579. Trump’s Public Execution Order and Burnham’s Brexit Intervention

How does Marco Rubio’s Parthenon speech fit the Trump administration’s ideas on European “civilisational erasure” – and how does it depart from traditional Republican rhetoric? With Pete Hegseth’s announcement of America’s first public execution since 1936 sparking outrage, are Trump’s likely successors, Vance and Rubio, staying loyal to their boss or quietly breaking from him? As Iran-backed Houthi attacks hit Saudi Arabia, can anyone predict Trump’s next move in the Middle East? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. __________ Enjoy Rory and Alastair’s interview with Andy Burnham 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. Sponsored by Lloyds. Move faster with daily global market analysis, the download on tokenisation and how to manage your company's energy transition all from Lloyds Corporate & Institutional Banking. Search Lloyds Corporate. __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Emma Jackson Video Editor: Caroline Kaye, Adam Thornton Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne, Evie Townend Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Bella Soames 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.

• 0:08Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to The Restless Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 0:10Alastair Campbell?

  And with me Alastair Campbell. And Rory, we're going to talk lots about America, lots about Saudi and Yemen and India. And we will also have a discussion about our interview with Andy Burnham and the political consequences thereof, which appeared to dominated life in the House of Commons yesterday. But let's kick off with your friend Donald Trump.

• 0:31Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's been quite a week, hasn't it? This is the week in which Donald Trump failed to win the Nobel Peace Prize and told Norway that there would be consequences. This is the week in which his Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has announced that he intends to hold a public execution, making the United States one of very few countries, along, I think, with Iran and Afghanistan, that still wants to do public executions. This is the week in which Marco Rubio stood down in front of the Parthenon on the Pnix at the Acropolis and made a great claim for the superiority of Western civilization, inviting Europe to join America in its civilizational project.

• 1:12Rory Stewart?

  And I think it's also the week in which we've seen again the extraordinary move of Trump to announce that diesel restrictions will be lifted on Putin after, I think, a 90-minute call with Putin massively helping the Russian economy, making probably a much smaller contribution to the American economy ahead of the midterms, seriously weakening Ukraine and when Zelensky complained, saying, well, they should get rid of Zelensky and get another president in. So I'm interested in this because this is just a seven-day period. And I think we're moving now from what might be called Trump Derangement Syndrome to Trump Reality Syndrome and really getting people to sit with what this is. Because one of the things that you and I often encounter when we talk to business people,

• 1:57Rory Stewart?

  particularly American business people, is that there are still a remarkable number of people out there wanting to be contrarian and saying, he's not as bad as everyone makes out and it's all going to be fine and there's no reason to react in any radical way to this. And I just would like us to sit with the last six days as a way of reminding people just how serious this is. Over to you. This episode is powered by Fuse Energy.

• 2:19Alastair Campbell?

  Most energy companies are counting on you doing absolutely nothing, not questioning what you're paying, not switching, just letting your tariff roll on, which is costing you hundreds of pounds every year.

• 2:30Rory Stewart?

  But the apathy goes deeper than our bills. We've almost given up on energy itself. We seem to all be accepting energy is expensive, the system's outdated, but that complacency is costing us.

• 2:41Alastair Campbell?

  Fuse Energy does not accept that because the energy transition is not something that just happens somewhere else.

• 2:48Rory Stewart?

  Fuse is building an energy company which is designed to bring down the cost of energy and right now its tariffs are up to £100 below the off-gem price cap.

• 2:58Alastair Campbell?

  So switching isn't just about paying less, it's about expecting more from your energy company and it only takes you three minutes.

• 3:05Rory Stewart?

  Switch to Fuse at fuseenergy.com/politics. Use the code POLITICS and you'll get a free trip plus subscription, allowing you to hear all the extraordinary members content that Alistair and I are now producing for you. Visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions.

• 3:25Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 3:27Alastair 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.

• 3:40Rory 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.

• 4:03Alastair 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?

• 4:10Rory 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.

• 4:28Alastair Campbell?

  This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate, an easy transfer and no surprises along the way. Wise keeps things simple. Wise is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies. Most transfers arrive instantly. Wise uses the mid-market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees. So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee and get on with it.

• 5:14Alastair Campbell?

  Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the Wise app today. Be smart, get wise, Ts and Cs apply.

• 5:23Alastair Campbell?

  There's so much goes on in Trump land that sort of turns our heads. The other thing was fresh sanctions on the International Criminal Court. He was obviously very, very upset, not only that he didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize, but it was given to a woman of colour from South Africa, whereas you know, if you're Donald Trump or Elon Musk, the only people to be concerned about there are the poor, persecuted, white South Africans. And this is a woman who has fought for justice, the rule of law and all of the things that he doesn't believe in. And then the other thing is this extraordinary story about members of his family who've been involved in this attempted interference of the elections in Bosnia. So there's so much stuff going on. Oh, and then the other one that I forgot was of course him coming out in favour of

• 6:08Alastair Campbell?

  these young men as part of a university frat club who are being, some of whom are being pursued for rate charges because a woman that he now calls a dog is involved in the prosecution case against them. So I agree with you. I mean, I'm up in Scotland and I've just been talking to an event where there were Americans there as well as Europeans. And I think, I find it impossible now to talk about Trump without really getting offended that we even have to talk about him so much because he's so poisonous, so damaging to so many of the things that I think most British people care about. And yet, there he is, we're coming up to the midterms.

• 6:51Alastair Campbell?

  The thing with the diesel, I mean, if he'd have done a deal with Canada, he could have got more diesel cheaper. But of course, Canada is an enemy because it doesn't want to play his silly 51st state game. The amount of diesel that he's actually getting out of Putin is, I think it will last about 14 hours in the American economy. It's not that big a deal. So you've sold out, you've upset the Indians because don't forget, it's not that long ago, Trump was sort of talking about sanctions on India because they were taking Russian diesel and helping keep the Russian economy afloat. So this is all just mad, crazy stuff.

• 7:28Rory Stewart?

  Just quickly, I mean, just while you're on a roll, and maybe you were about to say this, we were with Kellyanne Conway last week, who people will remember was Trump's campaign manager in 2016 and like many of his closest allies, a frequent appear on Fox News, in which she got really angry with both of us, and I think particularly with you, for suggesting that Trump was not fully supportive of Ukraine and Zelensky and told this extraordinary story saying, you know, he told Putin where to get off and he'd been, you know, he'd been very supportive of Zelensky and Zelensky keeps saying nice things about him. So just sort of develop that from what you felt listening to Kellyanne Conway and that whole account from the Trump administration of them being pro-Ukraine.

• 8:10Alastair Campbell?

  Well, at one point she accused me of being Trump Derangement Syndrome Level 5 and I proudly said, no, I'm much worse than that. I'm at least Level 6 or 7. It was a pretty, I find it like, almost like a sort of out of body experience because I thought we were talking about parallel universes. You know, she, just to give you one example, she was basically talking about the midterms and she was saying that if the Republicans don't do very well, and by the way, Trump's always been underestimated, if they don't do very well, it's because they haven't used Trump enough. And they know that if they use Trump properly, it helps them. Okay. Get this Rory, 1% of Republican campaign materials in this election mentioned Trump.

• 8:55Alastair Campbell?

  20% of Democrat materials mentioned Trump. They know that he has become a problem and yet you listen to her and everything that he says is right, everything he does is good. And for her to sit there when we remember the way that Zelensky was treated by Vance and by Trump and the fact that he's met Putin so many times and Zelensky, she got very upset when I talked about Kushner and Whitkoff being these clowns who go and do their own deals rather than make progress on Iran and Ukraine. But she talked, she talks of Trump like he's some kind of god. And of course, there are people who think of him in those terms, but I don't think you and I were amongst them. You were very polite though Rory, and at one point you were, you were having to calm me down a little bit.

• 9:38Alastair Campbell?

  You kept, you kept whispering on the platform, talk about France, talk about France.

• 9:43Rory Stewart?

  Oh, dear me. Listen, let's, maybe the thing that sat with me most amongst all these things was that speech in front of the Acropolis, in front of the Parthenon, given by Marco Rubio.

• 9:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 9:59Rory Stewart?

  And it's weird saying that, given what's happening. Because just to develop a couple of points you made, you reminded us about the International Criminal Court. What's interesting about the International Criminal Court is that Trump has made it clear that this is purely because they went after Netanyahu. In fact, he says this in a press conference where Rubio was trying to say it's about a broader international principle. And Trump interrupts the Secretary of State and says, no, no, no, he's being a bit fancy here. This is about one thing and one thing only, it's about the fact that they're going after Netanyahu. He began his sanctions against the International Criminal Court uh some months ago. And what happened is people lost access to their Google accounts and their Microsoft accounts.

• 10:43Rory Stewart?

  And then one of the judges lost access to their bank accounts. And this was a really interesting moment because what happened is the US president said, signaled that he thought these were unfriendly people and the companies fell over themselves to disable the access. And one of those companies had just made a statement reassuring Europeans that if they bought their products, they had full sovereign control and there was no way the United States could disable. And this is important, right? Because we're building our entire economies on cloud computing, on Google, on Microsoft. And what we've found with the International Criminal Court is that first moment where America is weaponizing our dependency

• 11:28Rory Stewart?

  on cloud computing and basic software against European allies, and in this case, a big international institution, right? This is not uh how this started. This started back in the day and I I did this um in fact for people who've been listening to the mini series. I I did a a long bit with Ed Fishman, which I thought was fascinating on the beginning of the story of America weaponizing this stuff, which begins with nine eleven and Iran and how do you chase down terrorists and unfriendly states? But it's the moment at which it turns against us. So I thought that was really interesting and I'm sorry I didn't talk about it enough. And it it goes to everything that we are going to go on and talk about in terms of middle powers and how Andy Burnham as a new prime minister gets any kind of sovereign independence for Britain.

• 12:11Rory Stewart?

  If in the end, the US president is saying that almost everything we've built on American platforms can be switched off at at will. And of course, you've made the same point with Ukraine because he's threatening to turn off the satellites again, threatening to suspend the ability of Europe to even purchase weapons for Ukraine. I mean, remember again, this is what Kellyanne Conway didn't want to take on board, which is America has stopped paying, stopped fifty billion dollars of payments. So it's European money paying for all this stuff, but America is still somehow managing to dominate a lot of the command and control from places like Germany, where American generals are overseeing a huge amount of the targeting and things with Europe paying for it all. Um but it's the it's the Athens speech that worried me most. Did did you see the Athens speech?

• 12:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, I did. Yes, I did. I did. And um I look, I I I agree with your assessment of it. I I I sometimes, I actually said at this event I was at this morning, I look at, I mean JD Vance, I think we've always kind of known what he is. I look at Marco Rubio and I just, I sort of wonder where his soul has gone. Um I thought, and and that speech fitted very much into the frame of European civilization or erasure. He was essentially saying, look, here I am in Europe. You guys used to be really good at stuff. You had the Greeks and you had the Romans and Europe was pretty cool for a while. But let's get with the program. It's all about us now and you're not really very smart anymore. That was kind of, you know, if I if I drill down into the into the rhetoric. And just on the um this diesel situation.

• 13:39Alastair Campbell?

  So he criticizes Zelensky for hitting Russian oil installations, diesel installations, much more than he ever does Putin for dropping the bombs left, right and centre on civilian infrastructure and on kids and on hospitals. There was one on kindergarten the other day. I mean, maybe let's come back to um America and talk about the midterms. But maybe this is the place to talk about the interview with Andy Burnham. Because I found this, you know, he clearly, I don't know what your impression was of the interview overall, but my sense was that that we didn't sort of press him on this Russia thing. It wasn't as if I was saying as I might have done, come on, Andy, for God's sake, call it out for what it is. This was the bloody Russians getting involved. They were manipulating the media left, right and centre.

• 14:22Alastair Campbell?

  Farage and Aaron Banks, they were right at the heart of all this, et cetera, et cetera. He, I think, as part of what is clearly, I think, a plan to get the country re re litigating or re debating Britain's relationship with Europe. He put this out there. And the way that, I mean, for Johnson, for Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, both to be bleating about Brexit and lies in the same sentence is quite a thing, given that, you know, they told more than anybody.

• 14:53Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, just just to bring um listeners in, this was our interview with Andy Burnham, went out on leading. And it was a really, I mean, I I'd love people to listen. And Shishana felt that he came across very, very well. I mean, she just began by saying what a relief it was to hear someone who sounded like a human.

• 15:10Rory Stewart?

  She thought maybe some of the answers around AI and things were a bit duller and quite got that. But basically, she had a very, very warm sense of him. But the reason it's gone really viral, I mean, this is this is the biggest thing we've done um in some time, right?

• 15:26Alastair Campbell?

  Since Al Shara.

• 15:27Rory Stewart?

  We mentioned a peer in the House of Commons where both Kemi Badenoch and Andy Burnham were quoting the rest of his politics and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Is um partly because of this big, big claim that uh there is evidence that Russia was involved in in the Brexit referendum, which is something that your friend Carol Kudwala has been saying for some time. That's one of her campaigns too.

• 15:47Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, absolutely, yeah. And and look, and they they squeal like hell when you even sort of mention it. And and what's even funnier is that they they use a combination of the Kremlin line. This is all a lie. We don't interfere. And the Trump line, which is it's the Russia hoax. So Nigel Farage comes, brings them together and says, Andy Burnham's a liar. This is the Russia hoax. Why do, when Andy Burnham stands up at the United Nations General Assembly and says that Russia spends over a billion dollars a year on manipulation of information in democratic countries? Why do they do that?

• 16:27Alastair Campbell?

  They've got hospitals they need to service, they've got roads they need to build, they've got an economy they need to run, they've got a war they need to pay for. They do it because it fits their strategic purpose, which is trying to divide Europe, break Europe apart. And the tragedy for the the period we're living through is that Trump's playing the same game. But I I thought it was very deliberate. And it's interesting, you mentioned Shishana, Fiona said that she said, she said her reaction was it's just great to hear somebody being a bit bold about this stuff, not being on the back foot the whole time. And I'm just so relieved that we're no longer pretending that there's any attempt to quote and make Brexit work. You can, you can live with it and we have to live with it for now. But you can't make it work in the way that the liars who gave it to us said that they would.

• 17:11Rory Stewart?

  It's interesting also that we got a lot of coverage on the fact that uh in the interview, he said that he thought that uh the live execution was abhorrent. And I was thinking about that because Iran and Afghanistan have live executions. But the Taliban live executions um feel more as though it's an attempt to reimagine an early medieval world. I mean, that's that's people literally gathering a crowd in the way that you would have done in medieval England around an execution. When Pete Hegseth does it, it's the cruelty of the modern social media. I mean, he's implying that this is going to be livestreamed and something that could be seen.

• 17:52Rory Stewart?

  A a man in a wheelchair being shot by uh eleven or twelve men, presumably in a firing squad, livestreamed and presumably seen by hundreds of millions of people and it's as the snuff movie.

• 18:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 18:04Rory Stewart?

  Uh so I I'm interested in that also because in trying to pin down what the problem is in being too reliant on the United States, which is an argument we keep having. And it was something that we were pushing into with Andy Burnham. And he was slightly, I think, still avoiding, he's not prepared to quite be as clear as Carney is about the fact that it's broken and we have a problem and we really need an intentional project to get away from this. But one of the things that we have to keep using these examples to illustrate is it's not just about America doing really big damaging things. It's more a style often of humiliation, bullying, cruelty. So there's the big stuff, right? We're going to try to take Greenland from you.

• 18:48Rory Stewart?

  Or we're going to cut off the satellite access for Ukraine or we're going to lift Russian diesel. But there's just the continual abuse, humiliation. For example, the video that Trump made, the AI video of him beating up Carney on an ice hockey pitch with Carney begging for mercy and now this live streaming of a public execution. And so in working out why we need to now separate ourselves more from the United States, it's partly about that we have to begin to separate ourselves from. A country that can do that. I mean, that's so far beyond our disagreement with the United States being that we didn't have the death penalty and they did. This is this is getting into a different world of indignity.

• 19:30Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it took, I said that we didn't sort of push him on Brexit. He came up with the the the Russian stuff. But actually, on the Trump and the the Hegseth execution, that was a little bit sort of kind of second, third time of trying. He said, you know, I find it abhorrent. If you think about the other things that he said, I think that even the things that he said on on Europe, I think would not necessarily have been fed back to Washington with sort of, you know, roses and and and whistles and bells. So I think what he's doing, I think what Mark Carney is doing is both showing and telling that there is a totally different world and we're going to have to deal with it. I think what

• 20:11Alastair Campbell?

  Andy Burnham is at this stage at the moment is is showing and not so much telling. But there is, I think, quite a lot, quite a lot of show. We should just say, Rory, we started and ended the interview with a mention of Steve Rotherham and the series we did on Becoming Burnham, the mini series. I really think that is a both the book they wrote together, but also that series with Steve Rotherham. I think they will be useful resources about Andy Burnham as we go through his premiership, because I think Steve Rotherham said so many interesting things that we're now seeing play out. So all you have to do is become a member at therestispolitics.com. Just on the on the the midterms, Rory, I've been looking at the the betting markets and the polls. So back in July, you and I said that

• 20:56Alastair Campbell?

  we agreed that the Democrats were almost certainly going to win the House, and that to win the Senate was going to be a very tough fight because they're going to have to win five of these seven states, Alaska, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Maine and Iowa.

• 21:10Rory Stewart?

  That was the conventional wisdom three months ago, wasn't it?

• 21:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And as as things stand, on the current polling, the Democrats are leading in all seven. And in the betting markets, the betting markets, they're doing not quite as well as in the polls. That's I don't know what that reveals. But in the betting markets, they're clear favourites, like clear, seventy percent, sixty five percent, that sort of thing, in six out of seven. And the only one where they're behind is Iowa, where there's slight underdoubts on the betting, but they are ahead in the polls. So just say North Carolina, in the polls, ninety five percent, the betting markets, ninety five percent. In Texas, the polls, seventy percent, the betting markets, sixty percent.

• 21:56Rory Stewart?

  And and Texas, Texas, I mean, Texas, the state, the obvious is huge. I mean, that's that's that's, you know, real deep, deep Republican territory.

• 22:04Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Trump, Trump had a lead in Texas in twenty twenty four of fourteen points. He had thirteen in Alaska, he had thirteen in Iowa, he had fourteen, eleven in in in Ohio. And the other thing that's happening, I mean, Trump went to some very strange places on his little tour. He went to some of the most Republican states in America. Now, was that because the candidates in the in the marginal states were saying, please don't come here, please make sure he goes to, you know, somewhere where we'd never ever go to lose. But people are now talking about Kansas and Nebraska as being kind of within range, as it were, which would be. Now, I don't think we should get too excited, because as you may recall, Rory, there were people who were absolutely nailed on convinced that Trump was not going to win.

• 22:46Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. If there's a big, big lesson for me in any of this, it's that trusting the polls or even the betting markets is pretty dangerous in the modern world going up to any election because it changes very quickly. But it's worth mentioning that I'm going to be going with the team to cover the midterms in the States. So I'll be in Clinton, Ohio, and and in a lot of the more rural areas. So in order to compensate for my over focus on the cities, I'm going to be back in the rural Midwest of America, trying to cover some of these marginal seats. So I'll be there from next week.

• 23:20Alastair Campbell?

  That's good. I would, of course, be with you, but I've I'm sticking to my not going to America during the four years of the second term. Just on Nate Silver, the guy who everybody talks about as being the sort of, you know, the one who's kind of, I don't know whether his record bears up the sort of sense of this being the sort of the guru.

• 23:37Rory Stewart?

  Wasn't so clear on the last one. I didn't think he gave us the very, it was not very helpful towards those of us that were not sure whether Trump was going to win.

• 23:44Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. But on this one, he has got Democratic control of the House, ninety two point nine percent. That's up from eighty five at the start of August. And the Senate, seventy three point eight, which he had at fifty fifty on September the sixth. And Trump's ratings, Rory, they're just, they're in the tank. I mean, Kellyanne Conway, talking about him as though he's this amazingly popular and we're all underestimating him and blah, blah, blah. But, you know, we have to, we have to assume that these polls, when they say to people, do you approve or disapprove? And people tend historically, even if they didn't vote for a president, they tend to lean towards giving them the benefit of the doubt. He has got the lowest ratings now since ratings began. And right across the

• 24:28Alastair Campbell?

  issues, the economy, immigration, or trade, or Iran. So he's in trouble.

• 24:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 24:34Alastair Campbell?

  Rejoice.

• 24:35Rory Stewart?

  He's in trouble. Which brings me back to Rubio, because the temptation will be to say, as people said after the first Trump, that the guy's finished, he's going, he's not standing again, thank goodness, and we can all go back to normal with the United States. So I think it's worth looking at J D Vance and Rubio, who are two of the leading contenders to replace Trump as president, to show what United States could be like after Trump. And it's worth looking at that part in the speech a little bit, because it's a speech which will have fooled and charmed some listeners, because it's quite complimentary towards Europe. As you say, the undercurrent of it is actually slightly

• 25:18Rory Stewart?

  strange. The undercurrent of it is essentially to say, Greek civilization is about greatness. Greek civilization is about heroism. Greek civilization is about excellence. Greek civilization is against mediocrity. And it's about knowing that when we're great, we deserve it. And the general sense is America, in his vision, is really, really kind of great in that sense, big, kind of muscular, successful, and we deserve our place in the world. And the implication was that if Europe pulls its socks up and becomes kind of grand and great and competitive and more like Trump's America, then they might be allowed to join the club and come along. And this is the kind of offer that Rubio is making. It is the most astonishing

• 26:02Rory Stewart?

  speech. I mean, because it is so much more radical in terms of its vision of the world than I think people understand. It's very, very, very familiar, unfortunately, to people like me, because it's essentially the sort of speech that a Victorian headmaster made to English public schoolboys going out to govern the empire. It's a, it's a speech, and I think it's lifted from that stuff, because the genealogy goes from Victorian empire to people like Theodore Roosevelt writing in the late eighteen nineties. And it's absolutely, we are the heirs of Achilles, we're the heirs of the ancient Greeks, we are the great muscular Christians going out to rule the world. And he, you know, he cites

• 26:44Rory Stewart?

  Cortez, the conquistador in Spain, as, you know, one of these great figures, Christopher Columbus, these kind of people. And the story that the British told themselves the nineteenth century, which is the story Rubio is repeating, is that, you know, Britain had a right to rule the world, because, you know, we were kind of excellent and advanced and civilized, and other people should sort of accept that we deserve our greatness and and put up with our control. Now, this was not the American Republican tradition, which is why this is so sinister, because it sounds much more like empires of the nineteenth century, it sounds much more like justifications of slavery, it sounds much more like some of the language of the thirties and forties. The American Republican tradition was completely different.

• 27:27Rory Stewart?

  I mean, Kennedy famously in his inaugural doesn't say, you know, there are great civilizations and by implication barbarians, right? He says, you remember, he says, we all breathe the same air. We all have children. We're all mortal, right? He's trying to make this universal. Clinton, in his inaugural, is all about shared global goods. Eisenhower is all about warning people about the dangers of American power. John Quincy Adams would have said, and this is right back in the eighteen twenties, would have said to someone like Rubio, you know, the danger is America could become the most powerful mistress of the world, but lose control of itself, right? I mean, it would, it's the corruption of power. And

• 28:09Rory Stewart?

  It's really troubling, really, really troubling, because it keeps coming back to the central theme, which I think a lot of the episode today is about, which is that we are increasingly in an abusive, coercive relationship with somebody or a culture expressed through the Republican Party that appears to want to say their way or the highway, they're the civilization, the other people are barbarians, and have actually lost all history. I mean, their description, the whole description that Rubio gives is not really a description of an ancient Greek. Aristotle would be horrified by this stuff. It's actually a description of an ancient Iranian, an ancient Persian, right? They were the people who were all about,

• 28:51Rory Stewart?

  you know, riding horses, shooting bows, speaking truth, warrior people. Anyway, over to you.

• 28:57Alastair Campbell?

  I wonder, look, what happens post-Trump is fascinating, but I can't work out the extent to which Vance and Rubio, who, as you say, are right up there as sort of potential, leading potential successors as the Republican nominee, I can't work out whether they're trying to stay close to Trump or in certain ways depart from him. So it's very interesting that Vance, and whether this is his Catholicism or his worries about the Catholic vote or whatever, but he didn't sound very keen about this public execution. He said he would not be watching it. He sort of gave an indication that he thought that Pete Hegseth was shooting

• 29:41Alastair Campbell?

  from the hip and he should have kept his mouth shut. Rubio's speech, I felt, in front of the Parthenon, I felt was much closer to something that he would think, even though it was a bit too airy-fairy for Trump, that actually if Trump was watching now the TV, and we've talked to people in the administration before who've said, you've just got to understand, these guys operate on the assumption that Trump might see them on television, okay? And he would have thought this is much more in kind of Trump territory. I can't help thinking there must be a natural law of political gravity that says that who actually eventually emerges won't be from the Trump orbit.

• 30:20Rory Stewart?

  I think the problem, though, for the rest of us, is that it's not clear that there is a big constituency anymore for the old American vision of rules and alliances in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, really. I'm beginning to think that that whole world from the Second World War through to 2016 will begin to seem like a strange exception in which Republicans and Democrats together assumed that there were Western alliances, that Canada was a friend, Russia was an enemy, that their job was to try to underpin NATO or United Nations institutions, keep open the sea lanes, and that they needed

• 31:01Rory Stewart?

  to accept restraints on their power and talk about universal values and say that they're not just there for American power, they're there for helping other people. Because I think there's the Republican version that we're seeing, and it's not just Vance and Rubio. I mean, Elbridge Colby, you know, has said about the Middle Powers, it's a complete waste of time, they're never going to be able to do it, and they don't have the resources to do it. Which is essentially, I keep coming back to this, it's the abusive spouse saying, I can humiliate you and abuse you, but what are you going to do about it? You know, you're not going to be able to, what are you going to do? Get your own house, get your own job? I mean, it's this very contemptuous attitude. But from the left, it will be different. From the left, it might be isolationism driven by guilt, driven by a sense that America just makes everything worse, given by a sense that they have priorities at home. But none

• 31:46Rory Stewart?

  of this adds up to providing a reliable alliance structure for the future, which is why getting with the Carney program and trying to work out how you talk about that, how you design for that, how you get to that, and how difficult that is, because you're doing it in the face of, I mean, if I continue with my abusive spouse analogy, in the face of abusive spouse that's going to make it as difficult as possible for you to leave that house.

• 32:12Alastair Campbell?

  Your point about whether the Republican Party is absolutely locked into this worldview and whether the Democratic Party might be closer to it than we might think. The only thing I'll say about the latter is that it is interesting to me how some of the real leading lights, the better campaigners, really are focused on the nature of the governance, on the corruption, on the values. I think there is sort of, there's definitely a spark still there for that kind of thing. And also, particularly in relation to Ukraine, I think, the internationalism. But also on the Republican side, I think you're absolutely right. I've got a friend in the States who regularly sends me extracts from Ronald Reagan's speeches.

• 32:54Alastair Campbell?

  Now, Ronald Reagan, who was, you know, Thatcher's best buddy, and in our world, very much seen on the right of the political scale across the world. And the one that this friend of mine sent me this week was this one, I don't know whether this speech was made, oh, it was in 1979, before he became, before, in one of the campaigns. And he said this, "The key to our future security lies in Canada and Mexico becoming much stronger than they are today. It's time to stop treating our nearest neighbours as foreigners." So there's a right-wing Republican presidential candidate who becomes president saying essentially, "Canada,

• 33:35Alastair Campbell?

  Mexico, friends." Trump is doing the exact opposite. And if you talk to people like Kellyanne Conway, people who are really in the kind of MAGA-Trump world, they do now speak of traditional friends as though they were enemies, and traditional enemies as though they were friends. It's a very, very, very strange world. To be fair, she's quite strong in Ukraine. To be fair to her, she's quite strong in Ukraine.

• 33:57Rory Stewart?

  You can't build alliances around that, because even if you were right, that the Democrats might come in and be more progressive and embrace progressive governments in Europe, the Republicans could still come in four years later and switch and start embracing the AFDs of the world and the Farage's of this world. So, once you've seen it, you can't unsee it. I mean, the point about the post-war order was that the values were remarkably stable. I mean, America restrained itself in relation to Europe and Canada particularly from 1945 onwards, and essentially said, "We're not going to interfere in their internal politics. We're going to be generous to them. We're going to treat these people as though they're part of our alliance." Now, that doesn't mean the United States wasn't frequently

• 34:41Rory Stewart?

  very, very brutal and intrusive in places like Latin America, which again, is a weird thing going on with Rubio, who of course is of Cuban ancestry. I mean, it's very strange for somebody whose family comes from Latin America to be celebrating this kind of vision of American civilization in which the Latin Americans were usually the barbarians, or celebrating Cortes and the conquistadors. Because who's on the other end of that is the indigenous people. So, I, it's, there's something very, very strange. It's as though Rubio has got so excited by his vision of what he calls atrophy and servitude, which is what he's predicting for Europe in Latin America. And now he's in the other position. Now he's, you know, he's become the master.

• 35:22Alastair Campbell?

  So, well, let's take a break, and then when we come back, we're going to talk about Saudis and the Houthis. We're going to talk about these extraordinary protests in India. And we're also going to have a little chat, you and I, about your stand-in replacement last week, the Right Honourable Michael Gove, and what you and I and our listeners and viewers thought of it.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tremfya offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremfya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject Tremfya, proper training is required. Tremfya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis, serious allergic reactions, increased

• 36:24Speaker 02

  risk of infections or lower ability to fight them, and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tremfya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more, or visit tremfyaradio.com.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zepbound Terzepatide may be able to help. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity, or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains Terzepatide and should not be used with other Terzepatide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic

• 37:31Speaker 03

  to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. If you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulfonilurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979, or visit zepbound.lily.com.

• 38:18Speaker 04

  Shaq here. What's it like to buy a car from Carvana 100% online and get it delivered to your door? Let me tell you. Your car is here, Mr. Shaq. Thank you, Mr. Carvana guy. Can't wait to take it for a spin. Only the best for you, Mr. Shaq. Hey, have you always been so big, tall and handsome? Not always. I was 6'10" once. Seven days to love it or return it, Mr. Shaq. Not that I would. You never do. No, I never do. So buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. See our seven day return policy at carvana.com.

• 38:48Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 38:51Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart.

• 38:52Alastair Campbell?

  So Rory, you want to talk about Saudi Arabia and the latest attack on the main airport in Riyadh? And it's pretty obvious why the Houthis are hitting an airport, because they've had their own airport hit. And I think they're kind of deciding to show that in a way, an attack by them on their airport is going to do a lot more damage to the Saudis than an attack on their airport has done in the past.

• 39:19Rory Stewart?

  I mean firstly, these have been very, very dramatic attacks. They're attacks that have killed civilians and you can see footage of Muslim pilgrims fleeing from the site of this attack. This is on a civilian airport terminal, attacked Riyadh, attacked Dhamman. And it's come right at the worst moment for Saudi because they were hosting the World Petroleum Council and the chief executives of Total and Shell canceled their arrival. And they're just going into their big international investor conference, the FII, which is where they're trying to convince the world to come in and Saudi to diversify and build data centers and everything. And the Houthis have chosen this moment to fire rockets. And the Houthis must be calculating.

• 40:03Rory Stewart?

  So to remind people, Houthis of course are this group in Yemen who have been funded in the past by the Iranians. They probably at the moment, or many of the people I was talking to in the last few days think are overstepping what the Iranians want them to do, that the Iranians are trying to get the Houthis to hold back at the moment because they think they're going too far. But anyway, the Houthis are this originally religiously inspired group of ZADs from northern Yemen and they're firing these rockets. And they can also, it seems, have the capability of hitting Israel, hitting UAE. So why are they doing it? Well, they're doing it because they must be gambling that this will convince Saudi to stop its current support for the other faction in Yemen, the recognized international

• 40:44Rory Stewart?

  government, which is trying to retake the Bab al-Mandeb, retake that control of the Red Sea corridor. Because at the moment Saudi is crushed. It's Iran has made real problems getting stuff out of Strait of Hormuz and its other major route out to Asia has to go through the Red Sea. And that's effectively closed if the Houthi control the Red Sea. So Saudis was flying 50 air sorties to try to get rid of the Houthis. And this is the Houthis' response. And they will also be calculating, perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly, that Donald Trump won't want to get involved in another war before the midterms so that he's not going to provide the support to Saudi, Saudi wants. Now, anybody who thinks they can predict what Donald Trump will do is for the birds because I've got friends in Saudi saying that they've got private assurances from the

• 41:29Rory Stewart?

  US that Americans are going to come in on the Saudi side. And I've got other people saying, no, Trump isn't interested at all. And a lot of disagreement about whether Saudi is going to go ballistic and say, this is unbelievable and we're going to wipe you out or try to wipe you out. Or whether they're going to say, well, in the middle of our conference with midterms coming and with all these problems in the Strait, we're going to try to get to a deal.

• 41:51Alastair Campbell?

  Was this one of the wars, one of the eight wars that Trump claims to have stopped? And that was why he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize? It was just last year, wasn't it? When they was, the Americans were intervening against the Houthis and declaring, I think they did, they declared a victory and an end to this war. And at the time, they were spending about over a billion dollars a month on the weaponry and munitions that they were, that they were using. And yet now, it does look like he's basically said to the Saudis, look, you know, we've got our own problems at the moment, we can't, we can't really help you out much here. And that does, you, you, you dropped in something very interesting there Rory.

• 42:30Alastair Campbell?

  You basically suggested that the Saudis would be tempted to obliterate the Houthis. Now, that's, that's the language of Trump and Iran. Is that realistic?

• 42:41Rory Stewart?

  It's, of course, it's not very realistic, which also people will be pointing out to the Saudis because of course Saudi and UAE fought a long war against the Houthis in Yemen unsuccessfully. And this was one of the early moves by Mohammed bin Salman, it wasn't successful and they withdrew. And they have been telling the Trump administration and others that they're on the verge of victory against the Houthis for some time, which is why the US did that bombing and it didn't work. So the Houthis may be fragile in some bits, they seem to be being pushed back a bit along the coast, but they're making advances elsewhere. And again, getting realistic information from the ground is so difficult because everybody who's talking to you has the dog in the fight. You know, it's a bit like, you'll remember this from Afghanistan, when people asked how strong or weak were the Taliban?

• 43:24Rory Stewart?

  You know, you would have generals who would say, oh, the Taliban are, you know, nobody likes them, they're corrupt and they're miserable and they're on the verge of collapse and one more heave and we'll get rid of them. And other people saying, no, no, these people are very embedded in rural areas and they'll actually outlast us. And how do you answer that question? I mean, there's not opinion polling you can do. You can try to assess how many fighters Houthis have got, but all you can say is that they've been much more resilient and much more successful than anyone predicted. So the idea that one more heave is going to wipe them out doesn't make sense. Another thing I think we need to update our listeners on is what's happening in the Strait of Hormuz. Because one of the weird things I think that happens with reporting in newspapers is, I don't know if I did a, maybe this is a mean thing to do, but if you're listening

• 44:09Rory Stewart?

  to this, ask yourself, what do you think's been happening in the Strait of Hormuz over the last two months? Do you think that there have been continual American strikes against Iran? Have there been Israeli strikes against Iran? Have the Iranians been striking many US bases in the region? The answer is no. Oddly, of course, what happens is you don't report what isn't happening. The last two months has been a sort of fragile, almost ceasefire in which there's been some tit for tat because the Iranians have attacked vessels, but the Americans don't release that. So there was a vessel a long way from Strait of Hormuz on the edge of the Gulf that was attacked successfully by the Iranians that the Americans haven't even commented on.

• 44:50Rory Stewart?

  But there haven't been that many strikes against US bases and there haven't been strikes against Iran and there haven't been Israeli strikes going on against Iran. Instead of which, what we have is a few vessels getting crude oil out around the Oman coast. The Americans claiming they're back to the full numbers, that isn't true. That's total spin from Trump with some of these states flattering him by pretending it's true. And we still have a negotiation going on where, again, we're on the nuclear stuff and it looks like there is some common ground emerging around what a nuclear file could look like. But there isn't really the American negotiating machine there used to be. There isn't a full State Department. I mean, you go and see the State Department, I mean, you'll remember the days where the

• 45:34Rory Stewart?

  American government was this formidable machine. You know, we interviewed Rob Malley and he was talking about, you know, 25 person teams right in the middle of the Middle East peace process, all of them with doctorates, all of them speaking local languages fluently, all of them intensely involved in the technocratic thing. Now, basically, it's Jared Kushner, Steve Whitkoff, occasionally JD Vance, flying around with four or five staffers. And so how do you get an Iran deal on that basis?

• 46:02Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing to say about the Strait of Hormuz, there are, there are 20,000 people there that are just trapped, they're stranded and they're trapped. And, you know, can you imagine what it's like living on one of these ships at the moment? I mean, for a start, there is, as you say, it's reasonably quiet, but you know, there are mines around the place, there are drones flying around, it is very, very unpredictable. But can you imagine the levels of stress and anxiety as you're stuck there, away from your families, away from your own country and you're stuck?

• 46:37Rory Stewart?

  Or even worse, if you're one of those very few, very brave captains and crews that are trying to run the gauntlet, because there's no insurance available. But the UAE seems to be pushing through vessels, saying that they'll cover the, the risks. So you're taking a, you're trying to sail a vessel at night with its radar off, sometimes with an American vessel in front of you, hugging the Oman coast.

• 47:00Alastair Campbell?

  By the way, we got told off, I was at an event recently, there were some people from the, from the insurance industry who said that we'd been saying that they were becoming uninsured, they said that we'll always find ways of ensuring this situation. So there you go. Listen, should we, should we, before we go, should we talk about, about India?

• 47:17Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, can I do a transition to India just quickly though? Because there was one thing I've been feeling guilty about, which is, your friend Ed Miliband, I've been hearing a lot of positive things about from the UN General Assembly. People who were at the UN firstly commented on the complete absence of the United States. I mean, it was extraordinary. You went to UN General Assembly meetings chaired by other P5 members and the American seats were literally empty, was just nobody sitting in these meetings. But Ed Miliband was the, I heard from some people, they felt was the only foreign minister that anyone wanted to talk to. He gave the impression that he had genuine authority, genuine lassitude, was a genuinely

• 47:58Rory Stewart?

  original thinker, was genuinely engaged on Sudan, genuinely engaged on the Gulf, genuinely engaged on Israel-Palestine. So apart from the small wrinkle that we haven't covered, which I am deeply distressed about, which is that Israel basically bullied Britain into closing or halving the size of our consulate in Jerusalem, which is extraordinary. I mean, that was really humiliating because that is territory that we don't recognize as being part of Israel. It's meant to be occupied Palestinian territory, we've had a consulate there forever, other people have consulates there and we've taken the sign off the building, we've halved the number of our diplomatic staff and there was no tit for tat, we haven't responded. That I think was not impressive, but... That wrinkle aside, I think Evan Laban is really making a really impressive

• 48:44Rory Stewart?

  appearance and that's worth watching. Anyway, over to you.

• 48:47Alastair Campbell?

  Good. Well, no, so I was fascinated by what was going on in India last week. We probably don't talk enough about Modi and India. But so just to fill people in, the cockroach, the, there was a judge who called, referred to these young people as cockroaches. And they decided to turn that into starting this cockroach Janta Party, which is to sort of, it's a sort of play on words of the cockroach. But also the BJP, which is Modi's party. And this guy is really interesting how leaders emerge in this way. So this guy, Abhijit Dipti, who spends a lot of time overseas, doesn't, not always in India, gets on a plane, he flies back in, he's going to do this big protest.

• 49:30Alastair Campbell?

  The police, they arrest him and two of his associates, they're taken away, they're locked up for a bit. And meanwhile, there is a security operation around New Delhi that is absolutely extraordinary. Layer upon layer of security, streets are empty, and they're just making sure these protests will not happen. And the reason for the protest is the fact that the, this new elections commissioner, a guy called Gyanesh Kumar, has overseen this thing called the special intensive revision. And the special intensive revision is a bit like Trump saying he needs to sort of clean up the voter rolls. As a result of which, one hundred and thirty million people were removed from the electoral rolls.

• 50:14Alastair Campbell?

  Now, I know India is a big country, but that is a lot of people who are suddenly falling off the directorial.

• 50:20Rory Stewart?

  A hundred and thirty million, so it's sort of the population of Britain and France combined, but actually much more because it's only the voting population. They're not including the children in Britain and France, yeah.

• 50:30Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. So there's no kids in there. And so this has led to, well, it led to the attempt to mount a huge protest. Not just by the cockroach guys, but also by other organisations. But the level of put down, the cracking down on it, meant that this is, it has been suppressed.

• 50:48Rory Stewart?

  But it's pretty amazing. I mean, they were arresting the former chief ministers of West Bengal and Delhi. They had, I think, twenty five thousand police and militia in Delhi, barricades, thousands of people being arrested. The Indian Supreme Court stood out for itself in an encouraging way, given how much Modi has been eroding institutions in India. But did say the government must release these protesters, must open the internet again, must let the metro go and support a freedom association.

• 51:20Rory Stewart?

  But it's got to be trouble for Modi, this. I mean, Modi has been so Teflon and has been so successful in, over the last twelve years, consolidating his power. But this, this allied with the thing that we covered earlier, which was the education results. You never trust a government when it redoubts electoral rolls anywhere in the world. I mean, remember, you weren't particularly trusting when the conservatives decided to up the ID card requirements on voting. But this is a different scale. And presumably Modi is in trouble now.

• 51:52Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we'll see. And we thought he was in trouble over the education, that he got rid of his education ministry and it calmed down again. So whether he might do the same on this, I don't know. But this, this does seem like it's got to sort of, it's kind of, the protests will have to come back at some point or they'll have to find a way. It is really interesting how this guy has emerged as a leader because he doesn't look like a leader, doesn't sound like a leader, but he really has become the sort of the symbol of this thing. Do you think, would you say, Rory, if you were back at, you mentioned being back at school, being given lectures about, you know, ancient Rome and ancient Greece. If you were given an essay question, is Modi a dictator? What would you say?

• 52:24Rory Stewart?

  No, he's a, he's a, he's a real, he's your full populist. He's your full, I think, I don't know what you think. I think he's your full Latin American style populist.

• 52:35Alastair Campbell?

  Is he an electoral, is he an electoral autocrat?

• 52:38Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, he's an electoral autocrat. India is a proper mass democracy. It still has institutions. I mean, he's done huge damage to the media and civil society. He's screwed around with the voting rule. There's a lot of, you know, it's very problematic what he's done on citizenship and the way that he's treated Muslims and their access to society. And Hindu nationalism is absolutely to the fore. But yeah, it's a populist autocratic democracy. I mean, it's reminiscent of Orban. And I think like Orban, he could be booted out.

• 53:10Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. Well, listen, finally, before you go, what did you think of your stand in last week while you were away, Mr. Gove?

• 53:17Rory Stewart?

  Well, I've heard about it from all over the world. I was literally, I was literally, I was called by a friend from Qatar, a Saudi. Where are you going? Where are you going? Well, I thought it was slightly terrifying because I think what I saw is the rather odd way in which very fluent sort of polite sounding language can defend the indefensible. I mean, he managed to suggest, for example, at one point when I, in that, for people who listened all the way through, that Israel had done nothing worse in Gaza than British and American troops had done in Iraq.

• 54:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And it was based on a report which turned out not to be what it said.

• 54:03Rory Stewart?

  He's basically implied that British American troops killed twenty five thousand civilian children. I mean, themselves bombed and killed twenty five thousand children. How can Michael Gove possibly think that's true? What is he thinking about? But what is, I mean, look, there are a lot of things to be said for the way in which the British Americans behaved in Iraq. And there were a lot of civilian casualties. But the idea that the Black Watch or the US Marines killed twenty five thousand children is insane. And, and actually, you know, if you want to keep developing this, the population of Iraq is far larger than the population in Gaza in percentage terms. You know, it would be like killing four hundred thousand Iraqi children. I mean, the fact that he can't see that. And he also nominate, am I right? He nominated the IDF for the Nobel Peace Prize?

• 54:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, yes, he did. Yes, he did. Yes, yes, yes, yes, he did.

• 54:52Rory Stewart?

  And why did he nominate the IDF for the Nobel Peace Prize? I mean, of all the people, I mean, along with Donald Trump, why would the IDF be the best candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize at the moment? What's he doing there?

• 55:01Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I guess his argument is that Israel, he makes the point that Israel is in this very, very special place. It's the only democracy. He said, here's the thing where, you know, if he loses his election, Netanyahu could be sort of end up in court, go to jail. That shows what an amazing democracy it is. And the IDF is part of keeping the peace. I don't know. But you know what I found really confusing? Because I'd, I'd been giving these figures where, you know, there, you see, I, I was desperate, you know, not desperate. I wanted to know why he cannot bring himself to say a word of criticism. He criticises his own government. He criticises the Tory record. He criticises, you know, the Labour government at times.

• 55:38Alastair Campbell?

  But he cannot bring himself to utter a word of criticism. So I give him these figures where the Israelis themselves are saying there's an eighty three percent civilian death rate in Gaza. Okay. And then he comes back with this report and he talked about this House of Lords report that had been gone to the APPG. And I'm thinking, I'm not as fast as you at the old sort of chat GPT trying to find this. So anyway, it took us ages to find this report.

• 56:00Rory Stewart?

  You're also not as massively paranoid and cynical. I mean, almost anything Michael says to me, I will just challenge for the sake of challenging, I just assume it's wrong.

• 56:08Alastair Campbell?

  No, but, but I couldn't find this damn thing. And it turned out that this report was not about civilian deaths in Gaza. It was about the, the death toll following the October the seventh. It's a report about October the seventh. So I don't know. It was interesting though, I got, what sort of reaction did you get? When you said you were slightly terrified by it, I wonder whether you thought it was so good that, you know, would we decide actually Michael Gove should permanently replace Rory Stewart?

• 56:36Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. I think it'd be a top, top winner. I think, I think I, I'm stepping aside. I'm going to, I'm going to dedicate myself to monastic life. And it would, it would be unusual cruelty though. You would have to spend every week, you and Michael Gove.

• 56:51Alastair Campbell?

  Being told, you're absolutely right, Alistair, but you're absolutely right.

• 56:56Rory Stewart?

  You're absolutely right, Alistair. Absolutely. You're absolutely right, Alistair. That's a very good observation. And Alistair, one of the things I've often noticed about you is your unusual courage and perspicacity has allowed you to.

• 57:06Alastair Campbell?

  Perseverance, perseverance.

• 57:07Rory Stewart?

  Perseverance. You're demonstrating, you're demonstrating your perseverance again, Alistair, there. And of course, you, in your very distinguished career of public service under. And there was a great moment when I was, when we were in Parliament together. And in that brief moment when Michael Gove had decided to campaign for Boris Johnson, when Johnson was running for leadership. And he, he called me, he called me outside the library on my phone and he said, Rory, Rory, we really need you on Boris's team. Because I think you haven't been properly recognised by the Cameron government. And I think leaving you off the field is like leaving the Duke of Wellington off the field at the Battle of Waterloo.

• 57:47Alastair Campbell?

  He is. Listen, we got a very, look, expectedly, we got a very mixed response. We've got some people who loved it, we've got a lot of people who hated it. He is clever, though, he is clever. It's just that the extent to which it was, it's so hard to pin him down.

• 58:04Rory Stewart?

  I also think you're much nicer than me. I, I, I never understood this. You're much nicer than me. I mean, you accuse me of being grumpy with these people.

• 58:11Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think I, was I too soft? Was I too soft?

• 58:14Rory Stewart?

  Well, I, it's very interesting. So you quite rightly, you know, have a go at me because you think I get cross with Bridget Philipsen, or I get cross about the wealth tax, or I get cross with Michael Gove, or I get cross with these people. But you, your interview style, given that you're such a reputation as a bruiser, is much more gentle. You're not really getting as wound up and cross as I do.

• 58:35Alastair Campbell?

  I get, look, I was, I get, I got very wound up about Brexit. I got very wound, I've been wound up about Brexit for 10 years, and I'm glad that we seem to be moving back in the right direction. I get very wound up about, I got genuinely wound up about his views about Israel, but I was more interested in just trying to push him to say just the slightest scintilla of criticism. Would have been interesting. Just on, final, final thing, Rory, your, your mini-series on existential threats, which has been absolutely superb. But this week, for our members, we're going to be slightly more positive with the, with the start of our series about perseverance, the word the world needs now. And you have interviewed me, and that will be out for everyone on Friday. And then we've got a

• 59:17Alastair Campbell?

  series following that for members, which if people want to get the whole thing, they just go to therestispolitics.com. But thank you, in your busy, busy life, for taking that time out to talk to me about my, my new book, which is out next week. Something a bit different tomorrow on Question Time. We're going to be talking to Alan Milburn, who is in charge of the review ordered by the government into NEETS. That's the 1 million young people who are not in education, employment, or training. We asked you for your questions. They've come in, in their hundreds. We'll be putting some of those questions to Alan Milburn tomorrow, so stand by for that.

• 59:52Rory Stewart?

  Very good. And just before you go, here's a brief glimpse of the forthcoming Persevillance series with Alistair.

• 59:59Alastair Campbell?

  Hi there, it's Alistair here. And this is a mini-series about my new word perseverance. No, not perseverance, not resilience, perseverance. It's how do you take everything that happens to you and turn it into an opportunity to move in the opposite direction, to move forward, not backwards.

• 1:00:16Speaker 05

  It's a bit pompous, that, isn't it?

• 1:00:17Alastair Campbell?

  Is it? How do people overcome extraordinary challenges in life? 10 years ago, nine years ago, I was sat in a psychiatric hospital on the edge of life, and now I am here.

• 1:00:28Speaker 06

  Ellie was diagnosed with the same form of blood cancer when she was nine years old.

• 1:00:34Speaker 07

  And knowing that someone you love was murdered.

• 1:00:36Speaker 08

  Jo Cox, MP for Batley and Spembera, has died as a result of her injuries.

• 1:00:40Speaker 07

  Jo was killed because of who she was.

• 1:00:42Speaker 05

  People said, why weren't you bitter? I said, you can't send bitterness like an email. All it does is corrode and erode you. It destroys you from inside.

• 1:00:50Alastair Campbell?

  I'm becoming conscious of losing control of my own mind.

• 1:00:52Rory Stewart?

  And what does that feel like?

• 1:00:53Alastair Campbell?

  I know this is an insane thought, but I thought I was going to be killed. How can you heal and grow from unimaginable trauma?

• 1:01:00Speaker 07

  What we see when these horrific things happen is the true strength of human resilience, and it is outstanding.

• 1:01:05Alastair Campbell?

  How can we build more perseverance, both personally and in our politics?

• 1:01:10Speaker 05

  I used to walk up that lane and breathe fresh air and think, I'm still alive.

• 1:01:15Speaker 06

  Greek mythology, Pandora's box, and all the terrible things fire out. Hope is hard, and hope is what's left at the bottom of the box.

• 1:01:21Alastair Campbell?

  So to kick things off, Rory will be interviewing me about my own story.

• 1:01:25Rory Stewart?

  You're both a kind of tough guy, and you're somebody who takes things unbelievably hard.

• 1:01:30Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know how we got through it, to be honest. So I don't care how I'm defined anymore.

• 1:01:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:33Alastair Campbell?

  As you know, I think young people get a very bad rep. I think the world is a pretty messy place and a complicated, difficult place. That's why I think it's the word the world needs now.

• 1:01:43Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 1:01:43Alastair Campbell?

  If you want to hear more about perseverance from people who I believe really have it, head to therestispolitics.com and become a member today.

• 1:02:03Speaker 09

  Honey, that flu keeping you up? Yeah, I don't got this. You need Nyquil Intense Flu.

• 1:02:08Speaker 10

  Undo your flu symptoms with Nyquil Intense Flu. The nighttime sniffling, aching, aching fever, best sleep with a flu medicine. You do got this. Users directed, keep out of reach of children.

• 1:02:16Speaker 11

  Espolon Tequila. It arrives in a cloud of feathers with a cry to wake the dead. Espolon Tequila. Balanced, delicious, perfect for nights out, nights in, and people who like to drink tequila. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth. Then hold on tight. 100% agave, 0% eagle. Espolon Tequila. For a real margarita, ride the rooster.

• 1:02:41Speaker 12

  Espolon Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Compaia America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.

• 1:02:46Speaker 13

  Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's premium wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch.

• 1:03:09Speaker 14

  Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan. $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.