← The Rest Is Politics
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- [00:00]
Alistair Campbell
Thanks for listening to the Rest Is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com that's therestispolitics.com it's been so catastrophic for Trump not to have had a very clear objective about what he was trying to achieve.
- [00:17]
Rory Stewart
You don't have a moral obligation to do what you can't do. If you can't fix it, then don't try because you'll often make things worse.
- [00:24]
Alistair Campbell
Most leaders in the world try to do statecraft, but Trump only does stagecraft.
- [00:30]
Rory Stewart
Iran has now demonstrated that it can will shut down neighboring economies, close the straits before moves. Iran, in a sense, now feels more powerful and that means there'll be pressure on Israel and the US to just keep going.
- [00:41]
Alistair Campbell
This is going to be terrible for the economy in Britain and in Europe and around the world.
- [00:53]
Rory Stewart
Welcome to the Rest Is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.
- [00:56]
Alistair Campbell
And with me, Alistair Campbell. And Rory, today we're going to talk about Iran, but unlike recent weeks, not the whole programme. We're going to talk about two catastrophic failures of regulation of our water on the back of an astonishing TV programme, Dirty Business. And also Ofcom, who I've tried to give the benefit of the doubt to, but their total blind eye to GB news becoming what even Andrew Neil now calls reform TV in, I think, total breach of the law that Ofcom is meant to uphold. But, Rory, before we start, you know how your mum. Yep. Is like the big influence on this podcast in your family? Well, with me it's, it's, it's my kids, the younger generation.
- [01:35]
Rory Stewart
Very good.
- [01:35]
Alistair Campbell
So Grace sends me this message. Dad podcast is fab, mainly because of Rory. Obvs. But you guys need to do more small talk. It's all so heavy. Trump, Trump, Trump. War, war, war. You need a bit of bance at the start, like, hey, Rory, how you been? What you been up to? Anything weird going on in your life? Otherwise, she says, you'll have people jumping off bridges before they get to the break. Lol. So, ffs, lighten, laughter, Emoji. Love emoji. But I think she's got a little bit of a point.
- [02:02]
Rory Stewart
Let's get to you and what you like listening to. Let's say you went to something and you were looking for an update on Iran on the news and you heard two middle aged blokes talking about their holidays.
- [02:12]
Alistair Campbell
You're absolutely right and absolutely it's true. The podcast that I listen to, where they do that stuff, I do go 20 seconds. 30 seconds. 30 seconds. That's true. But I think for younger people that. Because people go on about, you know, this because we get stopped and people talk to us, they're interested in our relationship, of the dynamic.
- [02:31]
Rory Stewart
Yeah.
- [02:31]
Alistair Campbell
So I think that's what she means.
- [02:33]
Rory Stewart
Do you think we could do a very, very short one so it's not too self indulgent? Because to be honest, what's happening in the world's a little bit more interesting than you and me?
- [02:39]
Alistair Campbell
No, but for example, she was saying, like this week, talk about whether you, like, you're happy with the Oscars. So I'm very happy that one battle after another one.
- [02:48]
Rory Stewart
Okay. I'm very happy, obviously, that Jessie Buckley won best actress for Hamlet and that
- [02:53]
Alistair Campbell
the Irish government flew out her family. That was nice.
- [02:55]
Rory Stewart
Very good.
- [02:56]
Alistair Campbell
I was very happy with Sean Penn that he went to see Zelensky rather than go ceremony. Grace probably thinks that's me being too political already. I think she's got a little bit of a. Bit of a point. And also, here's one for you. So, as you know, I'm obsessed with music. Yep. And I've given up on ever, ever, ever trying to persuade you to get into football. But I'm still.
- [03:15]
Rory Stewart
I'm still hopeful about it. This morning we were.
- [03:17]
Alistair Campbell
Because your sons are getting a bit interested, which is good. But I want to give a big plug to two things that I've been following this week. One is Louis Theroux. He's done this amazing documentary on the
- [03:29]
Rory Stewart
manosphere, and he's got such an amazing kind of ear.
- [03:32]
Alistair Campbell
He's brilliant. He's just brilliant at getting people to dig their own graves.
- [03:34]
Rory Stewart
Sort of plods around looking really earnest and slightly depressed. And it works brilliantly.
- [03:39]
Alistair Campbell
But the manosphere is so interesting because these are horrible views that a lot of young men now hold, partly because of these incredibly wealthy influences who've been able to monetize misogyny and hatred of women and sort of male supremacy. So I want to give a shout out to that. But I also want, as the antidote, to get you into music, promise me that you'll listen to a new album by James Blake.
- [04:05]
Rory Stewart
Okay.
- [04:05]
Alistair Campbell
Called Trying Times. It's quite political.
- [04:08]
Rory Stewart
James Blake, Trying Times.
- [04:09]
Alistair Campbell
And it's the antidote.
- [04:11]
Rory Stewart
What is this, like, folk music?
- [04:12]
Alistair Campbell
It's almost unique. He's been around for a long time, but it's like he's got a very, very interesting voice. The lyrics are quite political when you listen carefully. But the. The reason I say it's an antidote to the manosphere, and I've met him a few times, I know him quite well, is because it's really about men respecting women and men understanding the importance of their emotions and stuff like that. And it came out this week and went straight to number two in the charts behind Harry Styles.
- [04:39]
Rory Stewart
Okay.
- [04:39]
Alistair Campbell
So I think if our listeners got involved and engaged, I think James Blaine's
- [04:44]
Rory Stewart
the number one, actually. I saw a lovely head teacher who. She's actually the headteacher of a school you disapprove of called St. Paul's Boys School.
- [04:52]
Alistair Campbell
Oh, my Lord.
- [04:53]
Rory Stewart
But she was the head of.
- [04:55]
Alistair Campbell
Is that where Osborne went?
- [04:56]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, exactly. She was the head of a girls school before.
- [04:58]
Alistair Campbell
Okay.
- [04:59]
Rory Stewart
And she's an extraordinary head teacher. And she said that everybody, when she moved to this school with 1500 boys said, oh, poor you, being stuck with all these boys. And she had a lovely phrase. She said, having run an all girls school for much though, I admire the sophistication of young women. I actually really, really enjoy being in a school full of boys. And one of the things I really loved, I did a little conference with her on educating boys and it was really interesting. There were people from co educational schools, boys schools, but just talking about young men and how they worked is how much it's possible for good teachers to develop real affection and enthusiasm for the strangeness of boys. Acknowledging their risk taking, acknowledging their adrenaline, acknowledging their competitiveness. There was one interesting phrase, one of them said, there's no problem with aggression as long as it's not violent. I mean, there was a lot of interesting ways of talking about, yeah, what murders think. And I thought it was quite. And she said, you know, she'd been doing it three years ago, it would have all been about Andrew Tate and toxic masculinity. And now people are beginning to try to lean into how you talk a little bit more about the kind of positive wonder of.
- [06:06]
Alistair Campbell
I think there is a sort of fight back against it. This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy.
- [06:12]
Rory Stewart
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- [06:27]
Alistair Campbell
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- [06:32]
Rory Stewart
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- [06:42]
Alistair Campbell
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- [06:55]
Rory Stewart
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- [07:00]
Alistair Campbell
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- [07:09]
Rory Stewart
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- [07:14]
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- [08:11]
Alistair Campbell
The other thing is I've been reading this book by Liam Byrne about populism and it's really interesting how within that, with all these right wing Maga Farage Orban, a lot of that is a cut the it's the sort of it's the manosphere arguments that they play out all the time. And of course a lot of it is related to the whole muskification of the world, you know, because this manosphere thing, it's, it's big money, is big money for the people who are driving this stuff. So I think it's interesting. And then there you go. Rory We've done about four different political issues since final one.
- [08:42]
Rory Stewart
For me, Jack Watling, who I often talk the Ukraine analyst, has just got a book coming out this week called Statecraft and he's written a great article in the Guardian about Straits of Hormuz. But he's really, really good about trying to provide a formal analysis of how you do strategy. And so for people who are interested in kind of big politics, big strategy, Jack Watling's new book, Statecraft, highly recommended.
- [09:06]
Alistair Campbell
I can't remember I read something this week where somebody was saying that most leaders in the world try to do statecraft, but Trump only does stagecraft, which I thought was quite A very interesting observation.
- [09:16]
Rory Stewart
That's very good. Well, let's use this as our transition into Iran.
- [09:20]
Alistair Campbell
Iran, okay.
- [09:21]
Rory Stewart
So I was thinking, one of the fundamental things I'd like to say, my analysis is MT and C. Mtc, right? So M is morality, T is threat, C is capability.
- [09:35]
Alistair Campbell
Okay?
- [09:35]
Rory Stewart
And my point is this. We confuse when we think about invading a country like Iran, morality, our moral judgment. Right? This is an evil, horrendous regime that's killed tens of thousands of its own people and is profoundly unpopular. That's the MT threat. This is a regime that may or may not pose a threat. What kind of threat? Who is it threatening? Is it able to threaten the US does it have nuclear weapons? Is it only able to threaten Israel? And then the C, which is the most difficult thing of all, which is capability, what can we actually do about it? And we tend to conflate these things. We tend to think it's enough to say if you really think this is an evil, horrible regime, therefore we should be intervening. And the assumption is if there's a problem, somehow we can automatically fix it. And I think the depth of the problem we're in now is about our inability to move clearly between these categories. We get stuck in saying this is a very evil regime. So surely you can't be against intervention or getting very confused about threat. Is it a threat to Israel, is it a threat to the U.S. is it a threat to Europe? What kind of threat? Is it a threat in three years time if it develops nuclear weapons? What kind of threats are these proxies? Is it a threat to the Straits foremost and are we making it worse? Threat? And then finally this question of capability. What can you actually do about it? Yeah, you can bomb it, you can take out missiles, you can flatten it from the air, you could even invade the country. But is that going to change the moral nature of the regime? So is it going to produce more liberal regime? Is it going to make it less of a threat? And what levers do you do? What knowledge do you have? What power do you have? What capacity have you got?
- [11:16]
Alistair Campbell
I would add a P. Okay, go on.
- [11:18]
Rory Stewart
P. Planning, planning.
- [11:20]
Alistair Campbell
See, I think you've got to have all four.
- [11:21]
Rory Stewart
Okay.
- [11:22]
Alistair Campbell
So you've got to have a moral case.
- [11:23]
Rory Stewart
Yep.
- [11:24]
Alistair Campbell
Otherwise you're not going particularly in democracies, you're not going to take people with you. There has to be at least an understanding of a real threat. And you have to have the capability. And the capability depends on the planning as well as the, you know, who's got the biggest.
- [11:36]
Rory Stewart
Can I be more. Just push back for a second. Because this was slightly the conversation we had with Jonathan Powell where I got in trouble with him and he said,
- [11:42]
Alistair Campbell
you didn't get in trouble. He just got angry.
- [11:43]
Rory Stewart
He just. I got angry. And he said he was used to dealing with terrorists, but Jonathan Powell was trying to make the case that the problem in Iraq was absence of planning. And the kind of implication was that if we planned better, we would be able to do these things. I'm more pessimistic. I think that there are certain kinds of things that we cannot do, regardless of how much you plan. And I have this sort of idea that we live in too optimistic a world where Americans in particular think if there's a problem, there's a solution, and if you haven't got the solution yet, you just have to spend more money and plan more. My catchphrase I'm going to throw back at you is ought, implies can. You don't have a moral obligation to do what you can't do. So it's not enough to say the Iranian regime is horrible and a threat. If you can't fix it, then don't try because you'll often make things worse.
- [12:33]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah. And historically and definitely right now with Trump, Trump thinks he can fix anything, which is why last night he was blathering on about, I can do what I want with Cuba and I'm going to do it soon. But I think on the, on the planning, Rory, my son sent me a clip of Trump because I can't watch Trump at the moment, so I have to rely on other people to tell you what he's saying. It just riles me up so much. So Peter Doocy, who is from Fox News in the White House, and he said this to Trump. You said they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, uae, Bahrain and Kuwait. Nobody expected that. And then he went on. Are you surprised that nobody briefed you ahead of time, that that might be their retaliation?
- [13:11]
Rory Stewart
Trump?
- [13:12]
Alistair Campbell
Nobody. Nobody. No, no, no, no, no. The greatest experts, nobody thought they were going to hit. Everybody thought they would do this. And what's more, the Ayatollah himself, the now dead one, quote, the Americans should know that if they start a war this time, it will be a regional war. And then get this, I've been reading. I know you read Foreign affairs magazine, and I read it very, very closely, particularly when stuff like this is going on. And I don't know if you've been reading this guy, Nate Swanson, who's written some interesting pieces, and he's One of the leading experts on Iran in the world. He was director for Iran at the national security council between 2022 and 25. He was Trump's chief negotiator on the negotiation team. And he was sacked not long ago because Laura Loomer, MAGA cultist influencer, he was on her list. He wrote a piece in Foreign affairs magazine on February 24, four days before the invasion headline, US Military Strikes and the risk of a Quagmire. And we talked about this when the thing started, because he was the guy who was saying, Trump will think that because he's done Venezuela. And everybody said it would be a catastrophe, and it's not, because he moved the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and it would be a catastrophe, and it wasn't. And he says on this, it's easy to see why Trump would believe the warnings about another attack on Iran are overwrought. He can repeat his formula. This time is different. I spent 18 years working on Iran with Biden and Trump. From that experience, I see that Trump fundamentally fails to grasp that Iranian weakness will not lead the country to capitulate. On the contrary, Iran's present fragility narrows the space for meaningful compromise. Nor does Trump understand Iran faces entirely different conditions than June 2025, when it chose to de escalate. The Islamic Republic now believes that Israel and the US Intend to strike repeatedly its ballistic missile program and that it must be more aggressive to forestall the kind of perpetual assault that could topple it altogether. And then goes on to say Tehran could target global oil flows and international shipping, sending energy prices up and creating a serious political liability for Trump. Iran may well encourage the Houthis to resume attacking ships. The. The country's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has also been preparing to seize adversary ships in the Strait of Hormuz. If conflict with the United States deepens, Iran may consider targeting the Gulf Arab States, energy infrastructure directly. This is Trump's advisor saying it four days before.
- [15:48]
Rory Stewart
Okay, that's brilliant. Really brilliant. Because it's very rare historically that you can have such a clear example of somebody who is in the National Security Council saying something back of mind. I mean, I, like you, occasionally am asked to go in to talk to businesses, corporations, governments to give geopolitical advice. So I was at an event recently in a European country sitting with the CEOs of a number of companies, and they were all talking about, you know, what's the point of people like you and me coming in to give geopolitical advice? And I said, it's a really good question. Let me just take one example, right? Let's say we had said to you, Alastair and I, that back in November, December, Trump is building up a massive flotilla of ships near Iran. Let's say we'd said to you in December, and by the way, when he built up a massive amount of ships off Venezuela, it led to a strike against Venezuela. So there's a decent chance that there's going to be a strike against Iran. Right. And that's why we were trying to get Rob Malley on the show and all this kind of thing, because we were trying to get it done before Trump struck, let's say we'd also said that every expert in the world had spent the last 40 years saying one of the problems with Iran is the Straits of Hormuz. I mean, we weren't remotely original in that it was completely obvious it's their territorial waters. You stop the Straits Hormuz, you stop 20% of the global oil supply. And let's say we then explained that that would lead to a spike in global oil prices and actually a spillover that could be really catastrophic for the Gulf economies. That was pretty predictable that that would happen back in, I suppose, December, January. We also knew that Israel wanted to strike Iran because Netanyahu had said it again and again, and we knew that Trump had historically come along with Israel. So let's say you had said to these businesses four months ago, there is a 70% chance that Trump will hit Iran, global oil prices will go up, all these countries are going to be destabilized. Did any of you do any contingency planning? And the answer was none of them did. Now, what was really interesting is I pushed harder and said, well, why not? And one of them said, well, all that happens is that we have senior American generals on our boards who've been banging on about China, Taiwan for the last four years and telling us China's about the world, Taiwan, and they have very large checks and they haven't been telling us about this at all. The second one said, well, we calculated that Trump was kind of a bluffer. The historical record is he'd do something for a couple of days and then he'd stop. And we didn't really believe he would keep going in this way.
- [18:18]
Alistair Campbell
I guess, look, they're entitled to think people like you, me don't actually know that much more than they do. We could argue, well, actually, we do talk to lots of people and we can maybe assess things and what have you. So I get that. But I think the other thing they're probably speaking to is that Trump is so unpredictable. I think with most American presidents, you've always had a sense of what they might try to do. So, like yesterday when he suddenly starts going on about Cuba, I think before Venezuela, I'd have thought, oh, this is just a kind of distraction to try and get you off talking about because he realizes it's not going well. But actually it could mean that's the next stop.
- [18:55]
Rory Stewart
I think there's a 60% chance he goes into Cuba. I mean, again, what's weird about it is we're not in a world of There's 100% chance he's going to Cuba, but I would say it's more likely than not that he goes into Cuba, given that he said he was going to go into Venezuela, he signaled he was going to hit Iran, he did both those things. He signaled on Ukraine. So I think Cuba is very likely. Listen, can I just also lean into something that isn't discussed maybe quite enough in the Western press, which is the way in which this is shattering the economies of the Gulf. We see it with Dubai, everyone's noticing what's happening there. So think about the fact that in Dubai, a lot of people are living in huge skyscrapers. Think about what you feel if you're high up a skyscraper, if you think the electricity is going to be cut off and your elevator isn't going to work and a drone might strike the Saudi missile. Are you, if you are somebody who's moved to Dubai going to think that's a safe place to be? You didn't move there actually thinking this was a place that would be hit by Iranian missiles. So I imagine the property prices are going to collapse in Dubai. I, I also imagine its status as a financial center is going to drop quite quickly. But in the short term, Qatar is currently exporting close to zero liquid natural gas. That means that they're going from billions of dollars of revenue a day to zero. UAE is probably down at about third of its exports. The spillover effects of this will be unbelievable because actually, countries like Qatar have become central to the global aid environment as USAID is cut and stop putting money in and the UK and Germany and others. Qatar has stepped up and is funding UN agencies, nonprofits, charities all over the world. A lot of the money that's supposed to be going into Gaza, reconstruction is supposed to be coming out of the Gulf. And all those countries are not just hit in the short term, they will be very worried about medium term because a lot of the People who are buying from them will begin to think, well, maybe I'm going to diversify my contracts. Maybe I thought this was reliable. It's not quite as reliable anymore. Insurance values are going to go up.
- [21:03]
Alistair Campbell
These are countries which have spent an absolute fortune developing the image as safer business, safer tourism, based on their alliance with the United States.
- [21:13]
Rory Stewart
And I think it's heartbreaking. Look, I know there are many people who listen to the show who are not very sympathetic towards places like Qatar. I really am. I felt that actually in many. Not perfect, but in many ways they've done actually very, very good things on trying to bring peace around the world. Do resolutions support development, support aid?
- [21:33]
Alistair Campbell
I think where people are unsympathetic is people like Isabel Oakeshott, who emigrate to Dubai with Mr. Richard Tice, the man with the interesting tax scam that most media seem not to be interested in. And yesterday she's back in London posting pictures of how awful things are because she took a picture of somebody sleeping on the streets.
- [21:52]
Rory Stewart
But these countries have done incredible things over the last 40, 50 years, just transforming their economies, and they've become really interesting places. And it's tragic what's happened because they didn't sign up for this war. Certainly Qatar was not driving this war. In fact, if anything, they were trying to dissuade Trump from it. And they now find themselves in a completely impossible situation, which is every day that Trump continues to bomb Iran and more missiles coming to them, more disruption to the Straits. But even if he stops, Humpty Dumpty's fallen off the wall. Because now everybody can see for years to come that Iran, in a sense, can blackmail everybody. Iran has now demonstrated that it can at will, shut down neighboring economies, close the Straits of Hormuz. So Iran, in a sense, now feels more powerful. And that means there'll be pressure on Israel and the US to just keep going, trying to chase this very, very difficult idea that they can somehow topple the regime. I think close to impossible idea.
- [23:04]
Alistair Campbell
I guess also that one possible outcome in terms of this thing ending is if Iran basically says to the Americans, well, okay, we can call off what we're doing and we don't have to bomb the whole time. We just have to take out a few Americans every now and then. We just have to close down the Straits of Hormuz. We just have to do cause you a lot of trouble, which we can do, and we've shown you we can do that. So you need to get a guarantee from Israel that they're going to Stop. And they, the Iranians, if Trump were to do that, then can say, well, actually, we won. And that's why I think it's been so catastrophic for Trump not to have had a very clear objective about what he was trying to achieve. He's a rambling sort of changing goalpost, moving objectives. The other thing that this guy, Nate Swanson said in the piece he's written post, he's written another piece for Foreign affairs magazine, and he made that point. He says Iran doesn't need to score major military successes every day. The regime only needs to inflict enough periodic damage to keep. Keep regional partners, markets and the American public jittery. They can do that easily.
- [24:05]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, well, I was talking to someone in the US defense establishment and the most optimistic line, which is being sold by American admirals, is if we just keep going for another four weeks, we can degrade Iranian capacity so much that at huge expense, we can safely escort some vessels through the Straits. And then we will have. Wonderful. Because we will have proved the Straits are open and Iran can't shut it. My response is that doesn't make any sense to me at all.
- [24:32]
Alistair Campbell
They've got a grip, whatever they want.
- [24:34]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, maybe the US may, in four weeks time be able to take a vessel through the straits at huge expense with aircraft carriers and destroyers, but they're not going to want to do that every day, forever. And Iran doesn't need to demonstrate that it can hit 100% of vessels going through. It doesn't even need to hit 1 out of 100. People just need to believe there's a possibility that it might be able to hit one out of 100 next time, the next six 12 months and the US have lost. So there isn't a clear point at which they will be able to say the Straits are now completely open, completely safe. We're back to business as usual.
- [25:07]
Alistair Campbell
Maybe that's a good point at which to turn to the whole kind of big political picture and Trump's attempts to persuade other countries to get involved in sending warships, sending destroyers, sending minehunters to get the Straits of Hormuz operating again. And one by one, every single one of them has given him the bombs rush, which makes him angrier. So he's lashed out again at Geir Starmer, Mark Carney, who sort of was quite welcoming at the start, he's been absolutely clear we're having nothing to do with this.
- [25:39]
Rory Stewart
Pistorius was very clear. He said, if the US Navy can't do it, what hope have we got?
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Alistair Campbell
Mertz said Last night, this is not a job for NATO. Nick Carter, former senior military guy in the uk, he said yesterday, Trump's suggestion that NATO should take this on completely misunderstands why people are in NATO in the first place. It's a defensive alliance. If you think of the principle of what Trump's saying, any NATO country could say, right, we're going to war over there, and we then expect you all to come in and help us when it fucks up. Because that's all that's happened. All that's happened is all these things that Nate Swanson said to Trump, one presumes, which is why he got the boot, this will happen. Trump wanted to ignore it, to have the war, and now that it's happening, he's basically saying, britain, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Australia, you've got to come in and help me. I think, look, it's terrible what's going on. As you said last week, this is going to be terrible for the economy in Britain and in Europe and around the world. But I think in terms of getting America under Trump, hopefully for some time back into maybe just getting a few grownups around him to say, listen, this has gone far enough. My really, really, really big worry about what's happening at the moment with the kind of star, Makhani, Macron, Meltz, all pushing back at Trump is he's just going to one day wake up in the middle of the night and do a truth social post saying, we are pulling all support from Ukraine because the NATO countries have not been there to help us in our own need.
- [27:06]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a real risk. But equally, we couldn't be in a position where that blackmail threat meant Pluto to sign up for everything. And that was where I disagree with Mandelson. Mandelson was continuing even after he'd been fired from Washington to write articles and give interviews, saying things like, basically, we should let him have Greenland because the only thing that matters is U.S. support for Ukraine. There were people in our own intelligence and security establishment who were very critical of Starmer's line, saying, what happens if we go to war and we need the US to help us and we've got to go with them. People saying, when we went to Spain, what happens when Spain gets attacks? And I think the problem with that idea is the idea that Trump does favors or feels loyalty or because you've helped him out here, he's going to help you out there. As for the birds, so the reality is that actually US support for Ukraine has been reduced to basically $0. So we've had to step up, fill in a Europe $50 billion fund.
- [28:02]
Alistair Campbell
They're still doing a lot of intelligence.
- [28:04]
Rory Stewart
They do a lot of the intelligence and security, and they sell us stuff that we buy, although a lot of the stuff we're trying to buy, they've now blowing in the Middle East. So it's not even available to buy. But the main thing for which Trump was always given credit was putting sanctions against Russian oil and driving down the price of oil. He's now lifted those sanctions and put up the oil price. So it's basically down to the intelligence and security enablers. Yeah, and that is very vulnerable. It's a big problem. But the bigger problem he's done, he's done much more damage to Ukraine than helped it, in particular around oil and the Russian economy.
- [28:36]
Alistair Campbell
And that was before this. I'd say he was damaging Ukraine before this because he's always taking Putin's side of the argument. So is Wyckoff, Kirill Dmitriev, who's Putin's kind of Witkoff in this equation. And he did a post on Telegram, he said the United States is effectively acknowledging the obvious. Without Russian oil, the global energy market cannot remain stable. EU bureaucrats will soon be forced to recognize this, acknowledge their strategic blunders, and atone. Russia is, I'm afraid, I hate to say it, but I think it's true. Russia is the only power that has won out of this whole thing. He, because of the lifting the sanctions on oil, driving the price of oil up through what he's done in Iran, he is basically putting very, very large sums of money, 1.6 billion per month for every $10 increase in the price of crude. I mean, that is a lot of money. And this is why that's going to fund the next stage of the war.
- [29:36]
Rory Stewart
And this is why all the sort of, you know, I have friends who are like to poke Europe and the UK and say it's all our fault. And one of the great things they like to say is it was all Europe's fault for continuing to buy Russian oil. And that at least Trump had called that out. Well, now it's quite clear that Trump is on the other side. My final thing before we maybe take a break is my biggest fear is that this could continue for a very, very long time. I mean, the optimistic idea is that Trump somehow declares a victory. And we know that Trump is able to declare apparently a victory out of almost nothing. But his ability to do that feels less than it was before, because if he was saying, you know, what he would have wanted to say before, which is, I've destroyed their nuclear capacity. So I've won. I've taken out their ballistic missiles. I've won. The problem is the whole world can now see that Iran has choked the Straits of Hormuz, driven up the oil price, and basically is now holding all the Gulf countries to ransom. If he says, tomorrow, I've won and I'm stopping the Gulf countries, and a lot of the world will be like, you what? Excuse me, you're leaving these guys in place. They can now fire missiles at us whenever they want. They can close the straits for Moose whenever they want. You've declared victory. Right. So one of the real risks is that actually places like Saudi that might have been a little ambivalent about this may now be pushing him to keep going. And you'll start seeing this. I'm beginning to see this from some of our own British diplomats, generals, intelligence people who say to me, well, Rory, I didn't agree with the war in the first place, but now it's happened, we've got to finish the job. We can't leave these people here because actually they're too much of a danger to the world. To which I have to keep saying, what does it mean, finish the job? How do you finish this job? Because another problem is all the experts on Iran put so much emphasis on the fact the regime only had 15% of the support of the population, was very weak, was very unpopular, and they thought that would mean it would collapse like a pack of cards. In fact, I think there were optimistic Israeli analysts. I had one of them saying to me yesterday, a Brit saying, I thought Israel understood Iran better than anyone else. And what he meant by that is Israel was always much more cynical about Iran, much more aggressive about Iran, but Israel was wrong. Israel thought this regime would collapse immediately, and it absolutely did not. It's proved much more resilient. So the options are now, I don't know how you avoid two completely horrible outcomes. Horrible outcome number one, this war continues indefinitely because you never get anything that you can describe as a victory. Horrible outcome number two, you stop the war and you suddenly have Iran in a much more powerful geopolitical position, able to essentially blackmail all the Gulf countries.
- [32:29]
Alistair Campbell
Well, before we go to Bray, we should say tomorrow for Question Time, as you describe it, we're going to show little humility. We put out an appeal to listeners and viewers for questions on Iran. We tons of them, and we are. We've got a guest for Question Time which is one of the world's leading experts, genuine leading expert on Iran. That's Karim Sajapor. And so hopefully people enjoy that. Tomorrow, take a break and we'll come back and talk about how useless our water and media regulators are.
- [33:00]
Rory Stewart
Very good. Looking forward to it, Alistair. Have a good break.
- [33:03]
Alistair Campbell
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Rory Stewart
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Alistair Campbell
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Rory Stewart
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Alistair Campbell
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Rory Stewart
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Alistair Campbell
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Rory Stewart
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Alistair Campbell
And as we're doing that, a cyber attack occurs on average every 39 seconds. In the UK, hundreds of cyber enabled crimes are reported each day with around 4.5 million pounds lost daily to cybercrime.
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Rory Stewart
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- [35:21]
Rory Stewart
So good, so good, so good.
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- [35:55]
Alistair Campbell
Welcome back to the Dresses Politics with
- [35:57]
Rory Stewart
me, Alistair Campbell and with me, Rory Stewart.
- [35:59]
Alistair Campbell
Now, Rory, you probably know I do occasionally weave in little plugs for my newspaper, the New World. But today I am doing so underlined 10 times because they've done a piece this week written by Alan Rusbridger, who you thought should have been Director General of the BBC. Senator of the Guardian.
- [36:16]
Rory Stewart
Yeah. What would that happen? Maybe it didn't apply.
- [36:18]
Alistair Campbell
Probably because. I'll tell you why it wouldn't happen. It relates to what we're going to talk about because they would have thought, oh, we can't possibly put somebody in who's perceived as being left wing.
- [36:26]
Rory Stewart
I had a moment where I suddenly thought I should have applied for that job. I mean, somebody needs to do that job.
- [36:30]
Alistair Campbell
Well, the guy who seems to be in the frame for the job that you wanted Alan Rusbridge to get is a guy called Matt Britton.
- [36:35]
Rory Stewart
And the job I've now decided I wanted to get.
- [36:37]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, yeah. Which is a great name for the BBC. His background is Google. Google Europe.
- [36:42]
Rory Stewart
Do you think it would be a great job or do you think it'd be a nightmare of a job?
- [36:44]
Alistair Campbell
I think it'd be both. Most great jobs are nightmares. You know, if I was manager of Argentina when Maradona was playing, I mean, absolute bloody nightmare. What a great job. But no, so done. And it's, it's really, really interesting. I do love the New World and it's so. It's not many newspapers do. 12. They call themselves a magazine now. 12 pages on one story.
- [37:04]
Rory Stewart
Wow.
- [37:05]
Alistair Campbell
Okay. And. Well, with the front cover all written by Alan Russell.
- [37:09]
Rory Stewart
Yeah.
- [37:10]
Alistair Campbell
And it's an analysis of GB News.
- [37:12]
Rory Stewart
And just quickly remind listeners, GB News,
- [37:14]
Alistair Campbell
GB News, a right wing TV station founded a few years ago, funded very, very heavily by this guy, Paul Marshall, sort of Christian, right winger, used to be a Lib Dem. Andrew Neal, very well known journalist, was the kind of founding driver of it. He's quoted in Rusbridge's piece as saying it has basically become Reform tv. Reform, Nigel Farage's party. But what Alan does, he put together a team of quite a large team of journalists and people who had Experience of regulation. And not just kind of left wing people. There were people who worked for the Spectator, for the Telegraph, as well as for the Atlantic, for the Washington Post, for Tortoise, and so lots of different journalistic people. And they sat down, I think, in pairs, and they watched a lot of GB News and they were asked to score these programs that they watched. Faraday's program, an interview that Beverly Turner did with Donald Trump, Matt Goodwin, his program, some of the sort of chatty programs, and they asked them to score them against ofcom's own guidelines and the
- [38:26]
Rory Stewart
OFCOM guidelines, just to come in for a second, if I'm right, a lot of them about broadcasting. And this is different from how newspapers regulated or podcast regulated.
- [38:34]
Alistair Campbell
Correct.
- [38:34]
Rory Stewart
Is about impartiality, is that right?
- [38:37]
Alistair Campbell
It's about impartiality and fairness and accuracy.
- [38:41]
Rory Stewart
Okay. And the idea, if we go back to the beginnings of this, are that whereas newspapers were allowed to endorse political parties, how many bias broadcast was supposed to be. This is going back to the days of the founding of BBC and ITV and Channel 4 was supposed to have balanced points of view, were supposed to be impartial, were supposed to be objective. And the idea of that was you didn't want streaming into people's living rooms. Propaganda, completely biased propaganda.
- [39:08]
Alistair Campbell
And if you didn't abide by the OFCOM rules, you did not get a license. So GB News have a license to broadcast around the clock, which they do. The team that Rusbridge put together, they include people who have the Sunday Telegraph, the spectators, the Times, the Observer, BBC, itv, the Daily Mail, the Mirror, Prospect, the Economist, the Guardian, buzzfeed, the Washington Post, Tortoise Media, GQ magazine. So they put a lot of people and sat them in front of television and said, you watch this for hours and hours and hours. And what they've got, both in Allen's report and in the New World's account of it, they've given their explanations as to why OFCOM rules were being broken.
- [39:49]
Rory Stewart
Okay, give us some examples.
- [39:50]
Alistair Campbell
So, for example, Donald Trump interview with Donald Trump by Beverly Turner. He says in the interview, climate change is a complete hoax. An interviewer who's governed by Ofcom should at the very least say, well, that is disputed. Right, okay. Or have somebody who comes on afterwards to say, well, that's completely wrong. Instead of which he said, it was so amazing to see you drop all those truth bombs at the United Nations. It's propaganda.
- [40:15]
Rory Stewart
Okay.
- [40:15]
Alistair Campbell
Matt Goodwin.
- [40:16]
Rory Stewart
Matt Goodwin is an academic who did research on immigration. Has become increasingly right wing and then managed to run as the Reform Party candidate in Gorton, Denton by election, which he felt when he came second.
- [40:29]
Alistair Campbell
Your famous generosity there, Rory, in calling him academic. And what's more, he had a programme and has a programme. And guess what he was discussing four days before it was announced that he was going to be the candidate in Gorton and Denton, didn't he? He was discussing Gorton and Denton and he was discussing. These were the subjects he chose. Is Europe falling apart and becoming unrecognisable? What is the risk of Islamist fighters arriving on small boats? Why are Cowborough residents up in arms over a local camp for asylum seekers? And finally, on this fair and balanced program, sexual assaults by refugees in the Netherlands and the uk. So that Matt Goodwin program was scored by these guys at 11 out of 5 for being in keeping with the OFCOM guidelines.
- [41:15]
Rory Stewart
Okay, so just to put it in context, when I in 2010 showed the then Prince of Wales around my nonprofit in Afghanistan, and BBC News showed a couple of images of me pointing to things, Gordon Brown, then Prime Minister, made a formal complaint to the palace in Ofcom, saying it would help me in my election in Penrith and the border.
- [41:37]
Alistair Campbell
Gordon Brown.
- [41:37]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, yeah. Because I appeared with the King and was shown on television showing him around the project. So to see how far we've come in 2010, it was considered for me to be in the edge of a shot with the King as a parliamentary candidate about a stand for Pendrithan border was, in Gordon Brown's views, breaching impartiality and criticality compared to what would have happened if I'd actually presented my own program on the Pentagon border election every night about all the issues that I was campaigning for as a main broadcaster, let alone on the margin of a program.
- [42:08]
Alistair Campbell
Exactly. And so, for example, Andrew Neal, in the interview he does with the New World with Rusbridger, he says that when he was starting GB News, he said that there's no way that I would have allowed Nigel Farage to have his own program. Nigel Farage now his own program. Jacob Rees Mock has his own program. Lee Anderson has his program, Matt Goodwin has his program.
- [42:27]
Rory Stewart
And they all get financed, too. That's the other thing. So one of the interesting things here is about conflict of interest and the funding of members of Parliament. So as people will be aware, members of Parliament often feel underpaid. A lot of the population disagree, other bits of population agree, but they are allowed to have second jobs. But they have to declare quite carefully what those incomes are. If you are a presenter on GB News, or if you are as Boris Johnson was when he was an mp, a columnist for a newspaper, or indeed actually some of the Labour MPs who presented LBC radio programmes, you can end up earning literally hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, which I think Boris Johnson was in the hundreds of thousands. Certainly Farage seems to have been in hundreds of thousands of income and those are in effect or can be indirect donations coming from the owners of these media corporations. So the Barclays brothers, I think, owned the Telegraph and he was getting this money. Marshall, as you say, has been a big funder of GB News. And so a lot of the thing that's maintaining the lifestyle of Nigel Farage is not being declared as a direct donation from an individual with a political cause to Farage, which he has to justify. Instead it's just presented as I have a second job and I think all These questions around MPs, incomes, conflicts of interest, their future jobs are not being sorted personally to return to my current recession, pay them more and stop them from having these additional sources of income.
- [44:04]
Alistair Campbell
And also for the backers, Paul Marshals, they are. This is the equivalent to funding a political party because Andrew Neal says this is now Reform tv, by the way, fair play to Gordon Brown, in my view, because if you have rules, they've got to be upheld. One of the things that's happening with this report is it's going to go to Lisa Nandi, the Culture Secretary is going to go to the Culture Committee. Two things should happen in my view. First of all, the Labour government needs to get its head around why this is such a problem for our democracy and as it happens, for the Labour Party as well. But the other thing you said about how things change. Let me just read you this line from Rusbridge's piece to see how far Ofcom has journeyed in the way it operates. It's worth revisiting a meticulously argued 12 page adjudication it published eight years ago, which found the BBC had breached its duty of due accuracy in 2017 by failing to challenge Nigel Lawson's remark on the science of climate change on the Today program. These guys on GB News, they don't just not allow voices on to rebut what they say. They kind of almost cartoonize issues like climate change. And so somebody like Goodwin, he has a program where he literally talks about immigration day and night. And they would say, so they got Gloria Del Piero, former Labour mp, on that's balance. They have got so many really right wing presenters. This is why Liam Byrne's book is so interesting because this is all of a piece with how Putin corrupted his own media, how Trump is corrupting his own media. You now have Brendan Carr, who runs the fcc, the federal commission that gives out licenses to, to broadcasters, and basically saying, if these guys don't cover the war properly in Pete Hegs view, they're going to lose their license. And that is already having an impact.
- [45:53]
Rory Stewart
One of the things that is also odd, which I guess is going on and off comes head. And some listeners I think will already be shouting at our podcast, pointing this out is they will say, listen, how come we can put out podcasts algorithmically streamed on YouTube into people's living rooms and we're not governed by OFCOM regulations. And you don't need to be Dominic Cummings to point out that you and I have particular political views. We are rampantly pro European, for example, and we keep putting out those views, right? So there's a really interesting thing that's happened since these regulations were set up. Now, I'm not defending Ofcom because I think your point is, right, these guys get a broadcasting license, there is a law, they're not sticking to it. But just to explain why it's getting more complicated. It's getting more complicated because when these rules were set up, you didn't have podcasts and YouTube platforms. And actually our reach is now bigger than these guys, right? So if you look at the figures, these figures suggest that they are getting at one time just under 100,000 viewers. Now, this is a rolling average over a particular period. And it's quite difficult calculating, but it's worth pointing out that they will come back and say, hold a second. You know, you are often getting 10 times the number of people listening to your podcast. And they would probably say, understandably, listen, we have our own political view, which is incredibly pro European, kind of centrist, dad, et cetera. So they would say, how come you as a podcast get to have a pretty clear political view, but we as a broadcast network don't? We're just examples as us as news agents. And then the stuff coming from the states, like Joe Rogan, right, as a client or whatever coming in which Ofcom can't even touch. I mean, if you wanted to regulate Joe Rogan, you would have to deal with the fact that people would start using VPNs to get round government.
- [47:37]
Alistair Campbell
Listen, it's a very, it's a very, very fair point. And look, I went in to see OFCOM sometime last year because I was, I was already kind of spotting That I thought this was a real problem.
- [47:47]
Rory Stewart
Yeah.
- [47:47]
Alistair Campbell
And I went in and it was before the election, and I was basically saying, look, how can you have Farage presenting this program virtually daily? It is total reform propaganda. That's all it is, minute after minute. And. And the one thing we know about Farage, he's very good at it. He's a good broadcaster, he's a good talker, he's a good propagandist. So I met these people ofcom, and we'll come on to the water in a minute. But one of the best things about the water program that we're going to talk about were these the sort of bullshit merchants that they employed to give sort of empathetic lines to take. And one of the things the ofcon people kept saying to me as well, we can only take action under our remit if we get complaints. Okay, well, Matt Goodwin did a poll on his own program on whether Trump was right that Europe was recognizable. Guess what? 97% of the viewers agreed with it. Right now, even Trump's interview, which was the biggest blow job you've ever seen on television, I think they got 32 complaints and none of them were upheld on the basis that in other times on the channel, other points were made. If Donald Trump's on your TV station, you're going to get a lot of coverage. Rebuttal is not. The rebuttal has to be in the program. And I think Labour, the government and the Conservatives, I think, should join in on this as well. And definitely the Lib Dems, I think they're underestimating how serious this. I get your point about the podcast, and there may come a point, by the way, where ofcom's remit has to be extended. But right now, in relation to what ofcom's duty is to see that their own guidelines and laws are upheld. They are being broken minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, on a news station that claims and boasts that it now has more viewers than the BBC News and Sky News. So that is a real problem, I think, for our democracy. We've got to get a grip of it.
- [49:41]
Rory Stewart
Yeah. Also, what an amazing change in the media landscape we've seen. I mean, it's not just podcasts. 1989, something like 30% of the British population population every night watched the BBC news or the ITV News. It's now down to about 10%. The same is true in the US gone for about 20, 25% of the US population. Watching the main news anchors in the evening, down to about 5%. We've gone from in 1989, 5% of people getting no TV news to 32% of people from 2% of people getting no TV or newspaper news in 1989 to about a quarter of the population population getting new TV or newspaper news. Today, the number of people using a newspaper has dropped from 75% in 89 to 34% today. And it's only the over 55s where almost half people are actually regularly watching TV. If you get under 35s, 58%. Their main news source is social media.
- [50:37]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah. But a lot of the stuff they're consuming on social media is being produced by the newspapers.
- [50:41]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, well, it's very complicated, isn't it? I mean, so advertising revenue for newspapers has collapsed, which also I think gives the poor marshals this world more control. Because when you were in Downing street, they were making close to 10 billion pounds a year in real terms, they're now making about a quarter of that, which means that if you're a wealthy person, you can step up, fill the gap which otherwise would have been made for advertising. So we're in this very, very, very weird world. And then the other thing we've talked about, you were teasing me. You know, what am I doing appearing on Piers Morgan? What am I doing appearing on Today program? Today program's very interesting because that's remained incredibly high.
- [51:17]
Alistair Campbell
It's falling, though.
- [51:18]
Rory Stewart
Falling. But not as fast as you think. It's been a 75% collapse in the TV news. Yeah, today program is pretty constant. And then Piers Morgan, you were saying. Well, nobody watched Piers Morgan.
- [51:29]
Alistair Campbell
Well, the weird thing I was saying, what were you doing on it?
- [51:31]
Rory Stewart
But the weird thing is that gets picked up on YouTube, which again, makes it even more complicated, which is not regulated either. So Ofcom's in a really, really weird world. But I agree with you. If you are going to say newspapers and podcasts are one thing, people expect them to have political views, broadcasting is supposed to be impartial. Then of course, you can't have Nigel Farage regularly presenting a program.
- [51:53]
Alistair Campbell
But I think if you read, if you read this full report, you will see this is deliberate, systemic, and they
- [51:58]
Rory Stewart
should shut it down.
- [51:59]
Alistair Campbell
They should just shut down.
- [52:00]
Rory Stewart
They should take its license.
- [52:01]
Alistair Campbell
They will be loving this conversation, of course, because they'll say, hey, the lefty bed wetters, they don't like it when it's their feet on the other boot. Because the other thing that they've done is the man manage to persuade people like Ofcom that the rest of the Media is really left wing. We've got the most right wing newspapers basically on the planet. The BBC is constantly scared of his own shadow and is neither one thing or the other. You know, rightly in my view. I'll tell you what I would say. If the Today program don't have Alan rusbridger on at 8:10 talking about his report, I will say they're all part of the same bloody club. Anyway, listen, I think it's a brilliant. The New World is a brilliant magazine and this is a particularly brilliant piece of reporting and I'm really, really glad they've done it. And because we're fair, Rory, and balanced, unlike others, the New World actually offered Ofcom an interview or an article or some sort of response and they said they didn't have time to do an interview. They gave a statement which says our rules around due impartiality and due accuracy in news are cornerstones of the broadcasting code. They ensure that audiences are not misled and that they're exposed to an appropriate range of alternative views and perspectives. Well, we'll see how that stands up against the excellent piece by Mr. Rusbridger. GB News didn't respond to the New World's request for response, but they, of course have often said that they call themselves fearless defenders of free speech in the United Kingdom. Yeah, and the link to water is this. The final line of Alan's 12 pages in the New World is this clean information is, in theory as precious as clean water. We know what happened to water in this country. Is our national news going the same way? What a link.
- [53:36]
Rory Stewart
That's good, isn't it? Okay, let's go to water and tell us about Dirty Business.
- [53:40]
Alistair Campbell
Well, Dirty Business actually got me even angrier than the Post Office stuff because as you know, I like to swim in cold water. And it made me think. In fact, funny, I was talking to somebody at the swimming pool this morning who also seen me and said, I don't think I'll ever swim in a river again because you just can't trust it. You can't trust what they say about it. So that Dirty Business is the story of these two middle aged retired guys who notice that where they live, down in near where David Cameron's old seat, Whitney, that the River Windrush is changing color and they get very troubled by this and they sort of dig and dig and dig and dig and essentially what they're finding is these massive sewage spills and then woven through the story as they then try to campaign one to get the truth, which they Struggle to get, because these agencies just lie to them all the time. But secondly, to get things improved. Weaving through this story are two stories based on fact. One of a young girl who walked through some human sewage on a beach in Dawlish which had a blue flag, and she ended up dying.
- [54:52]
Rory Stewart
She died.
- [54:52]
Alistair Campbell
She died from infections, contract infections, and people couldn't work out what was going on, but she died. And then another guy who, in a different water incident, contracted Meniere's disease, which was utterly life changing.
- [55:07]
Rory Stewart
What is this disease?
- [55:08]
Alistair Campbell
You sort of lose your balance all the time and you have these kind of never ending, sort of vomiting fits. It was really horrible to watch.
- [55:16]
Rory Stewart
But the basic point is that human sewage is a very serious threat to human health and that actually stepping into these rivers and swimming them is not something you should do if there's human sewage floating around.
- [55:25]
Alistair Campbell
Point is, you don't know. So the Dawlish beach had a blue
- [55:27]
Rory Stewart
flag, right, Saying it was clean, saying it was clean.
- [55:30]
Alistair Campbell
And the fact you saw the family basically trying to get some sense of justice, or at least to find out why she died.
- [55:37]
Rory Stewart
Yeah.
- [55:37]
Alistair Campbell
And constantly being fobbed off and saying, well, you know, you sure she didn't eat something? And. And all this sort of stuff. And it's really what makes it so compelling as television. The first thing is it doesn't hide what sewage is about. And what you see is the. I'm afraid this goes back to Margaret Thatcher and privatization. There's just been a complete undermining of the systems that keep our water clean whilst these companies are making fortunes. And what's more, you see one of the worst things about the program is the guy who is in charge of the Environment Agency, which is meant to be the regulator, which is just in this program, just comes over as a complete bullshit industry. He's. He ends up at the end of the program working for one of the wash companies. So it's the old revolving door from regulator to business. It honestly drives you mad. And I've got to tell you where you're in it.
- [56:28]
Rory Stewart
I'm in it because I was the Water Minister.
- [56:29]
Alistair Campbell
Well, you. You're sitting. There's a clip in the. They mix real footage from policy. So, for example, there's a speech, Keir Starmer's regulation speech, which I didn't particularly enjoy. And. But you're sitting behind Liz Truss as she's sort of, you know, doing what ministers do, saying, oh, no, we're dealing with it. Da, da, da. I mean, what was your experience at the Environment Agents? Because they come across so badly, they look like a total failed operation.
- [56:51]
Rory Stewart
It's awful, right? I mean, firstly, I feel very loyal towards my teams, so I naturally felt very, very loyal towards the Environment Agency and I really was proud to work with them. During the flooding, I used to go out and, you know, I walked the super sewer down the Thames with them. I mean, I really took a lot of interest. And every week my Monday morning started with, with a call with the Chief Executive and the chairman of the Environment Agency, getting an update on what they'd done, what was going on, et cetera. I'd go and visit them in Bristol, I'd go and visit them up in York, I'd go and see in Cumbria. And I always felt as individuals, they were hard working, dedicated, thoughtful people. They were very happy to jump in a car with me, go out to see a farmer if there was a protest. And then on the other hand, you have the other side of the story, which is every farmer saying to me, this is a criminal organization. When I see Environment Agency turn up, I want to hang myself, really. All the businesses saying, the Environment Agency's got no idea what they're doing. Local residents saying they're dreadful. These stories around the water companies. And then I'd go back to the Environment Agency and see these very kind of educated, polite, helpful people in their special things going around. A lot of them, I'm sure there are good people, a lot of them became friends of mine and I liked a British diplomat who'd been our ambassador in India, ended up as chair of the Environment Agency and in fact, I was briefly put up to be chair of the Environment Agency. Fortunately, Boris Johnson scotched it because he hated me. But the reason they were considering me is I really was very interested in subject as water medicine left it. But all these things were completely true. So your revolving doorpoint, one of the first things you noticed when you were a minister in this is that the water industry was very, very good at entertaining ministers, very good at suggesting just how much money you could make as the chief executive of a water company, or how much money you could make on the board of water company. Indeed, some of my colleagues followed that route. So that's a conflict of interest, right? Number two, getting to the information. So the story that we were told again and again while this train wreck was happening, it's clear now, looking at Thames water, that it's a train wreck beyond imagining. Disgusting. Sewage overflowing, water not being provided, bills going through the roof, bonuses being paid out, private debt, companies coming in KKR being offered 3 billion quid and then walking away because apparently they can't make enough money off this. I mean, unbelievable, right? But the story that I heard again and again as the Water Minister now going back 10 years, is water privatization had been one of the great unsung successes of all time, that costs have been kept down. So you spent one pound a day on getting your water in and out. $20 billion of investment had gone in from the water companies and none of this would have happened if it had been kept in public hands, was the argument that the investment wouldn't have happened and the costs would have gone up anyway. That was my experience as Water Minister. And the final thing is that I think I said this before when I tried to challenge ofwad and say, look, are you sure these water companies are really doing a good job? Because I keep hearing from different people, their beaches are full of poo, et cetera. You would get these presentations which would say, this is all the improvement that we've done. We're 5% improvement this year, and this is the EU regulation and this is the number of blue flags. So you're given the blue flag confession, right? As a Minister, you have to be really persistent and curious, say, okay, you've told me, this is a blue flag on. I'm going to that beach. Here's a piece of human poo on the beach. Why is there a blue flag?
- [60:24]
Alistair Campbell
You're busy, aren't you? They know that you're busy. They know you can't visit every beach.
- [60:28]
Rory Stewart
And you're dealing with these very, very charming people. Now here's. Let me push it even further. What would have happened if I'd gone completely ballistic, made this my obsession in the way that I did violence in prisons, and really started saying, I think these water companies are crooks. I think the whole system's screwed. I think our beaches are filthy, Right? And I think we as the treasury need to spend 20 billion pounds more on sorting out the sewage system. Pretty soon, I think people would have been saying to the Prime Minister, whoever the Prime Minister was, I'm afraid your Minister's gone a bit tonto. He doesn't really understand what he's talking about. He doesn't really understand the treasury implications. He's embarrassing the government. He's asking, how are we going to get investment in from KKR if this guy keeps suggesting that he's.
- [61:08]
Alistair Campbell
Well, there was a very interesting exchange that I tweeted about this and somebody sent me an exchange between Barry Gardner, the Labour mp, and he was grilling Emma Reynolds, the Environment Secretary, and Barry really had his facts on him.
- [61:20]
Rory Stewart
He used to grow meat too. He's been on his quite a long
- [61:22]
Alistair Campbell
time, quite a good griller and he really was going for it. And. And when you boil down what she was saying, without wanting maybe to say in these terms, she was kind of saying, yeah, but listen, Barry, the only way to do this is to take it back fully into public ownership and there just isn't the money for that.
- [61:37]
Rory Stewart
So one of my heroes, as you know, is Dieter Helm and I might try to see if we can persuade him to do a little bit for the newsletter on this, because he thinks about this a lot, but essentially he says, in the end, you've got to bear in mind that someone's got to pay, someone's got to be bear the risk and someone's got to finance it. So who's going to pay? Is the government going to pay? Is the person with their bill going to pay? Or are you going to ask a private company to pay? And who's going to take the risk if it goes wrong? I mean, if the sewage ends up on the beach, is it the private company is going to take the risk? Is it the government that's going to take the risk?
- [62:10]
Alistair Campbell
England is the only country in the world with a fully privatized water system, only one in the world.
- [62:15]
Rory Stewart
So if we re nationalize, we've got to understand that in the end the government's going to have to take the cost and there's no desire from the government to do, in fact, what the government's doing in John Cutler's report, I'm afraid, may be the worst of all worlds, which is suggesting that OFWAT is going to be beefed up and interfere even more in a pretty arbitrary way with these companies, which will just drive the cost of financing up. So let's say you're some, I don't know, massive American fund and you're trying to persuade them to come in. And why is the government persuading mass American funds to come in? Well, the bottom line is the government doesn't want to pay and they don't want the householder to pay. So their idea is that somehow some complicated international private finance debt structure is going to come in, take over Thames Water. And the question is why? Why would they take it over? Right. Well, presumably because they think they're going to make money. But in order to make money, that company needs to know there's a predictable revenue stream. If Cunliff has set off an offer which Every year or two, politicians stand up in the House of Commons or Channel 4 Producer News Program saying, these companies are horrible. We need to hit their bottom line. They can't be paying their bonuses. They've got to take the risk. Well, they'll say, fine, but I'm going to charge you more. If you're going to have an unstable regulatory environment and you're going to say that I have to take all the risk, well, then the cost to the government of me, KKR, whoever, producing this 3 billion is going to go through the roof. So we've got to keep coming back to this question. Somebody's got to pay for it.
- [63:44]
Alistair Campbell
Absolutely. I mean, Macquarie is the private sector villain of the piece in terms of this, this program on, on Channel 4. But it. Honestly, I really do recommend people watch it because it's. I mean, it's a drama. But you've got these two guys who have actually, they've done an interview for, for our newsletter this week, the Gold, Ash Smith and Peter Hammond. And you can sign up for the newsletter in the description below. They're beautifully played. You've got these wonderful shots where they go along to these meetings where they're being bullshitted and they sort of look at each other and they're like, this can't be right, can it? And it's. They're not sort of shouty kind of people. But you see through the series, you just see a system that's broken and everybody who has a vested interest in the system not being broken saying that it's not broken. Yeah, but if you just, you know, the figures are stunning. 585,000 times. Sewage was dumped into our waterways in 2024. And they have this line that it's only when it's heavy rain. And that is bullshit too.
- [64:43]
Rory Stewart
So this experience, though, that you've described of going to a meeting, sitting there and just thinking quietly, this doesn't quite make sense, this can't quite be right. Is, I'm afraid, the experience of British citizens in so many bits. I mean, if I'm trying to get to the bottom of why my constituents are angry, I don't know whether this is. Your Liam Burns book on populism touches on this. The biggest driver of anger I felt with my constituents was this sense that something was going clearly wrong. Something's wrong with their school, something's wrong with their hospital. I remember famously this old woman saying to me, I don't need to pay to go to Switzerland to get killed. I can just go into the Cumberland Infirmary or Or your fields have been flooded or people are rewilding. Let's imagine you're a farmer. Suddenly, let's take what's happening actually at the moment today in Cumbria, the whole Lowther Valley, all the way from Penrith down to Kendal, has got into a government rewilding scheme, which is basically driving sheep off the fells, leading to a lot of farms being closed and essentially trying to create a native wilderness, right? And it's really disruptive for traditional landscapes, farmers, communities, schools, etc. You turn up to a meeting as an ordinary person, let's say you're a Cumbrian farmer and what do you meet? You meet a bank of people in lovely fleeces saying, environment agency, Natural England National Park. You have people who've done master's degrees in environmental science at Manchester, you have government regulation, you have lawyers, and they're all telling you, you it's the only thing to do. And they make you feel stupid. You stick up your hand and say, well, this can't make sense because there's gorse and bracken all over the hillside and how am I supposed to make a living when I'm going to sheep, no, I'm going to sell my farm. It's the same with the inheritance tax. I mean, that was a really interesting one with farmers, right? The farmers are like, this inheritance tax is going to kill us. And the government says, no, no, no, if you look at the figures, it's not going to affect any of you. And they're like, well, that's just not true. It's affecting all of us they wiped out. And the government's saying, no, no, if you look at the figures, right, so this really weird world that we've created, and sometimes it's about lawyers, sometimes it's about quango, sometimes about agencies, but it's also a lot about class. It's about people, often from cities with advanced degrees, telling people who have less resources, less education, less power to just put up with stuff that they know is no good.
- [67:03]
Alistair Campbell
Well, I think what it is, it's the state, through our political system, the way that people get elected, the way that governments are formed, basically saying, whatever problem you face in the world, we can fix it for you. But actually, once you've contracted out most of the fixing to people whose motivations are completely different. So I talk about 585,000 sewage bills in 2024 shareholders. The UK water companies were taking out a billion in dividends for what surely is reward for failure. And so I think it's that sense of the state failing. But the state partly fails because those at the top of it, across all the parties basically say, we can fix everything for you and you can't. And I think a little bit more honesty on that front would be no bad thing. But I think this is two cases of. I think Thatcher is, you know, Thatcher's. A lot of the stuff that's wrong with our country today, I think is down to Thatcher. Water privatization to me is absolutely a symbol of it. The Environment Agency was. Funding was massively cut during the austerity period. And then Ofcom, I mean, you know, God knows what they do. God knows what they do because here's something happening on their watch.
- [68:14]
Rory Stewart
Well, what are they doing? I don't know why. I mean, if they're not shutting down GB News, I mean, they've got loads
- [68:19]
Alistair Campbell
of work to do. I'm sure they do lots, you know, telecoms and all that stuff.
- [68:22]
Rory Stewart
We can debate whether or not they should be regulating broadcasting in a completely different way to podcast, but if that's their job, that's their law, do it.
- [68:30]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, but I think, honestly, I think what people will be amazing. And I kind of felt a little bit, because the way that these people speak, okay, these bullshit merchants, when they're dealing with staff, some of the Environment Agency staff in the drama are basically, you know, what are you doing? You're not doing your job, you're not letting us do our job. They do this thing called self monitoring where essentially the water companies decide when they're spilling out stuff that they shouldn't be, and they have the responsibility then to tell the Environment Agency when they're doing terrible things, hey, guess what? They say it's not going wrong. And so you've got people who are really complaining about it, wanting to do it, and you have these sort of suits and PR merchants who are basically just giving a line.
- [69:14]
Rory Stewart
There's been some amazing comic. I mean, maybe just finish on this. We could share these amazing short YouTube comedy sketches on how the water companies do this. And actually the trick seems to be that they start with empathy and then move to super specific detail, which you can't follow. It's to do with this exact widget on this particular control that you can't do this yet.
- [69:34]
Alistair Campbell
There's a great character in it. He was the guy who's looking after the sewage works and he's this wonderful character. He just keeps saying, I hate my life. Horrible job. Anyway, it's really, really, really good. So there you are, people, Dirty business and the new world they're your two cultural references for the week.
- [69:55]
Rory Stewart
Thank you very much. See you soon.
- [69:57]
Alistair Campbell
Bye. Bye.