Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 287. Trump’s VP, Labour vs. China, and the King’s Speech About this episode How has a man who once called Trump ‘America’s Hilter’ now become his running mate? What does a Labour government mean for UK-China relations? Will China define how Gaza will be governed in the future?
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Transcript 9,943 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 Alastair Campbell? And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.
0:19 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.
0:42 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?
0:49 Rory Stewart? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/restorspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restorspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
1:06 Speaker 02 This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents. But choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dyes.
1:41 Alastair Campbell? Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.
1:43 Rory Stewart? And with me, Rory Stewart.
1:45 Alastair Campbell? And Rory, we were going to kick off with the UK ahead of the King's Speech, but I think we should start with the United States, come back to the King's Speech and this very interesting European political community event that Keir Starmer will be chairing later in the week. And also, we both want to look at China. But let's just start with the United States. We now have the former President Trump with a bandage on his ear. We have the convention opening. In Milwaukee, we have J D Vance named as his runny mate, a man who once called Trump America's Hitler and who just referred to his politics as cultural heroin. And who I see all over social media this morning, a recent speech he made
2:25 Alastair Campbell? saying that we once thought that Iran and Pakistan might be the first Islamist power with a nuclear weapon. But now that Labour in power, it's actually the United Kingdom. Where I'd like to start, Roy, is actually just underlining that the fundamentals of who and what Trump is and represents have not changed by the fact that he was suddenly tried to kill him.
2:44 Rory Stewart? That's right, that's right. Well, so just the background on this. So this is the beginning of the big convention for the Republicans. And the timing for Trump is extraordinary. It's a very, very good week for Donald Trump and his candidacy.
2:58 Alastair Campbell? Yep.
2:59 Rory Stewart? He survived the assassination, came out of it looking with that extraordinary photograph of him looking defiant and unbowed. He wasn't badly injured. He's come into the convention. And at the moment at which the conventions announced, the case that was held against him for illegally taking classified documents out of the White House has been dropped by the judge, astonishing everybody. I mean, this was just announced on Monday, so.
3:25 Alastair Campbell? A judge that he appointed.
3:26 Rory Stewart? Judge that he appointed, but it was the case where people thought there was the highest chance of having him prosecuted on criminal grounds. And she's just thrown the whole thing out, claiming that the special counsel appointed was illegally appointed, overturning thirty years or more of legal precedent. So he's been cleared of this big case, or the case has been taken off his shoulders, be appealed. He's come onto the convention floor. And if you watch what's going on at that convention, you have never seen the Republican Party so unified or so energized. And it's an extraordinary first day. And in some ways, it calls into question a lot of what we believe about Donald Trump. He's playing it very, very differently at the moment.
4:05 Rory Stewart? So, you know, everybody will hopefully be listening to the incredibly good reporting from Anthony Scaramucci and Cathy Kay on the rest of his politics in the US. But one of the points that Mooch often makes is to say that traditionally, Trump loves to take. The limelight, doesn't want any competition, doesn't want to share a stage with anyone and would only want a well-known billionaire on his ticket. What's actually happened now is a very different Trump. He basically sat there beaming and listening to people through the whole day of the convention. And the day of the convention is going right into the democratic heartland. Almost everybody speaking was African-American. And it then finished with the head of the Teamsters Union and then a man from California with a Sikh prayer.
4:47 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
4:47 Rory Stewart? You have never seen such extraordinary kind of unity. And into into this picture comes the appointment of J D Vance, which is also unusual because he's thirty nine years old. We'll get into him a little bit, but is a real sign that Trump is setting up the next generation of MAGA leadership. Over to you.
5:03 Alastair Campbell? There's a German word, inszenierung, which mean it sort of means stage. It's not, it's not staging. It's a combination of staging and stage management. It's how you exploit situations. And what I think has been interesting is, you know, we talked on the other day in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt about how that amazing picture of Trump on the ground, you can see his face through the legs of the Secret Service people trying to protect him. You can sort of still see the mind whirring. And I think that's the moment where there's an instinct telling him this is a massive opportunity. And he gets up, he does the fight, fight, fight thing, which has now become a kind of battle cry. That's what they were saying at the, at the convention.
5:44 Alastair Campbell? They were pumping their fist, fight, fight, fight. And you say that he, he tends to avoid others getting the limelight. But in a way, what he was doing by handing the limelight to others was actually in the knowledge that they were all going to be talking about him. And they were all going to be talking about how he's a martyr. He's sacrificed his own blood for us. He's taken a bullet for us. So it plays into that. And then at the same time, giving this sense of being a figure of, of unity, which is the last thing Donald Trump has ever been, and frankly, I think ever will be. And of course, because the Democrats are basically being pretty decent about it, they're all coming out and saying violence has no place, political violence has no place, uh, get well Donald and all this sort of stuff. But they know deep.
6:30 Alastair Campbell? That were the boot on the other foot, this would not be happening. In fact, I was coincidentally, I was on CNN the other day, Rory, and we're on the Christian Allen Paws programme and I was on with David Frum, who was, worked for George Bush as his speechwriter and a very, very clever guy. And he now writes a lot for The Atlantic and, you know, amid this, so this is like within, you know, before we've even had a few days to pass, he has written this extraordinary piece and actually we've asked him on to the podcast and we're going to be talking to him in the next few weeks. I'll just read you the first couple of paragraphs, I think it's instructive and interesting. "When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump's sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that
7:13 Alastair Campbell? Paul Pelosi had brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure. After authorities apprehended a right wing extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat to rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted, lock her up. Trump laughed and replied, lock them all up." Fascism, says Frum, feasts on violence. "In the years since his own supporters attacked the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election, many of them threatening harm to Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence, Trump has championed the invaders would be kidnappers and would be murderers as martyrs and hostages. He's vowed to pardon them if returned to office. His own staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem in television.
7:56 Alastair Campbell? Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well." And it goes on in that vein, it's a really, really powerful piece of writing.
8:05 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
8:05 Alastair Campbell? You know, I think it's so easy to get caught up in this, is this sort of, you know, well, he's going to be changed, he'll be, he'll come back a different man, everybody does when they survive a brush with death.
8:15 Rory Stewart? I don't think he's changed in that sense, I just think he's very, very able politically. And I think the brutal truth is that he's on a roll. The Democrats are in real trouble. This is now his election to lose. So you're absolutely right, it's awful. Trump is an awful man. He is small minded, nasty unpleasant. I mean, his reaction to the assault on places his husband was unbelievably unpleasant. But that's the problem of running as Liberal Democrats against a proto fascist.
8:42 Alastair Campbell? I mean, we have to stand up for values that he completely rejects and undermines all the time.
8:47 Rory Stewart? The problem, though, is that Biden has never looked weaker. And they need to get rid of him very, very quickly. There's very little time left now. And the Republican Party has never been so unified. I mean, that was an extraordinary convention. Everybody falling in behind and a coalition that he's now forming around him that would have been almost unimaginable eight years ago.
9:09 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, so the Democrats are pumping out stuff that J D Vance has said about Trump, but it'll just be sort of brushed off. Oh, well, you know, he's he's kind of seen the light.
9:19 Rory Stewart? So just a little bit on J D Vance and love to get your thoughts on him. So I first came across him, I guess, in 2016. When people reached out to me saying he was the future of American conservatism. So he had, he was then in his early 30s. He grew up in pretty extreme poverty. He wrote this book, Hillbilly Elegy.
9:40 Alastair Campbell? Hillbilly Elegy, yeah.
9:41 Rory Stewart? Which is also quite a good Netflix film. I mean, it's it's pretty remarkable. This was a big New York Times bestseller. If you go on Amazon, it's got like 97,000 reviews. It was a New York Times bestseller for almost two years.
9:54 Alastair Campbell? Well, it's going to sell a hell of a lot more now.
9:56 Rory Stewart? Yep, very unusual to have a vice presidential candidate with his own documentary, basically on Netflix. So sort of Angela Rayner style backgrounds and like Angela, very much that dissonance between the childhood that he grew up in with a mother as a heroin addict and living in poverty to now being this big governor. He left high school, joined the Marines, served in Iraq in a public affairs role, came back, went to Ohio State University, but then got into Yale Law School. He's married to Usha, who is a woman, I suppose her parents come initially from the Indian subcontinent. And she clerked. For Brett Kavanaugh, who is the man that Trump put very controversially onto the Supreme
10:38 Rory Stewart? Court, they then worked, moved to California where he worked for Peter Thiel, the controversial major capitalist, and he then decided after the success of his book to run to be the senator in Ohio. And he was nowhere really in that race, despite the bestselling book. He was somebody who was best known to liberal intellectuals who saw him as a man who was good at explaining the Trump base, until Thiel convinced Trump to get behind him. And when Trump endorsed him, he romped home to victory. And all these attacks the Democrats are now launching, they launched in Ohio, too. They spent a lot of money reminding people in Ohio that he had attacked Trump, but it didn't work then, and I don't think it's likely to work now.
11:20 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. I think the position that he holds that may work is he's very, very, very profoundly anti-abortion. And once we get back to more normal post-assassination attempt debate, I think the abortion issue really was beginning to hurt Trump. And so that may be something that plays to Vance's disadvantage. It's also interesting, one of the few things that Donald Trump and I have in common, Rory, is that we both dislike facial hair. And yet, we just don't believe in the beard philosophy.
11:49 Rory Stewart? Where has Trump said this? Is he on the record of his opposition?
11:53 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, he's definitely, he's not a fan of beards. I remember what's suggesting to Frank Dobson that he should shave his beard off. You tell him to shave my beard off, you can fuck off. So I guess he's allowed one of his kids to grow a beard, and now we've got J.D. Vance.
12:09 Rory Stewart? Is that why Jeremy Corbyn won't come on our show at the moment?
12:11 Alastair Campbell? Listen, I had a very nice meeting with Jeremy Corbyn the other day. We're making progress, Rory, we're making progress. We opened a mental health residential unit together. I find this whole thing really, really worrying. You're right about the Biden situation being grim. And the thing is that what's happened here, there's been very little in the last few years really to shift the dial. People like you and I, we thought that Trump losing and then provoking that riot on January the 6th, we thought that would be the end of it. We were wrong about that.
12:43 Rory Stewart? And not just us, most of the Republicans, many of them, most of the Republican congressmen and senators who refused to vote for his impeachment, were saying privately at the time, we don't need to do it. He's yesterday's news. Let's not demean ourselves by impeaching him. Yeah.
12:56 Alastair Campbell? And as you say, now he's got complete control. Of the Republican Party, he's got greater control of some of these judges that he's now looking to in this changed mood that he's trying to create to get rid of other cases as well. So there's been no kind of really change moment in the whole thing. We thought maybe the him being convicted would be a change moment. It turned out not to be. This assassination attempt has become, particularly in light of Joe Biden's debate performance. And interestingly, in David Frum's piece, he makes the point that there was something he found profoundly unsettling about the fact that Joe Biden felt he had to do the debate with Trump because Trump is actually against American institutions. He's an extremist,
13:38 Alastair Campbell? not somebody in the mainstream. Joe Biden took that decision because he felt he had to, and it was a disaster. We've now had another game change moment. And it seems to me the only similar moment that can move the dial in a different direction now is, I'm afraid, for Joe Biden to step down and for the Democrats to find the candidate or the pair of candidates, the running ticket, that can beat what we now know to be the Trump Vance combination. That shouldn't be impossible, but they seem to find it impossible. And let's be honest, the Republicans are going to come through this week higher in the polls. It shouldn't affect the fundamentals, but it will. They'll come out higher in the polls. You'll have an amazing display of unity. Trump will try to project himself as a more unifying figure. Vance will become a really interesting character, not very
14:21 Alastair Campbell? well known to most Americans overnight. His book will become a bestseller again. And meanwhile, the Democrats are completely on the back foot.
14:28 Rory Stewart? Yeah, let's just sit for a second before we move back to the Democrats, just a little bit more on JD Vance. So 2016, as I say, he was seen as a conservative intellectual. And as you can imagine, those are pretty few and far between. So everybody gets very excited whenever you find a conservative intellectual. So
14:43 Alastair Campbell? Such as yourself, Rory.
14:45 Rory Stewart? That's right, exactly. And people said, you know, you've really got to meet him, Rory, because he's very interested in Scots Irish heritage and American history and got a sort of more traditional vision of conservatism. And he is an interesting figure. I mean, if you go back to the 2016 article, which people talk about where he says that, you know, Trump's views range between the immoral and the absurd, you know, he's quoting Walt Whitman, but His argument essentially is that Trump is responding to people who are alienated by stagnant wages, just the sense that the American economy is not delivering for the kind of working class, by the Iraq war, by the fact that free trade has taken everybody's jobs, by the opioid crisis, by unemployment and by immigration.
15:30 Rory Stewart? And that's his his kind of vision of this whole thing. And I suppose, let me just throw this one back to you. There's there's an interesting question here. So he's speaking for what he calls hillbillies. It's kind of what Ridley called kind of rednecks, people in the whole Appalachian spine of America, right the way from Kentucky up to Ohio. He's speaking for people who often are struggling to graduate from high school, certainly are not not getting to university, who are below the poverty line, who've been affected horribly by the opioid crisis, who live in these Rust Belt towns or these rural areas. But it's an interesting base because I would guess that's only, I don't know, 10, 15% of the American electorate, and I don't know how much they vote.
16:13 Rory Stewart? So in fact, Trump's coalition has to be much broader than that. He can't win on the basis of those people. He's got to get a more ethnic diverse vote. He's got to get suburban votes. He's got to get quite successful conservative Republicans. What's what's your sense on on how important that kind of group is? Because I guess in Britain, the equivalent would be people in the North East who attempted to vote for Boris after Brexit or something. Over to you.
16:36 Alastair Campbell? I don't know the American electorate as well as I do the the British, but there is without doubt part of the reason for picking him is although he became very wealthy through all this sort of venture capitalism stuff. And by the way, the Peter Thiel connection, I think, becomes an opportunity for the Democrats and it will go through that sort of that sort of big tech route to try to kind of undermine him. You you couldn't call your own memoir hillbilly elegy unless you had a genuine place that you were coming from. If you were kind of middle class politician, if you were Nigel Farage, who would share his politics, you couldn't talk about being a hillbilly unless you were. So he's he's definitely got that kind of that sort of root in. And and of course, one of the things that the Trumps of this world have done.
17:19 Alastair Campbell? Very, very well, and Vance is good at this as well, is to essentially be the elite, but sort of pretend to be speaking up for for the people.
17:28 Rory Stewart? Can I just interrupt on a second? Because I think I think Trump is different, isn't he? I mean, he came from a very, very wealthy background. But I guess JD Vance is probably more like some of the Labour front bench, somebody who came from extreme poverty, but then got to an Ivy League school, or in the case of the Labour front bench, got to Oxford and is now in a much more comfortable position.
17:46 Alastair Campbell? The thing about the Labour front bench, as Lisa and Andy said, when she was being, when they were being vetted for their outside financial interests, they were surprised how few they all had. I think that the difference here is that they've come from that poor background and gone way out to the right. And in Vance's case, you know, since he was presenting himself, he was a never Trumper. He defined himself as a never Trumper. He was close to Mitt Romney. And then, as you said earlier, once Trump got behind him and he worked out that Trump was the future of the Republican Party, whether they liked him or not, he got close to the family. And look, I was talking to this American guy the other day who said, he'd listened to our podcast when we're talking about Trump the other day.
18:29 Alastair Campbell? And he was saying, you've got to stop thinking of these people as normal politicians. You've got to think of them more as a kind of organised crime syndicate. These people don't care about anybody other than themselves. And that goes for Trump, that goes for his family, and that goes for a lot of their supporters. But where the political support comes from is from, quotes, ordinary working people who have decided that he is on their side. And I know there'll be a lot of people who'll find that offensive, but I think I think it is, I think it is a different way of thinking. And if you, that's why he is attracted to people like Putin. That's why he is attracted to these strong man leaders. And on Putin, Rory, this guy JD Vance, his views on Ukraine, he actually did an interview not long ago with Steve Bannon, where he said, I couldn't care less about Ukraine one way or the other.
19:14 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. Now, that's his basic take. He thinks America is wasting billions.
19:19 Rory Stewart? Exactly. So he's Vance is brutal on cutting support from Ukraine, doesn't want any support going to Ukraine from the US. He's also, I mean, just to state the blinding obvious, but this is really important to understand for all of these Republicans. He, of course, believes that the election was stolen by Biden and he supported what happened on January the 6th. And every single senior member of the Republican Party has been forced now to buy into Trump's big lie.
19:48 Rory Stewart? And so the whole thing is toxically anti-democratic at its very, very core. And you've got to ask yourself about J D Vance, what's going on here? I mean, you know, here's this guy that was the darling of the New York Times for a bit, quotes Walt Whitman, goes to Yale Law School and is now out there saying that Biden stole the election, trying to undermine American democracy, getting behind this man, who, as you pointed out, he referred to as America's Hitler. I mean, this is a form of kind of political opportunism and cynicism, which is kind of beyond, I mean, I'm struggling even with my slightly shambolic former party to think of anybody in mainstream elected British politics who's prepared to go that far.
20:31 Alastair Campbell? No, no.
20:31 Rory Stewart? I mean, even Liz Truss wasn't prepared to say that Trump won the election and that Biden stole it. I mean, this is really crazy stuff and yet J D Vance just represents so many of them.
20:42 Alastair Campbell? I also wonder whether, because if you remember, Trump had this sort of beauty parade of these possible running mate picks when he got them all down to Mar-a-Lago and he sort of made them parade in front of him and like a kind of reality TV show. And reading the American media, apparently Vance sort of made it through a final shortlist of three and he didn't know that it was going to be him until a few minutes before it was announced on Trump's social media. And I wonder whether the clincher was the fact that after the guy shot at Trump, Vance was one of the first people out publicly to say this. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.
21:26 Alastair Campbell? This rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination. No factual evidence, nothing to back it up. It's a straightforward kind of, well, it's a lie. The idea that Joe Biden sort of tried to get Trump killed is ridiculous, but that is the message that is now doing the rounds at the convention.
21:44 Rory Stewart? One more thing that's maybe not been reported enough in the UK media. As part of this convention, the Republican manifesto is announced and this is a pretty radical manifesto. So we can begin to see some of the policy ingredients of what's going on. And behind a new Trump presidency. And probably the most dramatic news on it is on free trade. So the Republicans basically completely given up. They don't talk about free trade at all. Instead, they're talking about 60% tariffs on almost all goods from China. And we'll get to that in a bit. But, you know, we're already in a situation of over 100% tariffs on Chinese vehicles. 10% tariffs on basically all goods from elsewhere in the world. And this is not only going to be very damaging for the global economy if Trump comes in.
22:25 Rory Stewart? So we really need to think about what that means to move away from free trade protections. But also will drive up prices for ordinary Americans, for a lot of Trump voters, almost certainly. So there's a big economic story that needs to be unpicked. And I don't know whether, well, maybe that's a question for you. Is that too complicated an economic story? Can the Democrats find a way of explaining to people that if Trump carries through on his manifesto and puts these huge trade barriers out? I mean, China's exporting has a trade surplus of $30 billion a month to the US. If you put up tariffs on almost all Chinese goods to 60% and all international goods to 10%, prices are going to skyrocket for ordinary Americans.
23:04 Alastair Campbell? Rory, one of the reasons why the Democrats are in a mess is because they haven't been able to tell properly the positive story about the positive state of the US economy under Biden. So if they can't tell a factual picture effectively and convincingly, a lot harder to kind of give them a sort of Project Fear type operation based upon what Trump's saying.
23:28 Rory Stewart? And remind us of your trio. You have a trio, don't you? You talk about what you've done, what you're going to. What's the three things you think you've got to do in an election again?
23:34 Alastair Campbell? What you've done.
23:35 Rory Stewart? Yep.
23:36 Alastair Campbell? What are you going to do and the risk of your opponents?
23:38 Rory Stewart? Okay, so in this case, you're saying the Democrats really got to find a way of explaining what they've achieved in the economy.
23:44 Alastair Campbell? Because it's positive and people are better off and the economy is strong. You've then got to have a plan for the future.
23:49 Rory Stewart? Second term, yeah.
23:50 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, which again, I think Biden, you know, needs to sharpen up on that. And then you've got to talk about the risk of your opponents. But the problem with Trump is he's the, where do you take the language? When you're talking about him being, you know, a threat to democracy, authoritarian, et cetera. Maybe they do need to bring it down to an economic place that says, have you actually thought through the consequences of what he's proposing? But I think with Trump now, his supporters just don't care. The only thing I'd say is that David Axelrod, Obama's strategist, he always has this wonderful line, conventional wisdom in American politics is always wrong. Now, it's not necessarily true, but maybe there is a conventional wisdom growing here
24:32 Alastair Campbell? that this single event is going to make the election virtually unlosable for Trump. That's the conventional wisdom at the moment. It might be wrong. It might be wrong. It may be that the sort of people Trump needs to win over are not going to come over whatever. But the problem is that Biden has lost people in some of those swing states and it's he who has to get them back.
24:53 Rory Stewart? We're, I suppose, almost at the break, but at some point, we need to do a proper deep dive into the alternative Democratic candidates. So there are these very strong governors, Gretchen Whitmer from Michigan, Governor Pritzker from Illinois, Gavin Newsom. I was actually very struck by Josh Shapiro. So he just gave a speech, he's the governor of Pennsylvania, and he's a Democrat governor of Pennsylvania, just gave a speech after the shooting, paying tribute to the firefighter who had lost his life protecting his children. And I was really impressed. He really knows how to communicate and he's so worth watching Josh Shapiro. What he did, and maybe that's a clue for one way of taking on Trump, he was absolutely straight and respectful about the assassination attempt on former President Trump.
25:38 Rory Stewart? He acknowledged that the man who died was a big Trump supporter. He called the person who died, he said, I talked to his family and they said I could mention that I spoke to them and his wife asked me to say that her husband was a hero who died protecting us. But he was just human, he was emotional, he was clear, and there was so much more energy. It made Biden's speech seem very sort of won and kind of stiff by comparison. So anyway, we should, we should get into them. And of course, Kamala Harris too.
26:06 Alastair Campbell? I thought it was odd, or maybe odd, maybe not odd, maybe in keeping, but if Trump really was the sort of political genius that people like to think he is, I think he might have visited the family of the person who was killed instead of going to play golf.
26:21 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
26:22 Alastair Campbell? But there were Rory, before we take the break, because we're going to come back and talk about Kier Starmer. What do you think about the fact that Kier Starmer arranged a phone call with Donald Trump?
26:29 Rory Stewart? Oh, gosh, I didn't, I hadn't realised that. That's very interesting and I think probably the right thing to do, right?
26:35 Alastair Campbell? Do you?
26:36 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
26:36 Alastair Campbell? As I understand it, there were, most of his team were saying, look, the world and his wife will be sending messages. Shouldn't you just maybe drop him a line? But it ended up having a, having a phone call.
26:45 Rory Stewart? Oh, no, I think it's, I think it's important. I think it's important because it shows that Kier Starmer is being generous in the aftermath of the assassination. I think it's also very important because Trump is now likely to be the president of the United States and he's an extremely nasty vindictive man and it makes sense for the British prime minister to have a relationship with him.
27:04 Alastair Campbell? Okay, Rory Stewart praises Kier Starmer. Take a break.
27:11 Speaker 02 This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents, but choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dyes.
27:45 Rory Stewart? Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.
27:49 Alastair Campbell? And me Alastair Campbell.
27:50 Rory Stewart? So we've been talking about Trump's momentum and now we're going to move on to talk about Kier Starmer. So very interesting time. He's just come into office with this incredible record number of seats and he is about to introduce the King's Speech, which for listeners is the moment where the government sets out its, its programme, its legislative programme going forward. It's the big reveal of the first priorities of the new government. And I guess many, many things to get into, again, the details of what they might be doing, but it's also, we can connect it back to Trump because the question is, is Kier Starmer going to be able to demonstrate the kind of changes, improvements in Britain?
28:32 Rory Stewart? Which will mean that in five years' time, we're not going to find ourselves falling back, like so many other countries, into this kind of populist, Trumpist world of angry people feeling the government isn't delivering for them. Anyway, over to you.
28:43 Alastair Campbell? The king's speech, it is remarkable how many people still think that the monarch writes these speeches. And in fact, in the book I've done for primary schools, I've explained what the role of the king is, because it is an important role in our constitution. The prime minister is the king's prime minister, the ministers are the king's ministers. He, as you explained in our interview with Lisa Nandi, he has to agree to the appointments. Now, I can't remember the last time that a king or monarch disagreed to one of the appointments, but that is the formal position. And so you get all this extraordinary kind of pomp and ceremony, and he sits there and he will read out the list of bills.
29:22 Rory Stewart? Yeah, just quickly for listeners, this is the moment that you will have seen where you have all, it's the big sort of state opening of parliament, you have all these carriages running down the Mall, you have the king in his full gowns and crown, he reads it from the House of Lords, and people like me who are in the House of Commons, we all walk down the corridor, I think there's a black rug comes and bangs on our door, we all walk down together, talking to other people, and then we stand at the back of the House of Lords, looking at the king, reading the speech. You talked about the importance of this. I just was thinking about this. So he's the head of state, and Keir Starmer's the head of government. And of course, Keir Starmer has 99% of the power in the country. But I wonder whether one of the reasons why in America, they're finding
30:05 Rory Stewart? it very difficult to move President Biden, is that countries like the US and France, which have these sort of presidents who are heads of state and the most powerful people in the country, they take on some of the kind of aura of a kind of mini-king. Whereas in Britain, one of the reasons we were able to get rid of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss very, very quickly, I think, is that we have a more pragmatic relationship to our prime minister. And I think the presence of the king maybe sort of psychologically helps that a bit.
30:35 Alastair Campbell? Well, certainly, if you look at the French situation at the moment, one of the criticisms leveled at Macron that has led to his sort of pretty stunning levels of unpopularity, is the fact that, in a sense, he proclaimed himself as this sort of Jupiterian figure, king-like. Now, I don't think he does conduct himself like that, but that, I'm afraid, is the image and it's stuck. Whereas in a sense, we do have a king and had for several decades a queen, who that was their role. And I was always conscious of this. Whenever I saw the queen with the prime ministers, be that the prime minister of the day, or I remember the the time when she was with all her living former prime ministers and Tony Blair at one of the jubilees. You were always conscious of the fact that the prime minister routinely described as
31:18 Alastair Campbell? the most powerful person in the country, sort of felt very second fiddle, you know, that she was the most important person in the room.
31:28 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
31:28 Alastair Campbell? And I think you're right. I think that does mean that there's a there's a clear separation between executive power.
31:34 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
31:35 Alastair Campbell? And formal constitutional leadership power, which is what the king has.
31:38 Rory Stewart? Yeah. And I think it's it can be quite healthy. I mean, it's it's I mean, I know we often disagree about this, but I do think when you see France and America getting very obsessed with their presidents and almost turning them into these semi sort of, you know, regal figures, I sometimes think it's it's quite useful that some of the symbolic weight is lifted off the prime minister's shoulders and it makes them kind of get on with it in a more pragmatic way. Anyway, back to you, King's Speech, sorry.
32:01 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, so this this one, they're talking about, you know, over thirty bills. So this is where the bills get put forward and these are the the things that the government wants to turn into law in the next session of parliament. And what you tend to see for an opposition taking over, you have all the priorities that were set out during the campaign, and then they have to be turned into where legislation is required, turned into into legislation. So for example, there will, you know, they talked a lot about the need for more financial stability, greater powers, greater control for the Office of Budget Responsibility. Where you're making institutional change like that, there is likely to have to be legislation. So a bill is brought forward, goes through the parliamentary process, and then eventually becomes becomes an act. There's some doubt as to how far
32:46 Alastair Campbell? they're going to go on House of Lords reform. But if they do, let's say they say we're gonna, you know, kick all the eighty year olds out. Well, they're all gonna be sitting there sort of grumbling and groaning as that gets announced. I know we have different views about this, Rory, but I find the whole spectacle ludicrous.
33:03 Alastair Campbell? Women in their tiaras and I mean, you know, all feels a bit ridiculous, but that's our system. But I think the big stuff that we can look to see is economic growth being the mission. What are the bills that they're going to bring forward to make that a reality? How big will the focus be on planning reform, on house building and some of the changes that have to be made for that? This National Wealth Fund, what sort of approach on the legislative front does that require? Artificial intelligence, there's talk about an artificial intelligence bill. What will that look like? Is that, is it about the opportunities or is it about the threats? So I think this is where you get the manifesto turning into a government programme. And then what happens is the King does his bit, goes off, and then you have a debate in the House of Commons where Keir Starmer will set out the kind
33:48 Alastair Campbell? of political shape of it. And then poor old Rishi Sunak has to, has to stand there and deliver the response for the opposition.
33:54 Rory Stewart? To come back to this question of what it would need to really make Labour go into the next election strong, if you're thinking five years forward, to stop a kind of Farage-Trump populist response, I guess there are two things, aren't there? Firstly, they have to demonstrate in this speech and then very quickly going forward that they're going to make stuff better, the economy better, public services better, our democracy feel like it's working. And secondly, they've got to, along with all the practical stuff, they've got to work out where they are on these culture wars. Because as you pointed out, Biden has delivered economically for the American people, but it hasn't really helped him because Trump is still winning the culture war narrative. But, you know, in, in Britain, I really think,
34:36 Rory Stewart? and this is where I'm looking at this a bit nervously, because I think this is the real moment to be very, very bold. Keir Starmer's got an enormous majority. I'd love to see this as the moment at which really radical reform for the NHS is announced. That this is, Ken Clark always said this, that you've got to do the really unpopular, unpleasant things in the first two years, and then you see the benefit of them as you come into the election in five years' time. So I'd like to see really radical, potentially unpopular reforms to the NHS now with the hope that in five years' time it's better. Really committing to sorting out transport, railways, really think-
35:13 Rory Stewart? Thinking about democracy, I'd love to see, you know, this is the chance to bring in the citizens assemblies. Maybe it's the third chamber of parliament. I mean, the really big stuff that might mean that you you can deal with what still feels to me like a kind of crisis in our democracy, because this is still a party that only got just over a third of the vote.
35:29 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I think you're going to be disappointed on some of those, Rory. I think there will be a transport bill and I think the rail will be at the heart of that. I I share your disappointment at the lack of focus that there was during the campaign on the health of our democracy. I think in other places there will be bold. I mean, and on health, by the way, I don't know how they're going to handle this. It's very interesting to me that your hero or one of your two political heroes, David Gork being the other one, your your Labour political hero, Alan Milburn.
35:56 Rory Stewart? Yes.
35:57 Alastair Campbell? He's kind of advising on the health reform. So is Paul Corrigan and Paul Corrigan's a very interesting guy. He was part of our health advisory team and really does have this very, very strong view that if you just focus on money, you are not going to change things in the way they need to be changed. And he's a big, big reformer. But whether that will come in an early bill, because I, as it happens, I was in hospital yesterday and talking to lots of doctors. And I think there's a huge relief that the Tories have gone, real expectations about Labour. But the last thing they want is some kind of big legislative Lansley type reforms that come along and throw the whole thing up again. So I think what Paul Corrigan and Alan Milburn and people like that will be doing
36:39 Alastair Campbell? will actually be sort of starting to frame it maybe as a kind of second year type thing. But we'll see, we'll see.
36:45 Rory Stewart? Your your health's okay, right? You just told us he went to hospital.
36:48 Alastair Campbell? My health's fine, Rory. Don't worry about me. I if I'm a bit dopey, I did. It did require a general aesthetic.
36:54 Rory Stewart? Oh, my Lord.
36:55 Alastair Campbell? So it's a great slide, a lovely sleep, but it was all fine. They were very, very good. Yeah, don't worry. I'm fine.
37:00 Rory Stewart? Goodness. Okay. Well, we're thinking of you. Um, let's.
37:04 Alastair Campbell? Are you thought some prayers with me, Rory? I'm honestly fine. I'm absolutely fine.
37:07 Rory Stewart? Good. Okay, right. You're fine.
37:08 Alastair Campbell? Actually quite enjoyed having a day to do very, very, very, very little and just have lots of people come in and say how pleased they were to be looking after me.
37:15 Rory Stewart? You deserve that. Um, can I just push once more? Did you, when you were in office, buy into this Ken Clark idea that you do the Called unpleasant unpopular things in the first two years. Take a popularity hit and then hope that your reforms play through so that by year four, five, when you go into the next election, you've got something to show for it.
37:33 Alastair Campbell? Yes, I do. But at the same time, I think what a King's Speech does, and this is what I think you'll see in the in the narrative that the ministers come out with, is that you're trying to shape a narrative for the for the term, but also for the home of Parliament. And when you were talking about how do Labour get into a position where they might win again with the sort of numbers they've just just won with?
37:52 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
37:53 Alastair Campbell? I I think that if you go back to all the polling that we looked at through the campaign, they'd be wise not to move that far away from cost of living, people feeling better off, the country feeling like it works again, that public services work. And above all, I think the big, big, big thing they're going to get judged on is NHS waiting lists. They have got to come down big time, and that is about reform. So I I I agree with you that. And the problem with it with a King's Speech is there'll be all sorts of things in there. This is where things like the King's foreign travel gets announced and certain bills that have to be done. You know, my my government will bring forward a finance bill. They probably have to address some of the overhang issues
38:34 Alastair Campbell? such as the infected blood scandal and all sorts of a post office possibly. So there's all sorts of things that. And it's how you try and turn it with a theme. And I think the theme will be, we've been elected with a mandate to make real change. And here's where we want to see the big change. And I think that is going to be related to this mission of growth. How do we get the economy going again?
38:52 Rory Stewart? Very good. Okay.
38:53 Alastair Campbell? Now, you want to talk about China?
38:54 Rory Stewart? We haven't talked about China much recently, and we have to keep talking about China. I mean, China obviously is second largest economy in dollar terms in the world, almost the largest economy in the world. If you look at purchasing power parity.
39:05 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I think it is the largest.
39:07 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and it's it's totally off the scale on so many things, you know, world's largest exporter, world's largest manufacturer. It's naval construction capacity, apparently 200 times that of the United States. Controls 85 to 90% of the key bits of the green energy sector from batteries through to the cobalt, the lithium, increasingly dominating electric vehicles. On the one hand, on the other hand, facing real economic headwinds because of the collapse of the property market, which made up twenty, twenty five percent of their economy, lots of people are really struggling because many ordinary Chinese put seventy, eighty percent of their savings into apartments that are now worth a fraction of what they
39:48 Rory Stewart? were when they bought them. Very little demand, people aren't spending in China, so China's raked up its exports and its its trade balance is now in a very odd situation. So it's running a trade surplus of nearly a hundred billion dollars a month, of which about thirty billion's going to the US, twenty billion to Europe. And it's just been challenged by NATO in the Washington meeting, which has accused China of supplying machine parts which are very useful for Russia in its fight against Ukraine, and has also criticised it for cyber espionage and disinformation. So, yeah, I think worth raising China. And I think the question of how Labour deals with China, how Britain deals with China is going to be important, because broadly speaking, you've got bipartisan agreement in the US to be
40:32 Rory Stewart? very aggressive on China. So we talked about tariffs of over a hundred percent on electric vehicles from China, sixty percent tariffs threatened by Trump on all Chinese exports to the US. Europe, on the other hand, has to be very cautious because fifty percent of the profits of the European automobile and luxury goods industry is made in China, so they can't afford a trade war. And so many of the component parts of German cars come in and out of China.
40:57 Alastair Campbell? When I was in Germany for the Euros, and especially in Stuttgart, which is the home of Mercedes Benz, there was a lot of angst and grief that the VIPs were all being driven around in BYD cars because Chinese cars were one of the sponsors.
41:11 Rory Stewart? Right.
41:12 Alastair Campbell? Your point about how the British government deals them is very, very interesting, because on the one hand, I think there probably is a feeling that David Cameron got too close, and then the Johnson sort of was a bit all over the place, and then Liz Truss was much more in the kind of American Republican place. And then Sunak, I wasn't quite sure of Sunak's position on China.
41:32 Rory Stewart? He sounded softer than Liz Truss, didn't he? I mean, Liz Truss was very much like, this is a Cold War with China. And I think Sunak was more trying To look at, well, he was trying to get growth off the ground, wasn't he?
41:43 Alastair Campbell? But if you, if you think about the, the competing interests there will be, so Rachel Reeves as the Chancellor will be wanting to focus on the economy. David Lammy as Foreign Secretary will wanting to be focusing on diplomacy. And yet I read earlier today of George Robertson, who was Defence Secretary and then NATO's Secretary General.
42:01 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
42:01 Alastair Campbell? During the New Labour years, he's part of this strategic defence review. And one of the first things he's talked about is this deadly quartet. He used this phrase, the deadly quartet, which was perilously close to George Bush's axis of evil.
42:14 Rory Stewart? Right.
42:15 Alastair Campbell? And this is China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
42:18 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
42:19 Alastair Campbell? As a military threat.
42:20 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
42:21 Alastair Campbell? So managing those sort of different competing pressures within that relationship is going to be a very, very tricky balancing act.
42:27 Rory Stewart? And one quick obvious example is that China can now produce reliable electric vehicles for a few thousand dollars. I mean, their most low budget ones, about eight thousand dollars. They're certainly producing for about half the cost of Europe. So if Labour is going to achieve its energy transition and get people into electric vehicles by 2030, and it wants to do so in a way that doesn't put huge burdens on the poorest households, it would have to bring in these cheap Chinese vehicles because they're about half the cost. If on the other hand, they decide that for national security reasons and protecting British car industry, they want to put up the tariffs high in the way the US did, then that transition is going to be much, much more expensive. And it gets even more complicated.
43:09 Rory Stewart? You talked about that Mercedes conversation, but the German car industry is conflicted because on the one hand, the import of Chinese vehicles might mean that people are buying less European vehicles. But on the other hand, the biggest market for Mercedes is in China.
43:22 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
43:22 Rory Stewart? So they can't afford to have a, well, certainly the biggest market in terms of profit margin is in China. So they can't afford a trade war. One other thing, just before we move to the end, China also again trying to flex its diplomatic muscle. It's hosting yet again a meeting of Hamas and Fatah. So these are the two big Palestinian factions for peace talks in Beijing, including the Chinese Foreign Minister. And this is an attempt to try to define how Gaza could be governed in the future. Would Hamas step back? Would they disarm their armed groups? What role would Fatah play in the government of Gaza? So here's China really inserting itself into something very, very central. Any thoughts on that?
44:04 Alastair Campbell? The first thought I had was that given that the leader of Hamas, Ismail Hanaoui, I presume is right up there on the target list of the Israelis as they go about their business of eliminating Hamas. I mean, that is quite a tricky logistical operation to get him to Beijing. Or would they actually, for something like that, because the Chinese are involved, would they think, you know, give him a free pass? I don't know. But look, it isn't, you're right that normally when we've had really big foreign policy crises in the past, the Chinese approach has tended to be to kind of sit them out. But this, as you say, is very much them putting themselves right at the centre of something and playing a role that you might have expected the Americans to play in a previous incarnation.
44:47 Rory Stewart? Well, Alastair, thank you. We've covered a lot of ground. And before we pat ourselves on the back too much for attacking China for its supply of machinery to Russia and the Russia-Ukraine war, we shouldn't forget that Europe is still buying Russian gas, particularly liquefied natural gas, LNG, as the pipelines have gone down, and still sending billions of euros into Russia through buying that gas. And that's largely because Hungary, Austria, Slovakia is still very dependent on that gas. So, and the Ukraine frontline is in a tricky situation. It looks like Russia just retook another settlement in the last couple of days. So, yeah, watch the space on Ukraine. We need to get into Ukraine again.
45:27 Alastair Campbell? You mentioned Orban there. Final point for me, he turned up at both the football games I went to, even though in one of them Hungary wasn't playing, and he was also at the final.
45:37 Rory Stewart? Oh, goodness.
45:37 Alastair Campbell? England against Spain.
45:38 Rory Stewart? Will you tell us a little, and can you give us a little bit of your sense of that game? What is the Alastair view on that game?
45:44 Alastair Campbell? Spain won 2-1. My view of that game is that the best team.
45:48 Rory Stewart? I did actually watch it. I did.
45:49 Alastair Campbell? Oh, did you? Well, what did you think?
45:51 Rory Stewart? Well, I, knowing absolutely nothing about it, it did seem as though Spain had the ball much more than England and were passing it much better.
45:58 Alastair Campbell? That's what we call greater possession. Yeah. No, I think Spain were the best team in the tournament. I think England did very, very well to get to the final. England didn't really play to the best of their capacity, I don't think, through the tournament. So I think that although England fans will be very, very disappointed, I think you'd be hard pressed to say that the better team did not win.
46:17 Rory Stewart? And are we supposed to be cheerful because we've got a young team that could do well under our new manager and that we...
46:22 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, you definitely got some very, very good... I thought Maynu might have been the young player of the tournament, but and the other, the Spanish youngster might have won the overall player of the tournament. No, I think, listen, England can be very, very hopeful about the future, but it does seem remarkable. I can remember watching England winning the World Cup in 1966 as a nine-year-old, 58 years ago, in a police station in Longtown.
46:45 Rory Stewart? Yes, I know. Longtown was my constituency.
46:48 Alastair Campbell? My dad was dropping us off to be picked up by other relatives. Politics and football, Rory. There was a very interesting... So if you imagine being the British ambassador to Germany, who's had to be part of this thing through the whole time, at the final, she had to look after Prince William, Prince George, Keir Starmer, Lisa Nandi. And I don't know if you saw, there was quite a lot of bilateral stuff going on. There was a very funny picture of, they all begin with S. Starmer, Schultz and Sanchez and Steinmeier, the German president in the background as well. So I think quite a lot of diplomacy got done there.
47:22 Rory Stewart? Very good.
47:23 Alastair Campbell? Final point, Rory. The German ambassador to the UK, Michael Berger, he posted a tweet at the end of the tournament, picture of all Scotland fans enjoying themselves in Munich, I think it was, being led down the street by bagpipes, and then a picture of this vast square, I think in Berlin, full of England fans.
47:43 Rory Stewart? And 70,000 of them or something. I mean, incredible number.
47:46 Alastair Campbell? Well, tens of thousands of both were there. And he pointed out that, you know, there'd been next to no trouble, next to no violence. So when you think about historically what the reputation of England fans in particular is, and actually, back in the day, when I was growing up, Scotland fans weren't the best in the world, like they are now. But actually, I think that was a very, very interesting thing, that the violence that was expected wasn't there. So that's something positive we can all take.
48:10 Rory Stewart? Thank you, Alistair. Just to finish with a thank you and a bit of a plug, we won't be doing a Question Time episode this week. But if people were interested, they can listen to my new BBC series on ignorance. I've made a six-part series on the idea of ignorance and how ignorance, of course, very, very controversial when we think about Donald Trump and politics, but also how ignorance can be very powerful and creative in art, in love and relationships, in religion. So six-part series, it'll be on BBC 9.30 in the morning, Radio 4 on Thursdays, but also available now on BBC Sounds. Love to hear what you think, my programme on ignorance. Thank you, Alistair. Have a great break. Bye-bye.
48:56 Speaker 03 Here we are getting a statement from Number 10 on that flight with 350 passengers on board.
49:05 Speaker 04 The great game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.
49:12 Speaker 05 We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.
49:19 Speaker 06 Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.
49:21 Speaker 07 They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.
49:24 Speaker 04 Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!
49:37 Speaker 08 We would need to understand the policy context.
49:39 Speaker 04 All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.
49:48 Speaker 06 A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?
49:53 Speaker 04 Yes.
49:55 Speaker 06 New from Goalhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?
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