Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 139. BORIS JOHNSON RESIGNS About this episode In an emergency podcast, Rory and Alastair react to the news that Boris Johnson is standing down as a Conservative MP with immediate effect after an investigation into the Partygate scandal found he misled parliament and recommended a suspension from the House of Commons.
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Transcript 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/risterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
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1:33 Rory Stewart? Welcome to the Rest is Politics Emergency Podcast with me, Rory Stewart.
1:39 Alastair Campbell? And me, Alastair Campbell. And Rory, thank you for doing it because I know you've just got off a plane. You'd be amazed at how much Twitter demand there was for us to do this. So we're getting towards 11 o'clock.
1:52 Rory Stewart? Where I am, getting towards 1:00 in the morning.
1:54 Alastair Campbell? I know. So thank you for that. But I do think that what appears to be a very large nail going into the coffin of Boris Johnson's political career merits an emergency podcast. I don't know how much you've been able to follow, but it's been a very, very, very strange day. You and I were in London together this morning. And since then, first of all, we had Nadine Dorries saying on her TV station that she is not going to be provoking a by-election because at that time she thought she was... Going to be on a peer edges list and she would sort of hang around for a bit. And then it turned out that she wasn't in Boris Johnson's resignation honours. And so she decided to throw toys out of the
2:37 Rory Stewart? Oh, sorry, just on that one, I say, am I right in saying she probably was in Boris Johnson's resignation honours? But that Rishi Sunak decided to strip certain people out of Boris Johnson's resignation.
2:46 Alastair Campbell? That is why I suspect has happened. However, Rishi Sunak, Downing Street are claiming that Rishi Sunak had nothing to do with this. That I know to be nonsense because he has to have something to do with it because he has to sign off the resignation honours.
2:58 Rory Stewart? And indeed, on this podcast, you were encouraging him to try to strip some of the people out of Boris Johnson's resignation honours. You were complaining about him giving honours to people at Dean Doris.
3:06 Alastair Campbell? I was, I was actually saying, I think he should have told Boris Johnson and Liz Trust that they weren't entitled to them. And particularly because with Boris Johnson, this privileges committee report was hanging over him. So we had the whole farce of the honours today. And then the full list came out and it was all Boris Johnson's supporters. And it was people who worked in number 10, who helped him try to cover up the partygate stuff. And then literally, just as that story was kind of dying down, well, not dying down, but we're sort of absorbing all that. Then the next thing, we get this news flash that Boris Johnson's stepping down from Parliament, having read the privileges committee and then coming out with this statement
3:47 Alastair Campbell? that is so full of self pitying, narcissistic whinging. And what is incredible, and it's amazing how history sometimes works like this. The same day, we have Donald Trump claiming a kangaroo court is out to get him on this indictment, which I've managed to read, it's very, very long and it's fascinating. And we should probably put it in the show notes at some point. The 49 page indictment of Trump is pretty damning. And at the same time as he's saying this is a kangaroo court and his enablers are coming out to say this is terrible, what's happening. We then have literally on the other side of the Atlantic, on our side of the Atlantic, Boris Johnson playing exactly the same game.
4:26 Rory Stewart? The resignation statement, for those who haven't read it, it is the most bizarre document. It is a bit Trumpian because it's very sort of rambling. For somebody who was once meant to be one of the kind of masters of the 800-word column, extremely experienced journalist who used to toss these things off in an hour, it's astonishing, and maybe that's the sort of self-pitying thing. He sort of repeats himself, has one go at Harriet Harman, wanders off in another direction, criticizes Rishi Sunak, grumbles about the Conservative Party, has another go at Harriet Harman, wobbles around again, says how much he loves his constituency, laments himself again. I mean, it's a very peculiar document.
5:03 Alastair Campbell? Well, it is Trumpian, in that it's just sort of flying around blaming anybody but himself. I did think the, look, as you know, I'm no great fan of Rishi Sunak. As I said on the television this evening, I think if Rishi Sunak had not been following Johnson and Trust, he would be seen as a kind of middle-ranking minister and a middle-ranking department material. But because he's better than those two, he's seen somewhat higher. But I think that Johnson basically saying, criticizing Rishi Sunak for failing to do these things that Boris Johnson won his mandate on. Boris Johnson won his mandate on exactly the same things, and he failed to do them. He had longer in the job than Rishi Sunak.
5:43 Rory Stewart? And furthermore, some of the things he's talking about in the resignation on his list are part of the Liz Truss legacy. He's still pushing for these very reckless, unfunded tax cuts, which basically bomb the British economy. So I think it's interesting. I mean, I think Boris Johnson, having won this huge majority, I mean, a significant majority, given that the Conservatives have been in so long, then did something almost unprecedented, which was to blow up his own career in a couple of years. And he did it really through endless sort of examples of just lack of personal focus, integrity, seriousness, revealed
6:27 Rory Stewart? in a whole series of ways. And so I think, a bit like Trump, the public thinking about him has a slightly muddled view of him, because we can barely remember what it was that he did. I mean, Was it that he parodied parliament or was it he was sort of endorsing somebody who was going around feeling up other MPs or was it that he was sort of cheating on his wallpaper or not doing his Covid stuff or getting someone to pay for the treehouse for his child? We hardly know because it just seemed as though every week that he was in, there was another one of these things.
6:58 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, and you know, it's interesting tonight, because I was being inundated with bits to talk about it and I wanted to wait until we did the podcast, but then I didn't know what time your flight was landing, so I did do a little bit of pedultery. I went out and did Sky News and the BBC and a bit of radio. And it was interesting talking, you know that thing when you have to listen to other people gabbing on before you get on? And it was interesting how many of the journalists were, they were still judging him through this prism of, well, you know, never rule him out because he's a proven winner and never rule him out because the media love Boris Johnson because he gives so much material. And in one of the interviews on Sky, I said, listen, that mindset and that attitude is part of the problem that has given us this guy who has then done so much damage to the
7:43 Alastair Campbell? country. And I actually did say at one point, I think it was on the BBC, I said, look, when Steve Rosenberg, the excellent BBC Moscow editor, talks about Vladimir Putin, he regularly says Vladimir Putin, who we know has a track record of lying about these issues, the BBC and other media, they have to start doing the same about Boris Johnson. The guy's a proven liar and he's lying again tonight and he's blaming other people tonight. And it's just horrible to watch. I actually think these Conservative MPs on the committee, I think they've got a case of defamation, you know, for what he's been saying about them.
8:16 Rory Stewart? Yes, exactly. I mean, I think a lot of these people, Bernard Jenkin, Alberto Costa, are quite, you know, will see themselves as relatively serious, objective people trying to do their jobs. And he's basically suggesting it's a kangaroo court and that it was unfair from the beginning. But it's part of the general populist playbook, isn't it? Because I think one of the things that populism has revealed in the collapse, I think of the right, I mean, it's something we were talking about actually, just something we were doing earlier today in an interview that's coming out, leading with Michael Ignatieff in two weeks. He was saying that the collapse of the right wing parties into populism has been so dramatic. It's interesting, he's somebody like you from the left. And he was saying in quite a generous way that actually some of the moderate conservatives
9:00 Rory Stewart? were part of the creation of the post-World War Order and he was paying tribute to Harold Macmillan for his house building and stuff. But one of the key themes of Boris Johnson and these conservative populists is a sort of contempt for the constitution. They claim that they were pushing through Brexit because they believed in the sovereignty of parliament. But every time parliament has tried to question him, he's just tried to rubbish parliament. He's done it when, by trying to parogue them, by trying to ignore parliamentary votes, and now going against the major privileges committee of parliament instead of doing the honourable thing, which is saying, you know, obviously I disagree, but I respect the institution and this is what they found and I'm going to have to go. It's very, very petty and vindictive.
9:45 Alastair Campbell? It's totally Trumpian. And of course, the other big point that he's hoping will land and he knows most of his right wing media enablers will pick up is basically already running the Brexit conspiracy card. This is all about people trying to undo his wonderful Brexit.
10:01 Rory Stewart? But just to depress you, I'm afraid my sense of the guy is that he doesn't want to give up. And he's partly done this because he loves getting the headlines. He felt it was going to be uncomfortable sitting in parliament with all this stuff coming out. This report, Covid report, separate Covid report coming. So he wants to get the headlines, but I also think he still has a huge fantasy about being leader of the opposition. He's somebody who loves opposition because he's not very good at governing. He loves generating headlines. He sees himself sort of mocking Keir Starmer from the other side of the benches. And I think it's well within possibility that he may try to use this to get himself out of parliament so that he's not kicked out, he resigns before he's kicked out, and tries to use it to come back again in the next election and take over the Conservative
10:46 Rory Stewart? Party.
10:47 Alastair Campbell? I think the other reason why he wants to get out is because it's becoming embarrassing month after month, seeing these register of members' interests and the vast sums of money that he's making for going around the world telling silly after dinner stories, which he will no longer have to do. He may go away, make lots of money.
11:02 Rory Stewart? Well, at least, it's sort of one thing, sorry, that actually our producer pointed out, is that in his resignation speech, he says, "Very sad to be leaving parliament, at least for now."
11:14 Alastair Campbell? Oh, yeah, that's absolutely signalling that he's going to hang around. Listen, we've said before that although he's very Trumpian in a lot of his antics, he is more Berlusconi than Trump. He's somebody that thinks, he always thinks he'll be able to come back. We've said, I've said many times about Johnson on this podcast that his entire life has been about getting into scrapes and then showing that he can get out of them when everybody says that he can't. But I think with this, if the Conservative Party seriously decides to bring this guy back in any capacity in the near future, I think they're in real mortal peril.
11:51 Rory Stewart? Is it remotely possible, it seems very, very unlikely, but is it remotely possible that the reason why Nadine Doris is going at exactly the same time as Boris Johnson is that he's actually planning to announce that he's going to stand in Nadine Doris's by-election and come back into Parliament in six weeks' time?
12:07 Alastair Campbell? But he'd have to be accepted there, but I know they could have the whole thing with the local party, but Rishi Sunak would have the power to say, no, that's not going to happen. And by the way, we're pleased to know, Roy, that in one of the interviews, one of the interviewers was saying, but Boris Johnson makes the point that it should be, it should be the electorate that gets rid of MPs. This sets a very dangerous precedent, in which case he could have, you know, he could have, bear in mind, this report is not a definitive judgment, it's what is a recommendation to Parliament. Parliament then votes, he could have done that and he could have stood if there had been a violation.
12:39 Rory Stewart? But it's also that the journalist is, my apologies for this, the noise of a Jordanian strange musical gas tank going past. I think the journalist is wrong. I don't think you should be seeing this as setting a dangerous precedent. I think it's important that Parliament is sovereign and Parliament has power and Parliament has always had power to be able to remonstrate against MPs who have broken the rules of Parliament or broken the rules of the nation.
13:09 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. We had one the other day with the SNP, Margaret Ferrier from the SNP, who was kicked out for god knows how long. But I think, and the other point I thought was quite interesting in terms of his take and the way that he was projecting all this, I think that you really do get a sense that now he really doesn't care about the future of the Conservative Party.
13:31 Rory Stewart? No, he never has, he never has. I mean, I think he, he, he, he's barely a Conservative. I think a bit like the way that Donald Trump was never really a Republican. I mean, he's somebody who fundamentally cares about power. He's somebody who, when he was six years old, said he wanted to be world king. And has set out very successfully to turn himself into a major celebrity and take power. But I think without, I think one of the things that we don't want to fall into the trap of is giving him what he wants, which is getting another burst of press attention, getting a sort of martyrdom out of a particular fringe of the right of the Conservative Party who thinks he's been badly treated. You know, he's recycling all the same conspiracy theories
14:16 Rory Stewart? here about Sue Gray, for example, the, the senior civil servant who's now gone off to work for, for Keir Starmer. All this stuff that Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries have been parroting for months, he's now put into his, his resignation speech. But we must try to remind people that he is a bad man and that he was a very, very bad prime minister. Because in the end, he did not have the seriousness or the thoughtfulness or the integrity to do that job.
14:47 Alastair Campbell? By the way, I did sort of refer to you because when they were telling me that, you know, Parliament should have kicked him out. I said, well, maybe he should have thought about that, about all the MPs that he decided weren't fit to stand, you among them and all the other people that weren't going to support his then policy on Brexit. It'd be interesting to know what Sunak is genuinely thinking about this. I mean, it does feel to me, this feels like, I was on one of the programmes with Anne Widdecombe and she basically said this feels like it's irreparable in terms of the future of the Conservative Party in the next election. I mean, Rishi Sunak must want him out of his hair, I'd have thought. He must want him off the scene. Was he trying to do a deal with him on these, this honours
15:27 Alastair Campbell? list? That's obviously gone wrong because of Nadine Dorries. The usual suspects, Rees-Mogg's already been out, Priti Patel's already been out, Simon Clarke, all the ones who've been given baubles and gongs are all out saying kangaroo court, kangaroo court. This guy Campbell Bannerman, who runs this organisation that was set up basically to sort of try and get Johnson back, says this is a day facto, splitting the Conservative Party will rally around Boris. So will there, you know, there is talk of whether he goes and forms a new party. If he does that again, I think that's really, really bad news for Rishi Sunak. So I think he'll just be hoping. That he will go away, but Johnson won't go away. It's just that I think the longer,
16:09 Alastair Campbell? the more that people do get reminded of the lies of the mistakes and don't underestimate how awfully he is going to come out of this Covid inquiry.
16:19 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and and and actually what Privileges Committee is going to report on Monday. I mean, I think the whatever he read that led him to trigger the by-election, I think is going to be eye popping when we see it. What they will have concluded about the way that he behaved and the way that he misled Parliament, consciously misled Parliament, thought nothing of it, just thought that he could get away with just looking people in the eye and saying there were no parties in Downing Street when he knew perfectly well there were, when his own staff were giggling about it.
16:49 Alastair Campbell? Some of whom are being given knighthoods and peerages and all sorts of nonsense. Don't you think, Rory, that you're thinking of your your your favourite person on the planet, King Charles, don't you think he was put in a really invidious position here that, and I don't, I'm really shocked that the palace didn't at least have a mind to, they knew this Privileges Committee report was going to come. They could have had a fair assessment, it wouldn't have been hard for them. Bear in mind, the King is allowed to look at any document that he wants about anything. So to have this this timing of King Charles has graciously approved the honour of bladdy, bladdy, bladdy, blah, and then you have these ridiculous people like Andrea Jenkins, so pleased that the King
17:32 Alastair Campbell? has chosen to hold me, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then, literally hours later, the guy who has put those people in those honours, given those honours and peerages is is has to resign in disgrace. I think that puts King Charles in a terrible position.
17:47 Rory Stewart? And I think it was the same when Boris Johnson lied to to Her Majesty the Queen about parroting Parliament, claimed that he wasn't doing it with anything to do with Brexit in order to get the excuse to get the royal prerogative to parrot Parliament.
18:01 Alastair Campbell? Is King Charles going to have to pin a medal on Jacob Rees-Mogg's chest when he says, arise, Sir Jacob? I mean, the whole thing's absurd.
18:10 Rory Stewart? It's it's I think it's deeply disturbing.
18:12 Alastair Campbell? What do you think? What do you think the King will be thinking, Rory?
18:15 Rory Stewart? Well, I'm going to stay off that subject. That's the subject I don't comment on. The subject I don't comment on. But I do do think your question, what Rishi Sunak's thinking is very interesting because it's.
18:26 Rory Stewart? As your great friend Emmanuel Macron likes to say, on the one hand, on the one hand, he's going to be thinking, thank goodness I got rid of this guy. And in fact, remember, you've been pushing for weeks now for him just to fire him and get him out, get him out of parliament. So he's gone. But at the, and actually, in some ways, remember, he only managed, Boris Johnson only got about 20 people rebelling against the Windsor Framework, the Northern Ireland deal that Rishi Sunak brought together. So in some ways, Rishi Sunak has proved in a way that Liz Truss hasn't, that he can last. He will last through the next election. He's got a reputation, at least amongst my friends in the Conservative Party, for being much more serious, much more competent, much more
19:10 Rory Stewart? focused on the details. But now he's got this great inflated elephantine buffoon prancing around outside parliament, trying to set up some splinter opposition rebellion Conservative Party, aiming almost certainly to come back in the next election in a kind of Berlusconi-Trumpian way.
19:30 Alastair Campbell? And he's also got, as I've experienced sort of doing the rounds tonight, he's also got quite a lot of media enablers who will continue to, the line being run out of these CBeebies people is all, you know, this is a terrible betrayal, kangaroo court usual stuff.
19:45 Rory Stewart? CBeebies is your word for GB News, is it?
19:48 Alastair Campbell? That's the one, that's the one, yeah. I don't take them terribly serious. Although I do think they're quite dangerous because they're funded by very, very right wing people, mainly based abroad, who don't care how much it costs, as long as they start to have influence. I see that the Privileges Committee have said that they're going to speed up, they're going to meet on Monday to speed up publication of the report. And Uxbridge and South Ryslip Conservative Party HQ has told people that anybody who's on the central party candidates list has got till 5pm Monday to apply.
20:21 Rory Stewart? So that could be your big chance, House, though. I do think-
20:24 Alastair Campbell? What, to be a Tory candidate?
20:25 Rory Stewart? Yeah, that's a great guess. Straight in there in Uxbridge, you've got till Monday.
20:28 Alastair Campbell? The chances of me being a Tory MP are very, very slim, Laurie. I think you have a better chance.
20:34 Rory Stewart? I'm not going to get my name in by Monday. I do think, though, it illustrates something that we've been talking about, which is the knife edge that Rishi Sunak has been on, trying to hold the Conservative Party together. And as he has become more sensible, more moderate-
20:51 Rory Stewart? Has made decisions like not trying to take through the bill of shredding all EU legislation, getting the Windsor framework through, not making reckless tax cuts, in fact, doing all the sort of things that people like me on the centre left of the Conservative Party want him to be doing. He's taken this enormous risk with the right of the Conservative Party, and I'm afraid with Boris Johnson's departure, there's a real risk that he will lose Redwall Brexit voters. And Boris Johnson will, and this is the, this is why Boris Johnson is so disloyal and destructive, and why no previous Conservative Prime Minister has ever done anything like this. Not Ted Heath complaining about Margaret Thatcher. No Labour leader
21:35 Rory Stewart? that I can think of has ever been just so destructive to their party as Boris Johnson is being. Because he's basically trying to remove from the Conservative Party the idea that they have anything to do with Brexit. So he's going to try to split them in two and present himself as the true voice of Brexit, try to portray Rishi Sunak as a Remainer, and an anti-growth Remainer. And by doing so, he's basically knifing his successor in the back.
22:02 Alastair Campbell? I think he's also trying to, I think he wants, he probably deep down now wants Sunak to lose because he wants to preserve the myth that he's a winner, and he wants to-
22:12 Rory Stewart? And he wants to be leader of the opposition. I mean, of course, and of course he wants Rishi Sunak to lose, because if Rishi Sunak wins, Boris has no chance of coming back into the leadership.
22:21 Alastair Campbell? But he won't, but to become leader of the opposition after an election, he has to get a seat. Now, maybe he could get a seat. I suspect that what this is all about is creating the narrative that I was a winner, I got majority of eighty, if only that it kept me, we could have won again because I was a proven winner. Sunak was a loser, he didn't what I'd tell him to do. And of course, he's got so many, he does still have so many enablers who will be pumping it out tomorrow. And I think, I think for the public though, I think, I really do believe the public saw through this guy some time ago.
22:52 Rory Stewart? But the problem is the public isn't just one thing. And as we found with Donald Trump, there's always going to be a chunk of the population that bizarrely, the more that people like you and me attack them, the more that we point out their lies, the more that we point out their incompetence, the more they decide that they're martyrs. And that somehow they're martyrs to elite opinion or Remainer opinion that's out to get them and that they represent the real people. It's astonishing. I mean, you can see these pictures now of Trump, absolutely extraordinary pictures, him almost being portrayed in the United States as though he's Jesus, as though he's a sort of martyr on a cross. And we will get, hopefully not as many, but there will be people out
23:34 Rory Stewart? there presenting Boris to say misunderstood, wonderful. And actually bizarrely, even moderate conservatives are now getting in touch with me or were over the last few weeks saying, please stop attacking Boris, you're beginning to sound a bit bitter. Let it go. Don't keep harping on about him. He's not that bad. And a surprise when I say, no, he really is a very, very, very bad man. I mean, this is the worst, genuinely, the worst prime minister, I think, that the United Kingdom has ever had.
24:04 Alastair Campbell? And the worst sort of character that you could have as prime minister, because he just doesn't have any of that. It's not just the lack of focus, the lack of work, the lack of attention to detail. It's actually the lack of care and concern for the genuine national interest. We had a great example of the other day, I don't know if you follow this story about the, his negotiations with the Australians over the trade deal, where they absolutely basically took his pants down and spanked him and got the whole thing done totally as they wanted it done.
24:34 Rory Stewart? With huge damage to British farmers.
24:36 Alastair Campbell? Massive, massive.
24:37 Rory Stewart? My constituency, small Cumbrian farmers, very, very worried about that. And he's still fantasizing about a US trade deal that is never going to happen.
24:44 Alastair Campbell? I know he's criticizing Sunak on that. He's saying, why isn't Xi Jinping gone and got the trade deal? Well, why didn't you answer? Because you lied about what your capacity to do so. So, no, and I think that, look, you'll never write him off, I get that. But I still think that, I do think tonight, that the turd is being flushed away finally.
25:05 Rory Stewart? And let's please not forget what he represented. Post-truth, polarization, populism embedded in that man. This was somebody who deliberately tried to whip up people against the elites, frayed our constitution, broke the ministerial code, then tried to rewrite the ministerial code so he wouldn't have to resign from breaking the ministerial code. And in all his actions showed such contempt for everything that we should hold dear about our constitution, our country, our traditions, and now he's attacking the very conservative party that enabled him and ripping it to pieces in his own fall.
25:42 Alastair Campbell? And the parliament for which he claimed he was fighting back to get sovereignty. Well, listen, Rory, thanks for doing that. Thanks for getting straight from the airport into your humble abode in Oman.
25:54 Rory Stewart? Well, thank you. Well, I mean, obviously, it's ten past one in the morning and I've wound myself up so much, I'm not going to be able to go to sleep, but I'm pleased he's left parliament anyway.
26:03 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I'm going tomorrow to the kite festival to talk about the bestselling book, But What Can I Do? And then Fiona is going to pick me up and we're heading off to Windermere in your old part of the world to do the Great North Swim.
26:17 Rory Stewart? Oh, fantastic. Well, swim safely.
26:19 Alastair Campbell? Oh, well, all the best.
26:20 Rory Stewart? All the best. Bye bye.
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