64. Hunt U-turn as Truss goes missing

As a divided Conservative Party tries desperately to work out how to replace Liz Truss, Rory and Alastair discuss the likely moves over the coming days and weeks in Westminster. Will the Conservatives find a way to avoid another membership vote to determine the next PM? Plus Biden, Japan, and debt forgiveness. Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to access Wednesday's 9am presale for our second date at the London Palladium on Tuesday 21st March 2023. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creef. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

  Hello. Welcome to another episode of The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. And we're bringing this to you a day earlier than usual. We're recording it Monday night. You'll have it Tuesday morning. Because frankly, such is the pace of what's going on in Westminster around the future of the government, that we frankly don't dare wait another 24 hours because we could be out of date. We might even, as things go, we might even have a new Prime Minister by then. I don't think we'll have a new chance, but I think Jeremy Hunt's there for a bit. But anyway, before we get on to all of that, we have some good, hopefully, for two and a half thousand of you, some good news. You may have heard, in fact, you will have heard because I was boasting about it all week, we sold out our live date at the

• 2:28Alastair Campbell?

  London Palladium in seven minutes. I had told them, Rory, I said to them, book the O2 or book the Wembley Arena, but no, no, no, they didn't listen, they went for the Palladium.

• 2:39Rory Stewart?

  We haven't managed, Alistair did not manage to persuade us to play to an empty Wembley Stadium, but we are going to do another night at the Palladium. So the night before our original date, Tuesday, March 21st. So all the people who missed out on tickets, we've gone back to the theatre and they have provided tickets for the night before. So please sign up and hopefully in the first nine minutes for Tuesday, March 21st.

• 3:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. So this is what you need to know. We go, as per the last time, when it was for March the 22nd, 700 have been reserved for subscribers to The Rest Is Politics Plus. And for those of you don't know, if you join Trip Plus, you can support the show, get all the pods without adverts for £3.49 a month, and you get access to early tickets, et cetera. And to sign up for that, you go to therestispolitics.com. The tickets for those members will be on sale from Wednesday morning, 9am. And just to mark your card, they sold out pretty quickly as well. We'll email all members the link for tickets, please check your spam. And then all remaining tickets will go on sale on Friday morning at 9am.

• 3:47Alastair Campbell?

  We'll tweet the link on Friday, first thing. So that's that, that's the housekeeping done. Let's get on with talking about what happened today. God, where do you start? Where do you start? I suppose you start with Jeremy Hunt.

• 4:02Rory Stewart?

  Yes. So again, for, in my, in my boring role, for listeners who haven't been following every minute of what's going on, he's come in. And as Alistair keeps saying, he is basically the new Prime Minister. And he's the new Prime Minister because he is the only thing that she is now relying on to try to reassure the markets that everything that she said... But three weeks ago, with the single exception possibly of a national insurance tax change has been thrown out the window. And he has set out systematically to reverse everything that she tried to do. So I think maybe the top headline things, just before we get into the details, are that he has, he will not be cutting

• 4:46Rory Stewart?

  income tax. So that's neither the cut for the top rate taxpayers from forty five to forty, nor the cut for a basic rate taxpayers from twenty to nineteen percent. He's going to be raising corporation tax and that cumulatively will make about thirty five billion pounds. But perhaps most importantly of all, he said that the energy price subsidy is only guaranteed for six months. Which means instead of an unlimited liability of one hundred and fifty billion pounds potentially, he's now reduced that down to something which feels more like a black hole in his finances of forty or fifty billion pounds. And then, and this is, I think, the thing that we're going to have to get into, that's probably going to have to be addressed through spending cuts. Anyway, over to you, Alastair.

• 5:30Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it was, I watched the whole thing and I watched, I also watched Keir Starmer's urgent question where Liz Truss did not turn up. And Penny Mordaunt was sent in and I didn't think Penny Mordaunt did a very good job, actually. I think she was too much in Tory party mode and not enough in cabinet minister mode. And she kept saying repeatedly that there was a very good reason why the Prime Minister couldn't be in the House. There was a very good reason why the Prime Minister couldn't face the question. She didn't say, look, she's got better things to do than get hauled in to be, you know, play politics with Keir Starmer. She sort of, I even began to wonder

• 6:07Alastair Campbell?

  whether something genuinely serious had happened, like, you know, a family situation, something, some terrible tragedy, because she kept saying, I wish I could tell you what she, why she wasn't here, but I can tell you it's a very good reason. And then she finishes. I thought Keir landed a couple of good blows on them. And as she finishes, Jeremy Hunt walks in and then moments later, Liz Truss walks in and Therese Coffey shuffles up and Liz Truss sits there. It was all a bit surreal, to be absolutely frank. And I think what you saw was a Prime Minister sitting there utterly devoid of authority. And Jeremy Hunt standing up, pretty much as he's done his interviews in the last forty eight hours when he's been on the airwaves.

• 6:52Alastair Campbell?

  Barely referencing her and essentially without saying, I am completely reversing everything that this Prime Minister City behind me has done. That's what he did. He didn't reverse the bankers' bonus. He didn't reverse the investment zone stuff. But on the main tax stuff, he was absolutely unequivocal. That's gone.

• 7:13Rory Stewart?

  I wonder on the investment zone stuff because there's a lot of wriggle room there too, because I think he can pretend that he's backing her. But what he'll be under pressure from the Treasury to do is to say instead of what she was talking about, which is an unlimited number of investment zones, which would lose them tens of billions of pounds worth of revenue. I guess he's going to quietly shut it down. So there are going to be almost none of them at all.

• 7:34Alastair Campbell?

  Well, also Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP, she, who I think is a very effective performer in the House of Commons, and she got up and basically said, you know, what's happened to your Green Tory credentials? You've always presented yourself as a Green Tory. And in his answer, he sort of said, well, I'm not against investment zones, but they absolutely have to be in keeping with nature, biodiversity, et cetera. So you're right, he might, he might be sort of.

• 8:02Rory Stewart?

  Well, that's pretty amazing. Pretty amazing. Because that's presumably exactly what Liz Truss was not intending with those investment zones. She wanted to rip up planning. She wanted, she felt when she was the Secretary of State for Environment, Food, Rural Affairs, that there was too much restrictions, you know, newts getting in the way of building. I remember her complaining about that. I remember her actually almost setting up a newt task force to try to work out how we could build more houses without worrying about newts. So.

• 8:27Alastair Campbell?

  Is it, please, please tell me that's not true.

• 8:29Rory Stewart?

  No, no, it's totally true. Totally true.

• 8:31Alastair Campbell?

  She wanted to set up a newt task force.

• 8:34Rory Stewart?

  Well, actually, I think to be, to be fair, it was driven from the centre of Downing Street in those days. She was responding to something that obsessed Oliver Lettwin, David Cameron, because what would happen in those days is that the discovery of a newt. Would be enough to grind all development to a halt. And this became this sort of totemic issue where people kept saying that newts weren't that rare and we didn't need to worry that much about newts. And then obviously, the charities that cared about nature would say, no, newts are incredibly important. Then other people would say, newts only got on the European directive by mistake because there was a shortage of newts in Poland and we didn't have a shortage of newts in Britain, etc. Anyway, the point, though, is that that must have been a real slap in her face to hear him stand up and say, of course, it's got to respect biodiversity and nature and all this kind of thing.

• 9:16Alastair Campbell?

  I think she might have disappeared by then. And then the other thing, doing the rounds, of course, is that she was in and out of a meeting with Graham Brady, who'd been in the House, then went out of the House. And of course, he's the chairman of the 1922 Committee. There's all this talk, for all the fact that there was, honestly, it was horrific to watch, particularly the urgent question. I don't think there was one question from the Tory back benches that you would have put in the even vaguely anything other than completely pro-government sycophantic. It was like watching endlessly planted questions. You got a few in Hunt's statement, particularly from people like Edward Lee, John Redwood, who are obviously Drax, the right wingers who are really worried that this kind of

• 9:59Alastair Campbell?

  low tax, no regulation agenda is now being lost. But basically, Hunt, kind of, he, look, and, you know, fair play to him, he's got a very balming, B A L M, very balming manner. But, you know, the truth is, he was, he was essentially saying, fasten your seatbelts because we're going to probably have further tax rises and we're going to have very, very big spending cuts. And he didn't go into the, well, the other thing he didn't reverse was bankers' bonuses. He defended that. He said, the more money they get, the more tax they'll pay. And also, he was, he was not, I thought he might at least have paid a little bit of lip service to some of the kind of wealth areas that Labour are looking

• 10:40Alastair Campbell?

  at, whether it's non-dom taxes, or, you know, some of the kind of stuff that he could get into. I still think tax avoidance is such a big issue that he could have got into that. He didn't. So we're looking, we are looking at austerity mark two. I don't think there's any doubt about that now.

• 10:54Rory Stewart?

  And actually, it's an interesting, I mean, I think it's an interesting point to to consider what options Labour really has, other than a form of austerity themselves, because the situation that Britain's now in makes it almost impossible for the government to continue to spend and borrow. And so the only choices facing, I mean, actually, I think this is something that should appeal to you, Alistair, because famously, you're a man who's never in debt, and as a fine Scot, always believes in balancing your budget. But the options facing the government, any government, are now incredibly tough, because it's not the United States, we're not the world's reserve currency, we can't borrow huge amounts of money. And if we do borrow, interest rates are now punishing,

• 11:35Rory Stewart?

  so the interest we pay on our debt is going to be phenomenal. If we start borrowing serious amounts of money, we'll be spending eighty, hundred billion dollars, a hundred billion pounds, simply on the interest of the debt if we borrow big. So Labour is going to have to come in, and their only option, if they want to increase spending, and they'll be under a lot of pressure to, the unions will expect them to increase spending, inflation's up 10%, will be to increase taxes dramatically, but taxes are now at their highest level since the 1950s. And it's going to be very, very tough. There may be some things they can do, maybe on more windfall taxes on the energy companies, we'll bring in some more money. But the amounts of money they're going to get by going after non-doms is not going to fill the hole in the budget.

• 12:18Alastair Campbell?

  No, non-doms, I mean, you're talking a very, very small number of billions. And I think, look, I think it would be a particularly perverse approach to politics if at the end of these three weeks, where the Conservatives have literally crashed the economy, it would be perverse if the burning question out of today was what does a Labour government do? A Labour Party in opposition has to have those questions answered as they get closer to a general election. I think it will have to involve at some stage, standing up and defending a real, you know, whether they are going to revisit the idea of wealth tax and so forth, I don't know. But I think that this is, what I found astonishing about

• 13:03Alastair Campbell?

  today, both the urgent question fronted by Mordaunt and Jeremy Hunt.

• 13:09Alastair Campbell?

  Was the mood amongst conservatives who really do, they really did seem to think that they just kind of need to move on now. It was almost like Penny Morden, I really found her performance quite disgraceful, actually. She was all, it was almost like, you know, what right does Keir Starmer have to try and summon the Prime Minister to talk about this when we've got the Chancellor coming to talk to us?

• 13:28Rory Stewart?

  I've seen it before, though. I mean, I saw it when Theresa May was in real trouble. We saw it when Boris Johnson was in real trouble. Do you remember that extraordinary moment where he went into Prime Minister's Questions about 24 hours before he resigned? And they were all standing up, you know, people you were expecting would criticize him, like Johnny Mercer, were standing up and lobbing him softball questions. And the whips had clearly been running an operation to get everybody to come out and support him. What it really is, actually, is not a sign that they've moved on. It's a sign of absolute desperation. I mean, this is, this is what parties do when they're absolutely against the wall. And this will be a last sort of desperate whipping operation where they will

• 14:09Rory Stewart?

  have gone round person to person, promising anything they can give. I mean, that's what Boris was doing in that final PMQs, promising jobs to people, anything to get them to give him softball questions.

• 14:20Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you mentioned Johnny Mercer there. We put, I do, as you know, this interview for Men's Health Magazine, and we've done one, I've done one with Johnny Mercer. And he's somebody who's had OCD for most of his life, gets depression, and was actually, when we were speaking last week now, we put it out because frankly, a lot of it was about the current government and, you know, Liz Truss might not be there very long. But he basically said that he was now in a place where he felt that he couldn't, in all honesty, say to his constituents, I think a Truss government would be better than a government led by Keir Starmer. And he also said that he felt that people had just given up. They weren't even getting angry anymore. They'd just sort of given up. And I think there

• 15:02Alastair Campbell?

  is that sense, maybe, that a lot of Tories are starting to think, you know what, we've had our time, we've had 12 years, the country's not much better. And this last thing has just been a kind of tipping point. It's been a huge tipping point. They crashed the economy. But he also told a story that I think people would be quite shocked by, which is that he'd gone into politics to fight for veterans. He's a veteran himself, been in three tours of Afghanistan, in the commandos. And he was made a minister, then he resigned, then Johnson put him in the cabinet at the last minute, that was never going to last. But he persuaded Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak that they wouldn't downgrade the veterans' ministers' job. And when she became prime minister, she called him in to see her and told her, told him that she wasn't going ahead with her promise.

• 15:47Alastair Campbell?

  And he said the thing that really got to him was that she just laughed at him when he protested. She just sort of thought it was funny. And I thought that said something very, very odd about the way she deals with people.

• 15:56Rory Stewart?

  So one of the things that is worth thinking about is where these cuts are going to fall. Slightly relates to your conversation about Johnny Massa, because almost certainly the cuts are going to fall hard on defence. And one of the promises that Liz Truss made to keep Ben Wallace, and it's Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, was actually probably a very strong runner to be Prime Minister and for some reason didn't stand. But he chose to use his position as Defence Secretary and his endorsement to get all the candidates essentially to sign up to increase defence spending up to 3%. Very, very dramatic increase. Used to be 2%. So that's a sort of extra nearly £40 billion a year that you're talking about of increases. And of course, this was off the back of Russia, Ukraine, and this

• 16:39Rory Stewart?

  was about Britain as a global power. But I think the first thing that will happen is she will have to break that promise too, because I don't think it's going to be remotely possible for this government or any government to fulfil that promise to increase defence spending in that way.

• 16:55Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's interesting, in the statement, Hunt's statement, there was obviously Labour in particular were trying to get him to commit to stand by promises that had been made either by Boris Johnson or by Liz Truss. And he wouldn't commit to any of them. And that included defence spending. It included spending on the health service and social care. He wouldn't really go much further than on that. He wouldn't commit to uprating benefits in line with inflation. He wouldn't commit to the triple lock on pensions. Now, I don't suspect he's going to undo all of those things, but there's no doubt whatsoever that he's going to undo some of them. And as you say, this is where he gets himself in both a very strong position, but also a very weak position. I think you said in the last podcast that when he was

• 17:38Alastair Campbell?

  running to be leader, he was talking about defence spending as four percent of GDP.

• 17:43Rory Stewart?

  Exactly.

• 17:44Alastair Campbell?

  He was also cutting corporation tax to 12.5%, not, you know, where it is now. So I think that he talked about eye-wateringly difficult decisions. Now, you know, I really would like him to go after the tax, the tax avoiders and the, you know, the wealth tax and the bankers bonuses and all that stuff. I agree with you, that's not going to fill the gap, which is still around about 30 billion, by the way. I think the Institute of Fiscal Studies is saying he's still got quite a big hole to fill.

• 18:13Rory Stewart?

  Huge hole.

• 18:14Alastair Campbell?

  So it's going to come from spending cuts. And this is a time when the health service is on its knees, when schools are really struggling and the energy bills are going to make it worse, you know, where the police are really struggling, where the armed forces is really struggling. I mean, I think it's, I don't really see how he fills the hole in a way that's both economically palatable to the markets and politically palatable to the country. And I can't remember, I guess the last time when you really had a sense that government economic policy was being, literally being designed day by day with the markets in mind as opposed to the broader national interest in mind, was probably when we got kicked out the ERM many, many years ago.

• 18:53Rory Stewart?

  From which famously the John Major government never recovered.

• 18:57Alastair Campbell?

  So Rory, based on all your inside knowledge of what's going on inside the Conservative Party right now, who's talking to whom? What is the future of Liz Truss? And here's one for you, which I think is, may become a question. Can the Conservatives seriously think that they can produce a new Prime Minister out of a hat and go along to see the new king and say, I am the person now who can be given the mandate to form a government, given that it could fall apart with the same, the same jigsaw falling apart with a new leader?

• 19:32Rory Stewart?

  Well, I guess there are two separate questions there. I mean, one is what's going on? Who's doing what? And the second question is, what happens if they come up with a new leader? I think it's inevitable that they have to come up with a new leader now. There's no way they can possibly win a general election under Liz Truss. And everybody senses that. And as you pointed out earlier in the podcast, they've now lost both the left of the party and the right of the party. So she never had the left of the party, the centre-left of the party were always against her. And a lot of the centre of the party was with Rishi Sunak. Remember, she came second to Rishi Sunak in the MPs' votes. So she's going in in a weak situation, weaker situation than Boris Johnson, much weaker situation than Theresa May. But now she's beginning to lose, as you pointed out, people like John Redwood on the right, who feel that she's backtracked and U-turned

• 20:17Rory Stewart?

  on everything they were backing her for. She was somebody who voted Remain, was a loyal Cameron minister, was a loyal May minister, was a loyal Boris Johnson minister. Nobody on the right saw her as a standard bearer for Brexit or libertarian economics, really, until she got into the leadership election. And then she managed to pull off this extraordinary thing of winning over Boris Johnson, winning over Nadine Doris, winning over John Redwood, winning over all the libertarians, who suddenly thought, this is the real deal. This is the person who's really going to make Brexit sing. And now everything that they believe in, massive cuts and taxes in order to power economic growth, have been thrown out the window. What they're instead going, because the thing they're obsessed with is the tax burden.

• 21:01Rory Stewart?

  They're obsessed with the fact that tax is the highest level since the 1950s and taxes have to be cut. So now Jeremy Hunt's come in, and Jeremy Hunt is absolutely their hate figure. I mean, he was the guy that was in the final two against Boris Johnson. And although he tried to move himself towards the Brexit side of that debate in order to win that election, nobody believed it. They always saw him as a Remainer. And now effectively, as you've pointed out, he's Prime Minister. Now, what you see Liz Truss's team now desperately doing is trying to brief against many ex ministers, people who sat at cabinet tables with me, Julian Smith, Mel Stride, Gavin

• 21:39Rory Stewart?

  Williamson. These people are now being portrayed as a cabal of male public schoolboys coming to get her. So she's trying to play, because she went to a comprehensive school, she's trying to turn the opposition to her into some sort of sexist class warfare.

• 21:56Alastair Campbell?

  Gavin Williamson didn't go to a public school.

• 21:58Rory Stewart?

  No, I don't think he did. But that's, but you will have seen press spokesmen say this again and again off the record, that they think these people, particularly those three, and you're right, it's an unfair way of characterising Gavin Williamson.

• 22:10Alastair Campbell?

  Grant Shapps, Grant Shapps, is he a part of the cabal?

• 22:13Rory Stewart?

  Grant Shapps is not part of that cabal, he's part of a separate cabal, so he's

• 22:17Alastair Campbell?

  He's part of a Grant Shapps cabal.

• 22:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and the Grant Shapps cabal revolves around this famous spreadsheet. So he tried to take down Theresa May, straight after the 2017 election. He ran all these strange intelligence operations, which sort of stuttered to a halt in the middle of 2017. He used to come up to me in the lobbies, and he'd say to me, what do you think of Boris Johnson? And I'd say rude things about Boris Johnson. Or he'd say, I'm rather a supporter of Theresa May, what do you think? And try to draw me out, because he believes that the way to make his amazing spreadsheet and list was to pretend to be in favour of Theresa May in order to get votes. Anyway, this spreadsheet came out again in 2019 for Boris Johnson's election, and it's meant to be a fabled spreadsheet. People refer to it as a kind of Star Wars

• 23:01Rory Stewart?

  spreadsheet, and now he's running it to topple Liz Truss. And the reason why he's doing it is that she fired him. And clearly, all these firings, you talked about the way that she got rid of Johnny Mercer, the way she got rid of Michael Gove, the way that she got rid of Grant Shapps, this makes a real difference. One of the reasons George Osborne, when he was editor of the Evening Standard, said that he wanted to cut up Theresa May and put her in a fridge, was that he felt insulted by the way that she'd sacked him. She told him apparently that you have to go out and get to know the party better.

• 23:31Alastair Campbell?

  Surely, all of these people, surely, they understand that they can't, maybe they do think this, I don't see how they can get rid of her, and Just install somebody else because they won't, they won't agree on who that somebody else should be because they're so riven. So that means, and I suspect that Grant Shapps probably thinks he's in with a shot, Badenoch thinks she's in with a shot, Penny Mordaunt, judging by her performance today, thinks she's in with a shot. They're back to where they were before they elected Liz Truss. And the public, they're just not going to wear this. So the, the only thing they can do, I think, is to find somebody who will take over. Sunak is probably the, the best place. Hunt will think he might be the best

• 24:11Alastair Campbell?

  place, it might be better place as well now. Otherwise, I just, I think they're destroying themselves even more if they think they can get away with another change of leadership without going to the country.

• 24:22Rory Stewart?

  If you step back and put yourself in their shoes, that's arguments, fine, but of course, it would be insane for them to go to the country. They're 30 points behind in the polls.

• 24:31Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe they're stuck with her.

• 24:32Rory Stewart?

  No, I don't think they're stuck with her. I think they have no good options. They've just got a range of bad options. I think, as I've said before on the show, they leave her in place, they're 100% going to lose. If they roll the dice and bring someone else in, maybe they're 90% likely to lose.

• 24:45Alastair Campbell?

  But how do they get the somebody else in? Do they have to have another leadership election where you could end up with, you know, Boris Johnson, some other crazy?

• 24:54Rory Stewart?

  Well, in, in the end, there, there are, there's the theory and there's the practice. So the theory is that she's under the current rules, she's not, you're not supposed to be able to mount a leadership bid against her for another 12 months.

• 25:07Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that can change with one visit from Graham Brady.

• 25:10Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, because the practice is, whatever the rules say on the surface, if she can't command a majority in the House of Commons, she can't keep her MPs together, she has to go. So in the end, the MPs have all the power here and they can do what they like. And it doesn't really matter, the theory of the fact that the rules say there have to be 12 months, or the rules say that the MPs have to create two finalists, or the rules say that the party has to vote on those finalists. The MPs can rewrite those rules. And I suspect what they will do is they will not want to go back to another leadership run. They're not going to want to go back to the constituency parties. They are going to try to find some sort of agreement amongst themselves. But that goes back to something we talked about before, which is that the

• 25:56Rory Stewart?

  Divisions within the Conservative Party, as you just pointed out, are so deep that what you were describing today, when you were watching the statement of people like John Redwood, Richard Drax, who are on the very far Brexit right of the party, are not going to accept any of the candidates who come in and we're going to return to a situation that will feel a bit like Theresa May Mark II.

• 26:18Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, you might have, you might have people in the Conservative Party, including MPs, so I get what you said before about they want to keep their jobs, it's wrapped up with their pensions and their lifestyle and their status in the community and all that stuff. You might get to a point where actually enough of them say to each, say to themselves, you know, we've, we've just got to go into opposition. I think that mindset is developing amongst some, some of them already.

• 26:43Rory Stewart?

  Well, many of them, I mean, so an MP called me today and what he pointed out, and he said, he wanted to reprimand us on the podcast. He said that I was spending too much time saying that what they were scared of is losing their seats. He said, you don't understand, many of us are thoroughly fed up and have no intention of standing again. And one of the reasons why Liz Truss has no control over us is that we've made it very clear, we don't want to be MPs anymore. The whole thing is horrible. The whole thing's so humiliating. We're not going to stand again.

• 27:09Alastair Campbell?

  If you're a leader and you're, or you're part of a leadership team, which has to include the cabinet and the chancellor and all of them, and you've gifted a 33-point lead to a Labour Party that you'd be telling everybody isn't up to the job, then you've lost all authority. You've lost all authority. That, I think a lot of MPs will be, I talked to another Tory MP the other day, who told me that she was already looking around for future prospects for a career in the media. She actually was asking me to help her. A bloody Tory MP thinking that I would help her get some work in the media. I'm, I'm sort of toying with the idea of whether I have to out her. I barely know the woman. I'll probably keep that little secret just for a little bit, a little bit longer. And

• 27:53Alastair Campbell?

  what about the second part of my question? I mean, can they credibly, let's just say they, they suddenly decide, right, okay, we've all, we've all got our act together and Rishi Sunak is the new Prime Minister. Here he is, here's Rishi Sunak. Can Rishi Sunak credibly go off to the palace and say to the king? I'm your new Prime Minister. Appoint me.

• 28:13Rory Stewart?

  Well, he'd have to convince the king in the same way that prime ministers have had to convince kings for 400 years, that he can command a majority in the House of Commons. But I guess the constitutional precedent on that is the king will say, okay, give it a go. See if you can form a majority. And if you can't, it's got to be another government.

• 28:30Alastair Campbell?

  He won't say, oh dear, oh dear, anyway, as he said in his trust the other day.

• 28:36Rory Stewart?

  No, I think, I think on this, let's take a quick break and then maybe come back and look at what all this looks like, kind of, kind of bigger stage, on a bigger global stage.

• 28:45Alastair Campbell?

  We should talk about Joe Biden and his views on trickle down as well, which he, I don't know if you saw him expressing his views while he licked an ice cream.

• 28:54Rory Stewart?

  That was good. That was good. Let's talk about that after the break.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 29:12Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 29:20Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 and middle without parent.

• 29:26Speaker 05

  Priceline negotiator.

• 29:28Speaker 06

  It's me, the.

• 29:29Speaker 05

  Priceline negotiator.

• 29:31Speaker 06

  We don't need the jingle twice.

• 29:33Speaker 05

  What about a third time?

• 29:34Speaker 06

  Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights, and rental cars.

• 29:41Speaker 05

  Seems like they decided.

• 29:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.

• 29:47Speaker 05

  Time to read the timeline.

• 29:49Speaker 06

  Fine. No one deals more deals than.

• 29:51Speaker 05

  Priceline.

• 29:52Speaker 06

  Please stop.

• 29:53Speaker 05

  Priceline.

• 29:54Speaker 06

  Touche.

• 29:54Speaker 05

  Priceline.

• 29:56Speaker 06

  Priceline.

• 29:57Speaker 07

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• 30:57Alastair Campbell?

  This week, the podcast is sponsored by The New European, and I have to declare an interest here. I am the editor-at-large, no less, of The New European. I write a diary every week, which the real editor assures me is much loved by our readers. Well, I love The New European. It was born a week after the referendum, June 23, 2016. It's still going, and it's one of a few new media titles breaking the mould of mainstream media in the UK and providing a very different perspective on the events that we're living through.

• 31:29Rory Stewart?

  And almost regardless of your politics, it's refreshing because you get a very broad picture of the arts and culture scene right across the continent and some really fascinating features in there every week.

• 31:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, that is absolutely right. But for me, what The New European does better than other titles, it gives an honest, well-written analysis of what's happening to our country right now. It's the complete antidote to the corrosive nationalistic press that helped to get us into the current mess in the first place. And therefore, I would say it really deserves your support. And I promise you, the front pages are worth the price of subscription alone. So they have a special offer for listeners to this podcast. It's the best offer you'll get anywhere, a full year subscription to The New European for just £1 a week. Or if, like me, you love getting the actual newspaper in your hands every week, you can get that plus full digital access for just £2 a week.

• 32:22Alastair Campbell?

  That's literally half the price that you'd pay at the newsstand, and you'll be supporting a newspaper that is making a real difference to politics and to journalism. All you have to do is visit www.theuneuropean.co.uk/trip. That's www.theuneuropean.co.uk/trip.

• 32:50Rory Stewart?

  So, welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 32:55Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. What did you make of Joe Biden? Joe Biden stepped in, he was campaigning, he was in an ice cream parlour, I think he was getting a chocolate, it was a sort of light coloured chocolate ice cream.

• 33:09Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it looked pretty light. I thought it was more like pistachio when I looked at it.

• 33:12Alastair Campbell?

  Was it pistachio? It might have been pistachio. And somebody threw him a question about what he thought about Liz Truss's economics plan, and he was very, very critical of it. And of course, he had said, in a different context, that trickle-down economics never worked. Of course, the Tories got very upset that an American president was wading into our political debate. But then I thought, well, if you're going to, during a leadership election, say Macron, friend or foe, the jury's out, then, you know, other leaders are entitled to comment on you.

• 33:42Rory Stewart?

  I think it's very, very sad that an American president would try to do that. I think it shows how much credibility Britain has lost that that's happening. I'd also be tempted to turn around and say, Mr Biden, how about you look in the mirror? It's all very well saying, Britain is cutting taxes on the super rich, but have you looked at the US tax rates recently? If there's one country on earth that has low tax rates for the super rich, it's the United States. If there's one country on earth that has the deepest inequality imaginable, it's the United States. If there's one country on earth that doesn't have an adequate welfare state, it's the United States. So I might turn around and say, President Biden, perhaps you'd better look at your own tax rates before you start chucking stones across the Atlantic.

• 34:26Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you can do that from the safety of your position as a former government minister. I think if our Prime Minister with her weakened authority were to do that now. I mean, I kind of agree, I do think the sadder point is that, I think if Britain... Was as taken as seriously in America as we were, then he's a very, very experienced politician. He would have known how to avoid that question completely.

• 34:49Rory Stewart?

  It's normal not to get involved in doing that kind of stuff. Interestingly, he is also now the victim, of course, of what's happening to the economy. So I 100% just to go on the record, believe that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kourting have made the situation much, much worse. But you'll remember that I've been saying on the podcast that we're heading into a global recession and I've been saying for months, and I think it's a sadly, I think it's a 10 year recession and the economic figures out of the United States are not good at all. They've now got 8.2% CPI inflation in September, food prices skyrocketing and US voters are now punishing the government that's in power. So the conservatives probably would have been punished pretty hard, even without the

• 35:33Rory Stewart?

  ludicrous stuff that Truss and Kwasi Kourting did, because American voters gone from 36% who thought the economy was the most important, issued a 44% in a month. And the polls have turned around. You remember we were saying that Biden was actually in quite a good position. He was leading in the polls a month ago. He's now three to four points behind on most of the polls on likely voters and the Republicans are in a much stronger position because of course, he is going to end up taking the responsibility for the economic pain that Americans are experiencing.

• 36:05Alastair Campbell?

  Although the, I don't think the midterms are going to be quite as catastrophic as people were saying maybe a year ago, because he is, you know, they're obsessed with fuel prices and he's done reasonably well on that up until the recent day march with Mohammed bin Salman. But I think that, you know, don't forget as well, we don't, we don't yet know who is going to be up against whoever shall be the Democrat. We could, we could end up with two very, very different people, somebody we haven't even thought of in both places.

• 36:35Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think sadly, these polls and the way the economy is going suggests that he will lose both the Senate and the House in the midterms, definitely. And I think, even though, as we've said in the podcast before, actually, this is a race which, for accidental reasons, has more Republican seats up. And some of these people are very disturbing. Again, as we said, there's a couple of Senate candidates and one governor candidate who refuse to say they will accept the results of the elections.

• 37:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 37:03Rory Stewart?

  There are these pro-Trump candidates coming through. Quite a good story, I mean, for those of us who are trying to get on to your story about post-truths and populism, which is this billion-dollar decision against Alex Jones, who was the guy that put out the fake news, the conspiracy theory about that Sandy Hook shooting. Remember that he'd said the whole thing had been staged as a plot by people to try to bring in gun control. And he's now got this record award against him.

• 37:30Alastair Campbell?

  It's almost a billion dollars.

• 37:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, almost a billion dollars, which apparently he doesn't have.

• 37:35Alastair Campbell?

  I think that's quite good news in a way, though.

• 37:37Rory Stewart?

  Very good news.

• 37:37Alastair Campbell?

  I think that, you know, those people, they've done so much damage to not just America. I mean, that book I mentioned, Christopher Wylie's book, Mindfuck, I'm just on to the bit where Steve Bannon is beginning to motor in terms of, you know, going around the world, getting involved with the Brexit campaign, getting involved with Trump, and a lot of it based on these kind of, you know, information warfare with this yet another. Did you know Alexander Nix, the yet another old Etonian who's helped to destroy our country?

• 38:04Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, to destroy the country, I agree.

• 38:05Alastair Campbell?

  Did you know him?

• 38:06Rory Stewart?

  I didn't know him, no, but I knew that he'd gone to Eton.

• 38:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 38:10Rory Stewart?

  But I have to, as I keep saying to you, George Orwell, that's what I say to you all the time.

• 38:14Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I know, you've got one, you've got one good one. Now, listen, what about, have you been following this story in Japan? We talked a few weeks ago about Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister, his assassination. And we talked, if you remember, about there was this suggestion that it was all because of his family's history involving the Unification Church, the Mooneys. And it's sort of rumbled on and on and on and on. And now the new prime minister, Kishida, Fumio Kishida, he's ordered an official inquiry into the church. Because the scandal is sort of deepening and the links between his party and the Moonies seems to be getting deeper. So I just, I think when these rumours first started, we thought,

• 38:56Alastair Campbell?

  well, this is just another kind of, you know, post-truth sort of fake news nonsense. But we now have the Prime Minister demanding an official inquiry into the links between his own party and the Moonies.

• 39:08Rory Stewart?

  Hundreds of his MPs. Not a thing that struck me. I mean, I don't know much about Japanese politics. And I'm sure there'll be many hundreds of listeners, the rest is politics, who can inform us. But one of the things that strikes me is we talk a lot about the way in which British politics seems to be overly dominated by people who went to Eton. But Japanese politics is extraordinary. I mean, every time I look into the backgrounds of any of these Japanese Prime Ministers, they seem to have parents who are ministers, grandparents who are Prime Ministers. I mean, in the case of some of them, you know, right the way back to a samurai, in the case of a recent candidate to be Mayor of Tokyo, I think he's descended from a princely family that goes back the 10th century. And the current Prime Minister,

• 39:53Rory Stewart?

  you know, again, his father and his grandfather were politicians, his cousin is the Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry. And another former Prime Minister is a relative of his. And that particular Prime Minister was also, you know, the son of a politician. This is Kichi Miyazawa. So I'd like someone on listening to the show to tell us whether the whole of Japan is run by this sort of aristocratic princely samurai families under the cover of a democracy.

• 40:22Alastair Campbell?

  I always liked going to Japan. I don't know. I always enjoyed our trips to Japan. And partly their sort of, the politeness is genuine, it's real. But I'll tell you a very funny story about G8 war stories involving a Japanese Prime Minister. This is one that we were actually hosting in Western Park in the Midlands in 1998. And it became very newsworthy. The main reason was that Clinton and Chrétien, the Prime Minister of Canada, they actually went off for a walk without telling the Secret Service where they were going. And they climbed a fence. And the Secret Service, they lost them for a few minutes, which of course with the

• 41:07Alastair Campbell?

  hundreds of American Secret Service had sent them into a blind paddock. But I must tell you this story about a Japanese Prime Minister. It was Hashimoto.

• 41:14Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 41:15Alastair Campbell?

  And it was the day that Newcastle United, that's a football team Rory, they were play, they were playing Liverpool in the FA Cup final. And I suggested to Tony, who is a Newcastle supporter, I'd got Kenny Delgleish was the Liverpool, the Newcastle manager, and I got Tony to, to write him a good luck message, which we then sent down to Wembley and was given to Kenny Delgleish before the, before the match. But as Tony was writing this letter, Hashimoto came into the room and he said through the interpreter, what are you doing? And we explained that he was sending a good luck message to Kenny Delgleish, the manager of Newcastle United. At which point Hashimoto said, well, I should do that

• 41:56Alastair Campbell?

  as well. So we tried to explain that. Anyway, it got too complicated. So I don't know whether Kenny Delgleish ever got it, but Hashimoto sat there and sent him a good luck message to beat Liverpool, which they didn't do.

• 42:08Rory Stewart?

  Well, so here we are. So Hashimoto is interesting. So Hashimoto's father was also a cabinet minister, a cabinet minister under Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi. And Nobusuke Kishi was a man who was known as the monster of the Showa era because of his rule of the puppet state of Manchukuo in northeast China, was imprisoned for three years as a suspected Class A war criminal.

• 42:30Alastair Campbell?

  And was his father a politician?

• 42:32Rory Stewart?

  Yes. And yes, he's also a man who's old, his younger brother went on to be Prime Minister, who's, who's older brother was the Vice Admiral of the Imperial Japanese Navy and is descended from an illustrious samurai family. So we've talked, talked about it a little bit before, but it is extraordinary. I can, I do want to know whether we can find a Japanese Prime Minister who doesn't seem to be deeply embedded in a whole sort of aristocratic political cabal.

• 42:56Alastair Campbell?

  Having said, you don't know much about Japanese politics. Did you just Google Japanese Prime Ministers and their relatives?

• 43:03Rory Stewart?

  Yes, I'm just very, very quick at Google while you're talking.

• 43:05Alastair Campbell?

  Did you? Did you? You didn't know, that was not in your, that wasn't in your head?

• 43:09Rory Stewart?

  No, that's not in my head at all. No, no, no. That's, in fact, I realised when I was talking to you that I'd actually been talking about one of these guys on a previous podcast and I barely remembered that Nobusuke Kishi is exactly who we were talking about a few weeks ago. That's how daft I'm getting.

• 43:21Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. Well, I, I, I must admit, I didn't Google. I just went to page 302 of the Blair, the bestseller, The Blair Years, extracts from the Alice Campbell diaries. But I did enjoy Mr Hashimoto. And then we had another, we had another prime minister that I sort of persuaded to, to, to write, to do a bit of an apology about the treatment of our prisoners of war. But that went wrong because after he'd done the apology, he decided he didn't want to do it anymore. So yeah, I've got some very fond memories of Japan. But I, you, you are right. Whenever you look at, whenever you look up the top level Japanese politicians, there's usually a quite a heritage.

• 44:00Rory Stewart?

  Um, just one thing to finish on, on a maybe slightly gloomier note, after your jollity about, about Newcastle United. I'm, I'm in Malawi. And one of the things that is very striking, and maybe it's been reported, but I haven't seen that much emphasis on it, is the way in which this global economic recession, and particularly a debt crisis, is destroying African economies. So here in Malawi, like many other economies in Sub-Saharan Africa, they are incredibly exposed on debt. Some of that is Chinese lending. So we can talk about that maybe in a future podcast. A lot of the Chinese lending was done on, not on fixed, but flexible interest rates.

• 44:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 44:37Rory Stewart?

  And we are going to find ourselves very sadly back in the situation that you found yourselves in with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, you know, 25 years ago, which is we're going to have to look at debt forgiveness again, because some of the poorest countries in the world are now crippled by debts that they can't possibly service. In other words, what we're finding, and it couldn't come at a worse moment, because of course, when you were doing things to help those countries in the early 2000s, the British economy was performing well. We're now in a situation where the need and the extreme poverty in the world has never been greater. It will get worse. Climate change will probably add another 100, 200 million people to the extreme poor. But it's at a time when in Europe and in the United States, people are going to feel with a recession coming on, very short

• 45:21Rory Stewart?

  of money and very reluctant to help.

• 45:23Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the other big difference then is that we had a Prime Minister Tony Blair and a Chancellor Gordon Brown, who were absolutely kind of mildly obsessed with the whole issue of debt write-off and development. And now we have a former Prime Minister who got rid of your old department, Department for International Development. You probably saw this, heard this morning, the, the famine crisis in Somalia at the moment, where basically Americans are lifting the whole load in terms of any relief there, that the UK is Committing a fraction of what it would have done under the good old days of DIFID. And you write to highlight climate change as well. I think the last meeting of the

• 46:06Alastair Campbell?

  last production of the African Economic Outlook focused hugely on the impact of climate change and the effect that's going to have on their economies.

• 46:13Rory Stewart?

  And it's so, so sad because partly this is driven by what's handled interest rates. Partly it's driven by COVID, which had a horrifying effect on African economies. But, but as you say, whereas in those days, as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were obsessed with this subject, I don't think I've seen any politician from any party talking about Africa's growing debt burden and how on earth it's supposed to survive.

• 46:36Alastair Campbell?

  Although I did see, I did see Labour committing to the re-establishment of DIFID.

• 46:42Rory Stewart?

  Which is really good news. And, and I also think Keir Starmer, when we interviewed him, committed to increasing spending back to the point seven percent. But the problem with all these spending commitments at the moment is, is financing them.

• 46:56Alastair Campbell?

  Jolly good. Well, there we are. We've ended on a glum note. But we can hopefully raise the mood with our Q and A, which we've already recorded because we did things the wrong way around. The one thing I'm disappointed we haven't had time to cover off is the Nicola Sturgeon statement today about the economy and the independence of Scotland, which I think was quite interesting, but we probably should save that for a rainy day.

• 47:17Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Well, good night, Alistair. Thank you for the call.

• 47:20Alastair Campbell?

  All the best.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 47:41Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped moving? You start, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 47:45Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 47:48Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 47:49Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

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