442. Question Time: Trump's Plot To Cancel The Midterms

Is Trump edging the U. S. toward military rule? Can Gaza survive famine amid total collapse? Will Ukraine resist Putin if Western backing falters? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus: Start your FREE TRIAL at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, an exclusive members’ newsletter, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away FREE TRIP+ membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP+ gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit ⁠https://www.fuseenergy.com/politics⁠ ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith Assistant Producer: India Dunkley, Evan Green, Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:00Alastair Campbell?

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• 2:01Rory Stewart?

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• 2:54Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:58Alastair Campbell?

  And with me Alastair Campbell. And Rory, I think we did, that must be the first time in a long time that we got through a main episode without talking about Trump or Israel. We're going to do both in Question Time. Let's start with Trump. John Nixon, Trip Plus member from More than. If it's true that Trump is sending the military into blue states, Democrat states like Illinois, is it also conceivable that he plans to incite such civil disobedience that he can claim a national crisis, cancel the midterms on the basis of preventing civil war and repeat for the 2028 election? We've got a lot of questions on this sort of theme.

• 3:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's absolutely stunning. I mean, basically what we're seeing now is stuff that would have been unimaginable a few months ago in the way that Trump is using the military. I mean, traditionally, the military is only deployed into civilian contexts in the most extreme situations conceivable. He's now making it almost the norm for the National Guard, who are really, you know, the equivalents of the Territorial Army. In fact, a much better armed, much more full time version of the UK Territorial Army, people who deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan are now being deployed into Washington DC, deployed into California, and now the story is they're going to be deployed into Chicago

• 4:14Rory Stewart?

  in order to deal with what he calls an epidemic of crime. And basically, what was pumping up? Homeland Security and deploying the National Guard in this way. Trump is essentially creating a militarized state. And part of this is just about intimidating opponents. I mean, part of it is, you know, he raided John Bolton, who was his national security advisor and who's become a prominent critic, sent people into his home and you can see this, I was talking to American lawyers who, over the last five months, I've been shocked at how people I knew who were very critical of Trump are now beginning to be very careful what they say about him because they're seeing what's happening to people, real people in their careers, universities is another example, anyway, over to you.

• 4:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I mean, the, just to go through some of the things in, in recent days that sort of play to this theme. So they, they sacked the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Why? Because he contradicted Trump's contention that Iran's nuclear sites have been obliterated. They fired now, I think, two dozen law enforcement investigators who were involved in investigating January the sixth. They've sacked the director of dance programming at the John F Kennedy Center for being too woke. And then here's another one, Rory, which relates to the discussions we've been having about energy. They've ordered that all construction stops on revolution wind.

• 5:38Alastair Campbell?

  And a four billion wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island is already almost built.

• 5:45Alastair Campbell?

  And that, that is a classic example of doing something because I can and because it speaks to what I think. And I think this whole thing about, you know, this is about making people feel that they can't speak out against something that is non-Trumpian. And one of the most extraordinary sides this week was, I think it was Hexeth Vance and Stephen Miller being heckled, that my favorite heckle was a guy shouting out, "Did you shag the couch, Vance?" I thought, I quite liked that one. But Miller, I mean, the guy is just, he's not even a kind of politician, he's, he's an advisor. It would have been like me when I was working in Number Ten, standing up. And in his case, saying that we've got all these ninety year old hippies protesting

• 6:30Alastair Campbell?

  against what we're doing, they don't belong here. These were people who were protesting against the National Guard stuff in Washington. So I think it's very hard to say these are not, they're more than creeping signs of authoritarianism, they are very powerful signs of authoritarianism.

• 6:45Rory Stewart?

  Well, John Nixon's question on whether he might cancel the midterms on the basis of preventing civil war, I think it's very worth thinking now about all the different ways in which Trump can play with the midterms and use intimidation of the military to do that. So he could say, unfortunately, we can't hold elections in these strong democratic voting states because there's too much of a crime wave. He could say, he could refuse to certify. And of course, the majority of his team still insists he won the 2020 elections. But I think what he's proving is this line that Bannon produces again and again, which is, we're not afraid, we'll do anything, and we sense that our opponents are afraid.

• 7:29Rory Stewart?

  Great speech, there's a shout out before we move on to the next question to Pritzker, the governor of Illinois. I don't know whether you caught his

• 7:35Alastair Campbell?

  It did, yeah.

• 7:36Rory Stewart?

  Incredible response. But the bit that struck me most, which I think you'd like, is, to the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country, I'm asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see, where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president's actions. And that's something you say a lot about the British press, but this idea that there are always two sides to the story, or reducing everything to who's up and who's down, and distracting people from what's really going

• 8:19Rory Stewart?

  on. Because as Pritzker points out, it's putting the National Guard in an impossible situation. They have to deploy because they could be court martialed if they don't. But there are Republican governors in other states talking about sending their National Guards from their states to Illinois. Which is really testing the boundaries of the US federal settlement.

• 8:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I think it's horrific and getting ever more so. And he did one of his sort of ramble weave press conferences yesterday, which you just, I didn't watch the whole thing, but just the clips of it were absolutely mind blown. We're now up to 10 wars that he's that he's solved. He's decided six was boring, seven was boring, he's now solved 10, hasn't explained yet what they are.

• 9:00Rory Stewart?

  Well, presumably the next war will be the civil war in the United States, which, I mean, his his his secret, isn't it, is that basically to encourage wars and then claim that he's solved them by giving in to the aggressor.

• 9:09Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. Gaza, Martin West, famine in Gaza, can the international community create a group of the willing to provide Gaza with food trucks from the land borders? Would Israel bomb the trucks? Do you see a way out of this horror? They wouldn't bomb the trucks necessarily, but I think there's no doubt that they have been pretty active in making sure that trucks don't get through. I mean, this has been a pretty horrific week on the famine front. So there's the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification IPC, which is backed by the United Nations. It's the world's leading monitor of hunger. And they have these three key indicators and you have to meet two of them to, for them to say that famine is taking place.

• 9:54Alastair Campbell?

  Starvation, at least one in five households facing extreme shortage in food. Malnutrition, roughly one in three children or more acutely malnourished. Mortality, at least two in every 10,000 people dying daily because of outright starvation or the combination of malnutrition and disease. So they have decided that is happening. The UN Human Rights Chief Volker Tuak has reminded us that it's a war crime to use starvation as a method of warfare. And yet, of course, the Israeli line remains that this is all down to Hamas and it's all down to the failings of the international community and blah, blah, blah.

• 10:33Rory Stewart?

  Just a sort of short one on that, as somebody who was a development minister, this IPC classification is a very, very serious international process with a lot of international NGOs involved and usually the IPC is accused of being too cautious. But definitely, if you take it back in the day when I was the DIF Minister, if a official came in and said, "An IPC V classification, which is the most serious in the world, has been declared in Somalia, or South Sudan, or Congo, or Ethiopia, or Yemen," that is, would be the immediate trigger for the UK government suddenly announcing a massive, hundreds of millions of pounds contribution to a big UN fund on dealing with famine.

• 11:15Rory Stewart?

  And for that to happen in what's basically a middle-income country, I mean, there's other places I've described, some of the poorest countries in the world, but Gaza before October the 7th was a country with one of the highest literacy rates in the world. It was a middle-income country with people living lives very similar to what you would have seen in a lot of Southern Europe, the Middle East. To trip that into famine is extraordinary. And for the IPC to call it, as you rightly say, is very extreme.

• 11:47Alastair Campbell?

  And when you dig into the detail of the reports, I mean, obviously, there's a lot of focus on death, there's a lot of focus on pictures of, you know, of children with their bones sticking out and what have you. But get this, fishing facilities destroyed, 90% of commercial or industrial assets required for any kind of food production destroyed, 62% of the road network destroyed, 82% of agricultural wells destroyed as of April 2025, 71% of greenhouses destroyed, 90% of cropland destroyed. As of June 25, 26%

• 12:26Alastair Campbell?

  of sheep have survived, 34% of goats, 3.8% of cattle, 1.4% of poultry. So when you read stats like that, you're basically seeing the absolute breakdown of an ecosystem that is meant to keep people alive.

• 12:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And let's just point out what's hidden behind those figures because Israeli journalists have now got hold of documents from the Israeli army that suggests that the Israeli army itself is acknowledging the very, very high number of civilians that are being killed, that this isn't a question of everybody being killed being Hamas. But the story on the killing of civilians, of course, is that they're used as human shields by Hamas. To put it very bluntly, that is not true of sheep. And it's very, very difficult to understand what the explanation is for the death of that number of livestock and the erosion of that amount of agricultural land, unless it's a deliberate policy, I'm afraid, or a very, very odd policy of

• 13:27Rory Stewart?

  targeting munitions when you end up with that kind of destruction. And again, the water is electricity provided from Israel to run desalination plants in Gaza directly controlled by Israel when the water is turned off.

• 13:40Alastair Campbell?

  Ninety-six percent of people report moderate to severe water insecurity. Municipal water production is twenty-eight percent of what it was in twenty twenty-three. Seventy-eight percent have lack of access to sufficient required toilet use. Eighty percent, no income, no savings. During July, this is July, and things have got a lot worse since, forty-three percent of children had diarrhea, fifty-eight percent reported fever, sixteen percent had vomiting episodes, twenty-five percent acute respiratory episodes, and forty-nine percent of children had skin conditions. I mean, this is off the scale. It is man-made, and it can be addressed by the international community. But if Israel doesn't let people in, they don't let them in.

• 14:25Rory Stewart?

  The final thing, which I think you've said in the past, worth re-emphasizing, is that that then contributes to so many other problems. So much more difficult to survive surgery if you're malnourished, much more difficult to get vaccines to work if you're malnourished. So the starvation then will contribute to a whole series of other very, very extreme life-threatening conditions facing people in Gaza. A question from Tom McKeown, who is a TripPlus member from Lymington. Assuming that Putin will continue to sacrifice men and materials until he's able to claim victory against Ukraine, do you think that he would be able to hold such a huge territory populated

• 15:06Rory Stewart?

  by a determinedly anti-Russian population? And if not, what then?

• 15:12Alastair Campbell?

  When you think about how many words we and everybody else devoted to what happened at the meeting in Alaska and then the meeting with European leaders in the White House. Um. I mean, has there been any progress on the political front? None that I've seen.

• 15:28Rory Stewart?

  I think broadly speaking, that was our sense, which is that the only policy Trump really had was hoping that by conceding everything he could to Putin, that that would bring an an end to the war. There was no real sense of negotiation. I'm afraid this is, you know, returning to my boring metaphor that the Europeans feel all the time, so they're just sticking their finger in the dike, that the basic direction of Trump is to get behind Putin and sell Zelensky down the river. And the Europeans have spent months hoping that they can sort of stop that from happening. But we've had revelations now from the Washington Post confirming that the Americans prevented Ukraine from using its attacker missiles and indeed from using British Storm Shadow missiles to fire

• 16:13Rory Stewart?

  into Russian territory in hoping that by reducing attacks on Russia, they would encourage Putin to stop. But Putin isn't going to stop because he feels he's got momentum. He doesn't feel he has any incentive to stop. There's no leverage that Trump has over Putin and increasingly no leverage he has over Zelensky. On the question though, and I'd love to hear a little bit about Independence Day and your reflections on that and your reflections on North Korea as well. But on the technical question, I think Putin's hope is to take control of the Donbass. He hasn't at the moment been talking about permanent occupation of Western Ukraine. If he attempted that, that would be a complete nightmare. I mean, that would be another Afghanistan for the Russians because he would be facing

• 16:57Rory Stewart?

  a continual insurgency from profoundly anti-Russian population against Western Ukraine.

• 17:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I thought the Independence Day was profoundly moving. I thought his speech was I thought it was very nice that he wore a suit. It was a more traditional suit than the one that J D Vance told him he ought to wear. Um. I thought it was great that Mark Carney was there and I had an exchange with Mark Carney last night. He said he found it one of the most poignant. Things that he's done in his entire life, never mind since he became prime minister. But I think there's an there's an understanding that, you know, Zelensky is, as you've said in your radio series on heroes, I think he is the closest we've got to a sort of modern day political hero. And he's a very, very impressive guy. I think the the fallout in

• 17:47Alastair Campbell?

  a way from the whole sort of fuss that there was last week with with Trump and Putin, and then the European leaders is we are pretty much back where we were. And then a lot of this is is about whether Zelensky can maintain the levels of political support. And I think he's, I think he does. This is what's so remarkable about it. If you read Mark Carney's speech, you know, that was somebody who is not remotely moving away from a position of absolutely solid, solid support. The Kim Jong-un thing that you mentioned was fascinating. I saw this on Der Spiegel. I don't know whether it got much coverage in the UK, but have they have the North Koreans admitted that they've been sort of sending lots and lots and lots of soldiers to help the Russians? Because this was-

• 18:29Rory Stewart?

  Well, initially, it was initially it was a secret. Initially, it was broken by some very courageous journalists. I think it's no longer a secret, but initially it was a real surprise for people. Yeah.

• 18:37Alastair Campbell?

  But what this was, and we should put it in the newsletter, because it's a pretty remarkable piece of film of it was from Korean, North Korean state television covering live, so we were told, the return of troops, North Korean troops who had been killed fighting for Russia against Ukraine. Now, they've now said they're going to send another another 30,000, but he put medals, they had pictures of all the soldiers who'd been killed. I didn't, I couldn't get the number, but there's a lot of them. And he was pinning medals to the pictures. He was hugging the children of these these soldiers. And then he was crying. Um, and I don't know whether that was, you know, I don't imagine anything gets put

• 19:21Alastair Campbell?

  out on the media without them wanting it to be put out in the media. Um, but he obviously felt that this was a, an appropriate response to seeing these fallen soldiers and their bereaved families. And he was, he was literally sort of, you know, weeping as he, as he watched these coffins come off the plane.

• 19:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, you very kindly did a little plug. Um, so the last episode of my five part BBC series on heroes and, and this one focuses on Zelensky goes out on Monday, nine AM in the UK. Um, as, as one says, you can catch up on BBC Sounds, but it's, it's been really interesting getting responses on trying to work out who our heroes are today. You know, what do we make of Trump? What do we make of Musk? Of course dresses like a superhero? Is Zelensky really a hero? You know, people now talking about corruption allegations and in Ukraine and what does it mean to be a, a modern hero? But I wanted to finish with one last question about one of our mutual heroes, Mark Carney. Um, there seems to be

• 20:22Rory Stewart?

  a debate in Canadian foreign policy about whether they should focus, for example, on Ukraine and Hawaii, or whether they should continue to be a big international convenor going around with international coalitions. And I favor the latter. I think Mark Carney's in a very interesting position. He's got the credibility and the international leadership. And I think at a time of Trump, we desperately need Canada to help form these international coalitions with UK, Europe, South Korea, Japan, in a way that probably wasn't true in the past. And it would be a great pity if Canada said, instead of, you know, doing all this international stuff, we're just going to knuckle down and focus on a couple of places.

• 21:05Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think the only thing I'd say about that, he, he was the world leader that was there in, in Ukraine for their Independence Day. I, I think he's very much of an internationalist mindset. And I think he's obviously top of his agenda. Most of the time is going to be how he manages this sort of big, the big bear next door. Um, but no, I think he's, I think he is absolutely stepping up to the mark.

• 21:27Rory Stewart?

  And it'd be lovely to see him continuing what he's doing. And, and, you know, as I said, we, it would have been lovely to see Matt Cross, Starmer and Carney together doing their announcement on, on Palestine. It would be great now to see Carney. Really pushing because I think that there isn't necessarily the international leadership there. And I think if Canada used to beat itself up a little bit a few years ago because it sort of thought that it was just sort of meekly going along behind a Western consensus, it now can really lead the Western consensus.

• 21:56Alastair Campbell?

  Agreed. Right, let's take a break and then we'll come to walk back another hugely consequential leader that you're always very nice about, that's Ed Davey.

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• 23:54Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 23:58Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell.

• 24:00Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy.

• 24:02Alastair Campbell?

  And we're talking about how global politics has a direct link into the energy that you're using and the cost of the energy inside British homes. Wars and rivalries may feel very remote, but when Russia squeezes pipelines or China tightens supply chains, the ripple effect can be on your heating bill.

• 24:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, we've had a great question from Kate Maddox from Brighton. Are we just too dependent on imports? And is that why global tensions hit our energy bills so hard? I mean, definitely true, we're very dependent on imports. I mean, it is pretty amazing, the story of energy and geopolitics. And people remember that 1973, the Arab Israeli war drove up oil prices fourfold. And if you look at the kind of stuff we're talking about on the podcast, it can all push in very different directions. So for example, if Trump's tariffs go wrong, we could end up with a situation in which global demand drops and the oil price drops. If on the other hand, there are sanctions on Iran and Iran produces a million fewer barrels a day, have I got fewer or less there, Alistair?

• 25:04Alastair Campbell?

  Fewer, that's fine.

• 25:05Rory Stewart?

  Fewer, thank you, yeah. Then the price could go up again. And then there's other questions. Are we going to be able to develop our own domestic supply? There was an article by my old sparring partner, John Redwood, in The Telegraph today. I think the combination of John Redwood and The Telegraph can give you a bit of a passing bit.

• 25:23Alastair Campbell?

  I did see it trailed on the front page. I can't pretend that I picked it up to read it.

• 25:27Rory Stewart?

  Well, he's pointed out that the government is really struggling to sell licenses for offshore wind at the moment. In its latest auction, it had offered £73 a megawatt hour and couldn't get anyone to buy it. It's now up to £113 a megawatt hour and it's still struggling to get people to come in because some of the policy uncertainty and planning uncertainty means it's quite difficult. Anyway, any last thoughts from you on geopolitics?

• 25:51Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I think it's a great question and it's true that this stuff has a direct impact on oil prices, the one that people always go to. But, you know, we regularly get asked by people, you know, why can't Europe just pull the plug on all Russian energy? And you know, the honest straightforward answer is that, you know, we've got to keep the lights on. So this stuff really matters. I think we're going to see it matter more because the the conflict in Russia and Ukraine is going to continue to be a factor. We've got rivalry between China and America, which is influencing supply chains and liquid natural gas flows. And the energy market, you know, you and I both talk to sort of

• 26:33Alastair Campbell?

  people who work in these kind of risk assessment places and political consultances. They now look at energy flows every bit as closely as they look at the the politics of a country. So this stuff really, really matters.

• 26:47Rory Stewart?

  Because in Britain, we have this very liberalised system, changes in global energy prices hit very, very directly into your bills. So they can fluctuate pretty quickly, which of course brings us back to our sponsor, Fuse Energy.

• 27:01Alastair Campbell?

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• 27:10Rory Stewart?

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• 27:18Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, Roy, let's listen, let's get back to the Lib Dems because we've talked about them the last couple of weeks. And last week, when you were sort of saying that they never say anything terribly interesting and nothing that goes through, we said to them, if any of the Lib Dem team were listening, could they send us some of the things that Ed Davey has said and done in recent weeks and months? And they did. Speeches, big conference speech that sort of set out the whole agenda, one on Europe, one on the future of the economy, article on Brexit, saying that Starmer must find the courage to change course. So what did you make of them? And have you shifted your view at all?

• 27:53Rory Stewart?

  Well, look, I think some of them are good speeches. Some of them are serious good speeches. I really very strongly in favour of his idea that we should join the European Union Customs Union. I'm sorry, he didn't make more of that. In the election campaign, they'll probably say they they made a certain amount about it. But I absolutely believe, and I think you do too, that that's a critical part of restoring confidence in the UK and would make a lot of difference to trade. I think his policy on Palestine was very good, and that was a very good speech. I'm much more sceptical, I'm afraid, about him on the economy. Good that he's speaking up for free trade, but really the speech, which is, you know,

• 28:36Rory Stewart?

  the importance of education and training is something we've always emphasised as Liberal Democrats. Or another speech, which I'm afraid I I sent you, which I was slightly, I'm sorry that I I've put on a voice where I'm being mean to him, aren't I?

• 28:48Alastair Campbell?

  You are, yeah. You've got the Christian Schmidt yesterday and Ed Davies today. I don't know.

• 28:54Rory Stewart?

  Here it is. He's got a slight tendency to go for sort of grand rhetoric and then slightly pathetic final sentence. So because Donald Trump is not only betraying Ukraine, it's not only their sovereignty he's selling out, it's our security, the security of Europe, the security of our United Kingdom, and that is unforgivable.

• 29:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but Roy, you read it in a certain way. I could deliver that in a way that you roll and you roll and you roll, and that is unforgivable. Round and applause.

• 29:28Rory Stewart?

  Much better.

• 29:29Alastair Campbell?

  I thought his, I mean, conference speeches are very, very, they're hard gigs. And I thought the conference speech they sent was good. I thought his stuff on Brexit was good. I, this goes back to a point that we were making yesterday in the main podcast. It is absurd. So yesterday, the BBC News, I got off the plane, I get in the car, I'm having a look at sort of some of the websites, BBC News, one of the main headlines was Farage says immigration is a scourge. Tell me the newsworthy value of that. That is something that he said first. That's like, so if if Ed Davies said care is very important.

• 30:12Alastair Campbell?

  Would that get covered on the BBC? I don't think so. So I think there is a real problem with our, with, with, with the way the media view Farage and the way they view the other parties. They've got 72 MPs. Yes, they could do a better job. I think where they're caught, we, we talked a little bit about this last week. I think they're caught the whole time between local strategy and national strategy. Um, and maybe they need to find the best single issue that brings those two together. Because as you saw in the speech, he does have a very strong line on Trump. He does have very strong lines on Europe. But is that the thing that's going to bring a national and a local strategy together?

• 30:48Rory Stewart?

  It's so, so interesting because we, we're plugging the interview with Nicola Sturgeon. And the one time when she really sort of gets cross is when we suggest the Lib Dems to her. She really thinks that's the most sort of shocking idea. And, and it's, it's, it is something I'm afraid that traditionally as a Conservative and most of my Labour colleagues too, we, we like to grumble about the Lib Dems. There's a hilarious piece for real political geeks. Um, if you read Tim Shipman's account of Sam Jima trying to, my friend and former Conservative tried to defect to the Lib Dems during the 2019 election. And it was meant to be this big thing. They'd got this Conservative minister over and he was joining the Lib Dems and he was going to run. And, um, and the description of how the Lib Dem press

• 31:30Rory Stewart?

  team managed to destroy that moment is one of the funniest pages you'll ever read in your life. I mean, begins with them putting Sam Jima in a hotel, which he describes as being like something out of The Shining. I mean, kind of peeling walls, kind of crazy. And they then tried to creep him up through the fire exit and distract by using, I think it's somebody like Geert Verhofstadt or Franz Timmermans to make a speech, which they think is really going to attract the, the attention of the media while they slip Sam in through the back door. And by the time they've got Sam in, they've missed all the front pages, the newspapers, because they've got all the timing out. Just tell me honestly, I mean, why do you think? At a time when I believe there is a massive story to be told, you know,

• 32:14Rory Stewart?

  I'm afraid Rachel Reeves hasn't got a grip of the welfare budget. I think she's going to be in real trouble with the next budget. They haven't managed to deal with the criminal gangs on boats. There's a real story about not getting the growth that we want. Massive space, I think, for somebody to make a good, pretty technocratic argument for a different type of government. Why do the Lib Dems not fill that space? And why, when you're not endorsing a Davies book and I got you off camera, might you secretly agree that there's sometimes something a little disappointing about the Lib Dems?

• 32:47Alastair Campbell?

  No, listen, I've always been slightly of the Nicola Sturgeon view that their problem is that, you know, where it suits them, they sort of, they lean towards Labour style arguments and policies and where it suits them, they lean towards the Tories. What I'm suggesting is that they find something that sort of breaks through that. No, it's not that I, look, I voted Lib Dem once and that was a protest vote. Um, and I, and I, I'm, you know, I'm not a natural Lib Dem at all, isn't it? Clegg and Miriam regularly tell me because they say, you're not really liberal. Is their view of me. So, but I, I, I honestly do think, I, I think this media point is, is a fair one. I actually, if I were them, I'd, I'd make far more complaints about the way that our media culture has developed and the way that our media landscape is.

• 33:30Alastair Campbell?

  Is, I'll, I'll read you the message that I got from one of their team. He said, I know I've got a vested interest in making excuses for us not cutting through, but at a time when the far right control one of the biggest social media platforms, the BBC follow around Farage, waiting for him to say something mean about immigrants. The Conservatives are great fun for the media and the government is having a bit of a shocker. It's pretty hard to get noticed by saying progressive things, doing okay in opinion polls and doing very well in local elections. That's their complaint. I think they should find, they should keep complaining. There's nothing wrong with complaining about the way that our media is. I used to do plenty of that myself, but I think you have to have that bigger message and strategy that's cutting through. And I think that the closest he gets to it really is with the personal story, but that's not enough.

• 34:15Alastair Campbell?

  You've got to have a policy and an area that you identify with. And I think at the moment they're caught because they're doing Trump, they're doing Gaza, they're doing Europe, and then they've also, there's all this domestic stuff. If I were them, I'd pick one, max two and say, right, that is going to be our national story.

• 34:33Rory Stewart?

  Okay, well, let's keep coming back to it because I still think there's something difficult to explain to. Anybody really, which is why when we all feel that there's a, it was Jacob's question which he asked on the pod, why is it when we all feel there's a massive gaping hole in the centre of British politics and we all want an alternative to Farage Conservative and in my case, an alternative to Labour, do the Lib Dems not naturally occur?

• 34:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, no, it's fair.

• 35:00Rory Stewart?

  And it's been a problem since the 1920s. I mean, there is that space and I don't know what's what the problem is.

• 35:08Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Okay, well, we'll come back to it. But thank you for listening, Lib Dems, and thank you for sending us. At least you thought that there was a bit of substance in them. That's quite important. Here's one for you, Rory. Nuala O'Connor. I'd love to understand more about how politicians get their data before making big policy decisions. Having never myself been asked to take part in a government survey, I wonder how representative these really are.

• 35:31Rory Stewart?

  It's a big problem. The Office on National Statistics, which is the key to everything, and I guess the two biggest issues we've been talking about this week are probably immigration and the economy, I guess is where I was with the Lib Dems. We don't have good data. I mean, and when I say that, I mean, it's completely shocking. I mean, some of the government data has had to be removed and rejected something like seven or eight different times. And it's a problem in a whole series of ways. There's some very straightforward bits of problem. And one of them is that unlike most countries, you'll notice when you leave Heathrow, you don't go through a passport desk. So people don't actually know how many people are leaving the country. We don't have ID cards, all sorts of stuff.

• 36:15Rory Stewart?

  Secondly, I think there are also potentially problems around the UK census and how people respond, how much detail they respond. And there's another issue, which is that Scotland now runs a separate census from England, which causes on a different day, which causes other complications on people moving around. But I think the basic stuff, immigration economics, is the stuff where we really don't know. And we've had to continue to revise. I remember Afghans saying to me when the figure was, there were 30,000 Afghans in Britain. My Afghan friends were saying it's complete rubbish. We think there's 150,000, 200,000 in London alone. Thirdly, I think- Think as our economy becomes more complicated, I really felt this encumbrance that we didn't really know what was going on. It's a true in the Orkneys here. If you try to look at the economy of rural Britain particularly,

• 36:58Rory Stewart?

  everybody's got multiple jobs and a lot of these jobs are very difficult to categorize and nobody actually from the government's going around asking what anyone does. All we've got is sort of basic tax statistics. So you're in a situation where policymakers are making decisions without really knowing what's going on. And that's why I think we see a lot of the problems. You see these situations where the government will say we're going to put inheritance tax on farmers and they've done some treasury indication running through their figures. And they've convinced themselves it's going to affect almost nobody. And then the NFU will come out and say, well, this is insane. This affects almost all our members. And the government will say, well, it's not what our figures say. And why is this happening? Well, it's happening because something's gone really badly wrong with statistics and most of our

• 37:43Rory Stewart?

  policy is based on statistics.

• 37:45Alastair Campbell?

  Final question, Lucy Parker, Stratford-on-Avon. With the lineup for Strictly Come Dancing having now been announced, can either of you dance? Would either of you ever consider going on the show? Well, my answer is no to both. I'm a very, very bad dancer. I've been asked, God knows how many times to do it. And I see, I read that some bloke who's quotes famous, whatever that means in the modern age, for saying bosh a lot and being a friend of Nigel Farage is on this year's Strictly Come Dancing.

• 38:16Rory Stewart?

  And is now being endorsed by Dominic Cummings to be the new mayor of London and met J D Vance. There was this very odd meeting with J D Vance held in the Cotswolds where he got Dan Kruger along.

• 38:26Alastair Campbell?

  Is this all part of the BBC's getting with the anti-woke zeitgeist that we have to get somebody who's famous for saying bosh?

• 38:32Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's also something where we've got to be serious about how famous people become. I guess this is why Matt Hancock made these slightly embarrassing decisions to go on, what was it, Celebrity Jungle and S A S A U hard enough? Because people become really famous. I was talking to your friend of mine, Krishnaguru Murthy, when he went on Strictly and he said it was absolutely unbelievable. Once he'd gone on Strictly, he couldn't walk down a high street without being stopped and photographed by everybody. I love dancing, completely love dancing. You've been to one of my dancing parties.

• 39:03Alastair Campbell?

  I've seen you dancing with Theresa May.

• 39:05Rory Stewart?

  I see me dance at the Palladium on stage.

• 39:07Alastair Campbell?

  I have, where you were, you were channeling, what was it called? The Cheeky Chap, Max Miller, the Cheeky Chap.

• 39:12Rory Stewart?

  Max Miller, the Cheeky Chap, yeah. But yes, no, I'm not going on celebrity shows like that, no.

• 39:17Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I'd love to be able to dance. Um, I mean, I can dance like, you know, I used to do something called polygliding when I was a student, which was this sort of thing where you kind of bit northern souly, you move across. But I don't know, you just need the, are you, would you say you're a good dancer, Rory?

• 39:33Rory Stewart?

  I don't know about that, but I love it. I mean, I do a lot of it. And I think it may be, here's a completely, totally non-scientific theory. I wonder whether, because I'm not actually that musical, whether I'm not more taken with the beat. I'm very, very, I think I would have been a decent drummer. I could have been a kind of Ringo Starr figure, but I think maybe if you're very, very musical, you get very caught up with the complexity of music and you're missing.

• 39:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 39:56Rory Stewart?

  The basic movements.

• 39:57Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there we are. Yesterday you were Luka Modric, today you're Ringo Starr.

• 40:01Rory Stewart?

  That's it. That's it. Good. It's good. Marvelous.

• 40:05Rory Stewart?

  All the best looking, best looking celebrities in the world. That's it.

• 40:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. See you soon.

• 40:10Rory Stewart?

  See you soon. Bye bye.

• 40:11Alastair Campbell?

  Take it back.

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