vehicle. But also more and more electricity for data centers. And that means therefore that your renewable net zero electricity is not a static thing. Your electricity demand is soaring through the roof. And therefore you need to generate more and more renewable energy just to keep up with that electricity demand, which is one of the problems that that people are facing all over the world.
14:58 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, just on this question about whether we care, do you think we do care less than we did?
15:02 Rory Stewart? I think that you can see two different types of polling. You can see global polling. Often put out by environmental NGOs saying eighty five, ninety percent of the world population still think it's a big problem. And then you can see YouGov polling drilling into a specific country like Britain, which will show that the number of people who think that we're overreacting to climate change has doubled in the last 10 years, gone from about 15%, 25%, 30%. And the real killer is that the polling shows that only something like 16% of people would be prepared to pay higher bills to pay for the switch.
15:41 Alastair Campbell? It wasn't anything like that in the poorer countries that are going to be more affected by climate change, they're willing to pay more than they are in the wealthier countries, which to some, to a large extent have caused it. Just one thing on the polling though, so for example, 71% of reform leaning voters think that the big polluters like oil and gas firms should be taxed more to fund climate action. And 67% of reform supporters say they're worried about increasing damages caused by climate change. So I still think it's that this is an argument there to be won.
16:12 Rory Stewart? Well, let me get to the on that because I think that's right, but I think we've got to think about how you win it. So I think immigration is an argument where it has almost been lost. It's very, very difficult now in the British political context to have an argument about higher migration. I think there's 70% probably the public now are in favour of more control, lower migration. Climate, I think there's much more movement. I mean, those figures you've shown show that a really good politician, good leader could shift that.
16:42 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
16:42 Rory Stewart? But I think the argument probably is changing from an idealistic argument about saving the world, because I think voters are aware that Britain is only 1% of global emissions, towards cost of energy, jobs, the economy and energy sovereignty and security.
16:58 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, the other report that came out from one of the London UCL, University College London, was a really interesting report, essentially saying that investment in wind energy, for example. Has produced a net financial benefit of over a hundred billion pounds for consumers over the last fifteen years.
17:17 Rory Stewart? Part of this is the problem, you know, you and I are studying this stuff all the time, but what we are facing, I would say certainly for me and probably for you, is completely conflicting reports.
17:29 Alastair Campbell? But a lot of it's misinformation, this is the point about.
17:31 Rory Stewart? Some of it's misinformation, some of it is the way that you count these things.
17:33 Alastair Campbell? Sure.
17:34 Rory Stewart? So the question with UCL is, how are they calculating that hundred billion? Are they taking into account the cost of the grid? Are they taking into account the fact that because renewable energy is intermittent, you need to continue to have gas power stations behind it? Why is it, if that were true, why is the latest auction on wind paying three times the current electricity costs in the auction? Why are our bills going up if it's actually true that the stuff is cheaper? And normally the answer would be, people at UCL are not looking at the total cost of renewables, they're not looking, for example, at the fact that renewables are generated, let's say, in northern Scotland, the demand is in southern England. And for that to work, you need to build an entire grid infrastructure to try to get
18:19 Rory Stewart? that electricity down, and they often don't count that. What they're often counting is per hour, how much does your wind turbine cost to generate compared to a gas station, not what's the total cost of the system.
18:29 Alastair Campbell? Well, I'm afraid in relation to the grid, I think we're back to our old friend austerity and the under investment in the grid. The grid is virtually falling to bits, but I suspect UCL will come back and say that they have calculated all that. But the reason why we're so exposed is because of the price of gas, which has gone up. Ukraine has been, the war in Ukraine has been a huge factor in our energy cost. So another guy that I really respect on this, a guy called Nick Stern, who you'll remember was.
18:55 Rory Stewart? I love Nick Stern.
18:56 Alastair Campbell? Well, he's great, and he's written yet another book on the climate.
18:59 Rory Stewart? And we're very happy to interview Nick Stern, if you'd like to do that.
19:01 Alastair Campbell? Well, we can't keep, we've got such a backlog of interviews, let's have these interviewee discussions between ourselves rather than on air.
19:09 Rory Stewart? Not on air.
19:10 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I think we keep throwing them out.
19:11 Rory Stewart? But we would say to Nick Stern, we both like him and we admire him.
19:14 Alastair Campbell? And I think at this stage, we'll plug his book, which is about the economics and opportunity of climate action. Now, he led. When we were in power, he led the Treasury Review on Climate and Economics.
19:25 Rory Stewart? And then he chaired the Climate Change Committee. We interviewed his successor, didn't we?
19:29 Alastair Campbell? Correct, correct. And what he now says is that when he did this work almost two decades ago now, he says he underestimated the risks of climate change and was way too pessimistic about the potential benefit of clear energy alternatives. And he's saying that what this loss of the political consensus, Trump Drill Baby Drill, Richard Tyson, Nigel Farage, Net Stupid Zero, et cetera, et cetera. And the Tories now playing the same game, that the loss of the political consensus is undermining business confidence. And those businesses that are investing in renewables are getting a really good return on their investment. And it's interesting that some of the business events I've done recently,
20:13 Alastair Campbell? and this takes me back to when Trump won his first term. I think I've told you before, I was just coincidentally was at this same event with Al Gore, one of the big climate campaigners. And I said, how are you going to deal with Trump in the White House? And he said, we're going to have to work around him. We're seeing, I think, a version of that now because the business investment, there's an argument to be made that the business case for renewables is very, very, very strong. And I think the reason why it's important we don't get into this habit of saying, well, the UK is only 1%, what can the UK do on its own? Is that one of the things Ed Miliband, I think, is trying to do is stake out a sense of global leadership. That's why I think this COP is important. And because Trump takes out so much oxygen from the political debate. I heard a thing on the BBC, you know, does it really matter if Trump's not there?
20:57 Alastair Campbell? Well, yes, it does matter if Trump's. It's better if Trump were there. It's better if Trump hadn't vetoed the thing we talked about a couple of weeks ago, the shipping changes to the shipping fuel regime. But it's still important that countries like ours, I think, make the case consistently for why we have to go down this track or face consequences that are just off the scale. Look at what happened in Jamaica last week. Uninsurable. They're talking about somewhere between eight and 20 billion pounds worth of damage.
21:25 Rory Stewart? Absolutely.
21:25 Alastair Campbell? And that is climate crisis.
21:26 Rory Stewart? Equally, though, the reason why businesses are losing confidence, and our friend Nick Stern is right, is nobody believes that Ed Miliband is going to hold to these targets. Nobody believes it. I go to all these energy conferences and they basically think that Number 10 is already signalling that they're uncomfortable with what Ed Miliband is doing. He set targets which are too rigid. He hasn't got the market signals right. The citing isn't being properly priced. In other words, the cost of generating in the north as opposed to the south. So businesses are sensing that number 10 thinks that Ed Miliband is too rigid. And actually, number 10 has been telling a lot of these businesses that they wanted to reshuffle him.
22:02 Alastair Campbell? Have they really, have they been telling the businesses? Come on, I'm going to challenge you. Okay. Number 10 has been telling businesses. What you mean is the businesses have been reading the papers.
22:11 Rory Stewart? Okay, businesses have been reading the papers, correct. Okay. And I think, no, but I, I think what businesses expect, and we'll see whether they're right or wrong, is that come the next election, either Ed Miliband will have been gone, or he will continue what seems to be the case of him rapidly rowing back from many, many of the commitments they made before the election, and in particular around timelines on electric vehicles, net zero, et cetera.
22:34 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think politically, that's a big mistake. I think that the argument can be won. I think actually Ed Miliband is doing a better job of winning the argument than other arguments that are being fought within government. And added to which, don't forget that one of the political challenges Labour are facing is the rise of the Greens under Zach Polanski now.
22:53 Rory Stewart? Now, of course, he's not talking much about climate.
22:55 Alastair Campbell? He may not be, but there is a clue in the word green.
22:57 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
22:58 Alastair Campbell? I think if Labour were to sort of slide away from being a global leader on climate change, I think that politically would be a mistake.
23:04 Rory Stewart? Well, you, you can see, so Claire Catino, who was the Tory Energy Secretary, and is now the Shadow Energy Secretary, is beginning to set out the case, I think, which will be made by the right in the election. And their case will be, we need cheaper electricity for industry, for AI, for data centres.
23:23 Alastair Campbell? And it's going to come through solar and wind.
23:24 Rory Stewart? And the data centres are going to Texas and Spain at the moment. Because the, the, the truth is, unfortunately, the cost of electricity in Britain is higher than it is in the US or Europe.
23:33 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
23:34 Rory Stewart? And, and that isn't. Just because of gas prices, I mean, they also have to pay gas prices. It's the way that our electricity prices are tied to gas in a different way to the way that they are in the European Union and in the US. And it's also to do with our pricing, our levies, our subsidies. And also, as we decarbonize, and we're going to have to get more and more people onto electricity, we're going to have to find alternative sources, which is why Claire Catino sounds surprisingly like your friend Tony Blair.
24:01 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
24:02 Rory Stewart? Who, of course, also came out saying phasing out fossil fuels is doomed to failure. We need to focus more on AI.
24:08 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
24:09 Rory Stewart? We're getting other voices, you know, Claire Perrin now regretting she didn't do more on carbon capture.
24:14 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. No, I wasn't terribly happy with my friend Tony's contribution to it, any more than I was very happy. I wasn't quite sure what Bill Gates was saying last year, last week either.
24:22 Rory Stewart? Absolutely. Well, he's come to the same thing. So his basic view, I think, which is increasingly common amongst the tech bros, is that technology is going to be your best hope of fixing this. AI is going to be your best hope of fixing this. And that they're hoping that by going all out with their data centers, blowing a lot of electricity demand, these brilliant brains within the computer are somehow going to fix the problem.
24:43 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, well, let's see, let's see. Just briefly on Jamaica, because the other thing, we talked about the manifesto commitment. And of course, you know, I think we accept, obviously, people do not like it when governments blatantly break manifesto commitments. But don't forget, they've already broken one, which was the commitment on overseas aid. And I was really quite shocked that the UK government's initial pledge of support for emergency work in Jamaica was 2.5 million.
25:12 Rory Stewart? That's unbelievable. 2.5 million? I mean, if I've just been up in Cumbria, that is considerably less than we're going to spend on rebuilding the Alswater Community Centre.
25:21 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
25:21 Rory Stewart? I mean, for the whole of Jamaica, that's just been wiped out by funding it.
25:24 Alastair Campbell? Under a little bit of pressure, under a little bit of pressure, they added another five. But if you think that Kylian Mbappe, who is a footballer for Real Madrid and France, he has put in 20 million.
25:35 Rory Stewart? So I was quite rightly pulled up by the Foreign Office because I actually got my maths strong and underestimated the amounts of overall spend. So to get my maths right, it was about twenty billion dollars when I was the Secretary of State for international development.
25:52 Alastair Campbell? At DIFID.
25:52 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and it's gone from point seven percent to it's heading to point three. So
25:56 Alastair Campbell? Much of which is being
25:57 Rory Stewart? More than half.
25:58 Alastair Campbell? Is on Ukraine.
25:58 Rory Stewart? Exactly. And bits are also going into refugees and bits are committed to the World Bank. It still leaves a few billion, but the reality on the ground is exactly what you've seen. When I was running GiveDirectly, which was this direct cash transfer NGO, I remember turning up in African countries and finding that our budget as an NGO was now three times the budget of the British government. So British ambassadors in some of the poorest countries in the world had bilateral budgets at that stage of five, six million pounds when we alone as an NGO was spending twenty five, thirty. And you've just made that point with Jamaica. And if you think, you know, when I was doing the job, the standard thing that you got from civil servants for almost any climate crisis or emergency response any worlds was usually a hundred million.
26:43 Rory Stewart? It's usually a hundred million for Yemen, a hundred million for Sudan, a hundred million South Sudan, a hundred million Somalia, a hundred million for Syria, going up in case like Pakistan, four hundred million.
26:52 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
26:53 Rory Stewart? So if you look at two point five, it's
26:55 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
26:55 Rory Stewart? It's not a lot.
26:56 Alastair Campbell? But the other thing, this, this, this, I think, goes back to the point about, and maybe this is where we should talk a little bit about the the way the media landscape has changed because this is what goes to the heart of the thing about whether we care more or less. I, I think, I think the debate has moved, I'm afraid. And I think a lot of them, because I, I think if that had been back in the days when you were in power.
27:15 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
27:17 Alastair Campbell? Two point five million.
27:18 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
27:19 Alastair Campbell? To Jamaica, which has just seen this catastrophic.
27:22 Rory Stewart? And which has this huge historical relationship with Britain in every single way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We couldn't be more closely connected to Jamaica.
27:28 Alastair Campbell? I think there would have been an absolute outcry.
27:30 Rory Stewart? Yeah, from, from both sides, from, from the progressive left saying, here are people suffering, and from the Tory right saying Commonwealth historical times.
27:38 Alastair Campbell? But it hasn't been. And I think one of the reasons there hasn't been is because this argument, you know, why are we helping people abroad? We've got enough of our problems at home. And playing into this whole thing about immigration and, and so forth. And I, I thought this week, you know, You you you know, saw the same thing. Elon Musk, I mean, he did this thing yesterday, it was circulated very widely on social media. Talking about how Britain, in Britain now, in Ireland, Scotland and England. There are villages of five hundred people. Who are sitting there like hobbits, living a nice, peaceful, quiet life. And men are arriving in their thousands to rape their women and children. It was utterly nuts and it was getting millions of views on social media.
28:22 Alastair Campbell? Alongside the, we had this terrible stabbing on a train at the weekend. And literally within minutes, you had politi-, including quite serious, significant politicians. Out essentially spotting something that they felt they could exploit. You know, we need to know the identity of this man with a knife immediately. Well, of course we do, and that's the police's job to go and try and find them. And they did actually an amazing job, you know, in dealing with this crisis as it, with this disaster as it unfolded. But I think this is where I think social media has changed a lot of these debates. Musk has driven it, and we now have a body of politicians, right and left. Who basically think that it's there as something to exploit, rather than something to challenge for the damage it's doing to our debate.
29:07 Rory Stewart? To remember, back in twenty fifteen sixteen, our our least favourite or second least favourite politician in the world, Boris Johnson. When Donald Trump said there were no-go areas in London. Boris Johnson said Donald Trump is out of his mind and is displaying stupefying ignorance.
29:22 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
29:23 Rory Stewart? Fast forward eleven years, where are the mainstream politicians calling out Musk?
29:27 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I I think, and I I had an argument with Peter Carl about this some time back when he was doing the tech job. And so, look, you know, like it or not, this guy's an important political figure because he was so close to Trump. He's an important economic figure because of his wealth and all that stuff. But I think this guy's doing real damage, using his platform to do real damage to the country that we live in and doing it deliberately.
29:49 Rory Stewart? And those are absolutely bugger all, right?
29:51 Alastair Campbell? Of course, they're bugger all.
29:52 Rory Stewart? So what preceded this? I mean, he's completely obsessed with Lord of the Rings, like a lot of these tech bros are.
29:57 Alastair Campbell? Palantir.
29:57 Rory Stewart? Yeah, Palantir, exactly, exactly. Arundel, exactly, all this stuff is Lord of the Rings. And he said that Tommy Robinson. Is like the Rangers of Rohan, the men of Gondor, brought out to protect the hobbits against the bad men. Now, the truth is, if anything, Tommy Robinson's one of the orcs, and he, dear old Elon Musk, is the evil wizard Saruman who's releasing them.
30:20 Alastair Campbell? Well, you're talking about a book I haven't read as closely as you have, but I can see the young people in our production team nodding, nodding knowledgeably. I was in Dublin when the riots were going on. So they've got asylum hotels, same as we have. And the dinner I was speaking at, I was sitting opposite the police, the chief of police, the guard of commissioner, a guy called Justin Kelly, very nice guy. And he'd been through the mill with this thing. And but what he was explaining to me was that this terrible, terrible, terrible incident happened where a 10 year old girl, who I think is in care, was out in the middle of the night, and she was raped by somebody who was in one of these hotels.
30:57 Rory Stewart? And this is in Ireland?
30:58 Alastair Campbell? This is in Dublin.
30:58 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
30:59 Alastair Campbell? And the minute the story got out, Stephen Yaxley Lennon, Tommy Robinson, so called, was in Israel.
31:06 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
31:07 Alastair Campbell? Where he'd been parading in his Maccabi Tel Aviv shirt.
31:10 Rory Stewart? Yeah. And was invited as a guest by one of the
31:12 Alastair Campbell? By one of his Israeli ministers, yeah. And he was tweeting about this hotel in Dublin. He said that a Canadian similar figure was not only tweeting about it, he was filming himself getting on a plane in Canada to come over to join the Irish patriots outside this hotel. And he said, within a matter of hours, they had two and a half thousand people outside this hotel. And they had people charging them with carts, horse and cart. They had people with pitchforks. They had a laser that was was trying to disrupt the activity of the helicopter that was that was above. Now, actually, they did an amazing job to bring it under control as quickly as
31:54 Alastair Campbell? they did. But what it shows is this Musk is part of the internationalisation. Of the production of as much mayhem as they can in our country and in Ireland.
32:04 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and of course, what he's, what he's doing on X is he's saying, I predict.
32:09 Alastair Campbell? Civil war.
32:10 Rory Stewart? Civil war. Now, but of course, my sense is he wants civil war. He's trying to create civil war. He's not going to get it. But he's fantasizing about it. He wants it. He wants to create it. It's not really a prediction. Most of his predictions go wrong. He predicted the AFD were going to win the German elections. He was wrong. None of his supporters remember this, right? But they really want to believe that civil war is coming. Um, because that feeds the sort of desire for violence.
32:32 Alastair Campbell? But what is this, what is this thing about? So like you, you know, the other big thing that's happening today, these elections in the US and including Mamdani in, in New York. And one of the big attack lines they've been running against Mamdani is that he's going to be like Sadiq Khan in London. Because they've, they've seeded this idea that London is like this hellhole where.
32:53 Rory Stewart? What, what, what's he talking about?
32:53 Alastair Campbell? You can't walk down the streets.
32:55 Rory Stewart? What if I was pointing out with Boris Johnson, they've been saying for 11 years.
32:57 Alastair Campbell? The American ambassador was in Ireland was at this thing and I, and I had a chat with him, a guy called Ed Walsh, and I said to him afterwards, he says, look, you know, can you please keep this guy Musk out of our politics? He knows absolutely F all about what goes on there. He misrepresents it the whole time. And I, I was telling him some of the stuff that Musk had been saying and tweeting. And he didn't know about it. And he said, oh, that sounds pretty bad. Yeah, it's really bad.
33:20 Alastair Campbell? Just, just on this, I mean, there was a really, I, I was actually trying to send Fraser Nelson, ex of The Spectator, the predecessor to Michael Gove, current leading episode. Um. Top of the charts.
33:30 Rory Stewart? Which, which it was an extraordinary episode.
33:33 Alastair Campbell? Anyway, I was trying to send Fraser Nelson a direct message to congratulate him on a piece he'd written. But I was very surprised to discover he's blocked me on social media. I must have said something to upset him sometime in the past. But he pointed out, he said, social media, he was talking about the train stabbings. And he was saying that literally within minutes, these theories were, were going around and politicians were piling in and, you know, speaking to their, their sort of, their, their existing biases and prejudices. And he said, for those interested, here are the facts about recent trends in violent crime. First of all, yes, the immigrant population has doubled over the last two decades, but crime, as measured by the gold standard crime survey for England and Wales, has halved.
34:15 Alastair Campbell? This crime has halved in spite of all these children born to immigrants. Now it's about a third of all births or half in London. And London, the most immigrant-heavy, racially diverse city in the UK, releases monthly figures for murders, perhaps the hardest of all crime metrics. They are at a multi-year, possibly even multi-century low. So there are facts.
34:35 Rory Stewart? And the response from Nigel Farage, when challenged with exactly this, is look at your phone. So the whole of politics has become virtual. Whole of politics become TikTok. These kind of facts are entirely irrelevant. So when I challenged Musk's thing on Twitter, I got two and a half thousand replies. And everything was, you're out of touch, Rory. Why don't you visit Britain? Why don't you come to my thing? It's mayhem, it's civil war already, it's madness already. And you turn around and you say, look at the figures. You know, Fraser Nelson also has looked at hospital admissions, which is pretty black and white. How many people are admitted to hospital for stab wounds? Down over the last five years. But that is not what people believe on social media.
35:16 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but if we go with what people feel and what people believe, that is what feeds populism. And that's why there has to be a far better job done. I mean, you'll wait a long time if you get the media to sort of do the job properly. But I think politicians have got to do a lot better job than they are currently doing at rebutting the lies and the nonsense. And you've got to be careful because you don't want to spend your whole time doing this stuff. But I think somebody with as bigger following as Musk, and it wasn't just about Britain. The stuff he was, he had three hours of Joe Rogan, and Joe Rogan pathetic and no rebuttal, no sort of challenging or whatever. But I just think this stuff is way, way, way more dangerous than we think. And they create a narrative which is very, very hard to push back on. And if you let it go, if you let it go, it becomes a fact.
35:57 Rory Stewart? And that's become the world, hasn't it? And that's really what's driving the world, yeah.
36:00 Alastair Campbell? Anyway, shall we, shall we take a break?
36:03 Rory Stewart? Let's take a break and come back. And after the break, let's get into Sudan, which is probably the most interesting international SUV in the world at the moment.
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38:02 Alastair Campbell? Welcome back to The Recipology with me, Alastair Campbell.
38:03 Rory Stewart? And with me Rory Stewart. Very much looking forward to seeing people in our forthcoming tour. To remind people, that's Bournemouth, Glasgow, Manchester, London. Come to the live tours. Love to see you. I think we're 96% sold out, but there is few tickets left and we'd love to see you.
38:18 Alastair Campbell? It starts this weekend Rory.
38:20 Rory Stewart? It does, I hope. You're feeling fit and well.
38:21 Alastair Campbell? Well, I'm not really focused yet. I will focus. I'll be there. I'll be there. I'll be there. But we've got West Ham Burnley on Saturday and Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell at Bournemouth on Sunday. And then also, if you're in, we get a lot of people in Belfast and in Dublin saying, why did you never come here? I go there all the time, but not necessarily with the Rest is Politics. But I'll be going there March the 5th and 6th with not Rory Stewart, but Anthony Scaramucci. So just the Mooch. So just go to therestispolitics.com to get the few remaining tickets for the current tour and also to sign up for Belfast and Dublin. Tickets go on sale on Friday, November 7.
38:56 Rory Stewart? And of course, if you'd like to sign up for early access to this amazing Alistair Mooch double show, please join as a member, which also helps us support the podcast and gives you access to some of our mini series and much more.
39:09 Alastair Campbell? Okay, well, let's talk about Sudan. 150,000 killed so far, thousands currently trapped in El Fasher. That's the reason we're talking about this now is because the extraordinary battle that has been in El Fasher. Siege followed by the one side taking over this crucial strategic city. 2 million at risk of or already in famine, 30 million in need of aid, 40 million displaced, 90% of children not in school. And our friend David Miliband and his IRC rescue organisation, they're saying this is pretty much the worst thing that's happening anywhere in the world right now.
39:43 Rory Stewart? I think so many interesting things to be said. One is that 150,000, to put it in context, is about 50% more than the number of people we estimate to have been killed in Gaza. Although of course it's worth bearing in mind, there are some very, very big differences when people try to draw equivalence. There's one of them is that as a percentage of the population, that's far lower than Gaza. The population of Sudan is about 50 million, population of Gaza is about 2-3 million. So as a percentage of the population, far more were killed in Gaza than Sudan, but it's still a horrifying number of people, 150,000. Another difference, of course, is that Israel is a Western ally supplied by the West. It's a liberal democratic state, as Sudan is a civil war.
40:23 Rory Stewart? Nevertheless, it is absolutely true, as many people have said, that most of the focus has been on Israel, Gaza. And on Ukraine and not on Sudan. And although we've done quite a lot of episodes on Sudan, I think we can see we haven't done anything like as many. And my goodness, it's both horrifying and interesting. Quick reminder explainer. Essentially, there are two different military groups operating. There is a group called the RSF, led by this man called Hermeti, who was essentially a camel, a rustler, camel trader from the Chad border. Arab nomad and his group used to be called the Janjaweed Devils on Horses. And people remember them because
41:04 Rory Stewart? they were the big perpetrators of the genocides in Darfur going back 20 years ago. His uncle was a famous criminal. He himself has been indicted by the International Criminal Court 20 years ago. And on the other side, you have the Sudan Armed Forces. The SAF under Burhan, who is the general commanding them.
41:21 Alastair Campbell? And back then, they were allies on the same side, fighting the same war.
41:25 Rory Stewart? And this is part of the whole complication because effectively when the dictator of Sudan was trying to attack the people in Darfur, he used the Janjaweed militia, he used Hermeti to do that. And then when that war began to come to an uneasy, fragile peace, he tried to merge the Janjaweed militia, the RSF, with the army. And then those two forces then brought down the dictator. 2019 and then 2021 did a coup d'etat against the new inverted commas democratic government. And then in 2023 started fighting each other, which has led to this horror. And Al Fashir is basically the last major
42:04 Rory Stewart? fortress of the Sudan Armed Forces west of the Nile, which has just been taken. And people who are able to get out of the city now fleeing to a refugee camp. 600,000 people in that refugee camp.
42:15 Alastair Campbell? To Weela.
42:16 Rory Stewart? And we're not going to play, but the atrocity videos are, I mean, I've been sent many of them and they are just so shocking. What's happening on the ground.
42:25 Alastair Campbell? Well, there's this, there's this guy who's become a bit of a sort of social media Abu Lulu, who is literally posting videos of himself. Killing people who are begging to stay alive and defenceless, not armed. So I think we're talking quite a lot of war crime being committed. But of course, the other thing that's that's that's happened is is the extent to which other countries are engaged and involved. So the SAF, Sudanese Armed Forces, are backed by Egypt, backed by Turkey, backed by the Saudis. And then the RSF, although the UAE deny it, are very heavily backed by
43:05 Alastair Campbell? the UAE. And there's been a little bit of a kind of diplomatic media flurry in Britain this week, because of course, there's been the suggestion that weapons that we have sold to the UAE have found their way into this battle in Sudan. So if you go back to twenty odd years ago, when there were these global protests and concerts and all the sort of usual panoply of support for a place in real trouble, the pictures were of these guys kind of riding around on horseback and camels. They've now got the the modern war, they've got drones, they've got howitzers, they've got really good transport equipment and so forth. And I think the what they're looking for is for the, I guess, for the Americans
43:47 Alastair Campbell? and others to step in and go beyond the pretty pathetic statements that have been that have been forthcoming the last few days.
43:54 Rory Stewart? UAE, great reporting from Declan Walsh, who's a veteran journalist in the region, and great reporting by the New York Times in general. We talked about the podcast, how they managed to use satellite imagery to expose that UAE had effectively a fake hospital on the Chad Sudan border, which they were using to push in supplies. Lots of weapons, many of them seem to be American weapons supplied to the UAE or Chinese weapons supplied to the UAE, have been found on the ground. And there's no doubt at all that the RSF, Hametti's group, this ex-January group, just couldn't operate without the money and supplies coming directly from the United Arab Emirates. So one of the questions is, why is the UAE
44:37 Rory Stewart? doing this? You know, and why indeed, you've just mentioned Turkey, Saudi, Egypt and others, why do they care? Well, there are basically three things that people seem to be caring about. One of them is resources, so gold, oil, and increasingly, food. So many of these Gulf monarchies are trying to think about. Food for the future and and that's particularly true because we're in a world now where people don't trust US security guarantees in the same way. They're trying to hedge. They're trying to get other resources. UAE is now this year is the biggest growing investor in Africa ahead of China. The second thing is ports. So people really got their eyes on Port Sudan and they're really thinking about the Horn of Africa and that's true in place all the way down Somalia, Djibouti,
45:23 Rory Stewart? Kenya, many of these countries competing to try to control ports all the way down to Yemen.
45:27 Alastair Campbell? Just say that again. They've got more, what was the thing with UAE and China?
45:30 Rory Stewart? Yeah, more investment coming in from the UAE and more growth in investment than any country in the world ahead of China this year into Africa. So the story over the last 10 years has basically been that China, France, Britain, which when I was the African minister in 2016, we were ahead of China. We've been dwarfed by China over the last 10 years, but now the UAE has become the biggest investor.
45:49 Alastair Campbell? Because back in, back in George Bush's time, when I remember George Bush saying this is a priority, we've got to sort this is a real problem. One of the issues was that China was investing very, very heavily in Sudanese oil. But that's fascinating. UAE all over all of it.
46:01 Rory Stewart? UAE is all over all of it. They also seem to have, they've got an incredibly close relationship with Abi Ahmed in Ethiopia, which we should also watch when we talk about global conflict because Ethiopia is now pushing to take Eritrea. And we need to talk to you about that too because you know about Eritrea. You went on an amazing trip to Eritrea where there's a famous picture of you with the current leader of Eritrea.
46:20 Alastair Campbell? Well, this was, this was a long, long, long time ago when he was a really good guy. He was a freedom fighter.
46:27 Rory Stewart? That's right. He was a great hero of the left. Yeah.
46:30 Alastair Campbell? It was extraordinary and he's since become one of the worst dictators on the planet.
46:33 Rory Stewart? Anyway, we, we should talk about it another day because it's, it's another big global conflict brewing as the world falls apart. They're also very close to Debbie and Chad, very close to Hiftar in Libya. They've been playing in South Sudan. They've been playing in Yemen. So what's UAE up to? Resources, ports. The third thing is that they are emphasizing that Sudan armed forces are relying on Islamist militia groups. And one of the ways in which they retook Khartoum is with these Islamists. And Mohammed bin Zayed, the leader of UAE, has a very, very strong anti Islamist view. He's very against Muslim Brotherhood all over the world. That's been some of the splits traditionally with Syria, some of the splits with Qatar. And I think also a really strong sense of
47:14 Rory Stewart? loyalty because this was the mercenary force. It's the Sudanese, it's the Janjaweed militia, the RSF, it's Hameti, that Mohammed bin Zayed used in Yemen. He took these Sudanese militia groups and deployed them to Yemen to fight in Yemen. So along with other things such as the extraordinary amount of gold going into UAE, far more than any of these African countries are registering as exported is coming into UAE, like sort of four times more than the registered export.
47:45 Alastair Campbell? What do you say?
47:46 Rory Stewart? It's illegal smuggling and quite a lot of this will be coming from Hamidi. Although it's probably also true that gold is coming in from Sudan armed forces, who are also far from saints in this whole picture.
47:55 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, there aren't really any good guys in this story, are there?
47:58 Rory Stewart? There are not any good guys in the story and and this is where I think the question is whether Trump can pull something off. So this is about number 20 on the US list of priorities. It's a classic part. I was talking to an amazing guy called Alex DeWol, who's studied the Horn of Africa for 20 years. And Alex was saying that it feels to him a little bit like the way the East India Company, the British East India Company, used to behave in India in the 18th century. We can listen to the kind of the Empire podcast, our sister sister podcast, The Goalhanger Group on this. But basically, it's about sovereignty collapsing. Many of these states no longer have real sovereignty. They're being divided in two, like Sudan, de facto. Their resources are being pillaged and lots of external actors are using generals,
48:42 Rory Stewart? political leaders for their own devices. And the world's system, which used to be, or we thought was in the 70s, 80s and 90s, about sovereignty is collapsing into something that feels much more like the Age of Empire.
48:54 Alastair Campbell? On this one, you mentioned Trump there and of course he keeps, this interview, there was CBS this week. He produced a list of all the wars that he's sold, most of which he hasn't. But this one is where you don't really feel an American engagement. I think he does have a special envoy, but I couldn't even tell you his his name. And you said probably rightly that we won't show the some of the worst videos. But there was a very, and I think there's something we should maybe put into the newsletter or put online. And that was a guy called Nathaniel Raymond, who's the head of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab. And he did a really interesting analysis of this. And he said he's been investigating war crimes for 26 years. And this is as bad as he's seen it. And these pictures where you see from the air.
49:37 Alastair Campbell? These body shaped blood stains on the ground and what's happening, of course, these people are, so they've been, they've been trapped inside El Fasher. There's been an effective siege, no food, no medicine going in. Lots of reports of people eating animal feed to stay alive. And as people try to leave, quite a lot are being killed as they go. And so the IRC, who are based in Tuila, they've actually, although as you say, I think they've got tens of thousands that have, that have got there, they have been expecting more. And I think the worry is that quite a lot of people have just not, simply not made it because they've been, they've been picked off as they go.
50:13 Rory Stewart? Well, there's, there's been such extraordinary work done by different humanitarian organisations. So Jerome Tubian and Eddie Thomas with Met San San Frontier, who we talk about a lot, MSF, are people who have sort of 20 years of Sudan expertise. I think Jerome Tubian's parents were anthropologists working in Sudan. They speak local languages fluently. Eddie Thomas is part Armenian, part Lebanese, part Goan, part Irish. And, and these incredible characters, along with some very, very brave Sudanese, incredibly brave Sudanese, are trying to keep the support together.
50:55 Rory Stewart? But it's also a story, if we want to link it to the bigger story, of the collapse of American power, because what I think we're seeing with Trump is a president who is able to exercise a lot of power and leverage over America's erstwhile allies. Developed countries like Canada, Japan, Switzerland, European Union, very vulnerable to Trump and American power, because we're so integrated in terms of our economies. But America has basically lost its influence entirely over places like Sudan. And this began probably five years ago. I was, know very, very well Molly Fee, who was the American Assistance Secretary for Africa, because she and I lived together for six months, shared a shipping container together in Iraq.
51:39 Rory Stewart? And she found herself taking over a situation where Jeff Feldman, who was the envoy of Sudan, had literally sat down with Hameti and Bohan, who had promised him that they were working together to resolve things, got on a plane. When he landed, I think he landed in Doha, he discovered they'd just thrown a coup d'etat and thrown the whole country apart. And the sense for America then in 2021 of this total betrayal, that people could lie to each other face two hours before they do a military coup, was really the moment where everyone was like, okay, what on earth has happened? And of course, what had happened is rise of China, France kicked out of Africa, but also the rise of these middle parts. Suddenly, all of Africa, particularly the Horn of Africa,
52:23 Rory Stewart? dominated particularly by, as you say, Turkey, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi, UAE, which turned out to matter much more than the United States.
52:32 Alastair Campbell? Well, there we are, biggest humanitarian crisis in the world right now.
52:36 Rory Stewart? And a possible US solution. So this is my pitch. And my pitch is this actually, Trump could do a repeat of Gaza, which is not a peace deal, but he could pull off ceasefire and humanitarian access. And the way that he'd do it is put pressure on UAE and Mohammed bin Sayed. That's the key to the whole thing. And there you've got to work out what does Mohammed bin Sayed and UAE want? Do they want access to ports? Do they want gold? But if you put that pressure on, the RSF cannot operate without international support because, as you say, they're so reliant on all these fancy drones, command and control equipment, electronic jamming. This is not a sort of Taliban-style war, if the sort you had in Afghanistan with people just wandering around with Kashi cops. And that is something you can imagine Trump playing through
53:21 Rory Stewart? the theatrics of peace might be able to do. So let's tempt him towards that for his next Nobel Prize move.
53:28 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, because one thing I have noticed, he has not talked about this one very much at all.
53:32 Rory Stewart? So you're not, you're not that confident?
53:34 Alastair Campbell? I'm not that confident. But I think you're right. The key is to actually put pressure on the UAE. But the UK could do a bit of that as well.
53:39 Rory Stewart? We've lost a lot of leverage, haven't we? I mean, we lost our relationship. I mean, that's been a really interesting one. You know, we often talk, show about how we bring foreign leaders when they're young to Sandhurst so that they develop a love of Britain. I think Mohammed bin Sayed had such a bad experience at Sandhurst that he's hated Britain ever since. And to add to that, we were very critical of their internal human rights abuses, stopped a lot of our intelligence work with them. And I think we lost a lot of leverage there. So I don't think Britain has much influence now in UAE.
54:08 Alastair Campbell? There we go. So last week I've been pretty much all domestic and a bit of international. This week was the other way around. Quite depressing, both the climate and Sudan. And I think this is a thing we should come back to another point about why we seem to be focusing so much less on crises and disasters and situations that deserve more attention than they're currently getting. Okay, Rory, back tomorrow with question time. Whether you like it or not, we're going to talk about your friends in the royal family, the former Prince Andrew. Apparently, what's your middle name, by the way?
54:40 Rory Stewart? Nugent.
54:40 Alastair Campbell? Nugent. We're going to have to call you Rory Nugent Stewart, and I have to be Alistair John Campbell, because apparently we now have to call the former Prince Andrew Andrew Mount Batten Windsor.
54:52 Rory Stewart? Right.
54:52 Alastair Campbell? What's this sort of middle naming thing?
54:54 Rory Stewart? And remember, they were originally called Battenburg. They only changed their name to Mount Batten during the First World War because they didn't like the German sound of it.
55:01 Alastair Campbell? Well, I look forward to your history lesson tomorrow, along with your explanation for the interview you did on Newsnight, which we're still getting lots of feedback on. We'll also talk about the Dutch elections, Rob Yetton, the young gay leader.
55:14 Rory Stewart? Amazing result, because interesting in terms of populism. And of course, the other huge issue, which is what Trump is up to with his sea and trade talks and nuclear testing and all that kind of big stuff around the world.
55:27 Alastair Campbell? See you then.
55:27 Rory Stewart? See you then.
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Previous The Monster He Made: Murdoch, Trump, and the Price of Power (Part 4) Next 465. Andrew’s Disgrace, Newsnight, and a Centrist Win in the Netherlands (Question Time) Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
