80. Question Time: How to become an MP, the art of whipping, and NIMBYs

Join Rory and Alastair for the latest episode of Question Time, where they discuss Labour's Brexit position, NIMBYs, the housing crisis, how to become an MP, whips, the favourites for the World Cup, and more. 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. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producer: Jack Davenport 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 Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair 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/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:44Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to another episode of the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:48Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:49Alastair Campbell?

  And Rory, I think the single biggest issue that was raised this week was the B word, Brexit, in two parts. One, the effects of Brexit, but also a lot of questions about Labour's position. Nick Simpson, Starmer seems to be really doubling down on being against free movement, single market. Does he really believe this? Why has his position hardened? Is this good politics or is he going too far? Richie G, given the raft of evidence emerging about the negative effects of Brexit, when do you think public discourse may move on to the potential for another referendum? Honestly, we had loads of these. And Adel, first Australia, now Japan, both mirages of trade deals. It just goes on and on and on. And it's all, you know, I do really think, Rory, the

• 2:33Alastair Campbell?

  public are ahead of the politicians on this. I really do.

• 2:35Rory Stewart?

  Well, there's definitely, definitely a big shift going on, isn't there? I mean, we can now see a more consistent picture in the opinion polls of people beginning to say that Brexit is a mistake, which wasn't true in the early days. I mean, I think the Remain campaigners kept hoping in the early days that they could show dramatic examples of people who voted Brexit who changed their mind. But more and more of those examples now emerging. And of course, as we face two types of crisis, one of them an economic crisis and the other the security crisis from Russia, Ukraine, there will be more and more pressure to say that Europe represents the region we have most in common with economically, in terms of our values, in terms of our security interests. And when you're trying

• 3:19Rory Stewart?

  to solve for the two big things, the breakdown of the global order and the collapse of the British economy, the European Union seems like a much stronger answer than it might have seemed for voters in 2016, who lived in a much more complacent era where they thought that trade with China was a pretty uncomplicated growth story and where they didn't have to worry about internal security in Europe.

• 3:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. I mean, I, look, I'm hoping that what Labour are doing, as I said on the main podcast, is just sort of avoiding big traps. But I almost got the feeling over the weekend that you had a sense that the government is beginning to understand that they're going to have to revisit some of this stuff. They still haven't fixed the Northern Ireland Protocol. There are still sort of massive barriers to trade that they appear to be doing nothing to try to bring down. Whereas Keir's line is very, very hard line. And I think there does come a point where there are some, I know that he's, you know, this is very much focused on, on people who maybe are fed up with the government, but also would be very, very upset if Labour tried to kind of undo the Brexit situation.

• 4:25Alastair Campbell?

  But, you know, ultimately, when we're talking about an economy that's getting hit by 4% year on year, and I don't know if you saw Jeremy Hunt being interviewed by Beth Rigby on Sky News. You know, so I'm often critical of our interviewers because they let the politicians away with murder. She did not let him go. She just pinned him and eventually he got very, very, very stroppy about being asked the same question.

• 4:47Rory Stewart?

  Beth is a ferocious interviewer. I mean, she was incredibly tough with Boris Johnson. I mean, she was one of the most effective interviewers with him. Incidentally, I'm not certain it's 4% year on year. Normally, the calculations are 4% over an extended time period. But just on Keir Starmer, one of the things that we did pick up in some of the Twitter questions is the question around his values. Remember, he was Jeremy Corbyn's shadow Brexit spokesman, and he very much presented himself in the House of Commons at that period as somebody who wouldn't compromise with a soft Theresa May deal because he was pushing, essentially seen for a kind of single market customs union solution. And at the same time, probably flirting with people like you by suggesting he was in favor of a second referendum and that maybe if he could kill Theresa May's deal, he could get

• 5:30Rory Stewart?

  a second referendum. And he seems to have abandoned that entirely. Instead of what I would have thought would be consistent, which is saying, I was a passionate Remainer. I remain very firmly of the view that Britain's interests lie in being closer to Europe. I may think we shouldn't have a referendum again, but I definitely will be pushing for closer diplomatic, economic, political relations with Europe. He's going the other way. And that is a bit odd, isn't it, given that it was so central to his brand?

• 5:57Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think it's, but I think it's because he's, he's concerned that the Conservatives are going to portray him as being determined to take us back into the European Union, come what may. But I, I just don't think that flies with the public because I don't think they, I think it's such a sort of inside the Westminster bubble point. I mean, how many people really remember what Keir Starmer's position was on Brexit? Not that many outside Westminster. And so I think he's far better to say, look, we are in a complete mess. Our economy is tanking. The country is going in the wrong direction. I agree with you. He could, he could say, we are not revisiting the basic question about membership of the European Union, but we have to fix this deal and we have to get better trade and relations with the European Union. He could definitely say that. Instead of which, it goes back

• 6:42Alastair Campbell?

  to the point I made on the main podcast about Labour saying what they're not for rather than what they are. Instead of which, we're getting, you know, we're not doing the single market, we're not doing customs union, freedom of movement is a red line, we need more British workers for British jobs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The public is way ahead of them on this.

• 6:57Rory Stewart?

  In 2018, when people like me were getting very frustrated with Keir Starmer, because, you know, remember there was a moment when Theresa May had essentially lost most of the Tory party and in desperation, reached out to Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer, tried to get a deal across the line. He set these six tests on Brexit. And maybe it's a good way of thinking about Brexit. I mean, these were quite thoughtful ways of thinking about the issue. So he asked, does it ensure a strong and collaborative future relationship with the EU? Does it deliver exactly the same benefits as we currently have as members of the single market and customs union? Does it ensure the fair management of migration? Does it defend rights and protections, prevent a race to the bottom? Does it protect national security? Does it deliver for all regions and nations of the UK? And you would

• 7:39Rory Stewart?

  have thought he could return to those, at the very least, as a way of making an argument for a much closer relationship with Europe without necessarily reopening.

• 7:46Alastair Campbell?

  I find increasingly few people who are willing to tell me there's any benefit to what we've done. And yet, you've got both main parties essentially saying it can't be revisited. It's fantasy land.

• 7:57Rory Stewart?

  Okay, now, question for you. I'm conscious you ask a lot of questions and, as you say, I give too long answers. So, Angela Neuburger, I'd assume that it would be very tough for Labour to win a general election without getting more seats back in Scotland. What's the electoral maths on this? Will Nicola Sargent's threat to turn the next election into a vote on independence help Labour or Tories or both? So, Labour in Scotland, run by Anna Selw, where do you see their future and their importance for the Labour Party at the next election?

• 8:23Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there are two things, I think, to say about this. The first is that the SNP are still very, very dominant in Scotland, no doubt about that. I think the thing that has stopped a lot of people who might be minded to vote Labour from doing so is because in recent years, they haven't thought there's a hope in hell's chance of Labour actually winning a majority. And therefore, they've been, the SNP have been able to corral people essentially to be saying, look, vote for the SNP because that's the way you're going to get Scotland's voice heard more strongly in Scotland. I think the more that it seems like Labour might win a majority, then I think you will get moderate SNP supporters. In other words, people whose defining issue is not necessarily independence, but just the fact that they prefer the SNP to the other parties.

• 9:07Alastair Campbell?

  I think there's a chance for Labour to bring those over. I do think she's taking a risk in saying that the next general election is a referendum on independence. Because, you know, the fact is that there's a lot, just there's a lot going wrong in our economy. There's a lot going wrong in, when I say our economy, I mean, the national economy, UK. There's a lot going wrong in Scotland in terms of public services and so forth. And, you know, if it looks like she's doing this as a way of avoiding the things that people actually tend to want to debate and see debated at general election, I can see that playing against her and for Labour.

• 9:42Rory Stewart?

  And for listeners, just to remind people how odd what happened to Labour in Scotland was. So Labour was the first party in Scotland, almost continuously from the 1920s and certainly from the, certainly from the late 50s. And it didn't really, from the early 60s, drop below 40 seats out of 71. The number of seats were reduced later, but still kept 40 seats out of 59 as late as 2010. So almost every year, every election, 41, 50, 49, even 56 seats in the early Tony Blair days. And then suddenly in 2015, in five years, went from 41 seats in Scotland to one seat. Lost, I mean, I don't know what that is, lost 90% of their seats.

• 10:27Rory Stewart?

  Crept up in 2017 to seven seats and then collapsed.

• 10:30Alastair Campbell?

  Why are you reminding me of this? I know all this.

• 10:33Rory Stewart?

  It's just the most astonishing thing, isn't it? And then collapsed again in 2019 to one, one seat.

• 10:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. But listen, how many, how many, here's one for you. You, you sent a very interesting article that had been written by. Sam Friedman about this thing of Nimbys and Yimby's, not in my backyard and young people who want things in their backyard, like, you know, houses to live in. When you look at how few seats the Conservatives now have in big cities, I mean, isn't it possible that the Conservatives, particularly if they carry on with this kind of, you know, NIMBYs at the heart of their planning, approach to planning and housing and so forth, and onshore wind farms, the other one that's becoming in now is a great sort of, you know, Nimbys v. Yimby's. I like that one, Nimbys v. Yimby, thank you for saying that. But isn't it possible that the Conservatives could see something similar happening to them

• 11:23Alastair Campbell?

  in places where they used to be strong?

• 11:25Rory Stewart?

  Well, this is, of course, what the Conservative Party has been terrified of now for ten, fifteen years. So Margaret Thatcher rebuilt the Conservative Party brand partly by getting people on the housing ladder, partly through this policy of allowing people to buy their council houses, which turned millions of people into owners and gave them a capital asset, which became very important.

• 11:49Alastair Campbell?

  Big part of the housing problem we've got now, Rory.

• 11:51Rory Stewart?

  Big part of the housing problem we've got now, but incredibly successful politics and actually incredibly beneficial for many of the families that were able to buy their houses. It totally transformed their assets, totally transformed their financial futures, which is why she picks up an enormous number of voters by doing it. And since that time, housing prices have rocketed. More and more people have begun treating their houses as an asset. And we're now in a situation in which it is almost impossible, and has been for fifteen, twenty years, for a young person to get, as it were, on the housing ladder. And most of the policies that the Conservative governments have pursued since 2010 haven't fixed this. They've done things such as to try to subsidise mortgages, which seem in many cases, just

• 12:36Rory Stewart?

  in normal economic terms, just have driven the prices up further. They tried to address it by building programmes that didn't work, they never met their housing targets. There's a lot of nostalgia for Harold Macmillan, who built, you know, millions of those houses back in the 50s. And at the heart of the problem seems to be our planning system. It's very difficult to get planning permission. Development land is very expensive, there's a lot of cases, although the property development companies deny it, of land banking, in other words, holding back land that they could develop and aren't developing. And this means that particularly young people and people in cities feel that they're never going to be able to own a house. And the Conservative Party has been trying since

• 13:19Rory Stewart?

  2010, or factions within it, Gavin Barwell, for example, who was Theresa May Chief of Staff, was an influential housing minister, trying to argue that the only way that Conservatives will manage to win back younger voters and working class voters is if they start allowing houses to be built. And certainly this nimbyism is blocking that.

• 13:38Alastair Campbell?

  And I see it's given rise to yet another of these marvellous names that they give themselves. We've had the European Research Group, which has done so much damage to the to the country and its economy and its standing in the world. And these guys call themselves the, is it the Planning Concern Group or the Housing Concern Group? Most of these Tory groups, it seems to me that you have to think of the opposite of what they're saying.

• 13:59Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, in that case, in that case, that's Theresa Villiers, who played a very big part in wrecking over Brexit, who's actually essentially driven a rebellion against the government's attempt to try to bring a bill in that would have made housing easier, has led a sort of nimby rebellion. And it shows a big fracture again in the Conservative Party and a big problem for Rishi Sunak's leadership, that somebody like Theresa Villiers can do that.

• 14:24Alastair Campbell?

  And we've also had both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss supporting amendment to try to force a change on the opposition to onshore wind farms as well.

• 14:35Rory Stewart?

  Extraordinary. Now, here's a question for you. How does a normal person become an MP? Question around normal person is very interesting. So there've been some comments about the fact that there are many more university graduates in the House of Commons than there are in the population as a whole. I think sort of nearly 80% of MPs are university graduates with less than 50% of the population. But Jessica Coates is coming from a different direction. She says, I've been reflecting on Francois Hollande's observation that increasingly few educated people are choosing political careers. My Cambridge educated friends and I all went straight into private sector careers without much thought. Now, having achieved financial security, many of us are considering a career in politics. But without parents involved in the political circuit, it seems difficult.

• 15:18Rory Stewart?

  So how does a, in inverted commas, normal person, which in her case seems to be, actually, you could call a wealthy, educated person, go about becoming an MP? We make all that.

• 15:28Alastair Campbell?

  Well, obviously, when it comes out next year, she'll have to get my book, But What Do I Do? How to Fix Politics. You know, we were talking about Johnny Mercer. When he decided to become an MP, he just went and found a seat and he just sort of went around knocking on doors and he sort of barged his way in.

• 15:44Rory Stewart?

  Not, not, well, let me, let me come in on this because he still needed to be approved by his local party. I mean, that's the big choke point.

• 15:51Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, correct. But he sort of, but he didn't find it that difficult. Now, listen, I know for most people it's incredibly difficult. More, far more people, I know lots of people at the moment who are trying to go for selection as Labour candidates, there are way more want to do it than there are places. It's about who you know, it's about how you get on with them. But I think the other thing you have to do, Jessica, if you, if you want to do this, I'm afraid you do have to kind of, you have to work out the power structures. You have to go and find the people that, and then you have to make an impression on them. And even then you might not win. That's the other thing you have to accept. Because a lot of people do want to be MPs. It's just that a lot of them really, you know, I don't think we're getting the brightest and the best necessarily who want to do it. Although I have been impressed by some of the new candidates that I've seen and by some of the people.

• 16:35Alastair Campbell?

  I met a guy last week who's 27, trying to get a seat. And honestly, if I were the Labour Party, I'd just, I'd just move heaven and earth to get him. He's really smart, really bright. I think we need a lot of younger people in there.

• 16:47Rory Stewart?

  How do you weigh up this question of, on the one hand, people saying MPs need more qualifications, more experience to the outside world? And how do you balance that against another argument, which says that the House of Commons should fully reflect the diversity of the country? In other words, if less than half the people in the country have a university degree, less than half MPs should have a university degree.

• 17:08Alastair Campbell?

  No, I don't, I don't buy the idea. I don't, I don't worry about whether it sort of accurately reflects the whole of the country. I think it'd be great if it looked a little bit more like the country than the House of Commons does now. You know, sometimes you look at Prime Minister's Questions and you look at the Tory benches in particular, you just see these sort of white men in suits and you think.

• 17:24Rory Stewart?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Sorry, let me push back hard on that.

• 17:28Alastair Campbell?

  Why?

• 17:28Rory Stewart?

  The Conservatives have had far more minority ethnic sects, actually, say you didn't have a single one when Labour was in, not a single.

• 17:35Alastair Campbell?

  No, we've talked about the cabinet. Now, I'm just saying, I'm saying sometimes that this this may be just the sort of the way that the seat, the ones who get in to get the seats. Sometimes you look at the Tory benches and you really struggle to see anything other than

• 17:47Rory Stewart?

  Look at the Tory front bench, you see something that's actually more representative.

• 17:51Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, Rory, I have noticed Rory, since Boris Johnson departed, you've become much more defensive about the Conservative Party. That's fine.

• 17:58Rory Stewart?

  Only, only when you say things which are not fully nuanced and reflecting on Labour's flaws in this. Why has Labour so catastrophically failed to get more diversity into its front benches?

• 18:10Alastair Campbell?

  We can name names. I can point to that wonderful chap from Slough, who's brilliant every time I see him on social media. We can point to David Lammy, we can point to all sorts of people. But the point, the point we're making, on what point was I making, Rory? I forgot.

• 18:24Rory Stewart?

  I think you were trying to talk about whether the House of Commons was representative and then for some reason you decided to choose the Conservative Party. Yeah.

• 18:30Alastair Campbell?

  No, I'll tell you what, the other thing I think we've got to understand is that, so for example, I got into a ferocious row the other day with somebody at a dinner I was speaking at, because he was going on about, you know, trouble is, these politicians, they're all the same and the usual stuff that you get fed up of hearing. And I was sort of pushing back on that. He actually said this, I don't want people like Angela Rayner in a government. I said, what do you mean, people like Angela Rayner? He said, well, you know, the way she speaks. And what do you mean? What do you mean the way she speaks? And it was like, and what it was, was it sort of, on the one hand, I want politicians to be more normal and more like us. On the other hand, the minute they are, I want to say that they're not fit for the job. And I got really, because I thought that was just a sort of basic kind of snobbery.

• 19:14Alastair Campbell?

  I think there is still snobbery about it.

• 19:16Rory Stewart?

  Coming out of my defensive crouch for a moment, this question of qualifications, experience, diversity is very personal to me. I mean, obviously, I'm the epitome of somebody who's not representative. I'm an old Etonian, middle-aged, white guy. But I found with constituents that there's a difficult thing to resolve. On the one hand, people felt encumbered, what on earth are we doing with this person as RMP? Because he's not like us. On the other hand, other people thought, well, you know, he's written books, he's worked abroad, he's had some quite interesting experiences. We think he might be quite good at being a minister. Maybe he'd be quite suited to be a foreign minister or a diff minister. Maybe he's managed things, he's run NGOs in difficult places. Maybe he'd be OK at running the prison system.

• 19:59Rory Stewart?

  So it's a very odd kind of job interview because it's not as simple as it would be in another job of saying you're just looking at somebody's qualifications and how good they are at running a department.

• 20:09Alastair Campbell?

  No, and listen, the thing I lament about the state of our, you know, we talked about on the main podcast about how few politicians now make sort of really big, serious speeches. I want at least a good 20% of our MPs to be really smart, really special, people, whether they're Labour or Tory or SNP or Lib Dem or Green or Plaid, I don't care. I just want people who I think, I really want to hear what they think. I've got to be honest, Rory, when most of the cabinet and quite a few of the shadow cabinet come on to the television and the radio, I kind of know what they're going to say before they've said it because I've worked out what the government and the opposition lines on something are. I want people who are going to say interesting things and give me interesting analysis of the world.

• 20:53Rory Stewart?

  And what about the other 80%?

• 20:55Alastair Campbell?

  I'd like them to be competent. I'd like them to have good values. I'd like them to be good local MPs and some of them to develop into something better. But I just feel, I feel we're probably going in the wrong direction. Ask me another question, Rory. The answers are getting too long ago.

• 21:09Rory Stewart?

  OK, well, let's go into the break and I'll ask your questions straight after the break.

• 21:50Rory Stewart?

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

• 21:53Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. And Rory, we've got, you know, one of the, one of the benefits, I guess, of being a popular chart topping podcast is that we get lots of people want to advertise and sponsor and so forth. And we've enjoyed the benefits of the sponsorship of Airbnb. And quite a few of our listeners have suggested that actually they don't see Airbnb as the force for good that you do. So I'm now going to put you on the spot and say to you, defend them.

• 22:23Rory Stewart?

  Well firstly, what is it that's troubling people? I mean, I don't really, tell me firstly, what, because I see Airbnb as a very positive force. I mean, I think it's fantastic way of bringing in extra incomes. And remember, we're talking about a housing crisis and difficult for people to find accommodation. And I think anything that makes it easier for people to use unused rooms or unused property to let other people use them is a good thing. Otherwise, it just sits empty and unused.

• 22:47Alastair Campbell?

  I get them. The criticisms that we seem to be getting is that they're actually having the opposite effect, that they're adding to a housing problem, they're adding to difficulties with tourism, that they're facing some of our coastal and rural parts of the country in particular.

• 23:01Rory Stewart?

  I guess, I guess one of the, I mean, obviously, this is relevant to Cumbria, where there was a lot of anxiety around second homeowners and holiday homes and holiday cottages. And it's definitely true that second homes, which are empty, unused, are not a contribution to the community and can lead to hollowed out communities. But by definition, Airbnb is putting things to use. There are people in the building, so it's not a question of empty second homes. It's a very good source of secondary income, for example, for farming families. And in fact, the Labour Government had a very good scheme, which I supported, of giving grants to farming families to set up little accommodation units for holiday lets. And, you know, most Airbnb,

• 23:43Rory Stewart?

  it's not true of everyone, but I think four fifths of them are people renting out properties for something like a couple of days a month. I stayed in one in London recently where the lady has her family and her children staying in her basement most of the time, but just occasionally will rent it out, which takes pressure off other people. So I think, look, a lot of these things, Airbnb, Uber, et cetera, have problems of credit controversy. But the basic idea that technology is being used. To open up opportunities makes sense and it's it's simply doing more efficiently. What's always existed, which is giving people the capacity to rent out their their rooms.

• 24:19Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, now we've got quite a lot of questions on partisan politics. Colin Sinfield, as you two can hold a civil argument and beg to differ on the details, why could running the country not be structured like this? That is, government and opposition agreeing basic provision for things like health, education, housing, and then establishing the difference in election. And this, I got this at the dinner that I was talking about where somebody was rude about Angela Rayner, somebody saying, you know, why can't we take the politics out of schools and hospitals? And the answer is because they are amongst the most passionate issues that you're going to get in politics. Now, I think it's easy to say, let's be more civil with each other. That shouldn't be too difficult. But what do you think of that? Did you ever think in the House of Commons that there was a less political way of doing politics?

• 25:02Rory Stewart?

  There were definitely times when I felt that. I mean, I did feel during Brexit that we should have locked the MPs in the House of Commons. You know, more than 400 of them claimed that they were in favour of a soft compromise on Brexit. I would have liked to lock the doors and make them come to a compromise and not let them out again, like Cardinals electing a Pope, till they'd come up with a solution. I definitely feel on adult social care, which is the big, remains the big central shame of British politics that hasn't been fixed since the Second World War, that you should get a cross-party coalition. And it's horrible the way that the Conservatives, every time that Labour brought a proposal together on trying to fund it, would go into death tax attacks and then Labour did the same to Theresa May when she came up with a good, could have been a good cross-party proposal on adult social care, they did a dementia tax.

• 25:46Alastair Campbell?

  We're going to get the same in the next election. I mean, things haven't changed on that, have they?

• 25:49Rory Stewart?

  No, and it's.

• 25:50Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, the issues have changed, but we're going to get the same.

• 25:52Rory Stewart?

  So your bigger question, though, I mean, other things are genuinely political. You can't take politics out of things because many issues in British public life are not simply technocratic. There's not an obvious subjective answer. It's about choices and trade-offs and lesser evils. You're always sacrificing something. You'll have always deciding what you want to prioritise. You know, I feel this very. Granular way, when I was the flooding minister, where there was no simple engineering solution, you were weighing up the interests of a downstream community against an upstream community of against the company that's trying to prevent droughts against the company that's trying to prevent flooding. You're trying to deal with rewilding moves, you're trying to deal with farmers growing crops. And this stuff needs politicians. And here's a question from Clement.

• 26:37Rory Stewart?

  I often hear about whips. What do they do exactly? How does the whip do Tory whips and Labour whips behave in the same way? What does this three line whip mean?

• 26:49Alastair Campbell?

  The whips love to think, they like people to think that you're not allowed to know how they work. But actually, it's not that complicated. They're there to instill discipline. They're there to make sure that their parties support their party's positions. And obviously, that's most important for the government because the government's trying to get legislation through.

• 27:05Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, just to give people a glimpse of who these people are. They are elected MPs, but they choose to enter a very strange unit in the House of Commons.

• 27:16Alastair Campbell?

  They don't choose, Rory, they get appointed.

• 27:18Rory Stewart?

  They get appointed, yeah.

• 27:19Alastair Campbell?

  They would choose to be in the cabinet, but they're not deemed good enough.

• 27:22Rory Stewart?

  Well, for some of them, it's a route to promotion. But anyway, that once you've agreed to become a whip, you basically have taken off in a vow of silence. You're not really allowed to speak much in the House of Commons. And your attention is focused very much on trying to make your own party vote the way that the leader wants. They're the kind of loyal, as it were, dogs of God of the leader, who are there to deliver those votes. And they do it in many different ways. You get kind of, but you get sort of smooth ones who try to charm you. You get kind of rough and tough ones who try to physically manhandle you into the lobbies. You get very straightforward people who take you out for, on the smoking terrace and have a cigarette and say, I just wish people would be sensible.

• 28:04Rory Stewart?

  There are many different tones and they actually have resources. I mean, they can also act sometimes as an HR or personnel department. They can theoretically help MPs who have mental health issues. They, in the past, have helped MPs even with financial issues, which gives them an enormous amount of leverage and power. But they are central to the basic idea, which is that you vote for a government and you want that government to deliver its legislation. You don't want too many independent MPs around.

• 28:32Alastair Campbell?

  I think they're also part of a two-way process. They are genuinely there in part to feed back to, it's often the chief whip that will give a minister or a prime minister very bad news about the way something is going down, you know, particularly in circumstances where there's a small majority. But I, you know, and the other thing I think people maybe underestimate in British politics, this may have changed because I think things have become more polarised. But I think certainly when I was both when I was a journalist and when I was working in for the Labour Party in the Labour Government, you tended to have pretty good relations between, certainly between the chief whips and other parts of

• 29:14Alastair Campbell?

  the whips operations. Because a lot of it is about doing deals to get the business of the Commons through without with minimum fuss. And that's what sometimes there's a shared interest in doing that.

• 29:25Rory Stewart?

  Last question, so we wrap up. What would you like for your last question?

• 29:29Alastair Campbell?

  Shola Ameyobi, could we ask Rory why he thinks Southgate can't find a way to utilise Phil Foden?

• 29:36Rory Stewart?

  That's a really, really good question. I've got a lot of questions for you like that and a greelish question too. I must say, I'm encouraged by you and by you sending me an amazing piece of Welsh nationalist propaganda around the Welsh team. I did watch

• 29:49Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, it was fantastic, wasn't it?

• 29:50Rory Stewart?

  The England-US match. And I must say, it was pretty dismal. I mean, I thought America seemed much more kind of spry.

• 29:55Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, I could have told you not to watch that. I could have told you that you should have watched Costa Rica, Saudi Arabia. No, yeah, that was possibly the worst game of the tournament so far. I strongly recommend that you that you stick with it.

• 30:11Rory Stewart?

  And, you know, top tip from you, Gunn, who are we supposed to be betting on?

• 30:14Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's between Brazil and France.

• 30:17Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Okay, I'm going Brazil.

• 30:18Alastair Campbell?

  Probably France.

• 30:19Rory Stewart?

  I'm going Brazil. You're going France. Let's see, listeners, which one of us is right. Thank you all very much and see you all next week.

• 30:25Alastair Campbell?

  All the best. Bye-bye.

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