422. Things Can Only Get Better? Starmer's Stormy First Year

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Welcome to the Rest Politics with me, Alistair Campbell.

And with me, Rory Stewart.

Rory, to keep things simple, let's do first half on the UK, Labour one year on, all sorts of rebellion going on right now.

And I'm really keen part two to look at Donald Trump and the monetisation of the American presidency, or as one headline in the States put it, the looting of America.

So I think we should do that after the break.

So Rory, here we are.

We're almost exactly a year to the day when Kirstama was elected with the landslide majority and there's been lots of reviews and he's done a few interviews and done a bit of maya culpra about mistakes and it looks like the week of the anniversary is going to be dominated by this welfare rebellion.

We are recording before the vote on the welfare reforms but a lot of people will be listening to it afterwards.

But what do you make of it so far?

Firstly, I think to be generous to him, My goodness, modern politics is difficult.

It's a really tough game.

And you can see, and we'll get on to this probably in tomorrow's podcast when we talk about new options coming out of the US where Mamdani, the potential candidate for New York mayor, shows a much more radical approach that people like Stama could be looking at, including wealth taxes.

So very, very difficult, I think, occupying the centre ground, which is what he's trying to do.

I think he basically comes across as a technocrat in a world in which people aren't looking for people to tinker around the edges, but they're looking for much more revolutionary change.

And I think, and I'd love to come on to you with this, I think one of the problems is handling the modern Labour Party and what the Labour Party thinks about the world and how it views the world.

So where do you want to start?

Do you want to start on the kind of big picture of how he's done over the last 12 months, what's been happening the last few weeks?

how this relates to positioning yourself in the world or the Labour Party.

Where would you like to start?

Okay, well, let's just start with a kind of overall analysis of how the year has gone and what the, if you like, looking back, what the story of this year has been.

I think there are two stories.

I think one

has been, I'm afraid, the steady

consolidation of the return of Nigel Farage to the centre of British politics.

And I think that's a story partly about Labour, but more about the Conservatives.

The Conservatives seem just to have imploded after the general election.

And I think the story of Labour, you and I regularly, when we're out and about doing things, and I always do this with audiences, given these three choices, has the government performed as you expected, better or worse than you expected.

And I would say that there's still goodwill, but I think disappointment is the word that keeps coming up.

People just a bit disappointed.

Not sort of, some people are furious, but not kind of the sort of fury that there was with the Conservatives towards the end.

But I think disappointment that a government that's come in with such a majority, with such a mandate for change, has just left people feeling a little bit, underwhelmed.

And the point about the Modern Labour Party, I don't sense that this is a party or a government at ease with itself.

And I don't think that's necessarily because of any great ideological divides either.

I think by and large that those MPs who were elected were quite happy about the programme on which they were elected.

But I think they feel, one, that they're not listened to.

And of course, every MP thinks they should be listened to.

I don't think there's ever been a Downing Street that hasn't had MPs from the party of government saying they don't care about us, they just think we're lobby fodder.

But I think we weren't great at it at the start, but we got a lot better as time went on.

You do have to listen to MPs.

This welfare rebellion was a long time in the brewing.

You've been hearing from people, I've been hearing from people.

And I think that there's a great quote from George W.

Bush.

He said that when he arrived at the White House, he thought politics is all about policy.

And when he left, he realized it was all about relationships.

And I don't think they're good at working the many, many, many relationships that you have to work at.

And if people listen to leading this week, we talked to the Cypriot president, Nikos Christadulades, and he was very interesting because, of course,

he could not have been warmer about Kiristama.

And what it says to me is that Kir has been very good at building those sorts of relations.

But of course, because he has been so focused on foreign policy, Ukraine, Gaza, Trump, G7, NATO, all this stuff, which you have to do as Prime Minister, maybe the domestic, both in terms of relationship and policy,

has been neglected.

First thing you mentioned is this incredible story around reform.

So reform famously came out of that election where you and I were up all night in that Channel 4 studio with a very small handful of seats, five seats.

They are now in a position, according to some of the internal polling that people are seeing, and that this is the sort of stuff that's scaring the Conservative Party, where they could be on track for for 260 seats after the next election.

I mean, I guess you would say, believe it when we see it.

But one of the things that happens in the first past-the-post system is when you get a critical mass of votes, you can actually flip the system in your direction.

So the Tories could end up with 40 or 50 seats and reform with 265.

And Labour, probably with fewer seats in reform, but may be able to cobble together a coalition with Lib Dems, Greens, SNP.

In which case, suddenly, British politics is much more like European, putting together these coalitions to keep out the firing.

Second thing, this point about what the problem is.

Well, there's one problem, you're absolutely right, which is relationships.

And the second problem, I guess, is whether we call it narrative or story or ideology or what's the big idea coming out of this government?

What does it really stand for?

And let's get on to that in a second.

Just my penny worth on relationships.

I spent an hour on the phone with a friend of mine who's a Labour MP who's still in the House of Commons on Sunday.

And they were really interesting for me because part of it was a story that would have been familiar for Conservative MPs talking about David Cameron.

It's the story that I remember when I first entered the House of Commons.

This leadership is out of touch.

They don't really understand what it's like on the street.

Still quite a lot of risk or anger about the way in which Keir Starmer brought in bright young things from the centre and pushed aside long-standing labor activists in constituencies and really annoyed local parties.

And I guess some of that may be about some of the children of your friends, maybe some of these sort of glamorous, this phrase red princes, some of the people that were brought in of the last few weeks, the general sense that long-standing labor activists have been displaced for bright young things.

Gaza, of course, which we've talked about.

Remember before the election, Keir Sama gave an interview in which he appeared to say that blocking food from Gaza was in accordance with international law.

And then a few days later, clarified and said that wasn't what he meant.

But the MP I was talking to said there's something wrong there.

They got in touch with the whips within minutes of Starmer's interviews.

And within a few hours, there were many, many of them saying, you're going to have to clarify what you were saying here.

And it took nearly a week for him to really come out and clarify.

So there's that stuff.

And then I think the final thing is the general sense, and that's what I want to come back to you on.

And I've been talking to a number of former Tory

colleagues, you know, Daniel Finkelstein, Matthew Paris.

I've also been talking to Tom McTaig, who's just taken over as the new editor of the New Statesman.

One of the points is just this is Labour.

Daniel Finkelstein's got an interesting point, which is we always have this idea that

you can be more radical challenging your own party base.

This is called the Nixon to China story.

And Daniel Finkelstein's a bit skeptical about Nixon to China because he says actually if Labour leaders start challenging their own party by cutting welfare and pushing ahead with mini austerity, actually it's incredibly dangerous.

Anyway, over to you on that, because I guess part of this used turn story is winter fuel allowance and now disability benefits, where essentially the Labour Party in the House of Commons has said, I think, hold a second, we're Labour.

We're not in the business of cutting money for disabled people.

We're not.

in the business of cutting money for pensioners.

On the specifics of the issue, I think it's almost like the rebellion or those who have decided that they were prepared to vote down the government on the second reading of a bill, which is quite a big thing to do.

I think it's partly a build-up of things.

And it does relate to this point about them asking themselves, what is Labour for?

Because you talk about these bright young things that were brought in.

Lots of bright young.

Actually, one of the best things that the Labour Party did, I think,

before the last election, was really to focus on candidate selection.

Get good people from all sorts of different backgrounds, including some good young people, get them into seats that were winnable.

They win those seats.

Then I think a lot of them are sitting around thinking, well, okay,

now what are we supposed to do?

When I was walking into the studio, I was listening to an interview with one young MP who said he hasn't met Keir Starmer since the election.

Now, Keir Starmer's incredibly busy.

But I can, you know, I remember there was a point, Tony Blair was very, very busy.

And by the way, we did have a welfare rebellion in the first year.

I think we had just under 50 MPs voted against what we were doing to bring in changes on lone parent benefits.

But there came a point, I can remember Sally Morgan, who was in charge of our sort of, you know, political management within Downing Street, reaching out to MPs, to the whips, and so forth.

And she ended up advocating that Tony literally had to carve out time in the diary every week where they would come in, sit around the table with Tony, whether in his office at the Commons or in Downing Street.

We did it region by region.

Sometimes we did it interest group by interest group.

But it was just a way of sort of making them feel heard.

And above all, I think more importantly, being listened to.

And I think what a lot of people have felt on this, they've been saying for ages.

Fiona and I were in France a while back.

This is a few months ago now, just after the welfare bill was announced.

And we met somebody who's actually in the House of Lords, but former MP, and said, My constituency, you're talking about something like six out of 10 people are going to get hit by this bill.

That is unsustainable if you're an MP in that constituency.

So, and by the way, Alan Campbell, no relation, the chief whip, he was starting to be briefed against as, you know, he wasn't reading the mood of the PLP, etc.

etc.

The whips have been telling them about this for weeks and months.

So I think there does have to be a reset about the relationship with the PLP.

Otherwise, this will happen again.

So again, the MPs I've been speaking to, and admittedly some of them are on the left of the Labour Party.

But the consistent story is we've been flagging these problems for a very, very, very long time.

Now, some of it will annoy annoy if you're Rachel Reeves listening to this or Stalma listening to this, because predictably when you're against something, you couch it in terms of all we're asking for is an independent review, all we're asking for is an impact assessment.

The government's pushing ahead with this without thinking about enough.

And of course, I recognise that, because when I was an MP trying to stop anything that David Cameron was doing, I was always like, well,

I'm not against the policy.

I just want a bit more time to look at do an impact assessment.

The consequence of that in this situation are that already they have moved the debate into by how much is Rachel Rees going to have to raise tax next time round.

So there are consequences to the choices that you make and there are consequences to the choices that you don't make.

But I think that has fueled the sense of disillusionment because there's all this stuff about, you know, Morgan McSweeney, Kirstama's chief of staff, saying that, you know, we need to show them who's boss and deselect a few and threaten them with losing the whip and all this sort of stuff.

And once you have MPs saying, I'm not really buying that anymore, then psychologically within the PLP, you have a bit of a problem.

Just to remind people, in the early stage of the government, Keir Sama was very, very radical with stripping people of the whip, including people like, well, Jeremy Corbyn, famously expelled from the party, but then rebels over the 22 benefit had the whip suspended.

John McDonnell, people like that.

And at the time, I thought, whoa, this is quite extreme, because in fact, Cameron didn't strip the whip off people for those kinds of things.

When people rebelled over Brexit, for example, in the early years, they were still allowed to remain in the party.

But it's now changed to a policy which is quite dramatically in the other direction of a sense that there are these continual U-turns.

And I was trying to think about what Tony Blair would have done, or what Margaret Thatcher would have done, or what John Major would have done in these kinds of situations.

Major, oddly, would have made a real business of it, probably

mistakenly, so over-maastricht and this kind of things.

Major would try to make all these votes a vote of confidence in his leadership and eventually triggered an entire leadership battle to try to reassert authority.

So, probably Starmer is correct in saying that you turning on this is the lesser evil compared to turning the whole thing into an existential crisis.

But it does mean that the story that we got in the run-up to the election, which was the Starmerism, insofar as there is Starmerism or I don't know, Rachel Reevesism,

is a very kind of fiscally cautious, let's keep taxes down, let's not borrow too much, let's cut public spending, is now running against the reality of what the heart and soul of the Labour Party is.

And the heart and soul of the Labour Party is about social justice.

And I don't think any Labour leader has actually tried, I think we underestimated how radical what Reeves and Starmer were trying to do was because we gently thought, well, it's a bit like Blairite centrism, but it isn't really, because when you came in, partly the public finances were in a different state.

So actually, in the end, Gordon Brown was able to increase NHS spending by, I don't know what it was, 30, 40% over time.

Yes, you controlled public spending, but you weren't actually going for this kind of swinging welfare cuts.

I can't think of a labor leader who's actually tried to do stuff which, according to the labor MPs I'm talking to, would have meant hundreds of thousands more people going to poverty, tens of thousands more children going into poverty.

Am I right?

Well, the front page of the Financial Times today says that even with the concessions that have already been made, you're still talking about the possibility of 150,000 more people going into poverty.

Look, I think you started right at the beginning by saying you shouldn't underestimate how hard politics is today.

And it is, it's hard everywhere.

I mean,

I've been quite surprised just the extent of media hostility to Kier Starmer.

It's sort of pretty relentless now.

And so they're operating in a very, very difficult environment.

In those circumstances, I think that I'll quote another American president, Bill Clinton.

He said, anything that goes wrong in your politics or your life is a teachable moment.

So the question is, this is clearly something that's gone wrong.

This last, this, the handling of this bill, the content and the handling of the bill have gone wrong.

And there's a danger, by the way, that it continues to go wrong because the latest argument that will be played out in the Commons today, Tuesday, is that

there is a kind of a timing issue between consultation and implementation.

In other words, implementation is going to come before proper full consultation with disabled people and the groups that represent them.

And so I think the teachable moment part of this is actually when you're making these big reforms,

the announcement is not the moment.

The moment, you have to turn that whole thing into a much longer-term process.

Otherwise, these resentments that build up, they suddenly spill out.

And so I think there will have to be a change in the way that number 10 operates, the way that government business is handled and the debates around this.

Because the point is,

if you voted Labour, oh, you became a Labour MP and gave up whatever you were doing before to become a Labour MP.

And then you find that, okay, I'm totally on board for sorting the public finances.

We've got to fix the foundations.

Totally on board for emphasizing the Conservatives have left an absolute car crash but then as you fix the foundations which is what they say they're doing and i support that as a sort of mindset then for your first big battle essentially to be

about winter fuel allowance and basically done not because of any sort of value judgment about rich people shouldn't have it people like me your mum we shouldn't have it but much more we've got to make the numbers add up and then the welfare debate they've never fully established in the public and the parliamentary mind, is this about saving money or is it about trying to get people into work who could work?

So those debates have clashed along.

And that says to me that the sort of intellectual thinking and the rigor that you should apply to big reform wasn't being done in the development of policy.

I think that this line that keeps coming back, and Tom Baldwin, who you know quite well, has written, as has Josh Glancy, as has Tom McTave, that there have been all these one-year-on big interviews.

And they're remarkably repetitive when you read them back to back.

Tom's is the best, though.

Tom's is by far the best.

Tom Baubin or Tom McTave?

Your friend Tom Babawa.

Tom Baubin.

Your friend Tom Baubin I think.

Tom who was singing our praises on a rival podcast the other day.

No, I think Tom McTagg's is brilliant too.

Let me just give a little shout out to Tom McTague.

Tom McTague gets to the highest point.

So what have you got against Josh Glancy?

Is he just

too?

Listen, on the repetitive thing, it's interesting.

You can see that all of them have been promised.

And it's an interesting question, that three major things, the Observer, the Financial Times, the New Statesman, have all been promised these one-year-on big story, and they've been given a lot of access.

And Starmer keeps coming back to certain central themes, the death of his brother, the firebombing against his house, the trip to Ukraine.

And he keeps apologizing.

I got this wrong, I got that wrong, this has been a teachable moment, I shouldn't have done this.

He wants to emphasize in all of them that his speech about immigration, where he used this phrase phrase about a nation of strangers.

Yeah.

That he regretted it and he didn't really realize what he was doing and he'd done it because he was stressed at work.

But one of the things that Tom McTay gets to which I thought was really interesting is that he says to Starmer after spending a long time with him, essentially I think the deal is that Tom comes in, he says, I've just become the editor of the New Statesman.

You've been in a year.

This is your big chance to lay out what your big vision is.

You keep saying people don't understand your policy.

Let's really pin this down.

Let's Let's make this a story.

This is what Starmer's about.

And he tries and tries and tries.

And at the end of the interview, he says, listen, I don't know whether I'm missing something, but I'm getting the impression that you basically don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with the country.

You don't really have a kind of big, radical new idea because your fundamental belief is that basically things are okay, that the problem is that the Tories were more than a bit incompetent, useless, useless, and evil.

But if we can get back to managing things well, things will be fine.

The basic economic structure is fine.

The basic tax settlement's fine.

The NHS is fine.

It just needs to be managed better.

And Stalm essentially says, yes.

And I think Tom's insight is that is very unlikely to work in modern politics, where most people in Britain think things are not fine.

They think the system is broken and government's broken, politicians are out of touch and they need something much, much more radical.

Tom, the other Tom, Tom Baldwin, and this is becoming a little bit sort of Westminster bubble as two podcasters discuss three interviews with a Prime Minister one year on.

But I think of all of them, Tom Baldwin is the one who knows Kir best in terms of having spent more time with him.

And what I think Tom would say to what you've just said is that he doesn't believe the country's broken because he doesn't believe that British people are broken.

And he doesn't want to spend his whole time running the country down.

Sort of leave that to Nigel Farage, as it were.

Although he did try it, didn't he?

He had that famous speech last summer where he basically did say, everything's crap, Britain's broken.

That was the joke of, which he've produced before, which I think we took from Daniel Finkelstein, which is.

Britain is broken, let's not do anything about it.

The point about

that, in these interviews, he has been saying that one of his regrets was that he felt he was too negative about the country when he came in because they were trying to pin so much on the Tories.

I actually do think a narrative that can work is that the Tories took this country to a breaking point.

And we feel that right across the piece in our public services, in our social structures, in the way local government works, etc.

It's not broken, but they got damn close.

We have got to fix it.

Fixing it is going to take time.

Fixing it is going to take difficult things.

But here's the better tomorrow you're going to have.

Don't fall for the better yesterday that Nigel Farage is offering.

Fixing it, though, is interesting because if you look at the details of what fixing it it looks like, it's not, and we're going to come on tomorrow's podcast to talk about a Mamdani in New York.

It's not a radical fixing.

And I remember this when we interviewed the First Minister of Wales.

So that's a really extreme example.

I mean, Wales is in real trouble, economically, socially.

The fundamental economic indicators in Wales are terrifying.

I mean, that's a nation which I'm afraid, if you looked at...

from a macroeconomic point of view is not doing well.

But I remember the First Minister of Wales when I tried to encourage her to say, is there something wrong with our structures, our economic system?

Maybe I was trying to invite her to be a bit more left-wing and say, actually, markets aren't really working.

Inequality is too extreme.

We need to rethink the way our whole economy works.

She didn't want to do that.

She basically said, no, no, the basic economic structures are fine and we're going to fix it.

And I think the same is true with Starmer and Reeves.

I mean, their analysis is not completely different to the analysis that a lot of my conservative colleagues were pushing for.

So let's look, you know, non-DOM taxes.

Well, Jeremy Hunt had started down that track.

VAT on private schools, that was something Michael Gove really wanted to do.

Investment in infrastructure, well, a lot of that was kind of leveling up Boris Johnson.

He put a lot of money into that.

And there's been some shifting around where it goes, but it's pretty similar.

I mean, Rishi Sunak wants to put a lot of money into supercomputers and AI.

Peter Carr wants to put money into supercomputers and AI, but in a different way, but it's broadly the same story.

Housing, again, as I've said, probably the thing I'm most excited for from Labour, I think most potential.

But again, it was something that Cameron was trying to do an enormous amount of, put a lot of talented housing ministers in and failed.

So it still feels as though

he's hoping that he can fix it.

I don't know, it's as though he's inherited a kind of old banger.

And he thinks that with a kind of relatively modest budget,

he can get the car running pretty smoothly again.

And, you know, a little bit of of work on the engine, a little bit of work on the paintwork.

Let's get a few more thousand teachers into school.

Let's put a little bit more money into the NHS.

Everything will be fine.

Whereas there are a lot of people out there, I think from the left of the Labour Party to Farage on the right, who are saying, ah, this old banger is really broken.

And you're not going to be able to continue to drive it for the next 15, 20 years just with this.

the kind of money you're putting into it.

I've, as you know, go to quite a lot of schools and I've been struck in the last two or three that I've been in

just how disappointed and defeated people feel.

There was one head teacher I saw who said look it's great that you know free school meals but we kind of we have that in London anyway and he actually said I don't see that as an education policy it's a child poverty policy.

Something else he said which I thought was really interesting was that he said something

happened during the pandemic that we don't yet understand.

This is a primary school where he was saying that some of the really young kids are

not

toilet trained.

The rise in special educational needs is off the scale.

And of course, as we go further down the track towards will she, won't she have to put up taxes, one of the things that's coming into

view is, oh, well, are we spending too much on special educational needs?

And the answer is, well, we're spending a lot more, but that's because the need has grown and we haven't fully got to the bottom of why.

So

another head teacher I saw recently said that I'm literally running to standstill and I cannot deliver proper education for the kids who are in here.

Now, this is okay.

Labour would say, well, we've only been in a year.

What I would say is that at this stage of a year in

under New Labour, David Blunkett in Education, teachers and head teachers had lots of excitement about things that they had heard were coming.

And I think that's where what you're saying, what I think I'm saying, and what these guys are saying, there is at the moment a gap between what people feel about the state of the country and the policy solutions that are being offered to fill that gap.

And I think the first year,

okay, you can give them some credit for fixing some of the foundations and real wages are rising.

West Streeting is getting the waiting list down.

Some houses are getting built, although the numbers are pretty terrifyingly low when you look at the pledge of of 1.5 million.

But there is going to have to be an acceleration of policy, momentum, change.

Don't forget, it's change that they were elected to deliver.

And Keir Starmer's clearly not somebody who's comfortable in the big narrative thing.

I get that.

And, you know, when I heard Tom Borgman talking about this earlier, and he was saying that people are sick of being offered big change that never comes.

So actually, maybe over time, this style will work.

I don't buy this Tom Balgwin line.

I think he's right about Starmer.

I think Starmer doesn't believe in Starmerism.

And I can completely empathize with that because I felt, you know, like Starmer, I'd been a sort of civil servant and I felt I'd been quite proud of what I'd done in my jobs in the past.

And therefore, I could do the same thing when I became a minister.

And my experience becoming a minister is politics is completely different to managing a business or a civil service department.

You're not really in the business of just rolling your sleeves up, doing a seminar, looking at the evidence, making a kind of marginal decision, and then weighing it up.

And what makes the difference between a great politician and a poor politician isn't how many hours you work, how smart you are, how careful you are.

It's the big story.

And I think that it's never been true.

that great politicians can get by without a very, very clear narrative and vision.

And it's even more true true today in the world of social media, in this modern world, that's impossible.

It just doesn't work.

And I don't know what Tom Baldwin's political experience is that he somehow thinks this is okay.

I mean, it's fine as a way of expressing stama.

It's fine as a way.

I mean, I remember when I was running to be prime minister trying to say to my team, I'm very suspicious of big ideas.

I'm very suspicious of slogans.

I just want to roll my sleeves up and get things done.

I just want to make things work better.

Basically, you could sense they were thinking, ah, this doesn't quite work.

And of course, now looking back on it, I realize that the only things I really managed to achieve were much bigger, bolder.

You know, I'm going to resign in prisons unless violence comes down.

I'm going to double the climate spending in DFID.

And so I don't quite get the ball with it.

I can't quite believe it.

It doesn't seem to me that it can work, this there's no Starmerism.

I don't believe in big ideas.

Well, it worked for Albanese, similar sort of approach.

I think the other thing that Tom's doing is taking the experience of Keir as leader of the opposition.

Don't forget, he was written off as leader of the opposition at several points.

Yeah.

And basically saying he keeps being written off, people underestimate him, and that plays to his advantage over time.

Where I think it is different is that government is so much harder and so much more complicated.

You know, maybe we, maybe before we go to the break, just sort of wrap up on, but by sort of reflecting on what

they can do better

in the second year.

Because believe me, I was talking to one of the key strategy people recently and he said well we've got time you guys keep going on about you know you're gonna run it but the fact is you don't have that much time a year has gone and there is still I always talk about three currencies in politics you've got the economic stuff the value of your pound goes up and down the strength of your economy goes up and down but the other two currencies that really matter are reputation and goodwill you need goodwill for when you have these really tough times.

So what they've found is that actually they've drained within the PLP, the Parliamentary Labour Party, they've drained quite a lot of the goodwill currency.

And because they haven't delivered a lot of, like, for example, getting the welfare bill through without this kerfuffle and this massive debate and rebellion, that has drained their reputation for competence.

So that hits their reputation.

So those currencies have to be re you have to redevelop them.

You have to win back the goodwill.

You have to win back the reputation.

And then you have to keep going on with the difficult decisions you've got to make.

And I think the

one Labour MP I was talking to, who not one of the new ones, but somebody who probably is in that category that feels a little bit ignored and overlooked.

She said that, look, you know, when you guys were in charge, right, we moaned a lot.

We did moan a lot, but

we sort of felt you guys knew what you were doing most of the time.

And that gave us, and also we knew that you were at least reaching out.

And you might be reaching out.

I mean, I heard Diane Abbott being interviewed on the radio the day.

And, you know, Diane Abbott, who's

probably leveled more criticism my and Tony's way than most.

But she did make that point.

She said, look, you know, Tony, I disagreed with so much of what they did, but the phone was always there.

They were always willing to talk to us and so forth.

So I think there's got to be that reset in relationships.

And then with the public, you know, I'll keep saying this to Kim,

but I'll keep saying it publicly as well.

I think this idea that a narrative is somehow spin, a narrative is the means by which you exercise leadership to people who are not listening all the time.

I've always believed in your view there because narrative is leadership.

Narrative is telling the entire civil service what the big idea is.

I remember Margaret Thatcher's ministers saying the great power of the narrative is that it allows delegation.

meant that every one of her ministers could answer the question, what would Margaret Thatcher be doing?

And all the civil servants understood what was supposed to be happening.

Two final things from me.

I think the Labour Party isn't acknowledging that right at the centre of our problems is that our government structures are broken.

My 10 years was all about learning how this parliament, this electoral system, this party system, this ministerial governmental system is really broken and just doesn't work and needs very, very fundamental constitutional reform.

And the second thing is my experience from Cumbria, which was that many of my constituents were bewildered by the fact that they were told that the country was getting ever wealthier, but that they couldn't keep things that they'd taken for granted in the 1940s and 50s.

So if the country's getting wealthier, why do we have to lose our community hospital?

Why are we losing our fire station?

Why are we losing our police station?

Much of my life as a constituency MP was...

demonstrating to try to keep things.

I was endlessly out fighting to save things all the time.

And so the experience, particularly in Northern England, is this government, it's not that things are remaining the same.

It feels as though things are getting worse.

Some thought needs to go from the government's point of view on what's going on there.

You know, why do farmers feel their lives are getting worse?

Why do teachers feel they're close to breaking point?

Why do communities feel so angry and ignored?

And I don't think I'm getting from the government.

an analysis of that problem or a solution.

So final point, Rory, marks out of 10 on the five missions, growth.

Well, it's fine but pretty anemic.

I mean it's it it's it's all about you know other countries are doing really rubbish so maybe we're doing this right but it's certainly not enough growth to generate anything.

Okay.

Health?

Just came out of a hospital talking to you

and I thought it as many many of the old strength and weaknesses the NHS, I think the problem there is going to be productivity.

We've put a lot more doctors in.

We're not yet seeing the results in terms of patient outcomes.

Crime?

Again, people

pretty angry about that.

I I mean, most of the polling suggests they're not cutting through on that.

Class ceiling, getting rid of the class ceiling?

Yeah, well, again,

it's tinkering.

It's not social democracy.

It's not we're going to create a profoundly more equal society.

It's we're going to do a few billion here, a few billion there.

But fundamentally, Britain will remain unequal.

And the fifth mission, the green one?

Well, there they're being much more imaginative.

They're spending much more money.

And there, I suspect they may make much more progress.

I guess the question is, how does that fifth priority really work for voters in the economy?

Okay, so with Roy Stewart's one out of five.

How would you mark them on those five?

Growth, I would say

five out of ten.

If they're really serious about growth, you have to look at every policy through the lens of growth.

And that would absolutely say, get back in the customs union.

I've been saying that fairly consistently.

On the education one, I'd have been more positive until the last week when I've been inside a few schools.

Health, I think they're doing better.

Green, I agree with you.

I think they're doing better.

Crime,

jury, very out.

And I think that the Home Office was a bit of a loser in the spending round, so that's going to be tough for the police.

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Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart, and me, Alistair Campbell.

And Rory, there's lots we can talk about in relation to Donald Trump, but I've been logging a lot of the stuff that relates to the money that he and his family are making.

And it's beyond, it's off the scale.

Well, I was talking to

a constitutional lawyer at Harvard.

And he said to me that the biggest, most unambiguous story is corruption.

In a sense, the jury's out on quite a lot of the other democratic backsliding.

You know, is he going to respect the courts?

Isn't he?

What's he going to do with the federal, local?

But the one thing that's changed in a way that has taken us almost back to the 19th century is the old corruption where the capital O has come back into American politics.

O and C, maybe old corruption.

The old corruption was a big revolutionary symbol.

And of course, it feels like 18th century British politics.

It's the stuff we tried to clear up with the Victorians.

But it's also a very, very, very modern version of it.

So I was reading something the other day.

His crypto earnings now are probably greater than his property earnings, which are pretty cool.

And last night, Roy, just think of all the things that are going on in the world now that the American president could go on to his money-making truth social post network and say,

so this is the one from last night.

From the president of the United States, Trump fragrances are here.

They're called Victory 4547 because they're all about winning, strength, and success.

For men and women, get yourself a bottle and don't forget to get one for your loved ones too.

Enjoy, have fun, keep winning.

And there's a link to the website and a picture.

There you are, Rui.

It's a slim-looking Donald Trump done in the form of an Oscar on top of the thing that you spray with his signature across the top.

Now, you're laughing.

We can all laugh at it.

But can you imagine not just any president in history?

Can you imagine any current world leader doing that?

I mean, you've got Trump sneakers, you've got Trump watchers.

It is pretty amazing because

you're right.

The reason we don't get any other current world leader doing it is that even in the poorest countries in the developing world, corruption has gone completely central to everything in politics.

I mean, obviously, if you're a Nigerian politician, or if you're in China, or you're in Vietnam or Cambodia or in Indonesia,

corruption is the number one thing you say about your politicians.

And it's the number one thing that your president tries to pretend to be cracking down on.

In fact, you know, most of the electoral campaign, if you're running to be Nigerian president, is I'm going to eliminate corruption, right?

So you can't, in those countries, go around blatantly taking

jets from other countries.

You can't go around

launching meme coins, NFTs, generating money in this kind of way.

You have to try to do it secretly.

Trump's totally

open

style implies firstly that America oddly, he must sense that America doesn't really care about corruption, that his voters are not worried in the way that Nigerian voters are about corruption.

Otherwise, he wouldn't be doing it so openly.

Well, where you're right, he's definitely doing it absolutely openly.

And that's what a lot of the Republicans, some of whom must feel very uncomfortable about this, their line of defense is, well, look, this is all out in the open.

He's doing it all out in the open.

But it's now reaching over into policy.

So for example, he is yet again on his truth social where he makes a lot of money out of that as well.

He's been posting about Netanyahu's court case, his corruption case.

And he's been saying that Netanyahu's a great guy and he's a war leader.

Leave him alone.

Drop this case.

It's like the witch hunt against me.

There's a story today about Bukay in El Salvador wanting some of these gang members.

He wants them sent back,

not because he's, you know, cares about their welfare or anything else, because he's worried about whether they would testify to some of this, maybe the connections there.

So he's sort of linking up with other leaders that have got corruption issues

standing against them as well.

But, Rory, just to go through some of it, so you mentioned the meme coin.

Okay.

A state-owned entity in the UAE has put in $2 billion into this thing.

Into the meme coin?

Into the meme coin.

So

they reckon they've made about 320 million in trading fees.

They reckon Baron Trump, the young one, has earned up to 40 million because he's one of the founders.

The other way they're making a lot of money is through legal settlements with the media.

And also Jeff Bezos paying Milani $40 million to make a documentary on Amazon.

And make a documentary on Amazon, which may or may not get aired.

Can I just put in a small footnote on the meme coin to remind people?

So Javier Selgas of one of the big shipping companies in Mexico bought $20 million of Donald Trump's meme coin

with the money from his publicly listed company.

And in his ruling with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is the big U.S.

regulator, he stated that this was a good use of the money of a publicly listed company of shareholders because he knows that if he buys meme coins from Trump, they will then get a concession on the trading terms that they get with the United States and therefore the company will be able to make money.

So

it's not even a secret.

The thing there is that you get a statement to the SEC literally saying, equid pro quo is you buy these meme coins and in return

we can be confident that our company will benefit.

We've talked about this in the past.

You can also buy these things in order to get the Department of Justice to drop its investigations against you.

Well, I'll give you one.

Justin's son, who's a Chinese billionaire, who photographed recently wearing a $100,000 Donald Trump watch.

He spent $75 million buying crypto tokens from this thing, World Liberty Financial, which is the thing that's set up by the Trump family and the Witcoffs, his sort of great special envoy doing Marco Rubio's job.

Five weeks after Trump became president, the SEC, that's the Securities and Exchange Commission, they dropped a civil fraud case against this guy.

Now, could be entirely coincidental.

Could be.

However, I think it's fair to say that we're talking here about somebody who's not averse.

We keep talking about him being

a transactional leader.

That's the sort of transaction that we're talking about.

And to cap it all, you have Eric Trump, one of the sons who's sort of does, he and Don Jr.

are doing a lot of the business for the family.

He does an interview in the Financial Times at the weekend where he actually presents the family as victims.

We would be making so much more money if my dad had not gone into politics.

If there's one family that's not benefited from politics, it's the Trump family.

And

he also says I have to look after my children.

It's very unfair.

I've got a, you know, why am I not allowed to earn the money to look after my children?

And meanwhile, 5.5 billion deal for a golf resort in Qatar,

which will include a seven-kilometre-long entertainment district, 18-hole golf curse, and a legends theme park.

And that's a deal led by a real estate company owned by Qatar's Sovereign Wealth Fund.

So, we're seeing why did he, why was his first trip to the Middle East,

not to Israel and Gaza, but to

the rich Gulf Petro states?

Answer, because he was doing loads of deals with them.

Can I quickly just remind people on the meme coin?

Because I know some listeners will be less into this.

So,

the meme coin is you basically buy something that that would be like the virtual equivalent of getting a kind of gold coin with Alistair Campbell's face on it.

Let's say Alistair issued in the real world.

Yeah.

You could collect 5,000 lovely gold coins with Alistair's face on it.

Well, even I wouldn't buy that.

So these things, these are the virtual equivalents.

Now, there are a couple of great advantages to them for the Trump family in making money.

One of them is that they are classified under U.S.

law as collectibles rather than investments.

So they completely escape normal scrutiny about pump and dump, conflicts of interest, misselling.

So

in the normal world, if I issued a product, let's say I was issuing, I don't know, an insurance policy, or I was telling you that I was going to build a monument and you were giving me money, A lot of law exists in the U.S.

to protect you as the investor to stop me running a Ponzi scheme, to stop me effectively stealing all your money on false pretenses, doing nothing with it, and then running off with it, right?

But once something's classified as a collectible, it escapes most of those rules.

And of course, they make it even easier for themselves because they locate some of the jurisdictions outside the United States.

So there are trading platforms located in China.

The second thing that it gives you, which is really helpful for corruption, is you have a leaderboard with a transparent wallet which lets you know who's bought the most of them.

So you can know that the Chinese investor has bought

tens of millions of that.

The top buyers get the Trump watch.

That's part of the deal.

And then they get invited to dinner in Mar-a-Lago if you've been a big donor.

So it's a beautiful thing.

And you as the Trump family get two advantages.

Number one, you can pump and dump.

So one of the things that happened is the prices massively spiked.

Let's say the Alastair Campbell coin went up to $85 and then dropped down.

But of course, what one assumes is that the Trump family sold at the top of the market.

The price came tumbling down and everybody who bought lost.

And the second thing is it's a beautiful way, totally unregulated, of I buy the Alistair Campbell coin and in return I get access to Alistair Campbell and presumably the influence that Alistair Campbell can come to bring.

But this is the present United States.

This is not my friend Alistair.

Yeah, but also the, if you think about it, I mean, let's just assume, I mean, our friend Scaramucci says that Eric and Don Jr.

are both dumb as rocks, but let's assume they're not.

Let's actually say that they're really clever, they're really smart, and if they were in business and nobody knew who they were, they'd be really, really effective.

Okay.

Even if you assume that, the truth is what they're doing all the time is trading on the marketing of one of the most famous names in the world, aka Trump.

So when they're going and doing these projects that they're doing at the moment in Saudi, in Qatar, in the UAE, in Serbia,

in India, in Oman, they're doing all these deals and they get through the door largely because their name is Trump.

And I think the proper, the definition of corruption is the use of your political position to advance your own personal interest.

Now, they say, well, he doesn't get involved in this, that, and the other.

I'm sorry.

There he is yesterday on his truth social posting his fragrance for profit.

And he does it with Bibles and he does it with, he's now got a new club.

There's a new Trump club in Washington, $500,000 membership.

Which his kids have set up with the Witcoff kids.

I mean, this is another part of the story of the kind of nepotism and family connections here.

I mean, I used to...

like, I'm sure, many of your friends and Jonathan Powell and others, as you get involved in international governance, particularly in the 90s and 2000s, we spent a lot of time traveling around the world talking about corruption because one of the big ideas was you needed to do governance reform.

A lot of development agencies differ and everyone involved, you know, a lot of my meetings in Nigeria were on corruption, et cetera.

We've forgotten, I think, in a way, what the theory of corruption is.

And corruption is a lot of different things, and Trump's doing almost all of them.

The first type of corruption is what's called embezzlement, where you take public money into your own pocket.

And you can do that in different ways, right?

You can do it by getting, as he did in the first administration, an enormous amount of public money spent on security for Trump properties.

Or the second thing, most recently, is local state money goes into Trump-affiliated companies to do disaster relief work.

Second sort of thing is foreign emoluments, where foreign governments give you money to your company, money to your kids, money to your

a plane, and in return you do tariff stuff.

Third thing is nepotism.

That's a kind of different thing.

That's about giving your friends and family jobs.

So that's putting Jared Kushner or your daughter into jobs.

That's putting your children's father-in-laws into jobs.

A lot of this stuff is about children's father-in-laws.

Fathers-in-law, Rory.

I think we.

Fathers-in-law.

Then there's misuse of office.

So he does a lot of that.

So, for example, using the Department of Justice to target your opponents.

There's obstruction of justice.

So that's blocking oversight.

And how does this all have a result?

Well, why does it matter to Americans?

Well, it matters to Americans because

in the end, what it leads to is

everything beginning to go wrong in your economy.

Once you have an economy where you can bribe or influence or get access to the leader just with money,

government resources begin to flow into inefficient projects where you've been bribed.

Regulations begin to get dropped, so you begin to get rid of regulatory agencies, so there's more and more environmental damage done by these companies as they roll it out.

The quality of public administration begins to decline because there's not much reason for civil servants to function, and you get into this incredible vicious cycle where because you're paying the government to speed things up, the government has an incentive to slow things down,

waiting for the money to come in.

So all of that comes.

all of that is what Trump begins to deliver for the American people.

And don't forget that one of the first things they did when they came in, part of the sort of Project 25 playbook, was to get rid of a lot of the investigators and the authorities that investigate corruption, and then to put somebody in the Department of Justice, Pam Bonde, who's just a basic cheerleader for MAGA.

They will want us to laugh at the fragrances, to laugh at the sneakers, to laugh at the Bibles.

But the fact is, there isn't that much transparency.

But Forbes and Bloomberg, if you sort of follow the way they cover this stuff, they're talking about his wealth since he became president going up at roughly at a rate of a billion dollars a month.

Now, tell me in which any other presidency, we've said before, Jimmy Carter, he got rid of his peanut farm.

Hillary Clinton, do you remember Hillary Clinton made, I think it was $100,000

out of an investment that she made in something or other 12 12 years before Bill Clinton became president.

And this was a massive scandal during the campaign.

This guy is doing it in plain sight, day after day after day.

My final question, Roy, is this.

Do you think people never cared?

Or do you think that Trump's people are just so dominant in the media ecospace and absolutely prepared to take him at face value with anything he says,

and so much goes on that it just gets blown away.

Do you think deep down people still do care?

I think,

of course, many, many people still care, but I think this is part of the bigger story that we're talking about, about the collapse

of

the normal traditional liberal democratic values.

Because we had a story that we believed in very strongly for probably 150 years.

which is that you would have a better government

if you had all these other institutions.

So the reason,

one of the reasons that we believed in civil society, media, NGOs, was it checked corruption.

You had all these independent third-sector organizations which were there to call us.

That's why they've gone after them as well.

Well, listen, we're going to talk about some of them in question time because we're going to talk about Gavi, we're going to talk about the impact of USAID, and we're going to talk about this rap duo that you and I had never heard of, Bob Villain, that now everybody's talking about, it would seem.

And yeah, I'd say they've played the media and politics like a fiddle, as publicity stunts go.

And two other big stories that we're going to cover tomorrow are going to be the new candidate for the New York Mayor, Mandani, and what's been happening in Rwanda and Congo with a peace deal.

See you.

Thank you very much indeed.

Take care, bye.

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