Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 351. Question Time: Geopolitics in Crisis About this episode Why did the president of South Korea announce martial law this week? What does the result of the Romanian elections spell for Europe? How can Georgia resolve the protests happening there?
Rory and Alastair answer all these questions and more in this week's Question Time.
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Transcript 8,969 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.
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1:08 Speaker 03 It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.
1:13 Speaker 04 Botox on botulinum toxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton Syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.
1:58 Speaker 03 Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.
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2:28 Rory Stewart? Welcome to The Rest Is Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.
2:32 Alastair Campbell? And me Alastair Campbell. Now Rory, we got loads and loads and loads of questions about Nigel Farage and reform and Keir Starmer this week. But I think even though we were pretty foreign policy related in the main podcast, there's so much other big foreign news that we didn't even have time to do in the main podcast. So let me choose what we kick off with. I'm going to ask you this one. Jacob Mardell, what do you think Vladimir Putin's reaction would be to a pro-EU revolution in Georgia? Jess Weller, what do you think the fallout of the pro-EU protests in Georgia will be? Adapt to accommodate disruptive leaders? Or is the risk to institutional integrity too great?
3:16 Rory Stewart? Well, this is, in some ways, if it weren't for Syria, would have been the very, very biggest news this week. So Georgia is an EU candidate state in the Caucasus, and it's completely vital for geostrategic reasons. It's, depending on whether it's pro-Putin or pro-Western, it's a vital route for Central Asia, for minerals, for oil coming in from Azerbaijan, for the security of that whole region. And the hope after this colour revolution 20 years ago is that as part of the breakup of the Soviet Union, it was on its route to becoming more of a liberal democracy and it became a NATO candidate, EU candidate.
4:01 Rory Stewart? An election has happened, very, very dubious election. And straight after this election, which saw a victory from a pro-Putin party, Georgian Dream, financed by a man who made his money as an oligarch in Russia, took the election by some pretty peculiar figures coming out of minority areas of Georgia.
4:27 Rory Stewart? They betrayed their voters by suddenly announcing that they're not going to push ahead with their EU membership. And this was the breaking point. A lot of the opposition were already very suspicious because this is a very authoritarian regime. It's very pro Putin and, you know, it's locking up opposition people and it's threatening and it's issuing lists of more civil society people it's going to lock up. But this was the thing that triggered them into the streets. I'd love to talk a little bit more about this, but just give us a sense of what you've thought about the pro EU demonstrations and what you've seen on the streets and your sense of Georgia.
5:05 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think what you're seeing is a country that's facing a fundamental choice about which direction it takes. Does it sort of lean into Europe or does it lean backwards towards Russia? And what you're seeing in the streets is incredible courage and bravery because as you say, these people are just getting, you know, banged up. And some of the scenes have been horrific of these balaklar wearing security forces, but some of them not even wearing uniform, but just sort of basically lifting people up, taking them out and we assume sort of, you know, banging them up. And these are Russians backed, sometimes Russians sponsored. And we talked in the main podcast about Notre Dame. One of the other reasons I was mesmerized by all the people watching going on was somebody
5:50 Alastair Campbell? who was present in a very prominent position, sitting just behind Donald Trump, was the lady we mentioned last week, the French born Georgian president, Salom Zourabich Fili. And if you look at her social media feed, she just went round the place. She had a word with Trump. She then did a post saying, good to talk to Donald Trump. He's a great friend of Georgia. He understands how awful what's happening is going on. She was photographed obviously with Macron. She was photographed with President of Poland. She just went, did the rounds, doing kind of, you know, speed dating diplomacy. And what she's doing is incredibly brave because she's basically saying, I'm not going to
6:31 Alastair Campbell? quit as president, even if you hold elections saying with your electoral council that I've lost, because I do not accept the illegitimate election on which the parliament was chosen.
6:42 Rory Stewart? And I'm glad we're recording today because this is an absolutely critical week for her and Georgia because it's next week that they will. Push in a new president and she'll become a lame duck. And this is the moment, this is the three, four day period where the opportunity is for European leaders, for the UK to step up and get to Georgia. What needs to happen is we need three foreign ministers, and it'd be lovely if the UK was one of them, turning up, meeting the demonstrators, saying, you're right, you should have a European future and there should be free and fair elections. Because the only person who's visited, only person is Viktor Orban, who's immediately come out for the pro-Putin authoritarians.
7:22 Alastair Campbell? Absolutely. And Rory, you were unfairly castigating me for not getting Nigel Farage on the podcast. Whilst this was happening in Notre Dame.
7:31 Rory Stewart? Yes.
7:32 Alastair Campbell? Because Eddie Rama, Prime Minister of Albania, was sitting just behind President Zura Beach Vili, I sent him a message saying, I don't have a number for Salom Zura Beach Vili, but if you're having a word with her, can you tell her that we'd love to get her on leading and given it's so fast moving, we would do it live. And the response came back that she'd love to, but she finds us a bit scary. Now, given what she's facing in Tbilisi, I think that is a, and I did get in touch with her press secretary, who understandably said that she's very, very busy, but the invitation is there and it's open. We would love to talk to the President of Georgia.
8:09 Rory Stewart? I've also had her number sent to me by various Georgian friends. My friend Gerhard Knauß, who I talk about a great deal, who works for the European Stability Initiative, he thinks this is such a litmus test for the West, particularly at a time when Trump is retreating. He feels it's like Mussolini marching on Rome and everybody's saying, well, let's hope it works out. And there's a real dance going on between European leaders. You basically get the sense you've got Nordic leaders saying, well, you know, I'll go to Georgia, provided someone else will come with me. And of course, it's terrible that just at the moment when we should be saying free and fair elections, providing support for the opposition.
8:50 Rory Stewart? France is so weak, Germany's so distracted, but gosh, it would be good. And do you think there's any chance that the UK could lift its head? Do you think this could be an opportunity for the UK to show that it can take some initiative, get on the plane with the Swedish Foreign Minister?
9:04 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, well, it could do. And I think at the moment, Keir Starmer's getting unfair, I think, criticism for sort of spending too much time abroad and too much time on foreign policy. As you said on the main podcast, foreign policy right now is as important as it's ever been. So I don't see why not, but you know, David Lammy's got a lot on his plate. But I think you're right, this is more important than a lot of the other issues that are grabbing a lot of attention. Similar theme, Rory, Toma Ito, what are the implications of the Romanian Constitutional Court annulling the results of the presidential election? Will we see similar actions in other countries taking against social media based interference? Elsa Patrick, can you explain what's happening in Romania? Is democracy
9:45 Alastair Campbell? hanging by a thread? And this was the election where essentially the candidate came out of nowhere, Kalin Georgescu, and he went from 5% to winning the first round of the presidential election. They've since released a lot of the intelligence stuff, showing that the Russians had been absolutely bombarding people, using TikTok. And this guy claimed that he had no financial support, but actually he was getting massive support, even if he didn't ask for it from Russia. So they've annulled the entire election. It's now going to be held in the spring. Now, the lady who was in the second, who was second in the, was going off into the runoff with Georgescu, she of course is saying this is terrible
10:27 Alastair Campbell? because the chances are she would have won. But others are saying, when you've seen this level of interference, it is right that it stopped. What do you make of it?
10:36 Rory Stewart? Well, it's amazing. So the stakes are very, very high. So Romania is one of the European success stories. I mean, it's still challenged, it's still one of the poorer countries in Europe, but it's gone from being a very, very poor authoritarian state in 1989, joined the European Union, and actually its economy's grown very remarkably, and its democracy was settling down. As you've pointed out, this thing is unbelievable. This guy who's like kind of martial arts, horseback riding, pro Putin.
11:09 Rory Stewart? Pretty obscure figure, rides to victory on the back of TikTok. There's been stuff analyzing suggesting up to 70,000 Russian accounts were involved in promoting his campaign, and they've decided to suspend the election. Now, the stakes are very high because if you're on his side, you say, oi, somebody you didn't like won the election and you've just annulled the election, this is proper dictatorship. On the other hand, if you're on the democratic side, you say, look, if we can find real evidence that Russians interfering, thank goodness we're standing up for the credibility of our elections. This is the litmus test that's going to be more and more relevant going forward in many,
11:54 Rory Stewart? many elections around the world. Does democracy have the nerve to defend itself? And when it finds evidence that social media and Russian interference is stealing elections, it calls stop and recounts. What do you make of how this is going to work out? Presumably it depends how much evidence they find, right?
12:09 Alastair Campbell? Listen, the election has been stopped and the first round annulled, so it will go to another election in the spring. I guess the hope of the government and of the authorities there is that the public will be at least conscious of the fact that this sudden bombardment on social media is coming from somewhere, but whether it will change the vote, we'll get to see. This guy won 23%. The lady who came second, Elena Laskoni, she got 19% and she obviously is assuming if it had gone to a runoff, that she would have won. I still feel, I mean, as Nigel Farage said to me on Question, get over it, the war is over, you're the worst loser in history. We still haven't got to the bottom of the extent to which Russia sought to interfere
12:54 Alastair Campbell? in the Brexit referendum. The Americans still haven't got to the bottom. We're going to be talking to Bill Clinton soon and he, in his book, his new book is absolutely clear that
13:05 Alastair Campbell? Putin played a role in Trump's victory in 2016. So I think we have been very, very, very cavalier. On the one hand, we're very keen to say Putin's a terribly bad man and he invades countries. But where it affects us, we want to look away. You remember that pathetic press conference that Johnson did with Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, where Lavrov said, no, no, no, we didn't get involved in the Brexit referendum at all. And Johnson basically just sort of like a nodding dog and say, look, you know, see, see what they're saying. The same as Trump. I mean, he preferred to believe Putin's version of events to those of his own intelligence agencies. So I think this is a country that is standing up against something and it's about time.
13:47 Rory Stewart? Let me come in on this because we have interviewed people who have said that we've looked closely into the evidence of Russian interference in the Brexit vote. And the conclusion is that what Russia tried to do, I think Ben Wallace said this in the interview with him, that Russia tried, but it wasn't very effective. And almost certainly Boris Johnson made more difference to Brexit vote than the Russians did. That doesn't mean that Russia hasn't been getting a lot better at it over the last eight years and that they're now able to operate bot factories at a scale you can't imagine. And of course, what Russia's doing all the time now is they're playing both sides. So one thing we can see with Gaza is Russia is both reinforcing messages from pro Netanyahu Zionists, settlers, and also
14:32 Rory Stewart? reinforcing messages from anti Israeli and even anti Semitic accounts at the same time because what they really want to do is whip up as much stuff in the streets of Europe as they possibly can on both sides. A quick one for you. Will Forster, how has Mahama managed his comeback election victory in Ghana after falling short in 2016 and 2020? And just before we come to that, just to explain, this is a weird African parallel to the United States.
15:01 Alastair Campbell? Trump.
15:02 Rory Stewart? Yeah, exactly. Where somebody who served one term, the Trump has come back again in another election later.
15:09 Alastair Campbell? Yes, this guy, John Dramani Mahama, he was president till 2016.
15:17 Alastair Campbell? He got booted out by the biggest margin of defeat in in modern history of Ghana. Massive corruption scandals, energy crisis, and he's made a comeback. And I know Donald Trump likes to talk about his amazing landslide, which wasn't, and his incredibly huge win, which wasn't. This guy's was, he got fifty six point five five percent, the largest margin of victory in a Ghana election since nineteen ninety six. Turnout again, along with a lot of elections this year, pretty disappointing, sixty percent. So he's back.
15:51 Rory Stewart? Ghana's fascinating. I mean, Ghana has been through a pretty tricky time, partly because of debt crisis, actually some serious problems on its borders with potential jihadist militants. But it was seen as the great success story of Africa. And when I was the DIFID minister, we were on the verge of stopping British development funding because it looked like it was going to become a middle income country and there wasn't any need to focus on Ghana anymore, et cetera. It's pro-Western. I remember Nana, when I was a junior minister, rather unusually, I was invited to Downing Street to sit with Theresa May and the Ghanaian president, the man that's just stepped down. And it was a real privilege because often as a junior minister, you're not brought
16:36 Rory Stewart? into these three ways with heads of state.
16:38 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
16:38 Rory Stewart? And it was the funniest thing you've ever seen, just the three of us. And Nana sits down with Theresa May and he says, now, Prime Minister May, I wonder whether I could give you some unsolicited advice on the basis of my experience, he's older than her. I think it's time for you to consider holding a second referendum and rejoining the European Union.
17:01 Alastair Campbell? Good man.
17:02 Rory Stewart? And I thought what was so funny about it is that obviously I'm going around the world lecturing African heads of state all the time in the same way, and now he's boots on the other foot.
17:11 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. This is, by the way, it's the fifth African country this year to see the opposition winning.
17:17 Rory Stewart? This is the great year of elections, but the stats are that basically incumbents are shedding votes every time. And they're losing, I think, eighty five times out of a hundred at the moment. And that's partly what's going on in the US. That's something that will keep Keir Starmer up at night. That's something that's going to be worrying Macron. It's definitely a problem for Schultz. And it's a problem for stability of politics everywhere. I mean, we basically, and I think it's a sense of a more generic crisis, isn't it?
17:45 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
17:46 Rory Stewart? That doesn't matter whether you're Ghana or Britain or the US. Our systems are not delivering for people in the way they like. Social media is whipping up so much anger and opposition. And the general response is just boot the government out.
18:00 Alastair Campbell? Well, talking of an incumbent who's been in a bit of difficulty.
18:04 Alastair Campbell? We've got a lot of questions about South Korea. Will Goulburn, was the president's declaration of martial law an attempted coup? Kev, please, could you provide a concise explanation for what happened in South Korea this week? Well, we could be here all day with that one.
18:18 Rory Stewart? I'm usually the pompous person doing explainers. Do you want to do a little explainer on South Korea and just remind people what happened?
18:23 Alastair Campbell? Well, what happened was that the president declared martial law totally out of the blue. Nobody could quite understand where this was coming from. And immediately there was, in a way, it showed sort of politics and political reaction working well. In that people took to the streets, there was a lot of protest. Parliamentarians, the troops tried to bar them from entering parliament, but they managed to get in and they had a vote. And it quickly became clear that the mood of the country and the mood of the parliament was against what he's done. There was then a move to impeach him. It just needed eight of his own MPs to turn, but they didn't. So the impeachment failed, but the protest is still going on, essentially trying to get rid of President Yoon. It was an amazing twenty four hours, though.
19:08 Alastair Campbell? Wherever you look in the world at the moment, you just think, is there nothing but turmoil? But this one kind of came out of nowhere.
19:14 Rory Stewart? Yeah. And again, you know, we don't talk enough about South Korea. We've done a little bit on it.
19:18 Alastair Campbell? Well, we talked about the election at the time, didn't we?
19:20 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and Asian culture. And I've been watching a bit of K-drama. There's some amazing historical dramas that I've been really enjoying produced from Korea that we could talk about at some point. But the reason it matters is this is one of the wealthiest countries in the world in terms of its GDP and GDP per capita. A real economic miracle because it was one of the poorest countries in the world. So we've just been talking about Ghana. South Korea was significantly poorer than Ghana in nineteen forty five.
19:46 Rory Stewart? And GDP per capita now in South Korea is running in nominal terms at probably fifty five thousand dollars a year. When GDP in Ghana will probably be down at at most a couple of thousand on a PPP basis, which means that it's gone from being poorer than Ghana to being, you know, multiples richer in simply, sorry, I think probably twenty five times richer, simply over the period of the last fifty, sixty years. And it became a democracy in nineteen eighty seven. So a lot of that growth, and this is another weird thing that confuses economists, was under a time of quite a lot of protectionism and tariffs and military rules. So it was a bit of an outlier in our general idea of free markets and liberal democracy.
20:29 Rory Stewart? Became a democracy in nineteen eighty seven, is one of the great democratic success stories, is one of the US's central allies. The US has twenty five thousand troops in South Korea, so that's ten times the number it had in Afghanistan. And of course, it's one of the great flashpoints of the world because North Korea, arming itself with missiles, allying with Russia, sending troops into Ukraine. So that's why it's not just a sort of cheerful kind of detail that the president has triggered martial law or tried to trigger martial law. For South Korea, that's, oh, my goodness, are we retreating to nineteen eighties? And for global security, what on earth is one of the wealthiest, most democratic countries on earth doing, going into these kind of problems?
21:11 Alastair Campbell? But I think one of the reasons why the response was so immediate and so strong amongst the public was because they do have memories of martial law and they have memories of those pre-democracy days. So it was quite moving, actually, the response. And the thing you said about their kind of growing wealth, this relates to the point about incumbency, is the extent to which people will take that for granted and then be wanting more, particularly if they have a sense of the it containing massive inequality. And one of the reasons why there was this kind of real opposition to him actually is because. Of his wife, and this has been a big scandal in South Korea for some time about the sort of her lifestyle. And we're seeing this, I'm not comparing Yoon to Assad, I'm
21:56 Alastair Campbell? not comparing her to Asmaa Assad, but, you know, one of the things that's emerging now out of Syria is just the sheer wealth that they had. There's this amazing video, I don't know if you saw it, Roy, of inside Assad's garage of his own personal collection of virtually every luxury car brand in the world. And likewise, his wife, sort of, you know, vast personal wealth. Now, that is not the same in South Korea, but in terms of the profile of Yoon's wife, it has been a lot of it focused on this sense of her being, living a life that people don't expect from the wife of a president who's not on the sort of money that oligarchs are.
22:39 Rory Stewart? Final fact on South Korea, which I think links to a lot of the stuff we talk about, is its fertility rate. On average, couples are having point eight children. That means that the population is on track to halve. So we're talking Britain, where our population's growing. South Korean population, more than anywhere on earth. I mean, by the end of this century, will be half the size it is now unless they sort out the fertility rate. And of course, that also means it's going to get much, much older. The young people will collapse as the old people expand. You end up with a crazy inverted pyramid, and that's going to trigger a massive economic crisis in one of the major world economies, which is the biggest Western ally in the region along with Japan.
23:19 Alastair Campbell? You had your image of Joe Biden as not just a lame duck, a duck without legs. This guy remains president, but he's not allowed to travel anywhere, nor his key people. They've done the classic thing as well of the the defence minister has sort of said it was all my fault. But no, this is a mess. And of course, I think the reason why the world is, well, two reasons. We don't focus much on our part of the world, doesn't focus enough on that part of the world, other than China and, you know, the focus on Taiwan in particular. But I think because the sense we have is of North Korea basket case, total poverty, authoritarianism, et cetera. South Korea, very, very stable democracy. But actually,
23:58 Alastair Campbell? it's got a very chequered history in terms of assassinations, in terms of attempted coups, in terms of toppling of regimes. But this seems to be a sort of a self-imposed toppling that is still underway.
24:12 Rory Stewart? Okay, Alastair, quick break and then more questions.
24:15 Speaker 02 I get so many headaches every month.
24:18 Speaker 03 It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.
24:23 Speaker 04 Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away, as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.
25:08 Speaker 03 Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.
25:16 Speaker 05 A payday candy bar is miles and miles of peanuts. Salty, crunchy peanuts, sweet, sweet caramel, raving you up with every bite. Enjoy the tasty journey, my friend. Payday Peanut Caramel Bar.
25:36 Rory Stewart? This episode is sponsored by Google. And we're talking about Google's work and doing advertisements for Google. And one of the things that we're going to be discussing as part of that is some of the incredible work that Google's been doing with AI.
25:48 Alastair Campbell? All year, we've been talking on and off about AI. In fact, I think if we go back a year, Rory, you identified it as one of the big themes for 2024, and it's going to get even bigger as we go forward. And I think what's really interesting is the NHS, take the UK National Health Service. AI is going to be either transformative in a way that saves the health service or just becomes another really difficult challenge.
26:18 Rory Stewart? Yeah, that's right. We've talked about this a lot. And I've seen this from friends in Silicon Valley. You can already get large language models, which is this form of AI, providing answers in closed systems, which are beginning to look as though they're more reliable than human doctors. Now, there are huge regulatory issues why people are very reluctant to issue these models, not least because you'd be worried that they could make a mistake or hallucinate. But some of these AI models now out there are unbelievably powerful. They can think incredibly logically. They can marshal information very well. One of the things they're discovering when they're studying how these models work, and actually, Reid Hoffman, who we interviewed on Leading,
27:03 Rory Stewart? gave a talk about this at the Hampstead Synagogue on Sunday night, which I was at. And Rishi Sunak was at too, actually. And Robert Peston from The Rest Is Money, it was quite a kind of gathering of goal hanger and politics. But, you know, one of the things he's pointing out about the way in which it operates for health is that it could, in the first instance, provide the most incredible kind of digital assistance. So probably it would begin with a doctor using this stuff, but the doctor's still sitting alongside to provide a second check.
27:32 Alastair Campbell? So his question is how you marry artificial intelligence with those who are working in the health service. When you look at some of the stuff, let's just take breast cancer, for example. So one in seven women in Britain on current trends will be diagnosed at some point during their life with breast cancer. And what Google is doing, they've got, they've developed this AI mammography screening system. They're working with Imperial College London and with the NHS. And the algorithm can read the scans to detect the signs of breast cancer. And the research suggests that the AI algorithm is able to identify cancers from the images
28:14 Alastair Campbell? with a similar degree of accuracy to an expert radiologist, but of course can do it quicker.
28:19 Rory Stewart? I mean, look, there are so many things we need to talk about AI. Maybe we're about to do an interview with an AI specialist where we can get into this stuff in more detail. There's, there's going to be serious concerns about how people's data is used. There's going to be concerns about surveillance. There's going to be concerns about hallucination. There's going to be concerns about discrimination. And above all, there's going to be concerns if this stuff starts operating without humans, complete general intelligence. But one of the things that Reid said on Sunday was that the way to develop good regulation from government is to make sure that as many members of the public are using this stuff and understand it as possible. Very difficult to regulate something you don't understand.
29:00 Rory Stewart? So what you really want is lots of people interacting with this and beginning to understand its strengths, its weaknesses, its risks, its benefits. Which is why one of the other good things that Google's doing, and obviously we're advertising Google, but this is, I think sincerely, a good thing that Google's doing, is training a million people on using AI, just getting them accustomed to it. And I think that's going to be vital, both for regulating it, but also for government to take risk. Because if government's going to do dramatic stuff, like put AI in charge of systems which here the two have been done by humans, you need the public to have a sense of what that means, you know, what works about that and what doesn't. So the government can take the risk of rolling this out in different areas and the citizens
29:45 Rory Stewart? are less terrified by what's happening.
29:47 Alastair Campbell? And that is going to require a lot of leadership and what I call educative politics. And, you know, hopefully maybe the podcast can play a role in that as well. But I think if you're West Streeting, the Health Secretary, he's got one of the toughest jobs in government, getting the health service back on its feet. There's no doubt that he and Peter Kyle, who we're going to be talking to in the new year, who's in charge of this area in terms of government policy, AI, technology, et cetera. This has got to be part of the rebuilding of the health service. If the health service is going to get back on its feet, then AI is going to be part of that. Okay, so that's it for this special segment brought to you by Google. Lots to be excited about when it comes to AI and we cannot wait to see what Google is working on to make AI work for everyone across the UK.
30:32 Rory Stewart? Okay, so this is a question that's coming from Nicole and the question is, why has there been so little coverage of Keir Starmer's speech? What was in that speech? What more could he have done to land this? Wasn't this supposed to be the famous reset where he was sending out his missions? And Alistair, tell us what you might have done if you'd been a number 10 to try to land it more clearly.
30:54 Alastair Campbell? I think that was a question from Rory. I think you took a question and then just sort of built in your... I'm trying to find that question in the question. I can't see it anywhere. By the way, I must complain about the BBC. Not one of my usual rants, but so as you know, Question Time is recorded a couple of hours before it goes out. So it was the first issue raised when I was on Question Time in Lincoln last week. And at one point Fiona Bruce, for whom I have a lot of time, by the way, I don't join in all the Fiona Bruce patching. She said, so Alistair, we've had three foundations, five missions, six of this.
31:33 Alastair Campbell? And now we've got these five or six or seven milestones, which Nigel Farage calls them millstones. She sort of said, it wouldn't have happened in your day. And I did a kind of, I just sort of sighed and let out a little kind of nothing. And they used it on the 10 o'clock news.
31:51 Rory Stewart? Oh.
31:51 Alastair Campbell? Of my reaction. So not allowing me to do my tribal defence, Rory.
31:56 Rory Stewart? Oh no.
31:57 Alastair Campbell? Very annoying.
31:58 Rory Stewart? For the sake of argument, let's give you a very, very short time for your tribal defence. Give us the defence.
32:03 Alastair Campbell? And tell you what I really think.
32:05 Rory Stewart? Well, exactly. And then tell us what could be done better to get around this problem.
32:08 Alastair Campbell? Tribal defence would be that there has been so much going on in and around the government, in and around the world, that the sense of those first weeks where the government was absolutely clear about its overall strategy hasn't really landed. And this was his attempt to sort of land it and make sure this is what we are doing. These are the missions. These are the things by which you want to be judged, judged by them. Now we're going to get on with it. Now, I'm not wholly convinced of that. And your point about why there's not been that much, there was a huge amount of coverage on the day, by the way, huge.
32:43 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
32:43 Alastair Campbell? Led the news all day, pretty much.
32:45 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
32:45 Alastair Campbell? Covered live on all the news channels. Wall of cynicism across the media next day. I was thinking more that come the weekend, it was almost as if it hadn't happened.
32:55 Rory Stewart? That is a sort of an issue, isn't it? Because I do think if you were thinking about strategic comms, yes, of course, it's amazing to dominate the coverage on the day. But it's the longer burn that matters in terms of the public remembering. I mean, what would worry me is if you and I were to ask an audience in three weeks' time, how clear a memory would they have had? And what is it that makes the difference between comms that dominate the news on a day and comms that really sinks into the public imagination? So they think, okay, Labour's got a plan, Labour's got a mission, and I can tell you what it is.
33:31 Alastair Campbell? That is a very, very fair point. And look, I think it is hard in the modern age because of social media, cynicism, lack, kind of just a general anti-politics mood. But I think in a way, you really have to work at what is it you're saying that relates to what you've said before and what you're doing into the future.
33:50 Rory Stewart? Yeah, illustrate, illustrate in this case.
33:52 Alastair Campbell? I think Yostam is somebody who finds it irritating that people like me talk about narrative, talk about the importance of narrative.
34:00 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
34:00 Alastair Campbell? He would argue, politics and government isn't about narrative, it's about doing stuff and fixing stuff. Both things are true. But if you're just saying you're doing things and you're fixing stuff, there's a real danger that you come over as being a bit technocratic. And leadership ultimately isn't about technocratic stuff, it's about signalling where you're going and then showing and above all, affecting in people's lives the changes that you've been talking about. So if you come along and say, I mean, I actually think the missions, we've talked about the missions before, I think the missions are a perfectly good strategic way to approach the government, but they haven't landed. Why haven't they landed?
34:42 Alastair Campbell? Because there hasn't been that sense of consistent drumbeat of the same things being said and done again and again. So the minute you allow your opponents to talk about it being a reset.
34:53 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
34:54 Alastair Campbell? Essentially, you're saying, well, okay, this is what we're trying to do, but we haven't quite landed it yet.
34:58 Rory Stewart? Got you. And you're also almost saying that you're not doing the same stuff that you were doing before and it loses the sense of a single continuity.
35:04 Alastair Campbell? One of the points I made on, I can't remember whether I made it with you or on Question Time, but I'll make it again because I think it's really important Labour understand this. This is the message from what's happened in America, it's the message about this thing about incumbency, it's the message about what's happening to Sholz and Albanese, two very similar left of centre leaders who have done some good things well, but are just not getting credit, but getting loads of blame for the stuff that's not, they're not doing well. In the modern age, you have to do even more than deliver. The delivery is what the public say, well, that's what you're there for.
35:39 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
35:40 Alastair Campbell? You said you were going to do that, so you've done that. We want more than that.
35:42 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
35:43 Alastair Campbell? We also want leadership. We want to know what song we're meant to be singing with you.
35:47 Rory Stewart? I'm often attacked at the moment for being too consensual, probably because I'm always accused in fact of being intimidated by you, Alistair, and not being.
35:55 Alastair Campbell? No, brainwashed.
35:56 Rory Stewart? Brainwashed and not being brutal enough about Labour. So here, to remind people, Keir Starmer's net popularity rating at the moment is minus 38. At this period, Tony Blair's, this long after the election, was about plus 60. This is fantastically unpopular. It's not far off how unpopular Liz Truss was. And, you know, I saw Keir Starmer on Wednesday and I was struck by how relaxed he was, how engaged he was, how graceful. I've seen a number of Labour ministers this week, they seem pretty chipper and feeling good about themselves, but I'm afraid you're right that. There's a real problem out there which they're not quite picking up on, which is
36:39 Rory Stewart? loss of the public is in danger of being seriously uninspired. And the problems that we face in our society require such radical solutions that just doing the job well and seriously and hoping that that'll be enough won't work.
36:57 Alastair Campbell? I presume you saw him at the state banquet?
37:00 Rory Stewart? I did indeed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we've got a question on this.
37:02 Alastair Campbell? Just sorry, just will you leave that, Rory?
37:04 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
37:04 Alastair Campbell? It's interesting though, you noticed his temperament.
37:07 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
37:07 Alastair Campbell? I do think his temperament is incredibly important in this. He knows a lot of people out there are a bit pissed off. He reads the numbers. He knows that his popularity ratings have kind of plummeted.
37:16 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
37:16 Alastair Campbell? But it doesn't seem to be getting to him in a way that would make him struggle even more. Now, that's a good thing. I'll tell you what I think is a bad thing. I'm reading far too much in the coverage of the government, the extent to which what they're doing, and that speech in particular, is an electoral strategy for the next time around. They've got to watch that because the truth is, there are new governments still. It might feel like they've been there for a long time. So the focus has got to be, rightly, this is what Keir Starmer does focus on, fixing the problems.
37:52 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
37:53 Alastair Campbell? But it should be about fixing the problems because this is the Britain we're trying to create, not fixing the problems, otherwise we won't win the next election.
38:01 Rory Stewart? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And characteristically, when we spoke, and I hope he doesn't mind me saying this, when I said, you know, that the things that he was doing, that I admired that he was doing, his immediate answer is, yeah, well, we've got a lot of problems to fix. So there is the past thing, which I think is probably important for them politically, which is to register what the Tories screwed up. But there's also the future thing. What's the vision of the country? Listen, we did have some questions on the Catterley banquet. I went to the state banquet. And for people who don't follow this stuff, you will have done this too. It's an amazing event where if there's a state visit, we're ahead of state visits, Britain, you'll see all the flags going down. The Mal, this is what Donald Trump did in 2019 when I was in the Cabinet.
38:44 Rory Stewart? And then the State Banquet is held in Buckingham Palace. And it's a thing where you all turn up in white tie and tails. And actually, Keir Starmer was looking very smart, relaxed in this quite kind of formal 19th century costume. And the state guests were held at one end of the table. It's very, very, very lavish. The King welcomed the Emir with some Arabic and he pushed on with some pretty difficult Arabic pronunciation. And it was really useful afterwards because I think what people don't get so much is that you've got an hour before the event and actually an hour and a half after in small groups,
39:26 Rory Stewart? where you're able to talk to the Katri Prime Minister, the Emir, and where senior British officials, the Chief of Defence Staff, the Head of our Intelligence Services, the Head of the Foreign Office, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, are able to do quite detailed informal conversations. Ed Miliband was there talking about energy and climate change. Get into the nubba stuff. Now, the criticism, of course, is that, you know, why are we welcoming Qatar? We've also had a question from Daniel Nichol, which, and this may be the moment to flip around to you. This week, Prince William Croesus of the Earthshot Prize had a warm and friendly meeting with Donald Trump. As a year five primary school teacher of children who care deeply about the climate, how on earth am I meant to teach them to stand up to bullies and bullying behaviours?
40:11 Rory Stewart? Whilst world leaders pussyfoot around Trump, why aren't we calling Trump out for his othering populist climate destroying rhetoric? So I spoke briefly to the Prince Wales before he went. So I was aware that this was happening. And my view, of course, is strongly supportive of what Prince William's doing. I think it's incredibly important. That we keep links with the United States and in some ways, the royal family doing it can provide some interesting alternative cover for the government. It can be less embarrassing, less high profile than the prime minister engaging. And I certainly don't think it makes sense for the royal family to be the people mounting big public political criticisms
40:54 Rory Stewart? of people. I think that's something more for politicians. But anyway, over to you.
40:57 Alastair Campbell? Although I remember one very, very, very tricky state visit when we were in power, which was China. Zhang Zemin came and your friend, the king, who was then the Prince of Wales, was very, very clear that he was not going to get involved. So they can make choices. I think you're right. I mean, in fact, one of the questions on Question Time was how should the new government handle Donald Trump? And of course, Nigel Farage was full of it. I did make the point that, you know, I think most British people wish that Trump wasn't president, but he is. And the British government has to engage and deal with him. It's certainly not a job of the Prince of Wales to call him out on policy.
41:40 Alastair Campbell? And I think you're right. I think that in terms of our, you know, you saw that with the way that Trump talks about. Trump basically sees himself as a monarch.
41:48 Rory Stewart? Yes.
41:48 Alastair Campbell? When he's sitting down with Keir Starmer or Olof Scholz, he doesn't think he's dealing with his equal.
41:55 Rory Stewart? Right.
41:55 Alastair Campbell? When he's sitting down with the Queen, when she was alive, or he's sitting down with the King. And so, and Prince William is like a sort of, he's somewhere between the King and the Prime Minister.
42:05 Rory Stewart? Yeah. Well, Trump's also incredibly interested in celebrity, isn't he? And of course, the other thing is that our royal family is incredibly famous in the US.
42:11 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. And also, he loves the idea that these are people that you don't really criticize because he wants to be one of those as well. But I think the, and interestingly enough, I was talking to somebody in the Qatari government a few months before our election, who was asking me whether I thought the Labour government, if and when it came in, would want to engage with Qatar, or just to make the issue of human rights, workers' rights and so forth, a big problem between them, as it were. And I said, well, I think that what's going to happen. Is that if you get a Labour government, Labour government knows that it's going to have to, if his number one mission is growing the economy, it's going to have to appeal to countries like Qatar to get engaged and to get involved in foreign direct investment
42:54 Alastair Campbell? and so forth. And that is, I guess, part of the reason why the state visit went in the way that it did. It was very much signalling that approach.
43:02 Rory Stewart? It's also interesting, the ways in which British soft power works. So the Emir of Qatar went to school in England, went to Harrow. He also, like many of the Qataris I was talking to, had been to Santos, to our military academy. And that's true for a lot of the monarchs in the Gulf. Interestingly, the very most senior people both mentioned to me that they'd been listening to the podcast. I mean, that's obviously, it's sort of ridiculous boast on my behalf, but it's just a sort of example, I suppose, more of the way in which Britain, English language media continues to keep us quite central to people's awareness in a way that may not be true even for very major economies like Germany. All right, serious question towards the end, and maybe you can just finish with a short, more jolly
43:46 Rory Stewart? one. Yasmin, I'd like to hear thoughts on Putin's current position in relation to Assad after personally granting him asylum. Also, what's it like to be an exiled dictator?
43:55 Alastair Campbell? You asked that question as though I have an exiled dictator and I'll be able to explain that.
44:02 Rory Stewart? Yeah, well, you are in France, and Matt Clyer is a friend of yours.
44:05 Alastair Campbell? Well, I don't think I'm in exile. I'm in a place from which our country has been exiled by one of the most stupid decisions any country's ever taken. Look, I think the Putin situation is fascinating on so many levels because the Russian state media has said that Putin personally granted this decision that Assad should be given asylum in Russia. I said to you when we did the emergency episode on Sunday that I could sense something was going on because of the way Lavrov was talking. The deal had already, obviously, already been done. He was basically en route as that discussion was going on. And I don't know where Assad is. I imagine that they'll have some sort of luxury set up for them. They'll be following what's going on in back in Syria. Assad will
44:49 Alastair Campbell? still be worried because his survival now totally depends on Putin's survival. And whenever a dictator like this falls, other dictators around the world either
45:00 Alastair Campbell? Double down because they think, oh, well, better make sure that doesn't happen to me. Or they just get a little bit worried. So they're, you know, Assad and his wife and whichever inner circle are with them, got three kids in their twenties. So they're there. We don't know where, we don't know how they're going to live. They are unbelievably wealthy because like Putin, they've stashed money all around the world. So they won't have any sort of financial worries, but they'll have political worries. And let's be frank, this is a defeat they never thought was going to come.
45:28 Rory Stewart? Yeah. And of course, as Guy Burgess and Kim Philby, our great spies film when they went to Moscow, the weather's not that great if you come from the Syrian Mediterranean and you find yourself suddenly stuck in Moscow through the winter. So we're pretty miserable at it. We're just wondering whether it ever really ends well for dictators. It can be pretty grim and mad, but it's even worse if they won't take you. Remember famously, there was a great controversy about the fact the British royal family panicked in 1916, 17 and signaled that they wouldn't take the Romanov family, the Tsars of Russia, who were then killed by the revolutionaries.
46:01 Alastair Campbell? We're watching this German series at the moment, Die Kaiserin, which is about Empress Elizabeth in Austria.
46:06 Rory Stewart? Oh, it's brilliant.
46:07 Alastair Campbell? It's absolutely.
46:08 Rory Stewart? I've been watching it dubbed in English.
46:09 Alastair Campbell? Oh, it's absolutely brilliant. Yeah.
46:11 Rory Stewart? On Netflix.
46:12 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, it's brilliant. Now, but final point on the Assad's, Rory. I mentioned the other day about this big profile that Vogue magazine did. It really was awful. The headline was the rose in the desert. And it was a real sort of puff job. But eventually, after this sort of outcry, this is one of my favorite ever statements Vogue said, this is when they took the article down from their website.
46:34 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
46:34 Alastair Campbell? As the terrible events of the past year and a half unfolded in Syria, it's become clear that Syria's priorities and values are at odds with those of Vogue.
46:45 Rory Stewart? Very good.
46:46 Alastair Campbell? My final question, I'm going to take this one for myself, Rory. What's the name of your K drama that you're saying is so brilliant?
46:53 Rory Stewart? So it's called Night Flower. And if you want a drama set in late medieval Korea about a martial arts doing widow escaping from her mother-in-law to bring justice to the streets of Josun, Korea, Night Flower.
47:08 Alastair Campbell? Excellent. And if you want something German about an Austrian empress, Die Kaiserin.
47:14 Rory Stewart? On Netflix as The Empress.
47:16 Alastair Campbell? That's a good way to end with another plug for Angela Merkel, who's not Austrian, but does speak German.
47:20 Rory Stewart? Exactly. Very good. Listen to Angela Merkel. Thank you, Alison. Bye bye.
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