554. Burnham’s Worldview, Trump's Ceasefire Collapse, and Advising Count Binface

Can Andy Burnham's 'Makerfield test' survive contact with a world of Trump, China, and a raging Iran crisis? Why did every one of Netanyahu's promises to Trump about the war with Iran - from destroying the ballistic missile programme to fomenting revolution - turn out to be wrong? What advice does Alastair have for Count Binface in his fight against Nigel Farage in Clacton? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in this week's edition of Question Time. __________ Enjoy Rory and Alastair’s interview with Gabriel Zucman by searching ‘Leading’ on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. 🌏 Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! Get an exclusive NordVPN deal + 4 months extra here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics. It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee! __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Bruno Di Castri, Caroline Kaye Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Exec Producer: Chris Sawyer General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Rory Stewart?

  On Monday, Andy Burnham is going to walk into Downing Street as our new Prime Minister, and all the questions initially are going to be about getting growth going and applying what Andy Burnham calls the Make-A-Field test to foreign policy. How is what Britain's doing in the world going to make difference to people on the ground? How's power going to be redistributed? But that doesn't get rid of the fundamental question, which is what is Britain's place in the world? What is our new Prime Minister going to make of Trump, of China, of AI, of Russia, of defence? And the honest answer is, I think, we barely know. We might even ask whether British politics, domestic politics, actually allows us to have a serious conversation about the really big issues that are going to define our lives

• 0:46Rory Stewart?

  abroad and at home. We've had a lot of questions about Andy Burnham's worldview, and we're going to get into some of them now in Question Time. This episode is powered by Fuse Energy.

• 0:57Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:07Rory Stewart?

  What I love is the simplicity of it. If you refer a friend, one of those few people who haven't heard about Fuse from us every week, and they switch both their gas and electricity, you each get £50 towards your next bill.

• 1:19Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:28Rory Stewart?

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• 1:41Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:57Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 1:59Alastair 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.

• 2:12Rory 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.

• 2:35Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 2:41Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics, and the link is in the episode description.

• 2:58Speaker 02

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• 3:37Alastair Campbell?

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

• 3:39Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart. So, Question Time. Well, we have had questions on Andy Burnham about to take over as our Prime Minister and what on earth it means to try to create a foreign policy when you're coming from being Mayor of Manchester. We've had questions, a lot of them, on what's happening in Iran. How did this ceasefire collapse and what does it mean for the world? We'll be talking about the climate emergency, and we'll be talking particularly there about a lot of questions that have come in about whether we're underestimating the national security implications of climate. We will be talking about Count Binface, the amazing candidate who's running against Nigel Farage. And we might, if we have time, get on to the question of this meditation retreat from which I've just emerged.

• 4:24Rory Stewart?

  Anyway, where do you want to start, Alistair?

• 4:26Alastair Campbell?

  So Rory, Olivia, recognizing that Andy Burnham is about to become our Prime Minister, wants to know how difficult is it to get the balance right between domestic and foreign policy? Very, very hard is the answer. Very, very hard. Do you ever go at that?

• 4:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, it's a hell of a question, isn't it? Because Andy Burnham is in some ways, I think, a bit of a mystery on this. It's very difficult. I mean, you've known him forever, since he was in his early twenties. And yet, almost nobody I know who knows him well is really able to tell me what his foreign policy vision is or what his views on artificial intelligence are. So there's that one question, right? What does he think? Second question, which I'd love to get into with you, is what's the team that he's going to build? So if he's not an expert on this stuff, how much is Jonathan Powell going to be at the centre of defining what UK foreign policy is? The national security adviser who he's retained? And what is Jonathan Powell's worldview going to be going forward?

• 5:25Rory Stewart?

  And then, thirdly, how is domestic politics and his experience at Makefield going to play into the kind of choices he has? Big example there, that he was running in a constituency which voted two-thirds for Brexit. So that, of course, immediately constrained the freedom that he might have on getting much closer to Europe. So a lot of things to get into. Where do you want to start us? Do you want to start us on, you know, his foreign policy machine and people like Jonathan Powell, or start us on Burnham's own views?

• 5:52Alastair Campbell?

  Well, let's do a bit of both. I mean, I think the balance question is really important because one of the arguments that Keir Starmer has been trying to make is actually, you can't separate them today. There is such a thing as the world economy, and you have to be engaged in it. And that requires you and your Chancellor and your business people to be making connections all around the world all the time. Keir Starmer, you know, they applied the label Keir never here because he was constantly abroad. Well, if you're dealing with the war in Ukraine, you're dealing with the war in Iran, as you say, you're trying to rebuild relations with Europe, it'd be very odd if you weren't travelling a lot. Andy Burnham has definitely been projecting himself both to the public and, I would say, to the PLP. He had his first meeting with the PLP last night, and he was at pains, the readout I

• 6:37Alastair Campbell?

  got, he was at pains to pay a really warm tribute to Keir Starmer on foreign policy, and in particular in relation to the relationship he developed with Zelensky and the support for Ukraine. So that says to me, continuity there. One of the social media posts he's published in recent days was very much distancing himself from the Starmer government positioning in relation to Israel and Gaza, much more sympathetic to the Palestinians. So we'll see how that works out in practice. On Europe, Andy is somebody who is, I would instinctively say, very, very pro-European, very, very pro the idea of Britain being a big leading player in Europe. But as you say, politics will have a role to play there as well. And I think also historically, because you've got to remember, Andy, people, because he

• 7:22Alastair Campbell?

  still looks quite young and because he's been off the main scene for quite a while, people do underestimate just how experienced he is in government and politics. I mean, he had a lot of experience in different government positions. He's had experience of the Treasury as Chief Secretary, he's had experience of public service departments. But he hasn't had that much experience of foreign policy. But interestingly, I was very interested when it sort of first emerged, and it's really been, as you say, I've known him for such a long time. I picked up Der Spiegel this morning, and there's a big profile of Andy Burnham. I was reading the Straits Times in Singapore, and there's a big profile of Andy Burnham. And what was interesting is how many, in some of these profiles in the international

• 8:04Alastair Campbell?

  space, for example, how many golf leaders have actually said, oh, we got to know Andy Burnham when he was doing this deal, getting us involved in this. So I think he's got the experience. What I don't think we have yet is the worldview. Now, that in a way, though, is a big, big opportunity because he's coming in with, and I think I said to you the other day, it's an amazing, it's an amazing thing to have pulled off, to be seen as the much nicer guy than the one that you're replacing, having absolutely been as ruthless as you could imagine a politician to be. But he's now got quite a lot of blank canvases. So Jonathan Powell, yes, what's Jonathan Powell's worldview? Jonathan Powell is in the best tradition of public service.

• 8:48Alastair Campbell?

  He will be guided. He will be guided. What Jonathan has, though, is the really amazing network of relationships around the world. And of course, he's developed those with Keir. I think Jonathan will be very, very important to Andy's sort of introduction to all this stuff. Who he appoints as Foreign Secretary is going to be important. I'll tell you the other thing that's absolutely fascinating. I've been talking to, you know, all the people you'd expect of me in recent days. I don't think a single one of them knows exactly what, if any, position they're going to get in the Cabinet. I don't think any of them know.

• 9:21Rory Stewart?

  That's really interesting. And that's partly because he didn't need to do what usually leadership candidates have to do, which is to make implicit promises.

• 9:32Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he may have made implicit promises. He may have made them, but...

• 9:36Rory Stewart?

  Well, I remember this wonderful moment when Boris Johnson was running and he tried to get me to back him. And he said to me, he said, Rory, Rory, what I'm about to say, ignore entirely, because I'm almost certainly not going to do what I say. But, but, but, I can imagine you in my cabinet, flying around Europe, sprinkling a little bit of British Ode Cologne on foreign policy. Which was the most elegant way of promising and not promising. But a lot of them, of course, went a long way beyond that. I mean, most of them come in because they have to, because they need the MPs votes. Having pretty much got their Chancellor in place, got their Foreign Secretary in place, probably got their Defence Secretary in place in order to get some

• 10:18Rory Stewart?

  military types. So he's coming in in a very, very unusually strong position, isn't he? And I wonder, I mean, how strong is the position? Could he put Yvette Cooper on the back benches? Could he put Shabana Mahmood on the back benches? How much risk can he take with big beasts in the party? Because sometimes people are able to do it. I mean, actually, Johnson did it and it had surprisingly little impacts, at least in the short term. I mean, it left a lot of us grumpy and grumbling and we were like, ah, you know, you fired Winston Churchill's grandson and got rid of Ken Clark and you've thrown out all these members of the Cabinet. But actually, it didn't really matter. It turned out we weren't as big beasts as we believed. How much freedom did he got?

• 11:01Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I've got to say, the feedback from the PLP was pretty positive. There was one, the peers were pissed off because normally the peers go to the PLP as well, but they weren't. He wanted to see the elected members. He wanted to pay tribute, as he did to Keir, but I think he also wanted to tell them, and more importantly, show them that he gets the fact that a lot of them have been really, really pissed off about the way the PLP has been managed. He made all sorts of commitments, the groups that he's going to see regularly, to the meetings he's going to attend. So that's all fine and dandy. He will get to a point. The one thing he may be, look, he's been a senior Cabinet Minister, and he's been the Mayor of Manchester. The one thing I don't think anybody really gets until they're there

• 11:45Alastair Campbell?

  is the sheer volume of pressure on the diary.

• 11:47Rory Stewart?

  You're saying he's going to start regretting the fact that he's promised to do about seven meetings a week?

• 11:51Alastair Campbell?

  He's going to start saying to the diary secretary, can you phone such and such an MP to say, can we put it off for a couple of weeks because the President of Poland has just arrived? Okay, well, there's going to be a lot of that. But then the other thing he did was to, I think, genuinely say, I want to be very focused on here. He's already announced that he's not going to have a summer holiday. He's going to tour Britain during the summer. He might regret that by the time he's absolutely knackered at the end of it. But this thing about the Cabinet is fascinating. Now, it may be, it may be, he has said to all of these people, right, this is what I want you to do, but you better not tell anybody, because I want this to be announced when I announce it.

• 12:33Alastair Campbell?

  But I know some of these people well enough to know that they would have said to me, listen, please don't tell anybody but, right? None of them have said that, not one. So that says to me, he's keeping them all on their toes. The truth is, he does have a lot of strength at the moment. He does have a lot of power. But he'll be wary of making too many enemies right at the start. Somebody, an MP who did not go to the PLP last night, said to me, I just couldn't face it because it's just going to be a gizzard job plea. And true enough, lots of people sort of talked about how hopeful and optimistic and how marvellous he was and blah, blah, blah, blah. But I think he'll be able to get rid of a few, but not that many.

• 13:16Rory Stewart?

  And how much, can you just explain how much of a risk is it? I mean, let's say it was a bloodbath and he got rid of, I don't know, more than half of Keir Starmer's Cabinet and they all end up on the back benches. How much trouble really can they cause? Because it sort of depends on the Prime Minister, doesn't it? I mean, you can end up with a situation where, you know, Ted Heath's on the back benches grumbling and everyone just thinks they're a bitter old person. It doesn't make much difference to you.

• 13:39Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, he's got very...

• 13:40Rory Stewart?

  How much damage, I mean, let's say Yvette Cooper's on the back benches. Could she really damage him? I mean, she can make grumbly and disobliging comments in the House of Commons, but in modern politics, does that really affect your standing?

• 13:52Alastair Campbell?

  Well, look at, look at what happened recently with, you know, John Healy resigned, very respected Defence Secretary, I suspect will be back in the Cabinet. Doing that, possibly even being Foreign Secretary, I don't know, but a serious person. But when he was out, now he's out at the moment, you know, when Dan Jarvis pops up on the television, surrounded by tanks and soldiers and he's talking, he looks the part, he sounds the part. So I think, I wouldn't overestimate the power that they have. I think where they have power when they leave is if they continue to organise on a different political agenda. The one thing that Andy keeps saying, I think this is the most interesting thing in the speech he made when he made that that sort of speech in Manchester, setting everything out.

• 14:34Alastair Campbell?

  He basically was saying, I'm going to be collaborative, I'm going to be consultative, but there will be no argument about the political direction. So I think what he'll do very, very early on is try to set out a very clear political direction. At some point, there will have to be a major foreign policy speech where we do get to hear about this stuff. But I think he will relate it. The reason he's saying this make a field test, I think he's basically saying that he's going to try to persuade people that part of the job of leadership in this very difficult geopolitical, geostrategic age is the foreign policy side of it, but try to link it to their lives. Now, that is not an easy trick to pull off.

• 15:10Rory Stewart?

  No, it's not an easy trick to pull off. And let me just finish on that before we move on to that question because that was Jake Sullivan's idea as Biden's National Security Advisor. After the Trump defeat, he went away into the wilderness for four years and he came up with this idea called foreign policy for the middle class, which is basically the make a field test. The idea was that in future, all of US foreign policy worldwide would be relevant to a blue collar worker in a mill town somewhere in Ohio. And there's a real attraction to it, but there's a real limit to it. Because so much of what you're actually doing in foreign policy isn't directly relevant.

• 15:49Rory Stewart?

  And if you try to make it all directly relevant, you end up pretty quickly in a pretty isolationist position, right? And that's one of the reasons I'm afraid why the international aid budgets have collapsed and why I fear Andy Burnham's not going to restore British international aid spending, which is at the lowest level since the 1970s. Because the make a field test will tend to bring us inwards. Now, the problem is what we actually have to be doing to survive economically, politically as a country over the next 20, 30 years is this middle power move, which is this very, very difficult, brave attempt to try to work out how you put Europe,

• 16:29Rory Stewart?

  Britain, Canada, South Korea, Japan, who knows, India, together and really develop significant sovereign capacity in all these different areas so that we're not over a barrel with the US and China. Otherwise, we're screwed. Our economies are screwed, our policies, we're really screwed. I mean, we can really see now how these things get weaponised. So that's something which is going to take real leadership. And as you say, Jonathan Powell is an extraordinary civil servant. But a lot of what he's been very, very good at is conflict resolution, relationships, unwinding Nazi problems, Northern Ireland, he was doing stuff with Ukraine and Iran.

• 17:11Rory Stewart?

  But the big structural, this is the vision for where Britain's going to be in 15, 20 years. That's a different story and that's what I hope we're going to get to and I'm worried about.

• 17:22Alastair Campbell?

  I would very, very strongly advise him that one of his early speeches should be answering that very, very question and doing it in a way that makes people around the world, who at the moment, this is what happens in politics, leaders around the world, I've been getting people saying, what's this guy Andy Burnham like, you know, will I get on with Burnham? And that's, it's inevitable. You see that with all the summits you ever go to. I even saw the NATO summit last week when it came to one of the family photos. Keir Starmer was literally on the edge, sort of right out. And it's like, that's what happens. It's just like, you know, power moves and it's brutal, but there we are. Anyway, he's going to be our Prime Minister, seventh in a decade, and he's got a very, very, very large entree

• 18:03Alastair Campbell?

  and will doubtless be coming back to it many, many weeks to come.

• 18:08Rory Stewart?

  Moving on then to, to probably internationally, the biggest story of the week and the thing that again is really defining global economy, global politics. We got a question from Amy Dixon. What do the latest ceasefire developments mean for the US and Iran? Things change so quickly, it's hard to keep up. But does this mean that the war is ongoing? How will this affect Trump and the GOP in the midterms? So just brief explainer before I come back to you on the details. Everybody will remember, I think, that a ceasefire agreement was put in place and there was a 60-day pause. And during the 60-day pause, vessels were going to travel through the Straits of Hormuz, tolls weren't going to be charged, mines were going to be cleared. And then in 60 days' time, who knows?

• 18:50Rory Stewart?

  But the hope was that at least this sort of temporary ceasefire would see us through and it hasn't held. It hasn't held because Oman and the US started moving vessels out of Iranian territorial waters through the south of the Strait. And Iran said, hold on a second, this is in violation of our understanding of what the 60-day freeze was supposed to be. We thought that we were meant to be demining and they were meant to be going through our territorial waters. And above all, we wanted to retain the leverage of being able to control vessels going through the straits. So no, we do not agree with this idea that you're trying to set up some independent corridors through the strait. They attacked a vessel. The US responded with hundreds of strikes against Iran. Iran then responded with strikes against the Gulf countries.

• 19:35Rory Stewart?

  And we're right back to the fundamentals of the whole thing again, which is... Iran has a lot of cards which haven't gone away. It can still prove again and again that it can stop ships going through the Strait of Hormuz and therefore affect 20% of all the oil in the world and everything else. It's proved again and again that it can still strike Gulf countries and cause chaos in its Gulf countries. And the US has proved again and again that when it wants, it can strike Iran. And we haven't got really beyond any of those things. Over to you.

• 20:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, Rory, when you were in your retreat, I did a solo leading interview with the author of the book that we've been talking about, Maggie Haveman and Jonathan Swan. And it was a really interesting interview. I really enjoyed it. But I read to them a passage from their own book. And I want to read it to you because it just speaks absolutely to what you've just said. This is an account of Bibi Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, going to Washington to persuade Trump to take out, to take on Iran. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near certain victory. Iran's ballistic missile programme could be destroyed within a few weeks. Iran would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz.

• 20:45Alastair Campbell?

  The likelihood that Iran would land blows against US interest in neighbouring countries was minable. Besides, Mossad intelligence indicated that protests inside Iran would begin, and with Mossad helping to ferment riots and rebellion, an intense bombing campaign would create the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime. Netanyahu delivered his presentation in a confident monotone. It sounded compelling and well-prepared. Sounds good to me, the president told the prime minister. To Netanyahu, this signaled a likely green light for a joint operation. Now, I pointed out to Maggie and Jonathan, every single line went wrong, every single one. And that's where, and then they have the memorandum of understanding.

• 21:27Alastair Campbell?

  But the memorandum of understanding feels to me like a rerun of the Great Gaza Peace Plan. It's unravelled.

• 21:34Rory Stewart?

  It's, so, so, so, listen, can we just hold for a second on what you've just read me? Because that is so, so interesting because it's right at the heart of everything. So firstly, it's right at the heart of all these interventions and wars that we've had for decades.

• 21:47Alastair Campbell?

  Which we talked to Ben Rhodes about, didn't we?

• 21:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, which is the moment when the military or the intelligence people or an ally come in and say, we've got it all sorted out. You know, we can answer every question or anxiety you can have. You think there are these risks, but you know, we've got this, we've got the greatest intelligence agency in the world. We've penetrated the Iranians from one end to the other. We understand the regime like you can't believe. We will be able to take out all the ballistic missiles. Well, as you point out, between 70 and 80% of the entire Iranian ballistic missile stock is completely unharmed. Turns out they can continue to fire these rockets almost indefinitely. We can guarantee that with our amazing Mossad agents on the ground will ferment revolution? No. We can guarantee they're not going to be able to use this to close the Straits of Hormuz? No, they can close it.

• 22:33Rory Stewart?

  They won't attack neighbouring countries? No, they are attacking neighbouring countries. They were wrong absolutely everything. Right? But this then leads us on the problem, I'm in the States at the moment, and I was talking to somebody yesterday who said to me, do you think Trump's going to be able to win in Iran? Is he going to be able to guarantee the open Straits of Hormuz? And I said, and I don't know whether you agree, I said, no, look, it seems inconceivable. It seems the only actual end to this is accepting that Iran de facto can shut the Strait of Hormuz when it wants and therefore controls it, and that Iran can de facto fire neighbouring countries when it wants.

• 23:13Rory Stewart?

  And that therefore the only real option for the US is to back off and hope somehow that the leverage of the Gulf countries and the self-interest of the Iranians allows traffic to pass through the States. It's, it's what would have seemed four months ago, a completely intolerable, inconceivable, mad situation in which you've just handed the Iranian regime control of 20% of the trunks of the world's oil. But I can't see what the other option is now.

• 23:43Alastair Campbell?

  No. Well, the other thing, of course, that's worth thinking about, I mentioned when I was sort of debriefing you and you came out of your, of your meditation about these attacks, including upon the president and upon the foreign minister and upon serious people in the regime who were being attacked at the funeral of the Ayatollah as appeasers. They were saying, you know, the Americans have just killed this guy, our leader, they've killed him, and now you're sitting down to make peace with them. And it was interesting, it was after that that the IRGC fired on these three ships, including one that's linked to Qatar.

• 24:15Rory Stewart?

  Right, right. And that's, sorry, so just very quickly on that, very quickly on that, because I think you've put your finger on something that we don't talk about enough. I mean, the way in which domestic politics plays and the way in which the Iranians aren't actually as free as you think, because they've got their hardliners, Trump isn't as free as he thinks because he's got his hardliners to deal with. And also, the regime may not control all its own people. I mean, to what extent is this IRGC strike what the president of Iran wants to happen? Or is it something the hardliners are doing to derail the?

• 24:39Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. He, and, and just, just to sort of get a sense of where, where they are. So Trump, who recently was saying, we've done it, let the oil flow. In the last week, while you were away, he declared the ceasefire is over. He said that all the leaders in Iran were scum and there were sick people, and he yet again threatened to destroy their desalination plants. Meanwhile, there were these really loud calls for vengeance over the death of the Supreme Leader. We've still not seen his son, the, the current leader. Then we had the closure of the, the Strait of Hormuz. I think they, I think they got 14 ships through on Sunday, which was a collapse from what had been happening. And then these, you know, attacks on-

• 25:17Rory Stewart?

  It's supposed to be 150.

• 25:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And then, and now these attacks on the infrastructure of other Gulf countries as well. So it's very, very hard to see where this goes.

• 25:24Rory Stewart?

  And now we've had this announcement from Trump that he's going to charge 20% tariffs for vessels coming through, which is staggering. Because if you go back four weeks, Rubio's argument against Iran is they can't charge tariffs because this is an international waterway. Nobody should charge tariffs. Now, the US has proposed to charge 20% tariffs. And that's a little finger showing you a whole new world where these choke points are not just used to deny regimes' access to things. These, these American choke points on, you know, their control of finance straits were used in the past to deny people getting money. Now it's used as a financial extraction mechanism. And when that happens, and there's no American guarantor anymore of free movement, America

• 26:08Rory Stewart?

  itself becomes a rent seeker for the security profession. A lot of other weird things are going to happen.

• 26:14Alastair Campbell?

  Hello, we shouldn't worry too much because JD Vance says we have all the cards. They do love talking about cards over there. They have all the cards. There we are. Rory, Caroline Lucas is making a series for us on climate and national security. And she's obviously listened to recent episodes, Rory, and she's got a little question for us.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  Hi, Alastair. Hi, Rory. This is Caroline Lucas here with a question for you. I wanted to say that I found your recent energy and climate change question time with Dan Jorgensen really, really compelling. And I thought he made some great arguments about the need for an urgent green transition. He talked very compellingly about the need for cheaper energy, for greater energy independence. But what really struck me was his admission that politicians, including himself, have focused too much on arguments about things like price mechanisms and not enough on the reality of climate breakdown and what that really means in terms of its possible impact on national security. He made the case that climate change is the biggest threat multiplier on the planet

• 27:20Speaker 03

  and that it could lead to wars and insecurity. So Rory, I know that slightly oddly in my view, you still weren't convinced by some of Dan's arguments by the end of the episode, but I wonder whether you would at least agree with him on this one, that climate and nature do pose a very real security threat.

• 27:38Rory Stewart?

  Where I think Caroline is absolutely right is that the argument has to be in the end about the horrors and the impacts of climate change, not about cost. Where I think I get wound up by Dan and by the European debate is by this endless insistence that clean energy is cheap energy. It's a very dangerous thing to say because all you've got to do is produce energy that is cheaper and isn't cleaner, and the whole argument collapses. And, and I think it's a really difficult argument to hold that net zero is cheaper when iron energy prices are four times that of the US and twice that of Europe.

• 28:21Rory Stewart?

  So I think the argument has to be, it is the right thing to do, and it's the right thing to do because climate change itself is horrifying. And, and this is where the national security pitch comes in. It's not just the fact that there are going to be hundreds of people dying from heat waves in our own country, it's that we will end up by 2030, 2050 with massive food insecurity, with collapse of forest systems, water systems all around the world, huge force migration. We have to keep the emphasis on that, but that also means another thing. What you can't have as a result is the cutting of British international development assistance. The, the thing that actually I was thinking about, it's driving me nuts, is one of the

• 29:04Rory Stewart?

  stupidest things Starmer and his team did is try to stop Ed Miliband spending £150 million on rainforest stuff outside the United Kingdom. Bang for buck, you're probably likely to make much more impact on global climate change spending money and poorer countries protecting rainforests, stopping them building coal-fired plants than putting all the money into Britain. And if the reason why you're spending all the money in Britain is to show a good example to the world, in other words, what you're trying to do, because we're only 2% of global emissions, right, is shape the world, then there has to be a lot of international work and international expenditure. Nothing would be madder than bankrupting our own economy without taking cheaper opportunities to shape the climate debate and get the moral argument out there globally.

• 29:49Alastair Campbell?

  No, well, we're, we're all now agreeing, we're all now agreeing. I agree with everything you said there, Rory. Well, we're definitely agreeing about the big point. Somebody sent me this morning, this absolutely, it's actually quite beautiful, but incredibly sad. It was in The Guardian a few weeks ago, and it's a thing where you can listen year by year to bird song since 1976. And the scale of bird loss in the UK is honestly terrifying. And if you remember, Dan Jorgensen said that the only podcast he listens to, apart from ours, it was one about birds. So the reason I think Caroline is contributing a question is because she's been spending a lot of, a lot of time in our studios because she's making a mini-series about climate and security.

• 30:34Alastair Campbell?

  And she's, part one is out on Friday. And I've listened to it. It is honestly, I think it's one of the best things we've done. Now, okay, with me, she's preaching to the converted, but she's, she's, she's interviewing in this one, a general, an army general, who is basically saying, this is a huge national security issue and we've got to wake up. She's interviewing somebody who has worked in the development world. It's, the interviews are really, really powerful. And, and this, this briefly, so, so the government commissioned under the Conservatives-

• 31:08Alastair Campbell?

  Carry through with this government, they commissioned this report by our intelligence agencies about the security threats of climate change. Honestly, Rory, it is absolutely terrifying. It is absolutely terrifying. We are close to tipping point on virtually all of them. And this is why I get so angry with these sort of Richard stupid Tyson, Trump saying that none of this matters, you know, just look around, just look out the window. You, we've had, we've had these, we've had forest fires in Derbyshire. We've had fires in Spain where British tourists were killed. Okay, we, we, we're just sort of letting this to happen. And okay, we all contribute. And every time I talk about this, people say, well,

• 31:51Alastair Campbell?

  don't go to an aeroplane and, you know, stop using this and stop the, and I know we can all do our bit. But I just think that the debate has got to get back to a place of saying, if we don't address this, this is where you and I agree. I saw some polling last week, people hate the phrase net zero. They hate it because it's been weaponized. But they still support in exactly the same numbers as five years ago, the proposition that climate change is real and that it's damaging our lives. Okay. So that's where you've got to win the argument. And just this, so far this year, and okay, the, the Richard stupid ties people say, oh, it's the establishment figures, right. But the UK Health Security Agency thinks there were 1500 heat related deaths last summer, 800

• 32:34Alastair Campbell?

  million pound in crop losses for British farming, and that so far this year, 2,700 people in England or Wales have been killed by the previous heatwave. Okay, so that's 440 deaths a day at its peak, which that obviously these may be mainly elderly people who will be dying anyway, but they're people who would not have died were it not for the, the, the, the pressure that the heat was putting on their bodies and their underlying conditions. So anyway, Caroline's series is going to be great. Let's just do a little trailer now, but I strongly recommend everybody listens to Caroline on climate and national security.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  Drill, baby, drill. What if the biggest threat to UK security isn't conventional warfare, but the collapse of the natural world itself?

• 33:20Speaker 04

  In the last seven years, it's changed. There has never been a June day as hot as today.

• 33:25Alastair Campbell?

  The impacts of this destabilization will profoundly impact every country on earth.

• 33:31Speaker 03

  Because it's been revealed that ministers have tried to suppress the publication of a report commissioned from their own intelligence community. Threats to the UK economy, to our food systems, to our geopolitical stability. The conclusions are frankly chilling. I'm Caroline Lucas, and for the past four decades, I've been doing literally everything I can to try to persuade successive governments that they need to go further and faster to address the accelerating climate and nature crises. And now I'm making this series. Why? Because in all of those 40 years of environmental activism, I have never read an official report that has alarmed me as much as this one. Join me for when nature becomes a security threat, a new series from The Rest is Politics.

• 34:16Alastair Campbell?

  So there we are. That's a clip from Caroline Lucas, part one of the series. It's out on Friday, 17th of July for members, and then new episodes every Friday for several weeks thereafter. At the end of it, Rory, don't know if I've told you this yet, you and I are going to sit down with Caroline to do a question time special on that. And in well in advance of the question time that we're doing with Caroline Lucas, if you want to send us in your questions, anytime between now and then, just go to therestispolitics.com. Now let's take a break.

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• 36:09Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Rest is Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 36:12Alastair Campbell?

  And with me Alastair Campbell.

• 36:13Rory Stewart?

  Now, here's a question, Alistair, from Ben. Would Alistair help with Count Binface's campaign? When is he coming on? Now, Alistair, before you answer, just to explain for listeners who haven't been following the ins and outs of all this, as you explained in the main episode yesterday, Nigel Farage, facing these incredible problems and challenges about these millions of pounds of funding and these strange connections to Montenegrin based gamblers, has decided to resign from his seat, trigger a by-election in the hope of proving that the British public still backs him by standing against in his own seat. And he was hoping he would be running against all the major parties and he'd be able to prove that in the end the people of Clacton preferred reform to Conservative Labour,

• 36:57Rory Stewart?

  etc. They all decided that they weren't going to run. And so the only people running are a very strange British tradition, which exists, I think, more in Britain than in most other countries, of comedy candidates, of whom the leading one is a man called Count Binface. And I know Count Binface very, very well, because when I was running for the leadership, and again, when I was running to be Mayor of London, I was on the stage with Count Binface a great deal. We did a lot together on social media. We did a lot in studios together. Count Binface is a relatively tall man who wears a dustbin on his head and has a black cloak. So he looks a little bit like Darth Vader with a dustbin

• 37:38Rory Stewart?

  on his head. And he is capable sometimes of being quite funny. When he ran against Andy Burnham, his policy was he was going to build one affordable house in the constituency, which is good. It's a good joke at the expense of politicians who never build any. And he was going to rename HS2 as FFS2. Anyway, over to you, Alistair, on advice for Count Binface's communication strategy.

• 38:07Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, well, my favorite Binface policy is that he will force all water company chief executives to swim in the rivers for which they're responsible. That is a policy that I would wholeheartedly support. So would I help him? I am helping him, whether he likes it or not. I'm constantly publishing things. I'm, I'm, I'm producing a pledge card based on our 1997 pledge card. He doesn't know that I'm doing this, but he's more than welcome to have it because I don't want him to get in trouble with financing. And of course, you know, my going rate, as you know, Rory, for a campaign is probably about $3 million a minute. So, so the pledge card, my, and this is my pledge card for Count Binface.

• 38:47Alastair Campbell?

  One, I will hold weekly constituency surgeries, unspoken, because Nigel Farage never does. Two, I will answer all letters and emails within three days. Three, for every day I spend overseas, I will spend 10 days in Clacton. Four, any outside earnings that I make will be donated to charities in Clacton. Five, on a postcode lottery basis, I will help one family per week put their bins out. Now, I think that is a great local campaign. When, when Cat Nealan did the series on funding of reform, she said the thing that the people in Clacton most complained about with Farage is that he's never there.

• 39:25Rory Stewart?

  I think it's brilliant. But I just, just in the next iteration, as you develop this, I, I think one of the things that was so brilliant about his campaign, where he says, I'm going to build one affordable house in the constituency, is the use of satire to point out the massive failures of the other side. And, and so if you can begin to develop a few more lines, which are, I think the stuff about foreign travel is good, but things that are simultaneously very funny, but are also a beautiful way of satirizing, exposing the problem with Farage. So something maybe which you could do around Montenegro and casinos and gambling and, actually, I'll give a bit of a plug here for Al Murray. This

• 40:07Rory Stewart?

  week, Al Murray, who's the co-host of our sister show, We Have Ways to Make You Talk, will be writing in our newsletter about the time that, like Binface, he took on Nigel Farage, and will be sharing some of his advice accounts. So be interested, Alistair, what you make of Al Murray's views, because I think a comedian can be really good on this. To receive that piece, sign up to our newsletter. The link is in the episode description. The reason I'm interested in this is I think it's something that stand-up comedians can be really, really good at, because what you want ideally is to find something that is both really funny, but also is making a killing point that actually totally attacks the other side. We had one in Cumbria, Willie Whitehall, when he first ran, ran against a man called Mr. Brownrick.

• 40:49Rory Stewart?

  Who was in favour of home rule for Cumberland and fair wages for mole catchers was his his big deal. But the the key thing here is to go beyond fair wages for mole catchers and find three or four things which really embarrass Farage. And the more ludicrous they are, and the more they can be making in jokes about a very successful aristocrat, or jokes about security.

• 41:16Alastair Campbell?

  You should just do one, because what's happening is people are just doing stuff and pumping it out there. So somebody's done an absolutely brilliant Count Binface version of the Obama Hope poster. It's absolutely beautiful. And so that's doing the house. Somebody has made a really, really professional, powerful party election broadcast for Count Binface. Count Binface doesn't know about any of this stuff happening. It's just all happening. I've seen Count Binface this week already on Australian television, American television, German television. The guy's got momentum.

• 41:47Rory Stewart?

  And and how how well is he doing? Listen, so just quickly on television, is is he as funny as he could be? I mean, or is it a little bit plodding? Is it basically just one joke that he has been on his head?

• 41:57Alastair Campbell?

  No, he's quite good. He's quite good.

• 41:59Rory Stewart?

  Oh, good. Because because a few years ago, it wasn't it wasn't that brilliant.

• 42:02Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he did an he did an interview. I was on his podcast a few months ago. So people can look at that as well. And he's clever. He knows about politics. He understands politics. And it's so interesting how when you're doing an interview with him, I had a 45 minute interview with him. Once you get through the joke at the start, you're talking to a dustbin. But it feels perfectly natural. When he asks you a serious question, you give a serious answer. Then you remember, oh, I'm talking to a dustbin. And but don't forget, Rory, that other people who have started out as these so called novelty candidates, they've gone on to win. We had the monkey in Hartlepool, who became the mayor. He was the football team mascot. We had the former Alan Howling Lord Hope, who was the leader of the official Monster Raving Looney Party, after the great Lord Such, who sadly ended

• 42:46Alastair Campbell?

  his own life at the end of last century. But he was a he was the real kind of star novelty candidate of all time. Alan Hope became the deputy mayor and then the mayor of Ashburton. And then we had Stuart Basil Faulty Hughes. He was the first Looney, a member of the official Monster Raving Looney Party, to win a contested election. And he went on to become the Devon Highways chief. So stuff can happen, Binface. And but the great, listen, let's be honest, Rory, the great thing is that Nigel Farage, who set this contest up as him against the establishment, it is him against a dustbin. And hopefully, it will be his route towards it.

• 43:25Rory Stewart?

  Well, nothing can possibly go right for him, can it? Because if he beats the dustbin, nobody's that impressed that he's won against the dustbin. If he loses against the dustbin, well, we're in a different world.

• 43:38Alastair Campbell?

  I'm going to make a little risky prediction.

• 43:40Rory Stewart?

  Go on then.

• 43:41Alastair Campbell?

  He won't stand.

• 43:42Rory Stewart?

  Farage may not stand.

• 43:43Alastair Campbell?

  That's my prediction. I've got no evidence. I'm just saying, I'm doing what Farage is. I mean, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if that's the case. I don't know. I'm just saying, maybe.

• 43:52Rory Stewart?

  Wait, so Binface may actually walk it?

• 43:56Alastair Campbell?

  Well, no, because then you buy a Piers Corbyn. Piers Corbyn might then win it. He's done a very, he sent me his, I don't know why, but Piers Corbyn sent me his video this morning of him trolling along the beach in Clacton, reading a poem about himself. It's all going to be mad. It's all going to be completely crazy. And meanwhile, Andy Burnham can get in and be serious and what have you. Right, Rory, Dan Needle versus Gabriel Zucman. Jen says, thank you so much for the very thought provoking interview with Gabriel Zucman. This is the Mr. Well Tax from France. I'm minded to agree with Rory that the solutions offered by Zucman wouldn't be a panacea for all of our current problems. I do think Zucman has a point, though. If you do interview Dan Needle, could you ask him about policies that would address the sense of unfairness in the current system, and what could be

• 44:41Alastair Campbell?

  done to address it? And this debate has really taken off at the moment, because Gary Stevenson, while you're away, did a TV documentary, How Do You Get Filthy Rich? Dan Needle had a real go at him about, I haven't seen the film, I've read a lot about it. I suppose I should watch it, but I've been busy. And then we are getting lots of requests for people to say we should get Dan Needle and Zucman together. So I listened back this morning to the interview with Gabriel Zucman. I've got two observations, Rory. One is, I thought he was more impressive listening back than I thought at the time. And secondly, I felt real anger in you, that I didn't necessarily feel at the time. I felt you were really getting angry.

• 45:24Rory Stewart?

  That's interesting, isn't it? And it'd be interesting psychologically why I get wound up. I suppose there's a tendency to sort of celebrate people with what seem to be wonderfully kind of idealistic, transformative ideas, and to suggest that centrists like me, who are trying to run things in the way that things were traditionally run, are somehow unimaginative, corrupt, I don't know, whatever. And I feel a kind of passionate desire to try to not allow this idea to get out there. So I would hate to sit through an interview. I mean, look, I had a lot of sympathy with Gabriel, but I would hate to sit through something

• 46:05Rory Stewart?

  like that, just sort of indulging the idea that these taxes are going to work, make the British economy grow, or help people. And I get so frustrated, because something about politics has to be, I don't know, I get very, I suppose I get really wound up by very, very idealistic, hyper progressive politics, because you always, if you're like me, coming from the centre right, end up being the bad guy, having to try to explain why it's not working. And that, yes, you're right, it seems to generate generate rage. Yeah.

• 46:44Alastair Campbell?

  Because you know, you were quite enraged with Gabriel Attau, although he wasn't really, maybe it's the name Gabriel. And but no, because you were also, maybe it's the name's beginning with G, because you're also enraged with Gary Stevenson.

• 46:54Rory Stewart?

  Jamie Reuben wound me up?

• 46:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 46:56Rory Stewart?

  Jonathan Powell wound me up.

• 46:57Alastair Campbell?

  But I wonder whether it's, see, I get quite excited by big ideas and idealism. Somebody saying, look, we can save the planet, we can address issues of inequality. I wonder if it's when it's something that's so fundamental, a challenge, that you sort of feel your inner conservatism just kind of under attack. Because I thought he was, I thought he had a lot of really good points.

• 47:22Rory Stewart?

  Well, I also wonder whether it isn't that I get a bit irritated that you get to play the good guy. You get to be down with the kids and be the progressive and be like, oh, yeah, man, I'm really, and I know perfectly well that if, God forbid, you actually became our chancellor, you wouldn't sign up to any of this stuff.

• 47:37Alastair Campbell?

  No, but Rory, hold on, hold on. I, I said to him that I really struggle to see how this works in practice. Okay. But I think the other thing you do when we're interviewing people like this, is that you're treating them like politicians, when actually they're campaigners. He's an academic and a campaigner. Gary Stevenson is a campaigner. That's a very different thing. And I think there is a place for that. I also say, this was listening back to it, rather than being in the room. If you remember, we were both in quite a bad mood in the room, because it was so bloody hot, climate change. But I think that listening back, I found it unbelievably impressive that he was so fluent in English, around very quite complicated issues and quite complicated historical stuff as well. He really, really knew his stuff, I thought.

• 48:22Rory Stewart?

  He is a brilliant French professor, from the École Normale Supérieure, which is, you know, the one of the greatest French elite schools in the world, that produce Michel Foucault and Quang Guillaume and all these guys. So it's not surprising, the guys say, this is Raymond Raymond Aaron, Jean-Paul Sartre. I mean, you know, he's from the absolute elite of the French intellectual establishment. So you'd expect him to have an unbelievable memory and a quick brain. And he taught in University of California for years. But you look here, for example, let me, in a calmer voice, read you a response I got from a French businessman. The disconnect with people like Zucman is that they've never actually built a company from the ground up. At my company, the fiscal reality is immediate.

• 49:04Rory Stewart?

  He's running a company in the UK, this French businessman. We have to collect 20% VAT on our services before we see a profit. Once we start running operations, we pay a 45% effective tax rate on employees, including national insurance contributions. Profits are taxed 19%. He talks about personal holding companies, but they defer not abolish dividend taxes. In other words, you still have to pay the dividend tax in the end. The real issue with the likes of Zucman is the moral framing. They make entrepreneurs feel as though the act of creating value is suspect. Regardless of where the entrepreneur takes a single dividend, the company is acting as a tax collector. Zucman's politics is the politics of envy, pure and simple. So there we are. There was a calm French businessman

• 49:48Rory Stewart?

  who actually runs the company.

• 49:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, Rory, you're doing, you're doing what people do when they're under attack. You're finding the voice. I've got, I'm looking at a whole host of emails that we've received saying, why did Rory give that nice Gabriel Zucman such a hard time? And why is he so threatened by the idea of addressing inequality?

• 50:06Rory Stewart?

  I'm going to give anyone a hard time who comes in as an idealistic campaigner and expects to just get deferential treatment because they're progressive and good. I think it's our obligation, obligation intellectually, to be tough on people.

• 50:20Alastair Campbell?

  We have to disagree, agree every time, we have to do that.

• 50:22Rory Stewart?

  And we're going to get Dan Needle on, right?

• 50:23Alastair Campbell?

  Well, do you want to get them together? We should get, why do we, we can get them together, get them together.

• 50:27Rory Stewart?

  I don't know whether they'll do that. But I definitely think we should get Dan Needle on, because I think it's exactly what I'd love, because it's much less exciting for progressive listeners. But it's a man who really understands tax, really understands the real world, and can actually make more moderate centrist policies. So if people are really interested in this, rather than just, rather than just getting, they should listen to Needle. Yeah.

• 50:49Alastair Campbell?

  My final point in this, Rory, we'll go to the last question. But it's interesting how you didn't feel this about Yanis Varoufakis. And I wonder if that's because Yanis is much less playing the game of, I know I'm right about this. Whereas what I find with Gary Stevenson and Dan Needle, they both do the kind of, I know I'm right about this. Whereas I thought what Yanis does, he kind of, he explains things from all angles and then says, why, you know, on balance, I'm with that one. You didn't get irritated by him.

• 51:18Rory Stewart?

  No, I think exactly. I think, I think, and I think Yanis is, and I think that's a communication style that probably in the end is really powerful, which is accepting that things are complicated, that there are different views, and that on balance, you've come down on one side, rather than I've got a magic bullet that's going to fix everything.

• 51:35Alastair Campbell?

  Now, Rory, the biggest question, obviously, of the entire week is from Simon. Did you find the meaning of life on your meditative retreat?

• 51:46Rory Stewart?

  It's an incredible thing, these silent retreats. So this was effectively, I guess it was 11 nights, so almost 12 days, and you're, of which the silent bit is the core 10. It's a really amazing thing to do. I mean, we talk about travel, but it's probably the most extraordinary thing that you can do to yourself over 10 days, which is to not speak and meditate.

• 52:10Rory Stewart?

  Almost continuously from four in the morning until nine, nine thirty at night. And what that does to your mind and what you think about death, what you think about aging, change, meaning, purpose. And I've now, this is the fourth, so I guess I've now done my forty days and forty nights. One of the awful things about it is that you're talking to me two days later and I can already feel how much of it is getting lost, how much you revert. I mean, you, you, you pointed out when we started this thing that I was much calmer two days ago than I am now, that already the world is intruding again. But, but yes, that there is real meaning. I mean, there's real, real meaning. And I, here we are, this is my pitch.

• 52:55Rory Stewart?

  The purpose of the whole thing is to try to make you a better person, try to make you act more morally, have a, what they would call a purer mind, maybe a calmer mind. And I, I'm, I'm sure that that's probably for my money as close as I can get to the meaning of life. It's about daily improvements around the margins. You know, maybe a way of thinking about it would be if you previously got angry ten times, now you're only going to get angry nine times. Or if you brooded about something for five hours and now you're only going to brood about it for four hours. But just how you make those endless daily marginal improvements to try to be a little

• 53:37Rory Stewart?

  bit more loving, compassionate, and maybe for the podcast, focus on reality more. You know, what, what actually is the reality of the atoms that make up our body, about our deaths, about time, about just how things are, not how we want them to be, how they are.

• 53:54Alastair Campbell?

  Wow. Well, while you were speaking, I, I, I reached to the, the bookshelf where my most important books sit. You need this one, Rory. My friend Philip Gould, this is a book he wrote as he was dying. And he definitely, he definitely, as he was dying, he knew he was going to die. We're all going to die, so we all know we're going to die. You don't need to get chronically ill as he did to think about your life in the context of how it ends. I'm nearly seventy now, I think about it quite a lot. So that sounds really interesting and meaningful. But when you say you've lost it just in two days, what was it? When you came out and thought, I must phone Alastair and find out what's been happening in the world. I presume you phoned Shoshana first, did you?

• 54:37Rory Stewart?

  I saw Shoshana first, yes, before you. Yes, I'm afraid, yeah, yeah.

• 54:41Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, good, good, good. Excellent, excellent. I, I, I want that to be the case. So what's the difference between now and two days? Is it just that you're, when you're meditating for all that time, what are you actually thinking about? What's actually happening inside your head?

• 54:55Rory Stewart?

  In this tradition, you're trying to think about only one thing, which is impermanence, that things are changing. I mean, you're, you're literally trying to drive all thoughts out of your mind, except as you scan your body, you're in the framework of your body and you're following small sensations around your body, you're just thinking, this too will pass, arising, passing away, arising, passing away, changing, changing, changing. And the point is that every atom and cell in your body is dying and being reborn. And you're aging and you're dying and the world around you is changing, changing, changing. And that, that's all you're thinking about.

• 55:35Alastair Campbell?

  And what, and what happens if you suddenly have a thought that comes into your head saying, I wonder if England is still in the World Cup, or I wonder if, if the ceasefire is held? What happened? What do you do with that thought?

• 55:45Rory Stewart?

  So that happens a lot. And of course, when it happens, you, you often don't notice for a few seconds that your mind started doing that. So your mind starts saying, you know, um, oh, I wonder what's happened in the World Cup? I wonder what Alastair's thinking as England's in the World Cup. And then you catch it. Hopefully you catch it within five, 10 seconds. But you, it could be two, three minutes before you notice that your mind's wandered off down all these sort of fun, funny parts. And then you just have to bring it back to whatever you're concentrating on, on the breath coming in and out of your nose or the sensation in your body. And try again, just to sit with it very calmly, very patiently, back with the thing. Cause you're trying not to, yeah, you, you're trying not to get agitated either by pleasant

• 56:30Rory Stewart?

  sensations or unpleasant sensations. So let's say you felt anger and you became aware of the physical manifestations, a tight chest or hair thing. You would just sit with it. You wouldn't try to control it or get rid of it. You'd just sit with it and you'd say, hmm, it's interesting. And this is changing, it's changing, it's moving around.

• 56:51Rory Stewart?

  You're trying to develop, one of the problems is we don't really have words for these things. The, the word that this guy comes up with is equanimity, which I think is a very kind of pompous word and it's quite difficult to put a finger on. But essentially the idea is, is that you're not reacting to either your negative or positive emotions, you're letting them play out.

• 57:15Alastair Campbell?

  I don't, I don't think I could do it for an hour. I don't think I could do it.

• 57:21Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 57:24Alastair Campbell?

  Does anybody ever leave?

• 57:25Rory Stewart?

  Yes, people, people leave, people leave. Yeah, there's suddenly vacant spaces because you can't talk to anyone. And I was doing it with, I was doing it, this was a Burmese course where it's mostly being taught in Burmese with mostly blue collar Burmese immigrants, US security guards, um, furniture fixers. And suddenly you'd notice, you couldn't speak to them, but you could see them and they would suddenly, there wouldn't be someone there anymore. It's also true that different people react in different ways. I mean, you're supposed to sit with your eyes totally closed, not open them or move your legs or your arms for an hour. And some people find that difficult. They feel an itch suddenly developing on their cheek, can't resist kind of opening an eyelid.

• 58:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, good to have you back, Rory.

• 58:03Rory Stewart?

  Lovely, lovely to be back. I'll try to keep a bit of the calm. Maybe if I'd done this before Zucman's, things would be better. Yeah. All right. Thank you, Alastair. You're looking well. And, and look, listen, pretty, pretty exciting. I know you're, you know, we're both Scotland fans, but pretty exciting about England. It is pretty exciting, though.

• 58:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. I think, I think we're recording this Tuesday morning.

• 58:24Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, most people in football think that the final is tonight, France against Spain, whoever wins that will win the World Cup. But I, I just don't think you can think like that because once it's down to one game, they're all four now, very, very good teams. And England have, and the one thing I will say, I'm not, you know, a flag waver, but I will say that this particular bunch, I like the German manager, Tuchel, but this particular bunch of players, particularly the really well-known ones, they're, they're bloody good role models. I mean, they are really, you know, positive, project a good sense of themselves and of what they do. And I've actually really, really enjoyed the World Cup. I've really enjoyed it much, much more than I thought I would.

• 59:04Rory Stewart?

  Fingers crossed. All right, Alastair, lovely to see you. Speak soon, next week. Bye-bye.

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