126. King Charles III's coronation, the geopolitics of net-zero, and the power of oracy

This Saturday May 6th, the UK will celebrate the coronation of King Charles III. But what is the political impact of such an event? And what is the relevance of the monarchy today? Rory and Alastair will discuss this historic event, plus Richard Sharp's exit from the BBC, the impending energy crisis in Europe, and the importance of teaching speaking skills. Sign up to the free TRIP weekly newsletter: bit.ly/3zhYAIl TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport 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 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.

• 0:42Alastair 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/rustorspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustorspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 1:34Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:37Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. We've got a lot to get through today, Rory. We're going to talk about the coronation of your friend, the King. We're going to talk about the energy crisis across Europe, and particularly something that you've been picking up about worries in Germany. We're going to give a little plug to our splendid leading interview with Tony Blair. And we're going to talk about the BBC ex-chairman and what the future of the BBC might be and what sort of person they should get. And we're also going to talk about something called oracy. Which is, well, we'll explain what it is later in the show.

• 2:10Rory Stewart?

  And Alistair, I'm seeing you in a bookshop with your books behind you. Just a quick, quick reminder. Book now on sale.

• 2:17Alastair Campbell?

  They're not my books. I'm in a books, I'm in the stockroom of a bookstore where, once we've recorded the podcast, I'm going to sign, I think it's about 700 books that Rest is Politics listeners have asked for personal dedications. I will have RSI by the end of the day. So I'm in the stockroom and you'll be pleased to know Rory, given you're the arch monarchist in the team. And the coronation is one of the things that we're going to talk about. You can see that they've put out a load of Union flags behind me.

• 2:43Rory Stewart?

  That's right, presumably for your benefit.

• 2:45Alastair Campbell?

  Where is yours?

• 2:46Rory Stewart?

  Well, I, I, I feel ashamed now. I see that you are doing a podcast with a Union Jack behind you and I will, I will try to sort that out in future.

• 2:54Alastair Campbell?

  So Rory, will, will you easily be able to find a Union flag in Amman? Will they be on sale? Are people in Jordan getting ready for the coronation? I see it's live on Al Jazeera.

• 3:02Rory Stewart?

  I've been thinking about this a lot, actually, because I was imagining that I was going to be assaulted by you because you are, of course, under the surface, basically a Republican, despite some occasional expressions of sympathy for the monarchy. But I've been thinking about it. I, one of the things that I think fascinates the world is ritual. And I think one of the problems that many people, many of my friends have in Britain is with the whole idea of ritual. They don't like the idea of symbolic, traditional ceremonies. It makes them uncomfortable, but the rest of the world is suffused with them. I mean, I've sat in Pakistan for weddings, which take literally four days, where you have a day dedicated to turmeric on the face, a day dedicated to Henna,

• 3:43Rory Stewart?

  or in Java where you, you know, the groom breaks an egg with his foot and the bride throws a beetlemat. So much of the rest of the world is much, much more comfortable in weddings, in funerals, in presidential inaugurations with ritual.

• 3:57Alastair Campbell?

  But hold on, we, we are, you talk about ritual. I mean, we're going to have an absolute surfeit of ritual. Added to which, they've now added to the sense of ritual by announcing that we're all sitting in front of our tellies, watching the coronation, supposed to join in this chorus of millions to swear allegiance. To the king and his heirs. Now, you, I presume Rory, being a kind of very, very firmly established member of the establishment and with your own royal connections, I presume you won't be in front of the telly, that you will be in the nave.

• 4:29Rory Stewart?

  I think wherever one is, one's meant to be swearing allegiance. Can I?

• 4:33Alastair Campbell?

  You're avoiding the question. You're avoiding Rory is going to be televised, is going to be televised. You will be filmed arriving. Are you going to be in the nave or not?

• 4:42Rory Stewart?

  I think at the moment, we're holding off answering those kind of questions. Even David Beckham hasn't said whether he's going to be there. As far as one, I don't really know who's going to be there. But you'll find out, obviously, the listeners will find out.

• 4:53Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we know, we know, the former prime ministers are going to be there. Are you going to be sitting behind or in front of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss?

• 5:00Rory Stewart?

  Can I, can I avoid your question and give you, give you just a little bit of context for listeners on this allegiance? So what used to happen, and one of the strange things, I think, that the Archbishop of Canterbury, who's suggested that people should be invited to do this, has been struggling with, is that the last coronation, obviously, was 70 years ago, in a very, very different world and a very different society. And when you watch that coronation, it's extraordinary because you have all these ancient dukes and peers with their crowns coming on and off their heads. And they were all meant to come up at that coronation, one after another. I think it was clergy, then the royal family, then the dukes, then the marquesses, all in order. And they were supposed to say, I

• 5:42Rory Stewart?

  become your liege man of life and limb and of earthly worship and faith and truth I will bear unto you to live and die against all manner of folks. So help me God. So I guess the problem facing the Archbishop was, what's he going to do about that? So presumably, you'd agree as a starting point, it wouldn't have been very suitable today to have a procession of dukes, marquesses and earls walking up, pledging their troth, and nobody else saying anything.

• 6:12Alastair Campbell?

  It depends, Rory, how much we are attached to old ritual, which you just told me a moment ago, we are attached to.

• 6:18Rory Stewart?

  Well, obviously, I quite like that.

• 6:19Alastair Campbell?

  I'm loving, I'm loving the way, I'm loving the way, I'm sensing here that this kite having been flown, and it's not flying quite the direction that people want to, is now all being landed upon the Archbishop of Canterbury, as opposed to the royal household. But carry on with your excellent desolation so far.

• 6:38Rory Stewart?

  Well, so I guess that the point is that they've changed the ceremony a lot. And I think there are a lot of things about it which are, which is smart. I think a really, really good improvement. So it's going to begin with processions of faith leaders from all faiths. And instead of what would have happened in the past, which is most of these amazing bits of royal rituals. So there are, there's a glove, there's, there's three different swords, there are two different scepters, there are orbs, there are cloaks. These things used to be generally handed over by ancient members of the aristocracy who had inherited these responsibilities. Some of them in sort of 15 parts over 900 years. But this time around, a lot of them are going to be done by people like your friend Baroness Helena Kennedy.

• 7:23Rory Stewart?

  There's going to be members of the House of Lords, but they're mostly life peers. So Said Karmal, who's a conservative Muslim life peer, is doing the armills, which are the bracelets. Gillian Maron, who's a Labour peer and was from the Board of British Deputies, is going to do the robe. Narendra Patel, who's a cross venturer, is doing the ring. Indrajeet Singh, who's a 90 year old cross venturer, is going to do the glove. So anyway, lots of different changes. And I guess somewhere in the middle of trying to change it up is this question of the South of Allegiance, which obviously really sticks in your gullet and you don't like it.

• 7:57Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, I like the fact that the Archbishop's people, when they were briefing it out at the weekend, said there are going to be lots of new elements that reflect the diversity of contemporary society. And you've alluded to some of those. That was, that was a very kind of multi-ethnic list of people that you read out there. And that's, that's, that's great. I think that's a good thing. I also like the fact that the languages of Britain, including Welsh with a hymn, Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic are all going to be used. I think that's a good thing. And by the way, Rory, while we're on the subject of Welsh, I don't know if you noticed, you got a lot of criticism from our Welsh listeners last week who felt that you, the word they kept using was snorted. You snorted at me trying to stress the importance of Welsh as a, as a language. So do you want to deal with that one?

• 8:42Alastair Campbell?

  Because you're a big fan of the union. You presume you support all the languages of union.

• 8:46Rory Stewart?

  I, I do, I do. I'm actually very interested in Welsh because I was a Cumbrian MP and Cumbria is of course the Old North and it's where a lot of the most ancient Welsh literature comes from Cumbria. The Gdodden happens just across the border. I was snorting, I think, for a couple of things, but one of them is I really hate lists and I think you produced the figure that it was the 50th most influential language in the world. I have a zippo idea how you arrive at the notion that it's the 50th most influential language.

• 9:14Alastair Campbell?

  I just said it was the world language barometer. I don't know how they arrived at it.

• 9:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Alastair Campbell?

  So you weren't snorting of the language. This is a firm rebuttal. You were not snorting of the language.

• 9:23Rory Stewart?

  No, and actually I want to take this opportunity to share my favourite Welsh word, which I was reminded of by a friend of mine called Roger Pauli and the word is cynefin, which is pronounced, which is written C Y N E F I N and it signifies all the different factors in your environment that influence you in ways that you can't understand. So not just your sort of ecosystem, but temporal, physical, cultural, spiritual. So that's my Welsh word for the day.

• 9:52Alastair Campbell?

  That's good. Well, I think you've got, I think that was a good comeback. I think linking Cumbria to Wales, I think having a word up your sleeve, I think that was excellent. Let's get back to the chorus of millions. Now, you will be in the nave, we've established that by your dodging my question, we know that and you'll be there and because you're quite an important person, you'll probably be there with your wife as well. So it's like even if I go to church on the rare occasions I go to church, I do find myself involuntarily sometimes joining in in the bits where you're meant to join in. So I can understand why you will swear allegiance because the camera might be on you and if you don't swear allegiance, you'll be in trouble. But are we seriously expecting people in their sitting rooms

• 10:33Alastair Campbell?

  to swear allegiance to the king and his heirs? And given the theme of the service, as I understand it, is about being called to serve, shouldn't this allegiance, swearing of allegiance actually to be the idea of service to the country or the Commonwealth even, rather than to an individual, the new king? Discuss.

• 10:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think very good challenge. And I think this all goes to the heart of what we think about kings and what we think about our constitution. We are a monarchy and a lot of bits, the army, for example, still do feel that they are pledging to a monarch rather than a country. And it's part of not being a republic. Look, I suppose the best argument that I saw against the the mass invitation to swear allegiance was made in The Guardian, where there was an article saying the problem with it is that it causes problems for people who are neutral. That there are many, many people out there who don't want to be put in the position of having to either swear allegiance or make a statement by not doing

• 11:41Rory Stewart?

  so.

• 11:42Alastair Campbell?

  If it's the same piece I read, I think it was less about neutrality, more about indifference, people who don't really care.

• 11:47Rory Stewart?

  So they don't want to be forced to make a choice.

• 11:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 11:50Rory Stewart?

  And I can completely see that. I can also see why they wanted to move away from the only oaths being made by the the lords and the dukes. But it's also similar things happen. Remember, one of the things that's, I think, maybe stirring this up is that at the heart of the culture wars in the US is the pledging allegiance to the flag. So, you know, very close friends of mine, relatives of mine in the States, get very, very angry at being made to pledge allegiance to the flag in the United States.

• 12:17Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. I mean, let's just, let's just say what it is that we're expected to rise. I'm not sure whether we're supposed to stay seated on the sofa in front of the TV or whether we stand and put our hand on our heart or on a Bible.

• 12:27Rory Stewart?

  It's incidentally not compulsory. It's it's.

• 12:30Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, okay. But the words, the words that we're invited to say together are, I swear that I will pay true allegiance to Your Majesty, he's there, we're now assuming that he could hear us on our sofas, and to your heirs and successors according to law. So help me God. So are we legally bound to swear allegiance to His Majesty and his successors? So this is about George as well.

• 12:58Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I don't know what the constitutional basis this is. I mean, obviously, in the Middle Ages, it was very, very fundamental, wasn't it?

• 13:04Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly, because they were the law. They decided the laws.

• 13:07Rory Stewart?

  I become your liege man of life and limb, of earthly worship and faith and truth. Yeah.

• 13:13Alastair Campbell?

  But we had, we had, we had, we had a separation of powers, if you remember, and and we then had this parliament thing came along, they set the laws. But now we've got the Archbishop telling us what the law is. And as you know Rory, I'm a fan of the Archbishop. I like the Archbishop a lot.

• 13:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, that's aside. Let's get you on to the main thing. What do you think about the main thing? Do you enjoy the sense it's going to be a lot of ritual? Do you think it's a waste of time, waste of money? Are you happy because it only happens once every 70 years to not care too much about it? What's your basic emotional reaction?

• 13:41Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I've got to say that given that Prince Charles has had the longest apprenticeship in history, and I don't wish him ill at all, but it's not going to be another 70 years before the next one, is it? Because if it is, he becomes the oldest person who ever, who ever lived. First of all, will I watch it? I probably will watch it. Will I be interested in it? I will be interested in it. Will I find it both fascinating but also slightly troubling? I think I will. I've always, I kept thinking, I've said to you before, my first ever major row with my mother was about my refusal to listen to the Queen's Christmas Day message because I just didn't see what she had to do with my life as a six or seven year old, whatever I was.

• 14:25Alastair Campbell?

  And my mother felt that we should always sit down and, and listen to what her majesty had to say on Christmas Day.

• 14:32Alastair Campbell?

  And I do think there's something, I do think there's something quite strange about our relationship with the Royal Family. And also, the reason why I think this thing has slightly backfired, it goes back to the point you made about people don't like being told that they have to do something. And that was the, I know that wasn't the intention, but that's how it was kind of projected through our, as ever, difficult, quite difficult media. And it's why I don't enjoy weddings. It's why I don't particularly enjoy Christmas. We're all meant to feel the same. And lots of people don't feel the same.

• 15:01Rory Stewart?

  So that's very interesting. I was gonna, I was gonna ask about that because you're quite right to draw that analogy. I think it is something like a wedding, formally in fact. He's going to have a ring put on his finger. He's, he's, it's a sort of ritual in which the king is marrying, marrying the kingdom.

• 15:17Alastair Campbell?

  Oh my God, so not only are we swearing allegiance, we're actually getting married to the guy. This is getting more and more baffling.

• 15:23Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and you'll see, he keeps saying things like, I do, I will. He keeps being asked these questions about whether he's gonna fulfil his obligations towards the kingdom.

• 15:31Alastair Campbell?

  Well, of course, he's said that before, didn't he? Are we allowed to talk about the parts of his life that have not been perfect?

• 15:37Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, I think, I think we definitely can. We definitely can. At the same time, I think I'm obviously a huge admirer. I'm not, not just because I am a monarchist, but because I've seen him. In Afghanistan, in Cumbria, in meetings on the environment, where he is just exceptional.

• 15:56Alastair Campbell?

  I'm going to give him the environment. I'm going to give him that.

• 15:58Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think one of the things that I have always been struck by is, and I remember in Afghanistan, when individual Afghans working with his charities were bereaved or in security issues, he would write handwritten letters to almost all of them. And again, on foreign trips, you know, I've seen him often abroad, sort of doing 12 events, jet lagged, stopping to listen to everybody. I mean, he's got a, he's got a pretty formidable sense of duty. I'm an Amara.

• 16:27Alastair Campbell?

  Talking of your acquaintance with him, I was flicking through the Financial Times at the weekend, and there was a huge piece on Prince Charles's fashion choices. And one of the pictures was of him coming out of a red brick building. And who should that be in the background but a young Rory Stewart? So what was going on? Were you helping him pick that coat?

• 16:49Rory Stewart?

  I think this was a visit to Dartmoor Prison. So when I was Prisons Minister, he came around Dartmoor Prison. He's very interested in prisons as well. I mean, he is, I think you'd like him very much. I mean, he loves music, he paints very well. It's a real joy in landscape. I think you'd share his Tree of the Day enthusiasms.

• 17:08Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, I think there's a lot of good to be said for him, and I do think he was ahead of his time on the, on the environment. I do think he's somebody like his mother who's committed to doing good. I hope he keeps up some of the causes that he's believed in, even though it's become more difficult. I just think that this point about us all having to feel the same thing. So I watched on Sunday night, I watched the BBC documentary, The Making of a Monarch. And listen, it was really interesting. There was some amazing old footage, which most of us, I think, had probably not seen that much of before. And I thought he came across very, very well. But it was essentially a one hour. If he was a politician, party political broadcast, for example, obviously you can't

• 17:53Alastair Campbell?

  do an hour documentary without mentioning Princess Diana, but she sort of came and went in a flash and there was no sense of it. He talked about his experience at Gordonston School, which everything I've ever heard and read tells me he absolutely loathed. And yet that too came and went in a flash with him sort of saying, you know, it was very character building and it was very this and that and the other. So, look, you and I would agree that politicians and even though a lot of them deserve a lot of opprobrium, they have a very difficult media landscape, so do sports people. The royal family are given this kind of, at that level, at his level, not like Harry and Meghan, but Charles is given this almost like a free pass. And I just think people resent it.

• 18:35Rory Stewart?

  And not when he was Prince of Wales, was he? I mean, of course, the awful thing is they have this schizophrenic thing, don't they, with the media where they can be held out on a pedestal and then they can be in the most sort of torrid, phone hacking, grisly expressions.

• 18:48Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, for sure. Listen, I'm not saying they've had it easy, but I am saying that I think that sometimes I think we would benefit. I mean, let's be honest, you won't be able to see it because you'll be in the nave with your friends. But with those of us who are watching on television, you know, we all know, it's all going to be of one tone. I don't mean monotonous boring, but it's going to be of one tone. It's all going to be marvellous. People are going to be loving it. Everybody's going to be happy. Everybody's going to look wonderful. There's no sort of reality, there's no sort of reality about it.

• 19:18Rory Stewart?

  Which, as you point out, that in your wedding and Christmases, you don't feel very comfortable doing even at wedding and Christmas. Lovely piece actually by Tom Holland, who is our Rest is History co-podcaster, which we like to refer people to. And a couple of random facts about it, which people like me who are massive history geeks love. One of them is that the King's Champion is turning up. And the king's champion, who's a man called Francis Dimoke.

• 19:42Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, I thought it was Rory Stewart, anyway.

• 19:45Rory Stewart?

  So that their role, you would have loved this role, actually. I think you should have bid for it. Used to be to literally ride in a suit of armour on a horse into Westminster Hall and throw down a gauntlet.

• 19:55Alastair Campbell?

  Love it.

• 19:56Rory Stewart?

  And challenge anyone in the kingdom who wanted to fight.

• 19:59Alastair Campbell?

  And see, now we're talking, now we're talking. Sky Sport would love that.

• 20:03Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, exactly, totally. And they've been doing this, their direct ancestors, all the way back to the champions of the Duke of Normandy, nearly a thousand years ago. But their condition for doing it is they have to hold on to this single bit of land that they were given in exchange for doing this back in the early Middle Ages.

• 20:19Alastair Campbell?

  That's how the land got given out, isn't it, Rory? That's why Scotland is owned by a handful of people who just happened to be good friends with the royals at one point.

• 20:26Rory Stewart?

  This is sort of, well, it's in this case, it's a pretty tiny bit of land the poor guy's still got. I mean, a poor guy, I'm sure he's a very, very happy guy, but it's a very, very small thing. I think he's only got the gatehouse left, but he's clinging on and he remains as the king's champion. And my second random fact before we leave this is that they're going to be carrying something called the Cortana or Sword of Mercy, which is broken off at the top and is first described in time of King John, so Magna Carta, King John. And he believed it to be the sword of the Assyrian knight Tristram, and that the top of it got broken off in the giant Moorholz skull. There we are. So there's a bit of history.

• 21:05Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, I know you're going to be busy on the day, but I think with the sort of knowledge that you have there, you should be doing, maybe not the BBC, but ABC in America or something like that. That's the sort of stuff they're going to, they're going to learn. Now, finally, Rory, finally, just as my, my mother will be listening up in heaven, and she, she died nine years ago this week, but just so that people don't think I'm an absolute sort of could never say a good word about, about these guys. The new book that you keep kindly plugging for me, what's he called again, Rory?

• 21:31Rory Stewart?

  It's not called What Can I Do, is it?

• 21:35Alastair Campbell?

  It's called But What Can I Do? But if you go to page 154, I recall an event I attended where the main guest of honour was the Duchess, the then Duchess of Cornwall.

• 21:45Rory Stewart?

  Ah.

• 21:46Alastair Campbell?

  Camilla spoke of her visit to Auschwitz in 2020, saying she would never forget a speech given by Marian Turski, Holocaust survivor, who had talked about the laws discriminating against Jews in Nazi Germany in the 30s and the relevance of this to our own time. He described, says Camilla, how people, victims, perpetrators and witnesses can gradually become decentrised to the exclusion, stigmatization, alienation of those who previously have been friends. Marian warned us this can happen again, but he gave us too the answers to preventing it. You should never, ever be a bystander. And then she went on to say, let us not be bystanders to injustice or prejudice. After all, surely our personal values are measured by the things we are prepared to ignore. So Rory, if Suella Braverman

• 22:30Alastair Campbell?

  is in the nave with you at the great event, if you could kindly take a copy of my book, give it to her and mark up Camilla's speech, that would be very, very kind.

• 22:38Rory Stewart?

  Anything to promote your book.

• 22:40Alastair Campbell?

  I love that line though. Never be a bystander, says Camilla. I like that. I hope that's in the service as well. Never be a bystander.

• 22:47Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Well, listen, I was in France last week and in Paris, I had a very interesting conversation about European energy and in particular, how Europe is going to respond to the energy transition. And somebody said, in fact, actually, it's a friend of mine called Ben Judah, who's a writer and who's got a great book on Europe coming out, said that you can almost see countries' success in terms of the particular energy source. So coal made Britain, Germany, France in the 19th century. Oil is obviously making the United States and the Gulf in this century. But the real question is going to be the future of the post-carbon future. And that is going to be a fight for minerals because

• 23:32Rory Stewart?

  battery technology depends very much on things like cobalt and lithium, a lot of which comes out of Africa and 80% of which is processed in China. And as part of this story, Germany is in a very, very serious problem. And before I turn to you, because I know you've just been reading a Des Spiegel article on this. One statistic before I turn to you, in 2019, Germany produced 3.5 million automobile units a year compared to China's 0.5 million, half a million. Three years later, by 2022, Germany was producing 2.5 million and China was producing 2 million. Between 2019 and 2022, the closing gap between China and Germany is unbelievable, and so much of Germany's industry

• 24:15Rory Stewart?

  depends on chemical processing, which is to do with energy, or creating parts for combustion engines which are exported to places like China, which aren't going to be needed if you move to electric cars that have far fewer moving parts.

• 24:28Alastair Campbell?

  Well, your point on minerals is one of the reasons why China has been so aggressive and active in its, what they would define as support for a lot of countries in Africa, whereas you and I have mentioned many, many times in recent months, Britain has withdrawn, not least through our lack of support in international aid and development. The Chinese have very much targeted those mineral resources. The article you mentioned that I've been reading in Der Spiegel, the headline is "Die größte Gefahr seit Tesla", "The Biggest Danger, The Biggest Risk To The German Car Industry Since Tesla",

• 25:08Alastair Campbell?

  and the piece really is about how Volkswagen, BMW and Mercedes have been really dominant. Of all the global brands in the Chinese car market, Germany has been right up there. And now we have these firms, which I must admit, until I read this piece, I didn't even know about, BYD, Neo and Geely, and these are Chinese e-cars, which the Chinese have got into their own markets, but now they're actually going to try and get into the European market. So, the question that the article's asking is what can the Germans learn from the Chinese? And the answer, the answer might be, from what you're saying, that maybe they're a bit late to learn some of those lessons, because the other energy issue that the Germans are having

• 25:53Alastair Campbell?

  to deal with is this sort of post-Russian dependence and where they go for their energy of the future. So, yeah, it's interesting that you were hearing that in France. I noticed you were getting out before the near riots of yesterday. I was hearing the same thing in Germany. So it's obviously the Chinese improving their hold on markets where we thought, not that long ago, These were going to be huge markets for Europe for the rest of our lives, as it were. It's changing very, very quickly.

• 26:24Rory Stewart?

  It's terrifying because, of course, energy costs are going to be vital in any kind of industrial production. And the fear is that Germany is in real trouble, that fundamental industries like chemicals, pharmaceuticals and the motor industry and the parts for the motor industry are going to be under real strain over the next 10, 15 years. Some of the German business people I was meeting in Paris at this roundtable were saying that they've gone from slightly looking in despair at Britain to fearing that they're about to become a version of Britain. They're very, very worried about their five, 10-year industrial future. Of course, they are burning a lot of coal. There was the banning on nuclear.

• 27:07Rory Stewart?

  There's the fact that they're having to import liquefied natural gas, which is five to seven times more expensive than if you've got it in pipes in the ground, which is what you've got in Qatar or the United States.

• 27:19Alastair Campbell?

  And it's doubled. The price of it has doubled since the invasion of Ukraine.

• 27:22Rory Stewart?

  Exactly.

• 27:23Alastair Campbell?

  Overall, overall energy prices in Europe have gone up by a third, 35%.

• 27:26Rory Stewart?

  And you have this weird thing, which is very common in the way that we've responded to the climate crisis, which is we feel very good about ourselves not burning carbon and then we import stuff from China that's made using carbon burned in China. But in this case, Europe feels good about itself not fracking and then imports a lot of liquefied natural gas, which is simply fracked in the United States.

• 27:50Alastair Campbell?

  It just seems strange as well that the German government with the Greens, quite powerful within it, have made this decision to turn their back on effectively on nuclear and go for more coal.

• 28:01Rory Stewart?

  So the phrase, the geopolitics of net zero, I think is a really good one for us to look at in a future pod, because that's the mineral race, that's Indonesia and Chile restricting exports of these key minerals, that's China dominating the trade, that's the US trying to position itself on things like AI and synthetic biology, China positioning itself on manufacturing and Europe being a bit lost.

• 28:26Alastair Campbell?

  I read a very interesting thing, because I knew you wanted to talk about this, by the Energy Saving Trust, and they did this sort of country by country. Analysis of what different governments are doing to try to get people to reduce their energy. And I don't know if you came across this this phrase in Paris, but their plan is to cut energy use by 10% in the next two years. And the strategy is called sobriété énergétique, energetic sobriety. This is all about going sector by sector to try to cut down on fossil fuels and reduce consumption. And I think they've been studying Tesco. Is it Tesco that have their thing every little helps? Their slogan is chaque geste compte, every gesture counts. So they're basically saying it's about, you know, turning off

• 29:11Alastair Campbell?

  things that don't need to be on and keeping your lights off and keeping the heating down. Spain has brought in some quite interesting temperature limits. Croatia is really doing the stuff about it's all about information and making sure people are aware that how they're consuming, what they're consuming. And we had this exercise in Britain recently where we all got the same message. We all got the same noise on our phone and the government were testing some kind of new alert system. And in California now, they send out texts to everyone in California at certain points. And the last one read, extreme heat is currently straining the state energy grid. Power interruptions may occur unless you take action. Please turn

• 29:53Alastair Campbell?

  off or reduce non-essential power if your health allows from now till 9pm.

• 29:58Rory Stewart?

  Goodness.

• 29:58Alastair Campbell?

  It actually stopped them having blackouts. It saw a massive diminution in energy use within the next 30 minutes following that message.

• 30:06Rory Stewart?

  That's fantastic.

• 30:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it was good. So those who were going for all the sort of conspiracy theories that were doing the rounds when we all had to do that thing, I think if it's used for that kind of thing, I would approve.

• 30:16Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, I wonder, that's an interesting thing from a comms point of view, whether where the effect fades over time. When you first do it, people respond, but eventually they get they get lazier.

• 30:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. What all of these show is that it's about trying to get people to change their own behavior and not not think that every little thing that you do doesn't over time have a have some sort of beneficial effect. The Netherlands, they've lifted, like the Germans, they're lifted lifting restrictions on Power stations, but they've also got an energy saving campaign. I was very touched by your Dutch friend saying that my Dutch accent was quite good when I was talking about bagpipes. I wanted to judge on this one. They've got a thing called Zet Oog de Knop Om, which means turn the switch. And it's a, it's a specific thing aimed at SMEs on how you can save energy and, and boost sustainability to try and build up a macro picture.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  Beautiful. Well, I think on that amazing bit of Dutch, we should go to the break.

• 31:12Alastair Campbell?

  Dank u wel.

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• 33:20Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to Rukk or welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 33:25Alastair Campbell?

  And I, Elster Campbell, on the Google translator.

• 33:31Rory Stewart?

  Very good, thank you.

• 33:32Alastair Campbell?

  I can't believe, I can't believe you looked up some Dutch on Google Translate in the break, but anyway, well done.

• 33:38Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Listen, one thing that we should be plugging is, I really enjoyed the interview with Tony Blair. And people who want to pick it up, it's on our separate channel, which is our separate podcast channel, which is called Leading, L-E-A-D-I-N-G, which you can find your podcast. It was very intense because it was forcing Tony Blair to really focus in on the issue of the Northern Ireland peace process. But I thought he had, it was actually, I thought, rather wonderful because he was really getting into what it means to be a politician, how leadership works, how persuasion works in those contexts, how you sometimes have to be constructively ambiguous. Did you enjoy it?

• 34:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, I said constructively ambiguous, he said tactically cute. So don't search The Rest Is Politics, people, search Tony Blair Leading right now and it will pop up.

• 34:27Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 34:28Alastair Campbell?

  So let's talk BBC chairman. He's finally gone, Mr. Richard Sharp.

• 34:33Rory Stewart?

  You're too modest, Elster, to mention, but it was one of the things that you predicted in the middle of the Gary Lineker situation that Richard Sharp was going to have to go. But what's brought him down in the end is this extraordinary conflict of interest. And at the heart of it, probably the most shocking thing, which is that our prime minister then Boris Johnson, while prime minister, got himself into some extraordinary financial trouble. So much so that he somehow convinced the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, to get involved and Richard Sharp, who became the chairman of the BBC, was involved in introducing him. To somebody who lent him eight hundred thousand pounds and this was not declared.

• 35:12Alastair Campbell?

  Did there somebody who was also weirdly a distant relative of Johnson, did he lend him the money or guarantor, was he the guarantor? We still don't know where the money came from. His name was Sam Blythe, but he didn't lend the money, I don't think.

• 35:25Rory Stewart?

  So Simon Case said it was okay to take the money because it was coming from a relative. But the point of the whole story is that Boris Johnson can't have known this relative very well if he had to be introduced to this person via Richard Sharp. It appears as though this person's a semi stranger who needed to be introduced to him by Richard Sharp.

• 35:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I mean, I can remember, I was only, as it were, a lowly special advisor to the then Prime Minister. But I can remember having the security people warning us of the dangers of blackmail and being, you know, having, ending up owing. One of the things they asked you when you were vetted is whether you're in debt to anybody, because that alone can produce a conflict of interest.

• 36:09Rory Stewart?

  It's absolutely unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable. So Boris Johnson made Richard Sharp, the chairman of the BBC, after Richard Sharp had offered to help him out of his financial difficulties. I mean, there couldn't be a clearer conflict of interest. But somewhere in the heart of this also is something that we should talk about again, which is Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, who I believe you met recently, Alistair, but it's very, very odd. I was obviously singing the praises of people like Burke Trend and even Richard Wilson, who I think was a thorn in the side of you and your friend Jonathan Powell. But boy, would Richard Wilson not, I think, have gone along with this kind of stuff. And I

• 36:49Rory Stewart?

  think one of the problems, without sounding ageist, is that Simon Case became Permanent Secretary when he was barely 40 years old. He'd only been in the civil service for 12 years, whereas traditionally Cabinet Secretaries were people who had been in the civil service for over 30 years, had run big government departments and would have had the full confidence. And he was brought in at a time when Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings were firing a lot of the other senior Permanent Secretaries across the System, Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Justice, et cetera. And I'm afraid that's at the heart of this problem, that we haven't had a Cabinet Secretary standing up to Prime Ministers in the way that they ought to.

• 37:27Alastair Campbell?

  No, and also there's this, these stories doing the rounds at the moment, that Simon Case is at the heart of trying to stop Sue Gray do the job that she's been asked to do for Keir Starmer as Chief of Staff. And it is interesting how often his name pops up in these situations, but the real villains, I think you've put your, you've named them, is what was happening under Johnson and Cummings. And this book by Anthony Seldon, which at George Osborne's recommendation, I finally got around to taking a look at it. It is absolutely incredible. I mean, it's worse than you and I thought. If his account is accurate, it's worse than you and I thought. The levels of incompetence and chaos and the extent to which Cummings actually thought he, not Johnson, was the Prime Minister.

• 38:12Rory Stewart?

  Also, sorry, just on that, I'm very, very struck when I see you with Tony Blair or Jonathan Powell, how much you likes and respect each other, whereas Dominic Cummings, from the beginning, despised Boris Johnson. He was trying to run the country while making no secret of the fact that he had utter contempt for his own boss.

• 38:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, which you can't function like that. And also that's completely, is completely sort of discombobulates the entire structure on which government is meant to run. And of course, the Cabinet Secretary is the most senior civil servant, is meant to be the person who's ensuring that there is good order within the government machine, that other departments are brought in at the right time, but also does have the role of speaking truth to power. And I think there comes a point with somebody like Simon Case, where if you are working alongside somebody like Johnson and Cummings, I think there does come a point where you say, look, I cannot, on the one hand, be expected to operate by standards that are expected of senior civil servants, and on the other, go along with some of the nonsense that I'm seeing.

• 39:09Alastair Campbell?

  And this was nonsense. The idea that this was not, that this loan should not have been disclosed is absolute total nonsense.

• 39:16Rory Stewart?

  We've also been talking a little bit about how much our system relies on a strong civil service. And we talked about it a little bit with Dominic Raab and bullying in the civil service. But Simon Case's career, which I've been looking at, is also an example of another problem that's happening to our government. So July 2014 to July 2016, he goes through five jobs in four years. He was nine months as executive director of the Improvement Group in the Cabinet Office, nine months as a director of GCHQ, 15 months as the private secretary number 10, nine months as the director general for the EU, four months as the director general for Northern Ireland, before he was moved to be private secretary to Prince William. Now, how is government supposed to function

• 39:58Rory Stewart?

  if people at a director general level, which remind people this, right at the very, very top of the civil service, are only in these roles for nine months or four months?

• 40:05Alastair Campbell?

  Well, especially if ministers are sort of changing every, in the case of the the Trust Johnson era, every three, every three and a half minutes. I think we shouldn't, given that we are goal-hanger podcasts, which you'll be thrilled as I was to see we're at one stage, goal-hanger, one, two, three in the charts this week. But we shouldn't neglect or forget the, the central role that the gaffer, Gary Lineker, played in these whole proceedings. Still playing it, I see the Daily Express front page the day after Richard Sharp's resignation. And this is the paper, remember, that campaigns relentlessly against woke and for free speech. Front page headline, BBC must act to silence Lineker.

• 40:45Alastair Campbell?

  And this was 30p Lee Anderson, saying that Lineker saying, making exact, virtually word for word, by the way, what David Dimbleby said, namely, that no serving government should choose the BBC chairman of the day, which you and I also agree with. And that somehow was elevated into a front page story. So I think we should actually just, for a moment, remember Gary's heroic role in bringing order and sense to the top of the BBC for a while.

• 41:15Rory Stewart?

  And also to remind people that the reason why the chairman of the BBC and the director general of the BBC shouldn't be appointed by the government is that no government can really be trusted. So the Conservatives brought in Richard Sharp. But you, when you were in power, brought in Greg Dyke as Director General, who had donated money to Labour. You brought in Gavin Davis as the chairman of BBC, who was a Labour donor and whose wife was the private secretary to Gordon Brown.

• 41:41Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think we could bring in the Director General, but the government does appoint the chairman. I should point out in my own defence, Rory, that that story ended with, how shall we say, somewhat bad blood between all of us, particularly between them and me, over the our differences of opinion over Mr Andrew Gilligan, special advisor to Boris Johnson. Look, I think it's absurd. I think it's absolutely absurd. And the other thing I'd say is we need a strong BBC that is prepared to speak truth to power. We need it more than ever. You know, you've got these GBBS people and the Talk TV people and the, you know, they're essentially just sort of mini Fox Newses that are being funded by, you know, very, very, very wealthy people who don't care whether they lose loads of money.

• 42:25Alastair Campbell?

  And the BBC, we should support the BBC. And a shout out, by the way, for local BBC radio and television, which is being shredded at the moment, shredded. I had a message from somebody who works for the BBC up in Humberside, who was saying that, you know, they're, they're losing jobs, they're, they're losing, they can't cover the area properly. And this does have long-term implications for, for the future of democracy.

• 42:49Rory Stewart?

  It's awful for local democracy, isn't it? Because it means that you can't hold, you don't know enough about your local representatives. You can't hold them accountable for what's happening locally. BBC Cumbria has been shredded to pieces. The incredibly important, and important for local identity, too.

• 43:04Alastair Campbell?

  Just to give a positive shout out to the BBC, you and I are both big supporters of the World Service, which I often listen to in my car. If you had this, why are you listening to the World Service when we're in Britain? I said, because I'm in Britain, I'm listening to the World Service. Emergency radio service for Sudan is being launched on BBC News Arabic by the World Service. So that's proper public service broadcasting, in my view.

• 43:22Rory Stewart?

  That is, but unfortunately, they're about to end their Arabic language production.

• 43:27Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 43:27Rory Stewart?

  Along with Chinese and Hindi.

• 43:29Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. So BBC, we both support it. It's gone through a very bad phase. Richard Sharp should never have been there. Good that he's gone. And now they need to get somebody in. Who would you have as BBC chairman, Rory? Please don't say me, because it's not going to happen.

• 43:42Rory Stewart?

  Sorry, I was going to say you or my, me. One, I think one really good thing would be for it not to be a politician. I mean, obviously, that's slightly against my own interests because I'm an ex-MP, but I think. I don't see why so many of these jobs are going to people who've been members of parliament.

• 43:56Alastair Campbell?

  One of the names, I can't remember, the name that is said to be Rishi Sunak's favourite is yet and yet another one from the kind of world of finance and hedge fundery. I mean, it's got to be somebody who understands business and broadcasting and it's got to be somebody who can stand up to pressure.

• 44:11Rory Stewart?

  Who was the best one you thought during your time that you remember? Who was a good chairman that you really thought was doing their job well?

• 44:17Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, I thought Chris Patton was quite good, but he was a politician.

• 44:21Rory Stewart?

  How about Michael Gray? Do you think he's good?

• 44:24Alastair Campbell?

  My opinions of people tend to be, because I'm very tribal, they tend to be coloured by people's position on Brexit.

• 44:29Rory Stewart?

  That's right.

• 44:30Alastair Campbell?

  It's why I never use Dyson hand dryers and I will never go into Wetherspoons. I mean, there are many reasons I won't go to Wetherspoons, partly the fact that I haven't had a pint of beer since 1986, but yeah, so no, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not buying the love for Michael Gray.

• 44:44Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Okay. Well, now the next thing you wanted to talk about was something called oracy, where initially I thought this is some misspelling. Do you mind telling us what on earth oracy is? It's like Morrissey, right? It's a pop group.

• 44:58Alastair Campbell?

  Do you not know what oracy is?

• 44:59Rory Stewart?

  No, no.

• 45:00Alastair Campbell?

  This is terrible. Well, oracy, the reason I wanted to talk about this is because I spoke at a conference last week organised by a group, a charity, an education charity called Voice 21. And Voice 21 was founded by my former Number 10 and Labour colleague, Peter Hyman, who left politics to go and become a head teacher and was a very good head teacher, but has now gone back into politics and he's now working for Keir Starmer. But Voice 21 is about trying to put oracy, which is about, if you like, how we teach listening and speaking on the same par as literacy and numeracy.

• 45:42Alastair Campbell?

  And there's a guy who was, did the main presentation, a guy called Professor Neil Mercer. Who just gave a brilliant explanation as to why in the modern age in particular, we have to be able to teach our children to communicate clearly and properly. And it's interesting, he's actually a Cumbrian, Rory, and he talked about how there's no such thing, we shouldn't get obsessed with sort of standardised English, because when he's in Cumbria, he admits he speaks differently to when he's in Cambridge. He speaks differently when he's doing a presentation to a room full of teachers, as we were doing that day, to when he might be doing the same presentation to children or to people in a different part of the country.

• 46:22Alastair Campbell?

  And what these guys do, the charity, what they do is they teach teachers how to educate children in the art of speaking and listening. And it's also about how you make decisions. So you'll be pleased to know that the room was full of people who listen to our podcast and love this idea of disagreeing agreeably.

• 46:40Rory Stewart?

  Somewhere in the heart of this, a little plug for my three-part BBC Radio 4 series, which was on public speaking and rhetoric and its use. And I was very struck, particularly with an interview with two young men from St Francis Xavier School in Liverpool, so state school in Liverpool, who felt that their lives had been turned around by entering a debating competition, public speaking. And what they felt about it was it wasn't just about the confidence, it was also about empathy, that learning to do these debates forces you to understand the other person's position and forces you to enter their mindset in order to try to persuade them.

• 47:22Alastair Campbell?

  Well, at the start of his presentation, and I write a whole chapter in my new book about the importance of this public speaking, and it's not public speaking as in standing up and making speeches, it's public speaking as in when you're dealing with bureaucracy, when you're trying to get something done over the phone, how do you deal with people when you open a bank account? Anyway, Neil Mercer, when he started, he said, hands up, this is a room full of several hundred teachers, he said, hands up if you were taught how to speak at school. And about, I don't know, 15 to 20 hands went up. He said, put your hands down if you went to a private school.

• 48:00Alastair Campbell?

  And I think they were left with two hands in the air. So the private schools do teach. When you were eaten, you were taught how to debate, how to speak. I remember Charles Kennedy used to say that one of the things that made him a politician, he went to a state school in in Le Carver in the Highlands, but they had school debating and he was a very good debater and that's what made him want to go to university and he was a great debater there and that's how he became a politician. And I think we we just need this more than ever and I hope that with Peter Hyman now inside Keir Starmer's office, I think oracy, the idea that we teach in the modern age, children how to communicate. And by the way, it doesn't mean they all have to sound like, you know, Queen's English, as it used to be called, accents are incredibly important.

• 48:42Alastair Campbell?

  People being, you know, proud of where they come from is not inconsistent. And even the thing about, you know, Ofsted, for example, there was a lot of kind of criticism of Ofsted at this conference because people were saying that Ofsted going to schools where, you know, children, because of where they're brought up and the accents of their parents and the way their parents might be, you know, we done rather than we did and all that sort of stuff, that that kind of stuff gets loaded on the school and the school gets marked down. And and so anyway, I just think it's a really interesting area.

• 49:12Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, one of the things that I love about it is that in the heart of the idea of debate or argument is the idea of persuasion, the idea that you can actually change somebody else's mind. And what I hope when doing is not just agreeing or disagreeing gribly, but also the possibility of persuasion because that's incredibly important in a very polarized world. And I think it's what Trump stood against. Trump fundamentally says, my supporters and I have this fixed worldview and nobody is going to change it and I'm not going to change anybody else's mind either.

• 49:45Alastair Campbell?

  And if you don't have my view, you're just wrong.

• 49:47Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. And there's this lovely book by a Yale professor called Brian Garston, which is basically in defense of persuasion. He argues that politics goes wrong when you give up on the idea of being able to persuade someone because then you give up on the idea of compromise, you give up on the idea of shared truth, you give up on the kind of humility which is embedded in politics.

• 50:06Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. By the way, oracy is now part of the curriculum in Scotland and Wales.

• 50:15Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 50:15Alastair Campbell?

  So Michael Gove, when he was pressed on this, apparently used to say, look, we can't just have our kids sitting around chatting. There's Michael Gove, who spends his entire life sitting around chatting with his Tory friends.

• 50:26Rory Stewart?

  And chats very well.

• 50:27Alastair Campbell?

  And he's a very good chatter, yeah. But so there we go. There's one for for Labour, I hope. Oracy, let's make oracy a word that, I mean, I'm amazed that even you didn't know what it was, Roy. That really is.

• 50:40Rory Stewart?

  That's shocking, isn't it? Shocking. Well, on that, I think we'll bring it to an end with a peen of praise to oracy. Thank you very much.

• 50:49Alastair Campbell?

  Thank you.

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