Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 132. Question Time: How to reform prisons, Macron vs. Clinton, and what is the Privy Council? About this episode Was Hillary Clinton arrogant in her comments about Emmanuel Macron? What's the best way to reform UK prisons? How much do you know about sporrans?
Tune in to hear Rory and Alastair discuss all this and more on today's episode of The Rest Is Politics: Question Time.
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Transcript 5,784 words · 12 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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.
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1:33 Rory Stewart? So, welcome to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.
1:37 Alastair Campbell? And me, Anister Campbell.
1:39 Rory Stewart? Very good. And we're sitting here, still in the Harrogate Theatre, looking at Edward Fox and family in Saints and Sinners.
1:46 Alastair Campbell? I'm looking at Elaine Page.
1:48 Rory Stewart? Elaine Page, one of the world's best loved entertainers.
1:51 Alastair Campbell? Ralph Fiennes.
1:53 Rory Stewart? Ralph Fiennes.
1:53 Alastair Campbell? And Chris Bonnington. They're obviously quite big on Mountaineering. Dara O'Brien, sold out.
1:57 Rory Stewart? We're doing a mountaineering thing, right, tonight?
2:00 Alastair Campbell? You can talk about walking up mountains.
2:03 Rory Stewart? I just want to get confused in these places. I always sort of think maybe if I'm here, I am, you know, whoever else has performed here.
2:11 Alastair Campbell? Max Miller.
2:12 Rory Stewart? Exactly, Max Miller.
2:12 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, okay. Right, as we're focusing on your fantasies, Dean Beaton, what is the Privy Council? On the back of Rory's Privy Council outfit for the coronation, which I see Graham Norton was channeling in the Eurovision Song Contest, can you explain what exactly the Privy Council is? Is it a lifetime membership? Who joins? Does it have a purpose? Do you get paid extra?
2:33 Rory Stewart? Very good. Okay, so Privy Council is lifetime membership. Generally, you become a Privy Council when you enter the Cabinet, but you can get it in the Shadow Cabinet. And actually, Prime Ministers increasingly give it out.
2:45 Alastair Campbell? Judges.
2:46 Rory Stewart? As rewards, people, and judges get it. It was originally a sort of super Cabinet for the King, so it was the private council of the King. And still, there is a convention in Parliament that if you want to read classified documents, you're supposed to be a Privy Councilor, though I'm not sure that necessarily holds out much. You stick Right Honourable in front of your name for the rest of your life, and occasionally you are invited to do various ceremonial things. So there's the acclamation of the monarch.
3:16 Alastair Campbell? Which was televised for the first time.
3:17 Rory Stewart? Which was televised for the first time. But the number of people in the Privy Council is getting very, very large, like the number of people in the House of Lords. And so I think it's becoming a pretty unwieldy type of body. And...
3:31 Alastair Campbell? You don't get paid extra.
3:32 Rory Stewart? You don't get paid extra, okay. But you do get a beautiful uniform. Macron versus Clinton. Graham Perkins, thanks for the Hillary Clinton interview. It was an enjoyable and interesting podcast, but I thought she was arrogant when she criticised Macron. Shouldn't those of us in Europe be able to think for ourselves instead of jumping into line when America snaps its fingers?
3:52 Alastair Campbell? Hmm. Look, I really enjoyed the interview with Hillary Clinton, but I did think she was very dismissive of Macron. In a way that slightly surprised me. She was basically making the point, he'd been talking about European security, possibility of greater European capacity. She was basically saying, I've heard this from presidents all my life.
4:06 Rory Stewart? After his China trip?
4:07 Alastair Campbell? After his trip to China. And I think the Americans were, as we've discussed before, they were a little bit troubled by that visit and the extent to which he allowed himself to be portrayed by the Chinese as being somewhere between America and China. I don't think that was the purpose of the visit. And, you know, I think he just got a bit carried away with himself in one of the chats on the plane coming back.
4:26 Rory Stewart? There is an American tradition of doing this, which is really interesting. So you remember, Biden is always getting himself in trouble because he called Saudi a pariah state. He was very rude about Erdogan, he called him an autocrat. Hillary Clinton's doing this about Macron. The other people who do this, of course, are people like Erdogan themselves, who are perpetually throwing insults around to everybody else. And it's striking that British politics isn't really like that. You don't seem to get huge populist points in British politics.
4:53 Alastair Campbell? Macron, friend or foe, let's trust.
4:55 Rory Stewart? Oh, yeah, but that's not, I mean, I agree. I mean, that was awful, absolutely awful. She said the jury's out. But compared to what Americans and Turkish politicians take as normal, which is throwing really offensive epithets against almost everybody. I mean, so Erdogan will say about the Egyptian president that the man's a tyrant and this kind of stuff goes on. And then he, he will compare the Israelis to goodness knows what. And then the Israelis will chuck stuff back. The Americans are more into that kind of politics. And Biden loves that stuff. A lot of his campaign was, you know, attaching these extraordinary epithets to people. But we don't really do that, Britain. We tend to be politer about foreign rulers, don't we?
5:33 Alastair Campbell? It's interesting. I don't feel that, but maybe that's because we lived through the Brexit period, where we've just heard Johnson and talking about friends and our friends and colleagues in Europe to their face while abusing them through the media. What about, did you see Macron's piece in the FT at the weekend?
5:47 Rory Stewart? No.
5:48 Alastair Campbell? Well, you know, we talk about, a lot about how we want political leaders who kind of give big picture messages. It really was a big picture message. I think he was trying to sort of Catch up with the the American IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, and signal the Europeans have got to be on that level of of thinking. But it's it's definitely.
6:05 Rory Stewart? Well, we've got to keep watching Macron because the key challenge to him is, is he going to be able to bring together very, very soon a candidate who he can endorse?
6:14 Alastair Campbell? I know. He's got to. He's got to think of our succession.
6:16 Rory Stewart? Because if not, either the far right or the far left are going to take.
6:19 Alastair Campbell? Well, it won't be the far left. It won't be the far left. It'll be Le Pen.
6:22 Rory Stewart? Marine Le Pen.
6:22 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. Now, Bio Savage, why isn't the T Sport business dealings getting more news? I listened to the Private Eye podcast and it looks like public funds are going to stray on a monumental scale. Sarah Ashwin, T side Freeport corruption and the cover up. It's a level of corruption worthy of Russia is going to take in the very damaging direction, if not expose them, challenge. We've said before that Private Eye seem to be the only media organisation that's really getting stuck into this. But the Franchial Times are now on to it. I can't pretend to understand the ins and outs of it, but I do get the sense of a very, very, very slow burning massive whiff around this.
6:59 Rory Stewart? Huge shout out to Private Eye, who consistently, over I don't know how many decades, have broken all these stories.
7:05 Alastair Campbell? Well, this one, they've been going on about it for weeks. And we've said several times, why the rest of the media not picking this up. The other people to give a shout out to, the Yorkshire Post have been doing quite a lot about this as well. And I'm not just saying that because we're in Yorkshire. It's because I've actually been, I've been seeing this stuff online. So I think maybe that's something we should come back to. And while we're up in the, you know, this part of the world, we are going to be doing, we're going to have our first double headed leading interview in a few weeks' time.
7:29 Rory Stewart? Yes, very good, very exciting.
7:30 Alastair Campbell? Two Andys.
7:31 Rory Stewart? Very good. Two Andys, Andy Street and Andy Burnham. And the only reason I'm pleased that is that, generally speaking, I'm always told off that I never manage to remember when I meet people to raise it. I did remember at the coronation to raise the question of the interview with Andy Burnham.
7:45 Alastair Campbell? Hmm, which is not quite the same as Kings.
7:48 Rory Stewart? King of Thailand was there, and he would have been a real winner. And we could have.
7:52 Alastair Campbell? Sorry, the King of Thailand from Munich was at the way.
7:55 Rory Stewart? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
7:56 Alastair Campbell? The coronation.
7:56 Rory Stewart? I know, and I missed my chance. It's unbelievable.
7:59 Alastair Campbell? We could have done it in German.
8:00 Rory Stewart? Exactly. You could have done the whole thing. Exactly.
8:02 Alastair Campbell? Oh, Rory, please, honestly, you've got to get better at this. You really are.
8:05 Rory Stewart? Question from Victoria Gray. You were brought back by a forward thinking new government to take charge of prisons. What are the first three things you would do? And then what?
8:16 Alastair Campbell? Oh, wow.
8:19 Alastair Campbell? Am I allowed to empty them?
8:21 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
8:22 Alastair Campbell? I would release an awful lot of people who are there. Um, I would have a mental health assessment of every single person who is in the prison estate.
8:30 Rory Stewart? Very good.
8:31 Alastair Campbell? And find out which of them could be better treated in hospital. Um, I think at some stage we are going to have to rebuild our prisons. Uh, so I'd probably have a rebuilding program as well. That's bloody expensive though.
8:42 Rory Stewart? Very expensive, about building, building pounds of prison. My first three would be set minimum standards. So I'd make it illegal to overcrowd prisons. So I'd give people a human right that they cannot be crammed two to a cell that the Victorians built for one. And therefore force any government to decide whether they were either going to build more prisons or put fewer people in prison, but not be able to get away with overcrowding.
9:06 Alastair Campbell? Wow. You might have to have a few of the migration barges brought in for the prison estate.
9:11 Rory Stewart? Secondly, I would abolish short sentences. So any sentences under two years, except for violent crimes, I would abolish because I think there is very good evidence that sending someone to prison for a short time increases their chance of reoffending. And thirdly, I would get rid, not just of the current IPP legislation. I make sure that any IPP prisoner currently in the system is released.
9:32 Alastair Campbell? On IPP, which we talked about last week, Aska Michael Libdem. I didn't see the debate, but he sent us both a message saying that there'd been a very positive response from the minister to something that he had raised about IPP in Parliament.
9:48 Rory Stewart? Oh, good. Well, as you know, I'm a big fan of Alex Chalk, who's the new Lord Chatsman.
9:53 Alastair Campbell? Although we didn't like his joint article with Suella Braverman, did we?
9:55 Rory Stewart? No, we don't write joint articles with Suella Braverman. And John Major made a very strong speech on prison reform, which I think we both read and both liked.
10:03 Alastair Campbell? I thought it was brilliant. And I can't quite understand the extent to which I've become such a proselytizer for the politics of John Major.
10:09 Rory Stewart? Despite being the person who brought us the fact that he tucked his shirt into his underpants.
10:14 Alastair Campbell? Don't do that. Fiona hates that being raised.
10:16 Rory Stewart? Okay.
10:17 Alastair Campbell? Here's one. Mickey Moran, Gerry Adams. I'd like them both to answer why they didn't push Adams harder on certain events. I think he got off lightly. I don't know about that. I thought we, I've had amazing feedback on that one.
10:30 Rory Stewart? Was there a moment in it where we could have gone in harder?
10:33 Alastair Campbell? There's no point going harder and harder on are you a member of the IRA? Why do you never admit that you're a member? Because he's answered it 50 million times. I think some of the specific, there's the book, because it was called Say Nothing. I think there's a lot in there that we maybe could have picked on. But the trouble is that he's just so, it's a bit like Osborne on austerity. I felt with Osborne, when we talked on austerity, there just came a point where I thought, we're now going around in circles, I'm going to say what I think, he's going to say what he thinks, and we're going to get nowhere, so move on. And I just feel that with Adams. I find it was much more interesting when we talked about, I was fascinated by some of the things he said about the various prime ministers. And the exchange with you about you being a soldier and, you know, it was tense. I don't agree with Mickey Moran though, I think we gave him a pretty hard time.
11:18 Rory Stewart? Our George Osborne interview is out on Leading this week. So people listening, just go to the podcast and look for Leading George Osborne. But I noticed somebody on Twitter saying that they thought that you'd been tougher on George Osborne than you were on Tony Blair. Would you accept that?
11:35 Alastair Campbell? Well, I agree almost with everything that Tony Blair does. So it's, Tony, I'm going to give you a really tough time about how you delivered the peace process. I really am. No, yes, I probably was, but the thing about austerity, we've talked about it so much, but it sort of goes to the heart. And I don't really think that Osborne, do you think he really believes that austerity has delivered the goods that he secured there? He can't believe it because it didn't secure there.
12:00 Rory Stewart? You know, we were talking in the last episode about all the different economic factors. And we talked about the fact that Syria since 1980 lurched up. So by 2007, gone from $1,800 to $10,000 and then dropped down today to $1,200. That Thailand went from $700 to $4,000 in 2007 and is now at $8,000. But the British economy, and this is what I'm trying to get to, the British economy in the same period Went from in nineteen eighty ten thousand dollars per capita to forty seven thousand dollars per capita and today since two thousand and seven it stayed exactly the same. So basically we've had no GDP per capita growth since two thousand and seven. Now, whether like you, you blame austerity or whether like George Osborne, you blame
12:45 Rory Stewart? the financial crisis, there is absolutely no doubt.
12:48 Alastair Campbell? He also blamed Brexit.
12:49 Rory Stewart? Absolutely on Brexit.
12:50 Alastair Campbell? So what you've just confirmed to me is I said to George Osborne, the Labour economic record was strong and the Conservative.
12:56 Rory Stewart? He had a real good line to that, didn't he?
12:58 Alastair Campbell? Weak. Bad link and play. Yeah, it's such an old cliche, I wasn't giving him that one. Now, here's one for you. Will Taylor, who were the best civil servants you worked with and why? It would be good to hear about more junior ranks in particular. What was it made them excellent?
13:10 Rory Stewart? I really, really liked some of the civil servants I worked with in the Ministry of Justice, for example. A guy called Andy, who was my private secretary, who'd been a prison officer. He's a kind of scrawny guy like me. He'd come from spending five years in the landings. He was brilliant about just bringing realism. If a prisoner escape happened, he would say to me, Rory, I have no idea why the officers didn't just grab them by the ankles. And that would then give me the confidence to go in and say, why didn't someone grab them by the ankles? In Difid, I loved the people in the field offices. So there's a woman called Bex Buckingham in South Sudan, who'd been in the British Army. She was fantastically funny, realistic.
13:51 Rory Stewart? She's now actually our acting ambassador in Venezuela and was a fantastic antidote to what happens when you become a director or director general or a permanent secretary, when it's easier as a minister to feel they're largely trying to run rings, shall you?
14:03 Alastair Campbell? I could give dozens. This is what, funny, there were a couple of civil servants came to the event. I did with Beth Rigby last night, who, I think I told you that somebody in the Ministry of Justice had told me that, however bad you think it was with Rab, it's worse. Somebody last night from the Home Office said the same to me, that it's just awful at the moment and that the spads treat the civil service with absolute contempt. Was that happening when you were there?
14:27 Rory Stewart? My spads.
14:29 Alastair Campbell? I don't mean yours, around government, did you hear that?
14:31 Rory Stewart? Yeah, well, that was Ken Clark's complaint. I mean, Ken Clark had a couple of complaints. One of them was that Cabinet government had collapsed, and he did put the blame of that partly on you guys. He said that under Thatcher and Major Cabinet meetings were much longer, the conversation was much more serious. And post Blair Cabinet meetings had become quite cursory, quite short, and people weren't very interested in the views of Cabinet Ministers. And we've got a leading interview on this coming up where Jonathan Powell is like, yeah, well, what do you expect? Ministers don't really have much to contribute, so why would we want to really listen to them?
15:00 Alastair Campbell? He did not say that, he did not say that, Rory. You can't pre-spin our interviews.
15:06 Rory Stewart? Everyone's gonna have a lovely opportunity to listen to it.
15:08 Alastair Campbell? They'll also hear you lose your temper.
15:10 Rory Stewart? They will, they will. So that was one complaint by Ken Clark, but his other complaint was that David Cameron, who'd himself been a special advisor, loved special advisors more than he liked politicians and Cabinet Ministers.
15:21 Alastair Campbell? That's interesting, isn't it?
15:22 Rory Stewart? And that's partly because special advisors, Ken suggested, are young people who can be hired and fired and removed at will, whereas someone like Ken Clark can't be. They're permanent bits of furniture, they're members of Parliament.
15:33 Alastair Campbell? Well, until Boris Johnson kicks them out.
15:35 Rory Stewart? Exactly.
15:36 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
15:36 Rory Stewart? So I think we've got lots of questions to come, so shall we take a quick break here?
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17:47 Speaker 06 Welcome back to the Restless Podcast's Question Time. Me, Alastair Campbell.
17:50 Rory Stewart? And me, Rory Stewart. Uh, Maria V. I am year twelve at the moment, thinking, applying to study medicine. Regarding doctors, why is there so little conversation about why there are so few places at medical school? How it's so difficult to get in? Meaning that many capable students with excellent grades are turned away each year. The Labour Party did pledge to increase medical school places to fifteen thousand. Do you think this will happen?
18:18 Alastair Campbell? I don't know. I didn't even know that was the case, that there was a shortage of medical. I thought we were trying to get more doctors.
18:24 Rory Stewart? I thought we were desperately trying to get more doctors, and it must, presumably, they do have to set some kinds of standards.
18:28 Alastair Campbell? I would hope so. I would hope that you can just go and buy a medical degree. So, listen, we have to come back. I don't know. We've got questions about sporons. Ian Bancroft.
18:38 Rory Stewart? Oh, good. I like questions about sporons.
18:39 Alastair Campbell? On last week's Question Time, when describing his Scottish sartorial garb, Alistair mentioned that although he had several sporons, only one of them was functional. Please can you put me out of my misery and explain what makes a sporon dysfunctional?
18:53 Rory Stewart? Yeah. Well, my view on that, I assume what you meant, as people listening will understand, a sporon is essentially a man purse. And if you're running, you probably want to move it onto your side hip, otherwise it bangs around a lot. And it can then get decorated. So I've got one with goat hair on the front, horse hair on the front. I found a badger in the road that had been run over.
19:13 Alastair Campbell? You made it into a sporon?
19:14 Rory Stewart? That's a sporon.
19:15 Alastair Campbell? Did you?
19:15 Rory Stewart? That's a sporon, yeah.
19:16 Alastair Campbell? Did you make it?
19:17 Rory Stewart? Yeah, I worked with a friend to make it, yeah.
19:18 Alastair Campbell? You made your own sporon? How many sporons have you got?
19:21 Rory Stewart? I've got five.
19:22 Alastair Campbell? If you tell me, yeah. I've got three, but only. So the functional point for me is, one is the belt broke. The other one, the baubles fell off. So there's only one bauble left, and it looks a bit ridiculous.
19:31 Rory Stewart? I've got one with two baubles, missing a third in the other one. Yeah.
19:34 Alastair Campbell? But as long as it's the two there, and not the middle.
19:36 Rory Stewart? It's the central one on the one on the side.
19:38 Alastair Campbell? Well, that's a dysfunctional sporon.
19:38 Rory Stewart? No good at all, yeah. No good at all. Meanwhile, I'm having a skin do made in Jordan.
19:43 Alastair Campbell? Okay. Would you like to tell our listeners what a skin do is?
19:46 Rory Stewart? Very good. Yes, obviously in Gaelic, it's a black knife, and it's what goes in your sock. But there is an amazing man called Zade, who is a knife maker in Amman.
19:55 Alastair Campbell? This is the second time you've mentioned the making of bespoke offensive weapons, Rory.
20:02 Rory Stewart? And what was the other one?
20:02 Alastair Campbell? You pla- I can't remember. You talked about making another knife another time.
20:05 Rory Stewart? I mean, Zade, literally, he takes some huge sheets of steel that are used in industrial processes. Saws that are used for cutting massive bits of wood, cuts them into knife shapes, and then he carves your name on the knife. And then he does silver tops and bottoms. So anyone going to Amman, go beyond the Roman Theatre and look for Zade and get a knife made.
20:28 Alastair Campbell? Did you watch the Eurovision Song Contest?
20:30 Speaker 06 I did not.
20:31 Alastair Campbell? Jestin, was the Eurovision vote rigged to get Sweden as host to the 50th anniversary of ABBA winning? I honestly think it would be unbelievable. Sweden, next year, you know what happens is that whoever wins it, they host the next one. So it was only in Liverpool because it was meant to be in Ukraine.
20:47 Speaker 06 Yeah.
20:47 Alastair Campbell? So Sweden have won it, 50 years on from ABBA, and I just think the avatars should represent Sweden.
20:54 Speaker 06 Help me understand about the avatars. Is it that ABBA themselves are a bit old and crocked and they can't perform anymore? Presumably if it was 50 years ago that they won.
21:00 Alastair Campbell? Rory, you're talking about musical, cultural legends. You can't say old and crocked. They're older than they were.
21:06 Speaker 06 Very good.
21:07 Alastair Campbell? So what the avatars do, it's technology. So when you go and watch it, it is like you're watching a live ABBA concert back in the day.
21:14 Speaker 06 Right.
21:15 Alastair Campbell? And it is truly mind blowing when you see it.
21:18 Speaker 06 Is avatar a word you made up like pedultry?
21:21 Alastair Campbell? No, I made up pedultry. I've also made up perseverance in the book, which you haven't mentioned much this today. I'm very disappointed with you, but what can I do?
21:28 Speaker 06 Publish this one.
21:30 Alastair Campbell? Pedultry are made up, but no, avatar is a word made up by the ABBA avatar phenomenon, which is phenomenal. And then now it's going to go to different parts of the world.
21:40 Speaker 06 Could you imagine Elvis tar and any number of things now that started it?
21:43 Alastair Campbell? Yes, it's already started. Listen, this artificial intelligence stuff, somebody sent me the other day, as you know, I like Elvis, Elvis singing Freddie Mercury songs down the years, most of which were written after Elvis died. And it is incredible. Elvis doing Crazy Little Thing Called Love is unbelievable.
22:00 Speaker 06 That's pretty weird.
22:01 Alastair Campbell? And it's Elvis. I mean, even though it's not Elvis, it's Elvis. So yeah, I think this musical, cultural stuff is going to be, I'm sorry you didn't watch Eurovision, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I thought the wrong country won. I was rooting for, France came 16th and they were brilliant. I felt sorry for May Muller, the Ackland Burley girl, who came second last. The Germans deserved to come last, as you know, I love the Germans, but they deserved, they were terrible. Croatia was one of the funniest songs I've ever seen in my life. But I think that Israel should have won, but I think politically.
22:33 Speaker 06 What was the Israel performance?
22:34 Alastair Campbell? Oh, I can't do it. It was very kind of funky.
22:36 Speaker 06 Okay.
22:38 Rory Stewart? Okay, Syria. James Thatcher, what's the latest on Syria and civil war? Where can you go and get good news and analysis on it? Why has this conflict received less and less coverage when it's still a major international issue? So my recommendations to James are look at Middle East Eye, look at blogs LSE, look at the Arab Monitor, look at France 24 and look at Human Rights Watch, hrw.org, if you want reporting on Syria.
23:04 Alastair Campbell? The other thing that's just vanished out of the news headlines is Sudan. It's still going on.
23:10 Rory Stewart? It's extraordinary. What it was like when I went to Turkey and the aftermath of this earthquake, which killed 40,000 people in two minutes, which wiped 10% off the GDP of the country, actually 4% off Turkish GDP, but 10% off Syrian GDP. And people are behaving as though it hasn't happened at all. These things are forgotten so quickly.
23:26 Alastair Campbell? I know, it's bad. Right, my final question, it will allow you to plug my book. Murray Mintz, what was your favourite book to write and why?
23:35 Rory Stewart? What was my favourite book to write and why?
23:37 Alastair Campbell? Mine was my first novel, All in the Mind.
23:40 Rory Stewart? Not But What Can I Do?
23:42 Alastair Campbell? I enjoyed writing But What Can I Do? I'm enjoying promoting it. I'm enjoying the fact that you enjoy promoting it so much. But no, my favourite was All in the Mind, my first novel.
23:50 Rory Stewart? So I loved writing my first book, Places in Between. I wrote it, I wrote half of it, took me six months. And then the second half took me six weeks and I did it alone in Scotland. My parents had gone away on a long holiday and I was all alone in the house. And I just, what I loved about it was I didn't talk to anyone in six weeks. I would wake up in the morning, I'd dream about it at night, wake up thinking about it. I'd work on it in the morning, I'd have a quick lunch, I'd go for a walk. I'd come back, I'd correct in the afternoon. I'd watch 24 on television, I'd go to bed, I'd dream about it again and that just went on.
24:24 Alastair Campbell? That's brilliant. Well, they're very similar because I got the idea for it out on my bike. I saw a funeral and I just started fantasising about whose funeral it was. And it gave me the ending of a novel. And then I went back home. I'd never written a novel before. And I started to write it and I didn't tell anybody I was doing it until I finished it, including Fiona. She just thought I was kind of, you know, doing upstairs, working like I do quite a lot. And eventually I read it.
24:49 Rory Stewart? Turned out you were upstairs skiving and writing a novel.
24:52 Alastair Campbell? But it was exactly the same thing. I was dreaming about it. The characters were in my dreams and I was waking up in the middle of the night and writing. And doing it on my BlackBerry as it was then because I didn't want to wake Fiona up.
25:03 Rory Stewart? It's pretty cool. Okay, last question then. Dementia among the young, Ian Perkins. Having read Steve Thompson's book, Unforgettable, could Alistair talk about his involvement with the 2005 British and Irish Lions tour? And I think this might be, for our final question, an opportunity for you to discuss dementia among the young.
25:22 Alastair Campbell? Well, Steve Thompson is a great rugby player, part of the England World Cup winning team and he's, the book he's written is about his dementia. And it's becoming a big, big, big thing this now in NFL and also now rugby is dementia and the constant sort of battering of the head. He is an amazing character. He was, that was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life going on that Lions tour. It was probably, it was probably a bad idea, me doing the media for the Lions because the press were not going to make it, make it work. But I got on very, very well with a lot of the players and my favorite, I don't know if it's my favorite Steve Thompson story, it's one of the embarrassing moments of my life. I came out of a briefing and you know this thing, did you ever play rugby at school?
26:04 Rory Stewart? I did, yeah.
26:05 Alastair Campbell? And did you know that thing about, I don't know what it is, it's clearly a kind of posh public school thing, but they try and take your trousers off the whole time, debagging. So you have to tie the lace up really tight, otherwise. So I'm walking out of this press conference wearing a tracksuit and Paul O'Connell, Irish captain, and Steve Thompson debagged me, right? And as they did so, my BlackBerry, which was in my right hand pocket, flew out.
26:33 Rory Stewart? With the novel on it?
26:34 Alastair Campbell? No, the novel wasn't on the BlackBerry, but I'll tell you what was on the BlackBerry. Was a long note that I'd written, the title of which was TBGB Transition.
26:44 Speaker 06 Oh, wow.
26:44 Alastair Campbell? Plan.
26:45 Speaker 06 And this is flying in the press conference.
26:46 Alastair Campbell? It's flying onto the floor and Steve Thompson has got it. And he doesn't know what's on my BlackBerry, but he thinks it'd be really funny, not just to take my trousers there, but also to steal my BlackBerry. I had to go and beg the head of security, the Lion's security, who's a kind of, you know, quite a rough, tough ex-cop or ex-special forces or something. And I had to go beg him to go put the frighteners on Steve Thompson to get my BlackBerry.
27:14 Speaker 06 Because he wasn't giving it back.
27:15 Alastair Campbell? He did want to give it back though, though. But no, so look, that's the sort of funny story about a very nice guy, but the truth is this dimension sport thing, he's, he's really shining a light on it. His book is very, very well worth reading.
27:26 Speaker 06 Okay, well, I think on that, maybe we should stop. Lovely to see you and good luck with the rest of the book talk.
27:30 Alastair Campbell? Thank you. The book being called.
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