408. Broken Britain: Farage’s Plot to Outflank Labour

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Welcome to to the Dresses of Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

And with me, Rory Stewart.

And Rory, there is a lot happening, and not a lot of it is good news.

You have the awful incident in Liverpool, where at the end of the massive sort of celebration of Liverpool winning the Premier League, somebody drives into the crowd and absolutely horrible.

You've got a sense of Ukraine going backwards because Trump is sort of giving up.

You've got a sense of Gaza getting worse.

I suppose good news, the king in Canada, and we'll talk about all of that stuff in the second part, but we're going to focus very much in the first half on domestic but we also want to get into an issue that doesn't get nearly enough attention and it's something that we haven't paid enough attention to and that's housing and we were both at a conference last week in Leeds where I think we both came away quite shocked by the experts in the field developers planners local authorities telling us just how much of a what they called a crisis we're facing in housing so we're going to talk about that and then with Nigel Farage up with his latest sort of you know populist outbreak this morning, where he's promising all sorts of things without saying how he's going to pay for them.

Well, he's saying how he is going to pay for them, but he doesn't add up for a minute.

We'll get into that as well.

But let's, why don't you tell our listeners where we were last week at this conference and where we both came away thinking we really need to talk about this?

I think first thing is the two things obviously connect that one of the things that drives support for anti-establishment parties for populist parties in Britain and Canada and the Netherlands, is the cost of housing.

The beginning of the problem is that it costs about seven times the median income to get a house in Britain.

And there is a huge inequality between the 60% of the population who own houses and the 40% who don't.

And just on that, Roy, I checked, on the year that I last served a full year in Downing Street, 2002, the ratio of house price to median salary was five.

And as you say, it's now seven.

Labour made this one one of its two main pledges in the election.

So along with growth it was going to be building one and a half million houses and Angela Rayner was put in charge of this who we've interviewed on leading and actually some of that interview is about housing.

This conference we went to we've been to now for three years and so we started under a Tory government where the story was generally how useless the Conservatives have been and a lot of the normal stuff.

They keep changing housing ministers.

There's no clarity of strategy and thank goodness Labour's coming in.

And when we did the session last year, we were in fact, it was about two hours after we were at the conference that the election was announced.

And there was enormous confidence that Labour was going to win.

And I think pretty strong optimism that Labour was going to sort the situation out.

Twelve months on, the statistics are pretty bleak in terms of housing starts.

In London, where...

the government was planning to build, I think, 88,000 in a year.

They're on track to build about 5,000 in a year, just to give a sense of the kind of gap.

And in fact, housing starts are down on last year, which are down on the year before.

So there's a big, big cliff to climb.

And I don't think anyone in that conference thought Labour was remotely on track to meet the one and a half million target.

In fact, when we did a show of hands, and these are real housing professionals, these are heads of local councils, these are builders.

As you pointed out, not 100 in the room, 250 in the room.

And they seemed to say that they didn't think 1.2 million could be built.

They didn't think a million could be built.

In fact, they thought we'd be lucky to make half the number that Labour's promised.

The conference was called UK Reef, UK Real Estate Investment and Infrastructure Forum.

And these really are, these are architects, planners, local government, developers.

It's absolutely, there's 16,000 people at the conference as a whole.

We've done this event, as you say, three years in a row.

And it's been very, very interesting to sort of get to know them.

They're very, they're interesting people, aren't they?

I mean, you have an image of developers as being all about kind of, you know, profit and money.

And I guess Donald Trump has not exactly helped the global image of real estate developers.

But it was interesting, particularly the guy from Argent who did the big King's Cross development, who's on our panel, Tom Goodall, the chief executive of the company that's put together the whole sort of King's Cross development.

And he was kind of emphasizing commitment to social housing, affordable housing, alongside all the sort of big development stuff.

And there was a lady there from Holmes England, which has obviously got a big role to play in this as well.

But what they were essentially saying, he was making the point

that if

the pledge had been by the end of the first Labour first term, we'll be building 300,000 homes a year, they might be able to get there.

But literally not one single person in the room thought that the 1.5 million pledge was realistic.

And that's worrying.

Now, they did also, interestingly, on another of our show of hands, they didn't think it would necessarily affect the outcome of the next general election.

I think it could be quite a bad effect if they don't deliver, as you say, was one of their big, big pledges.

But then when we got into the Q ⁇ A in particular, you had a sense of real support for the goodwill, actually welcoming targets, welcoming the idea that local authorities have a responsibility to get built a certain number of homes, but then really sort of suggesting that there were just there were too many hoops to go through and that every time there was a review of regulation,

even if the objective was to kind of cut down on the regulation, they seemingly ended up with more.

And I guess the other thing you got from this was just how complicated the housing market and the housing sector is.

The big famous story, of course, is Harold Macmillan building 300,000 houses a year after the Second World War.

And we're taking in, of course, in certain years at the moment, 750,000 new people net migration to the United Kingdom.

And in some years, we're building less than 100,000 homes.

The odd thing about it, which maybe brings us closer to the Farage conversation, is that it's not that governments haven't been obsessed with this.

David Cameron and George Osborne, in my memory, has talked about it all the time.

And a lot of the most talented, or what were believed to be the most talented ministers were put in charge of housing, even if they swapped around quite frequently.

And we were dragged in when I was running, in fact, almost every department I ran, we were dragged into the housing minister and there was this sort of star chamber where they would demand to know know which bit of public land would be releasing for housing.

So if you were in the Ministry of Defence, could you produce old training grounds for housing or old military bases?

And I spoke to Gavin Barwell yesterday, who was probably one of our most successful housing ministers, who worked with Sergeant Javid on a white paper, which was all about forcing councils to release land.

to really hit the planning stuff.

And they managed to get a certain amount of head of steam under Theresa Theresa May.

They were beginning to make relatively decent progress.

And then things went wrong.

And I think a couple of things went wrong.

One of them is that the Conservative Party lost its nerve.

So Michael Gove got very, very frightened about voters in the home counties.

And so he ripped out all the stuff about councils having to produce land for housing.

And then the second thing is pandemic costs of living created a big financial problem, which is along with all the other stuff, so there's big stuff around planning.

There's also a real question around affordability, which is that people simply don't have the money.

The demand isn't there, is one of the things that the house builders were saying.

They were saying we can build these houses, but people don't have the money to be able to buy them at the moment.

Rory, you came up on the panel with what I may say is a rather socialist approach to this.

You basically said

that

surely housing, when there's a recognition of the need for more housing, this is a national infrastructure need.

And the government should take the same approach to it as it does to, say, NHS, building hospitals, building schools, building prisons.

And you seem to be saying we should revert to a much more top-down government-led building program.

Because what the developers were saying is they are given targets, and the local authorities are given targets, and they have to sort of have a certain amount of social housing.

But actually, they obviously are going to be working out whether there's much in the way of a profit margin for them on this as well.

So, I thought that was very very interesting rory i just wonder whether this is part of your political journey this this con conversion to socialism with the building market if you look at the problems if the problem is that the builders claim that they can't um build houses which are cheap enough for people to buy what happens is the government's got one of two options either it can do these help-to-buy schemes where you give people money to buy houses, which is completely daft.

I mean, it's economically, completely upside down because all it does is temporarily inflate everything and it doesn't really sort out the problem for the next generation.

The other thing they can do is that they can build housing themselves either as a local council or through a registered housing provider or housing association.

And that's where I really hope Labour's going to move and hopefully we may see some of this in the budget but I think they should go much bolder and much further because unfortunately the councils and the housing associations are completely bankrupt.

For a range of different reasons, including the way in which the economy is going and their debts going,

they don't have any money money to pay for this stuff.

So, that's one big thing they should do.

The other thing that really came out of it is because of Grand Fall, we are now focused not just on building as many houses as possible, but building high-quality, safe housing.

And in London, in particular, the building regulator with any buildings over six stories has basically ground things to a halt.

It's taking months, in some cases over a year, to get the most simple things through.

75% of applications are being rejected.

So putting money into

that planning process, so it doesn't take 14 months, but takes two weeks to be really mad, but let's say two months, would make a huge difference because a lot of money is lost just in that delay.

And again, there is a slight problem I felt around that table from the civil servants of saying, well, it's all very difficult.

You know, you've got to look at 100 different factors in the housing market and we're going to set up a committee and we're going to try to accelerate and be more focused.

It really did feel as though much more radical things need to be done on the money side of it,

probably on the skills side, because we've lost a lot of housing companies since the 1990s, particularly in the SME sector.

But then around the financing, around the money from the government to build social housing.

The other thing that we have to look at is, so I...

After we left Leeds and I was digging around and looking at the issue a little bit, and there's something called the Considerate Constructors Scheme, CCS.

And they've done a paper which sets out that as of September last year, there are 100,000 fewer construction workers in the UK than in the previous five years.

And there are two very, very obvious reasons.

And one of them might be put to Nigel Farage when he's spraying out his promises.

And that, of course, is that Brexit led to an awful lot of European builders who couldn't come back.

COVID also was a massive factor in this, particularly with construction, which is pretty tough work for a lot of these guys.

And it led to a lot of retirement amongst the older construction workers.

And this report was predicting that over the next 10 years, a third of the construction workforce over fifty will retire.

And just to re plug that gap, you're going to need almost a quarter of a million people entering the building market by 2032.

And Rachel Rees, in the last budget, Rachel Rees set aside 620 odd million for a scheme to train 60,000 new construction workers by 2028.

But the Federation of Master Builders has said they need 250,000 more if they are ever going to get close to the government's own target.

So it feels to me like one of those areas where the policy objectives are widely supported, but that there is a gap between the objective and the policies that are in place to meet it.

And I thought the most interesting in the QA, Roy, I thought the most interesting question away was the last one.

I don't even remember the guy who said, we are genuinely talking about a housing crisis in this country.

And you look at the numbers, and you know, obviously, there's the most visible sign of it, homelessness, people living on the streets.

But the other data, do you remember the date?

They gave us the figures on how much local authorities are spending now on housing the homeless.

And it is phenomenal, the eye-watering sums of money.

So in London, right now, every single day we're spending £4 million on temporary accommodation for homeless people.

And that has jumped by 68%

over the past year.

So, local authorities, if they're not under enough financial pressure, that is something that they're having to contend with at a time when they're also being asked to build loads of new homes.

And, you know, and one of them has said, just imagine if we could spend that money on actually building for the future rather than just sort of, you know, plugging the gaps for

the mess that we're in at the moment.

This, I think, is a good segue into reform.

So, I don't think any listener now needs to be reminded that reform did phenomenally well in the local elections and surprised surprised people.

It took not just councils like Grimsby, traditional working-class constituencies, but also middle-class places like Kent, where they took every Tory seat in Kent.

I was thinking about why people vote for reform because I also did a Cumbria event last week and it struck me from my experience as a constituency MP that there are three big problems.

Number one, people feel that the government is continually getting rid of things they value.

Local community hospital being closed,

local ambulance going, fire station going, police station going.

Second thing, governments telling you that you can't do things that you used to do in the past.

So people from London or Manchester coming up with new regulations telling you you can't do things that seem pretty straightforward.

And third thing is government not delivering.

I've made the joke before that we announced the dueling of the A66 about 15 times from 2010 onwards and it's not going to happen for another 10 years.

So I think those three things are right at the heart of what a lot of people in constituencies like Cumbria feel when they vote for reform.

So in addition to attending the UK Reef Conference, Roy, I also, as you know, had a haircut in Leeds.

And I had my hair cut by a guy called Josh at a place called Ambassadors, Ambassadors Barbers in the Merion's shopping centre.

And it's a very, very fine haircut.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

So I went in.

He was a bit startled to see me.

We started talking about football.

I'm a Burnley fan.

He's a Leeds fan, promotion, etc.

And then slowly, as you do, we morphed into politics.

And eventually this guy, Josh, he said that you're probably not going to like my politics.

And I said, why is that?

He said, well, because I'm not just a reform voter, I'm a reform member.

And I said, that's okay.

We can, you know, still talk about politics.

And, but what was really interesting talking to him, I really sense that it relates to what you've just said there.

He's, to be fair, he's never voted Labour.

He'd always voted Tory.

He voted for Brexit.

He voted for Johnson.

He basically feels that for the entire life that he's been engaging with politics as a small businessman who runs his own barber's shop, as politicians have come along, they've made promises and then he feels that his life is not getting better and his communities are not getting better.

And then he said this really interesting thing about it.

He said, I feel that we're losing a sense of moral purpose as a country.

He actually made the point, I think if we were suddenly at war, I'm just not convinced that the young generation would be up for fighting for Britain.

We're losing a sense of what Britain is about.

So he wasn't, now, by the way, he had a very realistic assessment of Nigel Farage.

He said he knew that he was kind of a bit Trumpian Trumpian and you couldn't necessarily believe him.

But he did say, when I see Starmer, when I see Badnott, when I see these other politicians, I never quite know where they're coming from.

I never quite know what they're saying.

Whereas Farage is kind of, you know, straight out there.

And he did say, I couldn't imagine him prime minister because if you can't keep Rupert low in the tent, he was very, very worried about Farage's kind of, you know,

one-man bandism and so forth.

But what was interesting was that it was something that a Labour MP said to me recently that this was speaking to.

He said, you know, we're up against the zeitgeist.

We're not up against a different collection of policies.

We're up against the zeitgeist.

And that, I think, is why Labour and the Tories have really got to think very, very carefully about how they take apart Farage.

He can be taken apart, in my view.

And I actually think that, interestingly, his speech today, where he's talking about, you know,

reinstating the winter fuel allowance, scrapping the two-child benefit cap, going for tax breaks for married couples.

This is stuff that is absolutely kind of, you know, meat and drink to a lot of people who think that politics is simple.

And he's saying we're going to pay for it by getting the asylum seekers out, scrapping all the net zero.

If that is properly put under scrutiny, it will fall apart.

The question is whether the other parties and the media genuinely put it under scrutiny.

Your man who was cutting your hair seems to be pretty representative.

I've just been talking to James Johnson, who did our polling before the election and has been doing, he's been doing focus groups.

Your man seems to represent a lot of what you're hearing in focus groups which is that reform voters are very disillusioned and angry.

So they're angry about crime, they're angry about migration, they feel that Britain's broken, they feel that politicians are disconnected.

But they're not, this isn't America.

They're not starry-eyed about Farage.

You know, he doesn't have the kind of cult that Trump would have.

And it isn't ideological in the way that America is.

So it's not we're voting for reform rather than conservatives because we want the full fat version.

I think that would be totally true in the US.

In the US, there's basically no room for being a moderate Republican because people are just like, if we're going Republican, we're going full out.

We're going to go for Trump.

So that's an opportunity, which is that Farage doesn't quite have that cult-like status.

And there isn't, the culture wars aren't so deep here.

Or they're different.

I mean, you know, I think this is another thing that maybe we're quite well placed to think about on the podcast because we look at a lot of other countries, which is on the surface, populism looks the same all around the world.

But of course it's not.

Here's a couple of examples.

One of them is that I'm pretty sure the guy that cut your hair will have been pro the welfare state and pro-NHS.

Whereas populists in the United States will be very, very skeptical about the welfare state.

Again, if there are cultural wars in Britain, you know, people will complain about woke, but it's not like Hungary, where people are talking about recreating a Christian nation and all this kind of stuff.

Where I think, though,

the government has a problem is that there is my experience in Cumbria, which I talked about, which is the sense that things aren't getting done or people being stopped from doing stuff.

The second problem, which we haven't addressed, is my experience in government and just how slow and frustrating and weird.

I mean, this is what my books try to describe, is how strange it was trying to get anything done as a minister, how amazingly inert things felt, how often I felt I was really fighting the civil service unnecessarily to do quite simple things, how the culture of politics in Parliament was not getting stuff done.

And there I think there's still a lot of complacency.

I don't think either Labour or Conservatives has connected the fact that people feel very disillusioned in politics, feel as you sense that lack of moral purpose.

But my goodness, there isn't the appetite for the really radical reform of the the way that parliament works or government works.

But that was what the guy at the conference was saying when he was essentially saying that, you know, if you look at the data on something like housing, and Angela Rainer is the cabinet minister in charge of that, he was basically saying, I want to know that she is sitting down like every day with all of the people who are involved in this and tracking the data.

Why aren't we meeting this target?

What are the gaps?

What are the loopholes?

What is the change that's needed?

And of course, the other thing we haven't touched upon, I'll come back to Christianity, by the way, because that's really interesting in relation to my conversation with the hairdresser.

But the other thing that we haven't touched upon is NIMBYism.

I listened to a tortoise podcast recently, which was about the NIMBY nation.

And it had this astonishing fact.

France, admittedly a bigger country, they have built more motorway mileage since the turn of the century than the whole of the UK network.

We have not built a new nuclear plant or a new reservoir in 30 years.

And one of the things that this podcast talked about was this sort of professional complaining, use of the legal system.

And I didn't know this.

I don't know if you know this, Rory.

If you're an individual who takes the government, say, to judicial review, there's a cap on your costs of £5,000.

So the government ends up spending millions defending itself.

And I think this is what the Planning and Infrastructure Bill is trying to do: to say, look, we've got to stop this.

I mean, yes, you've got to have local views.

Yes, you've got to be able to complain and campaign and so forth.

But they're putting a limit of one judicial review because virtually every major building project now is being subject to legal challenge, environmental challenge and so forth.

Just on the Christianity point, Roy, this guy, he was such an interesting guy.

He really was.

And I actually said to Labour MP that I met in Leeds Later, I said, you could go and talk to this guy because he wasn't, I didn't detect.

any sense of the stuff that we that sometimes gets associated with reform racism the pictures on the walls of footballers and and and musicians and so forth

There were as many black faces as there were white.

He was very kind of open.

He just felt that his community was not getting better.

But he did say to me that he'd become a Christian in the last couple of years.

And he said now that the Bible was the most important book to him, and he read it.

And I think it was all about this thing about, you know, we're losing our way morally.

So he was very, very interesting.

I hope he doesn't mind me.

He did say, give me a shout out at the podcast.

So

I've learned more than done that.

But he was interesting because he didn't have any expectation, by the way, that if God, God help us, Nigel Farage did become prime minister, he didn't have any expectation it would necessarily be better, but he felt that it would help to blow up a system that he feels is not working for him.

That was where I think the connection with Trump maybe can be made.

Let's get to the sort of politics and numbers of this.

So, there are three things that could happen: Tories and reforms stay pretty neck and neck as they go into the next election, split the right-wing vote.

Number two, the Tories get rid of Kemi Badenock, bring in a new leader who somehow re-energises them, and they push reform down to 15% of the vote again.

Number three, Farage really gains momentum, keeps momentum, and he ends up significantly outperforming the Tories at the next election and being, as it were, the second party in government.

Which of those three do you do you feel at the moment is most likely?

I don't think Kemi Badenock is going to last.

And I thought her just watching her over the weekend...

weekend.

Now I understand why she wants to do sort of really strong clear primary colour positions but I think she's ending up in a very bad place in being so strongly supportive of Israel at a time when we're turning on the TV and just seeing absolutely horrific, truly horrific scenes.

There was one last night of this young girl who lost virtue her entire family in a bombing and literally tears.

I mean, we talk about tears streaming, tears streaming down her face as she described how she escaped from this fire, which has killed her siblings and one of her parents, certainly one and maybe two of her parents.

And then the other thing is she's decided, and this may be more interesting, she's decided to come out very, very strongly in favor of keeping the two-child benefit cap.

But I don't think she's going to last.

I could be wrong, but I don't think she's going to last.

So I think that will happen.

The question then is who takes over and where they position themselves against Virage.

I think that both the main parties have made a mistake by devising so much of their strategy around reform.

The thing that I don't know what James Johnson said about this, it seems to me that where Farage is very, very vulnerable, you mentioned there the NHS, he's very vulnerable on the NHS because most of the people who voted for him, this comes through in the polling, aren't aware that actually he does favour a much more kind of private insurance model of healthcare.

I think he's vulnerable on Putin and Trump, and I think he's vulnerable on this point that my hairdresser Josh made about the one-man bandism.

That once you take Farage away, there isn't much there.

And what he's good at, we'll see this today.

I mean,

to come out and say this is classic populism.

We're going to reinstate the winter fuel allowance and

we're going to get rid of the two-child benefit cap.

And we're going to pay for it by shutting down these, stop paying these hotels to keep asylum seekers.

Well, that begs the question.

Where are they going to go?

What problems is that going to carry on?

So it's classic populism.

It is total Trumpism.

You just say you're going to do something.

You say it with such confidence.

It's also interesting that, to give him some credit, he's got a feeling for what voters want.

And I think, oddly, in this, he's got a better feeling for Red Wall voters than what we're hearing from the rumours from number 10 and Morgan McSweeney, the chief of staff, Stalin's chief of staff, who the story was a week ago,

that we mustn't get rid of the two-char benefit because he thought from opinion polls that key working-class voters didn't like the idea of people on welfare with big families getting more money when they had more kids.

What's happened now is that Farage has outflanked Labour on the left, and he's sensed that his reform voters do want a generous welfare state,

like the idea of looking after people and having money for pensioners and having money for children.

And what we'll then see is I think Morgan McSweeney and Starmer will then come in behind Farage on this.

So, Farage is actually making the political weather.

There's no doubt about that.

But to me, this was an obvious one.

This is why, look, the thing about, I've said to you before, I think at the moment, within the number 10 operation, there is too much politics and not enough political strategy.

Political strategy, when we interviewed Ed Miliband this week on leading, and he was talking about one of Gordon Brown's skills, being able to see sort of 15 moves ahead, a year ago,

Nigel Farage and the politics that he was pursuing at that time, which were very much he's going for the Tories,

you would have said that he would have been absolutely,

you know, sought out the welfare scroungers.

That would be where he would be positioning himself.

But I think what anybody who's been to any of these places and who's talked to people, and this is coming from Labour MPs all the time, where you have real levels of child poverty

that

seem to be developing, that requires a big strategy.

Now, what he's done, as the conversation has started, with Labour clearly starting to think, maybe we need to look at this, maybe we need to unpick this, Farage has said to himself, That's what they're going to do.

Therefore, I'm going to say it first, and I'm going to get out there and do a big thing on it.

And when they do it, I'll be able to say, Look, they wouldn't have done it without me.

He played the same game in relation to the steelworks at Scunthorpe.

Labour clearly had a problem, clearly, he was sort of going through the complicated policy processes to get to the decision.

He smells the wind, he works out where it's going.

That is part of being in politics in opposition.

But I think it's a consequence of Labour having the wrong approach when it comes to dealing with him.

They've got to have a strategy that is about not dealing with reform, but addressing child poverty.

One of the issues is, of course, that there are people in number 10 who like the rise of reform.

And their calculation would be in any one of those three scenarios that I laid out, Labour benefits, regardless of whether reform is ahead of the Tories, behind the Tories, or neck and neck with the Tories.

I went off on one rather than answering your question.

I think that is the most likely as things stand, but I don't think I think we're in such volatile times.

None of us can really accurately predict.

Exactly.

I don't think any of us can accurately predict because a lot of it depends.

Will, as you say, Farage discredit himself?

Will he sort himself out?

So what's the best case scenario for Farage?

Well, best cases scenario for Farage, presumably, is that he begins to build a shadow cabinet and he gets a really credible person in as his shadow chancellor, not an MP, somebody from the outside world, because nobody thinks of Farage as being a good economic manager.

It's not like Trump.

Trump, of course, a lot of people in America think is a very successful businessman party because he ran The Apprentice.

Farage hasn't got that.

Nobody thinks Farage is the kind of guy who's going to be able to run the economy.

The Tories have got a difficult choice, haven't they?

Basically, if they replace Kami Bednock, and I think, just to analyse where she got wrong, you're right, she's doing primary colours now, but the basic problem since she came in is that she disappeared.

She had this idea, which never made sense to me, that she was going to slow roll and slowly develop her policies, and she had a long time till the next election, and she wasn't in a rush.

But what she forgot is that she's in a world of social media with reform rising fast, and she needed to fight every day for the British right.

And I don't understand.

I mean, I think the strategy should have been

get out.

Pound the streets, do town halls all the time, be humiliated, get the video cameras in watching you, create a narrative of Kemi Bade not travelling around the country, meeting people, being shouted at, arguing, apologizing, and create a story.

I think this was madness what she did.

Anyway, I think she's going.

So then the question is, do the Tories go with Robert Jenrick?

And here a Tory MP said to me, look, he's pretty awful, and we don't think he's got much sense of strategy, but at least he's got some energy.

At least we think he's going to be able to get some headlines.

Or do they bring back Boris, which I think would be a catastrophe, because it would be very easy to pin on Boris.

So many of the problems...

That's Boris Johnson we're talking about, is it?

That's Boris Johnson.

I'm so sorry.

I reverted to forgetting what he's supposed to be called.

He's another child.

He clearly sees himself as being in competition with Elon Musk, who can have the greatest number of offspring on the planet.

I agree with you, but I think bringing back Johnson would be a disaster for them.

Yeah, and then I suppose the third thing is whether they could get back to somebody like James Cleverly.

but James Cleverly's strategy has slightly disappeared, hasn't come on our podcast, hasn't been in the shadow cabinet, haven't seen much of him.

It's called biding your time, Rory.

What is the strategy for the centre-right?

The only strategy for the centre-right has to be to exploit Farage's weakness on the economy and to try to hope that with a couple of changes of leaders, the Tories can distance themselves from the catastrophe of the last 14 years, or the way in which at least the last five was portrayed, and get themselves into a position of mounting an economic attack and coming as credible on the economy.

I mean, implausible though that is, that's the only hope against Farage, right?

I think playing Farage at his own game, which I suspect is what Generic would do, is, I think, is doomed to fail.

I suspect that the membership of the Tory Party, such as it is, because I think it's dwindling, but I suspect that's the sort of person that they would elect.

But I think they need to really think afresh.

It's a little bit like the Democrats in the States.

I don't feel that they've had any sort of real analysis as to why they lost.

And because they've got a lot to attack Labour on, there's a going for Labour.

So in a way, they're doing an inverse of what you described as was happening at our first year at the conference.

You know, the Tories are terrible.

What's a Labour would be better?

The Tories are doubts, you'd be say Labour are terrible and we'd be better without...

actually understanding that until they have that proper public analysis of why they lost so badly, nobody's listening.

I mean, her problem at the moment is I don't think people are even listening.

Whereas they are listening to Farage, because and I always felt Farage getting into Parliament would be a really significant thing because he's not stupid and he uses it well.

Now, people do say, by the way, that when he's in Parliament, he's a terrible parliamentary performer because he's not used to being challenged directly as he speaks.

And so, he's so he's what he's going to do.

And I think you're right, he'll pick a cabinet of all the talents from outside parliament.

He's he's only got four MPs to pick for and you can't imagine Lee Anderson as your chancellor I don't think I think he'll do that and the Tories I think

they they need to think absolutely afresh and come up with something new and Labour meanwhile needs to have a strategy that is about governing and a strategy that is about addressing these big challenges some of which we've talked about today

and doing it in a way that paints this picture of what they're trying to achieve for the country.

Final point from my hairdresser.

He basically said at one point, he said, I don't really know what the government's trying to do and I haven't got a clue what the Tories are trying to do.

You know, Q open a door to a populist opportunist outsider.

And on the subject of populist opportunists outsiders, why don't we take a break and come back to Donald Trump?

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Welcome back to the Restis Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

And me, Alistair Campbell.

And I briefly mentioned Ed Miliband in part one, but just to remind people, we've done this two-part interview with Ed Miliband.

First part was out on Monday, second part is out on Friday.

If you can't wait till Friday and you're not a member of Trip Plus, just join and you'll find it will just waft seamlessly into your members' feed.

But I thought, what did you think of Ed Miliband, Rory, over the two hours we spent with him?

Well, to remind people, of course, he almost became Prime Minister.

He was leader of the Labour Party.

There's this amazing story about his fratricidal.

fight with his brother David, who many people, including probably you and me, thought should have been the Labour leader.

He's also been the big champion of net zero climate policy.

He's one of the people in the cabinet that really has a clear idea of what he's trying to do, controversial though it is.

So I think he's a big beast.

I mean, if you're looking for big beasts in modern politics and also looking for someone who's done something which is increasingly unusual, which is to stay in politics despite all the ups and downs,

I think he's anyone interested in politics should listen to that.

Yeah.

And also interesting, we talked a lot about reform and Nigel Farage, because one one of Farage's big things now he's sort of given up talking about Brexit.

Net zero is his thing.

And I think in part two when people listen to that, I thought he was, Ed was at his most compelling and animated when he was talking about how to win the argument on net zero.

And I think that will become a very big part of the

rest of this parliament.

Now let's talk about where do you want to start in foreign affairs?

Do you want to start with something positive?

The king.

Yeah.

Let's maybe finish with the positives so people can leave on a cheery note.

Okay, yeah, fine, fine.

Let's just do a very, very quick summary of the different things that have been front and center in the world.

So, number one, Ukraine.

A lot of talk of calls between Trump and Putin, exchange of prisoners, and then some very, very brutal attacks by Russia against Ukrainian cities.

Then we've had big new announcements on tariffs.

So, everybody will remember the tariffs came down, but Trump has then been threatening to ramp them up again, particularly against the European Union.

We've had a next layer in the attack on American universities with a big attack on Harvard saying that no visas will be issued for foreign students who want to study at Harvard.

It's a very big chunk of...

Harvard's base.

And then we've had Trump pass his tax policy bill, which is his big spending bill, which is going to have huge ramifications in terms of the U.S.

deficit and the direction in which those things go.

I think that's the main things from me.

But were there other things that caught your attention in terms of what's happening in the world at May?

Well,

there most certainly were.

The two things that really struck out to me this week, three things actually, the meme coin dinner.

You know, Mar-a-Lago, and this is straightforward corruption.

He has a meme coin.

Apparently, he's growing his own wealth at the rate of a billion dollars a month while he sort of keeps saying, I'm not taking a salary for being president.

I'm giving my salary away.

So, on the one hand, he gives his salary away, which is a couple of hundred thousand dollars.

And on the other hand, he's sort of taking in billions.

And this was a place where apparently some of the guests were so unkeen to be seen that they arrived with bags over their heads.

Others who were tweeting, tweeting, and posting merrily, saying, Look at me, I'm right up close with Donald Trump.

And the line from the White House was he was doing this in his free time.

The other thing that I noticed was he made the speech to West Point, West Point Military Academy, one of the most prestigious military academies in the world.

And he made a speech that was so off-the-scale bizarre.

He started talking about some guy who was chasing trophy wives and it didn't help him in the end.

He was criticizing Joe Biden, of course.

He then said, and by the way, Joe Biden and Obama, when they did this speech at West Point, they stayed and shook hands with every new graduate.

Thousand people, they stood there and shook hands with them.

Trump announced that he can't stay to shake their hands because he's got to go and deal with China and Russia.

Not long afterwards,

he was photographed in a golf buggy playing golf.

So that one.

And then the other one also relates, also relates to corruption: Vietnam.

You mentioned tariffs.

Vietnam were getting sort of, you know, whacked with tariffs.

And suddenly, there's this big deal to do a real estate golf course project in Vietnam for the Trump family.

And lo and behold, this helps the tariff situation.

I mean, you define corruption recently as the use of public office for private gain.

Okay.

Well, we're we're seeing it played out in plain sight day after day after day.

And indeed, Johnson, Mike Johnson, the speaker, he was interviewed about the weekend at the weekend.

He said, Well, I don't know about this dinner, but the difference between Trump and Biden is it's all being done in public.

It's all being played out in public as if that kind of makes straightforward corruption okay.

And my final point, Rory, sorry, the rant is coming to an end, I promise you, was that he sent a free speech team to come to the UK to look at the free speech issues of some of the people who generated the riots at the time of the Southport killings through social media.

I mean, you know, stay in your lane.

You may be president of America.

I would argue our free speech right now is a lot healthier than yours, not least because we don't have a government that's going after media, academia and judiciary, which is what you and Mr.

J.D.

Vance are doing right now.

I'm now calm.

Well,

one other thing we haven't mentioned was this amazing meeting with Cyril Ramaphosa, the South African president, which happened in the White House, which for, again, people haven't watched it.

I sat through about 17 minutes of it, and then I watched some of the questions at the end.

So this is the thing that, Alisa, you keep reminding listeners, has become a staple of the Trump presidency, which wasn't normal before.

So it's this thing before the meeting where traditionally,

I think in your account, if I understand right, what used to happen is you used to say, very happy to be in Washington, looking forward to meeting the president and deepening the ties between our countries and a few photographs, and then you go in.

This time, Ramposa turns up.

And the backstory is a lot of anger against South Africa from different bits of the MAGA coalition.

So people angry that South Africa was taking the genocide case against Israel.

People angry about South Africa because Marco Rubio says the G20 is going to be ruined because South Africa is talking too much about DEI.

But particularly in this case, Trump very, very focused on the issue of attacks on white farms and what he calls a white genocide.

And the fact that they've announced that they're going to give asylum, strangely, having an anti-immigration policy against almost the entire world.

So Afghans who served with the United States are left to loiter in Afghanistan.

In fact, some of them are at risk of being expelled from the United States now, whose families were all brought over two years ago and are at risk of being thrown out again.

Meanwhile, he's bringing over white farmers.

And so there was this amazing moment moment where Trump is sitting down with Ramposa and he suddenly says, Look, here's a video you've got to watch.

And you can't see the video in most of the angles from which the cameras are shooting.

You can hear the video and you can see Ramposa turning over his shoulder and it goes on for a long time,

five, six minutes of video.

But what you're hearing from the video is Julius Malema, who we've talked about, who's this radical beret-wearing fringe politician, leading a big rally, apparently, where there is dancing and chanting, not in English, which which I guess sort of feeds the sort of sense of something strange going on in South Africa, and chanting kill the Boer, which was an old chant.

And Ramaposa is trying to work out what to do.

Does he look at the video?

Does he look at Trump?

Does he frown?

Does he smile?

And then Trump brings out all these bits of paper.

And I'm going to hand back to you on this.

But the bits of paper are Trump saying, And I've got all these articles from people, and look at this.

You know, they hear all the white crosses of all these farmers buried in this field.

and here are mass graves.

And there is this concerted effort to steal their land without compensation and kill them.

And every time Ramaposa tries to answer, Trump either repeats himself, sort of rambles through the whole thing almost word for word again, or he starts attacking the NBC correspondent, who he's decided is a bad journalist and asked bad questions because he's asked him about the catapult.

Anyway, over to you on this.

Well, the other person in the room was Elon Musk.

And of course, a lot of this is driven by Elon Musk.

And I think the the thing to understand about I did I was at the Hay Festival at the weekend I did I did five events one of which was with I did one with Yulia Neville Nayer who said hello oh yes very good yep she was amazing she got standing evasion both ends I did one with Eddie Rama another leading guest and Anne Applebaum and Misha Glennie

where there was a very interesting spat between Eddie Rama and Anne Applebaum which actually relates to how you deal with Trump and how you deal with with Putin.

Eddie was trying to almost put the case that Trump had done some good by getting people to focus on the ceasefire in Ukraine.

Anyway, Anna Appleby was having none of it.

Putin's terrible, and we should never ever say anything but that he's absolutely terrible.

But the point about these, the meeting with Ramaposa, and this is how fake Trump goes on about fake news.

He was the author of the fake news.

Because the, first of all, just to give you some facts, South Africa, it is true, has one of the highest murder rates in the world,

an average of 72 a day.

Most of them are black.

In 2024, there were 26,232 murders.

44 of them were linked to the farming community.

Eight were white farmers.

So, you know, when he talks about genocide, it is absurd.

Even the Afrikaners Farmers Union says that under 1% of total murders have been of farmers.

Now, I'm not saying that that's a good thing or a bad thing.

I'm just saying that even they are saying, when you talk about under 1%, this is not genocide.

And also, Trump talked as though the government, the South African government, is just sort of going around expropriating land.

They have passed the law saying giving them the right to do so, but they haven't actually used it.

And if you look at the stats, 76% of farmland is owned by whites, who make up less than 8% of the population.

4% is owned by black South Africans who make up around 80% of the population.

So it's not unreasonable to say, let's try and sort of get a bit more equality, but they have actually not

expropriated any land, even though they have the law that allows them to do so.

And this is apparently the law that Musk has wound Trump up to say this is part of a white genocide.

It's absolute nonsense.

But then the other thing was that, so you mentioned these crosses, okay?

And he said, this is where white farmers are buried.

No, it wasn't.

It was a protest about the death of two white farmers.

But all the crosses were put down there to represent the deaths that there have been, as it were, in history.

And then the other thing with the cuttings, he's going through the cuttings, going, look, death, death, death.

Somebody from Reuters or one of the news agencies spotted that it was their story.

But it turned out it was from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It had nothing to do with South Africa.

This was the mass graves.

Yeah, yeah.

You take that one fact alone.

Here we are,

23 years after

the weapons of mass destruction dossier okay where most days somebody on social media will challenge me about that because it's still a kind of live issue right donald trump that story of him using

fake we and by the way we didn't use fake information we just used intelligence that turned out to be to be wrong which i would argue is different but he's there using a story about one country, pretending it's a story about another, and it doesn't even last a tenth of a news cycle because he's then on to the next thing.

We lose, don't we, so quickly a sense of what's normal.

So if you think about any British prime minister or former American president in a formal meeting with a South African president deciding to pull out a piece of paper and say,

in your country, there are these mass graves and kind of thousands of bodies being buried.

And it turns out that not only is he humiliating, embarrassing, and attacking his foreign guest, but that actually it's complete nonsense.

And that the bit of paper he's showing shows graves in Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,

thousands of miles from the border of South Africa.

It's sort of

unimaginable.

I mean,

any president or primacy, it would be the end of their career, wouldn't it?

But that would be the totemic moment.

This person has gone completely mad.

They've attacked a foreign visitor.

They're not briefed properly and they're lying.

Let's look at it another way.

Let's imagine that,

and somebody said that what he did in showing that video and presenting South Africa as he did was like Ramaposa

being in Cape Town, welcoming Donald Trump and showing him a film of the Ku Klux Klan.

Or

it's like him coming to Britain and showing Keir Starmer pictures of Tommy Robinson leading a kind of, you know, violent protest somewhere, and Trump saying,

that's your country.

And I think any other leader who did that, if Ramaposa did do that to Trump, and then it turned out it wasn't the Ku Klux Klan, it was some sort of, you know, weird far-right group from, you know,

somewhere in Europe, then he wouldn't survive.

He'd be done, finished.

And the Americans would make sure he'd be finished.

So I think it's the you talk about the normal.

We've talked before about the normalization of the abnormal.

It is utterly abnormal behavior it shows that there is no kind of checking going on around because remember by the way he actually leaned over to vance to say give me those papers so somebody has presumably gone through them and now if that was a british government a french government a german government and you decided that was the right thing to do heaven knows why you would but let's say you did

the fact that nobody's gone through them and said hold on a minute this isn't south africa or maybe they've gone through and said it isn't it isn't South Africa, but it doesn't matter.

And one of the events I did at Hay was with Anthony Scaramucci.

He said, you have to understand what was going on here had nothing to do with South Africa.

This was him absolutely playing to his base.

He's got a black guy alongside him.

He wants to humiliate him.

He wants to say that his country is F-U-C-K-E-D.

And he wants to say that there is a genocide against white people because it plays into, this is the mooch speaking now, it plays into the white replacement theory that you know black people are trying to replace you and therefore we have to make you angry about that.

So it was all about the domestic consumption.

And it plays into a second narrative too, doesn't it?

Which is that there are double standards.

He kept coming back to the fact, going, I bet you're not going to report this because you only report it when black people are killed.

You don't report it when white people are killed.

So there's also this whole story about the mainstream media being biased, which brings us to Harvard.

So I talked to a couple of Harvard professors yesterday.

and I think to probably

to save them, I don't want to put their names on the record, but it's very striking what he's doing.

So just a sort of quick reminder, there was a letter issued by the Trump administration to Harvard, which began by saying we want control over key decisions on how you hire people, what professors get in.

We want diversity of views, which is another way of saying, you know, we want people teaching our right-wing opinions as much as the liberal opinions that are are normally taught at Harvard.

And this was then followed up by another letter from Christina Noem saying, we want to know all the identities of students who cause demonstrations, disrupt the university, disrupt classes, aren't studying correctly.

And the implication was that foreign students at Harvard represent people who are causing anti-Semitic demonstrations, who are un-American, who are disrupting American values.

And if we don't receive anything back from you within two weeks, reporting on your students, and we want the full report and we want the systems in place to keep reporting on your students, we'll stop all student visas.

Now, Harvard's fighting back in the law courts.

It's fighting back, firstly, about the fact that billions of dollars of federal funding has been taken away from Harvard.

It's fighting against the stopper student visas.

We'll probably win on those, but what we'll lose on is the endowment tax.

So he's now putting in a tax of nearly 27%, I think, going through the current bill, up from 3%, which effectively takes about a quarter of Harvard's income out.

And they will also massively be cutting all the federal funding.

Two quick things on that.

Firstly,

the American Research University, of which Harvard is probably the most dramatic example, has been one of the most incredible successes of the United States since the Second World War.

It was a decision by the federal government to think, how do we get ahead in research and innovation and science?

We will give billions of dollars of federal funding to our very best universities.

And the results have been unbelievable in terms of the number of Nobel Prizes they've got in terms of the kind of scientific advances being done in these places.

The second thing is just this question around Trump's personality.

I suspect because Harvard pushed back so hard legally, he may not go after as many other universities as he might have done.

So maybe Harvard's done a favor to other universities.

But on the other hand, he is absolutely determined to humiliate Harvard because they stood up to him.

No, but it's all part of this thing.

We've talked about it before in relation to Vance and his obsession and and interest in Orban.

Going after the academics and projecting all academics as being sort of basically, you know, radical left lunatics, as Trump calls them, is part of the plan.

And I think that allied to this new media ecosystem, we're talking about the deliberate dumbing down of one of the most, as you say, one of the most intelligent nations in the world in terms of that top level of research, of academic study, of innovation.

So I actually really genuinely think

this is going to do them fundamental damage.

Ursula von der Leyen was straight out saying, you know, we'd welcome lots of these Harvard people coming to European universities if they feel that they can no longer go to Harvard.

And that goes for Americans as well.

But it's sort of, you know, we've made this point week after week after week.

The damage that this does to their soft power around the world is immense.

I think it's good that Harvard are continuing to stand up to it, but my God, they risk paying a heavy price.

Just one more thing on Trump and your reflections from your weekend talking to the mooch and others and ann alperbaum and rama um eu tariffs so this is really worrying stuff um people will remember trump put tariffs in place when he came in january february candidate mexico and then there was liberation day so second of april and this was the moment at which we got tariffs on penguins and we got 45 against vietnam and eventually 140 percent against china the stock market reacted badly the bond market reacted badly and he dropped it all down basically basically to 10%, except for China, and then he blinked on China too.

So everybody breathed a great sigh of relief and said, okay, maybe he hasn't gone full crazy.

And the one thing they've got back to is one thing that Trump cares about is the bond markets and the stock markets.

But the small print had been ignored, which is that actually what he said is, no, this is a temporary respite for 90 days.

And we know that he has history on screwing around like this because he brought the tariffs down on Canada when Trudeau made those concessions on fentanyl.

And then he ramped them up again.

And that's what he's just signaled he's going to do with Europe, right?

Signaling 50% tariffs against Europe again.

And the S ⁇ P dropped 3%, the stock market dropped 3% on this news, because this is really, really big news.

I mean, this could be US growth down by 1.5%.

And for countries like Ireland and the European Union, which are massively dependent on the US, that could knock 4% off that GDP.

I mean, trip them into proper recession territory.

And all of this stuff is going to come to a head in July, because that's when the EU stuff, he now says, will be returned to, and that's when the 90 days come up.

And that's where you might well expect more strange stuff going on with China and new announcements against Apple, where he's made it clear it's not just that he doesn't want Apple being made in China, he doesn't want it made in India either.

So the Indians who thought, well, this is a great opportunity geostrategically to balance India against China and all those companies that were moving their investment from China to India, now being told, no, no, no, it's got to move to the US itself.

But why would you put your investment in the US under Trump when you don't know when your supply chain costs are going to go up and you don't know when he's going to do something that will drive reciprocal tariffs against you, preventing you from exporting back to you?

Well,

you know, we're back to the unpredictability of the whole thing.

So he's suddenly turned on Tim Cook, Apple, who was one of the oligarchs, the media oligarchs who was at the inauguration.

Musk does seem, even though he was in that meeting with Ramaposa, seems to have been sort of, you know, pushed out.

Musk did a tweet yesterday saying he's going back to sort of full-time working on his business stuff.

Does that mean Doge is now dead?

I don't know.

And then, so the other guys, the sort of Zuckerbergs and those guys, they presumably will be next in line.

This goes back to Scaramucci's point.

Eventually, he falls out with anybody who absorbs any of the kind of glory or any kind of the space that should be all about him.

And Rory, it is incredible.

If you think we've talked for, I don't know, 15 minutes about Trump.

We've hit about, you know, 10, a dozen things that he's been involved in.

But actually, possibly the two most consequential relate to what I think are emerging as catastrophic failures for him.

That is Ukraine and Gaza.

Ukraine, he was going to sort the deal in 24 hours.

And he's now basically saying Putin's gone crazy.

Well, as Ann Applebaum said, you know, if you think this is Putin being crazy, you haven't been watching him for the last 25 years.

This is kind of how he operates.

So Putin has played him.

And the Russian media, Steve Rosenberg of the BBC, did a wonderful analysis the the other day of the russian media coverage of the the the phone calls there have been between trump and putin and it was basically like you know this guy's been successfully played and this and now he's going to walk away and meanwhile gaza where is the

as as things get worse it seems to me and certainly watch the news every night it's getting worse in there um and the humanitarian situation is just now a complete disaster where are all of these world leaders in terms of sort of talking about where they take this thing now?

So

I think it's very hard.

Unless you're an absolute MAGA true believer, it's very hard to say that

he's delivering on the things on foreign policy that he said he would.

So on Ukraine, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, and we said that the strategy from Macron and Starmer and Mertz and Zelensky was that they would do absolutely everything that Trump asked them to do, be as flexible as possible, say we're totally open to a peace deal, we're very happy to meet Putin in Istanbul, we'll do the prisoner exchanges, to force as much as they could Trump to recognize that the problem was not coming from Europe and Ukraine, the problem was coming from Russia.

And that was the very best case scenario.

And they got quite a long way.

And you remember the train visit to Kiev, which was a really interesting visit, unfortunately derailed by the stupid lie that they were taking cocaine on the train.

And there was a moment where Trump said, you know, entruse social, well, if Putin doesn't cooperate, you know, we're looking at sanctions.

But the bigger story, which we've known about for five months, is that in the end, when push comes to shove, I'm afraid Macron and Starmer, you know, they have to keep trying, but they're being too optimistic.

There's never been any real indication from the very beginning that Trump has had any interest in sanctioning Russia, putting pressure on Putin or continuing to provide supplies to Ukraine.

He's made it very clear from the very, let alone providing security guarantees.

So one of the sad things from the point of view of people like Macron who really lent into this is that they've just gambled everything that they can change Trump's mind, that if they do all the right things, visit enough, get the right context together, he will eventually agree.

First Macron wanted security guarantees, then at least to keep selling this kit, and at least to put some sanctions on Putin and recognise that Putin's not doing what he's promised.

The truth of the matter is Trump, yes, okay, he recognizes that Putin isn't doing what he's promised.

He says, I don't understand what happened to this guy, I've known him for 25 years, he's gone crazy, why is he killing all Sponge?

But absolute red line.

He is not putting sanctions on Russia.

What he wants to do is lift sanctions on Russia and he does not want to continue providing support for Ukraine.

That just doesn't change, does it?

Mertz did an interview yesterday where he said that Britain, France, Germany, and I think he said America as well, that now there is nothing to stop Ukraine using our missiles for long range,

which was taken as a really big change.

But whether he was speaking out of turn vis-a-vis the Americans, I don't know.

But this coalition of the willing has got to start to mean something now.

Otherwise, Putin just thinks he's kind of on the march.

So Rory, we've gone on for a long, long time.

Should we talk about Canada and the King in question time and call it a halt there?

Absolutely.

Look forward very much.

Look forward to speaking tomorrow.

Thanks again.

See you soon.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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