294. Labour’s defining moment and the next Tory leader

Is Labour planning austerity 2.0? Who is in the running to be the next Conservative leader? Should politics play a role at the Olympics? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all this and more on today's episode of The Rest Is Politics. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP UK TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Assistant Producer: India Dunkley Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producer: Fiona Douglas Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + 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/risterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:06Speaker 02

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• 1:41Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. So we're recording this Monday afternoon. We've just had what may turn out to be one of the defining moments of this parliament because essentially, we are now into the battle of the narratives. After Rachel Reeves has made all sorts of accusations against the Tories' management of public finances and all sorts of counter accusations. Have come back. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about the Tory leadership contest. I think we're up to six contenders, not including Suella Braverman. We both want to talk about what's going on in Bangladesh. We like to talk on this podcast about important things happening in the world, which most of the media seem not to bother with. And we're also going to talk, how could we not talk this week about the Olympic Games in the context of politics too.

• 2:28Alastair Campbell?

  So Rory, let's start with Rachel Reeves in the House of Commons earlier today.

• 2:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So really topical, and as you say, this is the big question. So the election was fought around growth and the economy. And as everybody pointed out during the election, neither the Labour nor the Conservative parties, nor in fact, pretty much anyone else, was remotely honest about the economic problems the country faced. And both the major parties were completely tying themselves in knots, promising that they weren't going to raise any taxes. And leaving us with this big problem, which is that the public sector is creaking, NHS in trouble, schools in trouble, infrastructure in trouble, not much government revenue coming in, huge amount of debt. And all these parties saying they're not going to raise any taxes. So where are they going to get the money from?

• 3:15Rory Stewart?

  And Paul Johnson of the IFS, who we often talk about on this show, said, I bet what's going to happen is Labour are going to come in and say, oh, they looked at the books and it turned out to be worse than they thought. So I'm saying, this is Paul Johnson, sort of six, seven weeks ago before the election, saying, can I just say before they say that, that that is not fair and that the OBR publishes a lot of the details? And they should have a pretty good idea now that the country's bust. And going in and saying the country's bust isn't going to, isn't going to wash. But sure enough, that is what Rachel Reeves has done. And the first warning shot of this was a very remarkable, I just want to touch on this for a moment because it's something I'd love to know from you. The Sunday Times article by, I think Caroline Wheeler, Harry York and a guy called Nicholas Hessen possibly,

• 4:00Rory Stewart?

  ran on Sunday with essentially the entire Rachel Reeves narrative. She's found this massive black hole in the finances. This is what she said to her civil servants. This is the internal conversations in Labour. This is how it's going to sort it out. These are the things that she's going to cut. And it was the only newspaper that had it. The Observer didn't have it, you know, Sun Express didn't have it. This was the Sunday Times and the narrative they were running was absolutely Rachel Reeves narrative. It wasn't the Paul Johnson or Tory narrative. It wasn't she says, he says, it was very much. She's come in, she's found this black hole and she's going to sort it out. Tell me a bit about this. Does this feel to you like? An exclusive? What does this mean when people read the newspaper and they see a story like that?

• 4:44Rory Stewart?

  What do you think might have happened behind the scenes?

• 4:46Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'm a little bit blind on this because I'm in France and I spent the entire day watching the Olympics. And so I didn't, I didn't read the Sunday newspapers yesterday as closely as you have. If what you were saying is right, then that does sound to me like the Sunday Times has been very, very closely briefed. And, you know, sometimes you will get more favorable. Interpretation of the briefing. If you are being told that this is not going anywhere else.

• 5:12Rory Stewart?

  So in effect, what the Sunday Times got to do was break the story in advance. Of a lot of what was going to be in this big Monday announcement that's just happened. And in exchange, they provide a pretty favorable view of what's about to happen. That's part of the deal, I guess.

• 5:25Alastair Campbell?

  If that is what happened, then the other thing that it does. Is it means that you get the first shot at framing the narrative. And as I said in the introduction, this it seems to me is going to be the defining battle of the narratives. Now, if you go back to when you first became an MP in 2010 and David Cameron became Prime Minister, this is what we talked to Nick Clegg about on leading for. The last two episodes, the narrative was defined very successfully by the Conservatives as. We inherited a mess. Liam Byrne left us this note saying there's no money left, which we are going to. Willfully misinterpret for the rest of his life. And that is why we're going to have to make big spending cuts. And if you're going to blame us, don't blame us, blame them.

• 6:09Alastair Campbell?

  And I always felt if you read my diaries, volume, whatever it is, five. I was relentlessly rowing with Ed Miliband, saying he did not fight back hard enough against that narrative. Okay, what seems to me to be happening now is that. The Labour Party, I suspect Rachel Reeves said in the statement that some of these budgets that are overspent were not, that the OBR were not aware, that we'll have to look into the detail of that, I don't know, but they basically come in and said, there are things that were spent here, which we were not told were being spent, which were not budgeted for, and we have concluded there is this overspend of 20 billion plus. As a result of that, we are having to make some very difficult decisions. And then they're making

• 6:53Alastair Campbell?

  these difficult decisions. You know, some of the, I know Boris Johnson's 40 new hospitals thing was always a scam, but there were, there are elements of hospital building programmes which are now going to be cut.

• 7:04Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, it was a scam in the sense that he claimed that he'd done 40 new hospitals, when in fact he'd launched a programme for some new hospitals, but a lot of refurbishing hospitals.

• 7:14Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, repairs here and there.

• 7:15Rory Stewart?

  But, but, but the fact is, it was a budget for fixing up hospitals that is now being cut.

• 7:19Alastair Campbell?

  Which is now being cut, yeah, exactly. And then the other thing, so we talked last week briefly on the podcast about how if Ed Cooper had gone in and said, ah, we thought it was 350 million on Rwanda, in fact, it was 700. So there's 200 million gone. What Jeremy Hunt seems to be doing as the Shadow Chancellor is coming back and saying, you knew everything about the finances, this is a complete political game, because what you tried to do is presage very difficult decisions and pin the blame on us.

• 7:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, you've talked about battle of narratives and Ed Miliband. So we'll need to talk about this bit as we get into the Tory leadership contenders, but I guess it would be smart for all the Tory leadership contenders, from their point of view, to very strongly try to fight back against the narrative that the Tories bust the country. Otherwise, they're going to face for the next 10, 15 years, every time they go into an election, the narrative they bust the country, just as I guess Labour felt right the way through to 2024, that they were fighting elections where the Tories were able to keep that narrative going from 2010.

• 8:18Alastair Campbell?

  That's a really interesting question, because of course, if you read what Kemi Badenoch has been saying. She seems to me to be wanting to, she wants to challenge the narrative of the past. She wants to be challenging the decisions that were taken by the last government. The piece that she wrote in The Times, yet another one who was given very favourable coverage, I suspect Mr Gove may have oiled a bit of the plumbing in there to help her in there. So she's gone in there and she seems to me she wants to challenge the narrative. And likewise, don't forget the other thing that Labour will want to keep at front of public mind is Liz Truss. Now, I don't know the extent to which that figured in today, but at some point during the leadership election, they presumably have to be confronted

• 9:01Alastair Campbell?

  with what they thought of the various political and economic decisions made by predecessors. I mean, I always find with your old party, Rory, although I see David Gork has rejoined it, we should talk about that. But what I always find is that your debates, it seemed to me, do get defined very much by the leaders and the budgets of the past. So Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson still figure hugely in debates about the future of the Tory party. Now, is it not time that somebody came along and said, you know what, we've just got to accept it, we balls things up big style and here's a change conservatism that I'm going to bring forward. So I don't know whether they want to get too hooked on this. Let's Sunak and Hunt do it.

• 9:42Rory Stewart?

  Let's have another look at what we're getting out of Rachel Reeves. So she has inherited a position in which growth has been endemic, inflation has come down. So there's a big debate about, you know, is the economy in bad position or not. So if you're the Conservatives, you're going to say the UK economy is actually in a good shape. Unemployment is now at 4.4%, which is half of what it was in 2010. Inflation is at 2%, down from 11%. Real incomes are beginning to rise and living standards are beginning to rise. Actually, just as a footnote on that, one of the things you might say to the Conservatives if they said that before

• 10:24Rory Stewart?

  you get into what the problems with that are, is why on earth did Rishi Sunak trigger the election for June, given that those things were happening? Because actually, there's a serious possibility that he could have gone into an election in November where the unemployment figures, the inflation figures and the real incomes were in an even better situation. They're in June. Now, the response from Labour is, yeah, but we have very low growth and productivity. Debt interest is very high. So, you know, when Cameron took over in 2010, it was about interest rates very low, kind of zero point five percent. It's now five point one percent. More and more of the government money is going on, on paying the debt. The pandemic and of course, these big structural problems of an aging population, which means that

• 11:09Rory Stewart?

  Rachel Reeves went into this election effectively having to sign up to billions of pounds of Tory spending cuts. And in the statement she made today, she said she's going to do another three percent of spending cuts against departments, going after what she calls back offices. And then I guess the next question is, if you're going to make savings, where are you going to save and where are you going to spend the money? Where are the priorities? She's decided that she has to accept the recommendations, the public sector pay review body, which is putting up salaries for basic NHS workers and for teachers. So millions of people, over a million people, by I think five point five percent.

• 11:49Rory Stewart?

  And junior doctors up, I think by more than twenty percent pay rise in order to try to stop the junior doctor strike. So she's accepting salary rises, but she's cutting down on infrastructure investments. So money not going into doing up hospitals, as we described, money not going into roads, the Stonehenge bypass, money not going into railways, money not going into a three hundred million pound investment fund that Jeremy Hunt had. And that's, I guess, is, is going to be one of the big questions. Because it's not true that she had to accept those public sector pay review bodies recommendations, a strong pressure to. But when I was in the Ministry of Justice, public sector pay review body came back, said they wanted to increase prison office salaries by a certain amount. I thought, well, we're going to have to do this. And David Gork, my boss, said, no, actually, we're not going to do this.

• 12:34Rory Stewart?

  I think we need more money to invest in the prison estate. I'm not going to put the salaries up.

• 12:39Alastair Campbell?

  I wondered when I saw this, I can't remember which newspaper it was, but I saw recently there was a big thing briefed out about there are costs to not resolving this pay dispute with the doctors. And that said to me that they were looking towards doing this. And there's something in that, by the way, one of the reasons why the waiting lists have gone up is because the there have been all these strikes. So that is going to cost more now to bring those waiting lists down, which is one of their big promises. So I think this is something they they've decided to put the investment into getting that sorted. But what you was what you were talking about is a parliament now where unless and until the economy does start to grow, Rachel Reeves is giving an awful lot of power to the Office

• 13:22Alastair Campbell?

  of Budget Responsibility. She's also, as I understand it, setting up this new body, Office of Value for Money. She confirmed to Parliament today, this Covid Corruption Commissioner, which will be going after money. There'll be a lot of public support for that. But whether, you know, once you get into the legal technicalities of big government contracts of procurement and some of the fast stuff that was done during the Covid crisis, we'll see where that ends. And of course, as part of this battle, the narrative, given Rachel Reeves has given so much power to the Office of Budget Responsibility, it's interesting that shortly after she spoke, up popped a letter from Richard Hughes, the Chair of the Office of Budget Responsibility, to the Treasury Select Committee, indicating that

• 14:05Alastair Campbell?

  he has found that there were things that he wished he could have been assessed. The last time they were looking at the previous government's spending plans, and that some of them, they were only aware of at a meeting this week. Interestingly, you mentioned Paul Johnson there. He has pointed out that the £20 billion gap is almost, quotes, exactly the cost of the national insurance cuts that Jeremy Hunt introduced this year. So again, we're talking about choices all the time. We're talking about governments making choices. I guess the other thing Rachel Reeves is trying to do is what Jeremy Hunt is trying to say is that this today is all about trying to prepare the ground. They're going to raise taxes in the autumn. That's what his big line was, which of course would go against the no tax rises on income, if assuming that is where they they go.

• 14:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, the promises they made in the election where they where they very much said.

• 14:51Alastair Campbell?

  No income tax, no VAT. And what was the other one?

• 14:54Rory Stewart?

  No national insurance.

• 14:55Alastair Campbell?

  So that's how they're going to do it. And Hunter's got a problem with that, although he's going to be gone by November. And the budget's been announced for late October. So that's just before we get the new Tory leader, I think. So this battle is going to go right up to the budget as to whether the Tories have decided the line is they're going to put taxes up. They're going to get a lot of fox's shot if she doesn't.

• 15:16Rory Stewart?

  Yes. But on the other hand, if she doesn't, where's she going to get the money from? So the the assumption is that given she can't put up the taxes, or assuming she doesn't put up the taxes, she's promised not to put up during the election. The assumption is it would have to come from capital gains tax and inheritance tax. And this is particularly, you know, are you going to go after changing the rules? And this is also where the Tories are also going to have to make an argument that might be pretty difficult to make. So the argument the Tories would have to make, which I have some sympathy for, but I don't know how you make it, is that it's true that there are massive discrepancies of income and wealth. But it's also true that much of the revenue of the government comes from

• 16:00Rory Stewart?

  the very wealthy. So the top 1% pay 28% of the income tax. So 85 billion pounds a year comes from just the top 1%, which is three times the amount paid by the bottom half of the workforce. And the 37,000 non-doms are bringing in about 6.5 billion a year. And of course, what people are on the sort of Tory free market side are worried about is that if Labour decides to start doing things that hit non-doms more than they're already hitting them, and goes after their inheritance tax on all their assets and investment, most of these people on the Sunday Times richness will just leave the country because they may be prepared to pay more income tax. And this is about. What they do with money they earn outside the United Kingdom. If they have to pay inheritance

• 16:45Rory Stewart?

  tax on all the money they've accumulated outside the United Kingdom, they'll probably leave. And you can already see people moving to Milan, people moving to Portugal. So I think that it's this goose and golden egg problem.

• 16:56Alastair Campbell?

  Before we go into Tories, Rory, you triggered me there because you just mentioned Milan and Portugal, which are in the European Union. The other point about the wretched state of our public finances is the impact that Brexit has had upon them. And that, it seems to me, was not figuring in either side of the debate. But there we are.

• 17:15Rory Stewart?

  I also think there's a strong possibility she may try to borrow more. That's probably the most, if you're not going to put up taxes and you need revenue, borrowing more money. And what do you think, just sort of, sorry, I'm unfair because I keep asking you for gut instinct views. But in terms of the promises and the tone of that election, do you think you could get away with the public with borrowing a bit more money more easily than putting up taxes?

• 17:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, definitely. But I said earlier, she has given an awful lot of authority to the Office of Budget Responsibility, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But I think we're in exactly the same place that we were, is that ultimately, the economy is going to have to grow. And what you saw in the King's Speech was them sort of setting out some of the first steps on that, particularly in relation to planning and housing and building. And then we're now going to have to see, there's a lot of focus in this on public-private partnership and investment coming through the private sector and so forth. So I think there is an element of a plan to this. But I still think what today really was about was this setting the framework for the politics of the economy for the next bit, possibly

• 18:24Alastair Campbell?

  for the entire parliament. And ultimately, if Labour get the economy growing, they will probably win the next election. If they don't, then they'll be in a bit of trouble. And I think that's where we are. Now, who are they going to be facing, Rory?

• 18:35Rory Stewart?

  Well, this is good. So the deadline has just passed, and I think about an hour before we recorded this podcast. So there are six MPs will be in the running for the three months long contest. And they are Tom Tugendhat, Mel Stride, James Cleverly, Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick.

• 18:53Rory Stewart?

  Priti Patel. And it's a very interesting new method where they're going to try to get down to four MPs by September, who are going to make their pitch at the Conservative Party Conference in the weeks leading up to it. And then the MPs will narrow down the list to two candidates. So I suppose the first thing to ask you is, what do you think of this group? It's four men, and Robert Jenrick, Tom Tugendhat, Mel Stride, I guess, look like central casting, just very superficially, white, middle-aged, British men. It's very young. So these are MPs who are mostly in their 40s. They are all MPs who either joined

• 19:35Rory Stewart?

  with me or joined after me. So they haven't reached back before 2010. So none of these people were in the Cabinet in 2015. Many of these people have never really made it into the Cabinet at all. So as far as I know, Robert Jenrick, Tom Tugendhat attend Cabinet, but were not Secretaries of State, which is very, very unusual in a leadership race. So if you looked at the last six in the run against Boris Johnson, everybody was a Secretary of State running a department. The other thing is that traditionally, the people who become leaders in the Conservative Party have often been from what's called pompously the great offices of state. They're people who've been Chancellors, Foreign Secretaries, Home Secretaries. So Theresa May was Home Secretary, Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary,

• 20:18Rory Stewart?

  Rishi Sunak was Chancellor, Liz Truss had been Foreign Secretary. In this case, James Cleverly was Home Secretary, Priti Patel was Home Secretary, but Kemi Badenoch, who's the frontrunner, has never had any of those big offices. Anyway, what do you think about this as a sort of group?

• 20:35Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think the first thing to say is that Suella Braverman is not there. And she announced yesterday that she was pulling out. And I want to announce, I'm pulling out of the 100 metres final in Paris. I've decided I'm not taking part in that contest. And I think it's exactly the same reason, because I have absolutely no chance of winning. She said she was grateful to the 10 MPs who were nominating her.

• 20:59Rory Stewart?

  Did we see their names? Did she even get to 10?

• 21:02Alastair Campbell?

  I suspect not. Given the noise that she's made in the last couple of years, do you not think if you were nominated, you would run?

• 21:08Rory Stewart?

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, because remember, everything can change. If you can get those 10 MPs and enter the race, things can change very rapidly. Favorites can fall over, they can etc.

• 21:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, in the next couple of weeks, our listeners will get the delight of hearing you and me talk to David Davis. Now, David Davis was at one point the runaway favourite, it seemed, in the battle that led to David Cameron becoming leader of the Conservative Party and then went on to be Prime Minister. At the moment of this six, every time I read anything in the right wing papers, it tells me that Kemi Badenoch is the party favourite. Well, if that's right, then I wouldn't, if I were Labour, I wouldn't worry too much about Kemi Badenoch. I think she's, my sense is she's somebody who has got support. It's back to the thing you've talked about before, Rory, about how Priti Patel and Liz Truss had, they had friends in the media who would sort of big them up and talk them up.

• 22:00Alastair Campbell?

  I don't find her impressive as a public performer. I don't find her impressive as a speaker. I've seen nothing that she's said that makes me think there's somebody coming along with a new, different vision of the Conservative Party. Tom Tugendhat, I had some time for until he came out the other day and decided, yeah, do you know what, this ECHR thing, maybe it's not all it's cracked out to be. He basically is going to try and play to the right.

• 22:23Rory Stewart?

  That's the European Convention on Human Rights.

• 22:26Alastair Campbell?

  Correct, yeah. I thought Mel Stride is interesting. Mel Stride, who I would know, I never saw him coming up as a leadership contender. I thought he was one of the few Conservatives who had a reasonably good election campaign because he went out and batted on difficult wickets all the time. But it's a pretty limited role. I don't have a sense that the Conservative membership, again, has much of a view of him. The two that I would look at and think they've got a better chance than maybe people think are Priti Patel and James Cleverly. Now, you, I think at this stage, are we too early in the leadership contest for you to do an impersonation of Priti Patel? Because people who've listened to your book tell me that it's really good. But and also I said-

• 23:04Rory Stewart?

  She's very difficult to do. I might, I might appeal to your musical ear to see if you can give it a go. It's a sort of funny kind of Essex-Hartfordshire combination. It's a, it's, and the intonation is always on a very unexpected word. She always emphasizes the word that you're not expecting her to emphasize.

• 23:25Alastair Campbell?

  I really, I'm gonna listen out for this now. I'm gonna listen out for this. Anyway, my sense is that she's got something that maybe they're looking for right now. Bit of experience, very kind of confident in her own skin and, you know, pretty tough performer.

• 23:42Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's a fascinating thing. So just to step back one thing, the election, of course, removed so many of the stalwarts of the party, which is why it's an almost unrecognisable party. So if you think of the people who would have considered running for the leadership, you know, people who were talked about as future prime ministers, in that election, Michael Gove left, Sajid Javid left, Kwasi Kouroung left, Nadiem Sahawi left, Dominic Raab left, and obviously Matt Hancock left. So all that generation, that's a good six people not around. They also lost a lot of the people that were, you know, I thought, the hope of the kind of centre-right. So Alex Chalk lost his seat, Gillian Keegan lost her seat, Victoria Prentice lost her seat.

• 24:26Alastair Campbell?

  Do you mean centre-left of the Tory party?

• 24:29Rory Stewart?

  Correct. Correct. The left of the Tory party. Tobias Elwood lost his seat. But also leadership candidates, Grant Shapps, Penny Mordaunt, lost their seats.

• 24:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 24:39Rory Stewart?

  And almost half the cabinet left, and two-thirds the MPs. So this is a very odd competition. They're trying to choose six MPs with a very, very limited number of MPs voting for them, and many of the kind of core of the David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson government have completely vanished already. They just don't exist anymore. Most of Boris Johnson's cabinet's gone, most David Cameron's cabinet's gone, most Theresa May's cabinet's gone. It's very, very interesting.

• 25:09Alastair Campbell?

  If you had to put your money on now, who do you think is the favourite?

• 25:13Rory Stewart?

  The favourite?

• 25:14Alastair Campbell?

  And based upon the system, because the system, as you say, it's down to four MPs and then it's then to two.

• 25:19Rory Stewart?

  And then then then it's down to two. So the reason that Kemi Badenoch is the favourite at the moment will be because MPs believe, or many MPs believe, that she's going to be the most popular with the party as a whole. So what they're going to think is we're going to produce two candidates finally. And the party members, these sort of 120,000 party members who are older and more right wing than the general population will then have the choice of which to go with. And MPs are very, very anxious about their jobs. They're very anxious about getting in the shadow cabinet. So if they think one of these candidates is more likely to win with the members and therefore more likely to be leader, they will have a tendency to want to make nice with Herali. That was basically the Boris Johnson phenomenon.

• 26:03Rory Stewart?

  And how can you explain the fact that all these MPs thought that he was dishonest and incompetent and not good at his job, but they went for him. Well, it was because they thought the party members would go for him massively.

• 26:15Alastair Campbell?

  But none of these people are that far out in the way that he was.

• 26:17Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 26:18Alastair Campbell?

  So so it's entirely possible that you could have a David Davis situation here. You could have somebody who is constantly being written up as the favourite who gets pulled in.

• 26:27Rory Stewart?

  I think first thing is it's a long race. It's very interesting. They've changed it to this final four thing, which actually would have been very helpful in previous races, which is it means it gives a few weeks to the country.

• 26:38Alastair Campbell?

  Because you'd have got there. You'd have got there.

• 26:40Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. Exactly. That's how I say purely self-interested all these analyses. Let's just look, look at these candidates for a second. So Kemi Badenoch, very likeable. I mean, it's always very polite to everybody right across the party.

• 26:52Alastair Campbell?

  Is she likeable? Is that what you, because I don't hear that.

• 26:55Rory Stewart?

  One on one, one on one, she's very charming.

• 26:57Alastair Campbell?

  Right.

• 26:58Rory Stewart?

  But she was seen as deeply disloyal within Rishi Sunak's cabinet. And there was a lot of briefing against her.

• 27:03Alastair Campbell?

  I've seen it as she was.

• 27:05Rory Stewart?

  And exactly. And Rishi Sunak's cabinet, his loyalists would say that she wasn't competent. And she's very much the person who leans into culture wars. It's where she, you know, she gets out on the front step, tries to pick culture war fights. Priti Patel, I'm afraid, again, very polite all the time to me and I feel very mean putting the boots in. And actually, it's a Theme, even with Liz Truss, Liz Truss was always very polite to everybody. Michael Gove was very polite to everybody. They're not people who ever make any efforts to make enemies with MPs. They're always scrupulously polite and charming to people from all parts of the party.

• 27:37Rory Stewart?

  But I just thought Priti Patel, I'm afraid, was the most hopeless Secretary of State. I saw her as my boss in Difid. I worked with her close siege. She did not seem to me to have the mind to allow her to really master her brief. Manage civil servants correctly. I think she's a charming media performer, but I'd be very worried to have her as Prime Minister. And if you listen to her talk. Her speeches are very, very eccentric, although Liz Truss made it without being able to give a public speech. So who knows? And Priti Patel is a sort of, I think, a sort of Liz Truss-esque figure.

• 28:12Rory Stewart?

  Mel Stride is somebody who I've always liked. He is very much a loyalist. He's understated. He's quiet. He's good at his job. He's, I think, a good minister, manages civil servants well. So. In so far as I'm always trying to sell the David Gork model, Mel Stride is probably the closest to the David Gork model amongst these candidates. And the question is, can a more introverted, hardworking, serious performer make it through and be reassuring? I think it'd be really encouraging if he did. I think it'd be an interesting thing to see, but he may not quite, quite have the charisma. James Cleverly, I think James is by far probably. Yeah, along with Tom Tugendhat, one of the best media performers amongst this group. He's a Brexiteer.

• 28:55Rory Stewart?

  He's very good at taking risks. He can be funny. He often gets himself in trouble. I think he's likeable. He did a good job as Home Secretary. He's been liked as Foreign Secretary. The diplomats have really got behind him. He tried to rule himself out of the race some months ago. I'm pleased to see he's back in. Because I think he could be a very interesting thing for the Conservative Party. The criticisms of him, I suppose, are that he's not a sort of Gove-like intellect. He's not that kind of manager, but he's somebody who delegates well. He sees the big picture. He may be more of a Willie White Law figure for real political nerds.

• 29:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 29:31Rory Stewart?

  Tom Tugendhat, really interesting. I mean, Tom Tugendhat, I was just. With some German politicians over last weekend who are very fond of him because Tom has made a real effort when he was Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee to make links in Europe. He speaks fluent French, he's married to a French woman, he has very good links with Germans, Spanish, European politicians. I've always noticed when I go to Europe that people talk about Tom Tugendhat there much more than they do in Britain. He's somebody who was in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was very close to General Richards, who made him a Colonel before he entered Parliament. Before that, he was a journalist. He was very much seen as being on the Remain One Nation side of the Conservative Party.

• 30:15Rory Stewart?

  He is very good at cultivating journalists, which is a real asset in modern politics. He's getting a little right wing for me, but he'd probably be quite pleased to hear me say that because I don't think the thing he wants is somebody like me. I mean, I think it's very noticeable, actually, that these are candidates who calculate that people like me and the side of the Conservative Party I represent feels like the past for them.

• 30:36Alastair Campbell?

  But is there not a risk, though, that what I thought when I heard him make this sort of, I thought, rather lame and opportunistic shift on the European Convention of Human Rights, I thought surely he's the one who could have carved out a position of his own, which is the only place from where you can show, I think, real leadership, where he actually says, I'm not going to be the same as all the rest.

• 30:58Rory Stewart?

  Well, this is interesting. I mean, I think this is, I mean, he, he sort of gently encouraged me to run in 2019. And I think his, I may be ventriloquizing for, but I think his reading of my run is I went too far in the direction of, you know, being against tax cuts, being too passionately in favour of the customs union, and that you have to be more realistic if you're trying to win Tory members. So, you know, I've been disappointed that he didn't come along with me and support a customs union. He's very much ruled it out. I'm very sad about the ECHR because that was something European Convention of Human Rights was created, something to do with the European Union, it was created by Conservatives. And it was something that we were very proud of as spreading rights and democracy through Europe.

• 31:42Rory Stewart?

  And I'm sad to see that a pro Europeans doing this, but I guess he thinks you've got to probably, I don't know. I mean, he would obviously say he passionately believes his position, but he also thinks you've got to be pragmatic to win. Robert Jenrick's the one that surprises me most because Robert Jenrick has managed to establish himself as a contender over the last few months, despite never running a government department. It's very unusual and despite not having been in parliament very long. So I don't quite understand what's happened there.

• 32:10Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he's made, he's sort of made, he's made a name for himself on immigration, hasn't he? That's what he's done.

• 32:13Rory Stewart?

  Because he was the junior minister in the Home Office responsible for immigration and he resigned.

• 32:19Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 32:20Rory Stewart?

  Saying that we should be more radical about the Rwanda scheme. Yeah.

• 32:23Alastair Campbell?

  Anyway, it'll be very, very interesting. We shall see. Let's, um, should we take a quick break?

• 32:26Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. Let's take a break.

• 32:27Speaker 02

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• 33:02Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 33:05Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. And did you get much feedback on Nick Clegg part two, Rory?

• 33:11Rory Stewart?

  I got really good feedback on Nick Clegg. Of course, people on my side of the austerity debate are very pleased to see that he's so sort of unapologetic about the spending cuts and all that kind of stuff in 2010.

• 33:22Alastair Campbell?

  People who are wrong love it when they can be wrong together, don't they? They love that.

• 33:26Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. And I presume on your side, there's everyone being like, why didn't you give him a harder time? You let him get away with his austerity stuff.

• 33:32Alastair Campbell?

  The best piece of feedback was from Miriam Gonzalez Dorantes, who said, I don't know if you saw she posted on Instagram, this is totally unfair. Why did you give him two episodes and I only had one? And I, and I said it was because he needed, he needed, he needed twice as long to be as half as good as she is.

• 33:50Rory Stewart?

  That's good.

• 33:51Alastair Campbell?

  So there we are.

• 33:52Rory Stewart?

  I'm really pleased. I'm really pleased we got to do that. And I think really worth listening to because he's a major figure now in the world of tech. And he was deputy prime minister and I think he's took the Lib Dems to the most extraordinary victory. I mean, they, as he points out, they got more votes in 2010 than Rishi Sunak just managed for the Conservatives in the last election. So incredible. So really worth doing. Now, Alison, I really want to get you on the Olympics because in this double act, you are very much the sports person. In the double act, you're very much the Francophone. And in this double act, you're very much the person who's currently speaking to me from France. So tell us about the Olympics and what do you think? And then we might get a bit into the history of politics and Olympics and how it's worked.

• 34:35Rory Stewart?

  But give us a sense of how the Olympics looks to you and is going at the moment from your immediate vantage point.

• 34:41Alastair Campbell?

  Did you watch the opening ceremony?

• 34:43Rory Stewart?

  I did watch the opening ceremony. In fact, you and I were WhatsApping back and forth a little bit during the opening ceremony.

• 34:48Alastair Campbell?

  There was a period during the first bit when I was, I really was beginning to think that we needed to resurrect the Tory party campaign slogan. Stop the boats. There was just, there was too much of that boats thing.

• 34:59Rory Stewart?

  And Sasha, who was watching it with me, pointed this out to me because we were in Paris a week ago. And we took a boat down the Seine and he pointed out they are unbelievably slow. I mean, to get from the Eiffel Tower to Notre Dame, you know, it took us nearly an hour. And he was like, what is going on? And every time we tuned back in, we'd occasionally go away because the children would just be like, this is ridiculous. And we'd come back and we'd get to Bhutan or we'd just reach Chile. I mean, it was just sort of, the alphabet was moving very, very slowly.

• 35:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it was, it was, listen, the whole thing was, was made for TV. Once the rain started pouring down, I really felt quite badly for those people who were just sitting there watching it. Because unless there were massive screens everywhere, which I couldn't see in the TV footage. Then how on earth were you supposed to follow all these amazing pre-filmed films, which I, some of which I thought were brilliant. Others.

• 35:54Rory Stewart?

  But that's also a bit confusing, isn't it? The, the jumping from the pre-filmed to the live was also very, because a pre-filmed film, you think, well, why am I watching that? I'm trying to watch something live. Why am I watching something?

• 36:05Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but hold on. But, but, sorry. But one of the best things of London 2012 was the, the Queen walking around with James Bond and then jumping out of a helicopter.

• 36:14Rory Stewart?

  That was beautiful, but that was, as far as I know, the only bit, wasn't it? And it was right at the beginning, whereas in this one, they kept cutting in and out. So I got very confused. Am I watching this live? Is this something pre-filmed? And generally you could tell by the weather, couldn't you?

• 36:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, there was a bit of the weather thing, but I, well, listen, once we got through all the countries being done, I thought the last hour was absolutely magnificent. I thought, once they got to the Eiffel Tower light show, it was amazing. I loved that. And I, I, do you know the bit that, because I'm a very, I'm very emotional when it comes to sport, Roy, and the bit that got me was the guy in his wheelchair, who was the oldest surviving French Olympic medallist, handing the baton.

• 36:51Rory Stewart?

  Was he the hundred year old, hundred, hundred year old cyclist?

• 36:54Alastair Campbell?

  And he handed the flame, the torch, to the two who were the judo guy and the athlete, Marie Jo Perreque, who went up and lit the thing. And the, the flame itself was just utterly magnificent. And it's now hanging over Paris. It was amazing. So anyway, listen, the, the other thing I loved.

• 37:12Rory Stewart?

  Celine Dion, what, what you, you also love music.

• 37:13Alastair Campbell?

  She was fantastic. She was unbelievable. I mean, there's a woman who's got some incurable disease, hasn't been able to perform for years, and she sang that. I mean, I, I felt, do you know what? Literally just before she started singing, I was literally about to tweet, why are we having piaf in the background but without a voice? And then along comes Celine Dion. It was wonderful. So now by the end of it, I loved it, but the, the first three hours could have been truncated a bit. But what do you do? Because every country has to have its moment in the sun. And we're going to talk about politics, Roy, the, the political moment, the only political issue that really, two political issues arose, and one I was glad to see that Donald Trump

• 37:54Alastair Campbell?

  Junior and the, and the National Front, the Rassemblement National, attacked it because of what they call the sort of anti-Christian element of the, you know, satirising The Last Supper, which is utter nonsense. They completely misunderstood what it was about, so we don't need to worry about them. The other political moment was when. They got the wrong career.

• 38:13Rory Stewart?

  That's something to be avoided.

• 38:15Alastair Campbell?

  That is to be avoided. And Willy Bak, who is the, it shows you how political they are. Willy Bak, who's the head of the Olympics, the IOC, he actually had a meeting with the South Korean president to apologize for the fact that they mistook North and South Korea. There was a worse example of that in London 2012, by the way. I don't know if you know this, Rory, because you probably weren't following sport quite as closely as you now do with my indoctrination. But there was in the football in London 2012, there was a game played at Hampden Park in Glasgow, where South Korea were playing, but they played the North Korean national anthem. So that was even worse, because that's actually forcing people, that's forcing a team to listen to your mortal enemy's national anthem. So that was, that was a bit tricky. But listen, it's going, in France, it's going unbelievably well.

• 39:01Alastair Campbell?

  They're, they're winning quite a few medals.

• 39:02Rory Stewart?

  Just go back to this phenomenon, though. So this was set up, the Olympics, by a guy called Pierre de Coubertin, who's a French Baron in the late, late 1800s. And he was really excited, inspired by the ancient Olympic Games that, that happened in Greece and that ran for an incredibly long period, from about 700 B.C. through to about 200 A.D.

• 39:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 39:23Rory Stewart?

  And he was a Frenchman who was absolutely obsessed, unlike you, Alastair, with British private schools. He loved the fact that kind of British boarding schools produced these kind of muscular Christians. That's what he loved.

• 39:36Alastair Campbell?

  No, Rory, Rory, I am obsessed with British private schools. I share the obsession. It's just that I, I think they should be shut.

• 39:46Rory Stewart?

  Anyway, what he thought is that he could set up a games which would celebrate these kind of amazing Anglo-Saxon virtues of sportsmanship and, and healthy, robust people, you know, getting out. He thought the French spent too much time studying books and not enough time being healthy and robust. And it was really a kind of slightly, well, like anything that you set up, initially, very difficult to be certain he could get it off the ground. He managed to get, and I, the praise for this man, I mean, imagine if you and I suddenly decided to try to come up with something of this scale. He did everything he could. He got a lot of very famous celebrities to endorse him. But The first two or three Olympics were a bit touch and go because it turned out, of course, they were unbelievably expensive. Lots of countries couldn't be bothered to turn

• 40:31Rory Stewart?

  up. The only way he could finance the ministry was by tying them to these world exhibitions or world fairs in a slightly embarrassing way. So number three was in St Louis in Missouri for their world fair and they insisted on stretching it out over about nine months. And it was completely unclear to most competitors whether they'd even won an Olympic medal or some other kind of medal called a world fair medal. Some of them died without ever being aware they'd won an Olympic gold medal. And so, and he, of course, had problems. He was pretty opposed to women's participation and this continued to be a theme right the way through to the 1940s. They were happy for women to do things like fencing, but they didn't want them to do things like shot putting. There was a long tradition through

• 41:14Rory Stewart?

  to the 30s where there was also awards for literary achievement at the Olympic Games and town planning. You could get a gold medal in a little town planning. I think Bryn Mawr's got a medal in town planning. Very good. Now, then we come into the modern day and I guess the Olympics that we all remember are, I suppose, 1972, which was the Munich Olympics with the massacre of Israeli athletes, 1988, Ben Johnson doping, 2002, Salt Lake City bribery, 2016, Rio corruption, and a sense, I think, that the Olympics, this is my challenge to you, where I'm going to sort of hand back to you. The odd thing about the Olympics is not quite keeping up with the change in the world. We often talk about the fact that back in

• 41:59Rory Stewart?

  the 1970s, the G7 were 70% of the world economy and now the BRICS are about the same size. So Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. The Olympics is not quite showing that change. So despite the fact that we went Salt Lake City, Athens, China got it in 2008, which you would have thought was the beginning of the new world of shifting away from the West. But it was then London 2012, Rio 2016, I guess, which is more BRICS, but then Japan 2020, Paris 2024, US, Los Angeles 2028, and Australia 2032. I mean, this is even worse than the Permanent Security Council, isn't it?

• 42:36Alastair Campbell?

  Well, London, Paris and next time Los Angeles will be the three cities that have had it three times. And it is such a big thing. I mean, look, when you look at the programme for the Olympic Games, I was just reading through it last night, when you look through the programme, to pack this much into two weeks is absolutely extraordinary. And very, very, very few cities can do it effectively. You're right, though, about the way that it's grown. The way it's grown is absolutely phenomenal. My favourite political story, I must tell you, Rory, goes back to Athens 1906. This was a gentleman by the name of Peter O'Connor.

• 43:10Rory Stewart?

  That was the second Athens Olympics, second Athens Olympic, right?

• 43:13Alastair Campbell?

  Correct. And this is a guy called Peter O'Connor. He was Irish, but he gets to Athens and discovers that because Ireland doesn't have its own Olympic committee, he's not allowed to represent Ireland. So this guy-

• 43:26Rory Stewart?

  Well, because Ireland's still part of Great Britain, right?

• 43:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, exactly, exactly. So, but he's not, he doesn't consider that, Rory. You know the history of this, don't you? You know, there's a deep history to this. So he's basically, he and his colleagues-

• 43:38Rory Stewart?

  Just for listeners, wait, wait, wait, I just want to put, before you tell us the story, though, just for listeners, in context, this is a good 16 years before Irish independence. So this is somebody who passionately believes in Irish independence, but it's a time when Ireland is fully part of the United Kingdom. So he is having to compete in the UK team and he's supposed to be wearing UK colours and blah, blah, blah.

• 43:59Alastair Campbell?

  Right. And he does, he does, he does, because the only way he can compete is to represent Great Britain, he does compete. And in his first event, he wins a silver medal. During the winners' ceremony, where they're presenting the medals, he removes from his kit an Irish flag, and such a great athlete is he, he climbs the flagpole and he waves the Irish flag. Now, isn't that just a wonderful way to celebrate?

• 44:27Rory Stewart?

  Amazing. He shins, shins 20 feet up into the air, doesn't he?

• 44:30Alastair Campbell?

  Correct, correct.

• 44:31Rory Stewart?

  And the Brits, of course, were absolutely furious, but it was an amazing propaganda coup for Irish independence.

• 44:37Alastair Campbell?

  And he then, he then went on to win a gold, where he stayed, he just took the medal and went home after that. I'm not sure you're right about the way that they reflect things. So Antwerp 1920, lots of countries were banned from taking part because of the outcome of the First World War. Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, they weren't allowed there. Soviet Union decided not to bother. The most famous political one probably is 1936 with Hitler. This is interesting about the Olympic process. So Berlin, you mentioned that Australia are going to get them in 2032, whatever it is.

• 45:09Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:10Alastair Campbell?

  Berlin was chosen in 1931 to host the 1936 Games. 1933 comes around and the Nazis are in power.

• 45:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 45:19Alastair Campbell?

  And the efforts that the IOC had to go to, to stop them using it even more than they did. Even so, lots of countries boycotted because of what the Nazis then represented. Forty nine countries attended. The IOC did insist, by the way, that there had to be at least one Jewish athlete on the German team. And somebody called Helena Meyer, we represented them as fencing, in fencing. And of course Hitler's massive propaganda efforts were defeated really by Jesse Owens because he won four gold medals. And he was black and that, you know, being a black athlete, he was the most successful athlete in the Games. Meant that it wasn't, you know, you can hardly say this is all about Aryan superiority.

• 46:00Rory Stewart?

  I think also before we get too smug about this, I believe it's true that FDR Roosevelt, the great American hero. Refused to receive Jesse Owens and shake his hand in the White House after he came back. That racism was so embedded in American society as well as in

• 46:16Alastair Campbell?

  Wow, really? I didn't know that.

• 46:17Rory Stewart?

  German society at the time, yeah.

• 46:19Alastair Campbell?

  Well, then you got the war. Here's one already, London, 1948. That was the first athlete to defect from communism was a Czech gymnast by the name of Marie Provaznikova. She defected during London. Um, Melbourne, 1956, lots of boycotts, Mexico, 1968. There was the, you know, you had the Black Power protests there. But the other thing that happened there, and here's a really interesting question. Do you think the Mexican army killed over 200 protesters and injured over a thousand?

• 46:55Alastair Campbell?

  When there was a protest in advance of the games about the students staged a protest because they didn't like the funding because it had led to social programmes being cut.

• 47:06Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 47:06Alastair Campbell?

  Two hundred protesters got killed. Do you think in the modern day, if an Olympic city killed two hundred protesters shortly before the games, that those games would go ahead? I'm not so sure.

• 47:15Rory Stewart?

  I don't know. But of course, remember, there were these huge questions around what Beijing tried to do to get ready for two thousand and eight and all the, the attempts to hide a lot of the abuses and things. I mean, there's a book that I've been reading about the way that power and politics plays into all these Olympics. My favourite guy, just to finish, is Jim Thorpe, who's this amazing American athlete from the nineteen twelve Stockholm Olympics. The absolute perfect all-rounder, extraordinary Native American who was a star football player, baseball player, who managed to win gold in both the pentathlon and the decathlon, and then had his medals stripped because he'd managed to take a small amount of money for, I think, an exhibition basketball match.

• 47:58Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, God.

• 47:58Rory Stewart?

  And was therefore considered not an amateur.

• 48:01Alastair Campbell?

  Not an amateur, yeah, yeah.

• 48:02Rory Stewart?

  And finally got his medals back. His family got them back in nineteen eighty-eight after he died, long after he died.

• 48:07Alastair Campbell?

  And you say, you say he was a Native American?

• 48:09Rory Stewart?

  Native American, yeah.

• 48:10Alastair Campbell?

  So I think politics can, a lot of the games, there are big political issues playing. I mean, obviously, the Moscow boycott by America, and then the Russians didn't go to Los Angeles and all that sort of thing. But if you look at Sydney, Sydney two thousand, and Australia, a massive sporting country. So Cathy Freeman was chosen to light the Olympic flame in Sydney, and that was a huge moment. And essentially, you sensed it was Australia trying to reconcile its history. And then, you know, ten days later, she wins a gold medal in the four hundred metres. And yet, twenty-odd years later, they have the referendum on The Voice, and you understand sometimes sport can sort of give you that sense of forward momentum, but it doesn't necessarily, doesn't necessarily last. And

• 48:55Alastair Campbell?

  I think from our own games, the last time we had them in London, twenty twelve, I do think it was the last time the country really felt kind of powerful and united. And I sort of feel a lot of that has dissipated. And partly, I think, is because we didn't necessarily cement the sporting legacy. Because the other thing which you mentioned, we're talking about policies, is that the Paralympic Games, which come a couple of weeks after the Olympic Games themselves. Is that what the Paralympic Games have done to change attitudes and change policies around the world in relation to disability is absolutely brilliant. So anybody who says politics and sport don't make, sometimes they're mixed together very, very well.

• 49:30Rory Stewart?

  Let's finish on Bangladesh. So often in the podcast, we will introduce people to a country and an election, and then we won't necessarily follow up on what happens next. So to remind people, Bangladesh was a country that had broke away from Pakistan in the 1970s, was famously described as a development basket case, one of the poorest countries in the world, horrible floodings, went through periods of military rule and coup, became a democracy in the 1990s, and there was proper peaceful exchange of government back and forth between the two main parties. Until 15 years ago, Sheikh Hasina, who runs the Awami League and who's the daughter of the great independence hero of Bangladesh, took over, female head of state, secular Muslim, been good at balancing India and

• 50:14Rory Stewart?

  China, taken millions out of poverty. There was a moment when the Bangladesh economy looked like it was delivering GDP per capita better than India, amazing progress, the garment industry. But as we pointed out, has become more and more authoritarian. So 20,000 members of the opposition facing court cases and an election which was boycotted by the opposition, which Sheikh Hasina walked, bringing her in effectively now as an authoritarian ruler of democracy is finished in this very large country, very important country, Bangladesh. And now over to you on what's happened recently.

• 50:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I mean, the reason we're talking about it is because there've been these big protests that have been going on in recent weeks over job quotas, essentially that there was preferential treatment, government imposed quotas, given to people that the protesters say essentially is a scam to give jobs to people who've supported her and supported her party. And it led to a lot of violence, 193 people killed, several police officers among them. And the UN Human Rights Chief, a guy called Volker Tuk, he has been protesting as loudly as he can and been asking for Greater transparency about what's happened. A lot of people have gone missing. The protests have subsided a little bit after the Supreme Court scrapped the quotas. Now, is that a

• 51:30Alastair Campbell?

  sign of protest working or is that a sign of protest that actually has failed because ultimately, you know, the protests have happened, but 193 people killed. And of course, this followed the election, as you say, where she won yet another term with a very, very low turnout because, as you say, the opposition had boycotted it. Over a thousand people injured last week. And another thing that Tuk has been asking for is to demand why people were denied medical care, two journalists killed. So, you know, a pretty horrific set of circumstances. She then made a visit, Sheikh Hasina made a visit to some of the people who've been affected by this and she was filmed crying. So what her critics were saying was that the tears were all because a big piece of infrastructure

• 52:13Alastair Campbell?

  had come crashing down in the riots as opposed to the fact that all these people are dead. On the parliament after the election, Rory, the biggest, you talked about the independents that are in the UK parliament. The current opposition secured only 11 out of the 300 parliamentary seats, whereas independent candidates secured 63 seats. So, I mean, it's just, you just feel, as you said earlier, a country that felt like it was going in a pretty good direction democratically, now in a pretty bad way.

• 52:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And, and the eighth most populous country in the world. So if countries, you know, if the G8 were done on population, Bangladesh should be right up there, 160 million people. And it's going to be an increasingly important security and economic player in the world. So I think something we should keep coming back to because it's, it's right there as perhaps the kind of most dramatic symbol of countries that seemed in the 90s to be going in a positive democratic direction have lurched back to authoritarianism. Rulers trying to hold on by delivering economic benefits to their people and now facing inflation, cost of living problems, unemployment problems. Can they hold on? And of course, in some places, Iran, for example, my goodness, they can hold on. They can hold on for decades.

• 53:23Rory Stewart?

  But definitely worth coming back to Bangladesh. Thank you for, for raising it.

• 53:27Alastair Campbell?

  And we should also close off maybe Rory, because we discussed last week Venezuela. Venezuela, where the opinion poll suggested that Maduro was going to lose and hey ho, the elections have happened. And his friends at the electoral authorities have announced that he's won, which reminded me of a situation at the elections in Bangladesh when Al Jazeera, they had, they had seen a dashboard on the, at the headquarters of the Electoral Commission, suggesting that turnout was 28%. And then, lo and behold, a bit later, it, it was up to 40%. And likewise, I suspect within what's going on in Venezuela, it's very, very hard to imagine. Nobody outside the Venezuelan ruling party seems to be believing the outcome of the election there.

• 54:10Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and there are, there's quite a good New York Times article which you can share, but there were a dozen different ways in which Maduro stole the vote. Some of them just to do with not handing out ballot papers in the right place, some of them to do with controls of media. I mean, it isn't all about stuffing ballots. It's if you get into the mechanics of how people steal elections, there are lots of sort of cunning ways of tipping things in, in your direction. But a tragedy for Venezuela because it looks like, for the moment, another six years in Maduro. Um, which just brings me to a small tribute to my friend James C. Scott, who you would have loved. He was a Yale political scientist who began his working life as a pretty radical anthropologist in Malaysia. He wrote a book that we've recommended on the podcast called Seeing Like a State,

• 54:55Rory Stewart?

  with the subtitle, How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, looking at kind of crazy ideas of central government from groundnuts in Tanzania to Prussian forestry. He's a beautiful, funny writer. I was lucky enough to be able to interview him on my BBC series on ignorance just before he died. He lived in an amazing farm, driving a really crapped up old tractor on the outskirts of Connecticut. And it's a huge loss to anthropology and political science. Brave, funny, provocative, so very sad that he's gone. And thank you, Anna, for joining us today.

• 55:30Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

• 55:31Rory Stewart?

  See you. Bye bye.

• 55:38Speaker 03

  There we are, getting a statement from Number Ten. On that flight, with three hundred and fifty passengers on board.

• 55:47Speaker 04

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 55:54Speaker 05

  We assess, Prime Minister,

• 55:58Speaker 05

  with high confidence it was Russian.

• 56:01Speaker 06

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 56:03Speaker 07

  They took down a British passenger jet containing three hundred and fifty people.

• 56:06Speaker 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!

• 56:19Speaker 08

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 56:21Speaker 04

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 56:30Speaker 06

  A FRAGO that says to... ...kill the President of Russia.

• 56:35Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 56:37Speaker 06

  New from Goalhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 56:41Speaker 09

  You're my soldier, are you? Sergeant Tom McDuff, Duffy!

• 56:45Speaker 06

  An audio drama journey like no other.

• 56:47Speaker 09

  Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.

• 56:51Speaker 06

  Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller. We have two types friendly key... Where Britain plays its strongest hand... He's the best. ...against its strongest foe. Don't do it, Duffy! Bear Hunt. Available now, wherever you get your podcasts.