← The Rest Is Politics
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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
So while your car recharges, your podcast feed gets a power boost too.
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Rory Stewart
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- [01:22]
Rory Stewart
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- [02:01]
Alistair Campbell
Welcome to the Rest of Politics with.
- [02:03]
Rory Stewart
Me, Alistair Campbell and with me Rory Stewart.
- [02:06]
Alistair Campbell
Rory, to keep things simple, let's do first half on the UK Labour, one year on all sorts of rebellion going on right now and I'm really keen Part two to look at Donald Trump and the monetization of the American presidency, or as one headline in the States put it, the Rooting of America. So I think we should do that after the break. So Rory, here we are. We're almost exactly a year to the day when Keir Starmer was elected with the landslide majority and there's been lots of reviews and he's done a few interviews and done a bit of Maya Culpa about mistakes. And it looks like the week of the anniversary is going to be dominated by this welfare rebellion. We are recording before the vote on the welfare reforms, but a lot of people will be listening to it afterwards. But what do you make of it so far?
- [02:55]
Rory Stewart
Firstly, I think to be generous to him, my goodness, modern politics is difficult. It's a really tough game. And you can see, and we'll get onto this probably in tomorrow's podcast when we talk about new options coming out of the US where Mamdani, the potential candidate for New York mayor, shows a much more radical approach that people like Starmer could be looking at, including wealth taxes. So very, very difficult. I think occupying the center ground, which is what he's trying to do, I think he basically comes across as a technocrat in a world in which people aren't looking for people to tinker around the edges, but they're looking for much more revolutionary change. And I think, and I'd love to come on to you with this, I think one of the problems is handling the modern Labour Party and what the Labour Party thinks about the world and how it views the world. So where do you want to start? Do you want to start on the kind of big picture of how he's done over the last 12 months, what's been happening the last few weeks, how this relates to positioning yourself in the world or the Labour Party? Where would you like to start?
- [03:58]
Alistair Campbell
Okay. Well, let's just start with a kind of overall analysis of how the year has gone and what the, if you like looking back, what the story of this year has been. I think there are two stories. I think one has been, I'm afraid, the steady consolidation of the return of Nigel Farage to the center of British politics. And I think that's a story partly about Labour, but more about the Conservatives. The Conservatives seem just to have imploded after the general election. And I think the story of Labour, you and I regularly, when we're out and about doing things, and I always do this with audiences, given these three choices, has the government performed as you expected, better or worse than you expected? And I would say that there's still goodwill, but I think disappointment is the word that keeps coming up. People just a bit disappointed, not sort of. Some people are furious, but not kind of not the sort of fury that there was with the Conservatives towards the end. But I think disappointment that a government that's come in with such a majority, with such a mandate for Change has just left people feeling a little bit, bit underwhelmed. And the point about in the modern Labour Party, I don't sense that this is a party or a government at ease with itself. And I don't think that's necessarily because of any great ideological divides either. I think by and large that those MPs who were elected were quite happy about the program on which they were elected. But I think they feel one that they're not listened to. And of course every MP thinks they should be listened to. I don't think there's ever been a Downing street that hasn't had MPs from the party of government saying they don't care about us, they just think we're lobby fodder. But I think we weren't great at it at the start, but we got a lot better as time went on. You do have to listen to MPs. This welfare rebellion was a long time in the brewing. You've been hearing from people, I've been hearing from people. And I think there's a great quote from George W. Bush. He said that when he arrived at the White House, he thought politics was all about policy. And when he left, he realized it was all about relationships. And I don't think they're good at working the many, many, many relationships that you have to work at. And if people listen to leading. This week we talked to the Cypriot President, Nikos Christodouares, and he was very interesting because of course he could not have been warmer about Keir Starmer. And what it says to me is that Keir has been very good at building those sorts of relations. But of course, because he has been so focused on foreign policy. Ukraine, Gaza, Trump, G7, NATO, all this stuff, what you have to. Prime Minister, maybe the domestic, both in terms of relationship and policy, has been neglected.
- [06:40]
Rory Stewart
First thing you mentioned is this incredible story around reform. So reform famously came out of that election where you and I were up all night in that Channel 4 studio with a very small handful of seats, five seats. They are now in a position, according to some of the internal polling that people are seeing and that this is the sort of stuff that's scaring the Conservative Party, where they could be on track for 260 seats after the next election. I mean, I guess you would say believe it when we see it, but one of the things that happens in the first past the post system is when you get a critical mass of votes, you can actually flip the system in your direction. So the Tories could end up with 40 or 50 seats and reform with 265. And Labour, probably with fewer seats than reform, but may be able to cobble together a coalition with Lib Dems, Greens, smp, in which case suddenly British politics, much more like European, putting together these coalitions to keep up the firing. Second thing, this point about what the problem is. Well, there's one problem, you're absolutely right, which is relationships. And the second problem, I guess is whether we call it narrative or story or ideology or what's the big idea coming out of this government? What does it really stand for? And let's get on to that in a second. Just my Pennyworth on relationships. I spent an hour on the phone with a friend of mine who's a Labour MP who's still in the House of Commons on Sunday. And they were really interesting for me because part of it was a story that would have been familiar for Conservative MPs talking about David Cameron. It's a story that I remember when I first entered the House of Commons. This leadership is out of touch. They don't really understand what it's like on the street. Still quite a lot of residual anger about the way in which Keir Starmer brought in bright young things from the centre and pushed aside long standing Labour activists in constituencies and really annoyed local parties. And I guess some of that may be about some of the children of your friends, maybe some of these sort of glamorous, this phrase, red princes, some of the people that were brought in in the last few weeks, the general sense that long standing Labour activists have been displaced for bright young things. Gaza, of course, which we've talked about, remember before the election, Kir Sama gave an interview in which he appeared to say that blocking food from Gaza was in accordance with international law, and then a few days later clarified and said that wasn't what he meant. But the MP I was talking to said, there's something wrong there. They got in touch with the whips within minutes of Starmer's interviews and within a few hours there were many, many of them saying, you're going to have to clarify what she was saying here. And it took nearly a week for him to really come out and clarify. So there's that stuff. And then I think the final thing is the general sense. And this is what I want to come back to you on. And I've been talking to a number of former Tory colleagues, Daniel Finkelstein, Matthew Paris. I've also been Talking to Tom McTague, who's just taken over as the new editor New Statesman. One of the points is just this is labor. Daniel Finkelstein's got an interesting point, which is we always have this idea that you can be more radical, challenging your own party base. This is called the Nixon to China story. And Daniel Finkelstein is a bit skeptical about Nixon to China because he says, actually, if Labour leaders start challenging their party by cutting welfare and pushing ahead with many austerity, actually, it's incredibly dangerous. Anyway, over to you on that because I guess part of this use turn story is winter fuel allowance and now disability benefits, where essentially the Labour Party in the House of Commons has said, I think, hold a second, we're Labour, we're not in the business of cutting money for disabled people. We're not in the business of cutting money for pensioners.
- [10:28]
Alistair Campbell
On the specifics of the issue, I think it's almost like the rebellion or those who have decided that they were prepared to vote down the government on the second reading of a bill, which is quite a big thing to do. I think it's partly a buildup of things. And it does relate to this point about them asking themselves, what is Labour for? Because you talk about these bright young things that were brought in, lots of bright young. Actually, one of the best things that the Labour Party did, I think, before the last election was really to focus on candidate selection. Get good people from all sorts of different backgrounds, including some good young people, get them into seats that were winnable. They win those seats. Then I think a lot of them are sitting around thinking, well, okay, now what are we supposed to do? When I was walking into the studio, I was listening to an interview with one young MP who said he hasn't met Keir Starmer since the election. Now, Keir Starmer's incredibly busy, but I can, you know, I remember there was a point Tony Blair was very, very busy. And by the way, we did have a welfare rebellion in the first year. I think we had just under 50 MPs voted against what we were doing to bring in changes on lone parent benefits. But there came a point. I can remember Sally Morgan, who was in charge of our sort of, you know, political management within Downing street, reaching out to MPs, to the whips and so forth. And she ended up advocating that Tony literally had to carve out time in the diary every week where they would come in, sit around the table with Tony, whether in his office at the Commons or in Downing Street. We did it region by region. Sometimes we did it interest group by interest group. But it was just a way of sort of making them feel heard and above all, I think, more importantly being listened to. And I think what a lot of people have felt on this, they've been saying for ages. Fiona and I were in France a while back, this is a few months ago now, just after the welfare bill was announced and we met somebody who's actually in the House of Lords, but former MP and said, my constituency, you're talking about something like six out of ten people are going to get hit by this bill. That is unsustainable if you're an MP in that constituency. So, and by the way, Alan Campbell, no relation, the Chief Whip, he was starting to be briefed against, as you know, he wasn't reading the mood of the plp, et cetera, et cetera. The whips have been telling them about this for weeks and months. So I think there does have to be a reset about the relationship with the PL, otherwise this will happen again.
- [12:51]
Rory Stewart
So again, the MPs I've been speaking to, and admittedly some of them are on the left of the Labour Party, but the consistent story is we've been flagging these problems for a very, very, very long time now. Some of it will annoy if you're Rachel Reeves listening to this or Starmer listening to this, because predictably, when you're against something, you couch it in terms of. All we're asking for is an independent review. All we're asking for is an impact assessment that government's pushing ahead with this without thinking about enough. And of course I recognize that because when I was an MP trying to stop anything that David Cameron was doing, I was always like, well, you know, I'm not against the policy, I just want a bit more time to look at do an impact assessment.
- [13:29]
Alistair Campbell
The consequence of that in this situation are that already they have moved the debate into by how much is Rachel Reeves going to have to raise tax next time round. So there are consequences to the choices that you make and there are consequences to the choices that you don't make. But I think that has fueled, called the sense of disillusionment because there's all this stuff about, you know, Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer's chief of Staff, saying that, you know, we need to show them who's boss and deselect a few and threaten them with losing the Whip and all this sort of stuff. And once you have MPs saying I'm not really buying that anymore, then psychologically within the plp, you have a bit of a problem.
- [14:09]
Rory Stewart
Just to remind people in the early stage of the government, Keir Starmer was very, very radical with stripping people of the whip, including people like Jeremy Corbyn famously expelled from the party. But then Rebels over the two child benefit had the whip suspended.
- [14:23]
Alistair Campbell
John McDonald, people like that.
- [14:25]
Rory Stewart
And at the time I thought, whoa, this is quite extreme because in fact Cameron didn't strip the whip off people for those kinds of things. When people rebelled over Brexit, for example, in the early years, they were still allowed to remain in the party, but it's now changed to a policy which is quite dramatically in the other direction of a sense that there are these continual U turns. And I was trying to think about what Tony Blair would have done or what Margaret Thatcher would have done, or what John Major would have done in these kinds of situations. Major, oddly, would have made a real business of it, probably mistakenly so over master it. And this kind of things. Major would try to make all these votes, a vote of confidence in his leadership and eventually triggered an entire leadership battle to try to reassert authority. So probably Starmer is correct in saying that you turning on this is the lesser evil compared to turning the whole thing into an existential crisis. But it does mean that the story that we got in the run up to the election, which was the Starmerism, insofar as there is stammerism or, I don't know, Rachel Reevesism, is a very kind of fiscally cautious, let's keep taxes down, let's not borrow too much, let's cut public spending, is now running against the reality of what the heart and soul of the Labour Party is. And the heart and soul of the Labour Party is about social justice. And I don't think any Labour leader has actually tried. I think we underestimated how radical what Reeves and Starmer were trying to do was because we gently thought, well, it's a bit like Blairite centrism. But it isn't really, because when you came in, partly the public finances were in a different state. So actually, in the end, Gordon Brown was able to increase NHS spending by what it was, 30, 40% over time. Yes, you controlled public spending, but you weren't actually going for this kind of swinging welfare cuts. I can't think of a Labour leader who's actually tried to do stuff which, according to the Labour MPs I'm talking to, would have meant hundreds of thousands more people going into poverty, tens of thousands more children going into poverty. Am I right?
- [16:37]
Alistair Campbell
Well, the front page of the Financial Times today says that even with the concessions that have already made. You're still talking about the possibility of 150,000 more people going into poverty. Look, I think you started right at the beginning by saying you shouldn't underestimate how hard politics is today. And it is, it's hard everywhere. I mean, I've been quite surprised just the extent of media hostility to Keir Starmer. It's sort of pretty relentless now. And so they're operating in a very, very difficult environment in those circumstances. I think that I'll quote another American president, Bill Clinton. He said, anything that goes wrong in your politics, your life, is a teachable moment. So the question is, this is clearly something that's gone wrong. The handling of this bill, the content and the handling of the bill have gone wrong. And there's a danger, by the way, that it continues to go wrong. Because the latest argument that you know will be played out in the Commons today, Tuesday, is that there is a kind of a timing issue between consultation and implementation. In other words, implementation is going to come before proper, full consultation with disabled people and the groups that represent them. And so I think the teachable moment part of this is actually when you're making these big reforms, the announcement is not the moment, the moment you have to turn that whole thing into a much longer term process. Otherwise these resentments that build up, they suddenly spill out. And so I think there will have to be a change in the way that number 10 operates, the way that government business is handled and the debates around this. Because the point is, if you voted Labour or you became a Labour MP and gave up whatever you were doing before to become a Labour mp, and then you find that, okay, I'm totally on board for sorting the public finances, we've got to fix the foundations, totally on board for emphasizing the Conservatives have left an absolute car crash. But then as you fix the foundations, which is what they say they're doing, and I support that as a sort of mindset, then for your first big battle, essentially to be about winter fuel allowance and basically done, not because of any sort of value judgment about rich people shouldn't have it. People like me, your mum, we shouldn't have it, but much more, we've got to make the numbers add up. And then the welfare debate, they've never fully established in the public and the parliamentary mind, is this about saving money or is it about trying to get people into work who could work? So those debates have clashed along and that says to me that the sort of intellectual thinking and the rigor that you should apply to Big reform wasn't being done in the development of policy.
- [19:22]
Rory Stewart
I think that this line that keeps coming back, and Tom Baldwin, who you know quite well, has written, as has Josh Glancy, as has Tom McTave. There'd been all these one year on big interviews, and they're remarkably repetitive when you read them back to back.
- [19:37]
Alistair Campbell
Tom's is the best, though. Tom's is by far the best.
- [19:39]
Rory Stewart
Tom Thompson, Tom Baldwin or Tom McTigg.
- [19:42]
Alistair Campbell
Your friend Tom Baldwin.
- [19:43]
Rory Stewart
Your friend Tom Baldwin, who was singing.
- [19:45]
Alistair Campbell
Our praises on a rival podcast.
- [19:48]
Rory Stewart
I think Tom McTiggs is brilliant too. Let me just give a little shout out. Tom McTig. Tom McTay gets to the heart.
- [19:53]
Alistair Campbell
So what have you got against Josh Clancy?
- [19:55]
Rory Stewart
Is he just Clancy? Listen, on the repetitive thing, it's interesting. You can see that all of them have been promised, and it's an interesting question that three major things, the observer, the Financial Times, the New Statesman, have all been promised these one year on Big Story, and they've been given a lot of access. And Starmer keeps coming back to certain central themes. The death of his brother, the firebombing against his house, the trip to Ukraine, and he keeps apologising, I got this wrong. I got that wrong. This has been a teachable moment. I shouldn't have done this. He wants to emphasise in all of them that his speech about immigration, where he used this phrase of animation of strangers.
- [20:35]
Alistair Campbell
Island of strangers.
- [20:36]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, yeah. That he regretted it and he didn't really realize what he was doing and he'd done it because he was stressed at work. But one of the things that Tom McTague gets to which I thought was really interesting, is that he says to Starmer, after spending a long time with him, essentially, I think the deal is that Tom comes in, he says, I've just become the editor of the New Statesman. You've been in a year. This is your big chance to lay out what your big vision is. You keep saying people don't understand your policy. Let's really pin this down. Let's make this a story. This is what Starmer's about. And he tries and tries and tries, and at the end of the interview, he says, listen, I don't know whether I'm missing something, but I'm getting the impression that you basically don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with the country. You don't really have a kind of big radical new idea, because your fundamental belief is that basically things are okay. That the problem is that the Tories were more than A bit incompetent, useless and evil. But if we can get back to managing things well, things will be fine. The basic economic structure is fine, the basic tax settlement's fine, the NHS is fine, just needs to be managed better. And Stammer essentially says yes. And I think Tom's insight is that is very unlikely to work in modern politics, where most people in Britain think things are not fine. They think the system is broken and government's broken, politicians are out of touch and they need something much, much more radical.
- [22:04]
Alistair Campbell
Tom, the other Tom, Tom Baldwin. And this is becoming a little bit sort of Westminster bubble, as two podcasters discussed. Three interviews with a Prime Minister one year on. But I think, I think of all of them, Tom Baldwin is the one who knows Kier best in terms of having spent more time with him. And what I think Tom would say to what you've just said is that he doesn't believe the country's broken because he doesn't believe that British people are broken and he doesn't want to spend his whole time running the country down. Sort of leave that to Nigel Farage, as it were.
- [22:38]
Rory Stewart
Although he did try it, didn't he? He had that famous speech last summer where he basically did say, everything's crap, Britain's broken. That was the joke of which he produced before, which I think we took from Daniel Finkelstein, which is, britain is.
- [22:50]
Alistair Campbell
Broken, let's not do anything about it. But the point about. In these interviews, he has been saying that one of his reasons regrets was that he felt he was too negative about the country when he came in because they were trying to pin so much on the Tories. I. I actually do think a narrative that can work is that the Tories took this country to a breaking point. And we feel that right across the piece in our public services, in our social structures, in the way local government works, et cetera, it's not broken. But they got damn close. We have got to fix it. Fixing is going to take time. Fixing is going to take difficult things. But here's the better tomorrow you're going to have to. Don't fall for the better Yesterday that Nigel Farage is offering fixing it, though.
- [23:30]
Rory Stewart
Is interesting because if you look at the details of what fixing it looks like, it's not. And we're going to come on tomorrow's podcast to talk about a Mandani in New York. It's not a radical fixing. And I remember this when we interviewed the first Minister of Wales. So that's a really extreme example. I mean, Wales is in real trouble economically, socially. The fundamental economic indicators in Wales are terrifying. I mean, that's a nation which I'm afraid, if you looked at from a macroeconomic point of view, is not doing well. But I remember the First Minister of Wales when I tried to encourage her to say, is there something wrong with our structures, our economic system? Maybe I was trying to invite her to be a bit more left wing and say, actually, markets aren't really working, inequality is too extreme, we need to rethink the way our whole economy works. She didn't want to do that. She basically said, no, no, the basic economic structures are fine and we're going to fix it. And I think the same is true with Starmer and Reeves. Their analysis is not completely different to the analysis that a lot of my Conservative colleagues were pushing for. So let's look. Non dom taxes. Well, Jeremy Hunt had started down that track. VAT on private schools, that was something Michael Gove really wanted to do. Investment in infrastructure, Well, a lot of that was kind of leveling up. Boris Johnson, he put a lot of money into that and there's been some shifting around where it goes, but it's pretty similar. I mean, Rishi Sunak wants to put a lot of money into supercomputers and AI. Peter Carr wants to put money into supercomputers and AI, but in a different way. But it's broadly the same story. Housing, again, as I've said, probably the thing I'm most excited for from Labour, I think most potential. But again, it was something that Cameron was trying to do an enormous amount of, put a lot of talented housing ministers in and failed. So it still feels as though he's hoping that he can fix it. I don't know, it's as though he's inherited a kind of old banger and he thinks that with a kind of relatively modest budget, he can get the car running pretty smoothly again. And a little bit of work on the engine, a little bit of work on the paintwork, let's get a few more thousand teachers into school, let's put a little bit more money into the nhs, everything will be fine. Whereas there are a lot of people out there, I think, from the left of the Labour Party to Farage on the right, who are saying this old banger is really broken and you're not going to be able to continue to drive it for the next 15, 20 years just with this, the kind of money you're putting into it.
- [25:56]
Alistair Campbell
I've, as you know, going to quite a lot of schools and I'VE been struck in the last two or three that I've been in just how disappointed and defeated people feel. There was one head teacher I saw who said, look, it's great that, you know, free school meals, but we kind of, we have that in London anyway. And he actually said, I don't see that as an education policy. It's a child poverty policy. Something else he said, which I thought was really interesting, was that he said something happened during the pandemic that we don't yet understand. This is a primary school where he was saying that some of the really young kids are not toilet trained. The rise in special educational needs is off the scale. And of course, as we go further down the track towards Will she, won't she have to put up taxes? One of the things that's coming into view is, oh, well, are we spending too much on special educational needs? And the answer is, well, we're spending a lot more, but that's because the need has grown and we haven't fully got to the bottom of why. So another, another headteacher I saw recently said that I'm literally running to standstill and I cannot deliver proper education for the kids who are in here now. This is okay. Labour would say, well, we're only being a year. What I would say is that at this stage of a year in under New Labour, David Blunkett in education, teachers and headteachers had lots of excitement about things that they had heard were coming. And I think that's where what. What you're saying, what I think I'm saying and what these guys are saying, there is at the moment a gap between what people feel about the state of the country and the policy solutions that are being offered to fill that gap. And I think the first year, okay, you can give them some credit for fixing some of the foundations. And real wages are rising. West Streeting is getting the waiting list down. Some houses are getting built, although the numbers are pretty terrifyingly low when you look at the pledge of. Of 1.5 million. But there is going to have to be an acceleration of policy, momentum, change. Don't forget it's change that they were elected to deliver. And Keir Slam is clearly not somebody who's comfortable in the big narrative thing. I get that. And when I heard Tom Baldwin talking about this earlier and he was saying that people are sick of being offered big change that never comes. So actually, maybe over time this style will work.
- [28:33]
Rory Stewart
I don't buy this Tom Baldwin line. I think he's right about Starmer. I think Starmer doesn't believe in Starmerism. And I can completely empathize with that because I felt like Starmer I'd been a sort of civil servant and I felt I'd been quite proud of what I'd done in my jobs in the past, and therefore I could do the same thing when I became a minister. And my experience becoming a minister is politics is completely different to managing a business or a civil service department. You're not really in the business of just rolling your sleeves up, doing a seminar, looking at the evidence, making a kind of marginal decision and then weighing it up. And what makes the difference between a great politician and a poor politician isn't how many hours you work, how smart you are, how careful you are. It's the big story. And I think that it's never been true that great politicians can get by without a very, very clear narrative and vision. And it's even more true today in the world of social media, in this modern world, that's impossible. It just doesn't work. And I don't know what Tom Baldwin's political experience is that he somehow thinks this is okay. I mean, it's fine as a way of expressing stammer. It's fine as a way. I mean, I remember when I was running to be Prime Minister, trying to say to my team, I'm very suspicious of big ideas, I'm very suspicious of slogans. I just want to roll my sleeves up and get things done. I just want to make things work better. Basically, you could sense they were thinking, ah, this doesn't quite work. And of course, now looking back on it, I realize that the only things I really managed to achieve were much bigger, bolder. You know, I'm going to resign in prisons unless violence comes down. I'm going to double the climate spending in dfid. And so I don't quite get the ball with it. I can't quite believe it. It doesn't seem to me that it can work. This. There's no Starmerism. I don't believe in big ideas.
- [30:27]
Alistair Campbell
Well, it worked for Albanese, similar sort of approach. I think the other thing that Tom's doing is taking the experience of Keir Starmer as Leader of the Opposition. Don't forget, he was written off as leader of the Opposition at several points and basically saying he keeps being written off. People underestimate him and that plays to his advantage over time. Where I think it is different is that government is so much harder and so much more complicated. You know, maybe before we go to the break just. Just sort of wrap up on by sort of reflecting on what they can do better in the second year. Because believe me, I was talking to one of the key strategy people recently and he said, well, we've got time. You guys keep going on about, you know, you're going to run out, but the fact is you don't have that much time. A year has gone and there is still. I always talk about three currencies in politics. You've got the economic stuff. The value of your pound goes up and down, the strength of your economy goes up and down. But the other two currencies that really matter are reputation and goodwill. You need goodwill for when you have these really tough times. So what they found is that actually they've drained, within the plp, the parliamentary Labour Party, they've drained quite a lot of the goodwill currency. And because they haven't delivered a lot of, like, for example, getting the welfare bill through without this kerfuffle and this massive debate and rebellion, that has drained their reputation for competence. So that is their reputation. So those currencies have to be re. You have to redevelop them. You have to win back the goodwill, you have to win back the reputation, and then you have to keep going on with the difficult decisions you've got to make. And I think the. The one Labor MP I was talking to, who, not one of the new ones, but somebody who probably is in that category that feels a little bit ignored and overlooked. She said that, look, you know, when you guys were in charge, right? We moaned a lot. We did moan a lot, but we sort of felt you guys knew what you were doing most of the time, and that gave us. And also we knew that you were at least reaching out and you might be reaching out. I mean, I heard Diane Abbott being interviewed on the radio the day. And you know, Diane Abbott, who's probably leveled more criticism my and Tony's way than most, but she did make that point. She said, look, you know, Tony, I disagree with so much of what they did, but the phone was always there, they were always willing to talk to us and so forth. So I think there's got to be that reset in relationships and then with the public. You know, I'll keep saying this to Kim. Let's see, I'll keep saying it publicly as well. I think this idea that a narrative is somehow spin. A narrative is the means by which you exercise leadership to people who are not listening all the time.
- [33:08]
Rory Stewart
I've always believed in your view there, because narrative is leadership. Narrative is telling the entire civil Service what the big idea is. I remember Margaret Thatcher's minister saying, the great power of the narrative is that it allows delegation meant that every one of her ministers could answer the question, what would Margaret Thatcher be doing? And all the civil servants understood what was supposed to be happening. Two final things from me, I think the Labour Party isn't acknowledging that, but right at the center of our problems is that our government structures are broken. My 10 years was all about learning how this parliament, this electoral system, this party system, this ministerial governmental system is really broken and just doesn't work and needs very, very fundamental constitutional reform. And the second thing is my experience from Cumbria, which was that many of my constituents were bewildered by the fact that they were told that the country was getting ever wealthier, but that they couldn't keep things that they'd taken for granted in the 1940s and 50s. So if the country's getting wealthier, why do we have to lose our community hospital? Why are we losing our fire station? Why are we losing our police station? Much of my life as a constituency MP was demonstrating to try to keep things. I was endlessly out fighting to save things all the time. And so the experience, particularly in northern England, is this government. It's not that things are remaining the same. It feels as though things are getting worse. Some thought needs to go from the government's point of view on what's going on there. Why do farmers feel their lives are getting worse? Why do teachers feel they're close to breaking point? Why do communities feel so angry and ignored? And I don't think I'm getting from the government an analysis of that problem or a solution.
- [34:59]
Alistair Campbell
So, final point, Rory. Mark's out of 10 on the five.
- [35:01]
Rory Stewart
Missions, growth, well, it's fine, but pretty anemic. I mean, it's all about, you know, other countries are doing really rubbish. So maybe we're doing this right, but it's certainly not enough growth to generate anything. Okay, Health just came out of a hospital talking to you. And I thought as many, many of the old strengths and weaknesses, the nhs, I think the problem there is going to be productivity. We've put a lot more doctors in. We're not yet seeing the results in terms of patient outcomes. Crime again, people pretty angry about that. Most of the polling suggests they're not cutting through on that class ceiling.
- [35:36]
Alistair Campbell
Getting rid of the class ceiling.
- [35:38]
Rory Stewart
Yeah. Well, again, it's tinkering. It's not social democracy. It's not. We're going to create a profoundly more equal society. It's we're going to do a few billion here, a few billion there. But fundamentally, Britain will remain unequal.
- [35:50]
Alistair Campbell
And the fifth mission, the green one.
- [35:52]
Rory Stewart
Well, there they're being much more imaginative, they're spending much more money and there I suspect they may make much more progress. I guess the question is how does that fifth priority priority really work for voters in the economy?
- [36:03]
Alistair Campbell
Okay, so with Rory Stewart's 1 out.
- [36:05]
Rory Stewart
Of 5, how would you mark them on those 5 growth?
- [36:11]
Alistair Campbell
I would say 5, 5 out of 10 if they're really serious about growth. You have to look at every policy through the lens of growth and that would absolutely say get back in the customs union. I've been saying that fairly consistently. On the education one, I'd have been more positive until the last week when I've been inside a few schools. Health, I think they're doing better. Green. I agree with you. I think they're doing better crime. Jury very out. And I think that they that the home Office was a bit of a loser in the spending round. So that's going to be tough for the police.
- [36:41]
Rory Stewart
Time for a break. Welcome back to the Rest is Politics.
- [36:51]
Alistair Campbell
With me, Rory Stewart and me, Alistair Campbell and Rory. There's lots we can talk about in relation to Donald Trump, but I've been logging a lot of the stuff that relates to the money that he and his family are making and it's beyond, it's off the scale.
- [37:04]
Rory Stewart
Well, I was talking to a constitutional lawyer at Harvard and he said to me that the biggest, most unambiguous story is corruption. In a sense, the jury's out on quite a lot of the other Democratic backsliding. Is he going to respect the courts, Isn't he? What's he going to do with the federal local? But the one thing that's changed in a way that has taken us almost back to the 19th century is the old corruption with a capital O has come back into American politics. You're in a capital C, O and C, maybe old corruption. The old corruption was a big revolutionary symbol. And of course it feels like a 18th century British politics. I mean, it's the stuff we tried to clear up with the Victorians, but.
- [37:54]
Alistair Campbell
It'S also a very, very, very modern version of it. So I was reading something the other day. His crypto earnings now are probably greater than his property earnings, which are pretty cool. And last night, Roy, just think of all the things that are going on in the world now that the American president could go on to his money making truth Social Post network And so this is the one from last night from the President of the United States. Trump fragrances are here. They're called Victory 4547 because they're all about winning, strength and success for men and women. Get yourself a bottle and don't forget to get one for your loved ones, too. Enjoy. Have fun, Keep winning. And there's a link to the website and a picture. There you are. It's a slim looking Donald Trump done in the form of an Oscar on top of the thing that you spray with his signature across the top. Now you're laughing. We could all laugh at it. But can you imagine not just any president in history, can you imagine any current world leader doing that? And then you've got Trump sneakers, you've got Trump watches.
- [39:01]
Rory Stewart
It is pretty amazing because you're right, the reason we don't get any other current world leader doing it is that even in the poorest countries in the developing world, corruption has gone completely central to everything in politics. I mean, obviously, if you're a Nigerian politician or if you're in China or you're in Vietnam or Cambodia or in Indonesia, corruption is the number one thing you say about your politicians. And it's the number one thing that your president tries to pretend to be cracking down on. In fact, most of the electoral campaign if you're running to be Nigerian president, is I'm going to eliminate corruption. So you can't in those countries go around blatantly taking jets from other countries. You can't go around launching meme coins nfts generating money in this kind of way. You have to try to do it secretly. Trump's totally open style implies firstly that America, oddly, he must sense that America doesn't really care about corruption, that his voters are not worried in the way that Nigerian voters are about corruption. Otherwise he wouldn't be doing it so openly.
- [40:13]
Alistair Campbell
Well, where you're right, he's definitely doing it absolutely openly. And that's what a lot of the Republicans, some of whom must feel very uncomfortable about this. Their line of defense is, well, look, this is all out in the open. He's doing it all out in the open, but it's now reaching over into policy. So, for example, he is yet again on his truth social where he, you know, makes a lot of money out of that as well. He's been posting about Netanyahu's court case, his corruption case, and he's been saying that Netanyahu is a great guy and he's a war leader. Leave him alone. Drop this case. It's like the witch hunt against me. There's a story today about Bukele in El Salvador wanting some of these gang members. He wants them sent back not because he's, you know, cares about their welfare or anything else, because he's worried about whether they would testify to some of this, maybe the connections there. So he's sort of linking up with other leaders that have got corruption issues outstanding against as well. But Rory, just to go through some of this, you mentioned the Meme Coin. Okay. A state owned entity in the UAE has put in $2 billion into this thing. Into the Meme Coin, into the Meme Coin. So they reckon they've raised and they reckon they've made about 320 million in trading fees. They reckon Baron Trump, the young one, has earned up to 40 million because he's a, he's one of the founders. The other way they're making a lot of money is through legal settlements with the media. And also Jeff bezos paying Malani $40 million to make a documentary on Amazon, make a documentary on Amazon, which may or may not get aired.
- [41:52]
Rory Stewart
Can I just put in a small footnote on the Meme coin to remind to people. So Javier Selgas of one of the big shipping companies in Mexico bought $20 million of Donald Trump's Meme Coin with the money from his publicly listed company. And in his ruling with the securities and Exchange Commission, which is the big US Regulator, he stated that this was a good use of the money of a publicly listed company of shareholders because he knows that if he buys Meme Coins from Trump, they will then get a concession on the trading terms that they get with the United States, and therefore the company will be able to make money. So it's not even a secret. The thing there is that you get a statement to the SAC literally saying the quid pro quo is you buy these Meme coins and in return, we can be confident that our company will benefit. We've talked about this in the past. You can also buy these things in order to get the Department of Justice to drop its investigations against you.
- [42:57]
Alistair Campbell
So I'll give you one. Justin sun, who's a Chinese billionaire who photographed recently wearing a $100,000 Donald Trump watch, he spent $75 million buying crypto tokens from this thing, World Liberty Financial, which is the thing that's set up by the Trump family and the Witkoffs, his sort of great special envoy doing Marco Rubio's job five weeks after Trump became president, president, the sec. That's the securities and Exchange Commission, they dropped a civil fraud case against this guy. Now, could be entirely coincidental. Could be. However, I think it's fair to say that we're talking here about somebody who's not averse. We keep talking about him being transaction, a transactional leader. That's the sort of transaction that we're talking about. And then to cap it all, you have Eric Trump, one of the sons, who sort of does he and Don Jr doing a lot of the business for the family. He does an interview in the Financial Times at the weekend where he actually presents the family as victims. We would be making so much more money if my dad had not gone into politics. If there's one family that's not benefited from politics, it's the Trump family, you.
- [44:08]
Rory Stewart
Know, and he says, he also says I have to look after my children. It's very unfair. I've got a, you know, why am I not allowed to earn the money to look after my children?
- [44:18]
Alistair Campbell
And meanwhile, 5.5 billion deal for a golf resort in Qatar, which will include a 7 kilometer long entertainment district, 18 hole golf course and a legends theme park. And that's a deal led by a real estate company owned by Qatar's sovereign wealth fund. So we're seeing. Why did he. Why was his first trip to the Middle east not to Israel and Gaza, but to the rich Gulf petro states? Answer. Because he was doing loads of deals with them.
- [44:47]
Rory Stewart
Can I quickly just remind people on the meme coin, because I know some listeners will be less into this. So the meme coin is you basically buy something that would be like the virtual equivalent of getting a kind of gold coin with Alastair Campbell's face on it. Let's say Alistair issued. In the real world, you could collect 5,000 lovely gold coins with Alice's face on it.
- [45:11]
Alistair Campbell
Right. Well, even I wouldn't buy that.
- [45:14]
Rory Stewart
So these are the virtual equivalents. Now, there are a couple of great advantages to them for the Trump family in making money. One of them is that they are classified under U.S. law as collectibles rather than investments. So they completely escape normal scrutiny about pump and dump, conflicts of interest, mis selling. So in the normal world, if I issued a product, let's say I was issuing, I don't know, an insurance policy, or I was telling you that I was going to build a monument and you were giving me money. A lot of law exists in the US to protect you as the investor, to stop me running a Ponzi scheme, to stop me effectively stealing all your money on false pretense. Is doing nothing with it and then running off with it. Right. But once something's classified as a collectible, it escapes most of those rules. And of course, they make it even easier for themselves because they locate some of the jurisdictions outside the United States. So there are trading platforms located in China. The second thing that it gives you, which is really helpful for corruption, is you have a leaderboard with a transparent wallet which lets you know who's bought the most of them. So you can know that the Chinese investor has bought tens of millions of that. The top buyers get the Trump watch, that's part of the deal. And then they get invited to dinner in Mar a Lago, if you've been a big donor. So it's a beautiful thing. And you, as the Trump family, get two advantages. Number one, you can pump and dump. So one of the things that happened is the prices massively spiked. Let's say the Alistair Campbell coin went up to $85 and then dropped down. But of course, what one assumes is the Trump family sold at the top of the market. The price came tumbling down, and everybody who bought lost. And the second thing is, it's a beautiful way, totally unregulated, of I buy the Alistair Campbell coin, and in return, I get access to Alistair Campbell and presumably the influence that Alistair Campbell can come to bring. But this is the President of the United States. This is not my friend Alistair.
- [47:24]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, but also the. If you, if you think about, I mean, let's just assume. I mean, our friend Scaramucci says that Eric and Don Jr are both dumb as rocks, but let's assume they're not. Let's actually say that they're really clever, they're really smart, and if they were in business and nobody knew who they were, they'd be really, really effective. Okay. Even if you assume that the truth is what they're doing all the time is trading on the marketing of one of the most famous names in the world, AKA Trump. So when they're going and doing these projects that they're doing at the moment in Saudi, in Qatar, in the uae, in Serbia, in India, in Oman, they're doing all these deals and they get through the door largely because their name is Trump. And I think the definition of corruption is the use of your political position to advance your own personal interest. Now they say, well, he doesn't get involved in this, that and the other. I'm sorry, there he is yesterday on his truth social, posting his fragrance for profit. And he does it with Bibles, and he does it with. He's now got a new club. There's a new Trump club in Washington, $500,000 membership, which.
- [48:39]
Rory Stewart
Which his kids have set up with the witness cough kids. I mean, this is another part of the story of the kind of nepotism and family connections here. I mean, I used to like, I'm sure many of your friends and Jonathan Powell and others, as you get involved in international governance, particularly in the 90s and 2000s, we spent a lot of time traveling around the world talking about corruption because one of the big ideas was you needed to do governance reform. A lot of development agencies different. A lot of my meetings in Nigeria were on corruption, etc. We've forgotten, I think, in a way, what the theory of corruption is. And corruption is a lot of different things, and Trump's doing almost all of them. The first type of corruption is what's called embezzlement, where you take public money into your own pocket. And you can do that in different ways. Right. You can do it by getting, as he did in the first administration, an enormous amount of public money spent on security for Trump properties. Or the second thing most recently is local state money goes into Trump affiliated companies to do disaster relief work. Second sort of thing is foreign emoluments, where foreign governments give you money to your company, money to your kids, money to a plane, and in return you do tariff stuff. Third thing is nepotism. That's a kind of different thing that's about giving your friends and family jobs. So that's putting Jared Kushner or your daughter into jobs. That's putting your children's father in laws into jobs. A lot of this stuff is about children's father in laws.
- [50:12]
Alistair Campbell
Fathers in law. Rory.
- [50:13]
Rory Stewart
I think we fathers in law. Then there's, then there's misuse of office. So he does a lot of that. So, for example, using the Department of Justice to target your opponents, there's obstruction of justice, so that's blocking oversight. And, and how does this all have a result? Well, why does it matter to Americans? Well, it matters to Americans because in the end, what it leads to is everything beginning to go wrong in your economy. Once you have an economy where you can bribe or influence or get access to the leader just with money, government resources begin to flow into inefficient projects where you've been bribed. Regulations begin to get dropped, so you begin to get rid of regulatory agencies. So there's more and more environmental damage done by these companies as they roll it out. The quality of public administration begins to decline because there's not much reason for civil servants to function. And you get into this incredible vicious cycle where because you're paying the government to speed things up, the government has an incentive to slow things down, waiting for the money to come in. So all of that comes, all of that is what Trump begins to deliver for the American people.
- [51:31]
Alistair Campbell
And don't forget that one of the first things they did when they came in part of the sort of Project 25 playbook, was to get rid of a lot of the investigators and the authorities that investigate corruption, and then to put somebody in the Department of Justice, Pam Bondi, who was just a basic cheerleader for maga. They will want us to laugh at the fragrances, to laugh at the sneakers, to laugh at the Bible. But the fact is there isn't that much transparency. But Forbes and Bloomberg, if you sort of follow the way they cover this stuff, they're talking about his wealth since he became president going up at roughly a rate of a billion dollars a month. Now, tell me in which any other presidency we've said before Jimmy Carter, he got rid of his peanut farm, Hillary Clinton, do you remember Hillary Clinton made, I think it was $100,000 out of an investment that she made in something or other 12 years before Bill Clinton became president. And this was a massive scandal during the campaign. This guy's doing it in plain sight, day after day after day. My final question, Roy, is this. Do you think people never cared, or do you think that Trump's people are just so dominant in the media eco space and absolutely prepared to take him at face value with anything he says and so much goes on that it just gets blown away? Do you think deep down people still do care?
- [53:00]
Rory Stewart
I think of course, many people still care, but I think this is part of the bigger story that we're talking about, about the collapse of the normal traditional liberal democratic values. Because we had a story that we believed in very strongly for probably 150 years, which is that you would have a better government if you had all these other institutions. So one of the reasons that we believed in civil society, media, NGOs was that checked corruption, you had all these independent third sector organizations which were there to call out.
- [53:43]
Alistair Campbell
That's why they've gone after them as well. Well, listen, we're going to, we're going to talk about some of them in question time because we're going to talk about Gavi, we're going to talk about the impact of usaid, and we're going to talk about this rap duo that you And I had never heard of Bob Villain that now everybody's talking about it would seem. And yeah, I'd say they've played the media and politics like a fiddle as publicity stunts go.
- [54:06]
Rory Stewart
And two other big stories that we're going to cover tomorrow are going to be the new candidate for the New York mayor, Mandani and what's been happening on in Rwanda and Congo with a peace deal. Thank you very much indeed.
- [54:19]
Alistair Campbell
Take care. Bye. Right, well done everybody who's still listening because that means you've listened to right to the end of the episode. Thank you, very impressive. But can I ask you something? Did you hear an advert on today's episode and did you think, you know what? I'm sure the listeners would rather hear about my brand rather than all these other things they're promoting. Well, you could be right, but there's only one way to find out.
- [54:50]
Rory Stewart
That's right. You could be the next NordVPN or BetterHelp. Put your brand in front of millions of like minded listeners by advertising on the rest is politics and other shows across the Goal Hanger network. So who are Gohanger? Well, they're the company behind this very show. And if you're in the market to increase the value of your brand, they want to hear from you. You can register your or your company's interest by going to goalhanger. Com right now. That's Goal H A N G E R Com. See you there.