56. Question Time: Prison reform, lobbying, and Alastair on Strictly

Should MPs be drug tested? Does the UK have a corruption problem? How could we radically reform prisons? Alastair and Rory join each other in person this week to answer these questions and many more. Plus, they discuss if they've ever been offered to participate in a reality show, and if they would ever consider doing Strictly Come Dancing... Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Blackpool live show tickets: Saturday 8th October: wintergardensblackpool.co.uk/events/the-rest-is-politics-live/ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Nicole Maslen Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve, and of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:43Rory Stewart?

  Here we are for another, rather astonishingly, in person, where Alastair gets to grimace at me across the table. Question time.

• 1:54Alastair Campbell?

  Get to the point!

• 1:54Rory Stewart?

  Question time version of The Rest Is Politics.

• 1:57Alastair Campbell?

  It's called The Rest Is Politics Question Time.

• 1:59Rory Stewart?

  With me Rory Stewart.

• 2:00Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell.

• 2:01Rory Stewart?

  And unfortunately both of us in the room, which I always find a bit intimidating. Okay, come on, I'm going to start with this. Lewis Abbott, how to suggest policy. When a normal person in the street, such as myself, thinks of what they deem a good policy idea, what do they do with it? Who do I contact? I've emailed Keir Starmer via multiple channels and have not heard back. Any advice on this? I tell you, it's pretty shocking, actually.

• 2:25Alastair Campbell?

  Well, listen, do you know what? I get this a lot from people. I think politics is uniquely bad at absorbing potentially good ideas from other people. Now, maybe his idea is terrible, and lots of people have really bad ideas which they think are brilliant. But I've, look, I'm quite well-connected in the Labour Party. I've still known awful lot of people. I've had, quite recently been trying to get somebody who I think would be an amazing asset to the Labour Party in to see people at the top, to see how they can be used. And he's getting quite close to giving up.

• 3:01Rory Stewart?

  It's a bandwidth problem, isn't it? The politicians end up not having any time to think. I remember Mitt Romney saying to me when I started as a politician, he said to me, "You've got to do all your thinking now because you're not going to have any time to think when you're a politician." And one of the reasons they don't take on good people and good ideas is they're so stressed and overworked, their brains are basically shut down.

• 3:19Alastair Campbell?

  But that's why you have to have people around you that you know can do that. I'll tell you one thing, you know, as you know, and I don't know if you saw the interview in the Times Magazine where Saieda Worsy.

• 3:27Rory Stewart?

  No, you haven't told us about this. Are you doing a show?

• 3:29Alastair Campbell?

  I'm doing a TV show called Make Me Prime Minister.

• 3:32Rory Stewart?

  Really? You and Saieda Worsy?

• 3:34Alastair Campbell?

  It was on Tuesday and it's going overseas. Anyway Rory, we did an interview together with the Times Magazine, and Saieda said that I was in love with Tony Blair, which, may I say, I am not, but I have enormous respect for Tony Blair. And one of the things I respect about him... Is that he did make time to think and he did a lot of it on planes. And he would literally turn the phones off like for a few hours and he would think and then he would write. And then he would send out notes. But my point is other people are every bit as good. People who are outside politics have ideas. How do you get them fed into the system?

• 4:10Rory Stewart?

  Well, one of the things I believe in really deeply, and I'm always getting in trouble for it. So I'm a real believer in these things called citizens assemblies, which are these juries where you randomly select 300 people from the country, a bit like a massive jury. And you let them get into stuff over six, seven days with a panel of experts. And the ideas that come out of those are extraordinary. It resolved the abortion debate in Ireland. I think it could have come up with a moderate Brexit if we'd given that kind of mechanism of proper, proper hope.

• 4:38Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'm hoping that Gordon Brown's late review for Labour of constitutional democratic questions might do things like that. And I also see that if the reports are accurate, that he's thinking of getting rid of the House of Lords.

• 4:49Rory Stewart?

  Before I get into the House of Lords.

• 4:50Alastair Campbell?

  Are you gonna go?

• 4:51Rory Stewart?

  Kind of slightly worrying.

• 4:52Alastair Campbell?

  Are you gonna go?

• 4:53Rory Stewart?

  Well, I mean, nobody's offered.

• 4:54Alastair Campbell?

  Would you go?

• 4:55Rory Stewart?

  Nobody's offered me yet.

• 4:55Alastair Campbell?

  Would you go into the House of Lords?

• 4:56Rory Stewart?

  Have you got a routine? Do I get to be called Lordy Dordy? He likes the party. I've always wanted that title.

• 5:01Alastair Campbell?

  Would you go into the House of Lords, Rory? Come on, just spit it out.

• 5:04Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely, definitely. Are you offering, really?

• 5:07Alastair Campbell?

  I've been offered them. I've said no several times.

• 5:09Rory Stewart?

  Oh, that's, that's the story. That's the story. You see, that's, now, but that brings me to another thing that you've been offered, I believe, before, which is strictly come dancing. Maria F, a non-politics one, brackets, sorry. Have either of you been asked to do strictly? And would you ever consider it? For those of you listening in Albania, this is strictly as strictly come dancing. Did wonder for Ed Balls. Bet you both have a few moves up your sleeves.

• 5:35Alastair Campbell?

  I've been asked many times. I've been offered. A lot of money.

• 5:40Rory Stewart?

  How much they, how much they pay?

• 5:41Alastair Campbell?

  The biggest one ever I got offered was not far off seven figures for one of the jungle ones.

• 5:47Rory Stewart?

  You, you would have made nearly a million pounds.

• 5:49Alastair Campbell?

  It was a lot of money, but I think they were just testing whether I actually ever would say yes. And I said to them, I will never ever say yes.

• 5:56Rory Stewart?

  That's a celebrity jungle, celebrity jungle, no, no, I wouldn't at all.

• 5:59Alastair Campbell?

  That was a very, very light no.

• 6:01Rory Stewart?

  No, no, that's a strong no.

• 6:02Alastair Campbell?

  Would you do strictly never?

• 6:03Rory Stewart?

  No, no, it's a strong no on all that stuff.

• 6:04Alastair Campbell?

  You've got bad knees anyway.

• 6:05Rory Stewart?

  Strong no on all that stuff. I actually was asked in two thousand and eight, a, a production company got in touch with me and they said, um, we hear you're a, you know, a bit of an expert on, you know, Indonesia and you speak Indonesian and, you know, you've done travel books and stuff. And I thought, oh, this sounds like a very classy offer. Then they said, well, so we've got this idea. What we're going to do is we're going to drop you and five members of the British public into the middle of the Borneo jungle. And then we're going to give you a chance to navigate them out over forty five days to the coast. Uh, and it's you or Bear Grylls, et cetera. And I suddenly could see a sort of vision of this show where every single day it was going to be Rory as the kind of

• 6:50Rory Stewart?

  floppy haired incompetent trying to, no, no, it's sorry, they totally, sorry, I've missed the point. They were five convicts, that's right.

• 6:56Alastair Campbell?

  You believe in prison reform?

• 6:58Rory Stewart?

  I was going to be in the jungle with five convicts and every day they were going to be like, fucking guys got lost again. And I'd be like, now come on chaps, I think we've just got to go north here. So I haven't done this stuff because I always thought that old Gorbachev looked a bit rubbish doing that pizza ad.

• 7:14Alastair Campbell?

  I've got a file at home that is ridiculously thick and might one day make a book.

• 7:18Rory Stewart?

  Wait, wait, wait a second.

• 7:19Alastair Campbell?

  Which is TV projects I've said no to.

• 7:21Rory Stewart?

  Why did you not, why did you not take a million pounds for going to the jungle? What went wrong there?

• 7:24Alastair Campbell?

  No way, no way.

• 7:25Rory Stewart?

  Why not?

• 7:25Alastair Campbell?

  I think once you've done that, you've, you've moved over to a very dark side.

• 7:28Rory Stewart?

  Okay, now I know you had a question for me, but because you struggled finding questions for me, I'm going to ask you a question from Cam Singh, which really interests me.

• 7:37Alastair Campbell?

  Mm hmm.

• 7:37Rory Stewart?

  Okay. Started listening to the podcast late spring, which happened to coincide with me starting to read the Wolf Hall trilogy.

• 7:43Alastair Campbell?

  Mm hmm.

• 7:44Rory Stewart?

  Now, the reason we're talking about Wolf Hall, of course, is the amazing Hilary Mantel has just died. My brain has subconsciousy somehow managed to assimilate the voice of Alistair with Thomas Cromwell. And I read the whole thing as if Alistair was playing Thomas Cromwell. Could Alistair have been Henry's fix and no offence intended?

• 8:03Alastair Campbell?

  Hilary Mantel once did an interview or talked at a festival. Well, she said that when you're reading the book, if you're a modern day reader, imagine Alastair Campbell with an axe. That's what she said. Now Rory, I've got a question for you.

• 8:17Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Alastair Campbell?

  Ellie Thompson, we've got some really eagle ears listening to this podcast. Does Rory realise that he used the term "we" in last week's Question Time podcast? When referring to what we need in the Labour Party? Is there an imminent announcement we should know about? Smiley face.

• 8:38Rory Stewart?

  Well, there definitely was until famously they announced they were abolishing the House of Lords. That's removing my big incentive.

• 8:44Alastair Campbell?

  No, no, they haven't announced it yet. So what, you would take a position in a Labour government if they bugged you a peerage? I think you'll find that the police could get involved in that one Rory.

• 8:55Alastair Campbell?

  Here's another one for you. Sophie Davis, following the catastrophic mini-budget, kamikwazi kwarteng, would Rory extend "Give directly to the poorest in the UK"?

• 9:05Rory Stewart?

  So Alistair, thank you for that question. And just to remind people who've not been listening to every episode, GiveDirectly is a charity that I am the president of and we work largely on extreme poverty. And we do it through believing very, very strongly that the most useful, efficient way of helping people in extreme poverty is not to try to guess what they want by giving them a bicycle or setting up a programme for them, but by giving people cash so that they can actually choose to fulfil their needs. And it's miraculous.

• 9:35Alastair Campbell?

  Right, so UK?

• 9:36Rory Stewart?

  Whether you're poor in the United States or you're poor in the United Kingdom, the most useful thing that you can have is cash because that allows you to decide what your priorities are.

• 9:47Rory Stewart?

  More than just being a question of you choosing what's useful for you, it gives dignity to you, it gives freedom to you. There is a difference though, which is that the people that we're working with in Africa are living often on three or four dollars a month. So the amount of money that you have to give in Britain or the United States to genuinely transform someone's life will be greater, but it's still true that actually somewhere at the very foundation of the welfare state, and I hope at the foundation of the welfare states that come to be built in the poorest countries of the world, is the idea that you give dignity to someone by giving them the freedom of resources.

• 10:24Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, talking money. Siobhan, who calls herself the Princess of Yorkshire, is the government a criminal cabal? Do you not think there should be a Royal Commission on Corruption? On the looting that appears to be going on of the public purse and on the insider trading. What do you think of that Rory? I do think we have a corrupt government by

• 10:42Rory Stewart?

  the way. I definitely think we have a corruption problem in Britain and I think that we need to set up proper institutions and part of that was exposed by the horror around the ministerial code, the fact that Boris Johnson clearly broke the ministerial code and it seemed to be difficult to do anything about it. So Parliament, the idea of Parliament sovereign, do whatever it wants. And there's this famous 18th century quote by somebody looking at Parliament, he says Parliament, the English constitution, Parliament can do everything but make a woman a man and a man a woman. So it's great commentary.

• 11:15Alastair Campbell?

  Which now it can.

• 11:17Rory Stewart?

  Which now it probably can, yeah, probably can. World's moved on a bit since the 18th century. But that only really works when Parliament has a sense of its own restraint and balance. So the truth in the 18th century was actually the Parliament, House of Commons was balanced against the House of Lords, it was balanced against the monarchy, it was in effect balanced against the Church of England. And if Parliament has lost a sense of self restraint, then we definitely need commissions, structures, rules, regulations, laws to hold the pressure.

• 11:47Alastair Campbell?

  And Liz Truss says she won't have an ethics adviser, even Johnson had one of those even in the room because she says she knows the difference between right or wrong. And there's a situation, there's quite a few questions about this. Alex P, I'd be interested in your thoughts on Mark Fulbrook, Truss's chief of staff, who's been investigated, been interviewed by the FBI recently about another scandal, having his salary paid by his own lobbying firm. Now, the papers that reported this story, and by the way, if, again, if that had been, if that had been me or Jonathan Powell or anybody in Tony Blair's team, that would have led the news. Okay? It's barely registered.

• 12:23Rory Stewart?

  And my fear, my fear, because I know you often say this, my fear is that it's even worse than you think. You think it's that they're getting away with it because they're a right wing government. I think it's even more awful for us, which is that actually standards in public life have dropped so much that things which would have seemed very, very shocking in the late 90s.

• 12:40Alastair Campbell?

  But I think the public will be shocked by that. If they knew about it.

• 12:43Rory Stewart?

  I deeply hope the public are shocked by it.

• 12:44Alastair Campbell?

  If they knew, but they don't know.

• 12:46Rory Stewart?

  But I think that you were held to higher standards, not just because you were a Labour government, but because generally we expected more of our governments.

• 12:53Alastair Campbell?

  So that one, for example, the papers that did write about it basically said... That they thought this is scandal because he was doing it so as to avoid paying tax. The point is, it's a total massive conflict of interest.

• 13:06Rory Stewart?

  It's also totally humiliating for the British government. So to be Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister should be the greatest job almost that anybody could imagine. A chance to serve your country, to have the most immense power, budget of nearly a trillion pounds a year at the rate they're spending at the moment, and a chance to really make a difference. And for somebody like Mark Forbrook, this is the moment to step aside and serve your country. Instead of which, I guess what's happening, even if he's not avoiding tax, I think probably more likely what's happening is he's probably paid a fortune. So what he's probably said is, all right, I'll let my company keep paying me and I'll work for you for free. I'll be seconded across, so I don't have to take a pay cut. But it's so sort of budget and humiliating and awful for a country to be in that situation.

• 13:49Alastair Campbell?

  Well, listen, here's another one, double standards. Tom Langridge, you talked last week about Michael Foot and the donkey jacket and Jeremy Corbyn not singing the National Anthem. Why has there been, next to no coverage, of Kwasi Kwarteng laughing in church at the Queen's funeral?

• 14:06Rory Stewart?

  Let me, let me try to defend him on that. I know I've become the professional Kwasi Kwarteng defender. I saw that and I recognised the 13-year-old boy that I knew years ago. I think it's a weird, slightly geeky facial tic thing he does. He does it a lot. If you watch him carefully, he will often, you'll see him walking down in the House of Commons, suddenly chortling about absolutely nothing.

• 14:30Alastair Campbell?

  Sorry, Rory, he was at the Queen's funeral, sitting behind six former Prime Ministers who were all, even Johnson, looking like they'd sort of understood the gravity of what's going on.

• 14:38Rory Stewart?

  But I think he's not conscious of what he's doing. I don't think he was, I genuinely think to defend.

• 14:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, let me ask this question.

• 14:43Rory Stewart?

  Let me just finish on this because nobody's defending him and I'm going to try to defend him. It's not really defence, but I think in, he's laughing in some weird way in something that's just crossed his mind. And he's completely unaware of his body and his laughter. I don't think he saw anything, I don't think he was laughing at the funeral.

• 14:57Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think that's defenceable at the Queen's funeral?

• 14:59Rory Stewart?

  The defence is he's a weird guy. I don't think he was laughing at the Queen. I think he had a thought and he started chortling and he does that all the time.

• 15:06Alastair Campbell?

  All I'm saying, all I'm saying, if that had been Jeremy Corbyn. Or Diane Abbott, would you say, oh, well, they're just, they're a bit weird? No.

• 15:15Rory Stewart?

  But that was basically.

• 15:16Alastair Campbell?

  The papers would just, would try to destroy them for saying they were disrespecting the Queen.

• 15:20Rory Stewart?

  That's basically been the Labour defence of Diane Abbott for about 20 years, hasn't it?

• 15:23Alastair Campbell?

  Good. Let me ask this question. Obviously, this one is totally unrelated to Kwasi Kwarteng's strange behaviour. Shaun, should MPs be regularly drug and alcohol tested, as in some other industries?

• 15:32Rory Stewart?

  I don't think he was off his head on drug and alcohol.

• 15:35Alastair Campbell?

  I said it was a totally unrelated question.

• 15:40Rory Stewart?

  But yes, it would be a good idea. Yeah, it'd be nice, nice to.

• 15:43Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think MPs should be drug tested?

• 15:44Rory Stewart?

  It's easy for me to say that. I don't really.

• 15:45Alastair Campbell?

  There is a problem with drugs in Parliament.

• 15:47Rory Stewart?

  Apart from famously smoking opium at a wedding in Iran, I'm not a big drug guy and I don't drink very much. So it's fine for me to, to line them all up for being tested.

• 15:56Alastair Campbell?

  Line them all up?

• 15:59Alastair Campbell?

  I think there's quite a few members of the Cabinet who've got experience of that. Prisons, prisons. I want to ask you about prisons, right? Two questions here. Patricia Lewis, more than 70% of young people in custody reoffend within a year. Is locking up the wrong response? James Marshall, if you could do something truly radical with prisons, what would it be? So why don't you take those two together?

• 16:19Rory Stewart?

  Okay, so first thing is, she's completely right. I, I met a guy in Bedford Prison who'd been in, when I met him, he'd been in nine times that year. Every time, basically, he was released, he'd reoffend and go back to prison. And so the, the answer to that is that one thing that I tried to do with David Gork, and that was quite radical.

• 16:38Alastair Campbell?

  Well, when David was at Justice.

• 16:39Rory Stewart?

  When he was at Justice and I was the Prisons Minister, is to abolish short sentences in prisons. So a lot of the problems in prisons and outside prisons are caused by people who are sentenced to prison sentences of less than two years, many of them for six months. They compose about half the prison population and there is a shocking problem, which is that you are in fact more likely to reoffend if you're sent to prison on a short sentence than if you're not sent to prison at all. It's completely counterintuitive. The public think that by sending someone to prison. You're making the streets safer, but in fact, giving someone a community sentence, they're less likely to reoffend than if they get a prison sentence. Why? Because the prison sentence tears you out of your home, tears you out of your job,

• 17:22Rory Stewart?

  disrupts your life, puts you into this very difficult environment, pops you back out again in a few weeks, because often your Durham prison, I think the average stay was 10 days, just long enough to disrupt your life, definitely not long enough to improve it.

• 17:35Alastair Campbell?

  What's the radical plan then?

• 17:36Rory Stewart?

  So the radical plan was to get rid of all sentences under two years. And we actually got a white paper written, we got Theresa May signed up to it.

• 17:44Alastair Campbell?

  She was signed up to it.

• 17:45Rory Stewart?

  Huge political heat, there were front pages in the Daily Mail about me saying, Rory Stewart, Prison Minister, gives green light to criminals, colleagues shouting in the House of Commons.

• 17:55Alastair Campbell?

  Criminals Prime Minister.

• 17:56Rory Stewart?

  I had colleagues shouting, exactly those same people, shouting at me in the House of Commons. And I was trying to explain that actually getting rid of these short sentences would make the streets safer, not more dangerous.

• 18:07Alastair Campbell?

  And they were wrong, Rory.

• 18:08Rory Stewart?

  Okay, here's a question for you. Tim Bell, given all the talk and concern, Tim Bell's distinguished professor, University of London.

• 18:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, I know who Tim Bell is.

• 18:16Rory Stewart?

  Given all the talk and concern about the influence on the trust government of market fundamentalist think tanks with so-called dark money funding, do you think it'd be a good thing if the UK followed Germany and allowed political parties to set up arms-length publicly and therefore transparently and well-funded think tanks of their own?

• 18:35Alastair Campbell?

  Why do you say well-funded? I'm going to German, I'll put that down to jet lag. Well, we could do that now, could we not?

• 18:45Rory Stewart?

  Well, he says, I mean, look, he says these not only play a really important role in political and policy debate in Germany, but by having offices all over the world are also a useful platform for projecting both German soft power and democracy promotion. So things like the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. Yeah, very good.

• 19:01Alastair Campbell?

  The Stiftung, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. You can't be a good Stifter, we need Stifter.

• 19:06Rory Stewart?

  And it'd be called after some famous leader, right?

• 19:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, Rory Stewart.

• 19:10Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, Rory Stewart Stiftung.

• 19:11Alastair Campbell?

  What Tim Bell should understand is that we are the think tank.

• 19:15Rory Stewart?

  Well, you and me.

• 19:16Alastair Campbell?

  You and I. Sorry, your grammar is just collapsing all around me here. You wouldn't say you and me are the think tank, would you? You'd say you and I are the think tank.

• 19:25Rory Stewart?

  I wouldn't say you and me are the think tank, no.

• 19:28Alastair Campbell?

  So, no, I think, look, this, this, this thing about the, the right wing thing, Tim, though, I mean, those Institute of Economic Affairs people, the Tufton Street Brigade, they get, they still get paraded by the BBC and Sky and ITV as though they're some kind of independent, and they are part of a very right wing political project. We need more of that kind of intellectual heavy lifting going on on the left of politics. So I think Tim Bell's absolutely on to something. Labour should be doing more of that stuff. Yeah, yeah.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 20:13Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 20:21Speaker 04

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 and under 18 without parent.

• 20:27Speaker 05

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 20:29Speaker 06

  It's me, the.

• 20:30Speaker 05

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 20:32Speaker 06

  We don't need the jingle twice.

• 20:33Speaker 05

  What about a third time?

• 20:35Speaker 06

  Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights, and rental cars.

• 20:42Speaker 05

  Seems like they just started.

• 20:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.

• 20:48Speaker 05

  Time to read the tagline.

• 20:50Speaker 06

  Fine. No one deals more deals than.

• 20:52Speaker 05

  Priceline.

• 20:53Speaker 06

  Please stop.

• 20:54Speaker 05

  Priceline.

• 20:55Speaker 06

  Touche.

• 20:55Speaker 05

  Priceline.

• 20:56Speaker 06

  Priceline.

• 20:58Speaker 07

  This episode is brought to you by Tic Tac. Lace up and get your game on because the Tic Tac lineup just got a new teammate. Dr. Pepper Tic Tac. This new double threat puts two of your favorite flavors into one box of mints. And when two iconic flavors come together, the result can only be iconic. Score big. Try Dr. Pepper Tic Tac today.

• 21:21Speaker 08

  There is so much NFL on ESPN right now. Monday Night Football, plus pregame and postgame. NFL Live, NFL Primetime. Everything you need to stay on top of every game every week. Unbelievable. And now NFL Network is on the ESPN app. More football, more coverage, more ways to watch. Football's on, all season long, on ESPN and streaming on the ESPN app.

• 21:59Rory Stewart?

  And here we are, back from the break.

• 22:00Alastair Campbell?

  Our final question is directed directly at you from Dr Wendy Smith. And you may not be aware of this story, but if you aren't, I'll fill you in on it. Rory, did you ever spend thousands of pounds on haircuts and beauty treatments while at DIFID? And could you please explain the approval procedure for expenses? Do you know what this is about?

• 22:21Rory Stewart?

  I guess one of my colleagues has presumably been spending a lot of money on haircuts and make-up.

• 22:26Alastair Campbell?

  Do you know who it might be?

• 22:28Rory Stewart?

  Could it be Quasi-Courtain?

• 22:29Alastair Campbell?

  No, think even more senior within the government.

• 22:33Rory Stewart?

  Liz Truss.

• 22:33Alastair Campbell?

  That's the one.

• 22:36Alastair Campbell?

  Emily Thornbury has got hold of all these spending from Liz Truss's Foreign Secretaryship, including eighteen hundred pounds to Norwich City Football Club, which apparently Liz Truss supports.

• 22:49Rory Stewart?

  And how much was she spending on haircuts and stuff?

• 22:51Alastair Campbell?

  A lot, thousands.

• 22:53Rory Stewart?

  That's pretty weird.

• 22:53Alastair Campbell?

  Whether it's her or it's the Department, I don't know. But the point is, they won't answer questions about it.

• 22:57Rory Stewart?

  That is pretty weird. I think that's pretty weird.

• 23:00Alastair Campbell?

  What was the worst, what was the most?

• 23:01Rory Stewart?

  So I wasn't allowed, so Liz Truss, when she was the Secretary of State, and I was the Flooding Minister, and I was very keen to try to learn about the American experience from Hurricane Katrina. You remember being a disaster? So I said I want to fly to the US and talk to the Americans about what they learned. Because I'm the Flooding Minister, I want to learn the lessons from them. And I was told that I could not get a four hundred pound economy class flight to the United States as the Flooding Minister in charge of a two point four billion pound budget to have a meeting with the United States.

• 23:33Alastair Campbell?

  Who told you that? Liz Truss?

• 23:34Rory Stewart?

  The Permanent Secretary, and apparently on instructions from Liz Truss, that there was going to be no travel paid for. So I paid for myself to go to talk to the head of the Federal Environmental Management.

• 23:45Alastair Campbell?

  Well, so why is she allowing spending on haircuts and beauty treatments and tickets at Norwich City Football Club? I don't get it.

• 23:53Rory Stewart?

  Is it possible they were taking some great foreign dignitary to watch Norwich City?

• 23:57Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'm a very good friend of Didier Smith, who's the big cheese. And I can assure you that Didier Smith would not... Charge.

• 24:04Rory Stewart?

  Something.

• 24:05Alastair Campbell?

  Some great foreign dignity. She'd welcome him and feed him and give him or her a very nice time.

• 24:10Rory Stewart?

  What is it?

• 24:10Alastair Campbell?

  So something very weird is going on.

• 24:12Rory Stewart?

  Is Norwich City not near Liz Truss's constituency?

• 24:16Alastair Campbell?

  She's apparently she supports Norwich City, which is not a crime. Ed Bull supports Norwich City. Charles Clarke supports Norwich City.

• 24:22Rory Stewart?

  That's a bit odd.

• 24:23Alastair Campbell?

  The whole thing's odd. Rory, I know you've been very busy, but Google Emily Thornbury on Liz Truss expenses and see the list. It is weird. And back to double standards, there's next to no coverage of it in the right wing media.

• 24:37Rory Stewart?

  And there's also been a series of requests on the meetings down in the Foreign Office by Chris Bryant. You've been following this, I'm sure.

• 24:45Alastair Campbell?

  I have, yes.

• 24:45Rory Stewart?

  So Chris Bryant, ex-clergyman, isn't he?

• 24:48Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 24:49Rory Stewart?

  Labour MP.

• 24:49Alastair Campbell?

  He actually appears in episode three of Make Me Prime Minister in two weeks' time.

• 24:54Rory Stewart?

  My goodness.

• 24:54Alastair Campbell?

  Alongside Johnny Mercer.

• 24:55Rory Stewart?

  Wait, wait. This is the show that you did with Baroness Saad Wazir.

• 24:58Alastair Campbell?

  That's the one, yeah. Which I've plugged almost as much as you plugged your lot very interesting. You're excellent documentary, radio documentary series about arguments.

• 25:06Rory Stewart?

  I'm sure you haven't listened to that, and I'm going to be watching your things so loyally.

• 25:08Alastair Campbell?

  Are you?

• 25:09Rory Stewart?

  I've been really offended by that.

• 25:10Alastair Campbell?

  Nine fifteen, Tuesdays.

• 25:11Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, brilliant. Nine fifteen, Tuesdays. Yes, anyway, so finally, Chris Bryant's been trying to push questions on meetings in the Foreign Office, and he's noticed a very odd thing, which is that you're supposed to record all your meetings with other people, and it appears, from what he put out on Twitter, that in November and December, Liz Truss had recorded only two meetings in the Foreign Office. And actually, I think people accuse her of many things, but she's not idle. She's a very busy, active person. So the question is, who were the other meetings with, and could we please know?

• 25:40Alastair Campbell?

  Well, she doesn't strike me as being terribly keen on the old transparency thing now that she's got the top job. But Rory, this is all coming back to a central point. The rules and the institutions that are meant to our government to account are collapsing, and people are not angry enough. And we've been talking about Iran, where people were taken to the streets. We've been talking about Brazil. In fact, let's close with this question from Christina Malais. If the RSPB are calling for mobilisation, how long before we see mass civil unrest? I actually don't think we might be knocked that far away from

• 26:15Rory Stewart?

  So let's just finish on that, because.

• 26:16Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not suggesting that's what we want, but I'm suggesting people need to be angry about this bloody government.

• 26:22Rory Stewart?

  So one of the reasons why we should be angry with the government is that. What is happening is that the last shreds of what used to be the called the one nation tradition of moderate conservatism is going out the window. First, we've had all the ideas of balancing the budget and fiscal responsibility out of the window. They're borrowing and spending like you can't believe and cutting taxes at the same time. And now actually our stewardship, in inverted commas, that we used to be proud of, of nature, the countryside, the landscape, six years of work of trying to build a sensible environmental policy, one of the few things that actually Johnson government got okay, is now seems to be ripped up as well, and I can understand why all these natural organisations are in the street.

• 27:04Alastair Campbell?

  We've got massive and growing poverty and a government that's economic strategy is devoted to the top, the people who've already got lots.

• 27:10Rory Stewart?

  It's deeply, deeply, deeply distressing.

• 27:15Alastair Campbell?

  They're dishonest.

• 27:16Rory Stewart?

  Deeply distressing.

• 27:17Alastair Campbell?

  And I think we've got to be a lot angrier than we are.

• 27:18Rory Stewart?

  So I know we're meant to be finishing us, but where is the apathy coming from?

• 27:22Alastair Campbell?

  I think a lot of it is the way our media covers policies, but I think we've just, I think a lot of people are just turning away from it and thinking they can't do anything about it.

• 27:30Rory Stewart?

  So I saw this in the lead up to the Italian election and there was some fantastic Al Jazeera reporting, I want to put a little probe for Al Jazeera, in which every Italian they were interviewing was just like, they're all the same, all these politicians are the same, I'm not going to go and vote. And at the bottom of it is this massive economic crisis hitting Italy with energy prices, an even more extreme version of what's hitting us now.

• 27:51Alastair Campbell?

  Right, so it's people thinking they can't make a difference and the politicians can't make a difference. So then we get the bad politicians who do make a difference, but it's for the worse.

• 27:58Rory Stewart?

  Right, and then we get the Berlusconi Boris and everything that follows on from that.

• 28:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, but I do think that...

• 28:02Rory Stewart?

  So economic decline, apathy, cynicism.

• 28:05Alastair Campbell?

  Media.

• 28:06Rory Stewart?

  And it creates this horrible vicious environment, doesn't it?

• 28:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it's got to change, Rory.

• 28:11Rory Stewart?

  And on that note, we bring this to a close.

• 28:15Alastair Campbell?

  Thank you, Rory.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  On October 2nd.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  And Digger's gonna dig us out.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 28:42Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 28:50Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.

• 28:56Speaker 09

  Espolone Tequila. Balanced. Delicious. 100% acave, 0% eagle. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth. For a real margarita, ride the rooster.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  Espolone Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Campali America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.