16. Johnson, monarchy, and the West Bank

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• 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/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:05Speaker 02

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• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

  Hello. Welcome to episode 16, I think, of The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:49Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:51Alastair Campbell?

  Today, we're going to be talking Queen and monarchy. But we'll be asking first whether Boris Johnson will survive not just to the end of the Elizabethan era, but to the end of the month. And also, what do we really know about the relationships between our longest-serving monarch and the many prime ministers from Churchill onwards who've come and gone? And with all our war now upon us in the Tory party, we will be talking peace and peace processes around the world. Rory's been in the occupied West Bank amid yet another political crisis in Israel. I've been talking to Good Friday agreement architect Bertie Ahern about the fragile peace process in Northern Ireland. And with an election in Colombia this weekend between populist left and populist right wing candidates, how worried should we

• 2:33Alastair Campbell?

  be about holding the peace there? But Rory, I think we've got to start with your former party and your former colleague Boris Johnson. On a scale of a toaster that starts at one and ends in 10, how brown is the Johnson toast?

• 2:49Rory Stewart?

  I think it's obviously got to be like spinal tap. We're taking it up to 11 here.

• 2:55Rory Stewart?

  No, I think, I think, I think he's, he's probably about at about a seven and a half, eight. Obviously, he is somebody who is completely determined never to resign, doesn't matter what disgrace he's in. But I would have thought a different prime minister with advisers that they trusted, anyone that they listened to, would now be preparing to go. And I sometimes wonder whether that isn't the difference, that with Mrs Thatcher, with Mrs May, even perhaps with John Major, there would have been people around that they trusted and relied on and would have been able to say to them, I think the game's up now, time to move on. And with Boris Johnson, you get the sense that there isn't anybody really there to tell him to do that.

• 3:34Alastair Campbell?

  But that's been a deliberate strategy. He's got a cabinet of people, you've mentioned this several times, of people who are never going to challenge him because they're not very good. Sunak has been completely defenestrated. He was probably the one credible possible alternative. And I suspect around him, I mean, the one thing I will always say in Tony Blair's defence, he liked having people around him who challenged him. And in fact, there's

• 3:56Rory Stewart?

  I thought he had you.

• 3:57Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he did, but he didn't just have me, he had Peter Mandles, he had Gordon Brown. I've just spent the morning with John Prescott. He had, you know, people like John who were, you know, Tony was not scared of that, whereas I get the feeling with, with Johnson, that he likes to be surrounded by sycophants.

• 4:12Rory Stewart?

  Doesn't like that at all. It's something that surprised me because obviously his, a public personality, you don't get that impression. I realised it when I was working from the Foreign Office, that if I came in with uncomfortable news, or I tried to disagree with him too much, he would smile the first couple of times and then a slightly sort of nasty air would come on. I remember once having a, he was trying to get me to do elephant conservation, I keep saying conversation, conservation in Africa.

• 4:35Alastair Campbell?

  There's nothing wrong with talking to elephants.

• 4:38Rory Stewart?

  Well, in a Boris way, of course, what he'd actually said at the meeting was, we must do something for charismatic mega fauna, charismatic mega fauna. I said, well, look, the Germans are doing this stuff in Zambia with elephants. And I think what we need to do is go in with them because they've got more than one hundred staff on the ground, they're spending over a hundred million dollars a year. And he said, Germans roaring nine, nine. So I said, um, you know, I tried again. And the second or third time around, you really got the impression that he did not like any type of pushback. In fact, I was then reading somebody who was writing about his time as mayor of London. And they pointed out that anybody who really pushed back, disagreed with him very quickly was not invited back into the room.

• 5:20Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, which is a terrible sign in a, in a, in a so-called leader. What do you think actually happens now? I mean, I, I don't think either of us are qualified really to work out what's going on inside his head. But what is going on inside the head of the cabinet? Because to be fair to the Tory backbenchers, I've been very, very critical of them for months now. To be fair, they came out in their numbers and basically said, this guy's got to go. They equally said, two or three of the ones I spoke to yesterday, they were saying, look, there's only so much we can do. Ultimately, the cabinet has to pull the plug.

• 5:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 5:52Alastair Campbell?

  So what is going, what is going on in their heads?

• 5:54Rory Stewart?

  So just, just to take it back one second to, to, to the basics of this, which is that the numbers are that he's got almost a hundred and seventy people on something called the payroll. And for listeners who don't spend the whole time geeking about this, that means ministers, that means trade envoys, that means vice chairman of the party, that means PPSs. These are people who are directly dependent on him for patronage and most of them directly dependent on him for their salary, for their position. And those people are expected in these types of election to vote with the prime minister. That's why when Theresa May was challenged, and you, you probably would have seen this clip because Jacob Rees-Mogg did this. At the end of twenty eighteen, when she got two hundred votes and the rebels got, I think,

• 6:39Rory Stewart?

  a hundred and eighteen, immediately Jacob Rees-Mogg came out and said she's got to resign. And his argument was that the overwhelming majority of the backbenchers were against her because you expect the payroll, the ministers to vote with them. So in the case of Boris Johnson. Actually, it looks like nearly seventy five percent of the backbenchers are against him if you remove that payroll vote.

• 7:01Alastair Campbell?

  There will have been some ministers who voted against him.

• 7:03Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, there'll be a couple, there'll be a couple, but if you think about it, and I remember thinking, thinking about this a little bit when I was voting on Theresa May's future, people in politics like being ministers, not just for selfish reasons, people kind of mock them about wanting cars and red boxes, but it's frequently very, very, can be a bit dispiriting, remaining a backbencher all the time, because you don't have a budget in your constituency, you're not the mayor, you don't really have legal power, you don't have money you can spend. And you've gone into politics, many people, because they want to change things and do things, and the only way that you can really do that is to be a minister. So you might wait five, 10, 15 years of your career before you finally become a minister.

• 7:47Rory Stewart?

  Some of these people that Boris Johnson's brought into his cabinet, like Nadine Doris, you know, haven't been ministers. I think she'd been in parliament 15 years before she was a minister. So suddenly, they find themselves in a position where they're having to think about, will the next leader keep them there? And nobody can be certain about that.

• 8:06Alastair Campbell?

  But I've, I've, I've just done an interview earlier with, with Luke North, I've been, I'm at this whole Business Week, which is why I was with John Prescott and Alan Johnson, and, and Luke North told me, they informed me that all the Tory MPs in their region, backbenchers, have expressed their support for Johnson. Now, it doesn't mean they all voted for him, but they're all saying that publicly, so let's take them at their word. These are people who are not ministers. I mean, these are some of the backbenchers who still think that he can do a good job. Now, I agree with you, three quarters, if you've lost three quarters of your backbenchers, you're in real trouble. But what actually happens now, because the one thing we've agreed about Johnson, he won't go unless he's dragged out kicking and screaming. So what, surely at the moment, it is only if the cabinet start to pull the plug, and

• 8:51Alastair Campbell?

  senior cabinet ministers, whether that's Gove, whether it's RAB, whether it's Sunak, Wallace, whether these people start to say, listen, mate, the game's up, and we've got to tell you that, that surely now is, is the only thing that will, will kick him out.

• 9:05Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and that's traditionally what kicked out Conservative prime ministers. So that, that's what happened, we think, with Anthony Eden. Senior people like Rob Butler went in, told him to move on. And it's definitely what happened to Theresa May. So she, this vote was in December 2018. And as you know, it's supposed to buy you 12 months if you survive under the current rules of the 1922 committee. And in effect, by about March, very senior people were going into her saying, I'm afraid you really can't keep going. And she then had to stand up in a meeting of the 22 committee in the House of Commons and say that if people voted for her Brexit deal, she'd step down. That didn't happen. And then she announced in May that she would go for good.

• 9:48Rory Stewart?

  So, yes, what will happen next, I predict, is that they'll lose Wakefield if they also lose Tiverton. Now, Tiverton's more is is going to be a really big loss if they lose that. That's the big bellwether. Wakefield's almost certain, but Tiverton, you know, there's a chance he can hang on to it. If he loses it, he's losing one of the very, very safest Conservative seats in the country and to the Lib Dems and all those MPs and a lot of his cabinet are people who represent southern seats that are vulnerable to the Lib Dems.

• 10:17Alastair Campbell?

  But they lost, they they they they lost a similar seat not long ago and they've moved on from that very, very quickly and people no longer talk about it.

• 10:23Rory Stewart?

  No, no, they're still worrying about that. And I think that underlies a lot of people's attitudes. So they'll then move in and if they can't budge him and if things continue to go wrong, and the one thing we can predict with Boris Johnson, I'm afraid, is that there will be more scandals to come. So when we get another couple of these things, eventually people are going to go and do what they almost did with Theresa May, which is to convince the 22 committee to bring forward another leadership challenge because you can change those rules.

• 10:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Can I just say, by the way, I I I think you're not alone in thinking that sometimes I think far too much of my own views and opinions. I want to be corrected. I think I have been rightly be corrected by somebody who has pointed out that when I keep saying the 22 committee was founded in 21, it was actually 23. It started in 22, but it came into being in 1923.

• 11:14Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 11:15Alastair Campbell?

  And the other thing, I'm going to throw something out here, which were I a journalist, which I'm not, and were I at a lobby briefing, which I wasn't, I would today have directly asked the question whether the Prime Minister had been taking any narcotic substances before his interview last night. Do you think that would have been a legitimate question?

• 11:32Rory Stewart?

  I think that's a good question. What was your theory on that? What drugs do you think he was taking?

• 11:37Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he was sniffing a lot. He was hyper in a way that did not fit with the moment of what had just happened. The woman reporter who'd been interviewing him for Sky, she used the word that he was very buoyant as he bounced into the room. And he just looked, I think the word is dilated is the word that's used in some conservative circles.

• 11:58Rory Stewart?

  So you think maybe a little bit too much of the Koffmetsen?

• 12:02Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I know we're going to talk about Columbia later on. I just think maybe, I don't know, I have no evidence other than the evidence of my eyes. But my point is, I think it is a legitimate question because he's in this mess because he broke the law. Now, I just point out, Roy, the-

• 12:17Rory Stewart?

  As you bankrupt our podcast for this libelous allegation against-

• 12:21Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I have many friends who are lawyers who would love, who would love to have Boris Johnson in a witness box. Do you not think though, I mean, listen, I was not alone, I was not alone in thinking there was something very, very strange about his demeanor.

• 12:36Rory Stewart?

  No, let's just-

• 12:38Alastair Campbell?

  Why are you not biting on this one?

• 12:40Rory Stewart?

  Move on quickly for your allegations.

• 12:41Alastair Campbell?

  I forgot, I forgot, you're an opium taker. I forgot about that.

• 12:43Rory Stewart?

  That's exactly. So I just want to play one more thing to you. I think one of the issues that we're going to have to communicate to people is, and this is one of the things I think the MPs are not yet maybe fully acknowledging to themselves, is that the real problem is that he's not going to be able to govern. The real problem, and I think you'd feel this if you were the communications director. Is that the only thing that his communications director is thinking about day in, day out is trying to keep him alive. And that really means that there isn't much bandwidth anymore in Number 10 for trying to think about whether you build a new generation nuclear power stations, how you think about Covid recovery, what you do about the Leeds Manchester rail line.

• 13:26Alastair Campbell?

  But Rory, when we did the Twitter Spaces thing last night, you rightly, I think, referred to Jesse Norman's devastating analysis in his letter. And the big point he was making was there is no plan for the country. So yesterday was meant to be Sajid Javid announcing it's Health Week, you know, and a couple of weeks ago, it was Crime Week. And it all feels to me like a really bad, low budget reality TV show where they're sort of having to think up new storylines, which have nothing to do with the challenges facing the country. And of course, as you say, I mean, it's like the commentary out there, basic line now,

• 14:07Alastair Campbell?

  they're looking at everything through the prism of Johnson trying to engineer his own survival. That is not a way to govern. It's impossible.

• 14:15Rory Stewart?

  He can't, he can't, and he can't, he can't basically land a headline. Everything that he does unfortunately feels like a joke. So you're right, it was meant to be Health Week this week. All we know is that he apparently said that he was going to, he somehow compared the NHS to a blockbuster Netflix. And then when the spokesman was asked, what does that mean? What's the comparison with Netflix? The spokesman was completely unable to provide any details. That's all you'll get. In other words, the entire Health Week becomes a little sort of joke and nobody really takes seriously anymore these announcements.

• 14:46Alastair Campbell?

  I also think, do you know, do you know, think we should probably touch a little bit on the, on the jubilee. I think it would be awful for the Queen. I mean, obviously, I know it used to be a treasonable offence to imagine the death of a monarch, but I think it would be awful if Boris Johnson was her final Prime Minister. So there has to be another Prime Minister before the Queen leaves us.

• 15:06Rory Stewart?

  It's a good, it's a good patriotic appeal to the Conservative base there you're making. I like it, I like it. I see.

• 15:14Alastair Campbell?

  Good.

• 15:15Rory Stewart?

  You've got me sorted there.

• 15:16Alastair Campbell?

  Did you do much jubilating yourself?

• 15:18Rory Stewart?

  I did do some jubilating. I thought the Prince Wales, Prince Charles made a really good speech. I thought that was a fantastic speech in the front balcony in Palace.

• 15:25Alastair Campbell?

  Which one? Your Majesty Mummy. I thought we were doing Your Majesty Mummy again. I mean, please Rory.

• 15:31Rory Stewart?

  You didn't like the mummy.

• 15:32Alastair Campbell?

  I didn't like that. I thought William's speech was excellent about the future of the planet.

• 15:37Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 15:37Alastair Campbell?

  Also, I can remember Jeremy Corbyn getting absolutely lacerated because he didn't sing the National Anthem at a church event. Prince Charles's rendition of the National Anthem alongside Mummy was really pretty feeble. His lips barely moved.

• 15:53Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I don't know. Do they sing the National Anthem? I'm not sure whether they do.

• 15:57Alastair Campbell?

  Well, William was. William was booming it out properly.

• 15:59Rory Stewart?

  He really belting it out, was he?

• 16:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Rory Stewart?

  I was a bit confused by that. I noticed that too, and I looked at it and thought, maybe they're traditionists, they don't sing it.

• 16:05Alastair Campbell?

  Well, in which case, why did Jeremy Corbyn get so much grief?

• 16:08Rory Stewart?

  Well, maybe the royal family think it's a bit immodest. Maybe they think they're sort of singing about themselves, like happy birthday to me or something.

• 16:17Alastair Campbell?

  No, I can get why the Queen doesn't sing it, but I think Charles should sing it.

• 16:20Rory Stewart?

  I want to, has it changed your republican views? Has it made you more pro-monarchy?

• 16:25Alastair Campbell?

  Um, look, as I, funny enough, this event I've just been doing in Hull, I was asked about my views on the Queen because I wrote about her in my book Winners, where I said she was the ultimate British winner because of her longevity and the fact that she's been so adaptable and so forth. I think it's impossible not to have massive admiration for the Queen. But I still feel that one of the problems with our country is its class-ridden structures. I think the whole hereditary thing I find quite offensive. And I don't think we'll ever be a true meritocracy when we feel so beholden to these people who just happen to be born into a position.

• 17:03Rory Stewart?

  So I feel I've not been defending the monarchy enough. And it's one of the things that I feel that in my, you know, because out of pure guilt and my sort of knee-jerk deference to progressive views, I don't do enough bringing out my true inner Tory.

• 17:18Alastair Campbell?

  Right, so why is the monarchy a good thing?

• 17:21Rory Stewart?

  So there's decent practical arguments. I think one of them is that you need a head of state. And it's actually quite a nice thing to be able to free up the time of the head of government to get on with governing and have a head of state.

• 17:31Alastair Campbell?

  Or having parties.

• 17:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, exactly. He's, he's, yeah, he's really, that's true. That's a good point there. But she is able to do a lot of the ceremonial stuff that, for example, President Macron has to do and take the burden of that off Theresa May. You know, if she's working hard, she can, she can get, she can get the Queen doing that. I think it's also, there's a nice unifying force and a sense of permanence there, which you don't get, obviously with our prime ministers. I mean, at the moment, the Conservative Party is in a flurry of short-lived prime ministers. You know, David Cameron went a year after his election in 2015. Theresa May went after two years. Boris Johnson looks like he's going to be going after two and a half years. So it's quite good to have some continuity and sovereignty.

• 18:17Rory Stewart?

  And I think finally, you're left with a very awkward question of what kind of sort of washed-up, aged politician ends up as our president? I mean, you know, it has to be someone like, some sort of a kind of version of you or me. And I don't think anyone really wants that, do they?

• 18:34Alastair Campbell?

  I, Rory, au contraire. I think the world is, they seem to be longing for any, that's exactly what they want. Interestingly, we, we got sent by somebody we both know from a previous life, Frances Crook, who was the, ran the Prison Reform Trust and is now working on something called Commission on Political Power. And she sent us quite an interesting paper about, are we, are we just sort of going to carry on with the monarchy as it is? And she ran, the, the paper ran through these six options. Option one, status quo. Option two, more formal powers for the unelected head of state. Option three, moving towards a purely ceremonial head of state and transferring those powers to a court

• 19:18Alastair Campbell?

  or a parliamentary committee. Option four, keep the monarchy as ceremonial but have an elected head of state. Option five, purely ceremonial but with more accountability, sort of take away a few of their houses and stuff. And option six, fully fledged republic, which I thought was quite interesting that they were thinking about that.

• 19:38Rory Stewart?

  I think it's quite good. And I think one of the things that is interesting is this question of how you get, I, I wouldn't ever want to get rid of the monarchy, obviously. That's my in a Tory speaking. But I think it is worth thinking about how you balance the ceremonial against the real political power. And the truth is that they're not really able to exercise power in the way that they were in the past, whatever their theoretical powers are. And you could see that with the terrible embarrassment of Boris Johnson convincing the Queen to prerogue Parliament.

• 20:06Alastair Campbell?

  Which she knew was wrong.

• 20:08Rory Stewart?

  And she didn't really have much option. I mean, it's not really possible, unfortunately, for the monarch to disagree with an elected prime minister for understandable reasons. I mean, we live in a democracy. So she wouldn't really have felt that she had the power to do that. She would have taken legal advice on whether this was a power that existed or not. So I would have thought that there might be a time, might come, where we are clearer about those powers which are no longer real powers and work out where they lie. And I think the prorogation is a very good example of that because that was absolutely shocking to see that Boris Johnson could do that. And it's really good that the Supreme Court was able to intervene and overturn that.

• 20:45Alastair Campbell?

  But her powers, the powers of the monarch, they rest as, as it were, idle powers. They're powers that are not expected to be used.

• 20:52Rory Stewart?

  But that doesn't, that doesn't matter if you don't get a prime minister playing fast and loose. That's where I get worried with Boris Johnson. I think most of this stuff in the British constitution is fine if people behave and play by the rules. But we're beginning to get now with Boris Johnson, somebody who seems to, yeah, not seems to, obviously does bend the rules on prorogation, bends the rules on the ministerial code, wants to bend the rules on lobbying, wants to bend the rules on campaign contributions to his wallpapers. So that's just another way of saying it may be for someone like me who's beginning to favour a written constitution that we tighten up that. Because the terrible problem that we have is because the monarch has almost absolute power in theory,

• 21:33Rory Stewart?

  or a lot of absolute power in theory, a prime minister can exploit the power of the crown to do extraordinary things. Hence these Henry VIII acts and stuff. Did you, what did you, what did you make of the relationship between the Queen and Tony Blair or the Queen and Gordon Brown?

• 21:46Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, interestingly, neither of them really talked about it much. I mean, I talked to Tony about absolutely everything, as you know, and as you can imagine. But he was always very, quite tight lipped about his exchanges with the Queen. I sometimes heard them. I would sometimes, sometimes if we were travelling or whatever and Tony wouldn't be able to go to the palace for the audience and sometimes they might do it on the phone. I can remember during the week of Princess Diana's death, a couple of phone conversations where I was in the room but only heard Tony's side. Because the thing about the conversation between the Prime Minister and the, and the, and the monarch is that they are literally, they have nobody else. There's no record, there, there's nobody else in the room. And I think it's extraordinary the, the way that these sent, these, these perceptions

• 22:29Alastair Campbell?

  have developed about her relationships with the different Prime Ministers. So for example, the fact that she refers to Churchill as Winston, people just assume there was a closeness, we don't know that. We know from, we know from Churchill's memoirs that he felt very protective and very supportive. And I think it was very much that was the way the relationship went. And then, you know, you hear, not least from people who worked with Harold Wilson, that she, she was quite fond of Harold Wilson, that she was quite fond of John Major, that she didn't much like Thatcher and she had a bit of a thing about Tony. And I, I don't know if those things are true or not. I think they did find it difficult, that even though they asked for our help in the

• 23:10Alastair Campbell?

  aftermath of Diana's death and, and they asked us to sort of help them plan the funeral, I think they did sort of slightly resent that in some way. And whether, whether, I, I also think the hunting thing that maybe was difficult. But I don't know. My, my sense would be that she would really like John Major. Um, I, I just have a feeling that's, that's her kind of Prime Minister. I can't believe, I can't believe she thinks anything other than that Boris Johnson is a complete chancer.

• 23:42Rory Stewart?

  I had an interesting observation from someone here in Jordan, who said that one of the reasons they think that we continue to have a very positive relationship towards the royal family is that the Queen and the Prince of Wales don't necessarily spend their money doing things that anybody else really wants to do. So we see that what they really like doing is tromping around on really wet Scottish moors and battered Atlantics. But if they were actually on, spending their whole time on super yachts in the Mediterranean, people would be more grumpy. Anyway, that was the Jordanian perspective.

• 24:14Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, okay. How's the Jordanian king going down with the people at the moment?

• 24:18Rory Stewart?

  Well, that's a really, really interesting question. So the answer is it's quite difficult to answer for somebody living in Jordan. Unlike in Britain, talking about the monarchy here is really, really forbidden. Everybody refers very, very politely to His Majesty all the time. It's obviously a complicated society because more than half the population are of Palestinian descent and were not originally part of, yeah, would not originally see themselves as Jordanians. So they have a complicated attitude towards the monarchy. And of course, the monarchy itself came where the rulers, their descendants, the Prophet Muhammad, who came from what's now Saudi Arabia in after in the 1920s. So the answer is I'm basically

• 25:02Rory Stewart?

  avoiding your question because you're sort of sketching around because I

• 25:06Alastair Campbell?

  You're taking quite a long time to do it.

• 25:07Rory Stewart?

  I'm sort of avoiding spending the rest of my life in a Jordanian jail.

• 25:10Alastair Campbell?

  Have you met the king? I've met the king a few times.

• 25:12Rory Stewart?

  I have, I have, I have.

• 25:14Alastair Campbell?

  Good. And did you bow? Did you bow? Did you do the little bow?

• 25:17Rory Stewart?

  I tend to keep my bowing for the British royal family. I'm not sure I'm supposed to be bowing to other royal families.

• 25:23Alastair Campbell?

  Before we go to a break, I'll just tell you one story that Tony Blair did tell me. He'll probably end up in the Tower for this. But he went, he did come back once from an audience with the Queen and said, oh God, I think I made a terrible mistake. I said, what? He said, well, I don't know whether she understood what I was saying, but basically she said to me that she was going to Ireland and she was wearing this green dress, a bit like the one she was wearing on the Platinum Jubilee the other night. And he said, I hope you, he said, I hope you're not going to wear that dress. And he sort of just for a moment felt that maybe she was, her Prime Minister was commenting

• 26:05Alastair Campbell?

  on her dress sets rather than the significance of the green colour.

• 26:09Rory Stewart?

  I can see that would not go down very well. Right. I think on that, let's go to our break.

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• 28:17Rory Stewart?

  Hello. You'll be back with Alistair and Rory in a minute, but we thought you might be interested in this week's episode of The Rest Is History.

• 28:24Speaker 10

  Yes, we have been looking at the ways that British prime ministers have been kicked out of office, so not losing elections to the opposition, but being stabbed in the back by their own side. From Robert Walpole, all the way back in 1742, through Robert Peel, Herbert Asquith, Neville Chamberlain, Margaret Thatcher, and all the way up to Theresa May.

• 28:42Rory Stewart?

  Expect backstabbing, scandal and out and out corruption. So, nothing like 2022.

• 28:49Speaker 10

  Nothing like 2022 at all. Search for The Rest Is History, or you can find the link in the episode notes for this podcast. And now, back to the show.

• 29:06Speaker 10

  Welcome back. Part two of episode 16 of The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 29:12Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 29:13Speaker 10

  And we were dealing with monarchy, both in Britain and in Jordan. Let's, let's stay in your region. You've just been in, in Nablus.

• 29:22Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 29:22Speaker 10

  In the West Bank.

• 29:23Rory Stewart?

  I think the first thing is that anybody who's interested in Israel and Palestine needs to get out on the ground and needs to get out to the West Bank and ideally Gaza, because it is so much raw, more raw on the ground than you could possibly believe. So, Nablus, for example, which is a very, very beautiful ancient city, one of the oldest cities in the world. Weirdly, its name, I discovered when I went there, is from the Roman name Neapolis, new city, which has become Nablus over the years. But it is a real classic ancient bizarre city with covered markets and jewellers and ceramicists and tile

• 30:04Rory Stewart?

  makers. And, and it was the, one of the centres of the Intifada 2002, 2003. So there are nearly 200 buildings in the old city are simply missing. They were destroyed in the fighting and thousands of them were damaged. And as you work your way in and out of these settlements, one of the things that surprised me most, I was in Bethlehem the day before. Bethlehem is a place that some people listening will have been to as visitors. It's a safe city, it's a very beautiful city, it's where this famous church, the Nativity is. But if you approach it as an Israeli, there is a huge red sign up saying it is illegal for any Israeli to come in.

• 30:48Rory Stewart?

  You may be killed. And that's put up by the Israeli government. And it was one of the things that surprised me. I was talking to Israeli friends and saying I was going to Bethlehem. And they said, oh, be careful. That's very, very dangerous. It's not dangerous at all, but these barriers have created, I'm afraid, communities that have so little connection to each other. I saw another Israeli friend and he, I just got the sense that he might almost have been living in Los Angeles for all the connection he had with what was happening in Nablus.

• 31:20Alastair Campbell?

  I've been to Nablus a couple of times, including in the mid eighties when the, I think it had one of the longest curfews that the region has had. And the old mosque there, there's a sort of 10th or 11th century mosque there.

• 31:35Rory Stewart?

  Incredible. And it's built on the site of a crusader church, which is built on the site of a Samaritan synagogue from the fourth century. So as in the story, it's a good Samaritan.

• 31:45Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I do remember visiting that. And the other memory I have of Nablus is the fact that it's twinned with Dundee. I don't know why I remember that, but.

• 31:54Rory Stewart?

  Oh, that's brilliant. Oh, I didn't know that. And I'm going to do something with that because of course Dundee is very famous for marmalade. And I discovered, reading Ibn Battuta, the 14th century Arab geographer, that Nablus used to export a form of jam made from something that looks like an orange, but isn't.

• 32:09Alastair Campbell?

  Well, maybe that explains, and it also might explain why sometimes you do see Palestinian flags at football matches in Dundee. And I think the other twin town.

• 32:21Rory Stewart?

  That's something else, I think you've got there. But it is true that there's true that there's a lot of Palestinian enthusiasm for Scottish football as a result.

• 32:28Alastair Campbell?

  I'm pretty sure that Dundee, and I think the other one is Dublin, that Dublin's twinned with Nablus. But the other, and the other thing I remember about Nablus was a mayor, and I don't know if he's still the mayor, but he was called Adli Yaisch. I don't know if he's still the mayor now. But he was one of the guys who was locked up for quite a long time without any charge. In one of the sort of tit for tat, when I think there'd been a kidnapping of an Israeli soldier and they just decided to chuck a few people in jail. I'll tell you something that really worries me, and you're in the region and you're visiting places like this all the time. It sort of isn't on the international agenda anymore. It's kind of fallen off. And if I think about, you know, we can talk a bit about Northern Ireland and what's happening in Colombia at the moment as well.

• 33:12Alastair Campbell?

  But these peace processes, they need constant international support and management. And I don't get the feeling of any of the major powers at the moment seeing the Middle East as a priority.

• 33:24Rory Stewart?

  No, it's very strange. It's partly unfortunate that Boris Johnson, Liz Truss have, I think foolishly, decided to back out of the Middle East peace process. It's partly the internal politics of the Conservative Party where people think that they need to take a very one-sided approach to that. I don't think they do. I think it's foolish. I think you can have very good relationships with Israel and also drive the Middle East peace process forward. I think it's a mistake. I think it's also true, unfortunately, that so much else has happened. ISIS, Syria, Arab Spring, the amazing economic growth of Dubai, the developments in Saudi, all of which have distracted attention from Israel-Palestine.

• 34:02Alastair Campbell?

  But also, we're about to have another collapsed Israeli government, aren't we?

• 34:07Rory Stewart?

  Yes, seems to be in real trouble.

• 34:09Alastair Campbell?

  And that's because the Parliament's voted against this, the extension of applying Israeli civilian law to the settlers. And the other memory I have of Nablus, correct me if this is wrong, I might not write that it is pretty much completely surrounded by Israeli settlements.

• 34:23Rory Stewart?

  There are settlements pretty close, yeah. There's a settlement on the hill pretty close. I also saw a very new Palestinian city called Ruadi, which is just in the process of being built, which is amazing. It looks like sort of Gotham City on a hill. Credible skyscrapers. It's the first brand-new-planned city of that sort I've ever seen. In Palestinian territory with an enormous Roman amphitheatre, a big, big gamble by a Palestinian businessman called Bashar al-Assad on trying to create the city of 20, 40,000 people in the middle of nowhere. And I'll be very interested to see whether that works, but you get a sense that he's really... There's something quite inspiring about the way that he's sort of betting on the Palestinian economy there.

• 35:02Alastair Campbell?

  Now, you mentioned Johnson and Truss's sort of disinterest in the Middle East, but far closer to home. I had a long, long session with Bertie O'Hern, the former Irish Taoiseach, the other day, who was Tony Blair's oppo during the Good Friday Agreement. And he was really quite down about what's happening in Northern Ireland at the moment. And, I mean, I didn't know this until he told me. You know, do you remember the North-South bodies that we set up as part of the Good Friday Agreement and the sort of the cooperation between North and South? They don't even meet anymore. There's nobody kind of corralling and holding the line and keeping people sort of moving in the right direction. And I always remember, Tony Blair always used to say about these peace processes, they either move forward or backwards, they never stand still.

• 35:44Alastair Campbell?

  And, and I think that what, what, I honestly, of all the many, many, many reasons that I, Neil Kinnock keeps telling me I mustn't say hate, but that I really despise this government, the cavalier vandalism with which they are approaching the Good Friday Agreement, is just another little toy in their game of Brexit.

• 36:02Rory Stewart?

  Interestingly, of the MPs who are getting in touch with me, one of the things, those that are sort of supporting what I'm saying about Boris Johnson, right, these are loyal Conservative MPs in the party, who feel that I should be calling out Boris Johnson. It's about Northern Ireland and the Republic and the peace process that they're most disturbed. That's the thing that's upsetting them most.

• 36:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I noticed Roger Gale, who's been very, very critical, but I noticed he's talked a lot about that. And I, and I do think there's this sort of, you know, he's meant to be the leader. And also, he calls himself the Secretary of State for the Union. Just another kind of little slogan that he dreamt up for himself.

• 36:39Rory Stewart?

  Do you know why he does that, just incidentally?

• 36:41Alastair Campbell?

  Go on.

• 36:42Rory Stewart?

  When, when he was running to be Prime Minister in that leadership race, which I was in, he wanted to try to get the votes of Conservative MPs in Scotland. And to do so, he went in front of One Nation, and there was a proposal, there should be a Secretary of State for the Union. It was a sort of, I did a much more senior cabinet position to replace the Secretary of State of Scotland, Wales, et cetera, where you'd have a real cabinet, big hitter, that was going to go and get money and invest and demonstrate what the United Kingdom was doing for all the nations in the United Kingdom. And he promised, Boris Johnson promised, he'd create a Secretary of State for the Union. But of course, the way in which he did it is just to give himself the name.

• 37:24Alastair Campbell?

  Did he ever promise you a job? You told that very funny story in our Twitter Spaces thing. I'm not, I'm not quite sure how that thing worked.

• 37:30Rory Stewart?

  No, go on then. So it's lovely the way he does it. So what he did to me is, this was 2016 when he was running first against Theresa May. He got me into his office and he said, Rory, Rory, don't believe a word that I'm about to say, and don't believe a single word, because I'll deny it all immediately afterwards. But I'd love to have you in my cabinet, flying around Europe, sprinkling a little bit of English Ode Cologne.

• 37:52Alastair Campbell?

  What is English Ode Cologne? I mean, it's surely Ode Cologne is from Cologne. The point of Ode Cologne is it's from Cologne.

• 38:00Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I didn't think, I didn't really wear it. I said, not very English, the whole idea, is it? I also not quite, it's a sort of fascinating, just a sort of wonderful vision though, because I imagine that's what he said to 200 people when he wrote in these handwritten notes. You saw it with Jesse Norman's resignation letter, that he'd apparently promised a job in the cabinet.

• 38:16Alastair Campbell?

  He must have, I mean, the, the, I, I, the palace surely have to remind him occasionally that there is a numerical limit on the number of nightclubs you can do in a, in a calendar year. You can't give them all. Now, listen, can we talk a little bit about, about Colombia? Because that's the other peace process that I think is, I think is even more complicated than Northern Ireland. And Santos, the president who sort of drove it, deservedly won the Nobel Peace Prize. But we've got yet another election between yet another right wing populist and yet another left wing populist.

• 38:50Rory Stewart?

  So let's just explain the Colombian peace process very, very quickly for those people listening who are not totally on top of it. So you had a very, very longstanding fight between effectively leftist groups and often a standoff with a more right wing government. This was eventually resolved in a very, very bold way by Santos, who'd come in initially on quite a right wing ticket, being quite tough on what he called terrorists. He then flipped that around, pulled a peace deal together, and then he made the great mistake of all time, which was having secured the peace deal, he then presented it in a referendum to the Colombian people. And the Colombian people narrowly rejected it.

• 39:30Alastair Campbell?

  And then he did the right thing.

• 39:34Alastair Campbell?

  By saying, well, we plow on.

• 39:35Rory Stewart?

  Ignored the referendum entirely and just drove it through.

• 39:38Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it was the the result of the referendum, I will let people know, it was fifty point two against and forty nine point eight. He then said, right, OK, let's sit down with the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and let's kind of revise the deal and let's put that through the parliamentary processes. And he got away with it. And here's the other thing, Rory. I didn't know this until I was sort of looking it up the other day. What famous international event happened on June the twenty third, twenty sixteen?

• 40:08Rory Stewart?

  I do not know. What was the famous event? Go on then.

• 40:11Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, you do know, June the twenty third, twenty sixteen was the Brexit referendum. OK.

• 40:16Alastair Campbell?

  But it was also that was the day that the agreement was signed in Colombia. And that was the one that went to the referendum and that was the one that was lost. But you've now got these two. You've got these two populist. One of them, by the way, this guy Hernandez, he's kind of come out of nowhere. He's almost eighty. He's expressed his admiration for Hitler in the past. He bases his whole campaign on Trump. He does everything on TikTok. And he came second. And he's now going into the runoff. I think the left guy, Petro, will win. But it's not guaranteed. And both of them are sort of saying the right things ish about trying to make the peace deal work.

• 40:57Alastair Campbell?

  But I have a real worry that, just as with, I think Cameron didn't show enough interest in the Good Friday Agreement, I don't think Johnson gives it enough care and attention. There is a little bit of, if it's not invented here, they sort of don't really give it attention. And I mean, the the numbers in Colombia, I mean, two hundred and eighteen thousand dead, forty five thousand children killed, eight thousand missing, five point seven million people sort of, you know, displaced. Twenty eight thousand abducted. I mean, this is this is on a scale that's.

• 41:26Rory Stewart?

  No, it's shocking. But another thing, given that this is a programme about politics, which is a horrible irony of the whole thing, is that Santos, having, you know, received every kind of medal and peace prize imaginable. Left office with a very, very low approval rating. And the whole, a party system of Colombia exploded. He'd come into a party which had been dominated by a man called Uribe. And he then annoyed Uribe. So it would be like, I don't know, Boris Johnson coming in and sort of annoying Theresa May.

• 41:58Alastair Campbell?

  No, I think, I think, I think a better parallel is it's Keir, it's Keir Starmer getting elected Labour leader by signalling that he sort of broadly supports Jeremy Corbyn, but then comes in and completely changes everything.

• 42:09Rory Stewart?

  Very good, okay, except in this case, Uribe turned out to have such an amazing personal level of support that he was able to effectively topple Santos and run someone against him from a totally sort of new party and put his protege in as his replacement. So it would be like Jeremy Corbyn sort of stepping outside, saying, screw you, setting up a whole new movement and then running against, running against Keir Starmer and putting his protege in.

• 42:34Alastair Campbell?

  Which, which he may, by the way, do in, in, in Islington, for all we know. But anyway, I, I sort of, it's, it's one of those things, those, those three things together, your Middle East, Northern Ireland and Colombia, I just think we, it's, it's just important to recognise the fragility.

• 42:52Rory Stewart?

  Funny populism, because I think that the story here in, in Colombia and in Peru, and actually in a lot of Latin American now, is the emergence of these hardly known radical populist parties.

• 43:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 43:03Rory Stewart?

  Just at the moment at which you're feeling cheery about the Slovenian results.

• 43:08Alastair Campbell?

  Now, listen, I think the finest question that we have had of the many thousands of questions, which we literally have had thousands and thousands of questions. Ed Blackburn, I will forgive him his name, you probably know Rory, why I don't like the name Blackburn, do you know that?

• 43:24Rory Stewart?

  I can, I can, that's a football thing, I guess.

• 43:26Alastair Campbell?

  That's good, well done, well done. His question is, could famine in Africa be the thing that forces China's hand on Russia-Ukraine?

• 43:36Alastair Campbell?

  As the maritime grain crisis will lead to a diminution of their soft power. Now, I think that's a great question.

• 43:43Rory Stewart?

  Well, I I just start by saying that one of the things that's consistent at the moment is that nobody talks enough about Africa. We keep underestimating Africa and one in 10 children born in the world are going to be born in Nigeria by 2050, be about 40% of the population of the world in Africa. And I think that that one of the things I like about that question is he's reminding us of how interconnected the world is, how it goes both ways. So shortage of grain coming out of Russia ends up with people in a very, very difficult situation in Sub-Saharan Africa, which is imports 60% of its wheat. But it can also go the other way, backlash against China and all that comes out of that.

• 44:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I've I've just been reading this this book about Xi Jinping. And it's it's it's German, it's written by two guys called Stefan Austen and Adrian Geiges.

• 44:32Rory Stewart?

  And what's the book called in German?

• 44:34Alastair Campbell?

  It's called Der mächtigste Mann der Welt, The Most Powerful Man in the World, which I think is a very fair title.

• 44:40Rory Stewart?

  Very good, yeah.

• 44:40Alastair Campbell?

  And you say we don't talk about enough about Africa. I don't think we talk nearly enough in our media about China. And interestingly, I don't, I I'm not aware of an English language biography that is just about Xi Jinping. But what's really fascinating about this book, and it's it's a story that you, you know, broadly, we will know, but when you see it laid out through his own words and his own life story, it's just the extent to which it has always been his belief that Britain dominated the world after the first industrial revolution, then the Americans took over and they've had the biggest economy in the world since 1872. And it has always been his belief that that is not the natural order of things and that China must be the dominant power in the world.

• 45:22Alastair Campbell?

  And there's an extraordinary quote from Sigmund Gabriel, who was in in the previous German government, asking Kagame in Rwanda, why they were sort of, you know, allowing the Chinese to kind of basically mop up all the foreign direct investment opportunities. And Kagame said, by the time you lot have put a stake in the ground, the Chinese have built two airports. And they, you know, the Silk Road, the way that this book tells the story of the Silk Road as a kind of strategic kind of Hoover, just hoovering up power and influence around the world. And of course, if the grain, I think what's great about Ed Blackburn's question, if this grain crisis does lead to the, some of the poorer countries in the

• 46:05Alastair Campbell?

  world facing challenges that, you know, we can barely begin to think about, then it does slightly change the game for them. I will, the other thing I'd say about this book is it, it sort of does make, because Xi Jinping's got quite a nice soft face. Do you know that you're not allowed to Google Winnie the Pooh? You, I know it's not Google, but you can't find Winnie the Pooh on the internet in China because

• 46:25Rory Stewart?

  You're worried they're mocking him.

• 46:27Alastair Campbell?

  You're mocking him, yeah. And you can't, you can't find Tiananmen Square. And he is, I think, on the ruthlessness front, he makes Putin look quite tame.

• 46:36Rory Stewart?

  It's, it's amazing, isn't it? Um, the, the other biography I'm aware of is by French, Frenchman, Le Monde correspondent. And that maybe goes to your point, that actually we're not awfully good in Britain. It's sad. We're not, we're not, we're not doing, doing well enough on making sure that we write well in our media and elsewhere about these things. There, there are sometimes good, good long stuff, sort of London Review of Books, sometimes.

• 47:02Alastair Campbell?

  But I, I think if you, if you think about just how much coverage Donald Trump can get for basically sort of farting into a paper bag, and, and yet Xi Jinping can make really big, significant speeches about the future of the world, and nobody really bats an eyelid. Anyway, it's a fascinating book.

• 47:21Rory Stewart?

  Have, have I told you, just to finish, have I told you my experience of going, and maybe I did, going, I went out to Kenya for President Kenyatta's inauguration, and it was a sort of grand thing, British minister arrives, red carpet, all this, and I was sat in the front row. And then suddenly, out of my right hand came three completely unknown Chinese officials. Nobody really knew who they were in the hierarchy. And I was immediately shuffled three rows backwards, and my front row seats were occupied. By the Deputy Vice Deputy Deputy Vice Minister of the Supreme Presidium. Right, on that, I think we're coming towards an end. Now, remind, we should remind people, we're back tomorrow with our Question Time episode.

• 47:58Alastair Campbell?

  There were some, there were some very, as ever, some very, very interesting questions.

• 48:01Rory Stewart?

  Fantastic, 500 questions, and I think people may be a bit relieved after us banging on about Boris Johnson's.

• 48:06Alastair Campbell?

  And we disagreed, we disagreed agreeably about austerity, again.

• 48:10Rory Stewart?

  We did, we did, we did, we did, we did. Right, much love from me, and this is goodbye.

• 48:17Alastair Campbell?

  Pleasure as always, speak to you next week.

• 48:19Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

• 48:23Speaker 03

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

• 48:34Speaker 04

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

• 48:40Speaker 05

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

• 48:44Speaker 04

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 48:47Speaker 05

  I'm not the first then.

• 48:49Speaker 04

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd, rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 48:54Speaker 07

  Espolon Tequila. It arrives in a cloud of feathers with a cry to wake the dead. Espolon Tequila, balanced, delicious, perfect for nights out, nights in, and people who like to drink tequila. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth, then hold on tight. 100% agave, 0% eagle. Espolon Tequila, for a real margarita, ride the rooster.

• 49:17Speaker 08

  Espolon Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof, copyright 2026, Compaq America, New York, New York, drink responsibly.