Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 101. Question Time: Palestine in 2023, Chat GPT, and what do diplomats actually do? About this episode What is the actual role of a diplomat? Would Brexit have had a different result if Labour was under Ed Miliband's leadership? How will artificial intelligence change our society? Rory and Alastair answer these questions and more in this week's Question Time episode.
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0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 Alastair Campbell? And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.
0:19 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. 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.
0:42 Alastair 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?
0:49 Rory 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/restorspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restorspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
1:14 Rory Stewart? Welcome to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.
1:18 Alastair Campbell? And with me, Alastair Campbell. And Rory, we've had some very distinguished people, some of your distinguished former colleagues, clearly listening to the podcast. I'll start with a couple. Alistair Burt, a distinguished former Foreign Office Minister. What are we going to do about Israel-Palestine? The issues are not going to go away, be managed or forgotten. Limited diplomatic bandwidth is not an excuse. Tensions are rising. Innocent lives will increasingly be lost. Happy to offer you two mates some opinion. In other words, I think that's a bid to come on the podcast, but we'll just take it as a question. And then Alisha Kern's MP, who is the committee, the Chair of the Foreign Office Select Committee. Alistair mentioned Sarah Mardinian. He's watching The Swimmers movie. I'm not sure if you're aware, she's currently being prosecuted by the Greek government
2:02 Alastair Campbell? for helping asylum seekers land safely. Worth looking into for the next episode. So what do you think, first of all, for Alistair Burt, what are we going to do about Israel-Palestine?
2:11 Rory Stewart? Well, again, very, very much front and centre of my mind here in Jordan. The sense is that the situation is disintegrating very, very quickly.
2:22 Rory Stewart? And that the Palestinian Authority, at least the way it's perceived by Palestinians here, or those that I've been talking to, has largely lost control of areas outside the central town of Ramallah. And that what's happening in Jenin, what's happening in Nablus, what's happening elsewhere, which is the beginning of a pretty serious series of demonstrations and uprisings, are not really being controlled by the Palestinian Authority anymore.
2:45 Alastair Campbell? Oh.
2:46 Rory Stewart? And, you know, we're back into the very, very bitter arguments of the past. I mean, and partly this is something we've discussed in the past, but remember that the big supporters of Palestine traditionally were countries like Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and all those places have been completely shattered and torn to pieces in the last 15 years. So they've lost a lot of their support in the kind of Mediterranean, Levant area. And the Gulf countries are less and less interested. They've all signing up for technology transfers with Israel.
3:24 Alastair Campbell? So with, I mean, I think the point Alice is making is that everybody's sort of being worn down by the scale of the problem, but it is in the end, it is only if the, some of the major powers and some of the regional, the smaller regional powers stay engaged in the idea that there, there can be, and indeed there has to be a resolution of this. Otherwise, we just throw up our hands and give up and walk away.
3:47 Rory Stewart? Yeah, it's, it's completely, complete horrifying.
3:50 Alastair Campbell? And what about Alicia Cairns? I was aware that the Greek government was prosecuting the younger of the, of the two sisters, or the older of the two sisters, but the one who didn't become an Olympic swimmer. But you actually sent me something really interesting last week, or you sent me an interview with the European actor who had played the, the main character and who was very, very, very critical of her own film.
4:14 Rory Stewart? Yeah, incredibly critical of her own film. She said the film was essentially sort of racist and that the, that Hollywood is still struggling to find out how to communicate Arabs and that they would... Firstly, we're very reluctant to cast a Syrian actor despite the fact that there are lots of talented Syrian actors. Secondly, that there were weird sort of making people talk in pigeon English and saying, oh, I am astonished that you're swimming. I thought that all women from the Middle East wore hijabs and couldn't swim. So it was quite a punchy piece by the central actor attacking her own movie.
4:49 Alastair Campbell? Oh, it really was. We talked last week about how we were often quite negative about politicians and we quoted somebody saying how well a Scottish MSP, Member of the Scottish Parliament, had served. Journeyman Severian, also on select committees, I'm finding them far more informative regarding issues of the day, watching people scrutinized in detail that is often skirted over in the main house is fascinating. Liam Capleton, do you have any words about Darren Jones and the incredible work he's been doing as Chair of the Business Select Committee? He is perhaps the most capable politician I've seen at work in recent years. Surely he has an incredibly bright future ahead when, I think if is probably
5:33 Alastair Campbell? the better word, Labour take the next election. And I'd noticed Darren Jones last week, I heard him, I was driving somewhere or other, he was on the radio talking about artificial intelligence, quantum physics and all sorts of stuff and how there wasn't a proper government strategy on this stuff. And I must admit, I was very, very, very impressed by it.
5:52 Rory Stewart? Well, so select committees are interesting. The big change that came in when I was first elected in 2010 is that they suddenly made the chairs of the committee elected and the members elected instead of being appointed by the whips. And I came in on the first wave of that. So I was elected on to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and then I was elected as Chair of the Defence Committee. I found it a mixed experience because some of these committees know a lot. So I was always very impressed by the Justice Committee when I was the Prisons Minister because most of the people on it were lawyers with experience of the prison system and the justice system. And because they were lawyers, they were very good at putting pretty good forensic questions. But I also saw a lot in the Foreign
6:35 Rory Stewart? Affairs Committee that it was very easy to get past the committee. Politicians would come in and provided they were charming, William Hague was a great example, he'd just sort of be charming and relaxed. He could make it through totally unscathed, nothing come out of it, whatever horrors were happening around the world. So, and of course, I did discover that we'd produced these brutal reports from the Defence Committee. So we produced reports saying that we were underestimating the threat from Putin in 2014, that we shouldn't have been getting rid of our conventional warfare capacity in Europe.
7:07 Alastair Campbell? That would be the Select Committee, which Boris Johnson said that it was ridiculous to think there'd ever be another tank war in Europe.
7:12 Rory Stewart? Yeah, well, that was a later iteration of the same debate. But the fact that he was still at it years later shows the basic point, which is nobody reads these reports, very sadly. I mean, I would talk to ministers in these departments and it would be quite clear that we would produce reports that had taken us months to bring together. And the ministers didn't even have the courtesy of reading a few pages of them, didn't even read the summaries.
7:34 Alastair Campbell? But I think it's interesting, the question, I think, is on to something. I think that, I think it partly explains why people listen to our podcast. I think there are millions of people who do want something a bit deeper at the moment than they're getting from most of what they see of politics. And so I think this, we should encourage select committees to do more, and we should encourage them, even if ministers aren't responding to them properly, to keep going with what they do, because there will come a point where we get back to proper grown-up government. And I think select committees will be an important part of that.
8:03 Rory Stewart? So you asked that we're accused, or the implication was that Chris Mullins, who'd been the Chair of the Education Committee, was made a junior minister, basically to silence him, that he'd been too effective as Chair of the Education Committee, and the idea was by making him a junior minister, he could become sort of irrelevant again.
8:19 Alastair Campbell? No.
8:20 Rory Stewart? Was there anything in that?
8:21 Alastair Campbell? No, absolute nonsense. No. I don't know. No, seriously, Chris Mullin was somebody who, albeit on a different, you know, on some issues, you know, well to the left of Tony Blair, as it were, was somebody for whom we had enormous respect. And, look, Chris is, I fear, is a published diarist, and it's, you know, I think it's fair to say that he found being a minister a challenge at times.
8:46 Rory Stewart? Well, so anyone who hasn't read that book, that is the most mesmerizing account of ministerial, a minister feeling completely impotent.
8:54 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but no, but he was, he tells, he tells quite a few funny stories at my expense in that book. I remember there's one where he was coming on a trip with us and he said he kept looking nervously at his watch and saying, you know, he was, I said, what are you so nervous about? He said, I'm worried we miss the plane. And, and I said, Chris, the plane goes, will we arrive at the plane? So it was, no, but Chris, Chris, Chris is a great guy. So no, that, I don't know where you heard that Rory, but it's not true.
9:23 Rory Stewart? Okay. Now, Ian Rapley, this links to this diary writing advice. I'd like to ask about diary writing. How do you find the time? How do you do it? What do you get out of it, Alison? Tell us about your diary writing.
9:34 Alastair Campbell? Well, do you write a diary?
9:36 Rory Stewart? I do sometimes. I wrote one when I was in politics and I wrote one bit when I was in Iraq. But I'm not writing one at the moment. Are you writing one at the moment?
9:43 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I mean, I, I still do write a diary, but I'm much, you know, I made a terrible mistake about, I don't know, about 10 years ago, I started to write it on a laptop and it's not the same. And I can't quite get back into the habit of doing with pen and paper. What I get out of writing a diary is I feel it's like an emotional dump at the end of the day. And I also use it as a strategic tool. I use it to write down, I've got this, I'm looking at my wall with all these mottos that I follow in my life and one of them is thinking ink, which was a poem by Marilyn Monroe, by the way. What I do is I write down what I've done and what I've thought during the day. And then
10:23 Alastair Campbell? I have a pad alongside it where I, I kind of take that into the next day or the next week. And also I spot trends in my own kind of patterns of, you know, I might decide that I'm, I'm spending too much time on doing this and not enough time on doing that. So I, I kind of use it as a bit of a, an emotional thing, but also as partly as a strategic tool as well. Here's one for you then, Jay Byers. What does a foreign diplomat actually do day to day? Are they well paid? How are they chosen? Do they alter? Or have a say in foreign policy. Is it a prerequisite to have in-depth knowledge, know the language, et cetera, of the country they're stationed in? Is it an outdated role?
11:04 Rory Stewart? That's a great question. So diplomats.
11:07 Alastair Campbell? I'd say there's a book in that.
11:09 Rory Stewart? Yeah, there is. There's a good book in that.
11:10 Alastair Campbell? In fact, Tom Fletcher has virtually written that book.
11:12 Rory Stewart? Yep, Tom Fletcher was an ambassador, has written a great book about diplomacy in the modern age, which which definitely should be recommended to listeners. So I was a diplomat. I joined the British Foreign Office and I served in Indonesia and in Yugoslavia and in Iraq. And the answer is Foreign Office is just another part of the civil service. So no, they're not very well paid. They're they're paid like other UK civil servants, which which, you know, compared to the private sector is not a lot of money. Traditionally, there was a big emphasis on languages and country knowledge. So I studied Indonesian, I studied Serb-Croat. And, you know, I had some extraordinary friends who joined the Foreign Office with me.
11:52 Rory Stewart? I had a friend called Jared Russell, who learnt such beautiful Arabic that he can, you know, he became the Foreign Office spokesman on Al Jazeera in Arabic.
12:00 Alastair Campbell? He was appointed by me.
12:02 Rory Stewart? Appointed by you, Alistair. Oh, well, there we are.
12:05 Alastair Campbell? Didn't know Jared. Jared was a friend of yours. I discovered him. And decided this guy is just absolutely brilliant.
12:13 Rory Stewart? Oh, well, well.
12:14 Alastair Campbell? Turned him and turned him into a star in the Arab world.
12:17 Rory Stewart? Please, you did. No, he's extraordinary. And he himself has written an incredible book on the lost religions of the Middle East, which nobody else would have been able to write, partly because nobody else has that combination of intellect, linguistic ability. So real model of a diplomat. But things are changing. So increasingly, our embassies abroad are becoming more and more complicated management positions. And there's less and less emphasis on getting out, spending time with locals from the country and mastering the local politics.
12:48 Alastair Campbell? There's also fewer and fewer of them. That's a problem.
12:50 Rory Stewart? Absolutely. And more and more emphasis on managing very complicated embassies with people from umpteen different government departments. And it tends to turn in a bit more inwardly. But the big problem is the question of what is British influence in the world? And, you know, I think I've told you before that when I was at Kenyatta's inauguration as a British minister, sitting there cheerfully as the senior foreign minister at that inauguration, I was suddenly, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, would you mind moving backwards? And. Entering from stage right was a Chinese man who was the
13:24 Alastair Campbell? Deputy Junior Assistant Advisor.
13:26 Rory Stewart? One hundred percent, yeah. From a very obscure advisory committee was suddenly put in front of me. So it's difficult being a diplomat if your country's stock is not rising high.
13:36 Alastair Campbell? Well, I just to go back to the interview, the leading interview with with Michel Bardet. I think that came through in what he was saying. And and I also had dinner with him while I was over here. And and even more so, I think it was this sense that Britain underestimates how much power we have lost in the diplomatic arena as a result of Brexit. And, you know, I think when you're talking to them, you meet ambassadors around the world, so do I. And I think they're all feeling that at the moment.
14:02 Rory Stewart? Here's something coming directly out of that, Alastair. Ed Miliband and Brexit. Brian W. from Discord. What role do you think Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party at the time of the referendum and his well-known personal views on Europe prevented the Labour Party from effectively exposing the Brexit lies in the crucial Labour heartlands? Basically, if Ed Miliband had still been leader at the time of the referendum, do you think we would have had the same result?
14:28 Alastair Campbell? Well, we'll never know. But I certainly think that there's two parts to that question. One is the fact that the Labour Party did not fight its own campaign as effectively as it might have done, in large part because of Jeremy Corbyn and his adviser Seamus Milne not wanting to. The second part of that is the there was a reluctance. This is maybe why I didn't get quite as involved is that the I think the experience of Scotland and the Scottish referendum was actually Labour and Tory fighting together produced all sorts of difficulties and tensions and so forth. But I can remember during that referendum period, the extent to which Cameron and Osborne,
15:13 Alastair Campbell? I think, started to think, you know, if only Jeremy Corbyn would go out there and campaign a bit more, and if only Jeremy Corbyn would tell the Labour Party what to do. I think they underestimated that actually it was it was deeper than that. But there is no doubt in my mind, if the Labour Party had really fought that campaign with the, you know, the passion and the fight that it puts into an election campaign, say, I think the result could have been different. All right, Rory, leave it there. Let's take a break.
15:42 Speaker 02 Here we are getting a statement from Number Ten on that flight. We had 350 passengers on board.
15:51 Speaker 03 The Great Game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.
15:58 Speaker 04 We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.
16:04 Speaker 05 Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.
16:07 Speaker 06 They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.
16:10 Speaker 03 Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!
16:23 Speaker 07 We would need to understand the policy context.
16:25 Speaker 03 All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today and disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.
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17:27 Rory Stewart? Now, here's a response. We're talking about MPs getting in touch. Robert Halfon, who was the Chair of the Education Committee and is now a Minister in the Education Department. Has written saying, Dear Rory, enjoying your podcast very much with AC. Thank you for being so fair in describing the Israelist view. I think your understanding of what is going on is a good one. And then on BTECs, it's not correct that one of your listeners said, we're getting rid of all BTECs, not supporting vocational education. We're getting rid of BTECs with a low take up, poor outcomes, or ones that completely overlap with T levels. Significant numbers of BTECs will remain. Plus, we have new T levels, new higher technical qualifications, plus apprenticeships at all
18:08 Rory Stewart? levels, including degree apprenticeships and a first reading of a lifelong entitlement bill which will enable all adults to access a loan, first for short courses and then technical qualifications, backed by increased funding. I didn't want to read the whole thing, but.
18:23 Alastair Campbell? Robert Half, who knows of the long list of education ministers. I think if I were to ask Fiona, my partner, who's a sort of expert on education policy, to list all the conservative education ministers we have had, I think she'd have Robert Half on as a net positive, whereas the vast bulk of them are very much net negative.
18:41 Rory Stewart? Oh, good. Well, that's good. Listen, there was one interesting sort of glimpse there of something which I think is important in the long run, which is this lifelong learning piece, because we've talked a bit about artificial intelligence and the way in which robotics, AI, nanotechnology is going to completely change the face of work and many professions that we take for granted today will disappear. So it will be vital for people to be able to retrain in midlife, for someone in the future at 40 to be able to take a year off and really focus on another profession. And I don't think the government's there yet, almost certainly because they haven't got the funding to do something big. But it sounds like they're taking some small steps in that direction. I think that is vital and it's something that both parties in the next election need
19:26 Rory Stewart? to have in their manifesto.
19:27 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. Now, here's one from Robert Bush. And we're so used to sort of the ridiculousness of our debate on Europe that this is barely getting any attention at all. But the question is, what are the international repercussions of the UK government proposing yet another domestic law exempting itself from international norms over the human right of asylum? You know, Rishi Sunak, we're back to him, yet another prime minister who's dictating his agenda according to the interests of the Conservative Party and the various factions, talking about bringing Britain out to the European Convention on Human Rights. And why? Because it has the word Europe in it.
20:01 Rory Stewart? It's heartbreaking. And of course, and it was made by the Conservatives. I mean, this is this was my hour and a half debate with Jacob Rees-Mogg. And it's typical British hypocrisy. We were very proud of the European Court on Human Rights when we set it up, when Conservative ministers set it up in the early 50s. And we were proud of it when we when we were going around telling other people how to behave. We were really proud of it when Britain was sort of pompously lecturing southern European states on not holding up to human rights values. As soon as it turns around and the 50 odd countries that have signed up to this begin criticizing us, we want to get rid of the whole thing.
20:37 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I know. And also, we're back to the whole thing about, you know, the rights that we've lost in relation to Brexit, the rights of young people to live and work and travel in, you know, 27 other countries. And on this, they project it as this is something that's being done to us by this European Convention, the European Court, uh, which has got nothing to do with the European Union, by the way. That's the other thing they deliberately tried to inflate. And this is about us as British people losing our rights.
21:07 Rory Stewart? It's extraordinary.
21:08 Alastair Campbell? It's horrible. It's just truly horrible. And this is what I mean about Rishi Sunak. He has lost that opportunity that he had when he took over, actually to signal that he was going to be different. And I'm afraid he's coming over as being just the same.
21:21 Rory Stewart? Now, let's look at this one. STEM versus arts humanities. Tom Parkin, why is there such a bias in favor of STEM subjects in schools, so science, technology, engineering, mathematics? Is it because these are the subjects ministers enjoyed? Very disappointed to hear the government continuing to pit STEM versus arts humanities. That's a really interesting question, isn't it? Because actually, the normal criticism of the British elite. Is that they don't know anything about science, technology, engineering and maths? And they've all studied PPE and history.
21:53 Alastair Campbell? Well, we had Margaret Thatcher, didn't we? She was a scientist. We had Margaret Beckett. Her background was was with science. I mean, I think Sunak, my sense of Rishi Sunak is that he's genuinely interested in technology. And I guess that's part of the thinking behind this recreation of this new department that he's talking about today. Look, I I think the STEM subjects are incredibly important. I I'd phrase the question rather differently. I think there's been a deliberate downgrading of the arts, which I think has been a a big mistake. So I I don't I don't think we should see these as a kind of either or.
22:25 Rory Stewart? Well, I I agree with you. I think it's also a question of balance, isn't it? Because one of the ways in which Britain has managed to move up the Education League table, so these international league tables on numeracy particularly, but also on on literacy, eight, nine points up over the last 10, 11 years, is partly because the government put a very, very relentless focus on getting the literacy right, getting the numeracy right. And the numeracy question around maths is interesting. It seems to be that the approach there was to keep children in class until everybody in the class had mastered a particular mathematical issue before they moved on to the next mathematical problem. So if you had children who were doing better, they could be given different examples of the same mathematical issue, but everybody in the class was going to get that.
23:09 Rory Stewart? And that's something I think that that Britain learnt from East Asia, the approach to maths teaching. But I think it it does come back to this question of how you get the balance right. Do you say, okay, we're falling behind on literacy and maths? We're going to go absolutely focused on that. We're not going to get distracted. Or are you going to create a system where you're confident to say, we really can get the balance? Of course, governments struggle to get balance right.
23:33 Alastair Campbell? International baccalaureate is the answer, or international blackgloria? Now, let's close on this one. Brendan Gallagher, a bit a bit fun. I know because you're a massive football fan and you follow sport so closely.
23:43 Rory Stewart? Of course, yeah.
23:44 Alastair Campbell? This question is as follows. Allegedly dodgy national anthems and rugby songs. Are we getting too PC or is it an issue? Delilah is about the murder of a woman. Sos pan fach is about cruelty to cats and child neglect. Swing low sweet chariot is an old civil rights song. So I don't know if you follow this story, but the Welsh have stopped singing Delilah as part of the build up to a match because it's about the murder of a woman. I just hate the swing low sweet chariot because I think it's a dirge and it's one of the reasons why Scotland played so brilliantly and rose to that magnificent win at the weekend after singing Fire of Scotland, which I think is a great tune, which sounds brilliant on the backpipe.
24:26 Alastair Campbell? So where are you on PC songs at sporting events?
24:30 Rory Stewart? Oh blimey, blimey, you've put your finger on three things I'm most uncomfortable with in the world. I know nothing about sport. I'm completely tone deaf and I'm always thrown off balance by questions around this. I'd be more interested in you because you connect more closely with those three things. What do you think?
24:47 Alastair Campbell? I see. I really don't like Swing Low Sweet Chariot.
24:50 Rory Stewart? But how about Delilah? That seems to be the key.
24:52 Alastair Campbell? Well, Stoke City fans sing it as well. No, I didn't. I've got to be honest, I didn't know that's what it was about. So I think you can get too hung up on this stuff, I really do. And I think we should change the British national anthem for sure.
25:04 Rory Stewart? Yeah, well, that's a boring song, I agree. So we've been talking a bit about AI and retraining in midlife and Rishi Sunak investing in tech. So I've had the opportunity, friend, to use the very latest version of ChatGPT, which is this artificial intelligence site. And they asked it to write seven lightbulb jokes about Rory Stewart, the politician. And I can report that AI appears to be developing a sense of humour.
25:31 Alastair Campbell? Oh, God.
25:32 Rory Stewart? God, I'm going to give you two or three of these. How many Rory Stewarts does it take to change a lightbulb? Two, one to hold the ladder and one to climb up and explain why he's not a spy. Very good.
25:44 Rory Stewart? How many Rory Sturts does it take to change a lightbulb? One, but he'll change his mind halfway through and switch to a different lightbulb. That's a bit rude, isn't it? How many Rory Sturts, just two more. How many Rory Sturts does it take to change a lightbulb? One, but he'll need a special adapter because he bought the bulb in Afghanistan. And finally, how many Rory Sturts does it take to change a lightbulb? One, but he'll make a long and eloquent speech about the history and symbolism of lightbulbs before he does it and will all be in the dark.
26:10 Alastair Campbell? My God, well, I've got to say, that is quite alarming because they're reasonably funny. And I'm worried that this thing is going to put writers and comedians out of business, which is a very neat segue to me responding to the seven messages I've had in the last hour from my daughter Grace, saying, if you don't plug my national tour, which is starting very, very soon on your podcast, I'll be really, really pissed off with you. So if you want tickets for Grace's tour, go to disgracecampbell.com. Oh, thank God, Rory. Thank you for leading me into that one.
26:44 Rory Stewart? Well, well, well done. Really well done. And so goodbye and, and see, see you soon.
26:50 Alastair Campbell? See you next week.
Previous 100. The Revenge of Liz Truss, Earthquakes in Syria and Turkey, and China's 'Red Zeppelin' Next 102. The Secret Brexit Summit, Erdoğan under fire, and the death penalty Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
