478. Farage’s Crypto Megadonor and the Graduate Jobs Disaster (Question Time)

Summary

The Rest Is Politics – Episode 478

Title: Farage’s Crypto Megadonor and the Graduate Jobs Disaster (Question Time)
Hosts: Alastair Campbell & Rory Stewart
Date: December 11, 2025

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Overview

In this episode of The Rest Is Politics, Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart dive into some of the most current and contentious issues in UK and international politics, with their signature blend of inside knowledge, sharp analysis, and a commitment to civil debate.

The primary topics addressed include:

• The £9 million crypto windfall for Reform UK and the troubling landscape of UK political donations
• The graduate jobs crisis and growing economic anxieties for young people
• The continuing fallout from the Zach Polanski interview and debates about economic orthodoxy
• The Gaza ceasefire, Middle East chaos, and the diplomatic circus that is international peacemaking today
• The bizarre spectacle of the FIFA World Cup draw, the Trump ‘Peace Prize’, and politics in sport.

Below, find an in-depth breakdown of key segments, memorable quotes, and notable moments.

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1. The Farage Crypto Donation & The State of UK Political Funding

Timestamps: 03:00 – 13:00

Discussion points:

• Reform UK received £9 million from a Thailand-based crypto trader—second largest political donation in UK history.
• Comparison with US political donations (“peanuts” by US standards, but massive in the UK context).
• Concentration of Reform/Brexit Party funding from just three major donors.
• The lack of regulation on donation size, but strict rules on electoral spending.
• Concerns about the loopholes and perception of foreign influence.

Memorable Quotes:

• “Why would a multi-million cryptocurrency dealer based in Thailand want Nigel Farage in power, I wonder?” – Alastair Campbell [04:55]
• “Nigel Farage parades as a man of the people…75% of the donations…have come from three men.” – Alastair Campbell [05:06]
• “Parties spending millions upon millions.… If you replace that with limits on spending and then state funding… it's much more likely to reduce the influence.” – Rory Stewart [10:08]

Proposals/Solutions:

• Ban foreign donations (anyone living outside the UK).
• End peerages and honours for donors.
• More radical: ban all private political funding, introduce state funding on the Australian model (as implemented in South Australia by Peter Malinauskas).

Notable Moment:
Campbell and Stewart both agree the UK system is “rotten to the core” [09:54]; Stewart shares first-hand experience of being reliant on large donors when running for London mayor.

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2. The Graduate Jobs Crisis & Intergenerational Anxiety

Timestamps: 13:00 – 32:00

Student and listener questions tackled:

• Are older, privileged commentators blind to the scale of challenges facing young people?
• Is there hope for graduates in a world of declining vacancies, fierce competition, and AI job displacement?

Key themes:

• Over 1.2 million applications for 17,000 UK graduate jobs in 2023–24 (around 80 per job). [27:30]
• Graduate vacancies down 33% on the year, 60% down from 2016. [28:21]
• Young people, per Campbell, feel the political class doesn't “get it.”
• AI is the central force transforming the job landscape and threatening entry-level roles.

Expert analysis:

• Stewart’s new AI miniseries with Matt Clifford looks at geopolitics, employment, threats, and innovation via AI, warning AI is “the single most important issue for our economy, our politics, our security over the next 10 years.” [23:37]
• Stewart cautions against the search for “astonishing new ideas”—dangerous when basic economic realities and technological disruption are at play.

Memorable Quotes:

• “I think AI is the single most important issue for our economy, our politics and our security over the next 10 years.” – Rory Stewart [23:37]
• “Our job is to call people out… we were the first media organization to actually try to ask [Zach Polanski] basic questions about his economic understanding and data. And I was shocked.” – Rory Stewart [31:32]
• “Where are the new ideas coming from?” – Alastair Campbell [23:11]

Hopeful notes:
Praise for Labour’s increased focus on apprenticeships, with hints at “meat behind this now” in policy, offering some hope [31:12].

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3. The Zach Polanski Fallout, Class, and Economic Debate

Timestamps: 14:51 – 32:30

Key discussion points:

• Drama surrounding the interview with Green Party’s Zach Polanski and subsequent backlash, especially from Gary Stevenson (“city trader turned wealth tax campaigner”).
• Rory Stewart’s apology for dismissing Stevenson’s credentials, conceding he should have engaged on the ideas, not qualifications.
• The intersection of class and expertise in political and media discourse.

Quotes:

• “We should have played the ideas, not the men.” – Rory Stewart [18:45]
• “I was wrong to put the focus on qualifications, I think he's wrong to put the focus on class. Let's keep this on ideas.” – Rory Stewart [20:43]
• “Making the state ever larger… has not actually contributed to a growing economy. The thing that's driving the problem… is technology. AI is making it much, much worse.” – Rory Stewart [21:12]
• “That's what the criticism of us... we don't have an alternative view to an economic system that is actually failing.” – Alastair Campbell [22:25]

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4. Middle East Chaos: Gaza, Peacemaking, and Geopolitical Drift

Timestamps: 38:38 – 59:23

On Gaza and the Peace Process:

• Official ceasefire is “holding in name only”; humanitarian crisis continues.
• Only a fraction of aid promised is getting in (1,000 out of 4,200 trucks per week) [42:00].
• Israeli occupation continues in large “Green Zone” areas; displaced Palestinians crammed into diminishing safe territory.
• The so-called international peace plan and deployment of third parties (e.g., Egypt, Jordan) is stalled and nobody wants to take on the thankless task.

Broader regional instability:

• Syria remains fractured; US/NATO involvement is distracted/disengaged.
• Yemen suffering “new military moves” with scant media attention.
• Libya is divided and fueling wars in Sudan and beyond.
• Extreme chaos across the Sahel (Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso); American power is less focused, with foreign policy going through “individuals” rather than systems.

Memorable Quotes:

• “This is a situation that actually suits both of them. Netanyahu… wants to keep this general sense of crisis going and on Hamas' part, so long as this situation continues, Hamas have a breathing space.” – Rory Stewart [49:26]
• “Trump is creating a world in which more and more disturbing things are just going below the radar.” – Rory Stewart [52:07]
• “If you’re Kuwaiti, you’re saying, why is nobody talking about Kuwait?… This is the violent, chaotic world that is beginning to accelerate. This is the acceleration of chaos.” – Rory Stewart [53:13]
• “If they were actually allowed to do and deliver… what the ceasefire agreement says they should, they’d be able to alleviate a lot of the suffering fairly quickly.” – Alastair Campbell [54:21]

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5. The FIFA World Cup Draw, Trump’s ‘Peace Prize’, and Politics in Sport

Timestamps: 61:03 – 64:19

Key moments:

• The FIFA 2026 World Cup draw at the Kennedy Center, themed as a “show for Trump.”
• Donald Trump awarded the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize by Gianni Infantino, to universal online derision.
• Audience of football dignitaries forced to watch a spectacle more concerned with politics than football.

Quotes:

• “It was utterly revolting. It was absolutely revolting… If there is a prize for global sycophancy and the selling of a soul of a great global sport, then Infantino has got it.” – Alastair Campbell [61:05]
• “Trump won the FIFA Peace Prize, but if there is a prize for global sycophancy… Infantino has got it.” – Alastair Campbell [62:31]
• “It’s like the kid who never gets anything being given a prize for trying really, really hard.” – Alastair Campbell [62:51]
• On football: “Scotland's not going to beat Brazil, is it?” – Rory Stewart [64:06]

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Further Notable Moments & Quotes

• Stewart recounts Qatari mediation efforts and diverse conference guests, noting, “Qatar really stepping up and getting an extraordinary range of people there” [55:09].
• Blunt look at US international development funding: “Nobody has any idea dealing with the American government, how you get funding… It’s all MAGA.” – Rory Stewart [58:40]
• Campbell ribs Stewart for conference name-dropping and pushes for big future podcast guests [56:49].

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Episode Tone & Conclusion

Despite the gravity of the topics, Campbell and Stewart retain their conversational, sometimes teasing style, deliberate but affable even when disagreeing. They show a mixture of frustration and hope—frustration with systemic inertia, growing inequality, and international chaos; hope in grassroots change, new policy moves (apprenticeships), and the determination to hold those in power to account.

Final note: A closing plug for The Rest Is Politics Plus—book discounts, ad-free episodes, and, per Campbell, a “civilized gift to allow families to disagree agreeably over Christmas.” [65:23]

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Quick Reference Timeline

• 03:00 Political donation scandal – Farage’s £9M and funding reform ideas
• 13:00 Fallout from Polanski interview, class and economic debate
• 18:49 Stewart’s apology to Gary Stevenson (“play the ideas, not the men”)
• 23:37 The era-defining impact of AI on jobs and politics
• 27:30 Graduate job stats—scale of crisis
• 38:38 Gaza, Middle East, international peace plans
• 61:03 FIFA World Cup draw, Trump’s ‘Peace Prize’, sport meets politics

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For further exploration:
Members can access Rory Stewart’s AI miniseries and more on the Rest Is Politics Plus platform.

Transcript

[Alastair Campbell]

Thank you so much for listening to the Rest Is Politics. Here's a thought for Christmas you can gift somebody membership to the Rest Is Politics. Plus ad free listening bonus episodes, early access to Q and A book discounts. So spread a little political peace and goodwill, head to therestagepolitics.com and click Gifts.

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Welcome to the Restless Politics Question time.

[Alastair Campbell]

With me, Rory Stewart, and me, Alistair Campbell. We're going to talk about Nigel Farage and all this money coming his way. We're going to talk about young people and the particular challenges they feel, and we're going to do that as part of a discussion about the ongoing fallout from our interview with Zach Polanski. Rory's just been in Doha, so we're going to talk about issues to do the Middle east and Syria, and we're going to talk about the FIFA World cup draw. So, Rory, first question is what?

[Rory Stewart]

First question is about reform and this whole question around donations. So Nathan Trip plus member Shropsh Reform UK has received a donation of £9 million from a crypto trader, making this the second largest political donation since records began in 2001, second only to a donation from John Sainsbury on his death of 10 million pounds to conservatives in 2022. Should this be more heavily regulated? And if so, how can the system be changed to allow smaller parties to receive adequate funding without resorting to large private donations by private individuals? Just a quick thing. International listeners in the US are going to think, oh, goodness, in a sense, how sweet. I mean, the US elections are now crossing a billion dollars apiece. Big donors are putting in over $100 million indirectly into these things, particularly through different forms of structure. They may even think that we're lucky we're only talking 9, 10 million at the moment. But anyway, I'm disgusted. I'm very worried. And over to you.

[Alastair Campbell]

You're right that Americans will think, why are we talking about this? Because it's peanuts. But I think one of the reasons that our politics is less corrupt, less dirty. I mean, I'm not saying we don't have issues to do with corruption. We do. But the last time I can remember Americans laughing at us was when the whole MP's expenses scandal, where they thought, you know, are these guys really going to jail because they fiddled a bit on their expenses. I think we underestimate just how much this kind of stuff is inbuilt in the American system. We don't have laws against the size of the nation. You can give all the money you want to a party if you want, but we do have laws on campaign spending during elections. And in fact, the other Nigel Farrar's story this week was the police investigating whether he overspent in the election in Clacton which led to him becoming an mp. And that's one that will just take its course. I think I'm right in saying I thought these cases were time limited and the election was more than 12 months ago and you have to bring them within 12 months. I don't know. But. So we'll see where that one goes. But this one interesting thing to say, Rory. I mean, Nigel Farage parades as a man of the people. 75% of all the donations that have been made to reform, reform and to the Brexit party when it existed in the last six years have come from three men, one of whom is this guy who's now given this 9 million donation, Richard Tice, who's the deputy leader, and a businessman called Jeremy Hosking. So they parade, as you know, a bit like American politicians. $5 here, $10 there. They get most of their money from people who want reform in power. Why would a multi million cryptocurrency dealer based in Thailand want Nigel Farage in power, I wonder. And I do think we should. It goes back to what we talked about in the main episode. We should wake up the extent to which a lot of this kind of stuff is, is now internationalized. So Nigel Farage, he does want a more American style politics. He does want to be able to raise money from super wealthy people to allow him to open new accounts, to campaign more on TikTok and all the other stuff that he does. So I think we should, I think we should be worried about you. And I said before the election, we've said many, many times since, I think there is a opportunity and a need for an overall review of the way our politics is done. From my perspective, I think there should be a ban on all foreign donations. And to my mind, if you're living in Thailand, that's a foreign donation. There should be no titles and honors and peerages given to donors. I think.

That would staunch quite a lot of the flow. And I think our politics is not in a good place and this does not help it.

[Rory Stewart]

Well, I think we must be much more radical and I think here we can actually, we need to go to our great mutual hero in South Australia who has said there are not going to be private donations coming in anymore. And there are two ways of doing it. I mean, one thing which I think is brilliant in Britain And I keep trying to sell to colleagues in America is the limits on spending. The great thing when you're running for a constituency mp, it only works at a constituency level, but at a constituency level you're capped on how much you could spend. So when I was running, I think it was £17,000 in the long campaign, £25,000 in the short campaign. And that sum of money, so sort of £40,000 stretched over a few months. Even the greediest Member of Parliament, I don't think can be bought and turned into an instrument of somebody else's interest for that kind of money. It's something that you can raise in small donations easily in your constituency. You don't need to take donations more than one or two thousand pounds most, and you can't be bored. The problem is these parties spending millions upon millions. I mean, the Labour and Conservative war chests going into the last election stretched into the tens of millions. And if you replace that with limits on spending and then state funding, I know that many people won't like the idea of state funding, but state funding for these campaigns, it's much more likely to reduce the influence. So we've talked about reform, but of course, Chris Harborne was a big Conservative donor before he gave an enormous amount of money to the Conservative Party, particularly under Boris, before he started funding farage. Labour, you know, we had in David Sainsbury gave five million pounds to Labour under Keir Starmer, gave eight million to the Lib Dems during the Jeremy Corbyn era. Sainsbury's daughter Fran Perrin gave 2 million to the party under Starmer's leadership. The unions gave a about £7 million. Gary Lubner from Autoglass gave £6 million to party under Starmer. Dale Vince from Ecotricity gave £4 million to party. Since 2014, there are hedge fund supremos, there are bankers. Wahid Ali given £700,000 to the party, as well as, of course, this famous ludicrous scandal about buying Starmer's glasses and clothes for his wife and for members of the cabinet. So it's rotten to the core. I mean, just to sort of reinforce this, I didn't see this. I was talking to a Labour MP about this two days ago. You don't see it when you're running for your own constituency elections because the sums of money are limited and they're so small. But once I began running for the leadership, where you were trying to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds, and then when I was running to be mayor of London, where you were trying to raise millions of pounds. You're then in a very, very bad situation because you're then reliant on people writing you checks for hundreds of thousands of pounds. And by definition, there are only two categories of people who can do that. Either trade unions for labor or enormously wealthy individuals. And the question you have to ask yourself again and again, why are they giving you the money? So it's not a charitable donation. It's not deductible against their charitable things. They're giving you the money because they think you are going to further their particular interests in the world. And this is completely unfair.

[Alastair Campbell]

I think there are some people who give donations because they genuinely believe in the cause that they're donating to and don't necessarily want anything in return. But I think we've allowed a system to develop where there is an awful lot of nudge and a wink, quid pro quo stuff goes on. And that is in its own way, a form of corruption. And you mentioned Peter Malinowskis. And of course, you know, I've written my column about Peter this week because he's done two things. When I first met him at the Adelaide Book Festival a couple of years ago now, he said he was going to ban political funding and he was going to bring in a ban on social media for children. Right. He's done both of them. And so social media that has now gone federal. He started it in South Australia. It's now federal law. It's coming this week. And the political funding, he's done it. It's now law. Now he had to go out and win an argument for state funding for that. Okay. He's coming up to an election in March. Believe me, Rory, he's going to absolutely walk it. And I think he's going to walk it. Look, it helps that he's incredibly good looking and he's very smart and all the rest of it. And it probably helps him even more that his main opponent quit last week and has plunged his party into a leadership election because they're so far behind in the polls. I think one of the reasons he's doing so well is because he's doing big things that require difficult argument that he makes over time.

[Rory Stewart]

Things that people told him were impossible.

[Alastair Campbell]

Exactly.

[Rory Stewart]

And were against his own interests. I remember when we had lunch with him in London, he was pointing out that he was getting more donations than anyone else. So his party was saying, why would you stop private donations when you're getting all the donations and your opponents aren't right. And that's of course, why successive Conservative and Labour governments don't get rid of the donations, because whenever they're in office, people are giving more money to the government.

But it worked for him. Listen, let me just. You pulled me up on that. Of course people give money without wanting a quid pro quo. And I was very, very lucky in both the leadership election and in the London Merrill election to have people who genuinely I'd known for many, many years and were friends and would never have dreamt of asking for something back. But it's still not a good system. It would be a much, much better if we limited Zending and we brought in state funding, because let's even take that point that I just made. You know, maybe I'm lucky for my own background and class reasons to know very wealthy people who've been friends of mine for 30 years and can give me money without wanting anything in return. That's completely unfair. That won't be true for 99% of the people running against me. So, money out. Money out.

[Alastair Campbell]

Let's go on to a question from Will, who's a TRIP member from Manchester, having followed the fallout from your interview with Zach Polanski. Is there a risk asks Will, that two white, wealthy, successful older men. Don't know if you're an older man yet, Rory, but you're, you know, I get where he's coming from. Don't fully understand the scale of challenges facing our generation. Elena from Edinburgh. I'm in my final year at university. My friends are already sending hundreds of job applications and still getting rejected. With rising competition, fewer opportunities AI impact to the budget on student loans and worsening intergenerational inequality, is there still hope for graduates? And the reason I think we should take those two questions together, Rory, is I think that we had a massive response to the Zach Polanski interview. We then had another wave of response to the fact that Gary Stevenson, the city trader turned wealth tax campaigner, was, I think, got justifiably a bit pissed off that you said he wasn't really a proper economist when he's got a degree and a master's from the same university as you went to. And that sparked off a whole new debate about this Polanski thing. But I think that's where this is all coming from. Is a lot of young people in particular feeling that politics and the political class, so called, don't really get it when it comes to this inequality. Now, I think I do get it because I know I was talking to somebody last week who has been really Smart young guy who has finally found a job after about 18 months of trying, because they're just being rejected. So, Rory, what was, you know, you've now had a couple of weeks to think about this. We've had a lot of feedback. You've had quite a lot of anger on social media. What's your take on how we did the interview and what you think about both of those questions, really?

[Rory Stewart]

Well, firstly, thank you so much for engaging. I mean, I don't think we've done an interview since Ahmed El Shara, the Syrian president, who we interviewed in. In January, which has got quite as much engagement feedback. I mean, it's been incredible on every side. We've had the Lib Dems taking us and using our entire interview as part of their communication strategy against the Greens. We've got the Greens suddenly using it as an opportunity to explain theory. We've got Chris Williamson leaning in from the Corbyn side. We've got academics, we've got Gary Stevenson. It's been all over YouTube. And we've had the listeners. We've had Trip plus members. We've had listeners of every different age suddenly engaging with some of the most fundamental questions about the way the bank of England operates and the way that we finance our country. Thank you.

[Alastair Campbell]

Tell you what, Rory, if you're a clever, malign Green Party press officer, you can listen back to that last answer and just put together a little press release saying, Rory Stewart compares Zach Polanski with former terrorist leader Ahmed Alshara. You've got to be very careful about how you frame things, Rory.

[Rory Stewart]

Well, I'm hoping no longer being a politician, I have to be less careful. But you're completely right. I'm being demolished on social media over the last two weeks. I've now got the whole MAGA crowd after me. This guy, Alex Brucevitz, who is, you know, Trump's favorite social media guy, has now swamped the social media space with attacks on me. So it's, It's. I'm. I'm really doing really well. I've got Zach, I've got Gary Stevenson, I've got Alex Brucevitz, I've got Femi from Novara Media. I mean, it's, it's really. I'm. I'm really feeling the love at the moment.

[Alastair Campbell]

As long as you're tagging. Rest is politics every time, Rory. That's the main thing.

[Rory Stewart]

I remain quite proud. That interview, with one exception, which is I shouldn't have attacked Gary Stevenson on the basis of what kind of degrees he had because, you know, I don't have those degrees and obviously I feel that I get to talk about things and I should be judged on whether I'm right or wrong and whether my arguments stack up, not what bits of paper I have on Gary. I like Gary. I think that book is one of the best books that I've read in the last few years and I endorsed it on the COVID I pulled him onto the podcast because I admire him so much. I shouldn't have gone down that route. It is absolutely nothing to do with background. I knew from the book that he'd been to the lse. What I didn't think was that he was an academic economist. And of course I hadn't picked up on the fact that after he had finished all the stuff described in the book, he went and did an mphil at Oxford, did a master's degree in economics at Oxford. And I suppose at my heart that was a silly prejudice that he's not an academic professor with a doctorate teaching at one of these universities. But that isn't the point. The point is I disagree with Gary's ideas. I should have focused on his ideas. And I don't like being attacked about my qualifications, which are less than Gary's, and I certainly shouldn't have been attacking him about his. So people quite rightly would say, well, why did you do it? And I've explained why I shouldn't have done it. We should have played the ideas, not the men. The answer is in the context. What happens in that interview is that we say to Zach Polanski, he says, I'm not going to pretend to be an economist. What I am, though, is someone who listens to brilliant economists. In other words, he's not over all the details of this, but he's appealing to authority, saying, there are these other people. And that, of course, is what tempted me to say, who on earth are these people? And then when I heard Gary Stevenson, Richard Mercy, Grace Blakely, who were the people he initially mentioned, I thought, well, wait a second, these people are not professors, they're not Nobel Prize winning economists. I shouldn't have done that. And actually he mentioned also James Meadway, who is an academic economist. So this whole path I went down was me being tempted in an argumentative state into something I shouldn't have done. I don't have these qualifications, he doesn't have these qualifications. And it shouldn't be about qualifications, it should be about ideas.

[Alastair Campbell]

But if we go to Will's question about whether people like us, people who are whether we, like it or not, seen as part of the political class, that we, we might see things in terms of, well, if you've got a Nobel Prize, that means you're legitimate. If you've got a. If you can call yourself doctor or professor, that means you're superior. And I think what. I think the class point is quite important because if you remember, during the interview with Gary Stevenson, you said to him when he was saying, I can't get in to see these politicians, they're not interested in somebody like me. And you said, I think you overdo this class thing a bit. And I wonder whether you automatically assuming that Gary Stevenson wouldn't necessarily be a proper economist is partly driven by that sense you had of him, that he's basically.

[Rory Stewart]

Nah, nah, Alistair, nah. No, no, of course not.

[Alastair Campbell]

You sure?

[Rory Stewart]

Listen, I knew I'd read his book carefully, I'd interviewed him carefully. I knew that he'd done an undergraduate degree at lse, that he had a very good brain. The context in which that came from was Polanski saying defensively, I don't know anything about economics, but I'm quoting all these brilliant economists. What I should have then gone to do, which would have been the right thing to do, is say, okay, this is why I disagree with Gary Stevenson, Grace Blakely, Richard Murphy, why I think they're wrong about these issues, instead of which I attacked their qualifications. So I should have kept the argument around ideas rather than around qualifications, but I don't think class has anything to do with it.

[Alastair Campbell]

Okay, but you said, I don't even remember this, you said to. On leading, that you thought Gary was. Quotes. Blinded by class anger. And I see, I sometimes feel this, that I think that people always think of class warfare as chippy working class people who think the establishment have got in for them. But I think there is also a sense sometimes of people.

From your sort of background who actually sometimes have stereotypical views of working class people. And I think that's what Gary felt.

[Rory Stewart]

I know that's what he felt. I know that's what he felt. But listen, I simply don't accept, I'm afraid, Gary's view that the reason why the Cabinet won't talk to him is because of his social background.

[Alastair Campbell]

Yeah, I think the Cabinet will and do.

[Rory Stewart]

I admire Gary immensely. But I think again, just as I was wrong to put the focus on qualifications, I think he's wrong to put the focus on class. Let's keep this on ideas. And the ideas point is where the problem is, right? So people think that I'm trying to shut down Zach Polanski because I don't care about inequality. No, I'm trying to shut it down because I'm saying that his ideas, I believe, will not help inequality. It's not going to make, if we follow his theory on debt and the deficit borrowing, it's not going to make Britain wealthier, it's not going to help people who are worse off. Making the state ever larger, which is what we've been doing over the last 25 years, has not actually contributed to a growing economy. And that really, the thing that's driving the problem with people getting jobs is technology. We are now manufacturing motor cars with a fraction of the workforce for making the same cars 20 years ago. And AI is making it much, much worse. And one of the problems with the whole worldview, which I'm not quite sure whether to say is Zach Polanski's worldview or not, because of course one of his rhetorical moves is to say I'm not really an economist. Presumably what he means by this, I don't really understand all this stuff, but there's some other people out here who are my authorities who I think understand the stuff, who I'm quoting, but they're not dealing with the question of technology and AI. They seem to assume that the problem is that we haven't understood some clever trick that you can play in monetary policy and some trick the bank of England could do which would sort out all our problems. Actually, our problems are about productivity.

[Alastair Campbell]

And what about Will's central point is that. And this isn't just about us, but I think what the criticism of us in the way that we handle those discussions is that we were very critical of somebody trying to put an alternative view, but we don't have an alternative view to an economic system that is actually failing. And that, that I think is. And I think there is something in this sense that people sort of, and this is what I think was one of the problems with the budget, is it? It felt very kind of same old, same old, Massive, massive problems being identified. Let's have a bit more tax, let's have a bit more spend. Where are the new ideas coming from? And I think when you go through the sort of list of things that Eleanor writes in her question.

And I'd be interested in coming to you on this because you've been digging into AI for this series that you're doing.

Should that generation be terrified of the extent to which AI is wiping out low entry jobs? Because it seems to me that most of the business people I speak to say that that is already happening and that's why young people are finding it so hard to get work. And then the budget comes along and they find student loans are going to be more expensive over time.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah, I mean, I think AI is the single most important issue for our economy, our politics and our security. Over the next 10 years, these companies are going to be at the heart of everything. We just did a National Security Strategy episode yesterday and really another way of talking about why America thinks that it can dominate the entire world is to do with the way in which its American large language models, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, are going to be right at the heart of everything that we do. The way we fight wars, the way we run the nhs, we run economies. And of course, the promise of these models is that they're going to be more intelligent than humans at certain things, and therefore they're going to replace humans with less employment. And so we've just done a miniseries for Trip plus members. Please go to thereslerspolitics.com and sign up because it's a real deep dive. I've done it with Matt Clifford, who was the AI advisor both to Keir Starmer and to Rishi Sunak, and who did the AI Safety Summit. And we are going through the geopolitics of AI employment and the economy, threats from AI. I think it sounds like technology, but it's not. It's politics. But your bigger point, Look, I think this is so important to everything, this idea that there are somehow radical new ideas out there, that the current systems fail, that what we need is people to produce some astonishing new idea that's going to change everything is very, very dangerous. Very dangerous. I mean, if you applied this to any other bit of life, right, let's say.

I don't know, you were struggling with cancer treatment and you became obsessed with the idea that the old system of medicine isn't working. We need a radical new one, right? It creates the world of Trump, it creates the sense of change for change's sake. The system's broken. And what it does is it leaves the window open for snake oil. It leaves the window open for people to say, well, I've got a radical new proposal that's suddenly going to make the country much wealthier, everybody much more equal, and deal with the problem that it's expensive of buying a house in London. I personally think that that is not the way to think about this, that the basic principles of classical economics make mathematical sense and that we should be operating within our Basic ideas of savings and investments and the operation of the bond markets and the way in which free trade works. And therefore, what are our ideas? I would say I would be following my friend Felix Martin. I'd be going supply side. I'd say our energy prices are much too high. We need to make sure that we have policies to make sure the million people who are currently in addition on welfare come off welfare, that we get planning sorted out and start building houses. And above all that there's a sense of deregulation, energy drive to support entrepreneurs, making the state smaller and creating more space for innovation and business.

[Alastair Campbell]

And on the basis of that, how much do you see coming from the current government? In some of that, you give them maybe 8 out of 10, maybe on planning, but less on delivery. Where would you be on regulation? Where would you be on innovation? Where would you be on entrepreneurship?

[Rory Stewart]

Well, I think that's unfortunately very sad. I mean, I think it's a very cautious treasury view, but it's not a government that's put growth at the center. And I think the problem with the government is they're neither one thing nor the other. They're neither doing what Zach Polanski would like to do, or many of our listeners would like to do, which is radically leaning into reducing inequality, increasing welfare, taxing the rich. Nor are they doing what I would like to do, which is creating a much more vibrant entrepreneurial business. What they're doing, and this is where you put your finger on it in the Budget where you said, what she's done is she's done just enough not to alienate the labor backed benches and not alienate the bond markets. And that's no, no route through when Britain's stagnant.

[Alastair Campbell]

Yeah, I read a thing over the weekend. How many applications were submitted for 17,000 UK graduate roles in 23, 24? 1.2 million.

[Rory Stewart]

1.2 million. So it's nearly 100 people, like 80 people applying for each job.

[Alastair Campbell]

Yeah. So that I think goes to the heart of why so many young people you meet say they're spending their time being rejected for jobs. And here's another one for you. The number of graduate roles advertised on one of the country's leading job sites. Percentage rise or fall since last summer? Have a guess.

[Rory Stewart]

Well, again, I mean, my whole AI series is about my instinct, which is we're going to find fewer and fewer jobs because of AI and technology, not because the government isn't borrowing and printing money, but I don't know how much.

[Alastair Campbell]

It'S falling 33% lower than last, last summer.

[Rory Stewart]

So a third down.

[Alastair Campbell]

Already 60% fewer graduate vacancies in 2025 compared with 2016.

[Rory Stewart]

And then Alistair, I guess one of the questions is what are we training people for? Because if what we've done is we've created a school system that says you've got to get into university in order to get a graduate level job. And a graduate level job is defined as, I don't know, working in a law firm or working in an accountancy firm. And those law and accountancy firms have of AI systems now which are doing most of the work that used to be done by the graduate entrants. We then have to completely rethink the kind of way in which we think about educating people and the kind of jobs that are going to be available for them. But there's no but. Again, this is the problem with Chris Williamson, right? I mean, I'm being mean to Chris Williamson, but he's one of the guys that's been most active in the criticisms of us. What is he suggesting would happen with his monetary theory? Is it that somehow the government would be creating graduate level jobs in law firms and accountancy firms even though AI could do those jobs much more cheaply and much more efficiently? And what would that mean for the fact that these businesses are global, they're trying to compete with American Chinese companies who are using AI or reducing their costs. We suddenly end up having generated all this work which could be done by computers. And that is not the route, sadly to productivity or, or competitive survival unless you cut yourself off from the whole world.

[Alastair Campbell]

Yeah, there was a very interesting explainer on this whole issue on the FT Working IT site and they were talking about this thing about the diamond. You have CEO at the top, middle management, and then historically you've had it, it's gone down like that. But what was a triangle has become a diamond because all these lower level jobs are going. And your point about what sort of people are we hiring? There were people who were in the hiring business who was saying that the problem when you get to the diamond is that you've got too few people coming into here who can then do the jobs in the middle. So you are still going to need to hire people. So there was an interview with a law firm who said that even though AI can do a lot of these jobs, they have decided they're going to keep hiring. Others were saying, no, we're just going to get rid of those jobs. And there were others then saying, well, that may lead to your company not existing in the future. So listen, I think people will be fascinated by your series, that this is the sort of thing that it's going to be looking into. But I guess what the main. I read all the feedback because one of our team did a very good note on all of the emails and all the social media comments or what have you, and I think that is where they were coming from. As you know, we've got a lot of young listeners and I think they look to us sometimes to give them a bit of hope that politics isn't as bad as it seems. But also where they're really looking for hope and at the moment is to think, you know, maybe there are people out there who do understand the level of pressure that we're under. I really like the apprenticeship stuff. I was glad that at the conference Keir Starmer made a big thing of it. I've been critical that they've not rolled it out enough. But actually I was, I heard Jackie Smith, who's the skills minister, yesterday talking about this and it sounded to me like on the apprenticeships thing there was a bit of meat behind this now. And I think we need to see more of that.

[Rory Stewart]

I think the final thing to say is our job is to call people out. I feel that we were very generous, actually, in the first half of that interview to Zach Polanski. We gave him a lot of chance to speak. I really liked him. I loved the stuff that he said about his identity, his journey, his political journey. I also remain proud and defiant about the fact that we were the first media organization to actually try to ask him basic questions about his economic understanding and data. And I was shocked. He has been the leader of the Green Party for many, many months and nobody had asked him these questions. He actually said it after the interview. If I'd known you were going to ask me those questions, I would have learned my lines better. And I thought rather than being something we should be ashamed of or apologizing to people, people saying it's gotcha journalism. No, it's holding people to account. And I think, just listen to the Michael Gove interview, if people think we only do this to people on the left.

[Alastair Campbell]

Or the Anna Wintour interview where you read some of the American Vogue and suggest it's not the finest Pulitzer Prize winning journalism ever. Anyway, listen, I think that was a very good discussion and I think we should revisit at some point while we've been talking. And I don't think I'm breaking an embargo here because by the time this question time comes out. It will already be out. I'm very, very, very pleased. I've just received a text message say the governments national youth Strategy which is being released today under embargo, says it wants half a million more young people to have access to a trusted adult outside the family home over the next 10 years. So I'm hopeful that is part driven by the work we've been doing on the Lost Boys task force. So there we are. Some good news I hope.

[Rory Stewart]

Congratulations. Well done making a difference. Let's hope we can do the same for farmers, rural areas.

[Alastair Campbell]

Exactly, exactly, exactly.

[Rory Stewart]

Thank you Alistair. See you after the break.

[Alastair Campbell]

This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

[Rory Stewart]

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[Alastair Campbell]

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[Rory Stewart]

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[Alastair Campbell]

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[Rory Stewart]

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[Alastair Campbell]

To get the best discount on your NORDVPN plan, head to nordvpn.com restispolitics. You'll also get four extra months free on the two year plan, plus a 30 day money back guarantee. The link is in the episode description.

[Rory Stewart]

This is a paid advertisement by BetterHelp. December, I guess, is a real month of contradictions. It's all about publicly celebrating peace and. But it often doesn't really feel very peaceful. It brings people together, but that can just bring unresolved contradictions out. And there's something in the discipline of a chosen ritual. Something small, steadying, deliberate, not inherited, not performative. Just a moment, maybe, to take stock before the year resets. That could be going for a long walk, but it could actually be the habit of talking through therapy, one quiet hour each week with someone to help you untangle what the year has left behind. Not just what happened, but how it shaped you and what you want to carry forward. And that's what BetterHelp offers. And for many, that rhythm becomes A new kind of tradition. Calm, considered and entirely your own. This December, start a new tradition by taking care of you. Our listeners get 10% off at betterhelp.com RestPolitics that's better. H-E-L-P.com RestPolitics.

Welcome back to the Rest Politics Question time with me, Rory Stewart.

[Alastair Campbell]

And me, Alastair Campbell.

[Rory Stewart]

And this question is in partnership with.

[Alastair Campbell]

Tesco Tesco, who are celebrating the real, slightly imperfect moments that make it feel like Christmas. So we thought we'd talk about what Christmas looks like in politics.

[Rory Stewart]

Some of it, I think will just anybody listening who's been to an office Christmas party can relate. I think this is when Liz Truss used to do her karaoke with her friends, where you get senior Cabinet members beginning to get a little bit drunk. You certainly have a lot of staffers partying around. What's your memory of Christmas?

[Alastair Campbell]

Christmas and politics? I think, yeah, a few parties, but this is going to sound really depressing, but one of the things I really hated about being in Downing street was this expectation that the Prime Minister had to do a New Year's message and spent most of Christmas worrying about it. Even though I can't remember a single Prime Minister's New Year message that anybody has ever remembered beyond January 3rd. You do a sort of chatgpt style, you know, bring together all the cliches of the past 12 years. You're absolutely exhausted. You just want to get away with it. So I remember that. And then I think the day. Other. Other thing, the, the other thing is, is there's this. I don't know whether it's still the same, but there used to be a hell of a lot of focus on the Christmas cards of the Prime Minister, the leader of the Opposition. And, you know, all these. We used to do all this work about the Christmas card. I remember thinking it was Shereen. Then he said, look, let's just put a bloody picture of the family on it and send it out. And they still do that. I'm. I'm becoming over like a bit of a Grinch, aren't I?

[Rory Stewart]

I. I remember actually the number of times I and myself had to skip out to the Tesco Express, which is just on the edge of Westminster tube station, to try to pick up food to keep us going, particularly the mince pies. I'm a massive mince pie eater. Another thing I've never really understood, but there's a weird sense that obviously the world keeps going day after day, but there's a convention in the British Media that somehow at August and am I right, it's sort of Christmas New Year sort of becomes the silly season where there really isn't any news and the newspapers go into a completely different mode.

[Alastair Campbell]

No, I think that's gone. I mean, even when I was a still a journalist, we used to have some journalists went into the office on Christmas Day because you had papers on Boxing Day. And it won't surprise you to know, Roy, that I was.

[Rory Stewart]

But you don't think people consume media in a different way? That maybe.

[Alastair Campbell]

Yeah, sure.

[Rory Stewart]

Even, even, God forbid, podcasts, they might listen to them less over the Christmas New Year period.

[Alastair Campbell]

Well, Rory, we've done a whole. We've, we've, we've got loads going out over Christmas. Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day.

[Rory Stewart]

No, we never going to change because our quality is so high. That will change the general tendency. But presumably there is a sense that you do hope that some of your staff can take a bit of a break. I mean, I missed Christmas in 2016. I've been really, really looking forward to it. It's going to be the first time we were going to go away as a family. We were going to go to Costa Rica and unfortunately, just as I was about to get on a plane, I began seeing signs from the Met Office that flooding was coming to Cumbria. And I remember thinking, oh, you know, maybe I can get on the plane and maybe the flooding won't be too bad. And fortunately I came to my senses and said, okay, I cannot be in Costa Rica as the flooding's minister when the flooding happened. So lost my ticket, lost all my bookings, the family went without me and sure enough, right the way through, I think I had a. My mother very sweetly came over on Christmas Eve to my cottage in Cumbria and we put something in the microwave and then Christmas Day I was just in water up to I guess my thighs sodding around with a high vis vest.

[Alastair Campbell]

Was it really, really bad?

[Rory Stewart]

It was terrifying. Right the way across Cumbria, Yorkshire, Lancashire, communities going underwater and right the way through Christmas just thanking volunteers we deployed the army.

[Alastair Campbell]

You probably did the right thing there, Rory. But I think that's a reminder to our listeners and viewers that they always go on. One of the things I loathe about a newspaper, MPs and their never ending holidays. Good MPs are never on holiday because any MP worth their soul if they thought they were going away for a little holiday with the family and suddenly they had something big in their constituency, nine out of 10 are going to make the decision that you made. So let's hear it for good MPs.

[Rory Stewart]

Rory yeah, let's hear it for good MPs. So I suppose to sum it up in politics, Christmas isn't really a holiday. It's more something that kind of bends stuff out of shape in weird directions, which I guess is a bit of a theme with our Tesco. Imperfect Christmas.

[Alastair Campbell]

Yes, Rory, because Tesco are leading into these real moments with great quality Christmas food, not the picture perfect ones.

[Rory Stewart]

Shop Tesco food this Christmas, either in store or online. So, John H. Trip member who might be able to step up to progress the ceasefire in Gaza, which currently appears to be holding a name only without the lure of natural resources or any progress with the resort concept, Gaza's unlikely to retain any continuing interest for Trump. And the concept of Rio Amaar seems dead for the Palestinians.

[Alastair Campbell]

Alison, I'd be interested to hear what you picked up in Doha, but I think, I think they're right to say the ceasefire is holding in name only. I mean, look, the truth is it is better than it was. What is happening in Gaza is better than it was, but it is still really bad. And I do worry. This goes back to we talked a lot about Trump on the main episode and this national security strategy in the very first page, he talks about all these wars that he's ended and he says he's brought peace to Gaza, just as he said he's brought peace to Thailand and Cambodia, who are fighting again now. And I don't think you can call this peace. And I've been talking this week to some of the aid organizations who've been, you know, keeping us in touch with the way that their operations are going now. They do say to some extent things are better than they were, but the fundamentals are really, really, really difficult. Let me just give you a couple. This is from Save the Children. The agreement that was reached agreed to 600 humanitarian aid trucks going in every day. That's 4,200 a week last week, average of 134 a day. So fewer than a thousand got in. And one of the issues that they're dealing with the whole time is the Israeli authorities deeming stuff that the aid agency is trying to get in as dual use. And some of the, in other words, could be used for, you know, by the bad guys. This includes meat, pesticides, vehicles, construction materials, tents, if they have aluminium. And get this one, learning and recreational materials for children. Now, that was from Save the Children. The World Food program gave me some very interesting data on how they are managing to get more meals to people. They are doing that and they're finding it. You know, that part of this is working. But they still point to a level of suffering and a level of homelessness and a level of people literally scratching a living that we're just not talking about anymore. And I think that's the point of the question, is that this is not peace and it is not settled. And you know, the world does seem to be looking away again.

[Rory Stewart]

And that's a relief in many ways for the Netanyahu government, may even be a relief for some people in Hamas that it's not being properly covered. I think maybe I'm being unfair, but I think many, many listeners, if you ask them what's actually happening in Gaza at the moment, would struggle to say so. Just to bring people up to date, what's happened since this so called peace plan was announced in October is it was meant to have a series of phases. The first phase was about hostage release, which has happened. The second phase is really the more important bit, which is about Israel actually withdrawing to the frontiers of Israel, so no longer occupying large swathes of Gaza and Hamas disarming. Right. Those two things are meant to happen together. It just hasn't happened. I mean, Israel continues to have troops in this enormous zone which they call the Green Zone, which is basically an enormous stretch of Gaza, including most of the agricultural territories stretching all the way around to the Egyptian border.

With the vast majority of the Palestinian population pushed out of that zone into an ever smaller territory about the size of Washington D.C. around the major cities. And the Yellow line, which is what divides Israeli directly occupied bits of Gaza from the other bits of Gaza, is where people are getting killed often. There are also strikes actually going directly in, Israeli strikes continuing, but at a lower level. The story that we're hearing leaked from American planners is that they were hoping to bring in this international security force. So there were stories about Britain and France and Norway and others coming in and they were going to be in the Green Zone on the other side of the yellow line. There was also a story that reconstruction was only going to happen in the Israeli occupied bit. And then presumably what happens there is those towns and villages in that bit of Gaza would be reconstructed and maybe some Palestinians would come back or not. This is not clear. Certainly Palestinians who've tried with families to cross that border have been killed, children have been killed trying to cross that border. Meanwhile, the biggest story around the peace plan is that there's supposed to be this new Council, Right. Remember, there was a board of peace which was going to have Trump and Tony Blair. Rumors now that Blair's been bumped off the board of peace. And then there was going to be an executive committee, and then it was going to be run somehow by Palestinians, but it wasn't going to include Hamas, which is very difficult because, in fact, even at the very junior level of people working in education, parks and recreation, these people are considered to be Hamas employees if they worked under the last government. And then you've got the question of the people who are going to be on the ground in the Hamas territories, bringing security, and this is, is it going to be the Egyptians? Is it going to be the Jordanians? Is it going to be the Turks? Well, not the Turks. Now it turns out the Turks have been volunteering, but Israel doesn't want Turkey in because they see them as too pro Hamas. Egypt very reluctant and Jordan very reluctant because they border Israel. And their people are so tied into this issue. And fundamentally, nobody's going to deploy troops, I think.

Because. Or it's going to be very difficult to get them. I mean, they might do, but it's going to be very difficult because the fundamental problem is, what are you doing? Are you going in in order to keep a peace that's already been established, or are you there to create a peace? In other words, are you supposed to be fighting Hamas on the ground? And if you end up fighting Hamas on the ground, what's your position here? Hamas sees you as an instrument of Israel. Israel's blaming you for not doing enough for Hamas. Meanwhile, the local population are enraged because reconstruction isn't happening. This town has been favored, the jobs aren't coming. They think you've stolen all the money, which is why all the funders are effectively saying that they're not getting involved either. So I was just in Doha, and one of the things the Qatari prime minister said is until Israel withdraws back, until this phase two has happened, there's no way reconstruction money is going back in.

[Alastair Campbell]

Yeah, on the. The national security document which we discussed on the main episode. There's so much in it. And I've just looked up the section on the Middle east which we didn't even talk about, really, in the main episode. There was so much about Europe in it. But this goes back to the point that we make about Trump says something, and therefore in his head, it's true. So the section of the Middle east begins like this conflict remains the Middle East's most troublesome dynamic, but there is today less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe. Iran, the region's chief destabilising force, has been greatly weakened by Israeli actions and President Trump's June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer. The Israeli Palestinian conflict remains thorny, but thanks to the ceasefire and release of hostages President Trump negotiated, progress towards a more permanent peace has been made. Hamas chief backers have been weakened or stepped away. I'm not sure the last bit is true. Syria remains a potential problem, but with American, Arab, Israeli and Turkish support may stabilize and resume its rightful place as an integral, positive player in the region. So the Middle east is sort of being parked by American strategy. And that, I'm afraid, is what these aid agencies are saying. They are still having to deal with the force fall out of the fact that this. There may have been a lull, but there has not been a real ceasefire and there has not been the workings of the peace process that set out in phase two. And I watched a press conference that Netanyahu did with Chancellor Merz, who was in Israel the other day, and Netanyahu's line was phase one is almost complete. We have the remains of one hostage to get back and we're ready for phase two. But then when you got that into detail, you felt that is him just saying that, because he can say that, he gets a headline out of that. But as you said right at the start, phase two is not yet happening in any way.

[Rory Stewart]

I think what Netanyahu and Hamas are doing is that this is a situation that actually suits both of them. Netanyahu, in a sense, and you can see he's doing more strikes into Lebanon. It's just killed another Hezbollah commander. There's been over 100 strikes into Syria. This is all to do with the Israeli position in relation to the Druze in southern Syria. I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't more strikes going into Iran at some point, because they'll argue the nuclear program hasn't. So that's Netanyahu signaling a very aggressive policy, keeping a general sense of crisis, probably in order to placate Iran, the far right in his government, Smotrich Ben gvir, who like this sense of aggressive action and maybe lead him through to an election, which of course is important because he's also being pursued for corruption allegations, which can't go forward so long as he's the prime minister. So Netanyahu wants to keep this general sense of crisis going and on Hamas part, so long as this situation continues. Hamas have a breathing space. They rearm, they reconstitute and increasingly in the red Zone, Hamas will be de facto in control of the whole thing. In other words, what actually Trump has done is put us back to a position which is a modified version of what existed before October 7th. It's just that the Gazan territory has been shrunk and Israel has now created a new, what would have been called Area B, an Israeli occupied strip, which, according to an Israeli army chief in a recent interview, they intend to stay in indefinitely. And the only problem that both of them have is this question is, is Trump going to get impatient with them? And how will Trump's impatience manifest itself?

[Alastair Campbell]

The other thing that happened in the region, which I thought would have got a lot of attention, but it seems to me didn't get that much attention at all, were these reports that Marwan Barghouti, who is in prison, Palestinian political leader, we interviewed his son, Arab Barghouti, on leading a while back, and these are the reports that he'd been assaulted in prison up to and including having part of his ear removed. And I know this was raised by the Turkish foreign minister at Doha, but generally this is not really. I don't think it's had that much attention at all. Which, again, underlines the point that this is what Trump's a genius at. He does his big moments, whether it's Putin in Alaska or I've delivered peace in Gaza. And then the world does kind of move on with it. And why I think these aid agencies have been getting in touch with me is actually to say, listen, this is not how it's being described. Yes, it's a bit better, but it's still really, really difficult. And the lives that people are living there are an absolute misery.

[Rory Stewart]

Suddenly, of course, having conversations surfaces. All these problems that we're not talking about in the media. Yemen, for example, is in a horrible, destabilized state with sudden new military moves that nobody's reporting on. Libya, as we've described, is now absolutely split into two sides with this shadowy warlord, effectively in eastern Libya, who's now facilitating Russia and UAE moving arms from Libya through Chad into Sudan. We've talked a bit about Sudan, but there's other things. We talk about Syria. I mean, Syria is in real trouble because, of course, the president, who we interviewed, has got Trump's support. He's hoping the sanctions will be lifted, but the Syrian economy is not really taking off. And he doesn't control the Kurdish areas on the east of the Euphrates. He doesn't have any control over the Druze areas. Down on the southern border. So essentially, whole bits of his country are not under his control. And then other things that nobody's talking about at all. Kuwait. The Emir of Kuwait is now going around stripping citizenship from Kuwaiti citizens. Citizens. He's gone after the man who was the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington, who was married to a Lebanese woman and stripped her citizenship that she's had for decades. And he's doing this to business families in Kuwait. People in Kuwait are terrified. They don't understand what's happening. They don't understand the logic behind it. You can't talk about it openly. And, of course, this climate of fear extends to other Gulf monarchies, too, particularly Saudi Arabia. So Trump is creating a world in which more and more disturbing things are just going below the radar. If you're Kuwaiti, you're saying, why is nobody talking about Kuwait? Why is nobody talking about Libya? Why is nobody talking about Yemen? Why is nobody talking about Chad, Mali? I sat down with one of the most senior diplomats in the Sahel, and he was explaining, he's a former foreign minister, that Mali is now in the most incredibly dangerous state where Islamists are on the verge of capturing Bamako. Niger is in real trouble. They're relying on troops from Chad. Burkina Faso is now divided in two. We're not even touching any of this because this is the violent, chaotic world that is beginning to accelerate. This is the acceleration of chaos.

[Alastair Campbell]

This is back to the National Security Strategy document. This is where Donald Trump says, we have to abandon the failed experiment of hectoring these countries about the way they govern. So that's one of the reasons why we're maybe not here as much as we did. Listen, let's end this discussion on a slightly more positive note. The slightly positive way to end this discussion is that the both the Save the Children and World Food Program said things are really bad, but they are at least getting better. And the point they made is if they were actually allowed to do and deliver what the ceasefire agreement says they should, they'd be able to alleviate a lot of the suffering fairly quickly. So all our support to them in doing that, as you say.

[Rory Stewart]

I've been in Doha for four days, and it's been a fascinating thing. This is Qatar really stepping up and getting an extraordinary range of people there. There was a big attack by Laura Loomer, which named me and Tucker Carlson as being part of a kind of anti Israel conspiracy who'd been invited. But she, I noticed, didn't mention that Alex Brucevitz, the pro Trump MAGA guy, was there, as was Donald J. Trump Jr. And Elon Musk's sister. So it was an extraordinary kind of collection of different voices from around the world. And to be fair to Qatar, they're really positioning themselves as mediators in a huge series of different events. But my goodness, you know, the Syrian president was there.

[Alastair Campbell]

I thought he did amazingly well.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah, he was interviewed by Christian Amanpour, and she asked some pretty tough questions. But he was, I think, as you said, when you whatsapped me after watching it, that very fluent and confident and so much the Syrian government was there. I spent a lot of my time meeting with ministers, officials, various others within the whole Syrian setup. And then there was Donald J. Trump Jr. Who made this incredible attack on Ukraine, calling Ukraine the most corrupt country in the world, claiming that when he hung out in Monaco, all the Bugattis had Ukrainian plates on them, et cetera. And then I found myself on a stage. I was supposed to be actually with Bruce Fitz and Tucker Carlson, but Tucker Carlson dropped out. So I was on with Tucker Carlson's business partner. But I hope you would have been proud of me, trying to stand up for some vision of a different way of doing journalism.

[Alastair Campbell]

So, Rory, after all this name dropping at the conference that I just forgot to go to.

How many of these big names will be on leading in the next six months?

[Rory Stewart]

Well, it's a really good question, and the answer is I haven't managed. I tried, I tried, I tried, I tried. But I cannot guarantee any of them for you yet, Alastair. But there may be some good news coming.

[Alastair Campbell]

Okay. I watched the Donald J. Trump Jr. And I thought this thing about Ukraine, I mean, you know, that thing about. You just know that is not true. I mean, I can't say Monaco is my favorite place in the world, but I have been there several times. And, you know, he's probably seen one or two Ukrainian plates, and they're probably put there by Russians, by the way. But he says half, half of the luxury cars have got Ukrainian plates on them. And it was, the whole thing was, was basically. And this, I'm afraid this goes back to it. This is what they think of Ukraine. They're pro Russia. They're pro Russia.

[Rory Stewart]

It's. It's terrifying. And, and of course, one of the interesting things that I'm not talking here about the countries, but talking to people from other Gulf states is how they feel that America is now operating like a royal court, 100%. And position doesn't matter. It's all about individuals. So Donald J. Trump Jr. The rumor at the moment is that he's less popular than he was because he didn't like Jared Kushner, so he was excluding Kushner. Now Kushner's up and Wyckoff may be down. And everybody's endlessly trying to navigate through this list of names to influence American policy, but not through formal systems or processes at all. The American ambassadors for the first time in my experience, felt very, very marginalized. Nobody really was, wanted to focus on them and talk to them in the way that they were trying to talk to social media influencers, business partners, the Trump, et cetera.

[Alastair Campbell]

Well, this is great that they have Donald J. Trump Jr. To go out and talk about corruption and nepotism in different countries around the world. Interesting.

[Rory Stewart]

Here's another small, small positive bit. So, as you're aware, America cut basically all development international funding and nobody has any idea dealing with the American government, how you get funding and what logic there is. Because there's a 29 year old guy called Jeremy and everybody just says, oh, Jeremy isn't interested in Sudan, so let's cut all the funding for Sudan. Or Jeremy's interested in this ally, or oh no, actually he isn't interested. And it's all maga. It's all about the fact that if you make the mistake of saying in a meeting that you've developed a good testing equipment which was used on Covid, their brains short circuit and they start saying Covid was a hoax. Covid was mad, right? So the whole American development funding mechanisms collapsed.

[Alastair Campbell]

But who is Jeremy?

[Rory Stewart]

So Jeremy is a 29 year old guy who was brought in by Elon Musk as part of the DOGE project, initially as a deputy administrator, usaid, who seems de facto to be the only person able to make decisions about what remains of American international funding. Where it goes, some of it's allowed to go into humanitarian, but suddenly it's not allowed to go into this country we're supposed to be helping. One of the phrases he apparently produces. We would help our allies if they were buried under rubble, but nobody can get them to define who America's allies are anymore. So basically, if you're any of these organizations, you are just going mad, right? However, there's interesting things, which is that people are working around it. So in Sudan, the UK and the EU have backfilled the US on humanitarian funding. And Bill Gates announced at Qatar an incredible partnership, I think it's $250 million each of pushing ahead with Qatar, working with the Gates Foundation. So there are these extraordinary Examples of people working around the problem, but it's never going to be able to create a stable rules based order. These are, these are people trying to improvise in a context of chaos. Now, here's a final question for you and it's definitely a question for you because it's something that I know y absolutely nothing about because of course it relates not to bagpipes but to football. Ivan McArdle, Trip plus member West Berkshire what did you, Alistair, make of the FIFA draw for the 2026 World cup and what are your views on the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize? It seems like the prize for the kid who never wins one.

[Alastair Campbell]

Did you watch any of it, Rory?

[Rory Stewart]

No.

[Alastair Campbell]

I think you should. I think you should because it was utterly revolting. It was absolutely revolting. And it was in the Kennedy center, which as you know, has been sort of taken over as part of the anti woke cultural war within the United States. Donald Trump was there, so was Mark Carney, so was Claudia Schanbone. Because this is a World cup that's going to be in the United States, Canada and Mexico. I was praying for Scotland to be drawn in Canada or Mexico's group because then they would have played in Canada or Mexico. However, they'll be playing in Miami and Boston. But the whole thing was turned into a bit of a show, not just for Trump, but also for Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA, who is, I mean, Trump won the FIFA Peace Prize, but if there is a prize for global sycophancy and the selling of a soul of a great global sport, then Infantino has got it. I mean, unfortunately, you couldn't see the audience when Trump was given this award, but the applause didn't feel very loud and the audience was made up of football managers, heads of football associations around the world who were all desperate to find out who they were going to be playing in the bloody World Cup. And they had to sit through Infantino describing how Trump had invited him to the Thailand, Cambodia signing and he delivered peace in Gaza. And so he gave him this award. And the thing is it, it actually, the award itself is quite hideous.

[Rory Stewart]

What is it? What does it look like?

[Alastair Campbell]

Well, it's a globe with these hands on it. So it's a sort of, it's a bit like the World cup itself. But the hands look like they're dragging.

[Rory Stewart]

Are they very small hands? They're very small hands.

[Alastair Campbell]

You could certainly think they might belong to Donald Trump. There was a brilliant, there was a. We should put in the newsletter the funniest thing I Saw was a German AI advert for a new perfume called Or d' Obedience Gold of Obedience. And it was just this tribute to Infantino's sycophancy. And of course, because Trump is a nasty narcissist, he can't see that the whole world are looking at this. I mean, I was. I was watching on television, I was following on social media. I didn't see a single comment other than, this is nauseating. This is revolting. As you say, this is like the kid who never gets anything being given a prize for trying really, really hard. He then made a speech saying it was one of the proudest moments of his life. To be fair to Infantino, he cut. He kept Trump very sure. It's about two minutes, max.

[Rory Stewart]

What do you think of the draw? The draw, that was the second question. Final thing.

[Alastair Campbell]

Well, it's really interesting. Two of the three teams that Scotland are drawn against, the teams that were drawn against the last time that were there in 1998, Brazil and Morocco. I think Haiti should be a nailed on win, but, you know, Brazil, you're doomed.

[Rory Stewart]

Right, Sorry, I don't want to be rude, but.

[Alastair Campbell]

No, not necessarily.

[Rory Stewart]

You're not gonna. Scotland's not going to beat Brazil, is it?

[Alastair Campbell]

Well, it'd be tough, but Brazil are not what they used to be.

So I think draw against Brazil, draw against Morocco, beat Haiti. Through we go.

[Rory Stewart]

Beautiful. Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed for Scotland.

[Alastair Campbell]

All right, Alistair, see you soon.

[Rory Stewart]

See you soon. Bye Bye.

[Alastair Campbell]

Bye bye. Take care.

[Rory Stewart]

As the year draws to a close, it's time for our annual reminder that even in an age of political noise and division one, national consensus still stands firm. Roast potatoes.

[Alastair Campbell]

Oh, God, all this British stuff. If you're wondering, however, what to buy the politically obsessed person in your life this Christmas, might I gently suggest a year's membership to. The rest is politics.

[Rory Stewart]

Plus, it's the thoughtful kind of present ad, free listening, bonus episodes, early access to Q&As, book discounts, and perhaps I think most interesting, it's our miniseries, available only to members, focusing on the world's most complex characters and topics. We've already explored Rupert Murdoch and J.D. vance, and we're doing many more subjects to come.

[Alastair Campbell]

So think of this as a civilized gift to allow families to disagree agreeably over Christmas. What could be nicer?

[Rory Stewart]

And if you've left it until Christmas Eve, as I fear I often do, the great thing is it's digital. No cues, rapping or panic. The membership lands neatly in their inbox on Christmas Day.

[Alastair Campbell]

So spread a little political peace and goodwill, head to therestispolitics.com and click Gifts.