84. Britain on strike, hostage swaps, and assisted suicide

Join Rory and Alastair as they discuss the strikes taking place across Britain, the debate on assisted suicide, and how prisoner swaps come about. TRIP Plus: 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 + Faye Lawrence + Theo Young-Smith Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + 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 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.

• 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/rustuspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustuspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:44Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to another episode of The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:48Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:50Alastair Campbell?

  And we are in the same room.

• 1:52Rory Stewart?

  It's amazing. I don't often get to see Alistair. I keep forgetting how big he is. I just came into his dressing room. We're in the Royal Albert Hall. He's got shoes about size of a sofa, I discovered.

• 2:01Alastair Campbell?

  Size 12. And we're in the Royal Albert Hall because tonight we are performing here on the day of the rail strike. And I've got to say Rory, it is a bit weird. Let's just be honest. When we first started this thing a few months ago. I don't think either of us thought that by, what are we, December, we'd be filling out the Albert Hall. It's a bit bonkers.

• 2:25Rory Stewart?

  It's really bonkers. I know you remember, but when you first approached me about it, I think we were talking about doing a trial run of something like eight or nine episodes.

• 2:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 2:33Rory Stewart?

  And we've now done who knows how many others. We actually got somebody who claimed that they'd listened to sort of a thousand hours, didn't they?

• 2:39Alastair Campbell?

  I know, they are. Yeah, they've got to get out more. They said they'd listened to eleven days worth. But I can, I can give a, a kind of counterpoint to that. You'll find now you're back in, briefly in London, Rory, that as you walk around, you will get people endlessly just saying, love your podcast, love your podcast, because it happens all the time.

• 2:57Rory Stewart?

  I happened to be in Paris last night. I walked into the Brasserie Leap.

• 3:01Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 3:01Rory Stewart?

  Right, right there, next to Saint Germain.

• 3:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 3:03Rory Stewart?

  And I walked in and immediately, we had somebody at the first table at the door say, love your podcast, love Alastair Campbell, good luck tomorrow.

• 3:13Alastair Campbell?

  That's weird, isn't it? So let me just put a little sort of counterpoint. Fiona and I were walking the dog the other day, and a woman stopped me, and she said, I've really tried hard to listen to your podcast, but I can't do it. You talk too much, you're far too fond of your own opinions, and I don't like the other guy anyway.

• 3:31Rory Stewart?

  It's very good. And she couldn't even remember my name. I was very sick with that.

• 3:33Alastair Campbell?

  You were the other guy. So, but it was sort of, it just, I think you need those moments to.

• 3:38Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 3:39Alastair Campbell?

  To bring you down to. Now, listen, you've just come in from Paris, but having been in Qatar.

• 3:45Rory Stewart?

  Having been in Qatar, yep, for the World Cup, which is where, since we last spoke.

• 3:49Alastair Campbell?

  Now, first of all, when we first had the discussion about Qatar and whether the World Cup should be there, and all the human rights stuff and gay rights and stuff, just give me a sense of, one, whether you've had any flak for being there, two, what your sense was and what the experience was like. And then, then we'll get on to how you've become an amazing football expert and pundit.

• 4:10Rory Stewart?

  Well, thank you, Alistair. So I think the first thing that was very striking, I mean, I guess everybody's heard endlessly about the World Cup, but it was a very, very unusual feeling. There weren't crowds in the streets, there wasn't drinking. The matches that I saw, and I saw two of them live, the crowds surrounding me were often people who were mostly, it seemed to be many of them migrant workers from Doha. So there were a lot of Filipinos. A lot of Indians, supporting the Portuguese team, or whatever. And one of the things that Catteries are actually quite proud of, and maybe this has been in the British press, is that it's a much more diverse audience and many people who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford tickets are in those crowds because they're given tickets for four, five dollars to get in.

• 4:53Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, so they were filling the stadiums with local people?

• 4:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and a lot of them are local people on low incomes, which was very interesting. It made for a much more, I think you probably, if you went, you might have felt the atmosphere wasn't quite as intense. But equally, I saw your friend Gary Lineker and I saw David Dean and Arsene Wenger and all these people. And one of the things they were saying is that they'd been able to see forty live matches and they'd never been to a World Cup, but they've been able to do that because the stadiums were so close to each other. So I think if you're really interested in the game as opposed to the kind of fan I mentioned, I think it was pretty exciting.

• 5:27Alastair Campbell?

  And what about the kind of just around the place? I mean, my son Rory was, is there, has been there. And he said he found it very strange. You didn't, outside of the stadiums, you didn't really feel there was a World Cup going on?

• 5:41Rory Stewart?

  Exactly.

• 5:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 5:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, there was nobody in the streets, there's no big gathering places, there's no bars open. No, I think that that feels completely different.

• 5:50Alastair Campbell?

  And the football, you've, would you say you understand the game better now, having watched a few games live?

• 5:56Rory Stewart?

  I can definitely understand much better why you're so enthusiastic for it. Actually, interestingly, the England team's been surprisingly sort of stable from when I was last watching them. So I do feel that I've got some relationship to them, but much less with France, with some of these other teams, I've got no idea. Portugal I really enjoyed, I saw the six-one Portugal victory, very, very exciting.

• 6:15Alastair Campbell?

  Big decision, talk about big, bold decisions, sacking Ronaldo, dropping Ronaldo and putting on the kid who gets a hat-trick.

• 6:20Rory Stewart?

  It seemed to really work, didn't it?

• 6:21Alastair Campbell?

  Did, yeah.

• 6:22Rory Stewart?

  And I thought it was very vindicating. And then when Ronaldo finally came on and the whole crowd around me were saying, where's Ronaldo, where's Ronaldo? And actually, the entire chant from the stadium was Ronaldo, Ronaldo, Ronaldo. That's all the crowd wanted to do was see Ronaldo. And eventually he came on very belatedly, but he seemed very kind of stiff and slow and awkward.

• 6:39Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, hmm, it's called aging Rory, it happens to us all.

• 6:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 6:43Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I never talk about when I played with Pelé and Maradona, but I'm just not the same person I was then.

• 6:47Rory Stewart?

  How old were you when you played with Pelé and Maradona?

• 6:49Alastair Campbell?

  I played with Maradona when I was forty-nine and I was fifty-one when I played with Pelé.

• 6:55Alastair Campbell?

  So I wasn't at my best, but I'd never really been at my best. And you sort of, I get the feeling that you, from our WhatsApp exchanges, that you, you got very fond of, of the Croatians.

• 7:06Rory Stewart?

  I did.

• 7:06Alastair Campbell?

  And of course, we, by the time this goes out, we'll know whether Croatia are into their second successive final. But whether they do or they don't get through, the success of Croatian football is an incredible story.

• 7:18Rory Stewart?

  Their, their first game against Japan was incredibly boring. That was the, you know, went to penalties.

• 7:23Alastair Campbell?

  Should we remind people that I said it would be the first game that would go to penalties? Should we remind people that?

• 7:28Rory Stewart?

  You do know a lot about football. That is absolutely true. And, but the next game, when they took on Brazil, was extraordinary because I'd never seen, I mean, that was sort of heroic. I could see the appeal of football there because you got the sense that they were down. You would have thought almost any other country in the world would be out, and they just kept going. And there, their 37 year old captain was not hobbling around like Ronaldo.

• 7:51Alastair Campbell?

  No, he's, he, but he, but he's, he's, he's one of those guys who's, who can, he seems to be able to walk and play really, really, really, really well. The amount of Croatia, though, because it's like, you know, when, if you think about all the fuss that there was for Wales, to being there with a very small population, just over three million. Croatia is between Wales and Scotland. And yet they got to a World Cup final. They've impressed the world yet again. And I, I think there is something, if you go back, so when they were part of Yugoslavia, two of the top four teams in the old Yugoslavia were from Croatia, Hradžk Split and Daino Zagreb. So they've got that kind of tradition. But then there must be something else that's just really, really special about them as

• 8:34Alastair Campbell?

  a sport, that they're so good at it, when, you know, Wales getting there was seen like a miracle.

• 8:40Rory Stewart?

  So I tried this, you know, there's this new big release by OpenAI, which everybody's been downloading on their phones, which writes essays for you.

• 8:46Alastair Campbell?

  Oh my God, have you seen the stuff they've done about this podcast?

• 8:48Rory Stewart?

  It's absolutely extraordinary. Yeah. So we should get on to the stuff to do about podcasts. But I asked it, you know, why was Croatia doing so well in football? And the computer's response was very, very polished.

• 9:00Rory Stewart?

  It talked about its youth development, talked about its strong footballing tradition, talked about its fan base, et cetera. And I was quite impressed, but a bit suspicious. So then I asked it, why was Spain so successful in football? And I got exactly the same answer. And I realised, basically, it's kind of classic Oxford and Cambridge bluffer, that computer.

• 9:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 9:21Rory Stewart?

  It doesn't really have any information. It's kind of skimming along the surface.

• 9:25Alastair Campbell?

  That's it. So it didn't mention Dynamo Zagreb and how to exploit their base?

• 9:28Rory Stewart?

  No content at all, just very generic. Good youth development, good fan base, yeah.

• 9:33Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent, okay, that's good. Yeah, because they, they, they did, I did see one that they did of, could it present us doing a comedy sketch? And it was moderately funny.

• 9:41Rory Stewart?

  That was moderately funny, yeah.

• 9:43Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing, I, you know, because this is, the rest is politics, not the rest is football. But I'll tell you a big political point is that the Croatia FA was recognised by America before FIFA. So they played a friendly between Croatia and the United States before Croatia was even recognised. And that was seen as like, it was quite a big political moment for them, both politically and in football terms.

• 10:08Rory Stewart?

  I, I, I lived in Croatia. I, I worked there as a diplomat, just at the time of the Kosovo War, so after the Bosnia War. The story of America's connection to Croatia was really important for Bosnia because America basically funded, so Croatia broke away from former Yugoslavia, early nineties. It lost bits of its territory to Serbia. It was trained by American contractors, mercenaries, CIA forces. It did this great advance, the end of ninety five, called the Storm, which involved some pretty extreme ethnic cleansing of all the Serbian populations. Tujman, who was then their president, basically a proto-war criminal.

• 10:52Rory Stewart?

  There was a very sinister history going back to their connection with the Nazis during the Second World War and some very extreme expatriate groups that were sending in weapons. And Croatia remains like some of those other states in former Yugoslavia. A state which has been doing very well economically, which has a very nice veneer on the top of lovely tourism and these wonderful islands around the Croatian coast like Kortula. But its politics remains pretty bizarre. The HDZ, this nationalist party, continues to have a grip on power and it's similar story really in Bosnia and in Serbia. But of course Croatia is in the EU, about to join the Euro when Bosnia and Serbia isn't. And the Bosnians particularly feel.

• 11:34Alastair Campbell?

  And Bulgarian remainers as well have been kept out, haven't they? So Croatia is kind of, it's way further down the track.

• 11:40Rory Stewart?

  On the Euro. Yeah.

• 11:41Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 11:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 11:42Alastair Campbell?

  So no, but it's, it is an extraordinary success story though. It really is. I mean, I agree with you that the politics, I think, is still tough. I think that whole region though is, that's the reason why I like the Balkans, I think so much. Is the, the politics is pretty brutal. Uh, but it kind of, they do get stuff done. I mean, the advance of Croatia as a, an independent country, since as you say, the early nineties, is pretty remarkable. To think that they're now going to be part of the Schengen Zone, they're heading towards the Euro. It's pretty extraordinary really.

• 12:11Rory Stewart?

  It is.

• 12:12Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I see we were criticised for saying extraordinary and incredibly too much.

• 12:16Rory Stewart?

  Shouldn't, shouldn't say that.

• 12:17Alastair Campbell?

  I wonder if that's been picked up by the, the bots.

• 12:19Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 12:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Now listen, shall we go to, um, you're back in your homeland, the United Kingdom. I don't know if you've noticed while you've been away Rory, but it's a bit of a mess.

• 12:28Rory Stewart?

  Uh, I've seen you've been tweeting about getting stuck on trains and that wasn't strikes, was it? That was just hopelessness.

• 12:33Alastair Campbell?

  That was just an absolutely horrific day at Euston where trains were getting cancelled left, right and centre. I do think, I know, I, I saw at the weekend, I saw somebody on the Labour front bench who was saying that this sense that the country just isn't working. I think is going to form a very, very big part of how they move into the next election. The then got to show how it would work better under Labour. But I think the strikes, the, the strikes are fascinating because today we've got the rail strike. Your poor mum was going to come by a train, she's going to have to fly. I'm going to Aberdeen tomorrow and I wanted to get the sleeper and can't. And so, you know, we're all going to have to. Do stuff we maybe don't want to do, but then you you look at the the nurses' strike and the postal strike and the teachers' strike and the lecturers' strike.

• 13:16Rory Stewart?

  How do you feel about this? Because I guess you're divided, aren't you? Because I I maybe this is wrong, but my sense of you is that when you were in government with Tony Blair, you would have felt that you needed to take a relatively strong line on some of this. Since you've left government, I think you've tended to be more enthusiastic about union strikes, about Mick Lynch. I don't think you were a great friend of the RMT particularly in there.

• 13:44Alastair Campbell?

  No, and certainly not during the referendum either, as they were the first union to come out ridiculously for Brexit. I'd I'd like to talk to Mick Lynch about that at some point. He was a bit rattled on the airwaves this morning, I thought, very un-Mick Lynch. I mean, he does that thing which I like to do.

• 14:00Rory Stewart?

  That was with Today programme, Michel Husein.

• 14:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and and he was, he does that, he does that thing which I like to do with the media, when you you push it back on to them. But he did it so much. Why are you pursuing that line of questioning? Why are you just parroting the lines of the establishment and the Sun and the Mail and the Telegraph? Now, I do that to people, but I think if you if you make that the main point of your interview, you start to think, oh. No, I think I'm more sympathetic, because I think the the gap, and I think the public generally are more sympathetic than they normally are. And I think it's because the divide and rule strategy, which I think the Tories are trying to do, is not working. I really got offended by Sunak. They're using this bogus figure about it's going to cost every family a thousand pounds a year, which is not, it's complicated, but it's not accurate. It's if you, even

• 14:44Alastair Campbell?

  at the top end, you're talking about six hundred quid. But he's got this this language that they use about, you know, punishing ordinary, hardworking families, as if these aren't ordinary, hardworking families. And they're ordinary, hardworking families, a lot of them, who are using food banks, who are having to try and get benefits to top up their salaries. And I think we're back to this point we've talked about before, that there's more poverty in this country than I think sometimes the political and media classes are prepared to acknowledge.

• 15:07Rory Stewart?

  I think the the starting point, you're completely right. Inflation is at least ten percent, and people's wages are not remotely keeping up. And so everybody, private, public sector, is facing a real terms cut in their pay cap measures. They're going to be, people will be worse off, and they'll be even more worse off next year as the economy goes into recession.

• 15:30Rory Stewart?

  So I guess the question is, what is the, what do we make of the strikes? On the one hand, sympathize, inflation up, people struggling.

• 15:40Rory Stewart?

  On the other hand, I think just a couple of small things. One is that most people in Britain no longer work for the public sector. They work for the private sector. Many people working in businesses are not going to have anything like those pay rises.

• 15:52Alastair Campbell?

  Although the pay, pay, private sector pay is rising faster than the public sector pay.

• 15:56Rory Stewart?

  It is, but not at, not at the level of which, I mean, nurses are asking at the moment for nineteen point eight percent pay rise.

• 16:02Alastair Campbell?

  Some of them, yeah.

• 16:03Rory Stewart?

  That's, that's double inflation. And I noticed that Wes Streeting from Labour has been very, very clear and hard about that. And he's raised something I'd love, love us to talk about a bit more, which is, he's, I think, quite rightly, and I admire him, said, we can't just be talking about pay, we need to talk about reforming the NHS. And in the end, we need to talk about service delivery. He was very, very violently brutal about the GPs who just voted that they were only going to work nine to five. And I think that's interesting. And you presumably as Labour had to do some of those things in order to make yourselves electable.

• 16:37Alastair Campbell?

  The BMA is a very, very powerful trade union. But because they're doctors, they're not necessarily seen in the same way as, you know, Mick Lynch, working class guys. But they're a very powerful union. I think they, I, I, as you know, I regularly defend GPs and I defend my GP is absolutely brilliant. And, and, you know, our, our local surgery is fantastic. But I think what Wes Streeting is doing is, it's back to this thing we've talked about before. Labour refusing to fall into traps that are being laid by the Tories. So the Tories want to create a situation where we're for the people trying to sort these strikes out,

• 17:21Alastair Campbell?

  even though brackets, we're not going to sit down and talk to them in the way that they might want to talk to us. And meanwhile, Labour, because they've got their history, the trade unions, they are backing the strikers.

• 17:30Rory Stewart?

  Can I just very quickly on the, they won't, won't sit down and talk. So I had to deal with prison officer strikes. And prison officer strikes are particularly. A terrifying type of strike because when prison officers go on strike, the only people left to run a prison are the managers of the prison, of whom there are very few. And within about forty eight hours, it becomes almost impossible to run a prison. You can't get food through to prisoners, you certainly can't unlock them. And I remember when I went into those negotiations that I would sit down with the unions. I remember we sat down in Pret a Monche around the corner from Parliament with the heads of the unions. And I thought I had a very good conversation.

• 18:07Alastair Campbell?

  Sorry, you had a pay negotiation in Pret a Monche?

• 18:11Rory Stewart?

  Pret a Monche, around the corner from thing.

• 18:13Alastair Campbell?

  Did you have a crowd?

• 18:16Rory Stewart?

  So it was a really, it was a really, really good conversation. And but I thought I'd making some progress here. We were making some promises on what we could do to protect prison officers, legislation to make sure that if they were assaulted, there were proper punishments. About forty five minutes after our meeting, the head of the prison officers' union went straight out to Parliament Green and told the press that the government was refusing to negotiate with them. And I had to go straight out an hour later saying, I have no idea what this guy is talking about. I literally was sitting with him having a cup of coffee an hour before. And there's definitely, I I get the impression a game going on here because I know it's Mick Lynch at the moment is saying, yeah, okay, I'm guessing to talk to certain people, but I demand to talk to Rishi Sunak, the prime minister personally.

• 19:00Rory Stewart?

  And the prime minister is refusing to talk to me. So it's clearly part of, is it or is it not? I think it's part of the union playbook.

• 19:06Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the R C N did the same thing. The R C N basically said, this is now, you know, you're talking about the future of the health service, our ability to deliver care over Christmas period. We should sit down with the prime minister and it's an obvious kind of tactic. I do think there has been a sense, and the other very interesting interview this morning was with Mark Harper, the Transport Secretary, who.

• 19:29Alastair Campbell?

  Was asked the same question six times about whether he had put on the table this idea of of driver only trains and this was like a kind of red line for him and he would not answer and Justin Webb was getting more and more frustrated because it seems such it's a one fact

• 19:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Alastair Campbell?

  Question.

• 19:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 19:46Alastair Campbell?

  And so I think there's obviously something going on there that maybe the RMT have been briefing about, that this is being driven by government, but the government want to pretend that it's not. And I think the government sort of constantly say-

• 19:58Rory Stewart?

  And this is no driver trains, right? Which is the thing that we've had in the tube because-

• 20:02Alastair Campbell?

  No, I think this is driver only.

• 20:03Rory Stewart?

  Driver only, okay.

• 20:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:04Rory Stewart?

  Because because definitely there's been this big problem in the London Underground.

• 20:07Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:08Rory Stewart?

  Which is that many, many other countries have tubes running without drivers and the unions have blocked it again and again, claiming that it's unsafe.

• 20:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. So, look, but I I think that we never had a situation, we, you know, we had industrial action, we had strikes to deal with when we were in government, but we never had a this kind of jigsaw that seems to be coming together. And I think when it does come together like that, I think the government does have to have a kind of overall strategy. Because at the moment, it's but they're saying that the, well, this is all down to the independent pay review body, but the independent pay review, they don't negotiate, they make recommendations. And they make recommendations usually within quite a tight envelope that the government has set for them. But I think for the trains now, there's not going to be an actual full railway service day between now and the second week of January. So and then if you get the nurses on top of that, and you get the, I

• 21:00Alastair Campbell?

  mean, the schools and universities are obviously going to shut for a while, but I mean, you're going to get them coming back.

• 21:04Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 21:04Alastair Campbell?

  So I've been very struck by the fact that the, it seems to me that even parts of the right wing media are not really getting stuck into the unions in the way that they might have done historically, because I think they think their readers are quite sympathetic.

• 21:18Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think that there's obviously been a big change in the place of unions in society and the way that they're viewed. We're not back in the seventies anymore. I I think it's also that the arguments for government restraint on pay are quite complicated. And it's quite easy for the unions to outmaneuver them and make them seem cruel and uncaring. But let me try to, in my role as defender of the government, try to make that case.

• 21:42Alastair Campbell?

  Why do you, why do you embrace this role so readily? You know, you'll probably get booed tonight if you say that.

• 21:47Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. Somebody's, somebody's got to, somebody's got to put the other, other, other side of the story. So I think public pay is two hundred and thirty three billion pounds a year at the moment. And if the government puts up pay, I don't know how much it puts it up by, but they've already agreed to put it up by three percent. And then I think with teachers and other groups, they've agreed to put it up considerably more. But obviously, the maths are pretty stark. I mean, if you went with the nurses, which is twenty percent, you know, you'd be looking at fifty billion. They're obviously not going to do that. And the problem is that whatever they do, five percent, seven percent, it's not just one year, it's every year. And it's the pensions. And it's at a time when our deficit is already out of control. So the

• 22:31Rory Stewart?

  government has to think, do we or do we not want to add ten or fifteen billion pounds a year extra to our bill from now onwards? And that's a lot of money. I mean, ten, fifteen billion pounds pays for a very, very big chunk.

• 22:45Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, you can buy an awful lot of dud PPE for that, and you can get a lot of periods for that.

• 22:50Rory Stewart?

  You totally can, but you can also pay for a lot of police officers for that. You can pay for a lot of the education.

• 22:55Alastair Campbell?

  But I do think this is part of the problem they're having.

• 22:57Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Alastair Campbell?

  I think the waste, the waste that people have seen, the inequality that people see, I think every time. And I read a thing in the Sunday Times the weekend, Michelle Moan is not even the big one. She's, she's getting all the coverage because she's in the House of Lords and, but they ran a full account of all these different companies that have made shed loads of money and provided dud PPE. And the people look at that and think, well, hold on a minute, you found the money for that government.

• 23:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. But, but the point is, I, I agree, that governments often, this government included, waste a lot of money. And you're right, the public often look and think, you must have an incredible amount of money down the back of the safe because you're spending all this money on all this other stuff.

• 23:39Alastair Campbell?

  And the other point, Rory.

• 23:40Rory Stewart?

  And this is what people are always saying about international aid. You know, if you can find twelve billion for international aid, surely you can spare this. But the fact is, we're talking about big money. We're talking about ten, twenty billion pounds a year more. And We're also talking about an anxiety, which is, you know, again, economists are going to go back and forth on that. But is it going to feed into inflation? How are people going to spend this money? Is this going to contribute to rising prices? And, and the, the challenge for Labour, and I think they're doing very well on this, is not falling into the trap of sounding like Mick Lynch and sounding like there is a magic money tree. And that somehow if they came into government, they would just be awarding massive inflation busting pay rises. And they'd be spending more money on everything.

• 24:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Rory Stewart?

  Because the truth is, they, they can't do that, and this government can't do it either.

• 24:24Alastair Campbell?

  And that's why both parties going to the next election have got to have a proper strategy for growth. Um, and that's quite hard to get out there at the moment when the people are feeling so down about, about the state of the world. But the other point, Rory, which I don't think you can get away from in this context. So sure, looking back recently, people look at, well, you found all that money for Covid. You found a lot of money for your Tory mates in the VIP fast lane, et cetera. But then you go back a decade to the, the first round of austerity. And I think people are feeling, well, we've heard this message before about you have to tighten your belt. And it's all going to come good, and it hasn't for so many people.

• 25:02Rory Stewart?

  A one hundred percent. Well, the weirdness that we've forgotten is that, of course, there are two very different Tory parties that have existed since 2010. So there was the George Osborne, David Cameron austerity, which was all about trying to reduce the deficit, reduce the debt, cut public spending. Then you had Boris Johnson come in, and what people forget is that he spent money like water.

• 25:26Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 25:26Rory Stewart?

  This giving money out to his Covid friends was part of Boris Johnson saying, end of austerity, turn on the spending streams. He put a lot more money into the NHS, he put more money into education. He was putting more money into Northern England, there were huge announcements on all this stuff. Because he genuinely believed that austerity was a total waste of time and that there was no reason why Britain couldn't borrow and spend like billiard.

• 25:49Alastair Campbell?

  Isn't that what he believed?

• 25:50Rory Stewart?

  Very much, and that's why he did so for two years. He spent two years borrowing and spending like video.

• 25:54Alastair Campbell?

  Spent much of my life trying to work out what Boris Johnson believes.

• 25:57Rory Stewart?

  He believes anything at all, but he's, he was somebody who was naturally liked to be popular. And an obvious way as a populist politician of being popular is just to borrow and spend a lot of money. So that Rishi Sunak is now going back to a story from 2010. But people forget in the middle, there was two years of Boris turning on the spending.

• 26:14Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. I do think Rishi Sunak listened to our interview with Julia Gilard, by the way. He's definitely taken her advice. Try and take the oxygen out of politics. Try and take politics. Don't be on the news the whole time. He's definitely very, very low profile.

• 26:29Rory Stewart?

  And do you think, do you think it was good advice from him? Would you have given him that advice?

• 26:31Alastair Campbell?

  I think, I think for him, yeah. I think it's not a bad thing that he, and he's, he's, he's not. It's also interesting, he's, he's apparently, he doesn't think they should do this kind of morning media round. We talked about this before. But I bumped into a couple of people in the Today Programme the other day who were gagging for that to happen, I think. Because they find these morning round interviews with ministers just a complete and total waste of time as well. Now, shall we take a break and come back to the state of the world in its many forms?

• 26:56Rory Stewart?

  Let's do that.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Ravenette.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped going? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 27:21Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 27:28Rory Stewart?

  This episode of The Rest Is Politics is sponsored by The New European. Now, Alistair, do you know what a bookazine is?

• 27:35Alastair Campbell?

  A bookazine, I do know what a bookazine is.

• 27:37Rory Stewart?

  Oh, rubbish.

• 27:38Alastair Campbell?

  It's a book, but it's kind of got the feel of a magazine.

• 27:40Rory Stewart?

  Okay, because that is what The New European's about to produce. They're going to take 100 of their best covers, binding them into a book. Now, what's your favourite New European cover?

• 27:48Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, there'll be some great front covers, but I think if I could only have one, there was one when Johnson was Prime Minister. And the headline was, it's all their fault. You had Johnson in the middle and you just had these hands kind of pointing out everywhere. And it just captured absolutely brilliantly how it's always somebody else's fault but his.

• 28:04Rory Stewart?

  The New European have got a special offer for Trip listeners. You can get a digital subscription for a pound a week or both print and digital for two pounds a week.

• 28:13Alastair Campbell?

  I think we should give every new subscriber a free copy of this bookazine on top of the bargain subscription.

• 28:23Rory Stewart?

  No, really?

• 28:24Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 28:24Rory Stewart?

  So you heard it here first. Take out a subscription between now and Christmas and Alastair Campbell is going to guarantee that you get a free book of their brilliant covers worth 15 pounds thrown in.

• 28:35Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I'm going to guarantee that.

• 28:37Rory Stewart?

  Sign up at www.the new european.co.uk forward slash trip.

• 28:48Rory Stewart?

  So, welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 28:52Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell.

• 28:53Rory Stewart?

  And we're still sitting here in the Albert Hall, which is still pretty surprising. I'm actually going slightly blind staring at these, you know, the spotlights you have on mirrors.

• 29:02Alastair Campbell?

  We're in a dressing room. I wonder if the cheeky chappies have ever been in here Rory.

• 29:05Rory Stewart?

  Definitely. I was looking at all the photographs on the wall and the Albert Hall basically tells the entire story of British history in this bizarre way. There's a photograph out there, you can see a big photograph, which they were obviously very proud of when they redecorated in the 80s, which they might be less proud of today, which is, "The Albert Hall was the scene of the annual production of Hayawatha from 1923 to 1939, only interrupted by the general strike, as we were just talking about, but played with a real Indian chief in a headdress." You know, they're thinking, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm not sure we're going to be doing that anymore.

• 29:41Alastair Campbell?

  Now, listen, we've both been in France in the last, you've been there last night, I was there a few days ago, and I was there the day that the launch of the Citizens Assembly en fin de vie, end of life.

• 29:54Alastair Campbell?

  And I'd completely forgotten this, that there was a Citizens Assembly in the Commons about the environment, and it kind of went nowhere because there was no political oomph behind it, whereas Macron, Elizabeth Bourne, the Prime Minister are really behind this, but it's a fascinating process.

• 30:10Rory Stewart?

  Can I just tell people roughly what a Citizens Assembly is? So, there are different versions of it, but the biggest, best example of it to begin with was in Ireland, where they did a Citizens Assembly around abortion, which of course, in the Republic of Ireland, incredibly controversial issue. But by getting what's really like a jury, you randomly select citizens, put them in a room, represented a sample of ordinary people, and then you have experts on the subject brief people over a few days on all the different details. And the amazing thing is that what they found with Ireland on abortion is that instead of emerging with everybody divided into yes and no, they begin to get into how about 28 days, what happens if you're raped?

• 30:49Rory Stewart?

  And they ended up with a proposal which then became Irish law, and I wanted to see the same on Brexit because I believe that actually... The only way through Brexit was to put Brexiteers and Remainers in a room, and I think they would have ended up at a sort of customs union, single market option, if they'd been given a chance to do that. Anyway, back to you and

• 31:05Alastair Campbell?

  Well, so that's exactly what they've done. They've got 173 people aged between 18 and 87, according to a kind of demographic, but then all the people within that, they're drawn by lots. They're going to spend nine weekends together with experts, as you say, with psychological support, with fact checkers, and they're not being asked to, they're not being asked to produce a policy, but they might produce a policy. They're just being asked to address all the issues. And people can follow it all live on stream. You can, you can see what's going on. And I think what's fascinating about it is Macron, he hates the word euthanasia, understandably, but that's kind of where the debate started. It's now into the, they're calling it fan du vie, I guess assisted suicide is where it's going

• 31:49Alastair Campbell?

  to, going to end up. But it's, it's got that political leadership. The Speaker of this National Assembly is going to be present, was present for the first weekend. So it's really kind of, it's, it's literally saying, right, we're the politicians, we want this debate to take place, and we're giving you this forum within which to do it. And, and it's happening at a time when I asked the campaigns here, here, so there's movement in Scotland, there's a, there's a introduction of assisted dying for terminally, terminally ill adults billed in the Scottish Parliament.

• 32:21Rory Stewart?

  Just very quickly on that, your friend Andrew Mitchell, who's now the Development Minister, is a big, big champion of assisted dying and always wanted us to talk about it on this podcast, so he'll be grateful.

• 32:30Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, ditto Charlie Faulkner on the same thing. Eleven states in the US, all six states in Australia, New Zealand nationwide, Canada nationwide, Colombia nationwide, several European countries.

• 32:42Rory Stewart?

  Famously Switzerland, in my constituency, I remember an old lady saying to me, she didn't need to pay to go to Switzerland to die, she just had to check herself into the Cumberland Infirmary.

• 32:52Alastair Campbell?

  No, you can't say that. You can't say that, Roy.

• 32:55Rory Stewart?

  No, I definitely can't say that. That was in the height of our superbug disaster.

• 32:58Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, my God.

• 32:59Rory Stewart?

  Lovely vision that all she had to do was save a bit of money by going to hospital.

• 33:03Alastair Campbell?

  But it's definitely, as a debate, it's moving and I sort of feel we're not having it here at all. I mean, you're right that there's been, there's lots of pressure for it, but I don't hear much from the government.

• 33:12Rory Stewart?

  We don't hear much about it, but I also love the idea of citizens' assemblies. I know that a lot of my friends think I'm mad because they think that, they think that I'm romantic about the public. My view is that actually, generally, the public sat down that way, come up with a much better answer than politicians because they're not party pre, they don't have any political interests. And these questions are questions which are, they're not specialist questions, questions around abortion or end of life or even I think ultimately Brexit are definitely questions which can be explained, which people have a right to have a view on, and where people can work their way through towards a compromise. One of the lovely things about it is that

• 33:54Rory Stewart?

  you tend to, for someone like me who's a horrible centrist, you tend to end up with a pretty centrist solution because people compromise.

• 34:00Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Now, when you talked about a citizens' assembly on Brexit being remainers and leavers, you meant not politicians?

• 34:06Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. It was going to be, my idea was 300 people selected at random from the entire country, demographically representative, put in a room, weekend after weekend, with experts, talking through the issues, coming up with a proposal.

• 34:17Alastair Campbell?

  Well, but remember, Roy, we'd had enough of experts by then. Mr. Goebbels said no more experts.

• 34:22Rory Stewart?

  The lucky thing is they, and actually I remember when I proposed it, it really annoyed my colleagues in Parliament. They kept saying, we already have a citizens' assembly.

• 34:30Alastair Campbell?

  It's called Parliament.

• 34:31Rory Stewart?

  You've got it, exactly. And then when I went up against Dominic Raab in the leadership debate, he kept, he'd obviously done a focus group where he decided that that the thing to say was Rory Stewart is proposing Venezuela, this guy is Maduro with his citizens' assemblies. They kind of felt it was like I was going on a Cuban model, but I think this is the future and I think our population's never been so educated, never been so well-travelled, and people are completely fed up with just vesting these decisions in Parliament. And I think A representative citizens' assembly is a really good way of addressing our major issues.

• 35:03Alastair Campbell?

  And you're right as well that the Brexit debate became so polarised. The idea of putting, dare I say, people like me in a room with people like Nigel Farage to come up with a solution. I mean, it would not happen without violence, would it? That's the...

• 35:16Rory Stewart?

  Luckily, there wouldn't be you and Nigel Farage. It would be 300 more people who are less politicised. And I think that's where we would have ended up.

• 35:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, at the moment, every eight days, a British citizen travels to Switzerland to be helped to die.

• 35:31Rory Stewart?

  Wow, so a lot of people.

• 35:32Alastair Campbell?

  It's quite a lot of people, isn't it?

• 35:33Rory Stewart?

  A lot of people.

• 35:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, so...

• 35:34Rory Stewart?

  And of course, it's very difficult to comment on because, on the one hand, you can get into debates about how it goes wrong. And of course, it goes wrong, or could go wrong, if the elderly feel that they're under pressure from their relatives.

• 35:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, of course, dementia is adding another layer of complexity.

• 35:51Rory Stewart?

  You know, I definitely have had relatives and godparents. I remember saying to them, "Oh, I'm just a burden. I should probably get out of the way. I should probably..." And you can imagine, maybe psychologically, how that could contribute to this. But on the other hand, very difficult to comment on unless you've had a relative who's been through it. I mean, I think one of the things we've picked up on Twitter is that if you've actually had a family member in that extreme situation, you feel that nobody really should be judging this who hasn't had that direct experience.

• 36:18Alastair Campbell?

  I, um, when I was in Paris, I picked up a newspaper. There was an interview with a guy called Theo Boer, and he was part of the Dutch Inquiry and the Committee of Control in charge of assisted dying there. And he said that they've had a quadruple of cases since it brought in. And he's become, he was an absolute advocate for it. He's become less certain because he thinks that the criteria are kind of spreading and widening. But anyway, I think it's a great way to have the debate. I agree with you about that. And I think it is moving. And of course, France is a Catholic country still.

• 36:59Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 36:59Alastair Campbell?

  In the main. The other amazing...

• 37:02Rory Stewart?

  Which is why it's important, because the sanctity of life.

• 37:04Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely. The other thing I picked up while I was over there is that Macron refers to the Pope as "tu".

• 37:11Rory Stewart?

  Ah, il ne vous voyez pas le pape. Very interesting, gosh, very interesting.

• 37:18Alastair Campbell?

  Isn't it? So he's got, clearly got a very familiar... Friendship with Le Pape.

• 37:23Rory Stewart?

  I was having a, so final thing, I was having a cup of tea in, in Jordan two days ago. And an Iranian British couple came up to me and gave me a real row, justifiable, I think now, for the lack of focus that we've put recently on what's happening in Iran. And particularly, not you and me being in trouble, but the British government. And they feel that the, so ju- just to remind everybody, going back in time, um, over the last eighty days, there have been a series of very, very brave demonstrations. And unusually, it's a revolutionary movement not run in Iran by intellectuals. It's run by sports people, it's run by women. Women are increasingly not wearing headscarves.

• 38:04Rory Stewart?

  There's amazing acts of people knocking turbans off Shia clerics in the streets. And we're in a situation in which many thousands of people have now been arrested, maybe as many as fifteen thousand, probably four hundred have been killed. The Iranian regime is desperate, hang on, Khamenei, who's the supreme leader, believes that the lesson of the Iranian revolution of seventy nine and the lesson of eighty nine to ninety one in Russia, and the lesson of the Arab Spring in two thousand and eleven, is that you mustn't give an inch, because if you give an inch, you're finished. So he's trying to really hold on hard. But the criticism is that whereas the Germans and the Canadians and many others have spoken out strongly in favour of the protesters and have sanctioned the revolutionary guard, Britain is so far holding off from doing it.

• 38:47Rory Stewart?

  And I was reminded of that because you've just done this interview with, with Mrs Litvinenko, who was very critical of successive governments, Tony Blair, William Hague in the Foreign Office, for their failure to stand up for Litvinenko against Russia. And there's something in the Foreign Office, I think, which can be, or feels from a distance, as though it can be a bit overly cautious about confronting regimes and calling them out.

• 39:11Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, the first, just on Marina Litvinenko, who, by the way, was fantastic. I really, really enjoyed talking to her. Um, her criticism of us in the early days was that we, we initially didn't give asylum to Litvinenko because she felt we were a bit too close to, to Putin, or trying to get a bit closer to Putin. And then with Hague and Theresa May, it was about lack of access to, to papers and such like. But what's happening in Iran is, I mean, two twenty-three-year-olds have been executed. This week, one charged with enmity against God, the other one with corruption on earth. Four hundred and eighty eight now killed, eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nine defeated

• 39:52Alastair Campbell?

  since the treatment of Master Amin, which set the whole thing, the whole thing off. And I mean, I think you're right. I think we're back to this thing about the the normalization of really bad stuff very, very quickly. And I sent you this morning, James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, made his so-called big foreign policy speech today. I mean, it is so vacuous, it's almost mind blowing. It was billed as this is going to be the sort of foreign policy post Brexit. And I honestly, I've read it twice now, and I can't, I can't even work out what he's trying to say. I think it's been produced by one of those chat box.

• 40:24Rory Stewart?

  One of the, one of the OpenAI things, yeah.

• 40:26Alastair Campbell?

  But, but, but I do think you're right about Iran. You're absolutely right. And there is more that we could do, and we're not doing it. And it's back to this thing about once the media turns away from it, the, the government just thinks, oh, we don't need to bother about it.

• 40:37Rory Stewart?

  Ju- ju- just to, to, to finish, there's been this very interesting prisoner swap, where Brittany Griner, who's a, a US sportswoman, a well-known US sportswoman, who was detained in Russia, and sentenced for having some cannabis in a vape, was swapped for Viktor Bout. And Viktor Bout is probably the most notorious international arms dealer in the world, who was, the Americans were chasing from nine eleven onwards, and they finally got him in a sting operation in Thailand in two thousand eight. It was one of their great kind of CIA triumphs. And it's extraordinary that you can release, you know, one of the

• 41:19Rory Stewart?

  most wanted men in the world in exchange for a basketball player who had a bit of cannabis in her vape.

• 41:24Alastair Campbell?

  And I mean, the ju- the judgments that will have gone on with that. And it was in, i- i- it was interesting how Joe Biden was very, very much wanted to be seen to be part of the whole thing. He was with Brittany Griner's partner as it was happening, met her, met her when she got back to the States. So that was obviously a big. Decision that had been taken by government, we are going to do this.

• 41:48Rory Stewart?

  And it's very, it's quite, it's very strongly American too, isn't it? Because it actually happened in Afghanistan too. Peter Juvenal, who was a very distinguished person, I mustn't use that word.

• 41:57Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, you're allowed, no, you're allowed to do that.

• 41:58Rory Stewart?

  Anyway, Peter Juvenal was an amazing cameraman, often with the BBC, did I think something like ninety trips to Afghanistan during the jihad. Um, was arrested by the Taliban and found himself in jail with a lot of people, including Americans. And of course Biden negotiated to get the Americans out. And the British didn't get Peter Juvenal out for many, many weeks afterwards. And Peter's family was understandably very, very angry, but. It goes all the way back to the Iranian hostage situation. It goes back to the release of prisoners of war in Vietnam. American politicians become very, very identified with this question, getting their citizens home, almost more than anyone else.

• 42:35Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but all, I mean, you do have um regimes and terrorist organisations that make money through hostage taking. Now, we have an absolute very, very hard line that we don't pay. Um, but it doesn't mean that all sorts of negotiations don't go on. I don't remember dealing with a, a direct hostage thing in a prisoner swap like this, but I do remember the period of. I think we talked last week about decommissioning with Cyril Ramaphosa and. My, uh, the Finland Prime Minister Atasari, when they were doing the decommissioning of IRA weapons. But the other issue that was just incredibly difficult, incredibly complicated was prisoner release because.

• 43:16Rory Stewart?

  Which prisoners were these?

• 43:17Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the, the, both sides, you know, who, who were being released as part of the agreement.

• 43:22Rory Stewart?

  And some of these people have done very bad things.

• 43:24Alastair Campbell?

  God, yeah. And also some of these things, people who've done very bad things to each other.

• 43:28Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 43:29Alastair Campbell?

  And some of them who'd done bad things to people who were in the room when we were negotiating.

• 43:32Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 43:33Alastair Campbell?

  And so, but the thing about, you know, if you say, right, notorious global arms dealer.

• 43:38Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 43:39Alastair Campbell?

  Who's a pal of Putin's against basketball player?

• 43:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 43:43Alastair Campbell?

  You don't feel in the kind of geostrategic that it's a, but you're having to make those calculations. How many unionists on life sentences for how many IRA supporters on life sentences? You, you, you making judgments? And also, who feels more strongly about when they should get out?

• 44:02Rory Stewart?

  Both cases, these were people who'd killed people, both on the Republican side and the Indian side.

• 44:07Alastair Campbell?

  And who got out early.

• 44:08Rory Stewart?

  Proper convicted terrorists.

• 44:09Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, who got out early. What's really interesting though, I, I, I think, listen, I could be wrong about this, we'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure hardly any of them were back in jail anytime soon afterwards.

• 44:21Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 44:22Alastair Campbell?

  So it did kind of work in terms of keeping the peace.

• 44:26Rory Stewart?

  Not referring.

• 44:27Alastair Campbell?

  But it's a very, it's a, you know, these are, I guess these are questions where morality collides with politics.

• 44:33Rory Stewart?

  So Viktor Valt was a really, really big figure when I first joined the Foreign Office. And he's like a glimpse of a world which, thank goodness, has faded a little bit. But if anybody wants to know about that universe, you've just got to read Frederick Forsyth's 1970s novel, The Dogs of War, which basically describes in detail how people like Viktor Valt were still operating in the 90s. So the story is absolutely extraordinary. The guy was a, almost certainly a Colonel in the GRU, so the Russian military intelligence. He speaks an extraordinary number of languages, speaks fluent Farsi, Khosza, Zulu, Arabic. He got hold of some dodgy Antonov aeroplanes as the Soviet Union collapsed, set himself

• 45:17Rory Stewart?

  up in a, a sort of African air freight business, started off shipping flowers from South Africa into Dubai. So he'd buy flowers for $2, sell them for $100. Then he got onto the frozen chicken business. So he'd buy frozen chickens for $2 in South Africa, fly them up to Nigeria.

• 45:34Alastair Campbell?

  While still being with the GRU.

• 45:36Rory Stewart?

  Well, this is the question, right? To what extent had he left them, to what extent hadn't he? But he claimed to be totally independent. Started flying frozen chickens up to Nigeria, shipping around UN peacekeepers, and then began to become very good friends with Mobutu, became very good friends with Masood in Afghanistan. And quite quickly went from gladioli to helicopter gunships.

• 45:56Alastair Campbell?

  Mm hmm. Where were the Antonovs at this point?

• 45:59Alastair Campbell?

  They're gone.

• 45:59Rory Stewart?

  And expanded to more and more Antonovs. And he was operating in those days, the United Arab Emirates was the perfect place to operate out because there were free ports there. He then shifted on to operating out of Ukraine. So this is the other thing we forget about with Ukraine now. Ukraine now is the great hero of the West and the great opponent to Russia. Ukraine in those days, late nineties, early two thousands, was the most corrupt arms mart in the world. Because when the Soviet Union had left, they'd left behind forty billion dollars' worth of armaments, all of which then disappeared over the next five, six years. And the president of Ukraine was recorded in a tape in his office doing a deal selling to Saddam Hussein surface to air missiles, hundred millions of dollars' worth of surface to air missiles.

• 46:44Rory Stewart?

  The journalist who reported on it, this is Ukraine, was found two months later headless in a bath of acid on the edge of a farm just outside Kiev. And all of this is Viktor Valtsova. By the end of his time, he was running planes to Liberia, Sierra Leone, DRC. Uh, he was getting involved in Afghanistan. He was in trouble for what he was supposed to be doing for North Koreans. And the, and the whole thing happening with this kind of big mustachioed guy who was obviously protected, or he would be dead by now, by the Putin regime.

• 47:19Alastair Campbell?

  Well, listen, Putin must be saying, this has been a really good trade.

• 47:24Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, you, you.

• 47:25Alastair Campbell?

  To get him back for a.

• 47:26Rory Stewart?

  For a wrestling basketball player.

• 47:27Alastair Campbell?

  Trivial. Had a bit of.

• 47:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Alastair Campbell?

  Vaping weed. So did you, so I, I don't, I don't remember being involved in hostage stuff.

• 47:36Rory Stewart?

  So.

• 47:36Alastair Campbell?

  Were you?

• 47:38Rory Stewart?

  In, in my earlier life, before I began, when I was a civil servant, before I became a minister, yes. And those were British hostages, I think in those, that case taken in Kashmir. And we would have very, very detailed meetings down in an underground cellar.

• 47:52Alastair Campbell?

  Well, not, not Pret a Monje.

• 47:54Rory Stewart?

  Not Pret a Monje. Uh, and they were very intense. You were working with our special forces, you were working with police. Liaison, you were trying to get information on the ground on where these people are located. You were trying to work out if there were any options there to extract, there were other people trying to negotiate with the local governments. And of course, you had at the other end, the families.

• 48:15Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 48:15Rory Stewart?

  Who often felt, and this is why, on the one hand, I'm very close to Peter Juven and his family, and I really feel their anger. But I also feel some sympathy for the British diplomats because I actually am confident that they would have been working very, very hard to try to get them back.

• 48:30Alastair Campbell?

  But with limits, with limits to what they're allowed to do, often with governments and regimes that are allowed to do an awful lot more.

• 48:37Rory Stewart?

  One hundred percent, and politicians who are a bit nervous.

• 48:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 48:40Rory Stewart?

  And regimes who are asking for huge amounts of money that we're not prepared to hand over.

• 48:44Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 48:44Rory Stewart?

  Meanwhile, the families are screaming and want them home.

• 48:46Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Well, tonight on the stage of the Albert Hall, Rory, I'm going to take you hostage until you admit that Australia was a disaster and the the audience is not going to let you go out until that's happened.

• 48:53Rory Stewart?

  And the Burnley Football Club is the greatest team that's ever existed.

• 48:55Alastair Campbell?

  No, because that would just be a lie, you don't believe, even though we did have a great win at the weekend.

• 49:00Rory Stewart?

  So, so, well, I guess that's it. I mean, the only thing to to finish on then is, um, what's your prediction for the results? Given that the results be out before this comes out.

• 49:09Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, oh, I, I think it's a chance of a repeat of the last final, France Croatia. I think, I just. I think France are going to win it, the whole thing, I do.

• 49:20Rory Stewart?

  You think they're.

• 49:20Alastair Campbell?

  I think France, I think France average, France on an off day, were actually the better team than England, who were very, very strong. Um, and all the English people in the room are shaking their heads and the Frenchman in the room is waving his arms about and saying, what a great pundit I am. No, I think, I think France will win the whole thing.

• 49:39Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Well, we'll find out. Thank you.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rear on October second. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You start, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 50:07Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 50:10Speaker 04

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October second, rated R, under seventeen, not a minute without parent.