397. Pope Francis, the Supreme Court Gender Ruling, and Trump’s International Populist Network

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Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

And me, Rory Stewart.

And Rory, I think, in common with virtually every public media organisation in the world, we should talk about His Holiness Pope Francis, RIP, funeral to be on Saturday.

It's just been announced.

I think then we should talk about this Supreme Court ruling in the UK seeking to answer the question, what is a woman?

Which it is claimed has brought clarity to the debate.

I'm afraid I don't think think it's brought clarity to this debate at all.

And then I think in the second half, we promised on the back of our leading interview on the weekend with Prime Minister of Australia Anthony Albanese that we would do our normal post-leading debrief.

So we'll do that as part of a discussion about whether Donald Trump is a help or a hindrance to politicians around the world.

No doubt that Albanese has been helped, or more to the point, Peter Dutton, his opponent, has been damaged by Trump.

Mark Carney in Canada has been helped.

But we also want to talk about Ecuador because there there's been an election where very much the Trumpian has won.

So lots to talk about, but let's...

You're the man of God in the team.

Let's start with the Pope.

What do you want to say about the Pope?

I think the first thing, and I've been talking to friends who are clergymen, so I was talking to my friend Father Yaroslav this morning, who admittedly is an Anglican.

But it's very interesting understanding how the Pope was a very polarizing figure, maybe in ways that is less obvious to people like you and me who aren't in the heart of the Catholic controversies.

And in fact, the very fact that I guess the Pope was pretty popular with people like you and me irritated some Catholics.

So that's the first thing.

A polarizing figure for a couple of reasons.

One is actually on the doctrinal messaging.

So there are conservative Catholics who were uncomfortable with the positions that he took on sexuality, transgender, divorce.

where he sounded more liberal.

He was pretty conservative, though, on things like abortion and contraception.

Yep.

You wouldn't define him as a radical and some of these cultural issues, would you?

No, certainly not.

So no, very much.

He was very much remained a Catholic.

Their second complaint, which I'd like to talk to you a bit about, is his style.

They thought that he wasn't careful enough, that he shot too much from the hip.

He really understood, they reckoned the media.

He was good at handling a social media age.

He was a great communicator.

But the result was that sometimes they felt he wasn't careful enough as somebody who was responsible for a billion people and this very complicated church.

So people would say, you know, what do you think about, you know, transgender?

And he would say,

who am I to judge?

Which on the one hand is a very good, humble Christian message.

On the other hand, they would argue, well, actually, that is slightly your job because you are the Pope, right?

You're supposed to give us a bit of a bit of a guidance on this stuff.

You are basically God's man on earth.

Yeah.

Who am I to judge?

The answer is, well, that's really what we want you to do.

We want you to judge.

Let's pause with that for a second.

Did you have a sense of him as a communicator and what his strengths and weaknesses were and whether you felt as an observer that he occasionally shot a bit from the hip and maybe that was a sign of a certain kind of skill, a certain sort of informality?

I'd tell you one of the most interesting pieces I read

and you know and a bit like the Queen, virtually every media organisation in the world has done really big things on the death of the Pope and including in countries that aren't necessarily even minority you know really small numbers of Catholic but he's a big big big figure but one of the most interesting pieces I read was a guy who covers the Pope for the New York Times, a guy called Jason Horowitz.

And it's interesting, he made exactly the same point about you.

He said that actually he found him more politically savvy and more accessible and humorous than, say, presidential candidates that this guy had been on a plane with.

So this guy, Jason Horowitz, flew around the world with him.

And he actually said that he really got a sense of him when he was in these places where there were very poor people, refugees, people who were fleeing for their lives, and so forth, that he really did have a genuine sense of connection.

But he also made the point that he was politically very, very savvy.

And

he actually wrote about this a time when some of the more conservative cardinals, of which there are many,

and we can maybe talk a bit about the conclave that is now about to take place to choose his successor, but a group of the conservatives had complained and had written to Pope Francis

what's called a letter of Dubai, doubt, asking him to clear up the, quotes, grave disorientation and grave confusion that they said he was causing.

And

his response was completely to ignore it.

And they kept asking him when he was going to reply, and he just sort of shrugged it off.

And

this guy Horowitz says that it was the papal equivalent of dusting off your shoulders with disdain.

And he was also very, you can see in the way that he dealt with the political,

the hundreds of political leaders that he met, you could see that he was very conscious of his own power and his own status in that setting.

But where he felt he got his moral strength was from the other settings of where he was actually out touching people that he felt too many of the politicians didn't really do enough for.

So he's very unusual also in the sense that his predecessor, Benedict, was an academic theologian who really spent spent his whole life, as it were, kind of in the ivory tower.

Whereas Pope Francis was right in the heart of Argentinian politics through these very, very different periods, 70s, 80s, and 90s.

So he was there with Galtieri, with the military dictatorship, with the disappearances, right at the sharp end of that, because he was the senior figure in the Jesuits in the 70s there when the Jesuits were very radical.

and associated with liberation theology and seen as being too close to the communists and some of his colleagues were abducted and tortured by the military regime.

And in that context, he was considered too close to the regime.

And one of those Jesuits criticized him and almost implied that he'd collaborated with the regime on getting them kidnapped.

I think that's the beginning of this story of somebody who grew up in a very, very political context who presumably, if you were being generous to him, was trying to, on the one hand, defend the church and on the other hand, defend his colleagues.

And by defending the church, I mean he probably thought that he needed to get on with the regime, needed to get on with the Argentinian government and make some pretty difficult compromises to keep the church going.

I think also because it's worth remembering in Latin America that in Mexico there had been a revolution which was very anti-clerical.

Many countries in Latin America threw out their Jesuits.

So there's a sort of backstory here of how you keep the church alive.

But the strange thing about that then is that he goes from being somebody who in the 70s is taken out of his job as the senior Jesuit in Argentina because he's considered not sufficiently left-wing by the standards of 1970s Argentina, seen as a bit conservative.

Fast forward to today,

where he's seen as a little bit too left-wing.

Now, he might well say, I didn't change.

The world changed around me.

Communist liberation theology faded, and this new American, more conservative form of Catholicism is now getting stronger, and I'm just the same person.

Although, one of the interesting points that Jason Horowitz made, that what was said by a lot of the people around Pope Francis was that he was somebody who was able and willing to learn from mistakes and be very open about that.

The Latin American angle is very, very interesting because he was the first Latin American pope and he was the first non-European since the eighth century.

And he did change.

So, this conclave, and I was at a lunch not long ago, and Stanley Tucci, the actor, was there, and I was sitting next to him and Delia Smith.

And he was saying that

he was one of the co-stars of the conclave, the film about how a pope is chosen, a fictional pope.

And he said it was one of the most enjoyable roles he has ever played because, and it is, I don't know if you've seen the film it is a good film i have i have i have yeah it's wonderful you know none of us know unless we've been a cardinal inside a coglive we don't know what goes on but it really gave you a feel for the kind of raw politics that takes place there and one of the interesting things that he did was that he appointed as cardinals a lot of new cardinals from what we call the global south.

Now, will that influence it's fascinating to watch all the papers who, most of whom don't really follow the Vatican that closely.

Okay, the New York Times have a guy who follows the Pope.

Most newspapers don't, but they're all giving us these runners and riders and the bookies are giving odds on who's the next pope.

But, you know, it is a very, very, very strange process.

But I think

he will be a very, very, very hard pope to follow.

I think he has made a mark.

in a way that very few popes of our lifetime have.

I think that's because he, I think, sincerely, but also quite publicly lived out a life of modesty and humility.

I mean he made a real central to his papacy was taking the name Francis after St.

Francis of Assisi, not living in the palatial apartments, wearing more modest clothes after being selected.

He's also said he wants a simple, a simple coffin.

He doesn't want exactly.

So in some ways he was living out something very important to the gospel message.

I mean really sincerely.

But like, I suppose all powerful churchmen, there's also the problem of power and the corruption of power.

So he was also quite impetuous, quite contrarian, quite authoritarian.

He liked stirring people up, maybe a little bit of the Alistair Campbell.

He quite, quite liked provoking people.

So he would deliberately sort of poke.

Prod.

And quite enjoy poking and prodding.

And I think maybe that's actually a bit of a theme of his whole life.

I mean, remember, he made some quite radical shifts.

He was engaged to be married and then decided to become a celibate Jesuit.

He obviously had quite a sort of confrontational attitude towards the Jesuits in Argentina in the 70s.

You were moving your fist there, Roy.

He was also a bouncer at one point.

He was a bouncer, that's right.

He was a bouncer at one point.

But the other thing I think which does relate to what makes it very distinct, I mean, let's take the most difficult thing, which is the child sex abuse scandals, which have been horrifying and very central to the Catholic Church.

He appears to have been both publicly very good at expressing horror, but in actual practice,

seems to have sheltered people.

So there's a man called Marko Rucknick, who he effectively gave asylum to in the Vatican, who's accused of horrible abuse, particularly of women.

There's a very sinister American called Theodore McCarrick, who was more on the sort of liberal progressive side of the Catholic Church.

He was a big fundraiser from America, who's also was accused, I think rightly accused of a lot of abuse and who he also covered up and protected.

Now, again, I suppose one also has to understand the context, which is that he's also trying to protect the whole institution of the Catholic Church and the papacy.

He's also not accountable in quite the same way that the Archbishop of Canterbury is.

So the Archbishop of Canterbury, who not long after we interviewed him, resigned because of the view that he had not properly followed up on allegations of abuse conducted by someone connected with the Church of England.

I thought you were going to momentarily suggest that we were responsible.

Well, actually, that interview, I mean, if people listen to it again, I mean, it made a lot of Conservatives, it's a sort of interesting example, very angry because it was the first time that he expressed real sympathy for gay marriage, for example.

And Conservatives have been in articles looking at our interviews saying, well, that showed who he really was, that's why he needed to go in relation to the Archbishop.

But the Archbishop was brought down because fundamentally the Archbishop of Canterbury is very connected to Britain.

And it was the British media.

that brought him down.

The Pope is not quite accountable in the same way.

The Catholic Church has ridden out more of these sexual abuse scandals.

You know, if he had been the Archbishop of Canterbury, the stuff that was going on probably might have led to calls for his resignation, but because he's responsible for a billion people in well over 100 different countries, and the Catholic Church has very strong relationships with the media and institutions, a lot of these countries, they're not quite accountable in the same way.

And the Pope does have a political power in so many different countries around the world.

And the Archbishop of Canterbury does to some extent of those that are part of

the Church, but he has a real, real power.

And I think he knew how to use it as well.

I thought it was very interesting.

His last meeting that we know about was with Vance, and then before that, he had made this

read for him this very brief address on Easter Sunday.

And it was very, it was interesting how it mentioned Gaza.

And somebody sent me actually a, we were going to talk about Israel and Gaza until the Pope died.

I think we should do that in QA now because we get questions about Israel every single week.

But I thought it was interesting that he mentioned that.

And somebody sent me a video of him.

Apparently, most days

he phoned, he had these video calls calls with Christians in Gaza in the last few weeks and months.

And there's one like the one that was sent me was asking this guy, you know, what did he have to eat that day?

And they were making a joke about sharing the chicken wings and what have you.

And he, he, so I think his views on Gaza were very, very clear and very, very strong.

I think his views on immigration were very clear and very strong.

It's probably why he didn't look that happy when he was with J.D.

Vance, but even putting to one side the fact that he's not been very well.

But I think on Ukraine, he was maybe a little bit more

less clear.

And I wonder whether that was because

he was more conscious of

the political dynamics there in a way that worried him in relation to some of the other countries that looked more kindly upon Russia.

I don't know.

But listen, there's no doubt the Vatican is an incredibly political environment.

The other thing, Roy, I think it's interesting, is a rest is politics podcast.

Of all the, I'm going to make a compliment to your friend here.

I

read

almost all of the world leaders' statements about the Pope's passing.

And I thought the two that stood out for me positively were King Charles and Mark Carney.

And I thought Mark Carney both the written, and he also did a very, really quite moving,

it's part of a speech, I think it was yesterday, where he talked about this meeting at lunch he was at with the Pope, where the Pope was basically saying that the job of people like Carney and all the other sort of political and media and banking figures that were there was to turn grappa, which is sort of strong alcohol, back into wine.

And Mark told this story in a way that's sort of laden with the values that the Pope was talking about.

And then it won't surprise you to know that the worst response, well, Putin's was pretty bad.

He talked about how important humanism and peace were.

But Trump, I mean, to do a tribute on the death of the Pope alongside the Easter bunny, as you're about to do the Easter egg roll in the White House gardens, and then to say, Melania and I will be going to the Pope's funeral.

I'm really looking forward to it.

It's just sort of off the scale.

Did you feel anything about the

because these are hard.

I've, you know, working with Tony Blair, you've had so many of these where somebody really big historical figures die and you have to find the words.

And it's not always easy, but I thought Charles and Carney got the tone absolutely spot on.

Good, good, good.

I mean, well, I think they're people who probably do have a sympathy for what he was doing.

Just to finish then with

a little line from him, which I've mentioned before, but I thought was a sort of him at his most powerful and moving, which was in response to J.D.

Vance saying that there was a concentric circle and we should look after our family and nation first and then other people later.

He wrote this letter to the American bishops, which was, I think, his last great intervention, where he says, Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interest that little by little extends to other persons and groups.

In other words, the human human person is not a mere individual relatively expansive with some philanthropic feelings.

The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation.

The true ordo amoris, you know, order of love that must be promoted, is that which we will discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the Good Samaritan.

That is by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all without exception.

And I thought it was so beautiful because only he could do it.

And it was combining some very unusual things in the modern world.

The idea of meditating continually, maturing as a human being, how love and obligation to refugees is also part of forming you as a soul.

That's what I'll remember him for.

And the press release headline could have said, dear JD, Rory Stewart is right about this.

Because he was very much taking your side of the argument.

My final point, Rory, here's a quiz question for you.

Where was the largest ever mass over six million people attended?

Apparently, it was in Manila on his visit to the Philippines.

My good six million people.

So the record says, yeah.

It's extraordinary.

That just shows you.

So no wonder if you're a politician in the Philippines, you don't want to get on the wrong side of the Pope.

Point on him seeing J.D.

Vance.

I mean, I suppose everybody's made this point.

But and the Queen seeing Liz Truss, I mean, just their sense of duty that, you know, when they must have been very, very, very ill, I mean, they're about to die, but presumably barely get out of bed, they're still putting their public duty first and pushing on.

Yeah, anyway, we'll doubtless talk about the conclave aspect of this again as that process goes on.

Now, shall we turn to the Supreme Court and the judgment last week, essentially saying that in relation to the Equality Act 2010, which was, I think, the Gordon Brown government's last Act of Parliament, that when that Act refers to gender,

they're talking about a biological sex and the Lord Hodge who's the deputy president of the court who read out the judgment and he did it in a very careful

judge-like way and then good luck on this one Lord Hodge he said this should not be taken as victory for one side against another in this argument and trans people still have rights etc etc but I guess where I come from it well first of all what was your initial reaction on hearing that judgment and and what it made you think about the issue?

The first thing is that I'm in the States, and interestingly in the States, it's not the same debate.

This is very much a debate in the States where most people on the progressive left are on the side of transgender, and most of the opposition to transgender comes from the Conservative right.

Britain is very unusual because it's in Britain that you have figures like J.K.

Rowling and others who are feminists from the left, who are strongly opposed to what they see as the excesses of transgender ideology.

So this whole dynamic doesn't exist here.

And actually explaining to an American audience why left-wing progressive feminists like J.K.

Renning or Kathleen Stock are troubled by transgender ideology is actually quite difficult.

So I've spent a lot of the last two days trying to explain it.

Do you understand it?

Because the, you know, I get the thing about women feeling they want,

quote, safe spaces.

And I get that.

And I also get, although I think it's completely blown out of proportion, I get the thing about women in sport and transgender, a man becoming a woman and then competing against women.

I can see why there are all sorts of issues that flow from that.

But when everybody came out and said this gives clarity, I just don't think it does give clarity at all.

And one of the most moving things I was at last year, Fiona and I did an event for a company where we were talking about mental health.

And on the same day, on the same platform, there's a guy who,

a trans man, so somebody who had been a woman, now a man, working in this place, who gave a presentation.

And it was just really moving how everybody accepted it, nobody saw it really as that big a deal.

And I was thinking, on the basis of this judgment,

if this is now, and this is the problem with this judgment, is that it's being taken as a woman is only, you know, if you cannot change your sex, is essentially what people are saying out of this.

But there's somebody who, this is the Equality Act 2010, there's somebody who, according to the the 2005 Gender Recognition Act, actually has been allowed to redefine as a man.

Now, under this ruling, and I'm just putting this out there because I don't know the answer, if that person is out in a public place, say like a swimming pool, and wants to go to the bathroom, are they going to the gents or are they going to the ladies?

As I understand it, he...

Now has to go to the ladies.

Is that what was intended?

Yeah, I think what the judges would say is that people who run that establishment have the absolute right to say that only cisgender males can go to the male bathroom.

They can make exceptions if they want, but the exception is then with the discretion of the institution.

So what's flipped is the question of who has the rights here and who can get an exception.

I was very struck by Jamila Jamil, who's a presenter, actress, quite a big thing in the States now, and also an activist on all sorts of fronts.

But she made the point, point, a sort of post she did, she made the point, you know, are we now going to be sort of checking on what she called, you know, people's tackle as they present themselves to places like bathrooms.

So I just, this is why I just think that this idea, and I saw Kierstarmer today saying, I'm very happy that this has brought clarity to this debate.

I don't think it's brought clarity at all.

And my big worry, my big worry is that because of the way, and it's interesting what you say about America, but let's be honest, the British debate around trans is pretty vile, pretty noxious, pretty toxic.

And you just had to see, so there's the judge saying, nobody should take this as a victory, one side over the other.

Cut to shots of lots of women popping champagne corks, pictures of J.K.

Rowling smoking a celebratory cigar.

And I just worry that, and actually, we had loads of abuse, you and I, down when we last discussed this.

And since this judgment, I don't know if you've seen, but some of the women columnists who are really, really active on this sort of poking hours on social media and what have you.

And one of them said, please don't give me any of that stuff about this being a marginalized, put-upon community.

It is.

And that doesn't change.

Let me try to do the explainer that you were asking for and see if I can do it.

My sense is that there are two completely different positions here.

There's the position of the trans community, which is that you are somebody who's biologically born male, but you identify as a woman, or you're biologically born a woman, you identify as a man.

Although that second category doesn't really feature in this debate, oddly, very little of this debate is about people who are born women who identify as men.

It's almost all the other direction is where the controversy is.

Somebody in that situation, so a trans woman, somebody biologically male who identifies as a woman, would want to have all the rights and access and opportunities that would normally be granted to a woman because they identify as a woman.

On the other side, on the J.K.

Rowling, Kathleen Stock side, you have people saying saying that women's rights were very, very hard fought for, and that the rights, accesses, protections, and opportunities for women should not be eroded by creating an ambiguous blur around the edges of who's a woman and who isn't, because it might allow men to be able to claim some of the access, opportunities, protection of women without being women.

And the one thing that those both positions have in common is they don't like people like you and me either saying this isn't the most important issue in the world that really irritates people because it feels very existential to them but secondly they don't like a liberal position which is my position i mean so to put my cards on the table my position would be okay this is a very difficult question of two competing claims of identity and rights so let's try to find practical compromises so you know in the rory stewart world i would say trans

uh women should not be able to compete in women's sports seems to me unfair i would probably uh be in favour of gender-neutral bathrooms in many contexts to get around this issue, right?

I would also be in favor of looking at a case-by-case basis on a trans woman wanting to go into the female estate in a prison, because you have to balance the fact that trans women are at a lot of threat.

I mean, if you've just pointed this out, right?

If you go into a male bathroom and you're a trans woman and you're wearing a skirt, you can be beaten up by a man in that bathroom or you could be in a prison, you could be very badly treated by fellow prisoners.

You could also theoretically, although there actually aren't that many cases of it, but it has happened, you could pose a threat to women.

So I would be trying to argue that you look at this on a case-by-case basis and you try to navigate your way through these very difficult claims of values.

But both sides hate that because if you are a trans woman, you might say, listen, I am a woman.

These are my rights.

These are my entitlements.

I don't want to be given a case-by-case treatment.

I mean, we don't say, for example, if an African-American is denied entry to a country club, they have to prove that they're not violent in order to be allowed to come into the country club.

They would say,

this is discrimination, right?

Yeah.

But as you've pointed out, all of this affects sport,

access to puberty blockers.

There's this amazing slow news Tavistock podcast done by Tortoise Media, if people want to get into that, looking at the use of puberty blockers, single-sex spaces, prisons, free speech, how you talk about this in school.

And my goodness, it feels polarized.

It doesn't feel like somebody like me trying to say, well, here's the kind of liberal compromise on this is going to get anything other than abuse and hate from both sides.

No, and

that's what I worry about this, the judgment.

And I don't think that was their intention, but I think that's the consequence, as the danger.

That's the consequence.

And I also do feel, I mean, look, we're a political podcast.

I still think this should have been resolved by Parliament.

This is essentially what's happened is that there's been a sort of not a conflict, if you like, a contradiction between two pieces of legislation.

And I think that could have been resolved if the politicians had wanted to have the debate.

And I think it's about that they don't want really to have the debate.

I think that could have been resolved by, you know,

a code of sil, an explanatory note.

It could have, you could have thrashed this out, instead of which you have the debate going on in the media, you have the debate going on through campaigners, you have the debate going on, if you like, through the loudest voices within that debate.

And then

a kind of quite subtle 88-page judgment comes out with what is taken rightly, I'm not criticising this, that was the most important line, was the thing about their definition of what a woman is.

And that is immediately turned into a reason to carry on the fight, a reason not just to say the court has made this judgment and therefore we now proceed on this basis, but more, if you look at some of the rhetoric around this, this essentially saying that there's no such thing as a trans person.

If you're born a woman, you're a woman for the rest of your life.

You're born a man, you're a man for the rest of your life.

So again, this is going to make a lot of people angry, but I think that we've also got to acknowledge that we are cisgender males, so we're people who are born biologically men and who still identify as being men.

And therefore, we don't connect with this debate as clearly as some other groups.

It's partly formed for me by a good friend of mine who was biologically a woman, but doesn't identify as a woman.

And they find this issue both something that's very personal, but also central to their work, because they run a clinic which works to provide puberty blockers for young people, young people who are often suicidal, who feel that they desperately need support in protecting their gender identity, who don't want to transition into a gender that they feel doesn't belong to them, and feels that they're doing work which matters deeply to them personally and their own identity, but also to some very vulnerable people.

But at the same time, that's balanced with the fact that, as the Tavistock report showed, there are many complexities around why people want to transition and how you back the evidence on the risk of suicide against the evidence, the damage that might be done for inappropriately blocking somebody's development, and how parents play into this, and how social media plays into this.

One of the things on the media I saw that really wound me up, I think it was on Channel 4, there was a debate between one of the women who'd been involved in the campaign, who was celebrating the Supreme Court judgment, and a trans woman up in the Scottish Highlands who'd been through the whole thing.

And

the woman on the, as it were, J.K.

Rowling's side of the argument, just kept calling her him, he.

And I just felt there was a sort of there was a sort of, there was a sneering attached to it that I really found unpleasant.

I think it's a classic example of something which has become very, very complicated, which is, for many people, very niche.

I mean, mean, you often get bad policies when you're dealing with something which I guess probably 85% of the British public doesn't have much of a view on, doesn't think about very much.

Well, this is the other thing.

If you look at during the last election, if you looked at the polling on the issues that people felt were important to them, and it wasn't asking about their voting intent, just the issues that were important to them.

Trans was very, very low down.

Very low down,

the pecking order.

I do think we have a media that's made the most of it.

We now have a president in the United States who wants to make the most of it and who actually even in his acceptance speech, did a big thing about, you know, there are only two sexes, you're either a man or you're a woman, and let's get these sports people out and all that stuff.

So, weaponizing, if you like.

And the other thing, you're right that, of course,

you and I are not women, just the same as we're not black, and we're not poor, and we're not African, and there's lots of things we're not.

But it doesn't mean that we can't have empathy for other people, or that we can't study things and try to develop an opinion.

And I get, you know, I actually had a real falling out with somebody at an event not long ago because basically said that, you know, she said, you've just been brainwashed.

You've been brainwashed.

And what do you mean I've been brainwashed?

And then said, and you know, what do you know about anyway?

You're not a woman.

And I said, and it's true, my opinions on this have largely been formed by, first of all, understanding this is a debate that's been weaponised.

So therefore, don't rely too much on the media debate.

Try to dig into it a bit deeper.

But then, in terms of my opinions, I would say they've been informed by Grace, my daughter, and her friends, almost all of whom, I think, just found this judgment really quite alarming and dangerous.

Fiona, my partner, and also a very good friend of ours, Hella Thorning-Schmidt, who we had on the podcast, and her family, because they have somebody that we knew going on holiday when she was a kid as Camilla, is now a male, he, Milo.

And it's worked for them.

And it's worked for them, I think, in part because they've had support,

understanding, and a legal framework that kind of is a bit clearer.

So when I see Akira Starmer today saying, I think this is great, this has all been cleared up.

I'm sorry, I don't think it has been cleared up.

And I think ultimately, Parliament is going to have to another look at this at some point.

Now, I know we're both going to get from various angles, we're going to get absolutely sort of lacerated, but I do feel strongly.

This is, we're talking about very, very, there we are talking about the Pope, who liked sort of reaching out to marginalised people.

And

I think trans people have enough on their plate without also constantly being thrown into the middle of a political debate, the heat of which does not necessarily get us to the right place.

Well, I think with that, let's take a break.

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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Expivia, vivimos para viajar.

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

Now, we said at the end of the leading interview with Anthony Albanese, which we did live, and it was very generous of him to give over an hour of his time in the middle of his election campaign.

That said to me, he was feeling quite confident.

I see that one of the Australian columnists has said, you know, doing foreign podcasts is what I call a luxury.

Well, Alistair, you're the communications guru.

I mean, do you think it was a luxury or do you think it's actually a good thing to do in the middle of an election campaign?

Well, I think he's showing,

like Trump did, that, you know, podcasts are worth doing during a campaign, the long form thing.

He does seem,

we talked a lot about the Pope in the first half, but

I think the Pope's death, I'm afraid, is another difficult thing for Peter Dutton to navigate because Dutton seems to have gone from frontrunner to underdog.

And at this stage of the campaign, because voting starts today, you can actually start to vote today in Australia.

The actual final vote is on May the 3rd.

And he's got some ground to make up.

Now, listen, Rory, we should just point out, I I don't know if I'm sure our Australian listeners will know this, but maybe our international listeners less so.

If you want to look up a really sort of stunning campaign moment, Google Mark Latham Handshake 2004.

And this is given credit for an election that people thought that John Howard was going to lose.

And what it was was that they were John Howard, who was the Liberal candidate, the Tory, and Mark Latham were meeting in a studio.

And Mark Latham, it was almost, it was like, you know, how Trump likes to grab people and pull them towards him, but this is like, this was like off the scale.

But that was the last time when the polls were this clear.

So

the polls are going to have to be very, very, very wrong for Albo not to win.

What did you make of him from the interview?

I thought he was, I mean, his backstory is extraordinary.

So, I mean, you know, we like backstories and people should really get into that.

We're not going to spoil it here, but you've got, I mean, it's incredible, his origin story.

I thought he was articulate.

I thought he played it very well given where he is in the campaign, and he's showing more confidence than he probably would have done a few months ago.

I mean, it is an amazing story.

Essentially, this was Dutton's to lose.

Dutton had a pretty consistent six-point lead, and now it looks like there's a nine-point lead for Albanese the incumbent.

And why was it his to lose?

Well, you know, as you've often explained, this was a year where incumbents lose.

Incumbents lose because everywhere around the world people are peed off for their governments housing costs too much cost of living is too much and there was an obvious campaign which dutton was running which had just been won by my friends in new zealand right they'd just run a campaign which said this left-wing government's a bit hopeless they're a bit too woke um in fact the the great phrase that dutton produced did you see it weak woke sending us broke right

which summed up you know what the right-wing attack on albanese was supposed to be so weak you know, not doing enough about anti-Semitism, national security, crime.

Woke was he'd lost the voice referendum, which was this referendum around Indigenous Australians.

And, you know, the fact that when we interviewed him, people looking closely will see he doesn't just have the Australian flag behind him.

You pointed out in the interview, he also has the Aboriginal flag and the Torres Strait Islanders flag behind him.

And sending us broke, he's taken them from a surplus into a deficit that looks like it's going to be hanging around for years.

There's a housing crisis.

So it should have been a no-brainer.

And Dutton pulled together a campaign that, you know, looked like it had all the right elements in place.

And he was going to be about efficiency and sorting stuff out, cutting the civil service, getting Australia working again.

And the whole thing has blown up in his face.

Over to you.

I sent you a couple of polling graphs, one for Canada and one for Australia.

And it is, you can map the spike for, well, there's several spikes for Carney.

One starts when Trudeau steps down and Carney steps in.

There's a fresh spike when Trump does the tariffs.

And likewise with Albanese and Dutton, there's a spike when Trump is inaugurated.

And another big moment was when Dutton seemed to say,

do you remember the time, I know you were obsessed with it at the time, the Gaza, the Trump Gaza video, when he was going to turn gaza into a sort of trump uh piece of real estate and dutton said something about you know well trump's a great deal maker um so let's see how it kind of pans out and i also think there is something about

albanese he's not the most you know he i really enjoy talking to him but he can be quite long-winded and he can you know it's interesting he sometimes he tells the same story almost in exactly the same words because he's on the campaign trail but interestingly enough fiona i was with fiona and she listened to it and she said that what she felt came through was was was a sense of real principle um he just sounded like somebody with real principle um and during election campaign that is that is gold dust because you know now that we got loads of responses from people in australia watching it and again very much splitting between the people said this guy's great hope he wins and this guy's the worst prime minister we've ever had and that's just the way of the modern world but i think there's something about his manner that lends itself to a kind of counter-Trumpian world.

Well,

it is, you're right.

And, you know, again, just to play the counterfactual, Labour could have been in a lot of trouble.

I mean, it looked like it might be in the position of being the first government since the 1930s not to get two terms, because as you keep pointing out, there's only three-year terms.

And in Victoria, in particular, and we both saw Ben Carroll, the deputy leader, I think, in Victoria when we were there in Melbourne, the Labour Party has been in real trouble.

There's been this sort of incredibly colourful story around the union there.

Have you followed the CFMEU militant trade union and John Setka putting dead pigs on rivals' doorsteps and fire bombing and protection rackets?

Well, as Albo said, it's a very robust politics.

It's a very robust politics.

And some courageous journalists exposing all this stuff.

But none of it seems to have damaged him.

And as you say, it's partly because he's, and you saw that in the interview, that he's very good at being the center.

You know, that moment in the interview where he says, yeah, there's media on the side of the right, there's media on the side of the greens and the left, but we're the kind of sensible people holding centre.

One last little criticism, which came from somebody who'd watched our podcast very closely.

You asked him his three favourite songs, and he named Cold Chisel.

And Cold Chisel is an Australian rock band from the 70s and 80s, which this columnist said is about the equivalent of naming Crocodile Dundee as your favourite australian figure yeah yeah and that actually if he'd been a bit savvier what he should have done is talked about k-pop because in fact korean pop out of australia is now one of the biggest exports in the world it's a real sign of the new australia but rory rory rory does it define itself as rock music is that rock music ah because he's a rocker defense it's the rock he's a rocker the other thing to say by the way normally particularly election campaigns if you're interviewing a politician they kind of subtly or less subtly they like to try and find out what's your first question going to be?

How long have we got?

What are you going to cover?

Any left field things that I'm not thinking of.

He made no effort to do that.

So he was a bit thrown when I said, give me your three favourite rock songs to take to Desert Island.

So I don't know.

I think in the middle of a, in the middle of an Australian election campaign, you could be right though, a bit of K-pop wouldn't have gone down badly.

One thing we did get quite a lot of questions about, Rory, was people just wanting a bit of an explanation because it is weird that they're called the Liberal Party.

I'll just explain.

They're basically, so you've got the Labour Party and the Liberals, but the Liberals are often called the Coalition.

And so it is confusing.

The Liberal is meaning essentially small government.

And that's an antidote to Labour.

That's the sort of basic thing.

And the reason they call the Coalition is because it's a bit like the CDU and the CSU in Germany.

You've got the Liberals and the National Party, who are, and the Liberals are more urban, and the National Party is more rural,

but they effectively campaign as one.

So it is annoying, though.

And then my final point is worth, you and I both favour compulsory voting.

I wish we had it.

I also think their voting system is pretty good, you know.

So they've got a preferential voting system where to win, you have to get, be the first person to get over 50% of the votes.

And the person voting has to rank all of the candidates.

So you can't just go in and say, I'm voting for Albanese or I'm voting for Dutton.

You have to rank them all because that way your vote will always get transferred when the bottom one falls out and the next one moves in.

So I think that's quite a, if we were to move to a different voting system, I would, I think, be in favour of a preferential voting system like that.

Well, let's use a bit of a transition because, and look at Australia as a sign of a bigger world.

So you, in the introduction, you talked about how Trump is affecting politics.

So one of the ways which Australia helps us make that transition is obviously it's a really big example like Canada of where a right-wing party that looked like it was cruising to win has been shattered and the centre left looks like it's going to win because the right's got too close to Trump.

And those two right-wing parties have wanted to be allied to the success that Trump seems to represent.

I think that's the point.

Exactly.

And maybe what you're getting at there is that we're looking at the fundamental dilemma of right-wing parties posed by Trumpism, which is the problem that Kemi Bedenock's struggling with in the UK, which is the right is now very, very split.

You've got a more populist far-right and you've got a centre-right,

and Trump has made holding those two bits together more and more difficult.

You know, Cameron had to manage an awkward coalition, the Conservative Party, but Trump has raised the stake so much, and this was beginning in Britain under Boris Johnson, where the centre-right, you know, kind of classic sort of wet Tories like me,

can no longer recognize themselves, or in the American context, a Rockefeller Republican, can no longer recognize the kind of Trump Republicans.

And so, whereas I guess maybe

a few years ago, the worries with the splits on the left, you know, how do you hold a Democratic Party together that's got Bernie Sanders or a Labour Party that's got Jeremy Corbyn, it is now the right that is in real trouble.

None of them have any idea really what to do.

And this is part of Dutton's problem in Australia.

He's got to desperately try to hold his far right because he's got people like clive palmer pauline hansen trying to outmaneuver him on the right but he's also losing on the left to these people called the teal independents who are the people that i really love because they're my sort of politics they're you know conservative fiscally but environmental women professionals who he's losing in all these wealthier sydney seats that he should be holding that's the problem that kemi bedenock has and i guess that's the problem that i guess the problem that the germans are facing too that the right right in germany also losing you 20 now, up to 26% of the vote going off to the AFD.

How do you handle that?

Listen, it's hard.

And in fact, there's a debate going on in Germany right now where Jens Spahn, who was the

Matt Hancock of the German government during COVID.

I hope not in every way.

Was it not a matter of time?

No, I don't think so.

I don't think so.

No.

He's sort of

whether this is for his own positioning, but he's basically starting to say, look, can we kind of ignore the AFD forever?

He's basically saying every time we

seem to back down on Mertz's very big stances on immigration during the election, which the Social Democrats have sort of watered down a bit, that is like a sort of, you know, that is manna from heaven to the to the AFD.

But Rory, the one you wanted to talk about, which I do think is interesting, is Ecuador, because there's an election that people thought was going to be very, this is a runoff.

between the president Daniel Naboa and a woman by the name of Luisa Gonzalez on the left, who runs the Citizens Revolution Party, which was thought was going to be either very, very close or she would probably win.

Okay.

And Naboa has won by 11 points.

He was one of the few leaders who was at Trump's inauguration.

He's very much in that sort of politics.

She's come out straight away and said she doesn't recognize the result and that she thinks some terrible fraud has gone on.

They've come out and said that

his opponents are now trying to get him assassinated and it's all a bit of a mess.

But I think you're right that it shows that we shouldn't assume in our kind of cozy, liberal, progressive world that there aren't places where being more like Trump is seen as a good thing, not a bad thing.

Maybe one rule seems to be that if you're an incumbent populist who's close to Trump, Trump in some way boosts you.

It sort of validates you.

So one of the problems for being a populist leader,

is that until recently, you didn't have sort of global recognition.

You didn't have the system around you.

But the people that were invited to Trump's inauguration, which include Nabur, but also include Giorgio Maloney from Italy, or figures like Victor Orban in Hungary.

And Millet.

Millé, yep, Millais in Argentina.

These people are able to be now part of an international populist network with Trump and the United States right at the center of it.

They're able to exchange ideas, they're able to get visits to the White House, they're able to get international recognition, they're able to try to signal to their people they might get a special deal out of it.

Bukele, for example.

Slovakia, Robert Fico, may benefit from this.

Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel clearly benefits enormously.

We talked a bit on the podcast recently about Erdogan.

Erdogan

shows the sort of two faces of Trump.

On the one hand, because Trump's a populist, Erdogan knows Trump will praise him at the same time as he's locking up opposition figures and really turning Turkey into an authoritarian state, you know, giving up on pretense of electoral freedom.

But he also knows that Europe and others are so worried about what's happening to NATO with Trump that he's not going to get criticized by them either.

And you can see there's this sort of

the smart populists, you know, Maloney may be another example of this, are able to use Trump to try to triangulate, present themselves as the route to Trump, but also

as people feel more short of friends, they're less likely to condemn them.

Quick thing on Ecuador, just to finish, because I'm really glad you raised it.

So obviously my hero on this is

an economist journalist called Michael Reed, who wrote a book called Forgotten Continent.

But he's really interesting in Ecuador because he points out that Ecuador is very unusual because it's very divided between a sort of populist coast around Guadalquil and the highlands around Quito.

Do they have heather?

They have

mountains and locks.

I don't think they have heather.

I don't think they have grouse either, to be honest.

Do they not?

They dare to call themselves the Highlands.

I don't, can you believe it?

There's only one Highlands.

No, so at the center of it is a guy we've talked about quite a lot, Rafael Correa.

And Correa was the great kind of populist leader from 2007 to 17.

He's the kind of epitome of this moment called the pink tide in Latin America.

So Latin America broadly, if the 70s was about military rule and the 80s and early 90s were about democracy and technocracy and Washington consensus and kind of fiscal rectitude, the mid-2000s becomes the pink tide where these left-wing governments come in and they coincide brilliantly with the rise of China, which demands huge amounts of commodities from Latin America and leads to a boom.

So some of these economies are growing over a two, three year period, about 5% a year.

Correa takes the growth

and he uses it to double the size of the government, goes from 20% of GDP to 40% of GDP,

spends like a drunken sailor, some of it good, you know, infrastructure, schools, stuff built.

And then sure enough, at the end of it, classic moment, the commodity boom falters, government goes pretty bankrupt, Correa steps down.

Meanwhile, Ecuador begins to become infested, having been a very safe country, begins to be dominated by drug gangs coming over from Colombia, and particularly using ports.

It was at one point very safe, wasn't it?

It was like felt to be one of the safest.

most peaceful countries in Latin America.

Absolutely.

A country maybe people talked about like Costa Rica.

Yeah.

And then suddenly it finds itself with the highest homicide rate per capita in the world as these drug gangs come in.

And so that's part of

the thing going on in this election.

So Naboa is a sort of example of something that feels like very traditional Latin American politics.

I mean,

he's a real billionaire, a princeling from a massive family that made its fortune in banana export, Ecuador, very much about banana export.

His father ran for president five times.

He had another relative who was the president of the past.

So insofar as Latin American politics is about class, this guy really represents a kind of a grand Ecuadorian kind of business dynasty.

But he comes in against correism.

And correism is presented not just as left-wing populism, bankrupt government, socialism, but also as corruption being too close to these criminal gangs.

So a lot of his legitimacy comes from declaring states of emergency.

we talked on the podcast i think last year about this amazing moment where suddenly the television station was raided by criminal gangs and a major drug lord got out of prison and 60 days of emergency things were passed and now he's talking you know you're talking about trumpism he's talking about bringing in american troops

building these masses and Mexican security prisons.

He gets photographs with Bukele.

I mean,

this time, literally, just right before the election, he declared a state of emergency in various parts of the country as as a way I suspect of just highlighting his kind of his tough approach.

The start of this year, Rory, there was an average of a killing related to the battle for control of the drugs trade every hour in Ecuador.

So that's what he's kind of got to take on.

Interestingly, Mexico, Claudia Schoenbaum, she, I don't know whether it's changed, but at the start, when I was looking into this,

she said she wouldn't recognize him.

She was buying into this idea from Luisa Gonzalez that the whole thing's been sort of been rigged.

So listen,

it's going to be a tough time for him, that's for sure.

My final point, Roy, people often say that politics is showbiz for ugly people.

This is about as good-looking as a candidate lineup as you could have had.

I mean, both Naboa and Gonzalez,

they are not short on the kind of good looks front, which always helps.

Well, let me make that my final point, too.

So on show business for ugly people,

we talked about President Proboo, who managed to win the election in Indonesia,

this enormous economy,

on course by 2050 to be the fourth largest economy in the world, enormous Muslim population, by doing really awkward dad dancing.

And the reason I wanted to sort of finish with him is that at some point we should do Southeast Asia, because this story about Trump changing politics has real relevance there, because if you're Proboo, who was seen as a very, you know, rejected by the international community associated with with human rights abuse, now a populist president, or in a different way, in the Philippines, Marcos.

These populist rulers are both getting a bit of confidence from Trump, but they're also, because Trump is disintegrating the international system, now playing FTSE with China.

And you can see a Chinese tour of Southeast Asia, where China is increasingly saying you can rely on us.

So at some point, we should do a little bit more in Southeast Asia.

Yeah, absolutely.

See you tomorrow.

See you tomorrow.

Bye.

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