476. Polanski’s Problem, Westminster’s Russia Blind Spot, and Justice Without Juries? (Question Time)

Are the Greens selling an economic vision they can’t explain? Should Britain ditch juries in some trials? And, how far has Russian influence seeped into UK politics? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away free TRIP Plus membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP Plus gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit ⁠fuseenergy.com/politics⁠ ⚡ https://therestispolitics.supportingcast.fm/gifts For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to goalhanger.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith Producer: Evan Green, India Dunkley Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Senior Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:00Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:04Alastair 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.

• 1:17Rory 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 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.

• 1:41Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:47Rory Stewart?

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• 3:12Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Rest Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 3:14Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 3:16Rory Stewart?

  Very exciting series of questions today, which get us into some of the big issues, actually, in Britain and in the world. So we've got questions on Zach Polanski, the new leader of the Green Party. We've got questions on what Jeremy Corbyn is doing. So a lot of that is about the left. Some might even say the far left in Britain. That'd be controversial to some listeners. We've got a good discussion around Russian influence, in this case, focused on the right, or some people might say the far right. We've got your secret plot, which we're going to leave to the very end of Question Time. People can find out about your secret plot because it's viddy, viddy secret. We're going to talk about climate change and the way in which the horrors of what's happening

• 4:00Rory Stewart?

  in Southeast Asia in particular, expose what's happening with warming seas. We're going to talk about Ethiopia and Egypt and dams.

• 4:09Alastair Campbell?

  And Rory, I think, given it's the big news in UK today, we should talk about government plans to change, modify the use of jury trials.

• 4:18Rory Stewart?

  Stop the use of juries for certain trials. Very, very controversial. Lot of agreeable disagreement to come on that. Anyway, let's start with the first question.

• 4:27Alastair Campbell?

  Sarah, TripPlus member London, given Rory's disdain, I love that word, for anyone who does not agree with his centrist views on the economy, open bracket Gary Stevenson, Kate Rayworth and now Zach Polanski, what would he have done in the budget? There has been no acknowledgement from Rory that the one issue driving people's unhappiness at the moment is the now extreme wealth inequality squeezing the middle classes and crushing the poor. Rory is very quick to attack people who he thinks are not properly qualified, yet with no acknowledgement that successive governments, including his own party, have got us into this position. Is it time for Rory to own this mess and not be so scornful of those who are simply pointing it out?

• 5:11Rory Stewart?

  Well, listen, let's, let's, let's take a step back because not everyone will have listened to this interview, but it's a really interesting interview. So Zach Polanski, for international listeners, is the leader of what was a pretty fringe party, the Green Party, that only had one member of parliament when I was in parliament, but did one on the last election and now since Zach Polanski's come in, has risen up to nearly 20% in the polls. And Polanski's big move has been not to focus really very much on traditional issues, particularly not on issues of biodiversity and the environment. He actually has talked much less about that than Caroline Lucas, who was the leader of the Green Party when I was in parliament, did, and instead to produce radical views

• 5:56Rory Stewart?

  on the economy. And so a lot of this is coming out of an interview, which I thought was a really lovely interview. I particularly enjoyed the first half of it, where he was very thoughtful, introspective and interesting on his own personal journey as somebody who was Jewish and brought up in an orthodox Jewish school, his journey on Gaza, where he's concluded that there's a genocide in Gaza. And then in the second half, we got into his economic policies. It's been quite interesting. I mean, it just, before we get into the details of Sarah, I mean, Sarah's got five or six different things that she wants to say, and I'm very happy to lay out my vision of what we should be doing the budget. But broadly speaking, what was your sense of the kind of negative critique of the way

• 6:40Rory Stewart?

  that we engaged with him on the economy?

• 6:43Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's interesting. I mean, Zach Polanski, who's very, very good at social media, he hasn't posted anything about the interview, which makes me think that he maybe doesn't think it came out well for him. I don't know, because I thought he seemed very happy after the event.

• 6:56Rory Stewart?

  Whereas the Lib Dems have posted a great deal. They've taken clips from our interview and used them against him a lot. There's been a huge amount of coverage from the Lib Dems taking the clips of him being unable to define even remotely how much we're paying in debt and trust, his fact that he confuses the deficit and the debt. All of that is really important to other political parties going after the Greens.

• 7:20Alastair Campbell?

  Right. Well, one of our team has very kindly done a pretty detailed analysis of all the feedback that we got. And Zach Polanski's team ought to be pleased to know that positive outweighed negative by a substantial margin. Positive towards Polanski roughly 60%, negative towards Polanski 25%, mixed balance 15%. And there was quite a lot of criticism of people who felt that we were sort of ganging up on him. I was going on the King's Speech, you were going on the economy. We should let our listeners know that Rory and I actually tend not to discuss what tack we're going to take in interviews. So that was not, if it was ganging up, it was accidental. I think that, I agree with you on the overall analysis. I

• 8:03Alastair Campbell?

  think that he came across really well. I think he really could do with trying to slow down the way he speaks. I know it's very natural to him. I had quite a lot of people saying they found it actually quite hard to listen at times because he speaks so quickly. But I thought he was very good on the kind of vibe zeitgeist stuff, less good when it got into detail. Now, I think in his defence, you know, we're years from an election, he's a relatively new senior political figure, and it probably is a bit much to think that right now, in the week of the budget, he should be telling us what he would do in a sort of Green Party budget, given that there isn't going to be such a thing.

• 8:42Rory Stewart?

  But that isn't what he was asked. What he was asked was something much, much more modest. He was asked what the top rate of tax was, and he didn't know that the top rate of tax was 45%. He thought it was 40%. He was asked how much we're paying in interest, which is really important. It's £100 billion a year, right? It's double the Defence Budget. And he didn't know what that was. And he refused to actually admit he didn't know. He then thought that the debt was seventy billion pounds, right? Which the debt is actually closer to a trillion. Do you really think that if you're the leader of a party, it's not fair to expect people to know the really basic figures around the debt, the deficit and the interest in the economy?

• 9:23Alastair Campbell?

  The only thing, yeah, I agree with that. I totally agree with that. The only thing I would say is that where all of our listeners were coming from was kind of saying, they've never seen you ask those kind of general knowledge questions of genuinely experienced politicians.

• 9:38Rory Stewart?

  Go back to the, go back to the Rachel Reeves argument. We get into exactly that. She starts saying, how much is the debt? I tell her, we go back and forward on exactly that debate. It's a very normal debate to have with someone.

• 9:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 9:50Rory Stewart?

  That's exactly one of, one of the moments in the Rachel Reeves interview. And actually, I was incredibly mild with him. I mean, it's extraordinary how defensive people are of Polanski. I think despite my affection for him, that is a big, big, big problem, particularly if you're very radical. So my point is this, that he is selling a very, very out there vision of what should be done with the British economy. And if you're going to go right out there, you've got to sound very credible and solid on the basic figures. If you're going to sell people on saying, we're going to do something that basically no government has done in Britain ever. Right, we're going to have a completely different idea of how this economy is run.

• 10:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 10:32Rory Stewart?

  How we deal with bond markets, how we deal with capital flows. You better have your figures right. Because if you're asking people to trust you to do something that's never been done before, you better be able to convince people that you're actually interested in how the economy operates. Let's give another example. He says, it will always have a return. I didn't beat him up about this. I didn't even challenge him on his income tax stuff. I didn't point out to the listeners that he actually confused the debt and the deficit. I let that roll, moved on, right? But if you look at a key indicator, he says, It always makes sense to invest in heat pumps. There will always be a return on investment, investing in heat pumps. And when I say, well, how much does a heat pump cost? He says, it doesn't matter.

• 11:16Rory Stewart?

  Well, logically, that's ridiculous. The only way you can calculate a return on investment is working out how much the investment is and how much return you get. If you don't know how much it costs, how can you be asserting that there's always a return on investment? So I, I, I'm really a bit troubled that 60% of our listeners seem to think that we were being unfair, asking the most gentle, basic questions.

• 11:41Alastair Campbell?

  No, no, 60, what I said was 60% were broadly positive about the way Polanski handled the interview. That's a slightly different thing. Some people, a smaller proportion, thought that we beat him up. I don't think we beat him up at all. In fact, we did get, give you some other questions here. Martin van Vezemel, why was Polanski let off the hook compared to the tough line of questioning used with Gabriel Attal or Michael Gove? So not everybody thought the same. But, but I, I think that, and then somebody, somebody was asking, you know, why, why don't we interview Nigel Farage with the same sort of intensity? We would love to, but he keeps not coming on. And then there were other people who said we were patronizing, smug, arrogant, elitist, we ganged up.

• 12:24Rory Stewart?

  What does, what does, what does that mean? That basically means that we disagreed with him.

• 12:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, we disagreed, agreed. I thought it was quite agreeable. In fact, he said at one point, he enjoyed the sort of disagreeable, the, the agreeable disagreement. Look, I think of what it is.

• 12:36Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 12:37Alastair Campbell?

  It goes to this point, Rory, that, that I said to Rory, my son, he said, I've never really seen him given a really tough interview. And I said, well, I don't want to be that tough, but I think we do need to be tougher than most of the interviews he's done. Because at the moment, it seems to me, he's got a bit of a vibe and a zeitgeist thing going. And Rory said, no, I think there's a lot more to him than that. Um. Which there is. I think there is more to him, otherwise he wouldn't be doing quite as well in the polls as he is. But the thing I said to him afterwards, and the thing I said to one of his team that I spoke to, is that they shouldn't go away and think that was a beating up, because it will be far worse as he gets nearer to an election. What they should be doing is going away and saying, right, those answers weren't good enough, we've got to get better answers. That's what they should do.

• 13:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Now, there was another interesting thing that came out of that. So we got, we got a challenge from Chris Williamson, who's the former Labour MP for Derby.

• 13:27Alastair Campbell?

  Corbynista, big Corbyn man.

• 13:28Rory Stewart?

  So let's take this as a question, because this, this takes us into a, um, a, a much bigger question about economic management that relates to Europe, US, all international listeners. So he says, when Campbell Claret and Rory Stewart spoke to Zach Polanski, they betrayed their fundamental misunderstanding of the monetary system. So here are 10 facts for Alistair and Rory to ponder. Number one, government debt is a misnomer. It's not really debt at all. It's the value of government bond sales. Number two, the government does not use the proceeds from bond sales to pay for its spending costs. I don't go through all 10 of them, but that's, I'll do three and then I'll step back from this. The government has access to as much money as it wants because it issues the currency. The challenge for

• 14:11Rory Stewart?

  the government is not finding the money, it's identifying the real resources in the economy, such as workers, raw materials, machinery and infrastructure. Oh no, I'm sorry, I'll do four. Bond sales and taxation withdraw money from circulation in the economy. That stops inflation getting out of hand. Now, this is something called MMT, not, not MMA, which is mixed martial arts, but modern monetary theory. And it's possible that one of the things going on in the back of Zach Polanski's mind, along with the, uh, your party, which is this sort of Corbyn new left wing party, is this thing called modern monetary theory. And one of the reasons I'm interested in it is these are, um.

• 14:59Rory Stewart?

  Completely incomprehensible points, I think, for 99% of the public. I think even a lot of graduates in science and arts from the top universities in the country

• 15:12Rory Stewart?

  are going to be a bit confused about this argument, right, which Chris Williamson is trying to have with us about exactly how the central bank works and how the treasury works and how the accountancy operates and how tax works and how bond sales work. But it's a brilliant trick for the populist left to pull off. Because it sounds on the surface as though they've got these kind of brilliant technical arguments, which basically amounts to saying, you don't need to worry about the debt and the deficit, that's the implication, because the whole thing's an accounting trick anyway. And we can keep basically creating the money and the only thing we have to worry about is inflation. And by the way, we've got a clever way of dealing with inflation, which is basically,

• 15:51Rory Stewart?

  one option would be to lock in bondholders or lock in the banks and to have in government cash without paying them interest. Now, I just wanted to come to you on that because I think it's a really interesting moment in politics, which is that we often talk about populism being about big bland abstract statements. This is a different form of populism and Farage has got a version of it too. When he's got a long story about the fact that we're paying too much interest to the banks from the national reserves, where the populists make highly technical and actually technically correct arguments about the way the national accounts work,

• 16:33Rory Stewart?

  but misleadingly implies through that that there's a complete set of options available, which are going to transform the economy. Anyway, over to you on that. What did you feel when you received Chris Williamson's attack?

• 16:44Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'm very glad that Chris Williamson listens to the podcast. During the interview, there was one bit where we were sort of having this discussion with Zach Polanski and trying to understand what he was saying. And he was probably sitting there thinking, well, my strength is... Authentic man of the people type communication. If I suddenly get into trying to explain what MMT is, I'm going to lose half of the audience. But at some point they are going to do, have to do that because that is what they're actually promulgating here. I thought the most interesting one of Chris Williamson's ten points, because this is where the real kind of raw politics came out. Point seven, bond sales are also a safe haven for banks, faceless corporations and super rich oligarchs,

• 17:29Alastair Campbell?

  providing them with a form of corporate welfare. Now, what that's basically saying is that these are our enemies. And what Zach Polanski seemed to be saying but didn't quite say, I said, Jim, so what, so hold on, what you're saying is it doesn't matter how much we borrow. And his answer was, we don't need to borrow. So what we do then is we print money. We don't need to print money. And it was like, I was left thinking, well, I don't quite understand. I kept saying, how do you get from A, the system we have, to B, the system that you want? And Chris Williamson's note doesn't really advise me on that. It just says that we're ignorant about the way the bond markets work.

• 18:04Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, let, let, let me try to, to make the case for Chris Williamson and Zach Polanski and then explain why I think it's all a bit of a red herring. So what they're basically saying is that when the Treasury decides to, I don't know, give nurses, let's say, giving a nurse two thousand quid. What technically happens is that the Bank of England creates electronically two thousand pounds. It debits it. This is going to sound very technical on this, so largely ignore the argument, but I'm just trying to explain it. They debit the Treasury with that money, so the Treasury's now minus two thousand. They put plus two thousand in the nurse's account at Barclays. And then they have reserves of two thousand sitting against that account, on which, incidentally, they pay interest. That's one of those discussions.

• 18:50Rory Stewart?

  And the point they're making is that the government doesn't need to borrow or raise taxes to, in your words, print that money. It can create that two thousand pounds anyway. The taxes come later. They sort of spend in advance of the taxes or borrowing coming in. But that technical point, which no conventional economist would disagree on, it's just a, a different way of viewing the same situation, how our central bank works. Doesn't really get around the bigger question, which is even if you could find a way of printing money, right? And then you pointed out one big problem with it, which is that we're a country that's running a trade deficit. We're a very open economy. We have a lot

• 19:33Rory Stewart?

  of international money flowing in. So you start playing those games, you are likely to generate inflation or the pound is going to drop if you start doing radical things against these bondinis. And so you're going to have to create a closed economy. Now, Chris Williamson probably doesn't mind creating a closed economy, but that's going a long, long way beyond anything that Britain has been thinking about for many, many, many decades. You know, we're now beginning to get into more Latin American experiments of how you run your economy. But the bigger thing, I'll finish on this, right, is that they want you to be stuck in these discussions about MMT. And I spent, I think, probably four and a half hours yesterday, looking into MMT and discussing all the mechanics

• 20:18Rory Stewart?

  of MMT, before I realised that's not the point. The point is, do you want to have a much bigger state with much bigger government spending and much bigger government control of the economy? Or do you think it's important to leave a big space for the private sector, for competition, for innovation? That's what the discussion is. It is of course true that there are things that you can do with a lot of risk to borrow more money or to print more money. But that doesn't answer the bigger question, what type of economy are you trying to create?

• 20:52Alastair Campbell?

  Whenever we're talking about economics, I ping out a few friendly economists. And you know, most of them had already listened to it. Those that hadn't, they listened to it. And most of them came back saying, he doesn't really understand how the economy works. Now, his people would say, that's because you don't understand the way the economy works. And he kept all these different paradigms. So for example, one person was saying to me that, you know, wealth tax, less of a problem, maybe you could probably make something work on that. But equalisation of capital against tax to income tax would be, that would be a complete disaster. And gave me the arguments as to why. But I think where, what I But I don't think you know the Swiss love their referendums. They actually had a referendum on whether to bring in a wealth tax at the weekend, and it was roundly rejected by almost eight to um

• 21:38Alastair Campbell?

  eight to two. I think it's, look, thank you to Zab Polanski for coming on. Um, and and and also, I don't, I don't think you should fear he was beaten up because to be absolutely frank, he's going to get a lot worse in the run up to the general election.

• 21:51Rory Stewart?

  Well, maybe just to finish on this, I think the bigger point which I'm suddenly thought about yesterday when I was spending four and a half hours in the middle of modern monetary theory is the weirdness of the fact that the way the central bank operates is so important to everything in real life. You know, cost of living, productivity, growth, investment, right? Everything that makes a real difference. It's the economy, stupid. But the details of how it works are so technical and bizarre that ninety nine percent of people are voting and hearing about something that we don't understand.

• 22:33Rory Stewart?

  And I definitely, to be honest, there were bits of what the Bank of England's doing that I didn't understand. And some of the things that they've been doing since um the financial crisis and Covid on interest payments. I was just beginning to get my head around how weird it was, but also what the consequences were of stopping doing it. So I do think there's something problematic in a way that are the most important subjects in our democracy is so technical and that actually politicians are struggling to explain it clearly, which leaves us very, very vulnerable to Chris Williamson providing ten point things saying, you know, Alison Rory didn't understand monetary theory. Where actually that isn't the point at all. The the debate is much bigger. The debate is what sort of economy do you want to run?

• 23:18Rory Stewart?

  Not what are the technical tricks you can play in the Bank of England?

• 23:21Alastair Campbell?

  Which is why we need political and economic literacy on the curriculum from the very start of school. Right, let's stick with the left of politics. Jess in London, can your party, that's the new Corbyn-Sultana party, realistically challenge Labour when it's already torn apart by feuds, financial chaos, internal purges, or is it just another left-wing faction doomed to repeat history?

• 23:45Rory Stewart?

  Well, Anna, so can I, can I ask you on this? Because the, the way it's been reported in the kind of newspapers that I read, which I'm afraid yesterday is what you would describe as the right-wing press, they were all having an enormous amount of fun with the Your Party Conference, because they were sort of describing it as though it was right back to classic 1970s jokes about Dave Spark and the People's Front of Judea, and the fact that Corbyn was defeated to be leader of his own party and they set up a collective leadership and Zara Sultana is demanding that they take a more strident position on transgender, which Corbyn's trying to avoid. And the whole thing really sounds a little bit, and am I unfair on this, a little bit like the kind of debates you

• 24:29Rory Stewart?

  were trying to get away from in Labour in the early 1980s in order to have a winning machine, because there's a sort of a pathology of the left which can happen, which can be quite sort of divisive and destructive and purist.

• 24:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, I, as you know, don't read those papers very, very closely, other than when I'm analysing their coverage of the budget. But I certainly think the coverage I did see, it had a flavour of the coverage that we used to inflict upon the Green Party in its early days, where basically you were sent there to count, not to put too fine a point on it, to count beards and sandals, and see who was eating vegan food and all that sort of stuff. And there was a kind of caricature about it. And it's interesting, when this first started, this is, this, to be fair to Zach Polansky, is what he's done very, very successfully as a, as a political leader. He seems to have, he seems to have

• 25:20Alastair Campbell?

  been the greater beneficiary of this sense that the Labour Party is not performing in a way that an awful lot of people wanted to. It was, I think it was more interesting than the press were giving them credit for. But what is absolutely true is that the launch was a fiasco, that there is, there are clearly pretty profound divisions on organisation, in particular between Corbyn and Sultana. And they haven't, beyond them, really attracted the source of names that I think they might have hoped for. Added to which, there was a whole thing about who should be allowed in and Socialist Workers' Party were being kept out. And it felt very, it did feel very kind of backward looking.

• 26:03Rory Stewart?

  I think this relates a little bit to our discussion about the budget, which is, there is a huge space now in the left of British politics, which Labour isn't feeding. And that's one of the reasons why the backbench has been very frustrated. And I think the issue is this, that, as you said, what drives Rachel Reeves, as far as we can tell, is probably a sense of social injustice, that she felt that she grew up in a community that wasn't being treated fairly or equally, and she wants to improve conditions for those communities and improve schools. And the story she's telling, and this is where I think she's vulnerable to Corbyn, and also particularly vulnerable to Polanski and

• 26:45Rory Stewart?

  modern monetary theory, is basically, see if you disagree with this, is that we really want to spend much more money on the NHS, we really want to spend much more money on education, we really want to spend much more money on welfare, we really want to grow a bigger government, have a more generous welfare state. The only thing holding us back is the bond markets and our anxieties about inflation. So, and the problem with running that argument is that it then leaves a huge space on the left where people like Williamson can say, well, it's not technically true. If you really want to splurge much more money on the NHS and education and welfare, there are accountancy tricks that you can use which would allow you to do that. What she's not able to do is to make, I guess,

• 27:30Rory Stewart?

  the argument that you would get from the right, which is, no, actually, we can't afford this. Now, what they mean by can't afford this is not the bond markets won't allow you, or you couldn't borrow the money. What the right has to be honest about is, of course, modern monetary theory is right. Theoretically, you could do this. What they mean by they can't afford it is if we are to compete with China and the US over the next 10 years, we need a smaller state, we need more entrepreneurs, we need less regulation, we need a much more business-friendly environment because we need to grow the economy, and that we can't keep spending more and more money on health, education, and welfare, because that will crowd out the private sector, make the government bigger

• 28:15Rory Stewart?

  and bigger and bigger, and make us much less likely to grow. But she's not prepared to have that argument, is she?

• 28:20Alastair Campbell?

  No. And the one person who might have been prepared to have that argument, and who kind of did have that argument when Jeremy Corbyn was the leader of the Labour Party, was John McDonnell, who was Shadow Chancellor, did actually, over time, build up a certain amount of credibility around his analysis of the economy. It was a very left-wing vision, but he sort of, I think, did quite a good job in terms of projecting himself in a certain way that people weren't quite as spooked as they were, maybe by hearing Zach Polanski the other day. Now, that being said, Labour didn't win that election. Now, Jeremy Corbyn did a lot better than people thought he would. But I think one of the reasons, well, the driving reason to me is I just think the country decided very early on, this guy's not going to be Prime Minister.

• 29:05Alastair Campbell?

  So where he is now, he's in that same space as Zach Polanski, and that is, they're trying to exert influence upon the political debate. He's not going to win a general election, he's not going to be the Prime Minister, Zara Sultana is not going to be Chancellor of the East Czechia. Those things are not going to happen anytime soon, and probably never. Now, while they're doing that, they have to project themselves in a certain way. And I think that what the problem they've got themselves into, as the questioner suggested, is they've just, from the off, looked like a bit of a rabble. And it's a rabble that is very easily satirised. I've got to say, with, you know, obviously I have my spies up there, my favourite piece

• 29:47Alastair Campbell?

  of intelligence, Corbyn did a poetry event on the Friday night with Len McCluskey, where Len McCluskey, former trade union leader, got heckled as an MI5 plant by the revolutionary communist group. And then later, later Jeremy Corbyn got heckled for being too pro-Israel. Get that.

• 30:07Rory Stewart?

  That, that, that's good. I like the poetry. I, I want to hear Len McCloskey's poetry. I'm sorry, can we for next week, get a little bit of his poetry?

• 30:14Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know whether it was his poetry, but he was at a poetry event.

• 30:19Rory Stewart?

  That's lovely. Well, let's, let's, let's, we do need some of that poetry. That's a lovely thing. Very good. Let's take a break and let's, when we come back from a break, let's look at Russian influence on UK politics. Let's look at what's been happening in floods in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Thailand. A little bit on Ethiopia, Egypt, and then we'll finish with your amazing secret campaign to bring us back into the customs union.

• 30:40Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

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• 32:30Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 32:33Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 32:36Alastair Campbell?

  My call from Leicester. Rory and Alistair, thank you for highlighting Reform's ties to Russian influence, including the Nathan Gill case and Conservative friends of Russia. I'm worried the wider media isn't exclusionising these links enough. Should they be doing more and how can Reform be better held to account? Absolutely.

• 32:54Rory Stewart?

  I'm really pleased that we've dug into this. I do want us also to think about whether there are some reforms that we could bring into Parliament more generally on this issue of lobbying, payments, connections. I mean, we're in a situation in which politicians over the last few years have gone down for some pretty odd connections. There was a scandal involving Mike Hancock, who was a Lib Dem, which included the fact that he was unable to say how many times he'd been to Russia because he'd, in inverted commas, "lost his passport in the sea". We've had allegations now against Tulip Siddique in terms of her

• 33:34Rory Stewart?

  acquisition of property in London and in Dhaka. She was the niece of the previous leader of Bangladesh. And I think there's a persistent question around all party parliamentary groups and MPs going on paid trips, which are often propaganda trips organised by governments, and the way in which a lot of governments use members of Parliament as election observers and sometimes seem to, in the case of Azerbaijan and actually in other places in the Caucasus, try to use European politicians as election observers on their side. So you saw a group of MPs, not just British but others, declaring that there was no need for them to go to the end of this election in Azerbaijan a few years ago because it was so obvious that the ruling party had done so well.

• 34:19Alastair Campbell?

  I'm in France, as you know Rory, and on the drive down, Fiona and I were listening to a very, very long podcast series, which I strongly recommend to people. I know we should only be plugging Goalhanger, but I'm going to make an exception. And that was Peter Dukes of Byline Times and Carol Cadwallader, ex-of Guardian journalist, who's done some brilliant work on Reform and Russia. And it's a 10-part series called Sergey and the Westminster Spiring. And throughout it, there are just so many really important stories.

• 34:58Alastair Campbell?

  Accusations, allegations, crimes. There are so many stories that just haven't been properly looked at. Now, they've done their best. They've really done their best. And I'm really troubled as to why Keir Starmer thinks that Nigel Farage should be announcing an inquiry into Reform and Russia. One, why would he? Two, why would we believe him if he did, given that his reputation? So why doesn't the government announce an inquiry into this stuff? There is so much stuff right across Whitehall, some of the stories you mentioned there.

• 35:28Rory Stewart?

  I'd be very excited. And, you know, I'm very happy to volunteer for that job. If one could actually go after Reform hard, but also impartially after all the other parties. And this is the thing that worries me a little bit. And I thought you were going to say that what you were listening to in France was a long podcast on the incredible links between the former French President Sarkozy and the Libyan leader Gaddafi and the funding taking place there. I mean, what on earth is going on in European politics? So campaign finance reform, bans on lobbying, much closer investigation into these links, bans on paid foreign trips, and maybe put their salaries up so that they're actually able to go or, I don't know, provide funding for them to go on trips financed by the taxpayers

• 36:13Rory Stewart?

  so they're not dependent on being bribed by foreign governments whenever they want to go abroad and look at something.

• 36:18Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing, look, we talked a lot in the main podcast, the way the press operates. Let me just give you another little insight into the way that Reform operate. Now, Nigel Farage is somebody who does not struggle to get mainstream press coverage, particularly in the right wing press. Last week, I've written my column about this this week, last week, there was just the beginnings of proper scrutiny. We were getting all the stuff about, you know, The Guardian had rerun these old stories about his classmates, his school at Dulwich, saying that he was racist and used to joke about gassing the Jews and so forth. And they had 20 people that Farage went to school out saying, he was this, he was that, he said this, he said that. That was beginning to cut through. Then you had

• 36:58Alastair Campbell?

  finally, for one day only, Nathan Gill is on the news because he gets jailed for accepting bribes from Russia. What did Nigel Farage and what did Reform do? They took out double page adverts in the right wing newspapers. They spent almost a million pounds advertising. And what I've, I mentioned Richard Scott in the main podcast, who was editor at The Mirror. I can remember I used to get told off for constantly trying to do stories about smoking. I mean, I was a big smoker myself, but I still thought it was newsworthy. There was all these reports coming about linking cancer to smoking. And they kept being spiked. I remember saying to a colleague of mine, why don't I have the

• 37:40Alastair Campbell?

  interest in this? And he said, go and ask the advertising department, dear boy. And of course, I remember that we were funded by tobacco. So what Farage was doing is saying to the papers, listen, loads more where this came from, two-page adverts. So they went easy.

• 37:56Rory Stewart?

  And think, without getting too conspiracy theories about this, let's say the big American tech companies began to be worried that we were going to be asking too many awkward questions about AI or the domination of American tech or influence. Think about the leverage those companies have. Nvidia now a $5 trillion company. Think about the amount of advertising they can take out. Think about the consultancies they can offer, the financial incentives they can offer, the little suggestions that maybe I'm going to be able to come into your constituency and help you a little bit in doing some data analytics on the needs of your constituents. Think about, you know, how easy is the government going to find it to stand up against these companies when these people are offering massive data centers, transforming the data

• 38:40Rory Stewart?

  of the NHS, etc. So I'm really pleased you've raised this. But this is so important because this is about conflict of interest. I mean, we talked about this with Trump. Fundamentally, we have to keep coming back to conflict of interest. Why does anyone think it makes any sense for Jared Kushner to have been making billions of dollars from Gulf monarchies for his investment fund? Why does anyone think it's okay for Trump-linked people to be having direct conversations with sanctioned Russian companies about grabbing rare earths? Why does anyone not think this is going to influence the negotiation? It's a conflict of interest. You can't negotiate in good faith if you've got the dollar signs going ka-ching.

• 39:26Alastair Campbell?

  Given that Karl Cadwallader and Peter Dukes have done such extraordinary work on such an important story, why do you never see them invited on to our mainstream media to talk about these subjects?

• 39:39Rory Stewart?

  And what's the answer? They've been sort of, people have sort of tried to discredit them or marginalise them?

• 39:43Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know what the answer is, but I think it's because actually, back to the point we made on the main podcast, the media prefer the kind of here and now story. And so like, you know, Nigel Farage denies there's a better story than let's go and try and work out what really happened. Somebody sent me last week an analysis of all the times that Reform MEPs spoke up for or voted in favour of measures that would stop proper investigation of various aspects of Russian activity. Okay? Now, analyse that, look at it, test it. Now, to be fair, to one BBC journalist, I don't know if you saw this, Rory, he tracked down one of the MPs who'd been named in the Nathan Gill case, David Coburn, who'd been MEP for Scotland, and he tracked him down, guess where he tracked him down?

• 40:28Alastair Campbell?

  To his chateau in France, where he was driving his little Peugeot out of his chateau in France. These fucking people who got us out of the European Union, and whether it's him or Andrew Neil or Nigel Lawson, I've got an excuse for being a Francophile. I've always been a Francophile and I've always been against Brexit. But, you know, honestly, it's like, but why is that not, back to my point about the lens through which we're looking. Nathan Gill, that story, if that was a Labour MEP, actually, probably if it was a Tory MEP or Lib Dem, we would still be talking about him today. There would still be stories about it. It was a one-day wonder. So that's why I think we should keep coming back to it and the media should stop sort

• 41:11Alastair Campbell?

  of burying their heads in the sand about really important stories that they have decided for their own political and sometimes commercial interests, it's not worth looking at.

• 41:20Rory Stewart?

  Right. Well, we've got a question coming in on climate water security. So, Heidi Hellman, why hasn't there been any mainstream press coverage of the national emergency briefing on climate change held on the 27th of November? The messages presented by the experts were stark. Yet the public hears nothing about it. Alan, Trip Plus member of Thailand. Sitting in South Thailand, surrounded by floods with no end to the rain inside, I'm wondering why would any right minded nation send a delegation to next year's G20? Which will be presided over by the insane climate denier Trump and his cowardly sycophants. Over to you.

• 41:54Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we are back to the same theme. A little apology here. I was invited to this national emergency briefing and I agreed to go. But then something came up and I couldn't and it looked like there was a really impressive lineup of people. And we're in that space where I've used this phrase before, dumbing down, numbing down. Dumbing down, we've got a very dumbed down media that were probably talking about, you know, something else that day, they can only handle one story at a time. Uh, but this was, these were really serious people. It was put together by Mike Berners Lee. It was attended by a lot of MPs and a lot of peers, a lot of business leaders. And it was essentially highlighting the fact that we are not prepared as a country

• 42:35Alastair Campbell?

  for the impacts of climate change and nature breakdown as they are going to affect us in relation to jobs, in relation to decarbonisation and resilience. And you had some key military people there, you had food security experts. So it's a very good question. And the answer, I'm afraid, Heidi, why hasn't there been any mainstream press coverage of the national emergency briefing on climate change? Is because we don't really have a serious media anymore. We have pockets of it, which occasionally do stuff, but I didn't see, I could be wrong. I saw next to nothing on this. And then the point from Alan in Thailand. These floods that have been going across Thailand and Indonesia, they are horrific. Hundreds of people are dying.

• 43:18Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. So Alan is, is sitting there as are millions of people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Malaysia. Seeing relentless rain. So very, very heavy monsoon style rains and tropical cyclones. 502 people being killed in Indonesia, 355 in Sri Lanka, 170 in Thailand. And Sri Lanka, this is basically the worst that they've seen since the 2004 tsunami. Hundreds of thousands of people are now homeless across the region. And this is something which is connected to the fact that the world is getting warmer.

• 43:57Rory Stewart?

  In a whole series of ways, firstly, as the air gets warmer, clouds can hold more moisture. So when the rain comes down, there's much more rain. But also, as the sea temperature rises, the air moving from the hot sea up into the cool air creates a rushing system that can get winds up to hurricane speeds. And so warm seas are making cyclones more frequent and stronger. And we are moving into a world where we are beginning to see very, very directly now these basic facts about science, these basic facts about, I don't know, as people used to say, carbon dioxide putting a great duvet over the earth.

• 44:40Alastair Campbell?

  And the point of the question amazes is that this is what Trump calls the greatest con job of all time. I mean, I don't know how you can, apparently he watches television a lot, mainly Fox News, but how can you watch television and see some of the things that we've seen in Sri Lanka and Indonesia and Thailand and Bangladesh? And sit there and just be absolutely determined to say to yourself, this has got nothing to do with climate change. This is not manmade.

• 45:08Rory Stewart?

  Well, there's a great line from Claire Perry, who's the former Conservative Environment Minister, who keeps saying that water is the key cutting edge of climate change. It's where we will see it first in too much water and not enough water. In other words, in flooding and in drought. And one place that we should see this play out, which will have big geopolitical consequences. We've talked about the Indus Valley and the way that India controls a lot of the water in Pakistan. But Ethiopia basically controls the water flowing down the Nile into Egypt. So Egypt contributes about 86% of the Nile's water. And Egypt has 118 million people relying on the Nile for 97% of its freshwater.

• 45:53Rory Stewart?

  And Ethiopia has built this thing called the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, just opened. So it was just inaugurated a couple of months ago. It's there to generate an enormous amount of electricity for Ethiopia. But essentially, is Ethiopia now?

• 46:09Rory Stewart?

  Putting Egypt in a very vulnerable state. And we've got to watch this because it's been back and forth, back and forth between those two governments, a real flashpoint. And you can also expect the flashpoint to happen quite soon between Ethiopia and your friend who you went to interview all those years ago in Eritrea.

• 46:28Alastair Campbell?

  President Isaias Afewoke.

• 46:31Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely, and I think you're on record saying Ethiopia is one of your favourite places. And maybe we should go and interview him again. Do you think he'd give you another interview?

• 46:38Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not sure if he would.

• 46:40Rory Stewart?

  Oh, go on.

• 46:41Alastair Campbell?

  We can try, we can try.

• 46:42Rory Stewart?

  That would be, I'd be absolutely up for that. And then we can, we can show some pictures of you as the glamorous youth sitting there looking adoringly, even, even better disposed towards him than you are towards Nicholas Sturgeon.

• 46:54Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, please. I, I think that I'd have to give him a bit of a tougher time than I did when he was a, a freedom fighter, which is what he was at the time, before he became one of the longest serving dictators on the planet. Well, listen, we should come, we should definitely come back to this Ethiopia-Egypt crisis, because I think that is, that is not going away. Now Rory, big news today, Tuesday, Kate in London, how can the government be allowed to dismantle the jury system? Surely it's enshrined in our centuries of democracy. Do you think Starmer's cohorts, nice negative sort of word, will be able to push it through? Quite a lot of questions on this and a lot of opposition. I have got some sympathy here for the government. We have got a criminal justice system close to collapse.

• 47:38Alastair Campbell?

  We have got a backlog of cases that is off the scale. We've got people waiting years on remand, people waiting years as witnesses, people waiting years trying to get justice because the backlog has grown and grown and grown and grown. And I'm guessing that is that that David Lam is trying to address.

• 47:55Rory Stewart?

  This is where my, you accuse me of my massive conservative instincts kicking in. But, look, trial by jury is the most miraculous, wonderful thing that we have in this country because it's basically putting ordinary citizens right at the heart of the most important thing, which is whether you are found guilty or not. And, and at a time when actually citizens feel so detached from democracy and government, juries is this wonderful thing. It's like a citizens' assembly, a miniature, sortition, random citizens getting to decide. I think this is going far too far.

• 48:32Rory Stewart?

  There is absolutely no doubt the government has got itself in a massive mess and it's a mess that goes all the way back to the Tories stacked up even worse since Covid. But we had a massive crisis of a creaking court system, even when I was a minister back in 2018. But the answer is not to abolish the jury system. I'm so worried by this because it's a fundamental assault on what was really the difference between the continental and Anglo-Saxon systems of justice. It's something that wouldn't be contemplated in this way in the United States. And essentially, there is no reason why we cannot run a decent court process. We were running a decent court process when you were in power without having to abolish the jury system.

• 49:16Rory Stewart?

  We were running a decent court process in the 1970s, when the country was much, much poorer without having to abolish the jury system. We're all hearing how crime is coming down. So with crime coming down in a wealthier country, we should be able to keep a system that we've had for 800 years.

• 49:31Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, Roy, but you talk about me and my friend, be they Macron or Afewerki and all the people that you label, but Paladzki, all these people are apparently my friends. This is all down to your friend austerity. This is because the system is crumbling.

• 49:46Rory Stewart?

  Luckily, we voted in a new government that has been in for well over a year and has turned against austerity and has coming in with a new approach to everything and presumably is getting rid of austerity, isn't it? It's going to provide good funding for the courts, good funding for prisons.

• 50:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it should do, but it's bloody hard to do.

• 50:02Rory Stewart?

  So the real problem is that they're pushing ahead with austerity, aren't they? I haven't noticed the budgets going up for the courts. Them having spent all their time saying the problem was the evil Tories cut the budgets. What they're putting the budgets up for is welfare payments.

• 50:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, remember, Roy, one of the first things they did when they had to, when they came in was they had to actually let people out of prison who should have been in prison serving a sentence.

• 50:21Rory Stewart?

  I agree with that. I think they should have done that.

• 50:23Alastair Campbell?

  Right, but I think this is one where it is entirely legitimate to say that this is a direct inheritance of a government that let this go.

• 50:33Rory Stewart?

  Fine, fine, fine, fine. I've got no doubt the cause of this is austerity, but the solution, presumably if the problem is lack of money. The solution is more money, not abolishing the jury system.

• 50:44Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, but at the same time, as we talk about more money for Ukraine and more money for the health service and more money for education and more money for child poverty, more money for lifting the two child benefit cap. I, look, I, I, at heart, I agree with you. I think the jury system has been a very, very good thing for this country. That being said, to go back to my journalistic days, I used to think when I was sitting there covering the magistrate's court in Tavistock, I didn't worry that some people were being sent down by magistrates. And I think you could maybe give them more leeway in the sorts of sentencing that they could do.

• 51:20Rory Stewart?

  There are lots of trade offs we have to make with the fact the government's short of money. And the government's made certain kinds of trade offs, right? We talked about it. It's decided that what it wants to do is, for example, lift the two child benefit cap. And it's also decided what it wants to do is cut international aid, broadly speaking, by more than the half, breaking a manifesto.

• 51:38Alastair Campbell?

  Which we, which we totally oppose.

• 51:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's decided to cut thirty percent of the staff in the Foreign Office when Britain should be leaning out to the world instead of which it's massively diminishing.

• 51:47Alastair Campbell?

  Tough choices.

• 51:48Rory Stewart?

  Doesn't seem to me as though it's going to bail out. I think the British Council is on verge of disappearing forever, the World Service is in trouble, et cetera, et cetera.

• 51:54Alastair Campbell?

  Terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible.

• 51:56Rory Stewart?

  It's all terrible, right? And they're very short of cash. But of all those things, jury, trial by jury is something so fundamental to British liberty.

• 52:05Alastair Campbell?

  Of all of them.

• 52:06Rory Stewart?

  Yep, if you had to make me choose, would I choose to save the trial by jury system? And sacrifice the other things, I'd keep the trial by jury system.

• 52:15Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, well, you said to Zach Polanski that if you're analyzing these problems, you have to work out how much is it going to cost? So how much, and this is a very unfair question because you haven't done the research, how much would it cost to deliver the sort of justice system you're talking about? You've now got eighty thousand cases.

• 52:34Rory Stewart?

  The cuts under austerity in real terms to the court system were in the region of a few billion pounds. So you would have to increase the budget by a few billion pounds. Now, they've just decided to put another three billion pounds, three and a half billion pounds a year into lifting the two child benefit cap. So if I, if you ask me, provided of a choice, I'd put that three and a half billion pounds into making sure that we can retain trial by jury.

• 52:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, Rory, now you're having your cake and eating it, you also supported lifting the two child benefit cap.

• 53:03Rory Stewart?

  If you're asking me my priorities here, I would choose trial by jury over the two child benefit. I'd keep the two child benefit cap in place.

• 53:10Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 53:11Rory Stewart?

  And I'd go after your winter fuel allowance and I would save trial by jury.

• 53:15Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. And building new prisons, you're gonna do that?

• 53:18Rory Stewart?

  I, I think we probably have to build more prisons, but I also think we should have far fewer people in prison. The government should be much, much braver about following through on what David Gork suggested and more. I mean, the government here with trial by jury has gone well beyond what my friend Brian Levinson suggested. This is well beyond in terms of the trial by jury.

• 53:38Alastair Campbell?

  It is. Brian, Brian Levinson, who did the Levinson inquiry, that the then government didn't properly listen to, which is why the press is still as awful as it is. Um, he did a review of the court system and this, particularly this backlog. This does go further than his recommendations. Um, and you're right, it probably is about saving money. But just go through some of this, right? Let's say you're, let's say you're a victim of sexual assault, okay? Which is hard enough anyway, because we know that, you know, a lot of people who suffer rape and sexual assault, they say the courts don't take it serious, please don't take it serious, et cetera. You can take now longer than an Olympiad, longer than a parliament to wait for your case to come to court. And the other thing

• 54:22Alastair Campbell?

  that's happening, and this isn't just the politicians saying this, because I've heard this from lawyers as well, is that if you're the criminal or the alleged criminal, you quote, game the system. Because what you do is no matter how low the case may be, you say, I must have a jury trial and you have that right. Okay. You go for a jury trial. Why do you have that? Because you know that the longer it goes on, the worse people's memory becomes and witnesses become less reliable, the more time you might have for a bit of intimidation as well. And therefore, the idea of swift justice, which is what we think the justice system should give us, it isn't being delivered. And so when people are making that choice,

• 55:06Alastair Campbell?

  I think, would you at least agree that it should be tougher, the conditions by which you should be allowed to say, I deserve a jury trial, that maybe a judge could be allowed to make that decision for you?

• 55:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think that's an interesting idea. And I think I have so much admiration for Brian Levison. And I, almost everything you'd recommend, I go with. But I think there's something, you know, we talked in the last podcast about the fact that I'm beginning to think as I go through all these departments I served in, how I would evaluate what's happening. Let's, let's look at this one. This was the department I was in, the Ministry of Justice. At no point did I think that we would have considered that the answer to the mess that we got into with courts is to abolish one of the basic constitutional rights in the country. You know, we can fix this by abolishing the constitutional right. It's a real recipe for despair. You cannot seriously be saying that our courts are in

• 56:01Rory Stewart?

  such a state that with money, focus, energy, you can't get those lists down. And that's, we talk a good game about digitalization. We're not doing digitalization in courts. A lot of this is basic administration, getting through backlogs, getting people through, making sure that you're paying the right people enough, making sure you get the incentives right.

• 56:23Alastair Campbell?

  More money?

• 56:24Rory Stewart?

  In terms of.

• 56:24Alastair Campbell?

  More austerity slash legal aid?

• 56:27Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. So the government has a choice here, right? And the choice is, do they say, we're going to fix this by spending a bit more money? I absolutely agree, probably will require a bit more money, but also lots of other things we're going to do. We're going to actually really get into the details of what's going wrong. Why is there a backlog? What's going wrong with the lawyers? Why have we got ourselves this mess? How come we could run the system well in the 1970s with much less money? What's the problem here? Not Well, we give up on the whole thing, so we're just going to abolish trial by jury.

• 56:57Alastair Campbell?

  So Rory, while we've been talking and disagreeing agreeably about jury trials, phone has been pinging away because David Lammy has been on his feet in the House of Commons, slightly watering down what he was planning, I think, but essentially backing or saying that they will implement the Leveson plans, which means that anything up to three years, no jury trial. Offences that might carry a sentence above three years, jury trial. Does that satisfy you?

• 57:27Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's a real lesson, as usual, being caught out on the hoof here. Because of course I came out big in favour of Brian Leveson, thinking that was a safe position, would allow me further out. I guess if I was in the complete Palace of Truth, Alistair, even though I adore and worship Brian Leveson, I'm a bit troubled by this. I remain very, very pro jury trial and would prefer we were clearing the backlog another way.

• 57:50Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 57:51Rory Stewart?

  Okay, well, final one, before I come to you on your plot on the Customs Union, I just wanted to pay a brief, brief tribute to Tom Stoppard, who died this week, who was, as many people know, the playwright famous for plays like Rosencrantz, Guildenstern Dead. Credible story. He was a Hungarian emigre to Britain. He was the most intelligent, courteous man. He was also probably our most loyal and regular listener. He was always getting in touch, saying that the one thing that kept him walking was listening and he would listen to absolutely every hour of content we produced because it was one of the things that got him out of the house and walking around the countryside,

• 58:31Rory Stewart?

  which was a huge honour because he's definitely much, much smarter than me, much wiser than me, much cleverer than me. And I'm pleased that we at least provide a bit of distraction while he stretched his legs. Bemiss terribly.

• 58:43Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that's very, very, very nice to hear. And, you know, he was one of those, as I say, I'm in France. He got a lot of coverage for his death and big obituaries here as well. You know, a big, big figure. And so, yeah, very, very sad.

• 58:56Rory Stewart?

  Right, final question for you, Alistair. Here we go. George Tripp, plus member from Liverpool. The Telegraph claimed in their Saturday essay that Alistair is secretly plotting to get us back into the Customs Union.

• 59:11Rory Stewart?

  Is this true? And if you are, why am I not part of your secret plot?

• 59:16Alastair Campbell?

  It's so funny, this, isn't it? So, um, I don't, is there anything secret about saying, I think it'd be a really good idea if we got back in the customs union? The Telegraph actually went further, Rory. It, it said that I am even, I love that word, I am even plotting to try to get a second referendum to get us back into the EU as a whole. Now, what was really fun, interesting, I did get, to be fair to the Telegraph, they did send me a message saying they were writing a story about people who were trying to persuade Keir Starmer to change his position on Europe. And they were told that I was one of the key movers in this, and would I talk to them? And I didn't.

• 59:57Alastair Campbell?

  But what was really funny about this story is the plot is, consists of me,

• 1:00:05Alastair Campbell?

  Tim Allen, who was my deputy many, many years ago, then went off to set up Portland and is now back in Downing Street, and Tom Baldwin. Tom Baldwin, ex-Jerger of the Times, Keir Starmer, and who worked with me on the People's Vote campaign. So, and what was nice about that, it was A, B, C, Alan, Baldwin and Campbell, they were the, they were the plotters. I, I've got to tell you, George, I sort of wish there was a plot. But what was really interesting, how did I find out about this story? Which went on and on. I ended up reading it, went on and on and on with this anonymous quote and that anonymous quote. And he said this, and he thinks this, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:00:46Alastair Campbell?

  What was hilarious, well, is this hilarious? I got so many people getting in touch, offering money for the campaign.

• 1:00:55Alastair Campbell?

  One guy, very, very wealthy guy said, how much can I give and where can I send it? So maybe there should be a not so secret plot.

• 1:01:04Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's absolutely amazing, isn't it? I mean, it really is incredible how you can generate a story like that. Because I, I think we've consistently said we wanted to rejoin the customs union from day one of the podcast and probably said it on air 50 or 60 times.

• 1:01:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:18Rory Stewart?

  And yet it's a very, a very secret plot.

• 1:01:21Alastair Campbell?

  Why weren't you included in the plot?

• 1:01:22Rory Stewart?

  I don't know. I'm passionate pro customs union. I've been part of customs union since 2019.

• 1:01:29Alastair Campbell?

  So there we are. Anyway, so we've talked a lot about the way the press worked this week, haven't we? That was a classic example, though. There was, there was literally nothing in the story. The thing about Tim Allen, for example, so Tim Allen's now in Downing Street. So the story made the link that in recent weeks and months, including yesterday in his speech, as I mentioned in the main podcast, Keir Starmer has been more vocal in saying that Brexit has been a disaster. Well, I've been saying that since 2016. So no, George, I'm not secretly plotting. I am openly campaigning.

• 1:02:01Rory Stewart?

  Excellent. Well, Alison, lovely to see you and look forward to talking again next week. And let me just try to draw together what we're doing. So we did today, we did Plancky and the Green Party and where it's going with monetary theory. We talked about Jeremy Corbyn. We talked about the extraordinary developments in climate change and denial and the national emergency briefing. We talked about your plot to get us back into the customs union.

• 1:02:27Alastair Campbell?

  And we talked about Russian influence on the policies of Reform UK.

• 1:02:33Rory Stewart?

  Very good Russian accent. So, and I think the binding thing that brings it all together is the very odd way in which some stories are picked up, some aren't, and the way in which the media oscillates between ignoring stories entirely to then getting dragged into the details of what I keep insisting is not mixed martial arts, but modern monetary theory. Anyway, thank you very much and bye bye.

• 1:02:56Alastair Campbell?

  Great, great to see you. Bye bye.

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