Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 50. Question Time: King Charles III, Scottish accents, and left vs. right About this episode What's the true definition of right-wing and left-wing? Alastair and Rory debate what defines the two sides of the political spectrum, who their favourite comedians are, and why neither of them have a Scottish accent.
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Transcript 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/rustorspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustorspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
1:44 Rory Stewart? Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.
1:48 Alastair Campbell? And me, Alastair Campbell.
1:49 Rory Stewart? And Alistair, as usual, you've been doing your thousand things, right? You've been sitting there with a thousand bits of paper and bits of pencil. Come on, the question's gone then. What have you got for us?
1:58 Alastair Campbell? Normally, there are so many different subjects that get raised. It's very rare that we get one issue that dominates. But I'd say the question that is most asked by our listeners this week... boils down to why is Liz Truss accompanying Prince Charles on his tour of the capitals of the nations of the United Kingdom? And it is, this is sort of bringing back memories for me because when the Queen Mother died, we were involved in this extraordinary awful period where the right wing media ran a whole campaign pretending that Tony Blair was trying to, quote, "muscle in" on the funeral arrangements.
2:42 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
2:43 Alastair Campbell? And it was really, really horrific. It's one of the, I think it's the only time that actually I went to the Press Complaints Commission.
2:49 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
2:50 Alastair Campbell? And because it was untrue, obviously somebody was stirring it somewhere deep in the kind of establishment undergrowth. But, and yet this does, I'd love to know what the conversations were that led to anybody thinking this was a good idea.
3:03 Rory Stewart? Yeah, it's a, it's a very bad idea. I mean, so, you know, you may come from a Republican background, I'm a big monarchist, I'm a huge fan of a new king. King Charles is going to be a good, good king, but I think it's a very bad mistake for Liz Truss to be going on this tour. I don't understand why. I think it's incredibly important the monarchy is apolitical, and I don't really understand the justification for this at all. And instantly, I mean, I've, you know, as you say, this is a very old story. When I was running to be a Member of Parliament, then Prince Wales, Prince Charles, visited our programme in Afghanistan and our charity in Afghanistan. And I remember Gordon Brown complaining very, very strongly that he was being photographed with a Conservative MP who was standing for office at a, at a charity back in the day. So it's not a new issue.
3:48 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
3:49 Rory Stewart? I'm not sure why this has happened at all.
3:51 Alastair Campbell? Well, Tim Fowler, you say it's a mistake by Liz Truss, but Tom Fowler asks, is Charles allowing Liz Truss to accompany him? Is the first mistake of his reign?
4:00 Rory Stewart? And again, it's also an interesting question of how much power the monarch feels they have towards the elected Prime Minister. I feel the monarch isn't elected, and what happens in these conversations if the monarch says, no, we don't want you to come? And how much can the Prime Minister push their luck on this? Because what neither side is going to want is to have a public rift. So there's a sort of chicken, isn't there? I mean, I wonder whether what's happening is that the royal family were reluctant for this to happen, the Prime Minister really pushed, and ultimately, people don't want to risk a division between the elected and unelected person.
4:34 Alastair Campbell? I really don't see why she would push because all that's going to happen, the focus is going to be on, on King Charles. She'll just be kind of hanging around in the background, there'll be a sort of association. But I don't, when she's been elected leader of the Conservative Party, she's become Prime Minister. There is so much that she needs to do and get on with. And actually, if I were her, I'd be thinking, right, the whole country is focused on this, the aftermath of the Queen's death and leading up to the funeral. And yes, she has to be involved in that to some extent. But actually, what an opportunity to get your feet under the table and really try to get on top of stuff. Instead of what she's travelling around the country.
5:15 Rory Stewart? Nobody's given that opportunity. You're absolutely right, because she's been in campaign mode for weeks. She hasn't been able to look seriously at policy. This is the chance to get to know her Cabinet Ministers, get to know the Permanent Secretaries, build up that team in Number 10 to get on with delivery, exactly.
5:30 Alastair Campbell? I mean, I do, you know, we had a couple of questions about the so-called politicisation of the civil service, which we were accused of endlessly without doing it. But I think to go in and, fair enough, she's been elected as leader of the Tory Party, she's become the Prime Minister, she says that she's not happy with what they call the Treasury Orthodoxy. But Tom Scholar is a civil servant, he's a very, he is actually, to use your phrase, or a quite distinguished civil servant and very well respected within the civil service. And we've talked about this before, that ultimately, our system does depend upon civil servants delivering on the objectives of the government of the day. This will send an absolute chill around the civil service and they'll feel that they can't,
6:14 Alastair Campbell? they can't speak truthfully to power.
6:16 Rory Stewart? It's terrifying and it follows on from the way Boris states it. He came in and I think he got rid of five Permanent Secretaries? Got rid of the Permanent Secretary in the Foreign Office, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Justice. I mean, it was a Permanent Secretary in the Home Office, of course, who then sued Priti Patel for harassment and bullying or unfair dismissal, I can't remember what it was. But anyway, the basic point is that you create a civil service which doesn't do what it needs to do, which is stand up to ministers and challenge them and tell them when they're wrong. That's what we desperately need. So and then follow through. I mean, civil servants do follow through. They do get stuff done, but they also need to be able to tell ministers who are often amateurs that they don't know what they're talking about.
6:53 Alastair Campbell? We had a very interesting example this week. I mean, I see it's been announced that the the job that Rees-Mogg had up until now, Secretary of State for Brexit Opportunities, this job is not being replaced. So perhaps they've they finally realised they're right. But that's a classic example. Civil servants had to work to Rees-Mogg on Brexit opportunities. If they were actually to write something to him to say, well, there may be these opportunities, but these are the downsides, they would be considered PNG within that, probably not get promoted. And this is what happened. This is the erosion of the values that actually have upheld civil service.
7:30 Rory Stewart? These organisations work best with a sort of tension or a dynamic, because of course politicians have enormity goes, they're very, very certain of their views. So they need people who are strong enough to stand up for them. Otherwise, they go crazy. Otherwise, they lose all humility, they lose all complexity, they lose all sense of detail, they become arrogant. So we need a system of balances and the civil service has been such a powerful system of balance.
7:55 Alastair Campbell? Joe Duncan asked a great question here, Roy, and we're just going to throw this one out. And I've been actually thinking about how to answer this, and I'm still not sure. I love the podcast, says Joe, but I'm not a political expert. You use the phrase right wing and left wing quite a lot. Can you tell me what right wing and left wing mean?
8:12 Rory Stewart? Very good, very good. Well, I interviewed actually a Labour MP about this, right wing and left wing. And she basically said, well, you know, the thing is that in the left, we care about people, we're compassionate, and basically the right wing is just evil. That was that was her take on things. And I said, do you not think that you should show a bit more empathy towards the other side? Is it not a bit prickly? That's a no, no, it's it's just. And I said, but what do you think conservative policies are? And she said to me, well, I think basically conservative MPs get out of bed in the morning and think, you know, how can we be mean to immigrants? How can we, you know, take money away from poor people? And it was very striking that it's one of the things people have pointed out about the left and the right, which is that the right finds it easier to understand
8:57 Rory Stewart? the left than the other way around. There were these tests done in the United States by a Psychologist, and if you ask people from the left to predict the views of right wing voters, they're much less accurate at doing it than right wing voters are at predicting the views of left wing voters. So for example, left wing voters in the United States, if you ask them whether right wing voters are in favour of cruelty to animals, they will say, many of them, yes, yes, of course, right wing voters are in favour of cruelty to animals. But the truth is, actually, there's no evidence at all that right wing voters are any more in favour of cruelty to animals than left wing voters. I'm avoiding though answering the question. Over to you to actually provide a proper answer to the question on what you think the difference is between left and right.
9:36 Alastair Campbell? Roy, you didn't answer the question there. You just waffled on criticizing an individual Labour MP who you didn't name. And I don't want to know the name, I don't care. They're wrong. I think left wing to me means that you have a basic worldview about collective endeavour and collective strength. Right wing is where you really are focused upon the individual. Now, I know that you can have both, but I think there's a sort of sliding scale between that.
10:04 Rory Stewart? Let me try another one. I think there are many differences between left and right. Here's another one. I think the left tends to be traditionally have a revolutionary origin, be much more progressive, much more radical in its views on the transformation of society. The right, as the word conservative implies, has often been much more focused on if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
10:25 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but the right at the moment in lots of different countries, not least our own and the United States, is defined and driven by the radical right.
10:31 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
10:31 Alastair Campbell? I mean, you could argue, you know, Brexit was a revolution, whether we like or not. Trump is a revolution.
10:35 Rory Stewart? 100%. And of course, for the listener who asked the question, I mean, there is this weird thing that left and right actually eventually meet. So you have this very weird phenomenon, obviously in Germany called national socialism, where it was very difficult to quite put your finger on whether Hitler thought he was from the left or the right.
10:50 Alastair Campbell? Hmm. I don't think, I don't think either of us have answered the question very, very well, because the question actually needs a book.
10:55 Rory Stewart? Here's another answer. Traditionally, the left focused more on equality and the right focused more on liberty. So the left was focused much more on trying to make sure that there weren't huge discrepancies, inequalities in society. And the right was more focused on the idea of freedom, individual freedom, because to achieve that equality, the right traditionally argued that you had to put huge constraints on individual freedom, on businesses, on people's ability to secure their property, pass money on to their children, do what they wanted to do in their mind of equality. And that's why often business has been seen on the right and trade unions traditionally on the left, but we can keep going on this forever.
11:33 Alastair Campbell? I think, Joe, the other way to think of this in modern history is that you had over a decade of a left of centre government in which the country improved hugely. And since then, you've had 12 years of a right of centre government and the country's got a lot worse. And Rory agrees with that. Now, Jackie, given Liz Truss has reversed the ban on fracking and therefore gone against a manifesto pledge upon which her government was elected, do you think she should go to the country to secure a mandate for what she would like to enact in Parliament? There is an interesting question out of this leadership contest about they they spent the whole time saying how awful things were, but now say they've got to get on and deliver the manifesto on which they were elected.
12:10 Rory Stewart? So just before we get on to that, look, I do feel, Joe, that I'm going to be, you know, I'm going to be standing up for the right in this podcast. And I haven't really been given a good chance to do that. So I'm just going to very quickly say, my colleagues would say, look, I don't like the Boris Johnson style of government. I'm very worried by the particular Liz Truss style of government. But I would argue that moderate conservatism has a very good record internationally, and it can be a way of being practical and pragmatic, getting away from flaky idealism, fantasies and jargon towards trying to get the right balance between regulating and private enterprise.
12:45 Alastair Campbell? Okay, now would you like to answer the question on fracking?
12:48 Rory Stewart? Go on then, go on then.
12:50 Alastair Campbell? No, you answer it. I'm asking you.
12:51 Rory Stewart? No, no, I want you first, and then I'll then I'll come in on fracking.
12:54 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think she's trying to, if I can use a Johnson phrase, she's trying to have her cake and eat it. She's trying to say that she's a new government because she's been become a new prime minister. But that is a huge change. And I think there is a legitimate question as to whether she really has a mandate for it. And I don't think she does.
13:09 Rory Stewart? Fracking is incredibly controversial, isn't it? I mean, it's it's one of the dominant issues in US politics now. We had this very strange experience. I mean, I was initially in favour of fracking. And then we had these extraordinary tremors in the north west of England when people started fracking. And initially, the company, I remember the company coming to brief me, saying it's pure coincidence that there's been this sort of earthquake tremor when we started fracking. But they stopped and then they started again a few weeks later. And then there seemed to be another earthquake coincidentally coinciding with their fracking, at which point everyone began to get a bit panicked about what was going on. We're also not talking enough about nuclear and particularly nuclear waste. That was something I really felt had been ignored
13:50 Rory Stewart? in Cumbria, which is that we still haven't really worked out good ways of dealing with the the nuclear waste. And it's pretty terrifying, actually, if you go to to West Cumbria and see the cost, the billions upon billions that are being spent on trying to clean up nuclear waste and the fact that the government really struggles to come up with convincing stories about how they stop nuclear waste leaking and radioactivity spreading.
14:15 Alastair Campbell? Let's let's stay in Cumbria because you've got a lot of farmers in Cumbria and you know a lot of farmers in Cumbria. Will Evans, I'm a farmer. Like every other farmer I know, I'm short-staffed, under pressure, questioning my future in agriculture. I believe there's going to be a food crisis, at least as serious as the energy situation. And that's something that Minet Batters of the NFU has told us before. And yet, government seems to be paying very little attention. Why?
14:37 Rory Stewart? Well, it's embarrassing, isn't it? It's that governments haven't yet caught up with the reality of the fact that the global economic system, which used to provide cheap food from Russia, Ukraine, the United States, is crumbling. And Britain, by leaving the European Union, has left a European Union that was entirely sufficient, basically, in terms of its food. It had food security. We're no longer part of a European Union with food security. We produce only about 60% of the food that we eat. And so I think we need to think about that very seriously. But thinking about that is going to include uncomfortable conversations, because one of the things we've been very proud of in Britain is we've taken millions of acres out of cultivation to rewild them for carbon reasons and for
15:22 Rory Stewart? biodiversity reasons. And if we are to grow more of our own food, that's going to raise questions whether that land is going to have to come back into cultivation. And whether we go with intensive agriculture with all the negative consequences on our wildlife.
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17:37 Rory Stewart? Here's one for you, and I know what the answer's going to be, but you've got to give two answers to this question. You're not allowed just one answer to the question, which is from Michael Litchley. Who are your favourite comedians? Notice there's an S at the end of that.
17:51 Alastair Campbell? Billy Connolly.
17:52 Rory Stewart? Yep, very good.
17:53 Alastair Campbell? And Grace Campbell.
17:55 Rory Stewart? Very good. Well done. Well done. Well done. Did well there.
17:58 Alastair Campbell? What about you?
17:59 Rory Stewart? So I love some of these political comedians on Twitter. I love Rosie Holt, who does these fantastic imitations of MPs. I love Michael Spicer, who I think is killingly funny if people aren't following. He does these...
18:11 Alastair Campbell? Is he the man in the room?
18:12 Rory Stewart? He's the man in the room. Yeah, absolutely fantastic. And then, of course, I love Max Miller, the cheeky chappy. That's a slightly older generation.
18:22 Alastair Campbell? Now, listen, if I can raise the tone again, Austin Ivory says that "I'm always banging on about Moise's name and his three Ps: populism, polarisation and post-truth. The Queen and now Charles represent the opposite in many ways. Could the monarchy be the rescue of democracy?"
18:45 Rory Stewart? Well, okay.
18:46 Alastair Campbell? Quite a big question, isn't it?
18:47 Rory Stewart? That's a great question. So I've got a great answer from Clement Attlee, one of our favourite post-war prime ministers. So he says, this is my little quote from Clement Attlee, "The monarchy attracts to itself the kind of sentimental loyalty which might otherwise be given to the leader of a faction. There is therefore much less danger under a constitutional monarchy of a people being carried away by a Hitler, a Mussolini or even de Gaulle." So it's a lovely idea that actually all this stuff that you're grumbling about at the moment, which is the amazing kind of outpourings of deference and sentiment towards the Queen, which happens every 70 years.
19:25 Alastair Campbell? No, no, no, Rory, Rory, Rory, don't misre... I'm not grumbling about that. I'm grumbling about the fact that that is all that is being covered on the media.
19:34 Rory Stewart? Very good. Okay, very good.
19:35 Alastair Campbell? That's my grumble.
19:36 Rory Stewart? Very, that's your grumble. But if you think about it, that is, and he added in, Attlee, de Gaulle, that in other countries, it's the president, it's the head of state who attracts an enormous amount of this sort of weird loyalty and patriotism. And Martin Amis, great quote, "The monarchy allows a holiday from reason, and on a holiday we do no harm." So the idea is that the kind of more irrational populist urges, which might otherwise be driven into our politics... Can be diverted more safely into the monarchy. And that means that someone like Boris Johnson always remains a much more diminished figure than a Trump or a Bolsonaro, because in the end, he has to play second fiddle to the monarch. And that's probably quite a good lesson in humility.
20:19 Alastair Campbell? Okay, but related to that, a question from Harriet Digby.
20:22 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
20:24 Alastair Campbell? How do we solve a crisis in which millennials, 61% of 18 to 34 year olds, have said they're open to strong leaders taking control of the country without elections? Now, I don't know if you saw that. This is a report by Will Tanner.
20:42 Alastair Campbell? And essentially, it showed that the older you are, the more likely you are to believe in democracy.
20:48 Rory Stewart? It's totally terrifying. So shouts out to Will Tanner, who runs this amazing think tank called Onward. He's also the guy that really was the first to predict the breaking of the Labour Red Wall and the Conservative victories there. I think that's terrifying. And I think it's part of this whole story that we often talk about, about the factors that are driving the rise of populism. And I think it is partly attention spans, it is partly social media, but it's also despair and disappointment. One of the other interesting polling things, which I was given by the head of Ipsos, Maury, he's noted that there's been a massive change. 20, 30 years ago, if you asked the British public whether they thought their children would be better off than them, the majority did.
21:30 Rory Stewart? And that number has dropped very, very sharply. So now the majority think their children are going to be worse off than they are. And that's a very dangerous moment for a country. And I think some of these young people, I mean, they're not able to get on the housing ladder. Their jobs are very insecure. Inflation is hitting them very hard. You know, we've heard about tuition fees and this, that and the other, but it's all leading into this idea. And it's very dangerous because the fantasy, of course, is that there's some fantasy figure with a magic wand who can ride in like a hero and by being a strong man somehow sort it all out.
22:01 Alastair Campbell? That's where Trump, Bolsonaro, Bolsonaro, by the way, who is already making signs that even if he loses the election, he's going to try and do a Trump and say that he didn't. Here's one for you, Rory. Alien Frosmog is the sort of Twitter handle that I know you love. And I'm just going to read this out. I don't think you need to respond to this. He's asking me to try to get you to read a book called Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blythe. It explains how austerity failed, even in its own terms. Let's just leave that one there, Rory.
22:29 Rory Stewart? Okay, well, I'll try to read that. And we'll come back to economics in a second. But here's one from Marian Robertson. That's very kind of her. She says, "It so happens you've both got great accents and voices, but would you have preferred to have had Scots accents? And is there an interesting answer to why you've not? And would having one have helped, stroke hindered, you to advance in life?" Alastair.
22:51 Alastair Campbell? Would I like to? Yes. In fact, when I, if you, my brother Donald, sadly dead, but had you met him, he had a totally different accent to me, even though we grew up together. And the reason for that was he joined the Scots Guards aged 18. He lived in Glasgow most of his life, and he had a completely Scottish accent, as did my parents. I've lived most of my life in England and therefore have a different accent. Although when I'm with Scots who speak like, when I was with Donald, a Scottish accent used to kind of come out. I think, I think it's still the case that a gentle Scottish accent is the most popular broadcasting voice.
23:32 Rory Stewart? And of course, James Bond.
23:34 Alastair Campbell? James, James, James Bond.
23:39 Alastair Campbell? No, I do. I mean, it's probably an inbuilt bias from my parentage, but I do think a Scottish accent is about as good as it gets. What about you? Why, your dad had a Scottish accent.
23:48 Rory Stewart? He did, he did. So my father sounded sort of, I guess, posh, but he had the hint for Scottish accent. He would say "airan", for example, instead of "iron". His Rs were very aggressively rolled. And he used an enormous amount of Scottish dialect from his childhood in Angus. He had, so.
24:04 Alastair Campbell? He'd say "sleeket".
24:05 Rory Stewart? A lot of that kind of stuff was coming in all the time. He had really kind of old music hall jokes from the 1890s Glasgow music halls about people wearing inappropriate hats in Scottish Presbyterian churches, to which the minister's supposed to say, "Ei tuton yrut", because the hat looked like it had a trumpet on it. Here we are, we're going to get more serious questions. So we've got a question from Fiona, Fiona McWilliam. Have either of you read economist Kate Raworth's book, Donut Economics? What do you think about no-growth economics? How can we expect continuing economic growth when the planet and her resources are finite?
24:46 Alastair Campbell? Vicky Weir, a very similar question. How can the drive for growth be compatible with driving down emissions to ensure that we have a livable planet? Surely planned degrowth and wellbeing and a wellbeing economy are what we need. Well, I haven't read the book. I'm very interested in that as a thought. I think politically, at this stage of our development, it would be virtually impossible to win the fight for that. But I could be wrong.
25:12 Rory Stewart? No, no, I think it's an unbelievably difficult fight. Because if you, so firstly, of course, in the long run, this question is right. Because if you think about multiple growth, you know, if a country like the United States keeps growing at 5% a year every year, you get compound growth. And you would end up in a few thousand years with a global economy that was, you know, 10,000 times the size that it is today, consuming presumably enormous numbers of resources and enormous amount of energy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So there is a real, real risk, a real problem with growth going on at that level. But in the short term, of course, we totally depend on growth to pay for everything.
25:55 Rory Stewart? So these questions around childcare, questions around energy costs, questions about how we pay for our pensions, all of that depends on our economy growing. If our economy ceases to grow and our population continues to grow, of course, we all end up getting poorer. And it's very difficult to imagine a country which is comfortable with the idea of the country getting poorer. Now, maybe an alternative is what happens in Japan, where population drops and the economic growth stops, and that's more handleable. Again, apologies for you here, strange noises coming in from Africa on the back of this.
26:28 Alastair Campbell? We love your strange noises from your travel. Pete Husky, this question doesn't really apply to you, Rory, because you don't read them as closely as I do. What happens to all the questions that you don't answer? Do you save them? Or do you start every week from scratch? I must confess, I start every week from scratch. I don't know whether. So I guess what that question's about is, is it worth resubmitting questions that we don't answer? But I do get very, one week, I don't know whether we'd ever have time to do this, Rory. Do you know, I think it'd be interesting if we were maybe on holiday, because you know, I like working holidays. If we actually did have, say, like 1,200 questions and we just sat there until we answered every single one of them, would you be up for that? Take about a day and a half.
27:11 Rory Stewart? I'm with that. I'm with that. Some of these questions are amazing. There was one that came in today saying, John Oliver takes a look at the Tory leadership race. Why did Rory Stewart attack a 10-year-old Prince William? So he's got this whole thing from Saturday Night Live, yeah. I think they're amazing.
27:30 Alastair Campbell? Can we have an answer, please? Can we have an answer? Why did you attack Prince?
27:33 Rory Stewart? If you watch John Oliver and Saturday Night Live, he eventually concludes at the end of the video, he brings in these sort of forensic analysts that actually I was not the person that attacked the 10-year-old Prince William. I was the person who picked up 10-year-old Prince William when he was attacked.
27:49 Alastair Campbell? Somebody did ask, you raised it, not me, somebody did ask whether you will ever talk about your role tutoring William and Harry, or are you sworn to secrecy?
28:00 Rory Stewart? I'm sworn to secrecy and I'm never going to talk about it.
28:04 Alastair Campbell? So when we have Rory Stewart memoirs, volume 113, if it's there, Rory, I'm going to come back to you.
28:11 Rory Stewart? Final, final, final one, final one for us to finish on came in just two hours ago. So I'm trying to keep up to date with these. And apologies to people. I mean, thank you for the questions. We are running on about a thousand a week and. Although question time this week will be kind of 40 minutes long, we're not going to get through a thousand questions. But here's a question, councillor Jason Walsh from Wirral, why do you never mention the Green Party and other smaller parties? You mentioned the Lib Dems last week, Rory talks about PR at times. Be good to hear some detailed discussions about this. I'm going to make a guess of which party councillor Jason Walsh represents. Over to you on that.
28:48 Alastair Campbell? Maybe not, maybe not, maybe not. No, I think it's a fair, I think we talk about green issues a fair bit, and I think we have done today. I think we, look, obviously, we talk more about the Conservatives, particularly in recent weeks and months, and about the Labour Party, partly because they're the main opposition, and also because of my history. I think we do actually talk about the SNP a fair bit. We are, I think rightly, we have been criticised in the past for not talking enough about Wales, which is why I'm pleased that we'll be putting out shortly an interview with the First Minister Mark Drakeford, which we've held on for a few days because of the death of the Queen. But I think it's a fair
29:30 Alastair Campbell? point, I think it's a fair point, and I think at some, because I think the Lib Dems and the Greens will be more important in the next election.
29:37 Rory Stewart? And Green parties are doing very well across Europe, aren't they? As we've commented before, there's no reason why the Green Party couldn't really take off.
29:43 Alastair Campbell? I think, can I have the last question, Rory? Because I think this is a good one.
29:46 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
29:47 Alastair Campbell? Okay, David Adcock, when are you two going to get back to disagreeing agreeably? I can't remember the last time that you had a proper disagreement. I think that's a fair point.
29:55 Rory Stewart? See, the answer to us is, I think we've never got back to that horrifying moment where we almost broke up our beautiful relationship, where I began to worry that some of your boxing training was going to come into action. But we have been disagreeing. Listen, on this show, we've already disagreed about left and right, obviously.
30:13 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
30:13 Rory Stewart? You know, and
30:14 Alastair Campbell? A bit about the monarchy.
30:16 Rory Stewart? We do disagree, we do disagree about the monarchy. I think there are many other things that we need to disagree about, and we'll pull them out. I mean, for example, clearly, we have a completely different cultural perspective on sport, which you tease me about a lot.
30:29 Alastair Campbell? And music, music, you don't love music enough.
30:31 Rory Stewart? I don't love music enough. I went to the wrong school, clearly. I don't spend enough time reading the German newspapers in German, I think it's lots of disagreement. But we'll try to disagree more for you all in the future.
30:42 Alastair Campbell? Okay, maybe we should leave the last word to Howell, given we raised music there. Is Rory Stewart living proof that the true Scottish gentleman is one who can play the bagpipes that does, but doesn't?
30:53 Rory Stewart? Sadly, I'm living proof of a Scottish gentleman who should play the bagpipes and can't. And on that, we should go. All the best. See you later. Bye bye.
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