← The Rest Is Politics
The Rest Is Politics
401. Trump’s Corruption Machine, Israeli Settlers, and the Rise of Reform UK
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- [00:01]
Alistair Campbell
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Rory Stewart
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Alistair Campbell
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Rory Stewart
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Alistair Campbell
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Rory Stewart
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Alistair Campbell
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Rory Stewart
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Alistair Campbell
And one bit of policy we can all agree on cheaper power and podcast perks thrown in. So download the app, sign up with the code POLITICS and visit getfuse.com politics for full terms and more information. Welcome to the Rest of Politics with me, Alistair Campbell and with me Roy Stewart. So we're going to kick off with Israel. Grim, grim, grim stuff going on there and I suspect Netanyahu is doing what he's about to do because Trump is about to go and he's really pushing the limits on that. Then I think we should talk about Trump and corruption. I think it's one of the least covered aspects of the many aspects of Trump right now and I think we both agree. Rory, maybe we should have done an emergency podcast on the local elections.
- [02:01]
Rory Stewart
Should have done.
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Alistair Campbell
Maybe I was being a bit tribal, getting my head under the covers and saying let's, you know, you're right, you're right.
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Rory Stewart
If I was going to be your therapist, it's possible that you weren't that excited by the local election results. Doing an emergency podcast on on Nigel Farage triumphing in the local elections wouldn't have been your favorite.
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Alistair Campbell
Well, my sister who I saw the weekend said if the Tories are still being in power and they'd had local elections as bad as that, you and Rory would be right out the traps.
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Rory Stewart
And I did meet a man running yesterday who was running down my street and stopped and said, where on earth is your local elections podcast? I've been forced to listen to Nigel Farage all morning. So there we are. So we need to remember that.
- [02:39]
Alistair Campbell
And then maybe, yeah, there's quite a lot of elections this week we could talk about. We'll do Australia in the local elections.
- [02:45]
Rory Stewart
And let me just a sort of brief spoiler alert because obviously we'll do this after the break. But it is really interesting because the broad story is that in Australia and Canada, the sort of soft left incumbent parties who'd been in government actually triumphed because what seemed to happen is Trump totally discredited the right. Oddly, in Britain, the local election story is different and in fact the right wing party, the more Trumpian party reform, triumphed and the conventional parties really suffered badly. So getting into this strange question of how Australia, Canada and Britain, which in many ways have a great deal in common, ended up with different results is the thing after the break.
- [03:23]
Alistair Campbell
Well, I'm hoping the difference is the general and the local, but we'll see. Right, Israel Cabinet meeting. Netanyahu comes out and says that they're on the eve of a forceful entry to Gaza, as if they've not been very forceful up to now. And it sort of feels to me, and I know you've watched the we I said I'd watched the Louis Theroux documentary on the settlers last week and you've now watched it as well. I've been really interested in your take on it, but I sort of feel we're at that point where the Ben GVIR Smotrich, the real hardline settler movement, is absolutely winning on the rampage. And you get the feeling that after all the Gazans have been through now to be told that they're going to be moved from north to south, having moved backwards and forwards and with the sense that Israel's basically saying, well, they'll move in, they'll take over the land and kind of indefinite as to when they take it back.
- [04:11]
Rory Stewart
Couple of quick things. One is to remind people that what happened after October 7 and the terrorist attacks was a very, very large bombing campaign which slowed towards the end of last year and was then replaced when Trump came in with what was supposed to be a peace deal which was going to have three phases. And the second phase was meant to be the return of all hostages and Israel withdrawing its troops. And the second phase never really got off the ground with a lot of recriminations on both sides about why that didn't happen. And instead what's happened is that Israel has imposed a entire blockade on food, water, humanitarian assistance, which is now on its 63rd day. And during this period, we have had the extraordinary, horrible killing of aid workers, very well documented and then buried in shallow graves. And we've had criticisms, very strong criticisms, from Tom Fletcher, who we interviewed on the show, who's the UN boss, Medecin Sans Frontiere, very strong in its statements about what's going on, because it is an extraordinary situation, because, of course, Gaza has been pummeled, well over 40,000 people killed, and now it's facing this blockade. And as you say, Trump is about to turn up on his visit to the Gulf, to Saudi, to United Arab Emirates, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and to Qatar. And part of that is supposed to be discussing Gaza and peace. And at this point, when the majority of the Israeli population in the latest Times of Israel poll are very much in favour of stopping the fighting, bringing the hostages back, moving to peace. Instead, Netanyahu is pushing ahead with a policy basically that seems to be really driven by Smotrich and Ben gvir, who are the extreme far right settlers who only got 10% in the last election, but are a key part of his coalition. And we can get onto that. This weird maths of how people who get 10% in election end up driving stuff are saying hostages are not the priority. The priority is to, in their words, eliminate Hamas, whatever they think that means.
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Alistair Campbell
I just saw this thing on social media this morning. Smotrich was asked what he thought about Ben Gvir's proposal to prevent all humanitarian supplies to Gaza for good. He answered, quote, I do not disagree with him morally, but practically the world is not going to allow us to starve to death 2 million people in Gaza. And Ben Gvir was in the documentary, the Louis Theroux film, where he said, we have to encourage Palestinian immigration and win. And win. It seems to me from the point of view of the settlers that you saw in that film does mean this Greater Israel, where the west bank and Gaza become part of Israel, which then begs the question, well, where do the Palestinians go? And if you have, as you had in that film, people who basically say, well, I don't really care because they're not the same as us, or you have rabbis talking about them as savages, I think this is. We're in a horrific place on this. And there was an interview I saw on the television yesterday with the Norwegian, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council. And he made a point of saying, if this goes ahead and bear in mind, part of this new plan is that Israel takes over the humanitarian project, not the international organizations that are there now. And he was saying if this goes ahead. And he named three countries, he said the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. He named those as the three countries that he felt could have some influence over this. And yet I just feel that the international order has sort of given up. When was the last time we heard a kind of international like we have in Ukraine now, Macron, Starmer, come together, push Europe? When was the last time we had any sense of that happening? We had it a little bit when Trump came in. We had it a little bit with some of the Gulf states, but it seems just to have faded away. I mean, I saw a picture yesterday of a girl, a young girl, who was holding her phone and showing a picture of herself a few months ago as this sort of lively, vibrant young girl. Young girl now, ribs coming through the skin. You see the pictures yesterday of people queuing for the limited food that was there, and it was children screaming and climbing over each other with these little pans to try and get some food into it. And I don't know, I just. I just feel, and I, I. Part of me feels that we've been too fair, actually, you know, because we have constantly tried to put both sides. But I just think this is now beyond the pale. I think it's utterly unacceptable, and yet we seem to be accepting it.
- [08:46]
Rory Stewart
The story in Israel is a story of two very, very different countries. It's a story of this extraordinary economic success story, this tech capital, a country which often, when I go to visit friends in Israel, feels dynamic, peaceful, sunny, beautiful. You know, I travel with family in Israel, and you can go to the beach, you can go to amazing restaurants, and barely be aware that the war's happening even now. And it's a country where, even in that thorough documentary, you saw the voices of liberal Jews. So we saw a Jewish NGO trying to help a Palestinian get their olive harvest in. You saw that the national security chief had said that the settlers were an existential threat, basically. But there's another very dark story here, which has been going on much longer than we've wanted to really focus on enough in the West. And I want to get to you on this, because the settler movement obviously begins after 67, when Israel occupies the west bank in Gaza. And in the 70s, it's still a slightly fringe, eccentric thing. Often the cliche would be American Jews from Brooklyn with strange religious nationalist ideas trying to put tents on bits of Territory that they claim they're allowed from the Bible, but in the middle of Palestinian territory. But it's as early as the late 70s that it actually becomes more and more part of formal Israeli politics. And I think this is where we need to be sort of clearer because in I remember this as the Middle east minister in Britain, we talked very clearly about occupied Palestinian territory, about illegal settlements, illegal under an international law, two state solution. And Israeli interlocutors were polite and didn't point out, of course, that a lot of these settlements are not illegal under Israeli law, they're illegal under international law and that they don't see this as occupied Palestinian territory, they see this as Israel. We saw this in one of the soldiers in the documentary. Thoreau says, I'm not an Israel, am I? And the guy says, yes, you're an Israel. Right? Under the right wing governments, under the Likud governments and the Labour governments, it went on big push with Sharon really leading the settlement process. In the 80s the Labour governments tended to. And for this I'm very grateful to Chris Doyle who, you know, who was talking to me about this yesterday, the different settlement panels. Labour basically was trying to take 25, 30% of Palestinian territory by building settlements around the edge of Israeli settlements, you know, Jordan Valley, edge of Jerusalem, Likud. The right was literally trying to put settlements on hilltops right the way through the territory to make sure they broke up the territory strategically. And that's what we were seeing a great deal of here. But I suppose what I want to say to you is to sort of finish this long ramble is when you were in government 97 onwards, Tony Blair was often seen as being quite sympathetic to Israel and he then went on to be the Middle east envoy. How is it that you reconciled yourself to the fact that on the surface the story was international law, occupied territories, illegal settlements, but in practice all the Israeli governments that you were dealing with were facilitating the building of illegal settlements again and again and again, despite the criticism from the international community.
- [12:12]
Alistair Campbell
Well, I think that's a very good question. And I think the answer is that we did think, I remember we went, we made a big trip to the Middle east, including Israel, not long after the Good Friday Agreement. And I can remember our media, we were having to calm our media down because there was a sense of, well, we pulled off the Northern Ireland thing, so maybe the next one will be the Middle East. And I think because the American administration at the time was still so focused on this idea that we can build the two piece, the Two state solution that I think some of these things that were going on wasn't just a question of reconciling ourselves to them. It was slightly pushing them away from our minds because they weren't in that big picture that we were pursuing. So you would say, you know, we're worried about the settlements. We've got to be careful about the settlements. But meanwhile, they were just growing and growing and growing. And then I think when Tony went on to be the Middle east envoy and with a particular focus on the economics of Palestine, although he was seen as very pro Israel on one level, but also he was spending most of the time working with the Palestinians. But I think that is a very, very fair question, because when I was looking back through some of the history of the settlements, and as early as 1967, the legal counsel to the Israeli Foreign Ministry wrote a legal opinion to the Israeli Prime Minister. My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Geneva Convention. And this is about where your, you know, the impact upon civilian life, even though it's been occupied militarily. And then the American government said the same. So the Israelis, we're going back to this point, and this relates to what's happening now, where the international order and the sense that we all have shared rules that we agree with and relate to is broken down. So what the Israelis, as you just said, the Israelis say, well, it's not in contravention of Israeli law. Indeed, it is Israeli law that turns outposts, when they set up a settlement into a settlement through which Israeli law is effectively pipelined. And, you know, you look at some of these places, it didn't really come through in Louis Drew's film because he was very much focused on some of the individuals. But you're talking about settlements that have grown into towns of 30, 40, 50,000 cities.
- [14:29]
Rory Stewart
Really. Yeah.
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Alistair Campbell
Effectively small cities. Yeah. And then you had that lady Daniela Vice, who's one of the kind of leaders of the settlement movement, saying back in the 90s, my vision is for 1 million and then 2 million. And then, of course, what you've got now with Gaza, there have been these International Criminal Court cases, and there's now this argument which I think is going through the court at the moment about whether starvation is being used as a weapon of war, which again, is a war crime. And yet the posture of the Israeli government is, well, it's not. We're not starving them. Indeed, look at this new offer. We're saying that we'll take over the feeding of these people, there's no reason for them to go.
- [15:06]
Rory Stewart
And this offer is one that has really troubled people like the UN because it's essentially saying they will use American military contractors to deliver aid only to vetted people. So one of the principles of humanitarian assistance is that it needs to be neutral and impartial. You don't really get into the game of saying, I'm going to interview you before I decide whether I'm going to feed you. I was talking to an Israeli general and he was being surprisingly honest and thoughtful about his experience when he was a commander in the west bank, of settlers coming to see him, and this is even 10, 15 years ago, saying, we want you to designate our outpost as being vital to national security, because if you do that, then we can get the army in, we can get legal recognition. And he would say, no, you are massively undermining security here. You are alienating the population, you're creating violence by doing this. At which point they'd say, well, we'll go over your head. And he would turn up then in Netanyahu's office, as Netanyahu in first time, and he would suddenly see leaders of the settler movement sitting in Netanyahu's outer office when he turned up to try to have a formal conversation about this. And it would be made very clear, and Daniel Weiss said this about having Netanyahu's AIDS on speed dial, that he would then be under enormous pressure, political pressure. So the settlers are very, very good, despite their relatively small size, at leveraging political context and leveraging this sort of strange, marginal thing you have in coalitions. Israel, though, is still a country that feels like it's incredibly polarized. You know, you've got these religious nationalist settlers who threw documentaries about. You've got secular liberal Israelis who are committed to the idea of the state of Israel, but don't buy into the religious nationalist settlement stuff. And then you've got the ultra Orthodox communities, some of whom live in settlements, some who don't, but who really don't get involved in the violence, and who don't really buy into the state of Israel at all, because they actually believe that you can't have a state of Israel until the Messiah comes. And these three groups are then made even more complicated by this massive wave of emigration from the former Soviet Union, from places like Ethiopia, from the Middle east, which have brought whole new voter blocs in, some of which are radicalised, but some of which are just going into the settlements because it's cheap housing.
- [17:28]
Alistair Campbell
The state spends more on the people living in the settlements than it does on people living elsewhere. A lot of that through security. Of course. One of the most interesting things in that film was where Louis Theroux was being shown round one of the settlements and the guy said, don't film over there, that's where the army are based. So there's the army surrounding them. And I don't know if you saw that. The guy, the Palestinian who was showing Louis Theroux around Hebron where what you got a sense of was just the sort of buggeration of daily life going through turnstiles. And no, you can't walk past that zebra crossing because that's only for Israelis. But that guy since has been had his home raided, has been abused by settlers. I mean, there's a lot of kind of violence goes on and psychological violence goes on as well.
- [18:11]
Rory Stewart
And Luther didn't get very much there, partly because one got the sense that a lot of the settler community is very wary of being interviewed by international media.
- [18:19]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah.
- [18:20]
Rory Stewart
And don't want it to come through. But I had a friend who was in Hebron recently, he was an American Jew who had grown up in a very, very strongly pro Israeli family, was thinking of working for Netanyahu's government and then walked through Hebron with a Palestinian friend, walked through the settlements and saw the settlers screaming incredibly violent abuse at this Palestinian woman, children chucking stuff at them, and just came back completely shaken, saying, and this is another thing, this sense that you can live a life in Israel where you're not aware of this, where you can become a really strong supporter of Israel and not concentrate on what's going on. And he totally came back, whole mind changed because his experience of these settlers in Hebron was so vicious.
- [19:06]
Alistair Campbell
But there was that film, there was footage of the guy, the settler, shooting a Palestinian. He didn't kill him, but he shot him. And you could see the guy go down. And then Louis Theroux just said in that very matter of fact way that he does, you know, he had his gun license taken away, but that was it.
- [19:24]
Rory Stewart
Two final things before we move on to Trump. One is how central the entire narrative of terrorism is. I mean, again and again, if you were sympathetic to what Netanyahu's government is doing in Gaza, what she would say, listening to us, is that we're not.
- [19:39]
Alistair Campbell
Talking about Jabi 7 we're not talking about terrorism.
- [19:41]
Rory Stewart
We're not exactly, you know, and that Louis Theroux showed Nablus, but he didn't show the, what they would call terrorists in Nablus, and that this entire thing that they're doing is about protecting themselves from an existential threat. And you saw this with the Texan settler who just keeps this story. These people are genocidal death cult. They want to wipe every Israeli off the face of the earth. They're engaged in an anti Semitic death cult. We have no alternative other than to do this in order to survive as a nation. And I think that's deeply embedded. And so this sense of trauma, which is partly historical connections, you know, the horror of the Holocaust, the experience of the wars in the Middle east, The experience of October 7th is right at the heart.
- [20:25]
Alistair Campbell
But Alex Younger, we interviewed Alex Younger, former head of MI6, on leading this week, and he made the point that if you were living in Gaza and what is happening to you is happening to you, and Hamas is the only kind of other voice that you can, you can hear and see, and as an opposition to this, don't be surprised if people go towards it. And likewise, he also said this related to when we were talking about Afghanistan. He made the point that it would seem that Israel only has a security response to this. It doesn't have a political response responds because it doesn't recognize the politics of the other side.
- [21:04]
Rory Stewart
And I think to finish on very dangerous territory, traditionally we draw a very, very clear line between settlers and other Israelis. But of course there is a connection, which is that at the heart of the project is it's a nationalist project for a homeland for the Jewish people. And it's based on historical claims that 2000 years ago this was the state of Israel. And secular Jews after 48 may have accepted the particular configuration of the bit of the Middle east that they got. But the argument of settlers that Hebron or Nablus or these places in the west bank were where Abraham died or where Joseph was born, the idea that the Bible is your land right to this territory is very, very central to even most liberal secular Israeli views. And therefore one of the things that the settlers can exploit, and I think Weiss makes this point in the documentary, is that they're pushing the boundary of something which still reflects the basic idea and which at a fundamental, profound level doesn't want a state with full Palestinian rights, because if it was a state with full Palestinian rights, it wouldn't be a Jewish homeland. And that national project of protecting Jews in this particular bit of Middle Eastern territory would collapse. So what I suppose I'm saying is that the complication here is that the whole project touches on the edge of.
- [22:39]
Alistair Campbell
Settlements well, listen, let's turn to Trump. So he's going there and it'll be huge, huge news, because pretty much everything that he does is huge news. And I think one of the hardest things with Trump at the moment is to work out what is significant, what isn't. And the last few days have thrown out some interesting stuff on that. And I particularly want to talk about corruption, because I think a lot of these things are a way of disguising the corruption. I think corruption is a huge thing. Now, when you have his Meme coin, you have these literally vast sums of money without any tracking going into him.
- [23:10]
Rory Stewart
Just quickly to interrupt on this, just as a brief explainer, and I'm not the world's biggest expert on this, but a meme coin is not making the kind of normal claims that things like Bitcoin make. Bitcoin is really posing as an alternative currency. So Bitcoin limits the number of coins that are issued, very expensive to mine. And it tries to present itself as something to be used in transactions. A meme coin isn't like that. A meme coin is basically initially a joke. It's a token issued. And there was something called, not surprising, a dogecoin. Yeah, must love promoting and going up and down on. And there's no limit to how many of them you can issue and they're basically completely unregulated and equivalent are NFTs. There was this weird thing called the Bored Ape Yacht Club that I remember seeing very, very wealthy Hollywood actors buying. I sat was one of them. He just bought one and he bought it for $300,000 and was showing off to me.
- [24:08]
Alistair Campbell
What is it?
- [24:08]
Rory Stewart
It was a cartoon picture of an extremely ugly ape. A digital picture that you got on your phone.
- [24:14]
Alistair Campbell
And how is that worth money?
- [24:15]
Rory Stewart
Well, so I said, this is ridiculous. How's it worth money? And he said, well, because I've bought it, it's now gone up to $500,000 as a well known Hollywood actor. So I said, it's the Ponzi scheme, isn't it? And he said, no, no, no, no, no. And he tried to make this very complicated argument for why it was actually a valid investment. Sure enough, a few weeks later, the thing had collapsed down to being worth almost nothing at all, because obviously it was a really ugly picture of an ape on your phone, which couldn't be worth anything at all. Now, Meme coin operates like this and the Trump Meme coin and Melania, these things are issued, they are traded in an obscure Chinese trade. He doesn't declare Any of the money that comes in, he doesn't declare any of the revenue he gets out of it. But what it is, as you've pointed out, is an amazing way of making campaign contributions. And in fact, we can see this because some publicly listed companies have started making buying the Meme Coin. And if you're publicly listed, you have to tell the Stock Exchange Commission why you're spending your money. So Javier Celgas, who runs a shipping company based in Mexico, has just spent $20 million of the money of his publicly listed company, which you might be lucky enough to own shares in, buying this Meme Coin. And in his SEC filing, he says this is a sensible business decision because it's advocacy for the, you know, the business interests of my company for a free trade deal between Mexico.
- [25:37]
Alistair Campbell
And he has to declare it. They have to declare it. But if you're the leader of one of these Gulf countries that is Trump's about to visit and you think, well, what would be a nice way to set up the visit is to bung a bit of either to get the boys out. Eric and Don Jr are out doing these big deals and saying that the fact that they're called Trump has nothing to do with the fact that, you know, Trump is the president of the American state, the United States, because they're now running the business side of things. There's no way of knowing who's paying that money. And Trump is the guy who's in charge of the regulation of the Bitcoin Meme coin, the whole damn shooting system. Yeah.
- [26:11]
Rory Stewart
So it's incredibly straightforward. It's essentially a transfer directly to Donald Trump's bank account from any foreign dignitary businessman in the world. And we can already see that when you make these transfers, court cases disappear, contracts are given. There's a wonderful speech by Chris Murphy, Senator of Connecticut, stands up in front of a flipboard and takes you through all the corruption of the last hundred days.
- [26:34]
Alistair Campbell
We should put it in the newsletter, actually, because, in fact, he posted a picture on social media of this sort of graph going through day by day by day through the administration. And there's kind of something every day. So whether it was getting rid of the regulators, whether it was getting rid of the ban on accepting gifts, or going straight into lobbying in and out of government. Even the thing about the employment of Musk, they had to kind of get rid of some of the old rules governing government appointments to allow him in there.
- [27:00]
Rory Stewart
Well, the corruption of Trump is beyond imagining. I mean, it's so staggering that we can Barely keep up with it. And it is so disgusting. I mean, corruption is obviously, I think, defined as using public office for private benefit. And it's unbelievable.
- [27:14]
Alistair Campbell
It's offscale.
- [27:15]
Rory Stewart
It's absolutely offscale.
- [27:16]
Alistair Campbell
So you've got 500 million, apparently into his political action committees. This is for somebody who, under the Constitution, isn't going to be campaigning again. So what's a political action committee if it's not to try and get you in for another term? So where's that money going?
- [27:29]
Rory Stewart
So you can give him cash directly, you can pay, it appears now, between 1 million and $5 million.
- [27:35]
Alistair Campbell
A dinner at Mar A Lago.
- [27:37]
Rory Stewart
Dinner at Mar A Lago or a meeting with him?
- [27:39]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah.
- [27:39]
Rory Stewart
As you say, the Trump children have been travelling around just before the President visits, coincidentally all the countries the President's about to visit, Saudi, uae, Qatar. And as Eric Trump said, it's amazing how quickly they get to. Yes, and all these countries are literally announcing billion dollar deals as he's turning up again and again. The other countries, of course they've been visiting, not surprisingly, are the far right populous countries in Europe, Hungary, Serbia, et cetera, where they're doing deals there.
- [28:09]
Alistair Campbell
And by the way, Don Trump Jr. Apparently is also doing it as part of what he calls the. A speaker, a paid speaking tour. So you go along, you make a speech that we can't criticize on that front, Rory, but you make a speech, you then meet the heads of government and you meet the, the big cheeses, and then lo and behold, there's an agreement that, yes, you can build a new waterfront properties all around Gaza.
- [28:31]
Rory Stewart
And the paid speaking thing is interesting too, because there's no limit to how much you could pay in inverted commas for a speech. You're apparently paying for a speech, but of course, the amount of money you could pay could be hundreds of thousands of dollars. And Trump, of course, is, unlike other presidents, not setting up proper blind trusts. He's not distinguishing himself from the family, so the income just rolls in. And we've seen other examples. He used the White House to strong arm the main Gulf association into accepting him and his Saudi partners. And PGA has agreed very reluctantly that they'll do their tours, his Live the Liv tour on Trump's golf courses, which massively drives up the value of Trump's golf courses.
- [29:08]
Alistair Campbell
I've got to say we're going to talk about labour in a bit, but if it's true that the Labour government to get the British Open to be played at Turnbury, because Trump has a hotel there Then I might be joining the protests at that one, Rory. And I'm not a natural protester myself. But then there's the whole thing about, you know, this guy that got pardoned after donating 1.8 million, he sort of, it's just, it's off the scale. And I think these other things that we spend so much time talking about. So if you just take the last 48 hours we had the thing with the Pope, now, I'm not a Catholic, I'm not anything, I'm an atheist. But given that the Pope, Pope Francis is, you know, dead. Just a few days for Trump to go out and first of all do an interview saying, I think I'd be a great Pope. And then to, on his truth Social and on the White House social media channels have this picture of him as the Pope dressed as the Pope. And then last night, because there's been a bit of backlash from Catholics, say that he knew nothing about it. It's on your effing truth Social. And, and then to say that it's, why can't people take a joke and this is how they do it. Farage does this as well, where you sort of, you say something over the top, but then you say, well, it's just a bit, bit of fun. Why haven't people got a sense of humor? So it's interesting, deeply offensive.
- [30:23]
Rory Stewart
I found it really offensive, really peculiar. And of course, immediately the bad boys of Brexit come in and attack me and say, I don't have a sense of humor and what's your problem? And actually, some of my more left wing Tory friends said, rory, you mustn't rise to this because if you react to their jokes, that's what they want.
- [30:40]
Alistair Campbell
I agree.
- [30:40]
Rory Stewart
That's what they want.
- [30:41]
Alistair Campbell
Well, of course, then the next day you had Alcatraz, you had two things, tariffs on films and Alcatraz. Now, there is something, somebody said me something today that apparently in Florida, there's a TV channel where Mar A Lago is and they play the film that was showing that night, on Saturday night was Escape from Alcatraz, right? So people are thinking now, did Trump sit down and watch this film and thought, you know, we got to reopen that place. You know, he suddenly throws out, we're going to put 100% tariffs on film, on foreign films. And this Alcatraz thing. So yesterday, as I was driving back from the north, the lead story was tariffs on films. The second story was Alcatraz. I would put my life on it that neither of those things will happen just as he's not going to become the Pope. However, we've spent, we, the world have spent 48 hours talking about it, during which we're actually not talking about Trump and Israel, not talking about Trump and corruption, not talking about things that really, really, really matter.
- [31:41]
Rory Stewart
So let's get back to corruption then. Just finished, so we don't fall into the trap. So corruption is something that's been around in the U.S. indeed, all our democracies, a long time. But the U.S. is pretty dramatic in the 19th century, unbelievably corrupt, big move to clean it up, obviously through the 20th century, but still some pretty strange things that we've been talking about. We talk about Buddy Cianci in Rhode island taking cash. We talked about, you know, senators with gold bars.
- [32:08]
Alistair Campbell
We've talked about the fact that they can get insider information and trade and all that.
- [32:14]
Rory Stewart
Nancy Pelosi talking about these amazing FBI stings in the 80s which found Congresspeople and senators, including one of the federal lawmakers, saying, when the FBI agent tries to say, you know, you're going to take a bribe, he says, you don't need to talk to me. I'm as bent as they come. Right. However, the real change is Chief Justice Roberts in the Supreme Court and the fallout from Citizens United. So Citizens United allowed this horrible campaign financing situation where under essentially an idea that this is a part of liberty and freedom, suddenly these incredible hundred million dollar funds are able to, often with dark money, finance bits of campaigns. And following on from this, there's been a massive retreat even before Trump in prosecuting American politicians from corruption. So Chris Christie's team was found, get this. In order to punish somebody in New Jersey who wasn't with them, they were creating traffic jams in New Jersey by fiddling around with the traffic lights in order to undermine their opponents. That was cleared. The Governor of Virginia, who with his wife was found taking tens of thousands of dollars in cash and gifts, again, was cleared. There's been an amazing investigation in Ohio into the speaker of the House, who had a genuine kind of guy who modeled himself in the Sicilian Mafia and whose dad was a Mafia enforcer, who killed himself by a pond and who the FBI was all over this. And then we come to Trump and the protections that the US Set up to try to deal with this are, of course, laws which Trump has suspended. So there are laws of Foreign Agents act, which was about trying to prevent Russian agents or Cuban agents paying American politicians. That's been paused by Trump. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. That's about companies going abroad paying bribes. Trump has frozen that too. Consumer protection acts frozen by Trump procurement. The State Department has coincidentally just issued a 400 million dollar contract to buy armored Teslas from Elon Musk and no proper procurement processes followed. In fact, contracts offered to Musk's rifles $2 billion contract after Verizon has now been annulled and it looks like Musk is now going to get that contract again with no due process at all.
- [34:38]
Alistair Campbell
This is the story, and to be fair to our friend and colleague, the Mooch, he said this right from the word go. While they're creating all these sort of distractions left, right and center, the real big story here is about kind of personal enrichment and enrichment of his friends. People should look out for that guy, Chris Murphy, follow him on social media if you don't. He really is onto this. And Bloomberg, by the way, they've done a. I don't know how they know because the crypto world is so secretive. But he reckons that their crypto, the Trump family crypto scheme, is now worth about somewhere close to a billion dollars. Okay, right. It's been depressing so far. Let's have a break.
- [35:12]
Rory Stewart
Yes, it was depressing, but after the break, we'll be back and we'll be looking at some really, really interesting electoral results around the world, some of which, Australia, for example, show a great deal of kind of optimism and hope and different directions. Trump isn't taking over the whole world and there are different currents moving in other directions. So a bit of optimism after the break.
- [35:31]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah. Well, I'm glad you can see the sunnyside of Live, whatever happens, Rory. We'll also talk about the local elections in England.
- [35:41]
Rory Stewart
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- [36:51]
Alistair Campbell
I'm David.
- [36:51]
C
McCloskey, former CIA analyst turned spy novelist.
- [36:54]
D
And I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist.
- [36:57]
C
And together we're the hosts of the Rest Is Classified, where we bring you brilliant stories from the world of spies.
- [37:02]
D
This week we're talking about one of the most significant stories of the 21st century, Edward Snowden, and how he orchestrated the biggest leak of classified secrets in modern American and British history.
- [37:13]
C
Snowden revealed that the American government was mass collecting data on its own citizens. And it was really the first time that Americans and so many others around the world understood the extent of the US Government's mass surveillance.
- [37:26]
D
That's right. It's a story I covered at the time. And it also really gets to wider questions about what privacy means, how technology has changed our lives, and what the government and companies can do with data we might have thought was private.
- [37:38]
C
And we'll take you through the whole story, from Snowden's early career in the CIA and the NSA to his life in exile in Russia.
- [37:45]
D
So to hear more, search for the Rest is Classified wherever you get your podcasts.
- [37:57]
Rory Stewart
Welcome back to the Restless Politics with.
- [38:00]
Alistair Campbell
Me, Rory Stewart and me, Alistair Campbell. So, Rory, why don't you, you said you were going to start on an optimistic note. Why don't you tell our international listeners how the local elections went?
- [38:09]
Rory Stewart
Well, listen, just to frame it for everybody, British and international, there are two totally different stories happening in the world. There's the story of Canada and Australia where being associated with Trump damages right wing parties and allows centre left governments who often were in pretty bad trouble and were seen as pretty useless and looked like they were going to lose elections. They've suddenly won these elections largely thanks to the fact the right wing has been discredited by Trump. And then there's the other story which we're seeing in Romania, which we're seeing in France, which we're seeing in Germany, which is actually right wing populist parties topping the polls. And that, oddly, is what happened in Britain. And why oddly? Well, we'll get onto that in a second because in many ways you would expect actually Britain to follow Canada and Australia, not what's happening in Europe. Anyway, the British results were astonishing because it was totally unprecedented, historic success for reform and John Curtis and all these.
- [39:10]
Alistair Campbell
Is this the optimistic bit?
- [39:11]
Rory Stewart
Yeah. So reform has managed to do something amazing. Reform, just to remind people, is this party set up by Nigel Farage. It was a relatively marginal party, a pretty new party in a country dominated of course by a two party system for over 100 years, where if you go back to 60s and 70s Labour and Conservatives getting well over 90% of the vote and very difficult for a new party to break through in British politics. The Lib Dems keep complaining because we've got a first past the post system, but this time they managed to break through to 32% potentially of the vote, up from a 2013 figure of 22%. And because of the way first past the post works, there's a tipping point you can reach which could mean with 32% of the vote you end up with 40% of the seats. And Labour and Conservatives hit very hard. So quick figures. Reform took 677 council seats, two mayoralties took a parliamentary seat by a tiny six vote majority. It won the popular vote in 15 out of 23 local authorities. Labour lost two thirds of its councillors, including Doncaster, which was the only council that it had up which was controlled. It's got the lowest vote share for, for 40 years. So it's gone from 34% of the vote in 24 to 19% of the vote in 2025. But it did end up by very narrow margins, holding a mayoralties in Docster and Western England. Now, the Conservatives lost all previously held councils. I mean it went from 16 councils down to zero, from having most votes and five additional ones to only having the most votes and two additional ones. And this is for Labour and the Conservatives the worst vote share for 40 years. So I guess the question is, what on earth do we make of this? In some ways, I mean, you know, for once in our lives we predicted it like half the world. You know, we said we thought reform would do very well. We said that we've entered a world which is much more fractured, fragmented because there are more parties in play. The Lib Dems did quite well. Not long vote share, but in the way they allocated their votes as part of their trick, they didn't necessarily get a huge amount of vote, they got maybe 16% of the vote, carefully targeted. So we're going to enter a world more coalitions, more fragile, more anti incumbency reform, doing very well. But what do you make of it all?
- [41:36]
Alistair Campbell
Well, I certainly don't find it optimistic. If you go to the betting shop today, which I never do, but I'll tell you the odds, most seats at the next election today in the betting jobs, you get six to four Labour and six to Four, reform.
- [41:51]
Rory Stewart
Now, the betting markets at the moment think that reform have a pretty good chance of basically getting majority in Parliament, being the next government.
- [41:59]
Alistair Campbell
Not necessarily majority, but they're reading this as a significant change and I think it is. And I think that the Labour government. If I'd have been them on Friday morning, I wouldn't have come out and said the sort of things they said. I would have come out and said, this is a real kick up the ass and we've got to listen. I said to you last week, I've been talking to people who've been campaigning and the winter fuel allowance was coming up again and again and again and again. Now, that's not something that's been in the media much. You've got a situation coming up where the welfare changes. And I see Elenid Morgan, the first Minister in Wales, who we interviewed on leading. Yeah. Where Labour are going to be coming up for election next year.
- [42:40]
Rory Stewart
And where reform is doing very well.
- [42:42]
Alistair Campbell
Reform is doing very, very well. And she is making clear that she is going to speak out against some of these changes. I was talking to an MP in Wales who reckons that something like two thirds of his constituents will be affected. Now, the point is, if you've been elected on a slogan of change, which Labour were, and I can point to, as I have on the podcast, lots of changes that they've made that I support. But if the changes that they've made that have connected with the public, not people like us who sit and talk about politics all day, what do the public know about what the government's done? They know about winter fuel, they know about farmers, they don't much like that. They know about national insurance on business and they don't much like that. And they know about PIPs. And the thing about PIPs, the personal independence payments, they haven't even happened yet and the pips haven't even happened.
- [43:33]
Rory Stewart
Pips is payments for people with disabilities.
- [43:35]
Alistair Campbell
Exactly.
- [43:35]
Rory Stewart
Yeah.
- [43:35]
Alistair Campbell
I've had quite an interesting weekend because I went to Burnley, then I went to see my sister over in Retford and I was in Doncaster, I was in Manchester yesterday. I was in the Peak District. And there is still. But they've got to be really careful because this will run out pretty quickly if they're not careful. There is still a desire that the Labour government does well, but what I heard again and again was this is just not what Labour government should be doing. Taking money away from pensioners, taking money away from the disabled, whilst not fixing the. The kind of big stuff of inequality and the, you know, we can maybe talk about Europe, because I still honestly do believe one of the reasons why Farage is able to get away with morphing from one sort of character into another whilst constantly being described as authentic, is because the things that he's done in the past have never been pinned on him. Why was he allowed to get away from the Trump shadow answer? Because he decided, I'm not. I'm going to play down the Trump thing. And he never talks about Brexit. He plays down these things.
- [44:40]
Rory Stewart
Is it also that the Labour government doesn't want to complain about Trump because they are worried that they'll annoy him so they don't want to pin Trump on.
- [44:49]
Alistair Campbell
But which is. I kind of understand, but let's just, you know, it didn't stop him coming out of the weekend and talking about the film tariffs, which is like, you know, the UK is one of the hardest hit on that.
- [45:00]
Rory Stewart
Just to. Just to sort of stop for a second on that. We really need to focus on that because we talk a lot about what could generate growth in the uk.
- [45:08]
Alistair Campbell
Creative industries are one of them.
- [45:09]
Rory Stewart
And creative industries and media and film has been the most incredible success. And actually, to give a little bit of credit to both Gordon Brown and George Osborne, they put a lot of stuff in place which a proper industrial strategy.
- [45:24]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah.
- [45:24]
Rory Stewart
Big studios, studios, tax breaks, and it actually worked. And actually, if we're looking for industrial strategies and growth for the other things that we often talk about that Britain's good at, you know, life sciences, AI development, the film industry is a really good model, but my goodness, it's a disaster if the big Hollywood studios. But my point is, can't make in the uk.
- [45:44]
Alistair Campbell
So you mentioned Carney, you mentioned Canada. So as you say, Albanese and Carney both won from left to centre perspectives at a time when people are saying that incumbents are dead and you can't win from the progressive left. Right, they've disproved that. I think it's less that the Keir Starmer government is worried about upsetting Trump. Too often the arguments are taking place on kind of accepting Farage's premise about the country. No, we can't touch Brexit. Yeah, the country is a bit broken. Yeah. The immigration system is a disaster. And why I said last week, attack him where he's weak and stop attacking him going from where he's strong.
- [46:24]
Rory Stewart
What does that mean in practice? Not attacking him where he's strong, attacking him where he's weak.
- [46:27]
Alistair Campbell
Well, immigration has to be fixed. Immigration is A real problem. But if you come at immigration from the perspective that says, we're going to do this because this is the way that we take on Farage, or this is the way that we shore up our vote in the red wall, which is how they breathe this stuff out the whole time. Fix the immigration system, because the immigration system has to be fixed. The fact that he could go through, Farage could go the last few weeks where all he does is campaign. He's a campaigner, right? I remember he once said to me, he said, I'd be hopeless as Prime Minister. I'm a campaigner, I'm a communicator, I'm out there. And he's very, very good at it. So the fact that there was a poll last week, who do you blame for Brexit? Okay. Farage was, he was way down the list. He was one of the big drivers of it. But if the Labour government decides, as the Tory party has done, let's not talk about Brexit, don't be surprised if he gets away with it. We should have had the Trump thing should have been pinned on him day one. Now, Keir Starmer can't do it for the reasons you say, but let me tell you, yesterday in Paris, Macron and von der Leyen were there. Macron stood in front, in Paris, in front of a slogan in English, and the slogan said, choose Europe for science. And he and von der Leyen announced 500 million euro scheme to attract American scientists to Europe. And she said, it is the most disastrous miscalculation to turn against science. He said, did we ever in our lives imagine that one of the great democracies of the world would turn against fact and turn against science. You don't have to. Now, is that going to affect Trump's impression of Macron? I suspect he will get told about it. Think, oh, got to watch out for him as he's done with Carney. Mark Carney's going to be seeing him today. We'll see. But I'd be very, very surprised if Trump does his 51st state thing. So I think it's about, look, I'm reluctant to sort of, you know, I, I, if I say to you, Rory, I don't want to become the Roy Keane of the podcast world. Do you understand what that means?
- [48:30]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, yeah, I get that he's grumpy. He's grumpy and complains and sits the corner.
- [48:33]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah. But also, he basically says, man United was a lot better in my day. And this lot aren't quite out yet. And I don't want to be that person who says, but I heard one of them in the aftermath, part of the line of defense was, well, this stage, the government, governments have always struggled in. We didn't. And they actually compared it to 1997. You know, the Blair government had all those problems with Bernie Ecclestone and blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, we did have lots of problems.
- [48:59]
Rory Stewart
But you weren't punished like this.
- [49:00]
Alistair Campbell
We weren't up in the polls in the first year and we didn't lose a by election for, I think the first six years. So if you start from this defensive mindset and I just felt the response was too complacent, it's take it as a kick up the ass and say, you know, because what you say, what they're saying is, we're going to go faster, further. But on some of these things, the change that's been offered is not change that people felt they voted for. And if you, if you've campaigned on change, don't be surprised if people then say, I don't like the change that they think, who else is offering change? And I don't know if you've ever looked at reform in the dictionary. It means change.
- [49:35]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, no, it's, it's amazing. Danny Finkelstein, who I saw at the event that we did for prisons, the twinning project, has this great line that Labour's slogan is, Britain is broken, let's do nothing about it. And I think there is, you know, I said to you before the election that it was difficult to put a cigarette paper between Starmer and Sunak on almost any issue. They sounded identical on immigration, identical on tax, identical on welfare. In fact, it was impossible to see what policies Labour had up its back pocket which was going to make it any different. They felt like they were an austerity like party that were going to come in and very difficult to see what they'd do that'd be any different. And you know, even on housing policy, health policy, a lot of the stuff that Labour was talking about is exactly what Sunak was talking about. Now the answer then was, I could.
- [50:26]
Alistair Campbell
Push back about that. Yeah, you could push back a bit, but I'm not going to bother. I'm grumpy.
- [50:30]
Rory Stewart
You're grumpy. Anyway, the answer, broadly, I might be exaggerating, I probably am exaggerating. But the answer then was, well, they've got to win this election, so they don't want to go too much on the policy difference. They'll just let the Tories lose Because everyone hates the Tories. And then once they're in, the mask will come off and then the policies will be revealed and then the radicalism will unfold. It doesn't feel like that, I'm afraid.
- [50:55]
Alistair Campbell
But what we both said during the campaign was that the scale of challenge that the country faced was not being met by the scale of policy response. Now, they will probably say, and I was talking to a minister last night who said, look, you know, we've still got a bit of time. And I said, listen, you will be amazed how little time you've got and once people start to settle on a judgment. And this is what I heard. Listen, I met loads of people who voted Labour, and I met loads of people who didn't vote who said they might come back. Okay? But I also met this, a couple who said to me that of any conversation, as you know, that starts with I've always voted, something is always followed by a but. Yeah, and the but that this guy gave me was this thing. I didn't vote labor for this. I didn't vote labor to lose my winter fuel. I didn't vote labor to see my, you know, my wife's benefits cut. I didn't, you know, you've. So what is the. And I keep obsessively going on this thing about what is the national story? And so, like, Farage does have a national story. And the trouble is, it's the same as, to some extent, it's the same as what labels Britain is broken. Farage went round the country saying, oxford is broken, Staffordshire is broken, Lincolnshire's broken, Durham's broken. Right. Now, I know, and, you know, he does not have a clue about how to fix it. But what is the Labour national story? What is. If you say to the Labour people, what. Give me the. Give. Tell me what Britain's gonna be like in 10 years. What's the change now? I honestly right now can't give an answer to that. That's me. And I'm obsessed with this stuff.
- [52:35]
Rory Stewart
So I had dinner with your friend Gordon Brown this week, and I.
- [52:40]
Alistair Campbell
So when's he coming on the podcast?
- [52:42]
Rory Stewart
I did ask him that.
- [52:43]
Alistair Campbell
He said, I'll get back to you.
- [52:44]
Rory Stewart
Well, I don't really have much to say. I'll come on when I have something to say. No, he does have a lot to say, turns out. And of course, I don't want to be, you know, put him on the spot because we were having a nice dinner conversation. But fundamentally, he would, I think, say a much more radical, ambitious economic policy and a policy that addresses society and a whole new economic model. And he would describe what that was. And let's get him on the podcast to try to explain that.
- [53:09]
Alistair Campbell
But, yeah, when I heard on the morning after the election, Ellie Reeves, party chair, was doing the rounds of the studio. I know it's difficult. You've just had a big hit and, you know, you've clearly lost and you go out and you've got to say something. But she kept saying about Runcorn and the by election, which was caused. Because that guy thumped somebody and. But they lost the majority of 14,700. Okay. It was only by six votes. And if it had gone the other way on the recount, we wouldn't have talked about it so much, but it's a huge swing against them. And she mentioned. She kept mentioning, you know, we've got to get our message out better about the things that we've done. For example, we've just delivered four new breakfast clubs in Runcorp. Right now, I've got nothing against the four new breakfast clubs, and I think food poverty is a terrible thing. But I was actually thinking about Gordon as she was saying that, because Gordon wouldn't have talked about breakfast clubs. He would have talked about our ambition to end child poverty. He would have taught, you know, what they're not doing to my mind is setting this stuff in this, as I say, a national story. Where is the country going? So breakfast clubs are great. They are not a national story.
- [54:16]
Rory Stewart
Final point. I mean, I've been very struck with our conversations with David Blunkett, with our conversation in Melbourne, this dinner I just had with Gordon Brown, that they must have been difficult figures to manage to put in mildly. Gordon Brown can't have been an easy person to manage. But, my goodness, the sense of intellectual confidence, his, you know, it is a form of charisma, and it's just astonishing, his certainty, his vision. And I'm struggling a bit within the Labor Cabinet to see people with that kind of degree of. Kind of raw and I guess, you know, I don't know, as you say, we don't want to make you sound like Roy Keane. Before we go into Australia, let's have a little chat about the Tories. I was actually talking to Luke Trill from More In Common.
- [55:04]
Alistair Campbell
Well, he's been doing these focus groups that he says are the worst he's ever heard.
- [55:07]
Rory Stewart
Absolutely unbelievable. So the Tories, I think, are in unbelievable trouble. So this is me speaking now.
- [55:14]
Alistair Campbell
You're cheering me up.
- [55:15]
Rory Stewart
Yeah. So this is. This is me speaking as A former Conservative Cabinet minister, somebody who may be pretty unpopular in my party, but I can assure you this is unimaginable, the mess they've got themselves in. We are now, I think, in a situation in which it's not inconceivable that reform could actually replace the Conservative Party as the major right wing party. We've seen it in France, Le Republican vanished. It can feel like what happened to the Liberal Party in Britain. Just to remind people, you know, Liberal Party, yeah, 1905, they win this enormous majority. Figures like Lloyd George Asquith. After the First World War, the Liberal Party vanishes and is outflanked and replaced by this new thing called the Labour Party. And we go from one type of two party system, Liberal against Tory, to a new type of two party system, Labour against Tory. And I think reform is doing very well at hoovering up Tory votes. And they're reassuring people. You know, you can see now quite a lot of my former Conservative colleagues saying, well, you know, Farage, not exactly Trump, is he? A lot of what he says is the sort of stuff that mainstream Conservatives agree with. And remember, of course, Farage himself came out of the Conservative Party, basically, he founded these parties, Brexit, reform, because he wasn't really given an opportunity within the Conservative Party. So I think she is in real trouble. And above all, do you think she's done?
- [56:38]
Alistair Campbell
Do you think she's finished?
- [56:39]
Rory Stewart
I cannot understand honestly why she's not out there speaking. She keeps saying, well, nobody will listen to me. Maybe a bit of truth in that, you know, I'll give her that. I need to develop policies. I don't want to come out and just talk nonsense. But it seems to me it cannot be right. You have to dominate the airwaves, you have to get attention. You can do it through speeches as much as policy. And you've got to make the call. Now, my call, my advice to Kemi Ednot, you don't want to listen to me. Apart from come on the podcast, you know, if you're not feeling your voice is being heard, here we are, millions of people will hear you directly.
- [57:11]
Alistair Campbell
Let me tell you, Kemi, we made the same offer to Pierre Puellievre and to Mr. Dutton in Australia. Their opponents came on and won.
- [57:18]
Rory Stewart
Yeah. So it is. It's a chance to get your voice out. And I would say that if I were the Conservatives, you've got two strategies. You've got the trying to imitate reform, which I think is a disaster.
- [57:27]
Alistair Campbell
Well, that's what they've done. And that's why they're in the mess. That is why I've said, and I'll say it again, I said it last week. If Labour honestly think that the way to deal with reform is to be a bit more faragy on policy. Absolute nonsense, absolute nonsense. The way they have got now to give a sense of a Labour government doing things that the people who voted for them expected them to do, and that is what they hear and know about, and forming a big picture that paints a proper story of where we go.
- [57:56]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, and the Tories, of course, what they should be doing is trying to present themselves as the serious, mature party of government and change. They should exploit people's uncertainty about Trump. They should exploit the fact that the Labour government seems a bit inept, that the growth isn't really coming, the economy isn't really taking over, and they should be really leaning in, I suppose, to figures like Mel Stride, the Shadow Chancellor, and producing a sense that this is going to be the safe pair of hands and they're going to rebuild that brand. Now, it's not easy because they had 14 years of discrediting that brand.
- [58:30]
Alistair Campbell
I think if they had a leadership election tomorrow, Generic would get it, and that would be a complete disaster because he'd just try and sort of be Farage. It's not serious. I think the other thing that was interesting about the Australian election, we talk about winners and losers in elections, and obviously Dutton was the big loser, they even lost his seat. But I think the other loser is Murdoch. You know, the Murdoch papers did what they do, they threw everything. And I think that one of the reasons why albanese won, and by the way, this was spectacular. We said when he did the podcast interview with us that we both thought he felt very confident, but I think even he did not think it was going to be quite as good as this. It was a swing towards Labour and it's very much his victory. Because if you're being written off, and maybe this is the thing that can give Keir Starmer a bit of hope, if you're written off a bit and you then turn it around, then he has remade himself and he's done it. Remember I said to you what Fiona, my Fiona said about the interview going down through France on this day, and she said, he's a bit dull, but he really sounds like somebody who's got conviction and principle. I really like that. And I think ultimately, in these volatile times, there was one of the Australian columnists said that, you know, in the end, Australians decided which of these Two would I want to look at my tax returns and do it right. And it was albo is that sort of sense of decency actually came through.
- [59:51]
Rory Stewart
Well, let me. I've been trying to think this through because I think it's so interesting. So if you were a political scientist, you would say that Britain, Australia and Canada have an enormous amount in common in the structures of their political systems which should mitigate against populism. So constitution, western style parliamentary democracy, strong party discipline, variations on first past the post, although obviously preferential in Australia. Two parties dominant in all these three countries divided basically between conservatives and sort of third way centrists and a similar kind of welfare state commitment, strong similar institutions. All three countries common law, public broadcasters which literally comet clear called abc, BBC and cbc, unions, civil service and also the sort of national character these are countries which often about incremental change, institutional stability, big consensus around NATO foreign policy. So you'd really provide quite a good explanation on why you'd expect those three countries to be similar, unlike the US or Europe which have very, very different systems. So what went wrong? And this is my attempt to try to answer this.
- [61:01]
Alistair Campbell
What went wrong for whom?
- [61:02]
Rory Stewart
The what went wrong? I guess for the right wing in Canada and Australia.
- [61:07]
Alistair Campbell
You could. By the way you could. I mean most people in Australia and Canada won't know that much about our local elections. So they actually might be looking at Australia and Canada in the same prism in that labor won a landslide a year ago. You see what I thought I remember. Remember I said to you what Francois Arom said to me, he says listen, you guys are lucky because you've had your populism with Brexit. So I think actually there's. But anyway, carry on because I think you're right, they've done something different.
- [61:31]
Rory Stewart
They've done something different. And Britain, of course these local elections remind us that in and this is something Gordon Brown pointed out to me that populist parties, far right populist parties are now leading in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Slovakia, Italy, Hungary.
- [61:47]
Alistair Campbell
And we've got this election in Romania at the weekend where the election having been ordered for a rerun because of Russian interference and the former candidate not being allowed to stand, the guy that was closest to him politically is now taking the lead and is going into the runoff with a very, very big lead.
- [62:03]
Rory Stewart
Exactly. And you would have thought therefore, as you say, anti incumbency, you know, Covid screwed up economies growth was pretty anemic in places that it was pretty easy to beat centre left parties in Australia And Canada and the Australian. I just want to push into the Australian narrative a bit. So, as you've pointed out, this is the biggest election victory on some numbers since the Second World War, in other measurements since the 60s or the 70s. Unbelievable number of seats exploded. Very, very unusual. Normally, governments do slightly worse. On the second time, it's a massive explosion. And in both countries, the leader of the Opposition lost his seat, Polyav lost his seat, Dutton lost his seat. Their story four months ago seemed pretty straightforward. And I produced this. Their great slogan, weak, woke, go broke. Yeah, exactly. I mean, how it sounds. Brilliant. Weak on national security a little bit woke on the voice referendum, sending us break. Well, Australia's going from having had a great budget surplus, going to deficit. Deficit stretches into the future.
- [63:04]
Alistair Campbell
Can I just say on the woke bit there? So I thought both of their speeches, Dutton made a very, very gracious concession speech. He said something very nice, actually. He said to Albanese, your mum would be really, really proud of you. And then he spoke about the woman who'd beaten him in his own seat, who'd also. She'd lost a son. And he spoke very kind of warmly and movingly about her and how he'd like to help her. And I was watching him thinking, why were you not a bit like this before? But one of the things, the. The culture war issues that Dutton got involved in in the campaign, he suddenly said this thing about, we're going to get, you know, when you go to Australia, as you know, and every time you do a meeting, they say, you know, we. We honor and pay tribute to those, the original owners of the land, et cetera, etcetera. And he said he was going to cut all that down. And I think he did that because he was such a big player in the voice referendum. But what Albanese did, he lost the voice referendum, but he didn't then trim his views on it. So when he made his acceptance speech, one of the loudest cheers was when he said, and I want to pay tribute to the original owners of the land. And da, da, da. It was a way of saying, I'm not moving off that, because actually we've still got problems on that to fix. So I think that's the point I was making about principle and conviction. You stick to the big things, that you believe it.
- [64:22]
Rory Stewart
When I was in Canberra, I saw Simon Birmingham, who was on the Conservative side, he was the sort of shadow foreign minister and he just got in touch, trying to reflect on how his party, Dutton's party, was trash in this election. And he Actually quoted Theresa May.
- [64:39]
Alistair Campbell
Oh, the nasty party. Yeah.
- [64:40]
Rory Stewart
He said our base is too narrow and so occasionally are our sympathies. You know what some people call us the nasty party. And he said that actually Dutton came across as too grudging, too intolerant of freedoms. And actually there was a narrative and it's the narrative that I would suggest that conservatives need to find in Britain that you could have had a narrative which said we are in favor of enterprise, innovation, mutual respect, we're comfortable in the modern world, but there's place for a party that isn't too owned by the unions. It's surprising actually in some ways. Albanese's party is quite old fashioned when it comes to unions. There were quite a lot of scandals that could have been used and somehow fizzled out. Scandals around quite Qantas Club around what was happening Victoria with the labor unions, scandals around, you know, clifftop houses. None of this really mattered in the end. They weren't able to land any of this, were they?
- [65:29]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, yeah. Albanese was lucky in having the opponent he had. But listen anyway, you did say at the before the break that we're going to cheer ourselves up. Australia has cheered me up a lot because I think it shows, you know, decency. He came, I think that's the thing that came through in our interview with him. He came over as a really kind of decent sort of bloke who is in politics for the right reason. He was almost crying when he won because I think there must have been times when he thought he was in trouble.
- [65:54]
Rory Stewart
Well, I mean it's amazing, isn't it? And let's just finish on this note of optimism. So we were setting up as we came out of a year of elections where incumbents were losing all the time, a world in which it was likely that most of the big countries in the world were going to give up on sort of left wing social democracy and embrace the right. And only Starmill would be allowed out there as the outlier. And actually the Trump effect has pushed in due direction some countries more populism. But in Australia and Canada, really astonishing. Has given a new lease of life to these centrist parties, turning people like Albanese and Carney into incredible heroes who've done things that sort of almost unprecedented in political history. I mean Carney's even more dramatic and let's just finish by paying tribute to him and reminding people we've done a couple of leading interviews with him and I just got a nice, nice message from him. We should get him on again. But he took what was a 20 point lead against him. A Liberal party that really would have been perceived in Canada as weak, woke sending us broke. Turned it all around at a moment where his economy is under huge pressure from Trump. Standing up for values that we need to somehow rediscover in Britain. And if Labour and Conservative don't rediscover them in Britain, we're gonna be in real trouble.
- [67:07]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, yeah, absolutely right. Final election that took place last week, Singapore, my friend, Lawrence Wong. Great win. Great win. Why are you laughing? He increased the vote.
- [67:18]
Rory Stewart
This famous liberal democracy, well, it's a.
- [67:21]
Alistair Campbell
Strong democracy, that's for sure. But anyway, he did bloody well. But again, Trump was a factor. I think people who were thinking about not voting with the status quo decided. And as I said to you before, his speech about Trump and the tariffs.
- [67:33]
Rory Stewart
Was, well, why don't we get him on? You gonna get him on?
- [67:35]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, we'll definitely get him on. Don't worry.
- [67:36]
Rory Stewart
Very good.
- [67:37]
Alistair Campbell
Okay, take care.
- [67:38]
Rory Stewart
Bye.
- [67:38]
Alistair Campbell
Bye.
- [67:45]
C
I'm David McCloskey, former CIA analyst turned spy novelist.
- [67:48]
D
And I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist.
- [67:51]
C
And together we're the hosts of the Rest Is Classified, where we bring you brilliant stories from the world of spies.
- [67:56]
D
This week, we're talking about one of the most significant stories of the 21st century, Edward Snowden, and how he. He orchestrated the biggest leak of classified secrets in modern American and British history.
- [68:07]
C
Snowden revealed that the American government was mass collecting data on its own citizens. And it was really the first time that Americans and so many others around the world understood the extent of the US Government's mass surveillance.
- [68:20]
D
That's right. It's a story I covered at the time. And it also really gets to wider questions about what privacy means, how technology has changed our lives, and what the government and companies can do with data we might have thought was private.
- [68:32]
C
And we'll take you through the whole story, from Snowden's early career in the CIA and the NSA to his life in exile in Russia.
- [68:39]
D
So to hear more, search for the Rest Is Classified. Wherever you get your podcasts.