563. Britain’s Afghanistan Shame and the Jason Arday Tragedy

Five years after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban takeover, why has not a single Western government marked the anniversary of a war that cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars? Why has Russia's last liberal anti-war party been banned ahead of next month's Duma elections, and is it a sign of Putin's strength or his weakness? What does the media frenzy that engulfed Jason Arday before his death reveal about how quickly we strip vulnerable people of their humanity? Join Rory, Alastair and Shoshana Stewart, as they answer all these questions and more. __________ Enjoy Rory and Alastair’s interview with Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah by searching ‘Leading’ on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. 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, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, Vasco Andrade Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Executive Producer: Bella Soames 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.

• 0:01Rory Stewart?

  Five years ago this month, the last plane left Kabul. Twenty years, $2,000 billion spent, 457 British dead. And this week, the anniversary, no statement from London, no statement from Washington, no statement from NATO. None of them are saying anything about it. Here's what makes this hard to talk about honestly. Go to Afghanistan and you will find that the security is better than it's been any time in 40 years. Nobody's shaking you down at checkpoints. You can have a picnic by the roadside. I've seen it, it's what Afghans will tell you. But at the same time, 2.4 million girls are currently locked out of secondary school.

• 0:42Rory Stewart?

  The UN rapporteur is calling it a crime against humanity, gender apartheid. Both of these things are true at once, and there are 14 million people facing malnutrition and hunger. One in nine getting any food from the World Food Programme. So what did 20 years actually buy? What do we owe the Afghans that we promised to protect? And does sanctioning a government like the Taliban punish the government? Or does it punish tens of millions of Afghans? This episode is powered by Fuse Energy.

• 1:14Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:23Rory Stewart?

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• 1:41Rory Stewart?

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• 1:50Alastair Campbell?

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• 2:07Rory Stewart?

  Visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions.

• 2:16Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 2:19Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:31Rory 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, and 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.

• 2:55Alastair Campbell?

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

• 3:01Rory 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/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics, and the link is in the episode description.

• 3:18Speaker 02

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• 3:56Rory Stewart?

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

• 3:59Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Anna Campbell.

• 4:00Rory Stewart?

  Number of things to be getting on with today. We've got Afghanistan. We want to talk about what's happened in Afghanistan five years on. You had some very interesting issues that you wanted to bring up and discuss around Russia, parties in Russia in particular, the one anti-war party being banned from running, and what's happening to grain exports. And we were also going to touch on Jason Arday.

• 4:22Alastair Campbell?

  A lot to get through. It's been quite a week. Where are you? You look like you're in yet another kind of quite weird hotel.

• 4:29Rory Stewart?

  Well, I am in fact in Edinburgh, and on my way in, I must say, I saw a Grace Campbell ad, because as you will be aware, your daughter is performing here in Edinburgh.

• 4:39Alastair Campbell?

  She is.

• 4:40Rory Stewart?

  Quick plug for Grace.

• 4:42Alastair Campbell?

  You should go and see her. It's your wife's birthday today. You should take her to the show at the Gilded Balloon, 8.30pm. The lady is a tramp. That's what the show is called.

• 4:52Rory Stewart?

  Very good. 8.30pm, Gilded Balloon, anyone in Edinburgh, chance to see Grace Campbell. Alison, let's start though with Afghanistan. So it is almost exactly five years since this chaotic, catastrophic withdrawal, those scenes at the airport of Afghans chasing large planes down, the US Marines at the gate, months of desperate Afghans trying to get evacuated from Afghanistan, and the end of 20 years of what was in fact, people now believe, a $3 trillion war. The numbers depend on whether you're Harvard counting it or others, but certainly thousands of billions of dollars spent. Country invaded to get rid of the Taliban after 9/11, 20 years on the ground, and then the country's handed back to the Taliban again.

• 5:36Rory Stewart?

  What have you been thinking about in relation to Afghanistan? For what it's worth, I've been talking to a number of people over the last few days. I've been talking to people in rural areas, I've been talking to people working in NGOs, I've been talking to business people. So happy to go in any direction you like.

• 5:47Alastair Campbell?

  I guess I've been thinking on two levels today, and the state of Afghanistan today with the economy that's dire, rights for women and girls dire, foreign policy in Afghanistan placing the world dire. One point about today which I think is worth noting, I haven't seen a single piece of commentary or analysis by any of the governments involved at the time, including our own. I find that quite extraordinary. Normally, big anniversaries, and it is a big anniversary, and you know, Lee Doucet on the BBC did some really interesting stuff the other day, but normally on a big anniversary of a historical event that we've been involved in, you'd think there'd be something coming from the Brits, the Americans, all the others who are involved.

• 6:29Alastair Campbell?

  So that then takes me, I guess, back to when the whole thing started. You mentioned 9/11. I was obviously alongside Tony Blair at that time. And I guess this is where history becomes so difficult. What we were doing at the time honestly felt like we were doing the right thing. It really felt like we were doing the right thing for the world and indeed for Afghanistan. Fast forward to today, as you say, and an incredibly costly military intervention, which cost a lot of lives and a lot of money, has left, well, you tell me, is the place better or worse than it was 20 years ago?

• 7:04Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's certainly not anything like what we dreamt of. I think the story on the intervention is still going to be fought over for years. And one of the strange things is that more work is not being done on really learning the lessons. I mean, given that this was a conflict in which so many hundreds of British lives were lost, so many people were wounded, so many billions were spent, given that this was, some people might argue, along with Iraq, a real inflection point in the whole rules-based international order, a moment at which people's faith in the US and coalitions collapsed. It's extraordinary, more study isn't happening. I mean, America, to do its credit, I spoke to a congressional team that's been set up

• 7:47Rory Stewart?

  that's doing a very, very detailed analysis, and came in and did two different sessions with me in the States on trying to go through the lessons learned. My sense is that the real mistake was not the intervention in the first place. I think the intervention to get rid of the Taliban was initially quite successful. I think it's that we began to try to do too much. We began to try to reshape Afghan society. We got involved in these very complicated counterinsurgency campaigns against the Taliban. And paradoxically, very difficult thing to argue at the time, but I felt very strongly that actually a light footprint would have been much better, letting the Afghans run things, taking risk, accepting it wouldn't be quite the country we wanted, but not getting dragged into trying to micromanage. Anyway, that's a bit of waffle.

• 8:32Rory Stewart?

  How is it now? Well, it's horrifying. I mean, it's a very, very depressing, brutal situation. Now, in detail, different people will tell you different things about what's going on, but the fundamentals are that the Taliban are an extremely conservative government whose number one distinctive characteristic is that they wish to not allow women to get into normal education. They don't want women to function in so many parts of society. I mean, it's central to so many of these edicts that comes out of Kandahar. Add to that, it's not a democracy, so it's a place where you can be arbitrarily arrested,

• 9:16Rory Stewart?

  tortured, killed, and that is happening to people. It's also a country which is very, very poor. It's getting very little revenue. It's basically under sanctions from almost the entire world at the moment. And there are millions of refugees that have been pushed back across the border out of Iran and Pakistan, a million more to come. People think up to six million refugees are coming back into one of the poorest countries in the region. That's part of the story, and I can get into other parts of the story. I mean, in some ways, life has improved since we left. It's more secure, safer, fewer people are getting killed, you can travel freely around the country. The government, the Taliban government, seems to be much more effective at building roads, setting up infrastructure than the previous governments.

• 10:01Rory Stewart?

  And although there are allegations of corruption, it's nothing like as corrupt as the old Afghan government. So it's a dictatorial, brutal regime that is delivering services and stealing less money than the previous government, but it's not a place where I think any of us would want to live.

• 10:18Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Should we bring in somebody who knows even more about Afghanistan than you do? Because I think, you know, we like to, unlike Michael Gove, we think expert voices are very, very important to have. So why don't you introduce our special expert guest on Afghanistan?

• 10:32Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's a great privilege because I am bringing in, for the first time ever in four years, the show, Shishana, my wife. She's, of course, in no way an expert on Afghanistan in the way that an Afghan would. And I'm, I'm very grateful to all the people that I've been talking to over the last few days. For example, my friend Saad Moxeni, who definitely is an Afghan and knows Afghanistan very well. But Shishana has been working in Afghanistan since 2006. She speaks Dari. She lived full time on the ground for many years in Afghanistan. And she's seen the full 20 year change. And it's also her birthday today. So happy birthday and welcome for the first time to the podcast.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  Thank you very much. It's wonderful to be here. I am a regular listener.

• 11:12Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, you're a subscriber?

• 11:14Speaker 03

  I am a subscriber.

• 11:15Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent. That's good. We like subscribers. Shishana, when we in the West talk about Afghanistan in the way that Rory and I've just done, what do we get right and what do we get wrong? I've only ever been to Afghanistan during the period immediately after, well, while the war was going on, but also then the period immediately after, I've not been back. So what do we get right and what do we get wrong?

• 11:37Speaker 03

  Oh, yes. Well, what we get wrong is much more interesting. What we get right is the macros that, you know, you and Rory just laid out. There's so much about the situation, particularly for women and girls. It's just impossible. But what we get wrong is it is the most spectacularly beautiful, fierce, unbelievable country, platitude, platitude. But when I arrived in 2006, I get out of my car at the gates of this huge mud fort with three foot thick mud walls, incredibly ornate carved wooden doors. And on the other side of it are 300 men with wheelbarrows and shovels just clearing the site, restoring the building. And

• 12:19Speaker 03

  today, you know, the old city of Kabul in this neighborhood where we restored 150 historic buildings, it's morning glory, blue flowers on vines going up the sides of these, these courtyards. So it's very beautiful. The mountains are unbelievable. They look untouched. And everywhere you go, as soon as you you get these photographs from Afghanistan of, of in particular, men staring very intensely into the camera, which is the look that Afghan men give you. If you, if you're just walking along the street, as soon as you put your hand to the heart, a sort of gesture and you say, Salaam alaikum, peace to you, all of a sudden, eyes light up, we're joking, we're greeting, it's a five minute long greeting.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  The hospitality is fierce.

• 13:05Rory Stewart?

  So Shishana, try to explain maybe what it's like for friends of yours who are still working in nonprofits on the ground. What are the kinds of things that people are struggling with? What are the kinds of things that are depressing people? What are the kinds of things that are giving people hope?

• 13:18Speaker 03

  It is difficult, I think, to summarize the situation as a whole, for sure, because you've got rural, urban differences are unbelievable. But if I, well, let me give you an example, one of the women we work with, I'm obviously had to use a false name, it's very boring, but Shabnam. So she lives in Jawsjon province, way up in the north of Afghanistan. She's a weaver. She learned to weave from her mother, her grandmother before that, as did, by the way, about a million women in Afghanistan are already trained weavers. If you roll back the clock on her life, she finished high school, studied veterinary medicine, was in a degree in university in history. Taliban takeover, a women's ban on education goes in through the age through grade six. So she has to leave university.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  She then starts studying midwifery, which was allowed at the time, no longer allowed to study anymore.

• 14:06Rory Stewart?

  I'm interrupting here because this is a key, key point, I think, that listeners have got to get because the Taliban government is demanding that Afghan women can only be seen by women when they go in for medical care. And at the same time, they have stopped women being able to train as midwives and doctors, which is leading to, I mean, there are still obviously midwives and doctors and Shishana's nonprofit, Turquoise Mountain on the Ground in Afghanistan, has a clinic with female doctors, midwives, but they're getting older. And the new generation is not coming in. It's just one example of the complete sort of censorship system. Anyway, back over to you.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  So she trains as a midwife. And she needs to earn an income from her family because the Afghan economy is contracted by about 25%. There are just no jobs in rural Afghanistan. So she goes back to carpet weaving. Let me explain what she's making. So this is a halfway college educated woman who has multiple degrees and qualifications. She's weaving carpets. She is the sole breadwinner in her family. Her husband wants a job, her sons want a job, there just aren't jobs. Let me tell you what she's weaving. She's just finished, she's the leader, the manager of 100 women who've just finished a carpet that's 90 square meters. So it's going to Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland, the royal residence.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  It's a masterpiece. It's six meters wide by 15 meters long. So it therefore needs a six meter wide loom and its own loom house in northern Afghanistan. So these 100 women have finished this thing. And it will go on show very shortly in Northern Ireland. It's traditional Persian carpet design, but also with the flowers of Northern Ireland and of Afghanistan in it, so it's thistles. And it has about 12 little bees that are woven into it so that kids, when they're visiting this historic royal palace, can find the bees, go on a bee hunt. Right? So Shabnam's been in charge of this group of 100 women who've been working for a year on this thing, right? I don't think you or I have any idea what it is like to be an Afghan woman.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  To go through that roller coaster and to now be the sole breadwinner in your family. By the way, she's also the community health worker for her area. We provide healthcare for about 35,000 people this year, but part of that is community health workers in these weaving villages. What the ups and downs of that are like, I think, are, even though I've been working there for 20 years, I simply cannot imagine it.

• 16:29Alastair Campbell?

  Is it true, by the way, that you now, if you are a woman in Afghanistan now, you cannot speak audibly, you can't speak in public in a way that men might hear, you know, is, is that, have I fallen for fake news there? Is that, is that one of the things that's?

• 16:43Speaker 03

  No, you haven't. No, you haven't. A decree banned that. But that is like the reality of all of those decrees, which are issued by the Supreme Leader in Kandahar, which is that their implementation is mixed.

• 16:55Rory Stewart?

  It's very weird. So Kandahar is very, very conservative down in the south. And there it is vice and virtue ministries walking around. It's extremely brutal. It's very conservative. If you get up to Kabul, the old capital city, it's not quite like that. It's a little bit more open. The shops seem to be flourishing, quite a lot of new housing is being built. Quite a lot of investment is coming in. Get up to Bamiyan in the center, which is a different community, it's a Shia community. The governor has tended to be a little bit more open. Harat, which was traditionally more liberal, has got a more conservative governor. So I think one of the things, Alistair, which is going to be something to watch over the next few months is this tension within the Taliban, which is there's a very conservative factions putting out these decrees.

• 17:40Rory Stewart?

  And then there's clearly other bits of society resisting them. And that can't go on forever. I mean, that's gone on for five years. And one of these two is going to dominate. Either this country is eventually going to become an unbelievably lockdown conservative country. Or it's going to push back in a more progressive direction.

• 17:55Alastair Campbell?

  Is it also right that, because I'm interested in the kind of, you know, the, where they see themselves in the world? Do they even think about this? Am I right that Russia is now the only major state in the world that has even recognized this government? We don't have an ambassador there, do we? They're allied in that way to Russia. They've lost so much. You know, the, the big donors have pulled out, USAID has pulled out. So they're facing these massive problems where they're ever more politically isolated, ever more presumably being hit financially. I just wondered for the women, even worse, but for anybody there, how do you kind of just get through your

• 18:35Alastair Campbell?

  how your daily life? And do they think about the outside world? Do they want the world to be more interested, more engaged and more involved?

• 18:41Speaker 03

  I mean, I do not know what is going on inside the hearts and minds of the Taliban. And I think it is really mixed by, by person. I don't want to sugarcoat the situation at all. They're, they are different from what we've seen before in that they seem to be trying to do things for the country. Now, I don't, again, I don't want to project why they're doing that. It also helps them stay in power, but they are building roads, they are collecting tax revenue and spending it and things like that. And so it means, and I mean, this is what I think is, is more interesting for people because I think people, people know broadly the terrible things that are happening. The interesting bit is the gray area where it is possible to operate, actually, and it's possible for Afghans living there

• 19:23Speaker 03

  and for the organizations who stayed to do stuff. So, for example, 400 clinics have been closed across the country. That's lack of money and some other complicated things. But if you can still run a clinic, it's an amazing ability to be able to do something. I think that's not just for us as an international NGO, but actually for our Afghan staff and the doctors to be able to come out of your house every day and actually do something for the people around you is quite a special thing when things are so difficult around. And I've actually never met a place in the world where there is such a coming together of need, because it's brutal, with the ability to have an impact on the ground. Not true everywhere. There are some places where the need is incredible. You just can't do anything.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  I do want to say thank you to your listeners and viewers, because actually there have been a number of people who have been very generous to Turquoise Mountain, who listen to the podcasts. One person in particular who reached out recently, totally transformed what we're able to do in Afghanistan. So

• 20:20Alastair Campbell?

  That's good.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  Thank you to everybody.

• 20:22Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, can I just ask you both the same question? And I want you to answer at the same time, because I want to see if you're going to give me the same answer. So this has to be an instant answer to this question. Should? The British government recognise the Taliban and should we have an ambassador there to reflect Britain's interests? You've got three seconds, three, two, one.

• 20:43Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  I'm officially no comment. I'm going to put the boring switch on. That's the absolute thing that I won't say in any of the countries in which I work.

• 20:51Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  Super boring switch, sorry.

• 20:53Rory Stewart?

  Let me make the case. I mean, Afghanistan, we haven't talked about its international stuff either. It's in a conflict, as you know, and many listeners will know, with Pakistan. I mean, incredible conflict. Pakistan literally bombed Kabul, killed about 240 people in the centre of the city on what they claim was a terrorist camp and the Taliban say was a drug rehabilitation centre. The Taliban are quite clearly allied with the Pakistani Taliban that's trying to undermine a very fragile Pakistan government. Asim Munir, the Pakistan chief of the army staff that we talk about a lot, who's the de facto ruler of Pakistan, the military is very powerful, is determined to try to do all he can to effectively bring down the Taliban government, it seems.

• 21:34Rory Stewart?

  Although, in many ways, any British soldiers or American soldiers listening to this will be sort of spitting out their coffee because it was the Pakistan supporting the Taliban against the British and the Americans when we ran operations there for 20 years.

• 21:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 21:47Rory Stewart?

  So all of that's going on. I think the brutal truth is that sanctioning Afghanistan, excluding Afghanistan, just hurts ordinary Afghan people. This is one of the poorest places in the region by a country mile. This is a place where millions of people are in malnutrition, some of them on the edge of starvation, with refugees flowing in. We're not going to change, I'm afraid, the behaviour of the Taliban, however terrible, however much we profoundly disapprove of their ideology. These are people who spent 20 years living in caves. They're not trying to go shopping in Harrods. The Taliban leadership is not going to be affected by what we say. What is affected by our refusal to engage is ordinary Afghans.

• 22:29Rory Stewart?

  And as you say, the people who are engaging are Russia, increasingly China, but I don't think it's in anyone's interest to have people on the edge of starvation.

• 22:36Alastair Campbell?

  Did you find it as odd as I did that there was such little political and diplomatic commentary around the fifth anniversary?

• 22:42Rory Stewart?

  I can't believe it, Alistair. I mean, look, it's painful for all of us, but it's been amazing. I mean, I remember talking to the ex-permistrator of the Foreign Office and the National Security Advisor back in 2014, 15, when they were talking about doing a commission inquiry in Iraq. And I said, how about doing something on Afghanistan? He looked very, very uncomfortable because the story was, as you know, Obama would say, Afghanistan's the good war, Iraq's the bad war. Gordon Brown said very, very similar things. We've had Johnny Mercer just on the show last week talking about what he experienced in Afghanistan, the terrible loss to him and his friends, but also the astonishing killing of Afghans. I mean, that's something I maybe should have pushed Johnny on more.

• 23:26Rory Stewart?

  Understandably, I felt, reading his book, but I understand it, his view of Afghans are not very positive. Shashana and myself, I think we think Afghans are the most extraordinary people on earth. I sometimes think I'd move the whole family back there. I'd find them some of the kindest, most generous, funny, warm people on earth. It's a terrible mutual tragedy and we're just not thinking about something which literally consumed thousands of billions of dollars, thousands of international lives, hundreds of thousands of Afghan lives, and we're not even really doing an inquiry into it.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  I'm actually not surprised that people aren't doing something for the fifth anniversary because I experienced mostly just a deep shame from both the American, European, British general public and governments at our involvement in that country over the last decade. So I'm not that surprised. But what you said, Rory, I couldn't agree more with. The sanctions are not, they're just killing the lives of the economy and individual Afghans. But the world is more like this today than it was five years ago and 10 years ago, which is you have more countries which are in conflict and we don't agree with what the governments are doing. And we either are going to be black and white about it or we're going to do what we can

• 24:40Speaker 03

  do and we can do quite a lot in Afghanistan.

• 24:44Rory Stewart?

  You actually deliberately working in a lot of these countries. You're working in Myanmar, you're working in Syria, you're working in the West Bank and you're presumably having similar conversations all these places. Syria, people would say, well, this is a guy who used to be an Al Qaeda, Al-Shara, who Alistair and I interviewed. Myanmar, there's a brutal military government, Taliban in Afghanistan, yet you still think that it's worth working. Tell us why you think it's worth working in these countries that many of us would just rather ignore or pretend didn't exist or, I don't know, we're too uncomfortable to engage with.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, we bury our heads in the sand and we just sort of go, oh, it's a black hole, we can't look at it because we're so embarrassed by our role in it, how difficult things are. Because you can do things. I mean, if I look at the news at a place that I've not engaged in, Sudan, it depresses me. When I think about the countries that I worked in, that you just listed, I don't get that feeling because I can do something. I can create 10,000 jobs a year, put 35,000 people through healthcare and that's enough for me in the day. I also think, I've come to find that the sort of ecosystem around all of us of activism, political choice, organisations on the ground, we don't all have to agree on the same things. It can be important that activists and think tanks are doing the research and putting

• 25:57Speaker 03

  out what the problems are and demanding that we don't engage. And it can also be true that I should go and work even when we don't agree with what governments are doing. If we just leave Afghanistan today, right? If we say, okay, it's too impossible for women and girls, we're just going to go. That just means we don't employ thousands of Afghan women or put tens of thousands of people through healthcare. It's as simple as that. Why would I do that? I think it's an amazing privilege to be able to go and work in these places. Also, I get to work in cultural heritage, so I make pretty things. I'm wearing my Afghan dangly earrings, I've got lots of props, Afghan pottery, I can go on here. It's a really fun way to work in a country, actually. It's what's beautiful about a country, it's not what's wrong.

• 26:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. You used the word shame. Do you think that shame is exacerbated by the sense that we maybe haven't done enough to protect those Afghans who actually supported our military in a very, very practical way? And also, the other thing Johnny Mercer talked about, Rory, was this ongoing inquiry into some of the atrocities that appear to have been committed by some of our troops. So I just wonder whether that feeds into this. And also, Shashana, if you can just give me a sense of what, if you say to an Afghan, oh, I'm married to a Brit, what is their feeling about Britain and what is their feeling about America?

• 27:14Speaker 03

  I think they say, well, we beat the British. Afghans have a very long memory and from their perspective, they have never successfully been conquered and you're welcome to come and visit, thank you very much. I also think that the Taliban is very open to tourism and very welcoming of people coming because they won, right? The war is over and they are in charge. So I don't have any concern being an American or American and British passport-holding person in the country. I do think, to your question about shame, I think the question about the way that we have dealt with resettlement, refugees and the evacuation, it is unbelievably important.

• 27:56Speaker 03

  I don't want to say that it's not, but it's the thing that's about us, not about Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a country of 45 million people and what we have an obligation to, or what we just feel if we have an obligation to people in the world, what can we possibly do to make X number of Afghans' lives better? I think the more fundamental question is what we are doing or not doing in Afghanistan. And the British government does continue to engage, even though we don't recognise, as do most governments around, providing aid and I wish we did more of it.

• 28:26Rory Stewart?

  There is though, Alistair, I mean, you're completely right, that particularly for people who worked as soldiers in Afghanistan or for the government in Afghanistan, we spent 20 years telling people that they were safe, encouraging them to take huge risks to sign up with us against the Taliban. From the very beginning, they were facing Taliban reprisals against themselves and their family and we were saying, don't worry, we've got you, we're here to stay. And then we pulled the plug on them. And it was Biden who pulled the plug on them. I think you need to be pretty brutal about this because obviously we spend most of our time on the podcast attacking Trump. It was Biden, completely unnecessarily. At the moment at which he pulled the plug, five years ago, in Afghanistan, there had

• 29:08Rory Stewart?

  been no British soldiers killed for five years and there had been no American soldiers killed for 18 months. That was not a live combat zone. We were sustaining that government with troops in bases and with air cover. And the first thing he did is he pulled out well over 10,000 American civilian contractors, many of whom were maintaining the Afghan aircraft, so that the planes that the Americans had provided couldn't fly. They require very complicated software updates every time they land. So suddenly you have Afghan troops stuck in forward operating bases with no medical evacuation, no ammunition coming in and no support. We collapsed it like a pack of cards and we didn't plan for it.

• 29:50Rory Stewart?

  I mean, it was really staggering, that, absolutely staggering. I remember Shashana and I were staying with Ashraf Ghani, who was the president of Afghanistan then, a few weeks before this all happened. And I was trying to say to him, look, if Biden follows through on this, what on earth is going to happen? And the truth was that he and the United States were in complete fantasy land. I remember him taking down books on French poetry from the shelves of the presidential library when we could literally hear gunfire outside in the streets. I mean, it was like something out of an Evil and War novel. And the result, of course, is that many, many Afghans, particularly those who served in the special forces alongside us, found themselves in incredibly dangerous positions and we didn't look after them properly.

• 30:34Rory Stewart?

  We didn't bring people home. And I find it going to be brutal, there's an element of racism in this. These people were as much fighting alongside us as our British colleagues and we put all the energy into looking after the British soldiers, but not into the Afghan soldiers who were effectively fighting with us and for us.

• 30:50Alastair Campbell?

  So Shashana, you were there five years ago. Just give us a taste of what you saw, what you heard, how you felt.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do remember that day very well, middle of August. So if you begin that morning, the Taliban were at the Kabul city gates, they paused there and in the weeks and days before, all the provincial capitals had fallen. It happened pretty quickly. So we convene a Teams meeting in the morning to go over our sort of plan for what happens if and when they take over. But everyone assumed there was going to be a six-month fight for the capital. There was no possibility that it was happening that day, right? Sitting there, one of my staff members gets a text message, they have come in through the Kabul city gates. By late morning, they were in the presidential palace, chalas, it's finished, they are in charge, 100% free and clear, not a shot fired. So we're all like, what?

• 31:42Speaker 03

  What do we do? Next morning, the Taliban actually went around to all the clinics and hospitals. And we're like, right, let's go, people. The war is over. You're welcome. Come back to work. Come back and serve your Afghan brothers and sisters. And so my staff are sitting there going, do we hide or do we go to work? And somehow we somehow we thought, right, wrong. If we don't open when they ask us to come out, it's going to be suspicious and it's going to be harder to open later. So some very brave doctors got up and went to work that first day. And I then a few days later, so the men went first. A few days later, the female doctors and nurses came out and we were able to open every bit of our project over the course of those weeks, months.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  I genuinely believe that it's because we opened the first day that the Taliban encountered us as just doing stuff for people around us. And I think that's why we're able to operate today. But yeah, that's what the day was.

• 32:40Rory Stewart?

  Wow. So this was a project which was conceived by the king, who thought that it would be a great idea to combine working on craft, training, cultural heritage, building, restoration, employment. So the sort of things that he does with did with the Prince's Trust or the King's Foundation in Afghanistan. But Shoshana has grown it now to operate in places like Syria, places like Myanmar. And it is extraordinary because it's basic healthcare, it's primary education, it's water supply and sanitation, but it's also these really beautiful traditional crafts. Why is it that you think culture and crafts matter in conflict?

• 33:16Speaker 03

  I did not see this coming, if I'm totally honest, because I arrived in Kabul 20 years ago as a science teacher. I studied astrophysics. Cultural heritage was not my thing. But I've watched over the last five years in particular, right? Began with COVID, then there was a coup in Myanmar, then the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, October 7th, all of these wars, right? You figure out real quick whether what you're doing is a good idea or not. Because when wars start, when regimes change, if it doesn't work, if it doesn't matter, people aren't going to come. The artisans aren't going to work. They're not going to make. And we watched it work better and better. We could do more and more every year over the last five years. Why? I think that when everything falls apart, when security disappears, your sense of the

• 34:01Speaker 03

  future disappears, public services stop working, hospitals close, you have to be able to feed your family. So the economic bit of what we do has to work. We have to be able to create employment. But there is something else about it. There is a mindfulness, a therapy in making, and you're making something beautiful. You're bringing something beautiful into the world. You are fundamentally doing the thing that is beautiful about your culture, what was passed down to you, what you'll pass on to your children. So weirdly, it seems to work just as well, if not better, when things are terrible, which I, as I say, it was a surprise to me.

• 34:34Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent. Well, I look forward to our next trip to Hillsborough Castle. We were there not long ago. Shoshana, thank you so much. I told Fiona that you were coming on and she said, well, we still haven't done that thing where you get us both as what you talked about for years and years and years. And she said, we should, maybe you should get us on to talk about how couples disagree agreeably.

• 34:54Speaker 03

  Wow, that is a high bar, Fiona.

• 34:58Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not sure we want to do that. I don't know what you guys think, but I'm worried about that one. Anyway, thank you so much. And, and, you know, good luck to you and all the work that you do in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Thank you.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  I'm so grateful to you all. Thanks.

• 35:12Alastair Campbell?

  Final plug, Sunday read on our wonderful newsletter. We've got a piece from Sir Laurie Bristow. We talked about whether there should be a British ambassador in Afghanistan. Well, he was the last British ambassador to Afghanistan and he's going to write a piece for us about what happened back then, as well as his reflections five years on. So sign up in the description below to get that.

• 35:32Rory Stewart?

  Brilliant. Well, let's take a quick break, Alastair, and then back to concentrate on Russia in two dimensions and then talk about the tragedy of Jason Adi.

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• 37:16Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 37:19Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart. And Alastair, you were very, very patiently and sweetly asking lots of questions towards me and Shoshana, so I'm going to flip it around. There's a couple of things caught your eyes this week in Russia. One of them was to do with elections and parties and the others was to do with grain exports. Do you want to give us a bit of a sense on what you thought was interesting there?

• 37:37Alastair Campbell?

  And there's a third thing that has happened since I've been looking at that, which is this extraordinary closeness now in the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un in North Korea at a time when Donald Trump seems to be distancing himself from South Korea. So that's becoming very, very complicated. But here's the thing, Rory, did you know there's going to be a general election to the Russian Duma, their parliament, a month from now? Now, who, you got the American election wrong, but who do you think is going to win this one?

• 38:07Rory Stewart?

  Well, this one, I, I mean, and let's hope that in the same way that my predictions on the American election went wrong, I predict Vladimir Putin, but let's hope I have the Kamala Harris effect on him.

• 38:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think that united Russia is going to win. And one of the, there's yet another new reason for that. The Supreme Court has banned Russia's only liberal anti-war party. Now, they're not massively anti-war because they're scared, like all the opposition parties are, but this is a party called Yabloko. There's an appeal process going on, but the chances are they're not going to stand.

• 38:41Rory Stewart?

  Can I ask you that question? Because I think that's, that's the thing that will confuse people. So Yablak is party that, as you say, has been getting, you know, 1.4, 1.6% of the vote over the last 10, 12 years. One kind of wonders, what does it say about Putin or Russia that he would want to work to ban the party? How did he ban it? And why does he feel threatened by a party that he's allowed to run for so many years and seem to be in the past, almost electorally irrelevant?

• 39:07Alastair Campbell?

  Well, they haven't won a seat since 2003. As you say, they've never been above low single figures in the polls and it's very hard to work out whether the polls are accurate, but they've, they've never really made an impact there. They were cleared to run by the Electoral Commission, which is run by the Kremlin. So that is the question that people have been wondering, why now? Why do this now? Now, if you look at it from the perspective, is he weak? Okay. Then basically the weakness says, I don't care how few votes they get. I don't want anybody saying, having the opportunity to say that party is against the special military operation. If it's a sign of strength, it's basically him saying, love, I don't care. I don't care. I'm just not going to have any opposition.

• 39:52Alastair Campbell?

  You know that anyway. The thing about Russia, I listened to this extraordinary podcast in German, Di Lager der Nation, and they had an extraordinary woman on called Gesina Donblut. And she's written several books about Russia. She's worked in Russia as a journalist for a German broadcasting company. She was saying what we get wrong about Russia is that we apply our logic to the way that they make decisions. Okay. So for example, we think, because we see Donald Trump thinking, I've got to sort out this bloody war in Iran because of the economy for the midterms coming up. So we think, well, Putin must be worried about the economy in Russia. And her point was, no, he can, he doesn't care about the economy, the impact of people.

• 40:37Alastair Campbell?

  You and I have said many times, you've got all these Russian families who now lost somebody in the front line through this meat grinder strategy. Surely that's going to get to Putin? No. Because if he, he now needs this war to keep his grip on power. Because if he loses his grip on power, he's probably now, the rational part of his mind is thinking, you know, what's the lesson of most dictatorships when they end? They end in death or they end in prison. And she was making the point, he's a hunted war criminal. Okay. He gets the cover at the moment from Trump, but he's a hunted war criminal. And when the war is over, unless he wins, he's done. So I think the, the logic of why does he ban a tiny little power? We think, we're thinking that from a Western perspective.

• 41:20Alastair Campbell?

  He's basically saying, I'm going to pretend we have a free and fair election. I'm going to behave as though I'm really surprised and honored when I win it again. And meanwhile, the thing goes on. And she also makes the point that Russians are not that used to genuine democracy. And of course, state assassinations have become normalized. People falling out of windows. We know that Boris Nemtsov was bumped off. We know that Alexei Navalny was bumped off. Litvinenko was bumped off. This is what they do.

• 41:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, it's such an amazing story, this. So Yablika has been the one genuine liberal party in Russia, as you say, for more than 20 years, sort of tolerated because it didn't get anywhere. One of the things that's been very striking about it is that, like all progressive parties, it's completely riven by internal dissensions. So it expelled Alexei Navalny, who was originally a member. It then got very cross because Navalny was encouraging people to do tactical voting. For example, to vote for the Communist Party against Putin's party if he thought the Communist Party was more likely to beat him. And they're real purists. And they said, you know, this is ridiculous. How can you possibly encourage people to vote for parties that we profoundly disagree with?

• 42:30Rory Stewart?

  It then managed to have a fight with the most liberal radio station in the country and boycotted it. So they're right in the middle of these kind of tiny factual things. But as we came towards this election, Navalny's widow, who we interviewed on leading endorsed them.

• 42:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 42:46Rory Stewart?

  And a lot of the Russian opposition has begun to get behind them. So along with your point about swatting flies, I think there's also a genuine anxiety that maybe the Kremlin thought that they could become a proxy for expressing anti-war sentiment. Even if they only got 4%, 9% of the vote, it might be a bit destabilizing for the regime to see that 4% or 9% of Russians actually are publicly so against the war in Ukraine. They're pro- this party. It's also interesting. You pointed out this strangeness that Sasha was getting to be at. He said, what do you mean they have elections? I thought Putin was a dictator. And, you know, there are people saying he's not going to accept a peace deal in Ukraine until after the elections.

• 43:26Rory Stewart?

  It's like when people say, you know, Netanyahu is not going to accept a sort of Gaza deal until after the elections. The pretense of this stuff is very strong. The party wasn't banned officially by the Kremlin, although some pretty good reporting says Putin gave a direct order. The way it happened is that a judge heard a civil case brought by Rodina, the motherland party.

• 43:49Alastair Campbell?

  Another party, yeah.

• 43:50Rory Stewart?

  Another pro-Putin party, which accused Yablika, amongst other things, of breaking copyright because they'd shown in one of their ads an image of Hiroshima, which they claimed belonged to the US Army for copyright.

• 44:03Alastair Campbell?

  The whole thing. But this is what they do. They make us sort of laugh by saying, this is quite funny, right? Just unpick what you just said. So it's the Supreme Court making the judgment on a case brought by another party that, as you said, is pro-Kremlin. Why do you have a pro-Kremlin party when Putin's already got his own party? Answer, to pretend that you can vote for other parties. Okay? So this guy is called Alexei Giravlyov, and he's quite a kind of, he's got very good teeth and he's got very well managed hair and facial hair, and he looks really tough.

• 44:41Rory Stewart?

  You make sound like a sort of tougher version of the mooch.

• 44:44Alastair Campbell?

  He's a much tougher version of the mooch, much, much, much tougher version of the mooch. He doesn't dye his hair. He doesn't have botox. He looks rugged. It looks like you wouldn't want to meet him, you know, coming out of a nightclub. So he brings the case. Now, what was the judge deciding? Some of the complaints they were deciding was, for example, this you can get because Putin's very profound anti-gay stance. Yabloko were accused of publicly supporting an extremist organization. What's the extremist organization? LGBT movement, okay, which the Supreme Court had designated as extremist three or four years ago. Second, this is another thing that gets said, Yabloko received money, no evidence given,

• 45:28Alastair Campbell?

  through third parties from Germany and the US and other countries. Okay? So that's the sort of thing. Okay. But then you go into this nonsense. The copyright, it wasn't just the Hiroshima photo. They were accused, Rory, of using the lines of Soviet songs, including these lines, "Let there always be sunshine, and if only there were no war." They take these lines from old songs. How dare they? The copyright is owned by the person who wrote that song.

• 45:57Rory Stewart?

  Can I just on that one? There's also, I think, possibly, and actually a Russian joke here, that they're upholding the copyright of Stalinist Russia and the US Army. I mean, particularly that last thing, you're upholding the copyright of the US Army in order to stop someone campaigning against the Ukraine war.

• 46:18Alastair Campbell?

  How dare you take a photo that was actually a photo from the Americans? We're insulting our good friend Donald Trump here. But you know, I mentioned in the discussion with Shoshana, how strange I thought it was that none of our governments came out and said something five years on. Not one foreign government has objected to this Supreme Court decision. Now, that just shows you how normalized this has all become. We're going into an election and they banned the only kind of real opposition liberal anti-war party, and not one foreign government has come out. The OSCE hasn't come out. A few NGOs have, and that's about it. So that's that. And don't forget, look, I'm not, these guys are unbelievably brave. Sometimes they get criticized for not being strong enough against the Ukraine war.

• 47:03Alastair Campbell?

  When you think how many of Putin's opponents have been put in jail, exiled or murdered. So these are pretty brave people are doing what they're doing. And they had a big protest outside the court of particularly young people. They've now got 40 party activists who are facing prosecution. Well, I think we know what's going to happen to them. So as you say, the other thing that I thought was interesting is the grain store wars that are going on. So right at the start of the war, one of the big worries was that Ukraine, wheat basket for the world, that the grain stores were, and the Turkish government got involved and some kind of deal got put together. You've now got them firing off at each other's grain stores. So that's going to have an impact upon

• 47:45Alastair Campbell?

  our economy, European economy and so forth. But it just shows you, to me, I mean, my sense is that this war is nowhere near ending.

• 47:53Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's just look at that story because people will remember in 2022 that when the first disruptions happened, there was a massive problem with world grain. Russia and Ukraine together provide something like 30% of all the world's grain exports. And Ukraine's providing over 50% of the maize for many markets. Huge numbers of European countries, a lot of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, some of them depend on 70% on Russian Ukrainian grain. And then there was this Turkish broker deal through the Black Sea that began to let this food come through again, and the grain prices came down. Since then, there's been a bit of diversification. But what's changed, as you've pointed out,

• 48:35Rory Stewart?

  is that since the middle of the summer, this is really a story just over the last couple of months, a new air war has started. And this is the use of drones, taking out these boats. Brutal. I mean, there's incredible reporting, the AP and the New York Times, from people interviewing a Indian Christian seaman who was on one of these boats that was hit by a drone. And the whole thing obviously explodes. The Ukrainian pilots killed, his captains injured. They stagger into the pilot's boat, the boat sinks. And what happens is we're seeing now, I guess, a repeat of what we see in the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea, which is increasingly the UN Convention on the Law on the Sea is going out of the window, right?

• 49:20Rory Stewart?

  It's very, very fundamental to global trade. Since the Second World War, is free navigation. The United States didn't sign up for the declaration, but the US Navy was all about this. The British Navy was all about this. And it's really important for the world when we've got globalization just in time, supply chain. So now we've got Strait of Hormuz basically closed. We've got the Red Sea where the Houthis are able to close it. And now it looks as though the Black Sea going down. And a lot of this is driven by the insurance markets because, as you've often pointed out, it's not necessarily that they need to strike every vessel.

• 49:52Alastair Campbell?

  Strike one.

• 49:53Rory Stewart?

  It's just that they need to strike one or two, and then the insurance companies say, well, we're not going to do this anymore. So Russia is being, is in real trouble because they're losing a lot of their grain exports. But Ukraine's in even more trouble because unlike Russia, they can't balance it as much with the oil and gas exports. And this is going to remove 3 billion euro a month from their exports?

• 50:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. The maritime insurance industry is a big player in this war. The decisions that they make are having that kind of impact. You mentioned the Turks there a couple of times, Rory. And I said last week that the Foreign Minister, Hakan Fidan, if there are any Turkish government people listening, we would love to talk to Hakan Fidan because he's a really interesting guy. But it seems to me that, again on this, on the grain, that Turkey is driving the only live diplomatic track. He said a few days ago, all commercial vessels are now being attacked indiscriminately.

• 50:45Alastair Campbell?

  Turkey has devised, they did the Black Sea Grain Initiative as it was called. But Turkey has apparently passed a Ukrainian proposal on how to end this to Moscow and is now awaiting a reply. So it's very interesting, the Turks yet again getting involved in this. Now, obviously, they're going to get directly impacted, but so are we all. Why are we not getting involved in that? Why are the Americans not getting involved in that?

• 51:08Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and then there's the question of escalation. We're reporting, of course, that Ukraine is striking deeper and deeper into Russian territories. So they struck something recently in an oil refinery, which is 500 miles east of Moscow. Deep, deep into Russia. But some of these strikes are killing dozens of people. Russian children are being killed by Ukrainian strikes. The strikes on the port, the Russian port, I think an eight-year-old was killed. And of course, the Russians are killing enormous numbers of Ukrainians and Ukrainian children. But as you get this retaliation in which Ukraine is effectively saying, look, Russia's been striking our civilians, striking our critical infrastructure, we're going to start striking the Russian infrastructure.

• 51:50Rory Stewart?

  You get the Russian government today saying, we hold Britain responsible. Ukraine is holding, using British drones to strike deep inside Russian territory and killing Russian children. Britain is now responsible for this. You can see the same with the ships, that we talk a lot about taking out the Shadow Fleet, which is the Russian vessels carrying sanctioned Russian goods out of Russia. And that's partly how Ukraine would describe what they're doing. But from the Russian point of view, this is Ukrainian attack on Russian civilian vessels. And then from the Ukrainian point of view, Russian attack on Ukrainian civilian vessels. All of this is escalation, right? All of this over the last few months is, you've found here with the grain, something which is a new development, but also builds on what's happening with drone warfare,

• 52:34Rory Stewart?

  which is a war which is broadening all the time. And I'm worried that as this escalation takes off, we're only at the beginning of something that could go very badly wrong.

• 52:44Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and the other thing that has really caught my eye this week are all these signs in relation to North and South Korea. Donald Trump had a massive hissy fit in the Oval Office yesterday because the South, you know, he was being grilled. You can always tell when Trump's feeling vulnerable about the issue because he gets really bad temper with the journalists. And it's usually a woman who asks him a question and he says, quiet, quiet, shut up. Where are you from? CNN, fake news, fake news. You made up this story about the mental health problems on the USS Abraham Lincoln. And if he got very antsy, and again, I thought, why can no other journalist stand up for somebody when they're under attack like that? But the issue that was getting under his skin was South Korea.

• 53:25Alastair Campbell?

  He appears now to be falling out with the South Koreans. And meanwhile, he was so nice about Kim Jong-un. Now, Kim Jong, according to Zelensky, the North Koreans are about to send another 50,000 troops to support the Russians. That is not the sign of a war that's coming to an end.

• 53:45Rory Stewart?

  And your point about his Truth Social post on South Korea, if people haven't seen it, I mean, it's staggering. It says, let me just read it to people. Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has long ago agreed to participate in joint military exercises with South Korea. These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America as usual, but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile to a country, North Korea, that as long as Donald J. Trump has been president, has been unthreatening and respectful. Therefore, and based on the fact that it's too late to cancel,

• 54:26Rory Stewart?

  I've instructed Secretary of War Pete Hethcote to substantially reduce the joint military exercises. While somewhat unrelated, and then he puts in a comic question mark in brackets, I recently asked the president of South Korea if they would like to join us in the denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, no, thanks. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump.

• 54:46Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it was the no thanks, it was the no thanks that triggered this hissy fit that then led to him sort of, you know, abusing this young woman. So now, if you're Putin, and I don't know whether Putin gets early access to Trump's Truth Social by paying $100,000, whatever it is, but he could read that and he's thinking, oh, he's coming back on side again. And to be doing it through Kim Jong-un, who was, now, I don't know if Zelensky is right or wrong in saying that 50,000 North Korean troops are on the way to Russia. One thing we do know is that North Korean troops have been there. And what else are they doing? They're learning, the North Koreans, this is the thing that's worrying the South Koreans,

• 55:26Alastair Campbell?

  the North Koreans are learning an awful lot from Russia and from Ukraine about the way that this war is being fought.

• 55:33Rory Stewart?

  Listen, we talked about the Taliban, and the Taliban are a brutal government. But North Korea is another level. It's unimaginable that any American president since 1945 would say what Trump has just said about North Korea. This is the most brutal, unpleasant dictatorship that has driven North Korea to be one of the poorest countries on earth. I mean, you can see the potential of that country from the fact that South Korea is one of the wealthiest countries on earth. A little border between the two, and you can see diversion. It's a country which has developed its own nuclear weapon program, that is testing ballistic missiles, that's threatening its neighbors, that's directly undermining a peaceful, democratic, prosperous American neighbor.

• 56:18Rory Stewart?

  And now, as you say, funneling troops into Russia's war against Ukraine. How is it possible, if you were looking for one country on earth that the United States should not be having a relationship with? It's North Korea from every way, from human rights, right through to nuclear. And there he is, putting out a Truth Social, saying he's going to stop joint military exercise with South Korea.

• 56:38Alastair Campbell?

  And partly because South Korea has not given him enough money. He actually increasingly is talking like a mafia boss, you know? I asked for 10 billion for the protection, they said, well, how about three? Well, three's okay for now, but you know, it's going to have to be more than that over time, you know? Do you want your cafe to be blown up or not? It's up to you. I mean, it's, anyway, there we go. Let's, we've managed to get through this episode without too much Trump derangement syndrome. Let's just, calm, okay. Now, Rory, before we go, Jason Arday, I think this is one of the most horrible stories from so many different angles. I just think the whole thing is truly, truly, truly horrible.

• 57:21Alastair Campbell?

  But the bottom line is, somebody who should not be dead is dead. And it's worth saying, because, you know, we should be very, very careful when we're talking about these kinds of events, that, you know, we don't know, there will be an inquest and the facts will one day be known better than they are now. But the horrible fear I have is that we're talking about a human being who was driven to a place where he just felt, I can't go on. And he was saying to his friends, we've had several on the record saying, he's saying to them, I cannot go on, I cannot. You know, he's losing the will to live, and that is a tragedy, a genuine tragedy for him, for his family, for his friends.

• 58:02Alastair Campbell?

  And I think we all of us just have to just step back and think and just be a little bit more empathetic than a lot of the coverage has been.

• 58:11Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's, well, let's start with that. I mean, this was a person who had a very difficult childhood, you know, whatever the details of it were. He had dyslexia, he had learning difficulties, he was very vulnerable. He deserved support, which he didn't get. But in the end, wherever we go on any of this and what he did, the bottom line is that he's dead. And I think it's highly probable that he killed himself. Still needs to be looked at, but that, I think, is the bottom line. And that should inform the way in which we think about everything else that's going on in this discussion. I mean, there were so many things I thought, and one of the things I thought is this question of

• 58:55Rory Stewart?

  whether we're honest enough with ourselves, all of us. He was accused of self-mythologizing, and it seems as though some of that may have been true, that he probably exaggerated what he'd done in some of his running. He may have exaggerated some of his childhood experiences or achievements. I've done the same. I mean, I feel the temptation to do that a lot. I feel, you know, if people say Rory Stewart speaks 11 languages, I don't point out that I didn't really speak 11 languages, that I've studied 11 languages. Most of them are really crap at. Certainly when I was a politician, I wasn't good enough about correcting people when they suggested I'd been in the army for much longer than I was. I was in for a very, very brief period, et cetera, et cetera. And look, I can keep going on myself because I feel myself and Jason,

• 59:40Rory Stewart?

  but I also think that many of us are like this. I mean, if you look at politicians who get in trouble for embroidering their CVs, exaggerating, letting it appear that they did more impressive things than they really did. Why does it happen? You know, sometimes it's vanity, sometimes it's pressure, sometimes it's you're flattered into it, sometimes you're telling yourself stories and you're getting carried away. I think it's very relatable, and that was one of the core things that I thought was so brutal about the media coverage, that there is, look, there were serious allegations, which Cambridge has been investigating around plagiarism, and we have to take seriously academic standards. I really want to say that, of course we do. And of course, professors will feel very strongly that that must be held to.

• 1:00:23Rory Stewart?

  But I also do feel that when the media is doing this, I just feel that could be me, could be any of us.

• 1:00:29Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, I didn't comment at all on this story through the whole thing until his death. And one of the reasons, I mean, I guess partly because I'm away, but as you know, Rory, I don't really switch off and I don't really have holidays and I'm always sort of, and I'm very, very interested in engaging issues of mental health. And the reason I didn't get engaged is because I felt very, very early on, this is becoming one of those frenzies. He is becoming one of those people who, in a story, being driven with literally dozens of stories. This is the other thing about social media, we talk about social media.

• 1:01:12Alastair Campbell?

  This is about national newspapers, particularly, you know, Mail, The Telegraph, The Spectator, The Times. They were writing dozens of stories about this guy, dozens. They were even putting out appeals, have you ever met Jason Arday? Do you know, we've talked about Jason Arday, get in touch with our news desk, et cetera. So it became one of those frenzies where he ceased to be seen as a human being. Um. Now, on the macro level, I've I've found that is probably ultimately what happened to Princess Diana. I think Princess Diana became, she's different. She's a, she's a, she was a member of the royal family. She was married to the future king. This guy was a, an academic with a good track record in several universities.

• 1:01:56Alastair Campbell?

  The plagiarism that people most talk about, this, this story was started by somebody who openly said, if anybody black gets a senior position in the academia, it's because they're black. It's because of D E I. So John Moores University investigated and found that he may have made mistakes, as lots of people do, but there was no sort of the plagiarism that people were talking about. But by then it was too late. Every single story became bigger than it deserved to be. And I think I'm afraid, why? Because he's black. It was othering. And then I think the other thing that I've seen since then, I mean, the, I just wonder how you,

• 1:02:36Alastair Campbell?

  what nastiness you have to have inside you, that even on the day the guy's body has been found, you want to have the same argument. I mean, some of the stuff about, I hate personalizing, but some of the stuff that Julia Hartley Brewer was putting out, some of the stuff that Isabel Oakeshaw was saying on the media. I mean, just try and have a little bit of empathy, just a little bit. Doesn't harm you. I had a bit of a, not spat, but Piers Morgan posted the, the article in the Daily Mail, because of course they all went a bit neutral. Jason Arday's body found at home. Okay. And a few people saying how tragic it was. And Piers quoted this, posted this, the Daily Mail thing, and he posted saying Cambridge University has a lot to answer for.

• 1:03:18Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. Well, maybe it does. But the way that we take these incredibly complicated human situations, yes, Cambridge has answers, maybe has questions. Now, we will never know what went on in his mind, but I've been in that place. I've been in that place where I'm thinking, I don't want to live anymore. And one of them, by the way, was a media frenzy. Um, now, and, and that media frenzy gets thrown at me every day because the only person who did take their life was, was somebody else, David Kelly. So none of us know what's going on in people's minds, but I have the worthlessness that he maybe felt was because he was, these stories were saying he was, he was utterly worthless. And there's a piece that somebody sent me this morning by a guy called Sam Chris of Substack.

• 1:04:03Alastair Campbell?

  The headline is the carrion eaters, what we did to Jason Arday. And what is interesting when you read this piece, a long piece, is that it touches on all of these complications. And of course, what the social media world and what our modern media world doesn't do is the complicated stuff. I feel sick about the whole thing. And I also feel there was a point at which I thought I should get a hold of this guy. I've never met him. I don't know that. I, I know what's going on here. I know exactly what's going on here. And I know it, look, it may have made absolutely no difference at all, but I sort of wish I'd got in touch with him and just said, listen, I can imagine what you're going through. It will pass. It will go. It will go. There will come a point when people are not talking about this anymore.

• 1:04:45Rory Stewart?

  One of the problems is that, um, that there is a really strange thing that I, I'm always struggling with, with this stuff. Where does the forgiveness come? Where does the moment come when you can actually reach out to a friend and say, you may have done awful things. I'm also really sorry for what you're going through because I don't think, uh, people who haven't been through it understand what it feels like. I mean, the closest I ever came, only time actually I've ever come to feeling, uh, like take my life was when I was under a full media assault, which now seems a bit silly when I look back at it, but it, as you're right, it's about the sense of worthlessness. It's the sense that what's happening is they're destroying everything that

• 1:05:25Rory Stewart?

  you thought about yourself. And, and maybe, you know, people in public life are a bit fragile and maybe we put ourselves on pedestals and, and maybe it's true that part of the reasons why, you know, a politician or a professor might be more vulnerable is that maybe you've allowed yourself to be set up with profiles saying that you're a great star and you're a wonderful thing. So then it's, it's that much more brutal. But I, I, yeah, anyway. I'll, uh, over to you to finish, but that was some of my thoughts. Yeah.

• 1:05:49Alastair Campbell?

  Of course, if you're a public figure, if you do things that are wrong, um, the press and the media and other politicians have a, have a right and a duty and a responsibility to go after you, to expose that. And to, and to, and to see you challenged. That's part of the, how politics works. I was talking to somebody about this last night. He said, you know, we, we're conscious of the, the, the sense of difference between the military and civilians. And he was saying that in public life, there is military and civilians. You and I are not civilians when it comes to politics and public life because we've chosen to be political public figures. We put ourselves out there. We make arguments in public and therefore we expect comeback.

• 1:06:30Alastair Campbell?

  I would say that Jason Arday was a civilian. Okay. Now he was a civilian attached to a big institution, Cambridge University, that has standards and should have standards and those standards should be seen through. The extent to which it became a fact that he only got this job because of D E I. He talked to the people in Cambridge and they say, no, that's not the case. That is not the case. He, he, he was, you know, very good academic. He'd had a lot of good published work. Now, there'll be others who say, well, no, it wasn't good enough. So, but, but, but what I can't stand is how people go out and they, they say, well, the opinion that I had about these issues before this terrible story happened, this has confirmed me in those, in those views. This has confirmed me in the view

• 1:07:13Alastair Campbell?

  that when anybody gets into a, one of these frenzies, we've just got to try and step back a little bit. I think there's something about, there, there comes a point in these frenzies where we just lose humanity.

• 1:07:26Rory Stewart?

  We lose empathy and we also lose, without being too pompous about it, we lose forgiveness. Where, where is the possibility of forgiveness? Where's the possibility of saying, you've screwed up. You might even, I mean, let, let's think about how we think about people who go to jail, people who commit crimes.

• 1:07:40Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. Exactly. That means they get no visitors.

• 1:07:44Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 1:07:44Alastair Campbell?

  It means nobody ever goes to see them.

• 1:07:46Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. No, and then, and then I, I had, um, you know, the usual crowd. I mean, uh, I don't know whether I should just come off social media completely like Fiona's done. I don't know, but I feel I've got to be on there because you, you do see things that inform what we talk about. But the number of people, usual suspects, Julia Hartley Brewer, Aaron Banks, all the usual lot, you know. The minute I literally said anything about this, like, you know, could we just understand this is a, this is a father, this is a, this is a son, this is a partner of a woman who's grieving. And literally come back, you know, you hounded a guy to his death.

• 1:08:25Alastair Campbell?

  Me, right? David Kelly. And now I know that I didn't, but I know that I was part of a, involved in a complicated process during which this guy took his own life. We all of us have to think, well, could we have done this? Could we have done that? We don't know the answers. We have to think about that. And that is, I think, then what creates the sort of understanding and empathy that was just lacking. It was lacking on so many levels. And I really, and the fact, I haven't seen, with the exception of, was it Matthew Syed? Somebody wrote a piece saying, we've all got to look at ourselves. I just wish a few newspapers, have any of these newspapers and broadcasters actually sat down and said, hold on a minute, when we, when we did have that guy, Simon Baron Cohen,

• 1:09:09Alastair Campbell?

  and we did have Jolly and Marm writing to us and saying, this is a very vulnerable man in the centre of a media storm. Did you, did any of them actually say, yeah, okay, let's just, let's just pull back a bit. I, I'd love to know the answer to that.

• 1:09:24Rory Stewart?

  Well, um, thank you, Alistair. And of course, tomorrow in question time, we're going to do a big domestic chunk, some really interesting listeners' questions on Andy Burnham and his media and comms strategy, which of course Alistair is a better place than anyone in the universe to think about. And then we will talk about the West Bank and what's happening with extreme settler violence uh, in the West Bank and that very under-reported part of the Middle East conflict.

• 1:09:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And we're not going to talk about Clacton by election at all.

• 1:09:52Rory Stewart?

  And we're not going to talk about Clacton by election at all because Binface has done it for us.

• 1:09:57Alastair Campbell?

  He's, he's, he won, he won. Binface.

• 1:09:59Rory Stewart?

  He won. He won.

• 1:10:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:00Rory Stewart?

  He won.

• 1:10:01Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

• 1:10:03Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

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