28. Question Time: Shinzo Abe, Sri Lanka, and 'Big Society'

Join Rory and Alastair for the seventh episode of 'The Rest Is Politics: Question Time', where they discuss the assassination and legacy of Shinzo Abe, the situation in Sri Lanka, Tory leadership, marriage, Rory's wedding ring, the Met, and more. Reading List: Not For The Faint-Hearted: My Life Fighting Crime - John Stevens Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Editor: James Hodgson Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 1:43Rory Stewart?

  Hello and welcome to the Westis Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:48Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:49Rory Stewart?

  We received over 1,000 questions this week. Huge thanks to all those who took time to write in on Twitter and email. Okay, Alistair, where do you want to start this week? I think you said, just as we were finishing yesterday, that we hadn't got on to Japan, which we promised you. Shall we have a little chance to talk about Shinzo Abe in Japan?

• 2:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and then, and also, we talked about Sri Lanka and we had a few questions on that. So we should do that as well. I mean, Shinzo Abe, incredibly sad and...

• 2:17Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, he was, you know, not exactly my kind of politician. He was a right wing nationalist. Um, he, but he, but he was, he was an extraordinary figure because Japan, where we a bit, little bit like, you know, yes, there's a dominant ruling party. But they did kind of change their prime minister's choirs a lot. And he had two terms in office. And between them became Japan's longest serving prime minister. And one of the best things about Japanese politics. They have incredibly, a little bit, I think even closer than ours, campaigning is very much out with the people. And he was out on the campaign stump. There's all these questions now about why didn't he have better security? But that's kind of how they campaign. And they have very, very, very tough gun laws.

• 3:00Alastair Campbell?

  So, you know, you can't, I think you have to have psychological checks to have a gun. You even have to, you can't have a gun if you've had a criminal record. You, you even have your neighbors interviewed by police.

• 3:11Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 3:12Alastair Campbell?

  And the neighbors have a right of saying, no, no, no, we don't think you should have a gun. And this guy, the, the guy made his own gun. I think you can see that in, in the pictures. But the other thing that was interesting about it is.

• 3:22Rory Stewart?

  Let's just on that, Alison, on that one for a second. Um, obviously some incredibly distasteful American Republicans are trying to suggest this shows that gun laws don't make any difference. But that isn't true at all. In fact, actually, the gun laws have made an enormous difference.

• 3:34Alastair Campbell?

  And. They had three, they, they had in twenty seventeen, they had three gun related deaths in the entirety of Japan.

• 3:40Rory Stewart?

  And, and this is, that's a very important figure. And, and also assassinations in Japan, incredibly rare. I mean, there was, there was, there was one famous attempt in nineteen, at Saturday nineteen sixties. And then a mayor was killed in the early two thousands over a personal affair. But this is not normal in Japanese politics. It's a horrifying thing. Japanese politics, very similar to British politics, actually, real, proper parliamentary system. Quite a lot of the seats first past the post, two chambers, a monarchy, of course, an island state. But unlike British politics, although I think you tend to say the Conservative Party has become a bit like this. But the domination of the Liberal Democratic Party, which is their right wing party in Japanese politics, has been extraordinary.

• 4:21Rory Stewart?

  Um, I think it's called, I'm gonna get the date wrong, something called like the nineteen fifty two system, but essentially.

• 4:26Alastair Campbell?

  Nineteen fifty, well, I think nineteen fifty five was their first win. And of course, Abe's grandfather on his mother's side, he was, he was a prime minister, he came from a very, very, very. Political party. Actually Rory, I've got a little, as you know, I like to catch you out on your knowledge because you do have a lot of knowledge, but I'll give you a million pounds, which I don't have to give, that's how confident I am.

• 4:46Rory Stewart?

  Maybe don't say that.

• 4:47Alastair Campbell?

  I'll give you a billion pounds if you could tell me what medical connection I have with Shinzo Abe.

• 4:53Rory Stewart?

  Um, you both, God, this is a chance for a million pounds. Is this the thing that Shinzo Abe claimed to resign for in his first term?

• 5:07Alastair Campbell?

  You have five seconds.

• 5:08Rory Stewart?

  He left, you're worried you're going to lose your million pounds. You're really worried I'm going to win a million pounds.

• 5:14Alastair Campbell?

  One, it was ulcerative colitis.

• 5:16Rory Stewart?

  I was going to win a million pounds.

• 5:18Alastair Campbell?

  You were so close, you were so close. No, he had, he had.

• 5:22Rory Stewart?

  Goodness that you got in so quickly. That's what I'm saying. He resigned for ulcerative colitis. I said that was the reason he was stepping down after only a year in office. I could have been, I, do you know, if I'd won that, I would not have been in this airport hotel. In the future, I would have been travelling luxury. And I know you always pay your debts, otherwise the real Rory would have been pretty cross with you if you hadn't delivered.

• 5:44Alastair Campbell?

  He would have been very cross, he would have been very cross. But he, no, he had ulcerative colitis, which I had for a long period of time, and we were on the same medication, Aceacol. And I had a kind of miraculous recovery because my doctor told me, you're going to have to live with this for the rest of your life. And eventually it risks becoming Crohn's disease, which is quite a depressing thought. And then, so I had to go for these annual checkups and then one year it just went. And something similar happened to Abe. He actually stepped down and then the colitis cleared up and that's when he then went back in. It did come back with him, I think. I don't know why I'm telling my medical history in a story about Apollonius's assassination.

• 6:18Rory Stewart?

  And we'll get, we'll get off your near miss there, back on to Nobusuke Kishi. So it's very, it's difficult to analyse somebody else's politics. And I'm sure I'm getting something wrong because one looks at another country, but it does seem with Shinzo Abe, something very old fashioned about it. His father was the foreign minister and he was his father's aide. His grandfather, as you pointed out, Nobusuke Kishi, was the prime minister. Nobusuke Kishi's brother was also the prime minister.

• 6:50Alastair Campbell?

  And Abe had also been the cabinet secretary, which is reckoned to be like deputy prime minister. I mean, they're they're very, they're quite tight.

• 6:57Rory Stewart?

  And then if we reach back, so Nobusuke Kishi, I think the other thing to say is that he was a serious war criminal. Nobusuke Kishi, his grandfather, was the Japanese economic administrator of Manchuria in China in the lead up to the Second World War. And he ran an economic policy where he brought in Japanese industrial companies to drive up economic productivity and essentially ran slave labour camps. They had to replace tens of thousands of Chinese workers a year who simply died through starvation and overwork. And Nobusuke Kishi partied in Shanghai with prostitutes and big drinking, very, very brilliant man. He passed out top from Tokyo University, came from the samurai family that got into

• 7:42Rory Stewart?

  sake brewing. So it's it's a reminder with, as I suppose is true with German politics in the immediate post-war period, how much of this still looms over Japanese politics?

• 7:53Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I tell you something which I think could be part of the fallout of Abe's assassination because one of Abe's big things was trying to change the constitution, very resonant of the German debate, so that Japan could be a much more active military power. He wanted, he was constantly trying to increase defence spending and being and being blocked. But actually, in part of the sort of, you know, because it's been, you can imagine the coverage in Japan has been utterly enormous. And they had, they had the elections he was campaigning in, they did much better than was expected and they attribute that to his death. And likewise now, the debate about defence spending and the military posture, particularly vis a vis China and also that, you know, I think they're a little bit worried sometimes about their relations with India as well.

• 8:38Alastair Campbell?

  So whether that actually will have a more lasting impact, I think, I think is is an interesting question.

• 8:44Rory Stewart?

  And he of course created this thing called the Quad, which is, in that case, was was Australia, US, India, Japan, to try to see what they could do to answer. So I think that's, yeah, and I think it could be really, really interesting. Tell us, tell us Sri Lanka a little bit, because I haven't been following Sri Lanka. I know much less about it than you do.

• 9:02Alastair Campbell?

  There's a question for Mangas. I live in Sri Lanka. I was at the protest. At the weekend, is there any country that's been through similar corruption, financial crisis, foreign currency run, debt default and come through on the other side? There was then somebody called Hippogriff, who said, who recommended Indonesia as a possible answer to that question. But it's a good question, isn't it? I mean, this is a, this is a crisis which is going to have really, really longstanding consequences. That I know is the statement to the obvious, but even thinking about how they get from where they are now, the president has vanished, they think he may be on a naval vessel somewhere.

• 9:44Alastair Campbell?

  And his, and it was hard not to laugh at those pictures of all the protesters diving into his swimming pool.

• 9:49Rory Stewart?

  I believe he's just resigned. I believe he's now formally.

• 9:51Alastair Campbell?

  Well, they've announced he's resigning.

• 9:52Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 9:53Alastair Campbell?

  Whether he has or not, I mean, I think there's so little trust now that people don't believe it. And it was the speaker, unless something's happened overnight, it was the speaker of the parliament who announced that he was resigning because the speaker is the one who is third in line. So if the president and the prime minister both go, then it's the speaker who's lined up. And is this something you would want to, you would want to take on?

• 10:15Rory Stewart?

  The, I mean, Sri Lanka is a really interesting country because in some ways it was a source of huge optimism, you know, obviously horrifying civil war, and then a moment of real economic recovery, but, but has been very unlucky in some ways. I mean, hit horribly by the tsunami. Had this very bizarre experiment that we talked about, I think on the show, where they decided to go full organic farming. And there was a moment where the president was absolutely heralded by bits of the environmental movement around the world for being.

• 10:50Alastair Campbell?

  He banned fertiliser, didn't he?

• 10:52Rory Stewart?

  That's it. Well, because unfortunately, to create the amount of manure that would have been required to fertilise the fields would have required seven times the number of cows that are actually in Sri Lanka. I mean, that type of real, sort of, he was going for a very old fashioned type of organic farming. Obviously, it's just not as intensive. You just can't grow as much food.

• 11:09Alastair Campbell?

  There's another lesson in here for the Tory leadership contenders because President Rajapaksa, one of the other things that is now being put into the, the scales of judgment against him. Were massive tax cuts in twenty nineteen.

• 11:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 11:26Alastair Campbell?

  Which cost them one point four billion.

• 11:28Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:29Alastair Campbell?

  Um, and are now seen as one of the reasons why the economy went foot.

• 11:33Rory Stewart?

  Well, I mean, boy, here's an example of radical politics. I mean, so big bet on organic farming. I may be being a bit unfair to say they couldn't produce food with those methods, but they certainly needed a long, much longer transition to do it safely. And those radical tax cuts, and I think a real warning to politicians who think that being bold and radical is necessarily the way to go. Now, here we are, David Pearson, what is the strangest experience you've had at a political event or meeting? I was coordinating Xi Jinping and David Cameron's twenty fifteen visit to a national football museum in Manchester. Just out of view of these VIPs, one member of the British security staff tried to gently move the Chinese counterpart to one side. The Chinese security official reacted by wrestling his British counterpart to the ground. The two men in suits continued fighting, were finally dragged out of the room by their team.

• 12:18Rory Stewart?

  So this is kind of amazing. So the British security guy goes up to the Chinese bodyguard, Chinese bodyguard, at which point does some amazing martial arts move. While Xi Jinping and David Cameron are walking around the National Football Museum. God, what's your strangest experience at a football event, a political event or meeting?

• 12:32Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, God, hundreds of them. The one that popped into my mind when you were telling that story was, I remember

• 12:40Alastair Campbell?

  on a trip once with Trevor, who was Margaret Thatcher's special branch guy. And we were with lots of the Americans and it was a presidential thing. And the American security service were going on about it, can't understand how you guys managed, you know, just a handful of you guys looking, you know, we've got five hundred guys out here. And we've got, you know, we've got, we've got a thousand on standby and the security is so intense, nobody would ever dare get near Reagan at the time. And I remember Trevor just, just sitting there, sitting back and he just said, oh, well, we've never lost one.

• 13:16Alastair Campbell?

  That was a nice way of putting the American Secret Service in their place. Listen, I want to read out my question of the week.

• 13:21Rory Stewart?

  John, question.

• 13:22Alastair Campbell?

  It takes us, we did a lot yesterday on the Tory leadership election, but the question of the week is from Andy Soares. Is there even one Tory leadership candidate who isn't an arsehole, wasn't a Johnson apologist, has some sense of what the economy actually needs, and doesn't have stupid ideas about the ECHR hunting or the metric system?

• 13:41Rory Stewart?

  Good question, Rory. Let me turn that around to you. What's your answer?

• 13:46Alastair Campbell?

  I think they're all, I said yesterday, I think Sunak at least is trying to have a, from a different perspective to mine, but at least have a sort of serious debate about the economy. I do think the rest of them are just away with the fairies. They're just making promises they can't keep. And by the way, Sunak's doing that as well. And all the populist culture war stuff.

• 14:03Rory Stewart?

  At this famous nightmare at Buxton where I lost my wedding ring, I asked, there were 950 people, I think, in the audience in the opera house. And I did one of our NAF straw polls we keep doing at Live Affairs, and asked them who they'd vote for. And it was very, very interesting. I would say well over half of them stuck their hands up for Tom Tugendhat, about 15% I'd say for Rishi Sunak, and then almost nobody for almost all the other candidates. Now, that may be that a literary festival in Buxton tends to attract a slightly more centrist, lefty audience. But it was, it was an interesting thing.

• 14:43Alastair Campbell?

  Presumably with Sunak as well, there's a lot of, he's got name recognition in a way that some of the others haven't. Similar question, I was saying to you yesterday, Rory, I think this leadership contest is going to anger so many people. Somebody with the wonderful name Two Stone of Cellulite, we are now enthralled to 120,000 aging Tory farts whose brain functions have been rotted by the right wing press. How on earth do we resist all this? I think we should take a break on that one.

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• 17:18Rory Stewart?

  Here's one from Devon Airey, and it's an odd one to ask you. It's a sign of the direction the podcast may be going. My partner and I are huge fans for the podcast and got married last week. What advice would you give for a happy marriage?

• 17:34Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, my God. I would say, don't listen to the rest is politics on your honeymoon. I think that would be a very odd thing to do.

• 17:42Rory Stewart?

  I think that's an important one. And that's important.

• 17:44Alastair Campbell?

  I think, I say, here's the advice, Rory.

• 17:45Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 17:46Alastair Campbell?

  And it's very difficult to follow.

• 17:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 17:48Alastair Campbell?

  But I think they should try to disagree agreeably.

• 17:51Rory Stewart?

  That's good. That's good. That's good. I think that is.

• 17:54Alastair Campbell?

  I think the other important thing I'd say is that.

• 17:56Rory Stewart?

  Do you argue much actually at home? Is Fiona the sort of exception to the rule? Are you, are you not very argumentative at home?

• 18:03Alastair Campbell?

  No, we argue. We, Fiona is, Fiona is a great arguer and, and she's very, very, she can be calm. She's incredibly kind.

• 18:14Alastair Campbell?

  But she, yeah, she, she, she will always, always, always hold her own. No, we have, we've had some fierce arguments, fierce. And of course, the worst thing, I think this comes through in my diaries. The worst periods of my life in, working in, in number 10 were when I wasn't enjoying work and we weren't getting on at home because of something related to work, the Iraq war being the, being, being, being the worst of all. But no, we have some pretty good arguments.

• 18:40Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Okay. Excellent.

• 18:42Alastair Campbell?

  You didn't give, what about your advice? Don't lose your wedding ring.

• 18:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a really important bit of advice. I, I, you know, I think, I'm not sure. I mean, I think that'll have to wait for our next podcast called Rory and Alistair's Life Advice on a Happy Marriage.

• 18:56Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, there's, there's one here as well. This, this extent to which everywhere we go at the moment, we're bumping into people literally who are listening to this podcast. One we hear from Kamlesh Bhava. Wanted to apologise because one of my three-year-old twins got in your way as you were trying to get through the barrier at King's Cross Tube yesterday and then went on to say, do we need to stop constantly passing the baton to new Tory ministers without public involvement? We've covered that one.

• 19:23Rory Stewart?

  So was it me with a poor three-year-old that I ran over my wheelie bag trying to get to Heathrow at King's Cross? Or was it you at King's Cross?

• 19:30Alastair Campbell?

  No, this was when I was coming back from Newcastle after the rugby league. Here's a good one for you Rory, here's your throwing difficult ones at me. Robert Slinger, Rory, how on earth did you fall for David Cameron's big society? It was a hollow slogan. It was all about getting the voluntary sector to step in for 40% local authority cuts.

• 19:47Rory Stewart?

  Okay, let's do that one. So that's a proper serious one and it's a bit more political than happy marriage. The answer is that it wasn't about just a cover-up for the cuts. It was something that he sincerely wanted to do before the financial crisis. And actually, one of the ways in which the whole thing was destroyed, though, is that, of course, it was implemented at the same time as austerity. So that very, very quickly, people said this whole thing is just a way of trying to push responsibility on to the voluntary sector to deal with the cuts. But what I think it had much more going for it, I think it had a really important message, which is that local people, I felt this again and again in Cumbria, I felt it when we were doing, building social housing, we did

• 20:30Rory Stewart?

  community-led social housing, we did community broadband projects, we did community renewable energy projects. And the point is that there are many areas of life where local communities know more, can do more, care more than distant officials. And we had some amazing successes of tapping the genius of communities because they were able to build far more low-income housing than the government would have been able to do in a way that was much more acceptable to communities with nice designs, in the right places, and tied in to getting the renewable energy going, getting the broadband in, saving local pubs. So I'm a real big society, unapologetic big society fan.

• 21:11Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, Robert, we'll look forward to you sending in your views in response. David Benton, you were both kicked out of your parties inappropriately. What conditions could you see that would make you rejoin?

• 21:24Rory Stewart?

  Okay, well, I'll come to rejoining to you in a second, but I think the inappropriate kicking out is important because I think British politics got away with not having a proportional representation system because these parties were broad coalitions. They were tolerant of many, many different voices in them and they they worked like that. And I think the risk of throwing out people because they don't agree, in the case of Alastair, it was absolutely about about Brexit, in my case, basically also about Brexit, but also because he was trying to get rid of the centre left of the Conservative Party is a very bad thing. And it's one of the reasons I think we need to change our electoral system. If these parties are not prepared to include differences of opinion, not prepared to be broad coalitions, things go wrong. Come back to it, though, what would make you rejoin the Labour Party?

• 22:10Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I emotionally, I don't feel I left really. I wasn't happy during the Corbyn period, that's true, but I do think I do see with Keir Starmer, I can see a sense of direction and I can see a sense of purpose at the moment. I still think there's an awful lot they need to do better. I think I've quite enjoyed the freedom of people knowing that I'm still Labour, but I don't feel maybe as bound as I would have done. I know you think I'm not critical enough, but I actually probably am more critical than I've ever been, and I think that comes partly from freedom. So I don't know, really, and Fiona is the same. Fiona, she actually left the Labour Party before I was kicked out, and that was over the antisemitism stuff. And she says she's that sense of freedom doesn't mean you don't stop.

• 22:54Alastair Campbell?

  I desperately want Labour to win the next election, desperate, and I will, you know, I will help them, but I joining the party, I'm not sure. And I, one of the, one of the other questions we got, by the way, was whether doing this podcast, whether, here we are, James Marshall, what have you learnt from each other? Has your politics changed since the podcast? I think I've definitely become, in talking to you every week, I've definitely become more persuaded of the, we talked about this on the on the main podcast this week, that Johnson has been a symptom as well as a cause of the broken politics, and it's the politics that has to be fixed.

• 23:34Rory Stewart?

  Okay, well, I think we're coming to the end, but one final, final question.

• 23:38Alastair Campbell?

  Just a minute, would you rejoin, would you rejoin the Tory party?

• 23:41Rory Stewart?

  Yes, with the right leader, if I thought the party was actually becoming what I'm desperate for, a Liberal Unionist party, a party of the centre-right, more of a teal-type party, I would definitely rejoin.

• 23:53Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that takes me to the question from Rootless Cosmopolitan, is the Conservative Party now so far to the right that the return of the death penalty is inevitable one day?

• 24:00Rory Stewart?

  I pray not, but, but you are right that some of the dynamics that's emerging, some of the flattering, the harder ride of the party, some of the populism does, does worry me a bit. Let me just maybe finish, I, I thought quite an interesting question, which may be a good one to finish on, which is about the police. Adam, as a serving police officer myself, I'd like to know what you think of the appointment of Mark Rowley as Met Commissioner, how Alistair's government got on with John Stevens and how Rory would have approached him, any, any reflections on how you got on with the John Stevens Metropolitan Police?

• 24:32Alastair Campbell?

  I think our relations with the police were reasonably good most of the time.

• 24:37Alastair Campbell?

  It's interesting talking to the police, when I was, I don't know if I told you this, when I was doing this TV programme, Make Me Prime Minister, we were filming down not far from Johnson's constituency, actually, and we're in this park and two police vans arrived and a load of dogs got out and the police, and I thought that was quite interesting. So, and then there were two, there was a policeman, police, police officer, man and woman, they came, jumped out the vans and the dogs were just kind of running around. So I went over to talk to them, we had a chat and it turned out, so they work for the, for the dog, the police dog section, and this is where they took them for a walk twice a day. And of course, you don't think about that, they've got 250 dogs, they have to take them for walks. So they're out walking the dogs and so they were out, the dogs were walking around for

• 25:22Alastair Campbell?

  about, I don't know, half an hour or so. So we ended up having quite a long chat and it was really, really interesting. I mean, I, I feel very sorry for the police at the moment and, and I felt a lot sorry after this. The woman was telling me that it is a very rare week where she does not get spat at. It is very rare, and of course now what's happening, they're getting abused in public, friends of the people who are abusing them are filming it, they're trying to provoke them and so forth. And I do think that the extent to which, you know, the government, I think, is both in relation to the health service workers and teachers and police officers, these constant attacks on public servants. And I think this whole sort of race to the

• 26:04Alastair Campbell?

  bottom and, you know, we're going to pay for all my unfunded tax and spending promises by getting rid of 20% of the civil service. They mean 20% of public service.

• 26:13Rory Stewart?

  So just to maybe finish on the John Stevens, I'm a huge admirer of John Stevens. He was a really, I like him very much. I think he was an extraordinary police officer. He was somebody who led from the front, who was right there with the guys at three in the morning. He's actually written a very good book, which we will put on the podcast if people are interested in reading about policing. Maybe a bit old fashioned from the point of view of some people, but I thought was a really positive force in the Metropolitan Police. And I think we do need a bit of that again. I think there has been a bit of a loss of confidence. I think Crested Dick was a highly intelligent, I think, dedicated public servant, but a lot of things went wrong over the last few years.

• 26:55Alastair Campbell?

  I still think, by the way, even though, listen, lots of things went really wrong, badly wrong. But I still, I do think that the, you know, both Priti Patel as Home Secretary, successive mayors found the police quite an easy political target. And I think that's making police very, very difficult. And one of the saddest things, this police officer said to me, she said, I don't know a police officer at the moment who would recommend to their kids that they go into the police.

• 27:23Rory Stewart?

  So sad. And you hear it, but you, I'd say the same about politics, the same about foreign office, same about teaching. It's very, very sad across the board. I think there's a lot of improvements that can come with the police. I think it's an amazing potential organisation, but I'm hopeful the new Met Commissioner is going to be able to get it back to the basics and restore some of that confidence. Thank you all. I think we all now have to run for our various aeroplanes from our airport hotels.

• 27:46Alastair Campbell?

  And then plant some trees.

• 27:48Rory Stewart?

  And then go and plant some trees. Thank you all again for listening from me, Rory Stewart and.

• 27:53Alastair Campbell?

  Me, Alastair Campbell. And keep looking for Rory's ring. We have to find the Rory's ring. And I'll just go and cuddle my bike. Bye bye.

• 28:01Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

• 28:07Speaker 03

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 28:11Speaker 04

  On October 2nd.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 28:17Speaker 04

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

• 28:24Speaker 05

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

• 28:28Speaker 04

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 28:32Speaker 05

  I'm not the first then.

• 28:33Speaker 04

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 28:38Speaker 10

  Espolone Tequila. Balanced, delicious. 100% agave, 0% ego. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth. For a real margarita, ride the rooster.

• 28:48Speaker 09

  Espolone Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Campagna America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.