522. Has Hungary Shown Britain How to Beat Farage? (Question Time)

Summary

The Rest Is Politics – Episode 522: Has Hungary Shown Britain How to Beat Farage? (Question Time)
Hosts: Alastair Campbell & Rory Stewart
Date: April 15, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode of The Rest Is Politics, Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart address listener questions with a primary focus on Hungary’s dramatic political transformation where Viktor Orban, the emblematic populist leader, has been ousted by Peter Magyar. Drawing parallels between Hungary’s populist defeat and the rise of similar movements in the UK and beyond, the hosts dissect the tactics and lessons from Hungary, implications for Nigel Farage and the Reform Party, and the ongoing challenges of populism. They also reflect on broader political trends in Scotland and Wales, discuss social media’s effects on the younger generation, and end with some personal notes.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Hungary’s Upset: Ousting Viktor Orban

• Background & Result
  • Viktor Orban’s 16-year reign comes to an end, defeated decisively by Peter Magyar.
  • Many Hungarians across the political spectrum united to remove Orban.
• Why Did Magyar Win?
  • Magyar, a center-right figure, capitalized on anti-Orban sentiment, visiting an extraordinary number of communities and running an active grassroots campaign ([05:35]).
  • He avoided polarizing debates, maintained a centrist stance, and didn’t engage in "culture wars" ([07:29]).
  • Magyar’s first press conference suggested a more conciliatory approach to the EU and Ukraine and distanced himself from both Trump and Putin ([03:57]).
• Orban’s Legacy & Tactics
  • Orban’s grip was sustained through constitutional manipulation, gerrymandering, control of media, and the cultivation of oligarchs ([05:35]).
  • Despite an appearance of democracy, state mechanisms were co-opted for populist benefit.

"He didn’t just win, he absolutely trounced him."
— Alastair Campbell ([05:35])

"In many ways many people who knew Hungary well thought that Orban had stacked the cards in a way that it was going to be very, very difficult to beat him."
— Rory Stewart ([05:35])

2. Lessons for Defeating Populists Globally

• What Other Countries Can Learn
  • It’s possible—but not inevitable—to defeat entrenched populists; it demands tireless direct engagement and charismatic campaigning ([07:29], [13:55]).
  • Defeating populism requires transcending polarization and providing a credible alternative, not just attacking the populist ([09:38], [13:55]).
• Implications for UK & Farage
  • Farage and counterparts like Le Pen and Vidal in Europe are showing signs of distancing from Trump, whose brand is "tanking" globally ([12:03]).
  • Corruption scandals and pro-Russian stances damage the populist image, particularly when they betray “man of the people” credentials ([12:03]).

"If you project yourself as the man of the people and suddenly you become the corrupt elite you're meant to be fighting against, you're going to pay a price."
— Alastair Campbell ([12:03])

3. Populists, Social Media, and New Campaigning Models

• The Power of Social Media
  • Social media acts as a double-edged sword—empowering both populists and insurgent centrists outside the mainstream media ecosystem ([09:38]).
  • Candidates like Magyar, Mamdani (New York), and Zelenskyy (Ukraine) succeeded by bypassing traditional media and exploiting digital platforms.
• Reforming Political Campaigns
  • Modern campaigns succeed with relentless presence, charisma, and direct communication—not bureaucratic technocracy ([13:55]).

"You need very, very aggressive, active, charismatic campaigning... It's the only way I think of defeating the populists."
— Rory Stewart ([13:55])

4. Hungary’s Next Challenge: Rebuilding Democracy

• Obstacles Facing Magyar
  • The system remains stacked by Orban loyalists—in judiciary, media, state appointments—similar to challenges faced by Poland’s Donald Tusk ([16:44], [18:25]).
  • Quick, legal, and effective institutional reforms are essential, leveraging Magyar’s 2/3 parliamentary majority.
  • Calls for president’s resignation and plans to overhaul state propaganda are among first steps.
  • Orban is expected to remain a disruptive presence in opposition and international populist circles ([18:25]).

"He should really go for this, the old cliche, hit the ground running. He should really make some big moves very, very quickly."
— Alastair Campbell ([18:25])

5. Re-engaging the Polarized and Disaffected

• Winning Back Reform Voters (UK context)
  • Many disaffected voters feel ignored by mainstream parties. It's crucial to "make them feel that you get their lives and you want to be part of making their lives better" ([21:13]).
  • Liam Byrne’s analysis: populism is driven by ‘appeasement, autocracy and avarice.’ Exposing corruption ("avarice") is especially potent ([22:42]).
  • The progressive left and centrists need to directly challenge media ecosystems that fuel the populist narrative and money-making ([22:42], [25:16]).

6. Populism in UK and Scottish/Welsh Elections

• Local Elections & The Referendum Framing
  • Reform and SNP are pitching council elections as binary referenda on national questions—Farage on Starmer, Swinney on Scottish independence ([28:27]).
  • This overshadows vital local issues and shifts focus to national identity and leadership ([29:18], [31:37]).
• Changing Party Dynamics
  • Scotland: Potential collapse of Labour and Conservatives in favor of SNP and Reform—traditionally a two-party system now fracturing ([31:37]).
  • Wales: Labour’s historical dominance under threat—possible third-place finish behind Plaid Cymru and Reform ([35:04]).
• Message for Campaigners
  • Both hosts stress the need for compelling, values-based, and anti-corruption narratives. Criticize bland technocracy and urge for bolder policy positioning ([36:55], [38:42]).

"If you can't land something on a party that managed to produce Alex Salmon and Nicola Sturgeon's husband, you're really struggling."
— Rory Stewart ([38:42])

7. Critical Thinking, Social Media & Gen Z

• Should Social Media Be Banned for Kids?
  • Listener question calls for teaching ‘discernment’—the ability to sift truth from manipulation—in schools ([39:02], [40:15]).
  • Young people increasingly cynical, taught to distrust and question, yet risk overshooting into nihilism ([40:15]).
  • Hosts announce a series focusing on Gen Z’s views of politics, society, and technology ([43:21]).

"The real challenge, I think, is that we create... a hyper-intelligent, hypercritical, but ultimately quite cynical and nihilistic culture."
— Rory Stewart ([41:37])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Challenge of Unseating Strongmen:
  "Populists can be beaten. But I think the second point is it's not inevitable. It takes real bootlever, it takes real energy." — Rory Stewart ([05:35])
• On Farage’s Manipulation of Local Elections:
  "Farage, who understands the media, frankly, better than most of the media do, that's the game that he's playing." — Alastair Campbell ([29:18])
• On Cynicism Among Young People:
  "If you watch advertisements with them... they are incredibly quick to say this is a scam. Who's making money out of this?" — Rory Stewart ([40:15])
• On the Importance of Communication:
  "You have to make them feel that you get their lives and you want to be part of making their lives better." — Alastair Campbell ([21:13])
• On Corruption as the Achilles’ Heel of Populists:
  "I think there's always something. Garry Kasparov makes this point. There's always something about the far right that they really like Putin and they really like money." — Alastair Campbell ([15:59])

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Timestamps for Key Sections

| Segment | Timestamp (MM:SS) | |-------------------------------------|-----------------------| | Hungary and defeating Orban | 03:13 – 09:38 | | Lessons for UK/Reform/Farage | 12:03 – 15:59 | | Institutional challenges ahead | 16:44 – 20:03 | | Re-engaging disaffected voters | 21:13 – 24:04 | | Populist money, crypto, donations | 24:04 – 26:41 | | UK & devolved elections analysis | 28:27 – 35:04 | | SNP & Scottish Labour dynamics | 35:04 – 38:42 | | Teaching discernment/Gen Z focus | 39:02 – 43:21 | | Rory’s Galapagos trip (personal) | 44:46 – 51:23 |

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Tone & Approach

Alastair and Rory maintain their trademark: reasoned-but-spirited debate; mutual interruptions; injection of wry humor; deep dives into institutional detail; and a strong call for political engagement without descending into cynicism.

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Final Thoughts

This episode masterfully dissects the anatomy of populist power and defeat, offering hope that even the most entrenched autocrats can be beaten—if opposition parties and civil society harness charisma, relentless grassroots work, compelling anti-corruption narratives, and a willingness to learn from both failures and international successes.

The push for critical thinking and discernment among younger generations, coupled with the political challenges across the UK, rounds out an episode rich in insight, candor, and forward-looking analysis.

Transcript

[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

[Rory Stewart]

that's therestispolitics.com People thought that it was going to be very difficult to defeat him.

[Alistair Campbell]

He didn't just win, he absolutely trounced him.

[Rory Stewart]

How do you dismantle what the other lot have done in a way that is legal, effective and quick?

[Alistair Campbell]

On day one he called for the country's president to resign. This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy.

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[Rory Stewart]

Welcome to the Rest Is Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart and with me Alistair Campbell. Lots of questions. We're going to do quite a lot on Hungary, where there's been an incredible result. We'll also look at the local elections coming in Britain, Scottish elections and and Welsh elections and much more. But, Alastair, I wanted to start with a question from Joe. Is it not possible that the Hungarian people have just pinched their noses to vote for Magia due to fatigue from 16 years of Orban's government? Given Maaja's own politics, are they really out of the populist quagmire?

[Alistair Campbell]

I think that is a little bit harsh on the new incoming Hungarian Prime Minister. It is true. China show that a lot of people who would not normally vote for Magyar, who essentially is a centre right politician, did so because they just wanted to get rid of Orban. No doubt about that at all. Including people considerably. Well, to the left of him, quite a few people who might have stood didn't. Some of the parties pulled their punches and essentially anybody who was not for Fideh or Ban was wanted Magyar to win.

[Rory Stewart]

Sorry, I'm interrupting this. Very naughty of me, but I've got a lot from a Hungarian telling me that the correct pronunciation is Peter Magyar.

[Alistair Campbell]

Okay, well, Peter Magyar did a pretty amazing job. And yes, it's true, Joe, that a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily have voted for a centre right politician decided to do so because the big driving goal of the election for so many people was just to get rid of Orban. Are they out of the populist quagmire? Well, the answer to that is hopefully. I thought it was very interesting, his press conference, because Orban is much more than the Prime Minister of Hungary. He's this big global figure, part of the populist, nationalist, authoritarian politics that is kind of spreading like a virus, which is why it's so good that Magyar has managed to sort of put a stop to him. But I thought his press conference, he covered an awful lot of ground. He was definitely being more reasonable towards Europe. He was being pro Ukrainian, saying Ukraine has to be able to sort out its own future. He said if Trump phoned him, he'd take the call, but he wasn't looking for it. And he said the same about Putin. He said he hoped that the UK rejoined the European Union. Tick, in my book, let's just not underestimate this. In any election, you have to fight what's in front of you. And he had to fight a guy who's been in power for 16 years, who has set the institutions of the state basically as extensions of his own political project, with a massive control of the media, Russian money pouring in, Trump sending Vance and Rubio to back him up. Trump himself saying on the day, you know, vote for this guy, if you want a direct line to the White House. And he won. He didn't just win, he absolutely trounced him.

[Rory Stewart]

It's an incredible day, isn't it? It's a really incredible day because in many ways many people who knew Hungary well thought that Orban had stacked the cards in a way that it was going to be very, very difficult to beat him. What Orban essentially had done over 16 years is demonstrate, or it felt like he could demonstrate, that you could create the beginnings of a proper authoritarian, non democratic state without doing any of the formal things that you would expect an authoritarian government to do. So use a genuine majority in parliament to re rig the constitution and stack the judiciary, state money to rewire the media. So he didn't need to actually censor independent media, but basically use market mechanisms and enormous subsidies to boost his own media, use government contracts and procurement to create a new class of corrupt oligarchs, to reinforce gerrymander district boundaries. And so with district boundaries gerrymandered, the courts captured, the media captured and all the stuff you're talking about real interference. People thought that it was going to be very difficult to defeat him and such credit, I think, to Maggio for doing this because I mean, the guy visited something like 95% of all the parishes in Hungary during this campaign. So he managed to see 327 towns 517 times, visited 161 parishes out of 174, often managed to visit six or even nine, nine towns in one day. So I think it's a real inspiration that absolutely, populists can be beaten. But I think the second point is it's not inevitable. It takes real bootlever, it takes real energy. And if people are going to do this, my goodness, they're going to work harder.

[Alistair Campbell]

Because Orban has been such a dominant figure, not just in Hungary, but as part of this broader political debate around the world. I think we underestimate as well the role of civil society that it did keep going. There were lots of organizations who did keep trying to call this stuff out as it was happening. But listen, the campaigning, he literally, as you say, went right around the country again and again and again, just trying to get his message through because he couldn't get access to the mainstream media. It's maybe a point here, Rory, to plug the populism series. We delayed episode two because of the Zelenskyy interview, but it's out for members on Friday and this is an extended interview with Liam Byrne and a lot of what Magyar has done. Sorry, I'm finding the Magyar very difficult. A lot of what the new Hungarian Prime Minister has done relates to some of the lessons and the messages that Liam Byrne is putting in his book, why Populists are Winning and how to Beat Them, which is what we talk about. So, for example, I saw a lot of the kind of celebration of people on the left was based on the assumption that this was a traditional left right contest and the guy in the right has lost. No, he stayed very much as a right of center politician. He refused to get pushed into a lot of the kind of so called woke debates. They kept trying to lay a trap for him to come out on lgbt. They kept trying to sort of suggest that he was going to, you know, be so pro Ukrainian that your kids would be sent to war as soon as he became prime minister. And he just held very, very firm in the center. And so I think that's one lesson. The other thing is, I think that, and this is something that Liam Byrne said, you don't win people over to your side by telling them that they're wrong the whole time. I think the other thing that he did is he created a new framing for why somebody who did support Orban could be persuaded to come back to something more mainstream and sensible. And when we get to part two on Friday, it's very much where we're talking about how to beat populism. And I think that, you know, Magyar is going to be part of that story going forward.

[Rory Stewart]

There was a question from Douglas, one of our listeners. After democratic success in Hungary in part due to Fides's pro Russian stance, what do you think UK voters red lines are. Do you think reform and other European right wing parties will change their tactics? Now, some of you keep pointing out Hungary, which is quite a small country and my goodness, you don't envy Peter Magyar because he is dealing with a country which is in demographic decline. Women are having on average 1.3 children. The Hungarian population has been dropping since 1980, has a serious debt problem, serious problems of productivity and quite a small population. But why did it matter? And you keep pointing out this tiny country matters so much. Well, Pannikas Orban became for 16 years increasingly the global cheerleader of the populist right. He used Hungarian state money, for example, and Fidesz linked banks to fund Marine Le Pen's party. And he put these huge global conferences together and he had, he thought this wonderful recipe that he was sharing with Trump's Team Maga, which was this whole recipe about how you could, while apparently still operating within a pretence of a constitutional market framework, rig the whole system in favour of your populism. I just think, though, that in terms of reform, and this is a point you've made in the past, and I'd be interested in how we develop this, one lesson from this is that Trump is increasingly becoming a liability. Second lesson from this is that if we look at three people that we've discussed a lot recently, Magyar Mamdani, the person who's won in New York, and Zelenskyy, who you've just interviewed, these are people who ran very unconventional campaigns outside the mainstream media. They challenged the sort of Trumpian model, not by doing conventional campaigns in the mainstream media. In the case of Maggio, he had to. He couldn't get to the mainstream media. In the case of Mamdani, basically the Democratic establishment under Cuomo had stitched the whole thing up and had the running behind Cuomo. So what they have found is the other side of social media. On the one hand, of course, social media has superpowered people like Trump and the new media environment, but it also gives these chinks of light, these opportunities for insurgent independent candidates to come out of nowhere. We see this maybe with Zach Polanski and the Green Party getting a kind of name recognition that's never been seen before. Anyway, over to you for the UK implications.

[Alistair Campbell]

Yeah, look, I think it is interesting how Farage is without a doubt trying to distance himself a little bit from Trump. He went in both feet into the start of the Iran war, saying we should be alongside him, quickly realized that was a stupid mistake and is trying to sort of wriggle his way out of that. Vidal, the leader of the AfD in Germany, she has become increasingly quite critical of Trump. I noticed that the weekend that Meloni, right wing populist in Italy, she was critical of Trump because of his attack on the Pope. Mark Carney, who in a sense partly became prime minister because of the Trump attacks on Canada, which so damaged Pierre Polievre, the right wing populist candidate who was so far ahead. Mark Carney spoke at his party conference at the weekend and he was not messing about in terms of hitting back at the Trump. Sanchez, who you mentioned in the main podcast, he's another one. So Trump's brand is tanking. And if you just think about some of the judgments that Nigel Farage represents, pro Putin, terrible, Pro Trump, terrible, Absolutely obsessed with money. And I think that one of the really big things that damaged Orban so much was this Sense of corruption. Even though it wasn't that widely reported because the media was controlled, people knew that he had these massive mansions and they knew that his best friend, the gasfitter, had become a billionaire. And if you project yourself as the man of the people and suddenly you become the corrupt elite you're meant to be fighting against, you're going to pay a price. I think that Farage, Vidal, Le Pen, I think they also lost in this election. But here's the thing. Only if the progressive left learn the right lessons from what's gone on here, don't assume that this mean the sorts of culture wars that lost the Democrats support in the United States.

[Rory Stewart]

No culture wars. And I think a second lesson is you really need very, very aggressive, active, charismatic campaigning. I mean, just coming back to both Mamdani's skill with social media and Madge's relentless turning up in every village hall over two years building his base. I mean, if Starmer wants to do well in the next election, Labour wants to do well in the next election, they need to either find a way of Starmer communicating like this, or they need to get rid of Starmer and find someone who can do this. The only way I think of defeating the populace I'm seeing over the last six, seven years is real communication skills, charisma, skill with social media. And all those people that you've talked about have that. And I think what can't happen is kind of gray, steady as you go, boring. Technocracy, safety first. Tempting though that is. It didn't really work for Theresa May, it's not really working for Starmer, it didn't work for Biden. You need a very different type of approach. Final one for me. And you've made this point. But the reason, of course we're talking about the Hungarian election is the really big change is in terms of what it means for Europe. Orban was the big disruptor, the big veto holder, the big guy who could really disrupt Europe coming together. And on Ukraine, Peter Maja's first statement, which I just want to read out because I just think it's so startling for the difference. Everyone in Hungary, he said in his speech, knows that Ukraine is a victim of this war and no one should tell them under what conditions they should enter a peace or sign a peace treaty. We cannot tell any country to give up their territory. And this is what the Fidesz politicians said. Then I'd like to ask them, what would you do if Russia attacked Hungary? Which Hungarian counties would you be willing to give up? Ukraine should receive security guarantees and. And territorial guarantees that can be observed and kept. Ukraine, under the Budapest memorandum, something you discussed with Zelenskyy, gave up its nuclear arsenal for guarantees, but those guarantees were violated repeatedly by Russia.

[Alistair Campbell]

Very good, very strong. He's still pretty young. He's mid-40s. He's got something of a checkered past. And all these accusations related to how he treated his wife, who was also a minister, and he says it's all smears and all that, but I just felt he fought an amazing campaign that met the moment. And I'm sure he came under lots of pressure to be maybe a little bit less centered in the strategy that he pursued just on this corruption thing, because, I mean, I'm staggered that the issue of corruption in the United States is not far, far, far bigger than it is. But I think there's always something. Garry Kasparov makes this point. There's always something about the far right that they really like Putin and they really like money.

[Rory Stewart]

Alison, We've done a lot on Hungary. I think there's a lot more that we could do because I think it's probably one of the most exciting moments. I mean, we've been leading up to this for four years where we actually, at the beginning of this show, covered Orban's first re election. So 16 years of Hungarian populist rule finished. But something that we maybe need to get into a little bit more is the challenges that murder will now face in not just kind of demographic, economic, but as with Poland, one of the challenges is the way in which the whole thing is stacked. And we had a question from Henry, who asked, are there lessons from Donald Tusk in Poland for what Marsha would have to do in Hungary to turn the situation around and to remind people the problem there that Donald Tusk defeated the Law and Justice Party, which had been in power in Poland since 2015, but he found that the whole institutional structure of the Polish state had been rigged in favor of the populists. Masha is now taking over a situation where the judges have been appointed with a central bank governor, where most of the leading business people are all stacked on Orban's side. Orban will be gambling he can just wait this out, have another go in a couple years time and try to make sure that Masha can make no progress, because he can basically paralyze him. And the challenge to polls rules have faced is how do you dismantle what the other lot have done in a way that is legal, effective and quick? Because often what you find is that In Poland you have these very strange situations where Tusk has been criticized for firing judges that the last government, the populist government, was criticized for appointing in the first place. So.

[Alistair Campbell]

Yeah, well, I think this is why the 2/3 super majority, it was so important because it means he does have a greater power to make constitutional change. But so, for example, on day one, he called for the country's president to resign. Why? Because the country's president is there basically as a sort of tool of Orban. So he knows he's going to be oppositional. There are all sorts of new bodies, institutions that Orban set up that Magyar will want to get rid of. We've talked a lot about the media. Essentially what you have is a sort of Russian style propaganda outfit running as the state broadcaster. He'll need to change that. And of course, as you say, now that he stops being the challenger and he becomes the incumbent, it then becomes a little bit harder. That's why I think he should really go for this, the old cliche, hit the ground running. He should really make some big moves very, very quickly. And Orban, interestingly, yesterday, two interesting things about Orban, first is he threw the towel in very, very quickly. I hope that wasn't to do some deal about not being gone after himself, because Manturov has been very clear through the campaign, people who've looted the country like the best friends who've become billionaires and all the rest of it. He feels that there has to be some sort of accountability. But Orban did a very short piece to camera which said to me, he's not going away quietly. He kept talking about the patriots in the country have got to stick together. I suspect we'll see a lot of him on the Liz Truss CPAC circuit. He's not going to go away as a voice and he's not going to go away as a thorn in, in the new government side. So.

[Rory Stewart]

Well, the other thing that won't go away is that he still has a lot of supporters. I mean, this was a huge victory for Magia, but we mustn't forget that there is still a very, very big group and this is something you've been discussing in your populism miniseries, who genuinely remain very polarized, very divided and will be very angry about Macho's victory. So there are a lot of Orban supporters out there who buy into the narrative that Europe is rigging things against Orban, that they're facing cultural decline, that they're fighting for the survival of the Hungarian nation, against immigration that they're being dragged into a war in Ukraine by Zelenskyy and a global elite. And so we're not in a world in which it's easy to sort of do roundtables and compromise and bring people together. He's got to find some way of re engaging that group with the body politics. He won't get them all on board. But. But just quickly, because this was the theme of your miniseries on populism. What is the lesson about how one would re engage with what I suppose are the Hungarian equivalents to the reform voters?

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, this is where I found Liam Byrne's analysis so interesting because essentially he's done a lot of research, a lot of polling, a lot of survey work, breaking them down into different groups. And essentially he's saying there are a fairly sizable group of people who are reform minded or reform curious, who are just not going to vote anything but reform. A lot of them may not vote, but they're not going to vote labor, they're not going to vote Tory, they're not going to vote lib demons. He reckons it's about 40% that labor could get back. And partly it's this thing about respect. It's this thing about understanding why they're so pissed off with the main parties, why they feel their lives have not got better. And you have to give them the arguments for that and the policies for that. And you have to back to your point about communication and being out there the whole time. You have to make them feel that you get their lives and you get, you want to be part of making their lives better. And then I think the other thing that he was really strong on is that we've got our three P's, populism, polarization, post truth. And he's got his three A's that he says are absolutely fundamental to the way that populists operate. Appeasement, autocracy and avarice. Now, appeasement basically means, and this is what Orban did brilliantly for four terms, even the opposition felt we're never going to beat this guy guy. He's got too much control. So you give in or you give up.

[Rory Stewart]

I mean, that's what Trump's gambling on in the global system, isn't it? In the end, everybody will appease Trump and we'll just suck up whatever America does.

[Alistair Campbell]

And then autocracy is the system that you build around yourself. But he says that the third one, which is so important, I'm really glad that the Philip Rycroft review was, is underway. I think the government needs to go even further in cleaning up the financing of our politics because the third A is avarice. And there is something very, very strange. I mean, why aren't people appalled at the money that Trump and his family are making being in power? Why has it taken the Hungarians 16 years to realize that this is just utterly sickening? And yet when you see Nigel Farage and some of his money making schemes, the one that I nearly fooled you on April 4, where his Bitcoin thing with kwasi kwa tang, all the money that, that they make from GB News, I mean, one of the other interesting things that Liam Byrne has analyzed is that there's this huge, over £150 million worth of media infrastructure that is essentially built there to help the populist far right. We've just got to be far better, the progressive left in particular, but centrist politics, and I would argue the Tories who are center right as well, far better at exposing this. So listen, I think there's a lot in Liam's book, but there's also, and the series, but there's also a lot in what Magyar's done that I think parties of the left can learn from, not just parties of the right.

[Rory Stewart]

We had a question from Robert from York. What did you make of British crypto billionaire Ben Dello's recent 4 million pound donations reform? It was apparently made before the government's cap on donations to political parties by British citizens living abroad and was brought in, but he's actually moving back to the UK so he'd be able to donate more in the future. I mean, just before you get onto that, it is interesting. Why on earth are all these rich people giving so much reform? And given that there will be a lot of business people who won't believe that reform will be good for the British economy, a lot of more conventional British people who traditionally would have given money to Labour or the Conservatives, believing that a little bit more predictability, a little bit more reason, and maybe even a little bit more of getting close to the European Union will be good for their businesses. Why are they staying away? And why are all these other guys coming in? Is it that a lot of them made their money in crypto and that makes them in a sense, naturally quite anarchistic, anti status quo, anti elite. And of course, crypto money is made so quickly and has so little to do with normal, predictable, functioning economies that maybe that is the sweet spot for a lot of these people on the populist far right.

[Alistair Campbell]

Totally. I think you've answered your own question. They don't want any sort of government oversight, not just of crypto, but of anything that they do to make money. You know, we're back to my argument about the sovereign individual. We're back to why Musk projects himself as a believer of free speech. What he means is that he should be free to do whatever he wants to make more and more money and assimilate more and more power. I just think we've got to wake up to this, that the sorts of, you know, and I don't know these people individually, they may be very, very nice. They may be very nice to their mums and very nice to their dogs and cats. But, you know, I'm instinctively very suspicious of somebody who lives in Thailand and makes his money in crypto and gives loads of money to Nigel Farage. I'm very suspicious of this guy who comes back being portrayed by Richard Tice and Nigel Farage and the Daily Telegraph as a great patriot because he's coming back to put his money into reform. I'm sorry, I do not see this as patriotism. I see this as people who can clock that if they can get Nigel Farage into power, people like them are going to be able to make more money with less oversight and the public will not have a bloody clue what's going on and inequality will widen rather than narrow. And just before we go to the break, Rory, to listeners and viewers who are not yet members of TRIP, who want to hear our fantastic series on populism and all the other bonus content content that we put out there, just

[Rory Stewart]

remind people we've got AI series out there. We've got your series with Michael Wolf on Murdoch. We've got our series on J.D. vance. Lot of stuff to get into and much more coming because it's where Alistair and I pursue our specialist, enthusiastic projects.

[Alistair Campbell]

Anyway, episode one and two of the Rest is Politics miniseries on populism. Get them by joining Trip plus by going to the restispolitics.com now. We'll take a break.

[Rory Stewart]

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[Alistair Campbell]

Com welcome back to the Rest Is Politics Question Time with me, Alistair Campbell

[Rory Stewart]

and with me, Rory Stewart. Now, we've done a lot of international stuff recently, we have, but there's some very interesting things happening in the uk. So Tian, who's a trip member from Bristol, what role will binary divisive populism play in these upcoming local elections? I noticed both the SNP and Reform are reframing these elections in referendum terms. SNP leader John Swinney is pitching another Scottish independence referendum for 2028, while Farage is pitching these local elections as a referendum on stammer. Just on that issue. That's quite interesting, what Tian's picked up there. What's happening in campaigns where essentially you say in a local election, and in Farage's case, you know, you're talking about local council elections, this is a referendum, a binary choice on a big issue who should be prime minister or whether Scotland should be independent. Over to you.

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, it plays into something that I've always felt is really, really terrible about the way that we talk about COVID and campaign in local government. I mean, local councils are so important to so many of the things that people really care about when their bins get collected, how clean their streets are, whether there's actually a local youth club to go to and what have you. And the media has always done this game, and they're doing it in this one as well, is essentially they play into the idea that actually what you do at the end of the local election is you add all the votes together and it's like a gigantic opinion poll and you say whether the party of government is in trouble or not. And it's really, really, really tedious. But of course, Farage, who understands the media, frankly, better than most of the media do, that's the game that he's playing with this. Fiona and I were on our way to the heath the other day and the reformer handing out leaflets outside our local railway station and they actually look like Labour Party leaflets because they're red and there's a picture of Keir Starmer and Tulip Siddiq, local mp, on there. And you think that's interesting. It turns out his whole thing attacking Keir Starmer and Tulip Siddiq and say, if you want to get rid of them, vote reform. Well, if you want to get rid of them, you have to vote for them in a parliamentary election. This is an election about Camden Council, so I can see the politics of it, but I just think it's really sort of pathetic and pure trial. If you go to the Scottish question in Chian's Point, then it's true. We've interviewed Anna Sawa and it's on Leading on Monday. We interviewed John Swinney a few weeks ago, the Scottish First Minister. And when they did the first of the big TV debates the other day, the news that came out of it, the news, as decided by Her Majesty's BBC, was that John Sweeney has indicated that if they win the election, it's the green light for a referendum. It's not really what this election's about. And I get why he's doing it, because Labour is trying to make it a referendum on 20 years of SNP government. He's trying to make it an opinion poll about whether Scotland wants another independence referendum. And meanwhile, all the issues that the Scottish Parliament is responsible for and people in Scotland fought to get health, education, transport, crime and all the rest of it, they barely get a look in.

[Rory Stewart]

It's very frustrating just on the YouGov polls, and we've had a lot of painful experience on this podcast of how wrong polls can go. But just to understand why people see this as so seismic, I came into Parliament 2010, and if we look at the elections since 2011, it looks as though in this election, after 15 years, we're going to end up in a position where the SNP are basically in one of their strongest positions ever and where reform, which didn't manage to elect any MSPs into Hollywood, it's only MSP, and Hollywood is actually a Tory who's defected across, is going to go from zero in the 2021 election to 14, 15, even 20 MSPs. Meanwhile, conservatives and Labour literally will fall off a cliff. I mean, Conservatives might go down from 31 MSPs to 7, labour might go down from 22 down to about 15. So we're really moving into a world in which, instead of where we were in 99 when you were first set up, Holyrood, which was 56, Labor, 35 SMP, and for a long time. Basically a two party system in Scotland. Labour, SMP. I mean, 2007, 47, SMP, 46, Labour into a world which is dominated in seat terms with the S and P, potentially with reform, which was nowhere emerging as the second party, and Labour and Conservatives almost vanishing.

[Alistair Campbell]

Because I think Anasawa is a genuinely good campaigner and good candidate. And when the interview comes out on Monday, I challenged him a bit because I wasn't that happy when he sort of came out at the time that he did, saying Keir Starmer has to go. But when he explained the strategy and the reason why they are polling so bad, badly, you kind of get a sense of why he felt he had to do it. And it's true. This goes back to the conversation about populism. I think we've always felt, or too many people have felt, that reform was always going to really, really struggle to get any sort of foothold in Scotland. You know, if you remember previous visits when Nigel Farage went there and he'd get hounded out and what have you. So there's always been a kind of right wing populist streak in Scottish public opinion. But as you say, where it's going to reform is because of the collapse of the, the Conservative Party.

[Rory Stewart]

Can I just challenge, challenge that? Because presumably what you've done on your miniseries also suggests that quite a lot of those reform voters will also be coming from Labor. That's certainly true across the United Kingdom as a whole. Yes, a lot of them come from Tories, but a lot of them come from Labour too. I mean, it's basically the implosion of the two main parties with their traditional voters going to either SNP or Reform,

[Alistair Campbell]

or where there isn't the snp. What's happened in parts of England is they go, those on the left go to Green and those on the right maybe more curious about reform. But I think that what will happen if, you know, it does seem to me extraordinary, go on about power corrupts absolutely. If you actually look at the SNP record, I think this is something you feel even stronger than I do. You've had these gigantic figures in Scottish politics, Alex Salmond, who's, let's be frank, whose career ended in ignominy. You've had then Nicola Sturgeon, whose husband's career is, you know, not ending exactly where either of them would have wanted

[Rory Stewart]

it to do, which is a polite way of saying about your friend, that the guy is under massive police investigation.

[Alistair Campbell]

I was, I was conscious of the, of the legal ramifications as Always, as I was speaking, my journalistic training of essential law for journalists from many, many, many years ago. And then you've got John Sweeney, who literally has been a big figure in the SNP for 20 years and he's essentially, he's the change. So it just feels a bit weird. And of course, what Scottish Labour people I talk to say, say they're being dragged down by the sense of the Labour government at Westminster not being what people thought that they voted for, because Scotland did go very much to Labour at the last election, at the last general election. I don't know what the odds would have been, but you'd have been pretty nailed on if you'd have put a bet on. And people thought that Anasawa was going to be coasting to first minister. Doesn't look like that's happening. And then Wales is, you know, Wales, which has always been labor and there it's not impossible that labor comes third there with Plyde and reform. So we now have these systems that were devised in a very different era for what we now appear to be the development of this very, very multi party politics. I've got to say, by the way, you often say, I don't criticize, as you call him, my friend Keir Starmer very much. I didn't much see the point of the party election broadcast that Labour put out because it was essentially, it was Keir Starmer at a lectern with two union flags behind him, talking mainly about Iran and the war. Now it's incredibly important, but he does press conferences, he does Parliament for that. I think there should have been a really strong local government message why your local council matters, why these choices matter.

[Rory Stewart]

That's where I thought Anna Sawad's interview was interesting. The strongest bit, the message that would appeal to me and that I hope is going to get him to win over some centrist voters. The kind of, I suppose, the centrist Tory voter or the centrist Labour voter is that he was basically saying it's about performance, it's about sorting out the Scottish economy. He'd like to see taxes come down, he'd like regulation to go, he'd like to grow businesses. He talks very openly about the fact his father was a very successful businessman and entrepreneur. It's a kind of pro business. Let's sort out the education system, set up standards. Quite an optimistic local vision for a more vibrant Scottish economy and public services. I felt, and I'd be interested in some feedback that he could have actually been a little bit more colorful and developed a Few more striking phrases about the moral corruption of the snp, I would have gone with that. And let me reinforce this. I know you disagree with me, but listen, we've just seen Peter Mahria win a whole election by going against the corruption of another party. It's a massive valence salience issue. And so I would be tempted to say that in modern politics, if you want to campaign against, and I see the S and P as actually being equivalent of populist nationalists, you want to run against them, you've got to have striking, impressive things and it can't just. And the problem with ANAS is I love the underlying message, which is solid, good, competent, pro business policies, fine, but it's got to excite people. And you've been given a gift, I'm afraid, by the incredible moral conundrums that the S and P found themselves in. If you can't land something on a party that managed to produce Alex Salmon and Nicola Sturgeon's husband, you're really struggling.

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, I hope this has made people want to listen to the interview when it comes out on Leaning, but the reason I was laughing, Rory, is because when I got home and I said to Fiona, this is what Anna said. And what did. She said, what did Rory think about him? And I said. I said, he thinks he needs better adjectives. And so it is true. You did say. So I was walking around the kitchen going, what do we want? Better adjectives? What do you want them now? So anyway, I think he's a. He's a. He's an interesting character and I hope people listen to and enjoy our interview with him on. On Monday. Now, here's one. Rory, I know how much you like my former. I nearly said former friend. My friend and former colleague, Peter Hyman. This is from Emma. Emma in Glasgow. Should we ban social media for kids? Tick, tick. And instead be teaching what Peter Hyman recently described as the lost art of discernment in schools? Did you have time to read it? I sent it to you. It was this substack he wrote about a teacher that he'd hired when Peter was a headteacher, who he said was brilliant at teaching and getting kids interested in writing and reading and language. But actually this point about discernment and kind of, I guess, separating wheat from chaff and understanding motivation, understanding that as you scroll endlessly through Instagram, somebody's making money out of you and starting to think of those things. And it was sort of a kind of deeper form of critical thinking. But I thought it was a lovely Old fashioned word discernment.

[Rory Stewart]

I mean, I think one of the challenges in a way, is not that young people are gullible, it's that they're unbelievably cynical. I mean, I noticed with my now 9 year old and 11 year old that if you watch advertisements with them or you watch Trump give a speech, they are incredibly quick to say this is a scam. Who's making money out of this? They're very, very alert because they're being scammed all the time. I mean, there are on social media that, you know, they're trying to buy some five pound thing for their video game add on and it turns out to be a brilliant video that ends up in a rubbish product. They're very, very conscious when they're watching Trump speak that it's all nonsense. They'll be very aware of his kind of image of himself as Jesus, et cetera. So one of the challenges, I guess, if you're teaching in schools is not how do you develop cynicism? I think basically the world is making young people very cynical. And they're also taught critical thinking in school, which involves questioning politicians, questioning historical texts. They're very good at that. Part of the problem is how do you encourage them to actually believe anything? How do you encourage them to work out where the skepticism and the questioning ceases and where you're actually prepared to say, in the end, this person, though flawed, is the lesser evil. This person may not be perfect, but actually it's the kind of politician I want to support and I want to support passionately. Here's the compromise I'm prepared to make. Because the real challenge, I think, is that we create. And this I'm worried about sometimes my Yale students, which is a hyper intelligent, hypercritical, but ultimately quite cynical and nihilistic culture.

[Alistair Campbell]

Peter ends his piece by he goes through all these things that you think you have to that are part of this discernment. Establishing whether something is true, understanding the context, working out whether it's actually what worth your time, thinking and caring about it? Is there a value attached to it? Moral purpose, self knowledge? What triggers me, what flatters me, what confirms my biases, what kinds of narratives am I too ready to believe? On it goes, then he says, this is the hardest thing of all. To choose to live life with a greater repertoire of experience, to be discerning about what we watch, read, consume and do. And without teaching the next generation discernment, without all of us asking these questions, we're likely to drown under the vast, never ending Weight of content or be mown down by the AI juggernaut heading towards us. Anyway, it's an interesting piece. We'll put it in the newsletter. And also, Rory, just those that are listeners and youngers of all ages, but particularly the young, I hope will be interested in this. We're planning a miniseries on Gen Z which is going to be presented by somebody else, not us, because we're very, very not Gen Z, you and I, Rory, but we are going to try and find out how Gen Z are perceived, how they perceive themselves and what they think about their prospects in life.

[Rory Stewart]

Can you remind us? I'm so non Gen Z. I don't even know what Gen Z is. What is Gen Z?

[Alistair Campbell]

If you're aged 14 to 29, you are Gen Z. And we've put together two surveys. We're already getting a fantastic response to them. One is for members of gen Z that is 14 to 29, and the other is for the rest of us above the age of 29.

[Rory Stewart]

So Gen Z means anyone who was born after Tony Blair's first election victory?

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, no, but then it stops, stops, stops.

[Rory Stewart]

Basically, I don't know, sometimes two years into David Cameron.

[Alistair Campbell]

Correct. We've asked all sorts of questions. Would you ever consider going to politics? Would you ever consider joining a political party? How do you see your own future? How are you? How worried are you about AI? So anyway, please take part. Especially Gen Z people take part. But also getting some very interesting insights into what older people think of Gen Z, which I think is a lot of it misaligned with reality. But there we are. So the forms to fill in whether you're Gen Z or not are in our free newsletter and they're in the episode description below. So either just go follow the link in the episode description or just go to the rest is politics. Final question, Rory. Izzy wants to know. Well, first of all, she says, welcome back. How was your week off? Did you do anything exciting?

[Rory Stewart]

Well, so I was in the Galapagos and the Galapagos, people who don't know, is a set of volcanic islands about a thousand kilometers off the coast of Ecuador. So I was in Quito and then I went across to the family. Very, very lucky. I was on a National Geographic boat and for people who haven't visited, I mean, it's tough getting there, it's expensive getting there, but it is a life changing experience because the animals are quite unlike any animals that you'll see anywhere else on Earth. The particular group of animals is a very unusual one. It's Giant tortoises. I think people have heard of iguanas, blue footed boobies, but the main thing about them is that they grew up effectively without any predators. And because it's so inhospitable, very little fresh water, no humans until very recently in geological time. Darwin visited and became very interested because it's a real sort of way of telling the story of evolution. It's isolated enough from the continent to have developed these very independent species, but the little island chains produce tiny micro variations, species to species. But this means that you can sit, as I did, on a beach and a sea lion will come straight up to you or it will play with you in the water. Giant tortoises will walk straight past you as though you're not there. Iguanas will sit on your foot. Birds will almost land on your head. You can see albatrosses, I mean, and it's like a sort of picture of the Garden of Eden. It's very, very strange and startling. And of course, the one thing they're not worrying about is Donald Trump. So I had a very, very happy hour lying on a beach with a sea lion being. And essentially the sea lion was teaching me. If you just lie on the beach, just let the water wash you up and down again, you get very sandy, but you don't think about Donald Trump.

[Alistair Campbell]

But you know what's really interesting? I'm just looking at some pictures now and I mean, the beaches are incredible. They're like, they kind of, they remind me of the Hebrides. They're sort of goldy light. Gold is how I describe them.

[Rory Stewart]

Well, there's that, but it's also that these are very recent islands in geological terms. And in Scotland, you know, bits of it are 450, 500 million years old. You know, my bit of Perthshire is like that. These are islands that came out of the sea between 500,000 and 5 million years ago. And therefore some of the islands you go to are basically just black volcanic lava with one or two tiny sprigs of grass. That's the sort of newest ones. And there are active volcanoes. Even the oldest and inverted commas, islands are still just establishing themselves. And it is that sense of being almost at the beginning of creation.

[Alistair Campbell]

Yeah. Where did you stay?

[Rory Stewart]

Stayed on a boat. Stayed on a boat. Because the whole thing, Ecuador has turned the whole thing into an enormous national park. And it regulates very, very carefully where you can go, where you can snorkel, how many people can go on each place. They actually tell you which bits of the islands you can go to at any one time. It's very, very well organized. Lots of restless politics listeners. So when I was lying, embarrassing myself, looking pretty unattractive in my swimming trunks, playing with the sea lion, people would walk up to me and say, well done. On the rest of this politics.

[Alistair Campbell]

They didn't say, why weren't you with Alastair to interview Zelenskyy?

[Rory Stewart]

No, they didn't ask that. But a very particular demographic. I mean, our little boat was basically doctors, university professors, vets seemed to be the demographic being picked up. People like your dad.

[Alistair Campbell]

Are they trying to develop a tourist infrastructure or not?

[Rory Stewart]

No, they're trying to keep most of it offshore on these boats. So they take you in on these Zodiac, these rigid inflatable crafts that take you into the shoreline. And they're very limited on where they allow you to walk. Unless you're actually like my great friend Robert Sapolsky, a genuine naturalist who could sit under a tree and stare at the sea Lions for 20 years. No, I'd really recommend it. It's unbelievable. And it made me so moved by nature and so moved by the sense of when you're underwater, snorkeling. I'm sure many people love snorkeling as much as I do that you're looking at such an ancient world that horseshoe crabs that have been there 400 million years, sharks that have been there hundreds of millions of years, turtles that have been there hundreds of million years, they're before the dinosaurs, moving around in these strange, dark submarine environments.

[Alistair Campbell]

You said that Charles Darwin went there. And I know if you read about Darwin, his visit to the Galapagos was that not. Did that not play quite a role in his developing theories of evolution. What happened to him when he went there?

[Rory Stewart]

Well, he arrives on the Beagle, this amazing five year journey that he takes as a young man, and he collects all these specimens and he notes in it that a man says to him that you can tell just by looking at it which island a tortoise comes from. So the islands where the tortoises have to stretch their heads up higher to get to the prickly pear trees, their shells have a different shape, they have a sort of saddle shape so their heads can go up and they have a more domed shape in the place where the vegetation is near the ground. There are these finches which have totally different beaks depending what type of fruit they're going after or nuts they're going after. Now, Darwin didn't catalog this very well at the time. In fact, Captain FitzRoy, he's traveling with does a much better job at cataloguing properly, which I. But later when he writes the Origins of Species, he gives a lot of credit to his voyage of the Beagle, beginning to get him thinking about natural selection and the species. They're beautifully written books. There's a wonderful audio recording actually of Origin of Species read by Richard Dawkins if people want to listen. And essentially what the Galapagos Islands tells us, even if he wasn't fully aware when he was there at the time, is through these island environments. You can see most clearly of all the way that evolution works, the way that very specific micro environments can generate entirely new species.

[Alistair Campbell]

Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, it sounds amazing. And the kids at no point said, can't we go to Euro Disney?

[Rory Stewart]

No, because it's wonderful for kids too because they get to literally walk and look at the. I mean they've got everything, got penguins and flamingos. Very oddly, these very cold water meets very warm water. So you have animals together that you'd never expect to see together. And they're so tame, so you don't need binoculars. I mean, you're literally right next to an albatross or right next to a flamingo or a penguin.

[Alistair Campbell]

That sounds great. Well done. Well done.

[Rory Stewart]

Well, thank you for letting me off and I hope this is going to encourage Alistair to take a holiday sometime.

[Alistair Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever, whatever.

[Rory Stewart]

Right.

[Alistair Campbell]

See you soon.

[Rory Stewart]

See you soon. Bye. Bye.

[Alistair Campbell]

Take care. Bye.

[Rory Stewart]

Bye. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe [e-mail]

[Gordon Carrera]

why did we really go to war with Iraq?

[David McCloskey]

And did Saddam Hussein really have weapons of mass destruction?

[Gordon Carrera]

I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist.

[David McCloskey]

And I'm David McCloskey, author and former CIA analyst. We are the hosts of the Rest is classified. And in our latest series, we are telling the true story of one of history's biggest intelligence failures. Iraq WMD.

[Gordon Carrera]

In 2003, the US and UK told the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But they were wrong.

[David McCloskey]

This wasn't a simple lie. It was something far more complicated, far more interesting and far more dangerous.

[Gordon Carrera]

Spies who believed their sources, politicians who wanted the public to believe in the threat and a dictator who couldn't prove the we'd already destroyed the weapons.

[David McCloskey]

In this series we go deep inside the CIA and MI6, go into the rooms where decisions were made and look at the sources who fabricated the intelligence that took us to war.

[Gordon Carrera]

The Iraq war reshaped the Middle east and permanently weakened public trust in governments and intelligence agencies, and its consequences are still playing out today.

[David McCloskey]

Plus, in a Declassified Club exclusive, we are joined by three people who were at the heart of the decision to go to war. Former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, Tony Blair's former communications director, Alistair Campbell, and former acting head of the CIA, Michael Morell.

[Gordon Carrera]

So get the full story by listening to the rest is classified and subscribing to the Declassified Club. Wherever you get your podcasts.