449. Starmer Loses Control: Will Andy Burnham Challenge the PM?

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There is absolutely no way that this can continue into the week of the Trump's visit.

The minute Trump gets a question about Epstein, anything could happen.

The mood around Keir Starmer at the moment is just very, very negative.

This question of the leadership now is, of course, really, really interesting.

When your back is against the wall sometimes that can produce something that is unexpected.

And has he ever done that?

I mean

the idea that he can turn it how can he turn it around?

He's incapable of doing this.

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Welcome to The Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

And me, Alistair Campbell.

So, Donald Trump is about to arrive in our country for a state visit at a time when Keir Starmer is not really having a very good time of it.

Yeah.

But let's just, for a second on this, just to frame it.

Ideally, I guess Starmer would have been hoping that Trump arrives, he gets to make some announcements on tech and investment.

Exactly.

He has done a reshuffle where he's got the team in place.

Will he intended to do this reshuffle before the Trump visit, I'm not sure at all, because it may well simply be that it was triggered by trying to cover up for Angela Rainer's resignation.

And that that would then team up for future relations.

But the background story is that the whole visit, presumably, is something that in an ideal world, Starmer wouldn't have been doing.

It was really part of this funny, let's cozy up to him, let's get a good trade deal for Britain, let's get his support on Ukraine.

Early in the day, where Starmer produced the letter from his pocket, but presumably if you sat him with a light in his eyes, he would say, it's not ideal to have Trump visiting the United Kingdom.

So I

mean, I think the problem with the current situation is the context.

So if you go back to the Oval Office when he pulled the letter from the King and Trump was clearly sort of, you know, oh, that's nice, I like that.

That the context then, I think there was a general understanding that even if people can't stand Trump, which a lot of British people can't, they kind of get why he had to do that.

And the visit, it was described as couldn't have gone better.

And of course, there in the background helping to plan it was Peter Mandelson appointed as ambassador.

The context now is very, very different.

The context is of, as you've been saying, poll ratings and ratings for Starma that are very, very low.

We're going to be talking later in the podcast about this Tommy Robinson rally at the weekend, which was, again, part of the context now for this visit.

State visits are when you tend to see lots of flags around the place.

Well, we had a lot of flags at the weekend, and Keir Starmer had to come out and say, you know, they do not own the flag.

We all own the flag.

Just sorry for international listeners, the flags over the weekend were a loss of UK flags and St.

George's crosses in a far-right demonstration organised by Tommy Robinson, former Footboo Hooligan leader of this far-right group.

And the flags you're referring to now, presumably, is the question around US flags for the presence of his.

And, you know, UK-US flags will be around.

It's a big state event.

So you've got the Mandelson context, you've got the general political context, you've got then this other story that emerged overnight that in normal times would have just sort of not been, I don't know how seriously it would have been taken about this official who, this advisor who works for Keir Starmer, who sent some ridiculous WhatsApp messages about Diane Abbott, Labour left wing MP, a decade or so ago.

But in this atmosphere, he's had to go as well.

And so you've got a sense of Keir Starmer being there as the Prime Minister, doing part of the job, which is getting on with the American President, but at a time when the mood around Keir Starmer at the moment is just very, very negative.

And the mood around the Downing Street operation operation is very, very negative.

Can I be a bit provocative and do a bit of disagreeable agreement, or whatever it is, agreeing disagreement?

You're going to say that the atmosphere around Keir Starmer is

wonderful, and the Downey Street operation is the best it's ever been.

No, you're right.

You're completely right.

I'm not going to say that.

So maybe it isn't really a full disagreement.

But when we discussed this last week,

we kind of came round to the view that Starmer had to defend him in Prime Minister's questions because you're in a difficult position.

But it now looks as though that was very, very strange.

It seems clear now that Bloomberg had, on Tuesday the 9th of September, so the day before PMQ, so it's on a Wednesday, had already sent the FCDO

the details of what was in those emails.

And on the Tuesday, Ollie Robbins, who's the Brexit negotiator, who's now the

top civil seven of the Foreign Office, had asked whether they were authentic from Peter Mandelson.

And on Wednesday the 10th,

quite a long way into this,

we have Stalmus standing up saying, I knew there had been media inquiries.

I didn't know the content.

I knew questions had been put.

Now, that seems to me to be bizarre.

If on the Tuesday night you've already been told, and Ollie Robbins is all over it and he's contacting the ambassador, there's a trove of emails, and...

Already Mandelson has given an interview to the Sun Online, basically saying there's more to come out.

You, I think, in that job would have been saying,

calling Peter yourself and saying, do we know everything?

What more is coming?

Because you would have been aware that there is absolutely no way that this can continue into the week of the Trump's visit.

If you just play it through, you defend him on Wednesday,

the questions come Thursday, Friday, Sunday newspapers.

Trump arrives.

What are all the press conferences?

It's the BBC political correspondent saying to Trump, who's already embarrassed about the Epstein stuff, what's all this about Madison and the Epstein notice?

So what on earth convinced Starmer to defend him on Wednesday if basically the details are coming on Tuesday?

Well the question is whether they had the details or whether he just had a general sense that this was going on, which we knew anyway.

But I do find it unfathomable that given how high profile this story had become, given the extent to which there is this baggage around peter that that is part of that that particular context i find it unfathomable that anyone can be sent into the house of commons without at least having all relevant information and having asked all relevant questions and so so just to dig into this the way in which you would imagine it is somebody morgan mcsweeney or the director of communications somebody

should have been on the phone to Mandelson, who's of course on an earlier time zone right the way through Tuesday, saying what can come out, what's in his emails, so the Prime Minister can't go in.

To be fair,

no, and to be fair, I always say about Prime Minister's questions is, and this was Tony's absolute obsession, we can work out how we handle it and what we say, but only based on having absolutely every relevant piece of information.

And we used to drive departments mad on a Wednesday morning when we'd say, we need the stats on this and we need the stats on that.

And they'd send over a kind of, you know, some cut and paste thing from a previous briefing document.

And Tony would say, no, I want more than that.

I want to know this, this, this, this, this.

So I don't know what happened.

And then when you read some of the stuff that's that's come out there since, so I read a piece, I think it was on Politico, and it looked to me like it was very heavily briefed from Morgan McSweeney's perspective, that he wasn't watching Prime Minister's questions, wasn't aware of what was going on.

Now, again, I just find that kind of hard to compute.

Because, okay, a week earlier, as we said on the podcast when we recorded the other day Kemi Badenlock had not gone for Angela Rayner when most people thought she should that made it even more obvious to me that she's gonna go on this Peter Mandelson thing and if she doesn't somebody else is but she's got six questions so if you send the prime minister into that situation and I when I watched it remember I said what I said to Fiona I watched it I thought well he must feel really really confident and I also said to Fiona one more thing on this and I think Peter's in real difficulty.

Well, what's now clear is the one more thing was already there.

Well, because Bloomberg had warned them on the Tuesday and all you had to do is get on the phone to Mandelsson and really hammer him until he got all the information.

Yeah, but to be fair to Peter, he's the one who alerted them to it.

So I don't understand how that hasn't led to.

Now, did they get into a mindset that said, oh, God, we don't want to lose another one.

So therefore, you go into that mindset that says, our goal now is to make sure we don't have to sack him before the...

He doesn't have to go before the Trump statement.

But that can't make sense.

I agree when the thing

done for is epstein and trump is connected to epstein and that's the big issue with magra i mean it's almost the worst possible issue if it had been that he'd fiddled his mortgage or something but the actual issue he was being done for is the one issue that would really upset trump and talk and also see the the other thing is that you know i think you and i both feel that even though trump is there undermining the rule of law attacking the media left right and centre now apparently he's going to sue the new york times because they backed camela harris i mean god knows how that plays out.

You know, that we,

the UK, should not remotely play that game.

So there's Trump, who's been backing the news with Epstein over the drawing that he says is fake and the signature that apparently somebody faked his signature decades ago, knowing clearly that he'd become president again, all this nonsense.

So we don't want a government and a prime minister that operates like that.

But in Trump's mind, if he does get a question at the press conference, just to go through the state visit, he arrives Tuesday, arrives tonight, tomorrow is all the sort of royal stuff at Windsor Castle, Thursday

checkers, and presumably they're going to do a joint press conference together.

Now, they're going to have lots of things to announce about tech, and Google have announced this five billion thing for the UK today, and they will try to frame it as part of that sort of positive stuff.

But you know full well that the minute Trump gets a question about Epstein, anything could happen.

Anything.

So I just feel that

My sense is Keir's the Prime Minister.

He's going to Prime Minister question.

It's his responsibility to make sure that he's confident and comfortable about everything he's going to say.

But it's his team's responsibility, given all the stuff he's having to deal with, to make sure he knows everything that is relevant to the question.

Okay, let me make the case for Morgan McSweeney then.

Yep.

Right at the heart of this is Morgan McSweeney, who people like you and me and the...

Westminster class talk about all the time, but maybe not all listeners have focused on, who is effectively the great chief of staff power behind the throne for Keir Starmer.

He's a man who cut his teeth in Labour politics in local councils in London and who led, at least in the narrative of his supporters, Starmer's takeover of the Labour Party and the fight back against Jeremy Corbyn.

Okay, so the case of Morgan McSweeney is: here is this morally serious man who thinks deeply, who has a clear vision of the country.

He's somebody who speaks emotionally and powerfully about the grooming gangs and how much he feels responsibility and how heads should have rolled, who really believes in trying to bring control over immigration, who feels that he's got a mission to transform the economy of Britain.

So he would say, you know, look, what is this this this trip really about?

It's about me, Morgan McSweeney, thinking about, as you say, about Google investment, US tech, partnerships with Europe on agriculture and industry, small modular nuclear reactors, which Morgan McSweeney cares about.

Hold on, Rory, if you go on, you're falling into a trap here, I think, of assuming that the chief of staff person or the main advisor should be somebody with their own agenda, the Dominic Cummings-Boris Johnson situation.

That is not good for a government.

It's not good for a Prime Minister if...

people think that there is somebody that this is not the prime minister's agenda it's somebody else's agenda so i think even you thinking and talking in those terms i thought you were going to come at it from a different perspective, but you're basically saying, well, poor old Morgan can't be dealing with everything because he's having to sort out deals on nuclear reactors and so forth.

Well, that's not really his job.

Yeah, the defense of Morgan McSweeney, I think, is that he's the grown-up, that he's crippled by having this Prime Minister who isn't really able to articulate Morgan McSweeney's vision properly.

Sorry, I'm not violent at all.

No, I'm not.

No.

The story is supposed to be that

here is this amazingly serious, impressive chief of staff.

And unfortunately, every time he sends Starmer out to communicate his message, Starma somehow doesn't quite have the language to

McSweeney keeps getting let down.

McSweeney really would want to stop the boats.

He'd really want to control immigration.

But unfortunately, Yvette Cooper didn't deliver for him.

So he's bringing Shabana Mahmoud to try to sort it out.

I can't believe whether you actually believe this or you're responding to all those friends of yours in Tory circles who tell you that we don't fall out enough and disagree.

Oh, no, I'm getting this.

I'm getting this, obviously, from

Labour people who are on the McSweeney end.

So I suppose these are people who see themselves as more Shabana Mahmoud, more conservative Labour, who believe that what the Labour Party needs to do is really connect with working-class voters, needs to have a coherent vision, and they seem to think that the one person in the middle of all of this is Morgan McSweeney and if it's not working for him it's not McSweeney's fault.

You either are the strategist and you take ownership of the whole strategy in which case it's a bit much for these friends to say well it's all Keir Starmer's fault or you make sure, because this is part of what strategy is, that the whole team and most importantly the leader of the team are completely aligned.

I think this is a consequence.

I think the way that you're even talking about this this is a consequence of there being

too much focus on Morgan McSweeney's role.

As there was, and listen, by the way, I had exactly this situation.

Were you accused, though, of the strategy or were you accused more of the management of the communications?

Well, I was a lightning conductor when anything went wrong.

And did people sort of try to suggest that in the same way that I'm suggesting with Keir that really it's Alistair's government and Tony?

No, look, the thing with me used to be, you know, he's the real deputy prime minister, so it was a way of undermining John Prescott.

But not that you're the real prime minister still.

No, what there was, though, what there was for a time, I mean, I think the reason the Conservatives got into such a mess with us was because they couldn't work out how to handle Tony Blair.

So

part of their attack was that Tony Blair's just this sort of flim-flam PR guy, and the real engine is me and Peter Mandelson.

These dark, sinister people.

So that was their kind of line of attack.

There's a bit of that with Morgan.

But I think the other thing is like when that book came out, the Patrick Maguire book about sort of the rise of Keir Starmer came in called Get In.

And,

you know, it was, it wasn't really about Keir Starmer.

Now, I think that's bad for him and it's bad for the government.

So that is something which has developed.

I think that's the wrong way to read this.

And I think there's far too much focus on more.

I'm not, by the way, saying that Morgan didn't fight a very, very effective, put together a very effective election strategy.

What I do think is that government is very, very different to campaigning.

And I also think that the thing about personnel, now, to be fair, Keir's gone out and got Jonathan Powell and now Tim Allen's come in.

And I know these people and I think, well,

I think they can do a good job.

But ultimately, I would argue that nobody in those positions can do a really, really good job unless there is alignment.

with the team and in particular that the leader is driving that.

That's the most important thing.

So it's actually weakening of Keir

for somebody like you who follows this closely and talks to people even to think in these terms.

Yeah.

But the reason they're thinking in this terms, of course, is that

people like Tom McTaig, who's, I think, a very, very wonderful, thoughtful journalist who now edits the New Statesman, is partly trying to make the intellectual case for this government, is trying to work out what Starmerism is and what the vision is.

And the closest they can get often comes back to Morgan McSweeney, because he's the one person who really seems to be able to, I don't, talk in the serious, passionate, thoughtful, emotional.

Where have you seen that, though?

Oh, a lot, New Statesman articles.

Exactly.

So this is why I think you've sort of slightly bought an image that, to my perspective, is not helpful to the government.

It never is helpful if there's a...

This is why in the end, Steve Bannon was a massive problem for Trump.

ultimately in the first term.

You can't have a sense of the leader not being the leader and as it were having to subcontract.

Borrow was the Dominic Cummings problem, right?

Totally.

And I remember that totally because he was perpetually saying, oh, yeah, the problem is Boris.

He's not very good at delivering my message.

I've got this incredibly deep, profound thing that combines Thucydides and Oppenheimer and Doctor Strange Love, and this is going to make Britain into a particular thing.

And unfortunately, Boris is useless.

Yeah.

You can't operate like that.

And see, what's happened now is that...

So

somebody said at the, was doing an interview, I think it was Richard Bergen.

Now, Richard Bergen, left-wing Labour MP, Corbyn Easter, doesn't like Keir, and it's no surprise that he's saying he's not up to the job.

But he did make

an observation which is worth listening to.

He said that we're now being talked about as a government that's kind of been there forever.

It doesn't feel like we've been there for a year with a huge majority.

And I think that, and so I was getting calls over the weekend from, including from people that I really wasn't expecting.

You know, I got one call.

It was a guy who just said, you know, if there was a, if there was a leadership relation, if say it was streeting against Burnham, we'd direct you back.

And this was somebody who I would reckon a year ago was absolutely nailed on Keir Starmer's supporters.

So those conversations are happening.

You can't ignore that.

Before we get into the general question of discipline in the Labour Party, this question of the leadership now is, of course, really, really interesting.

Andy Burnham.

And a big plug for leading.

People who aren't subscribing to our separate channel, Leading, should do so because we got a great interview on that with Andy Burnham.

And I think it's one of the things that you and I probably most proud of, these interviews.

This is, I believe, episode 36.

Andy Burnham.

Alongside Andy Streets.

Alongside Andy Street, former Mayor of the Westminster.

We liked him, didn't we?

And it was quite interesting.

He was very much talking about how he'd refound himself as Mayor of Manchester, how pleased he was to get out of Westminster.

But now the story is that he's looking to pick up a seat that maybe Andrew Gwynne is going to step down.

That's going to be interesting, although Gwyn's got a 13,000 majority.

Reform is number two there, so different by election.

And he's going to try to run.

And then you've got Peter Kyle again, leading a deview, politely saying Burnham should stay in Manchester.

He's doing a good job in Manchester, not come home to cause trouble.

How seriously should number 10 be taking this talk?

I mean, imagine you were Morgan McSweeney

or your friend from Portland.

Are you now beginning to think?

about Andy Burnham?

Is it worth thinking about Andy Burnham if you're thinking defensively in number 10?

Well, I mean, as you say, these conversations are happening.

You can't ignore them.

There's something that, I mean, Andy Burnham is an interesting guy.

I like Andy.

He was, I've known him for a long, long time.

He started out,

I think I first knew him when he was working in Tessa Jowell's team, way, way, way, way back.

You know, good minister.

At the time, I think I said this when we interviewed him.

At the time, you wouldn't have said was going to be seen in the sort of top level.

But I think he has grown.

There's no doubt about that.

He's grown in that job.

He's got a real, you know, of all the mayors, obviously, Sadiq Khan's a very, very well-known figure nationally.

But I think Andy Burnham is, you know, he's a national figure, even though he's now best known for being mayor of Manchester.

I think

you've always got to be wary of the old, you know, he who, what's the thing?

He wields the sword, doesn't always get the crown.

Manchester Hasseltime problem.

Which Michael Hasseltone, yeah.

But because Boris is the big exception, who was perpetually wielding the sword

all over the place, eventually got the crown.

Yeah, but then he became so tarnished, and he's now sort of, you know, he's now history.

But I think that the

Andy, you see, if you look through, I mean,

it's crazy in a way that we're even talking in these terms, but they are going to be doing this.

At the party conference, Keir is absolutely going to have to produce a speech and a week that really connects with the party and the public and makes people think, yeah, well, he's had a rough ride, but you know what?

He's still got it.

It's so difficult.

And there is,

I don't want to be boring, but your friend Tom Bulbin keeps saying, you know, he's always been underestimated.

I can completely understand why he's always been underestimated.

I mean, when I hear that, I'm afraid he just doesn't have a voice.

He doesn't know how to publicly speak.

It's so dreary and kind of banal.

I mean, I can almost hear in my head what this conference speech is going to be like.

No, no, no.

I don't want to do a horrible imitation of Kier Summer, but there is absolutely no way that I can imagine some kind of Churchillian speech which is going to restore it.

He's going to drone on about, you know, seriousness and his values and all this sort of thing.

And it's going to sound like some sort of.

I thought you weren't going to do an impersonation of Gustava.

No, but so, but I mean,

the idea that he could, the idea that he could, how can he turn it around?

He's incapable of doing this.

This is what I completely can't understand about Tom Bourbon.

This, he's always been underestimated.

I mean, for good reason, right?

When I said, Rory, what I said,

his conference speech and the week as a whole is really going to have to be good.

Okay.

Sometimes, when your back is against the wall and you know you've really got you're in a fight, sometimes that can that can produce something that is unexpected.

And has he ever done that?

I can't really think of him ever making a great speech.

He's done speeches that you've liked more than others.

I mean, he's never going to be Barack Obama

on a conference floor.

But if he goes out, look,

if I were him,

I would be sitting down and he won't have much time at the moment because this is the the other thing about

the sort of pace at which things move and the sense of you say that he doesn't have a voice.

He's not in the in the conversation in our politics in the way say Trump is in his or Macron is in his.

Now Macron's also struggling.

And that's not his style, but I think this conference and the budget that follows, they have got to go beyond well.

Otherwise, these conversations are going to take on a life of their own.

And once they take on a life of their own, then you know, you're on the back back for a while.

A lot of this now is resting, I think, on Shabani Mahmoud.

They're putting a lot of emphasis on this.

I mean, this is the person that they're now hoping is going to be right at the heart of things as Home Secretary.

They're essentially using the Foreign Secretary role, I'm afraid, as a kind of demotion for vett Cooper, which implies that they, I guess, they think Stalma can do the foreign policy stuff.

So the question is: is she going to step up?

And we should get her on leading as soon as possible.

Is she going to be the big, charming, intelligent, informed, provocative, get things done voice?

Is she going to fulfil the roles that your best secretaries of state fulfill, whether it was different tones, whether it was the kind of thing John Prescott did or the kind of thing David Blunkett did for you or in a different way, Jack Straw?

I mean, but a loss is resting on her because boy, oh boy, they're not going to get the communication out of Starma.

They're not getting the communication out of Rachel Reeves.

They're not getting the communication out of Bridget Phillipson.

It's It's basically Westreeting, maybe Peter Carl, and a lot of it is going to be Shivana Mahmoud, isn't it?

Well, she's certainly taking, you know, because of the nature of the reshoff and the way it came about, she's, you know, she's into a big role and they've got to make it work.

I mean, the boats issue, rightly or wrongly, has been elevated to a point at which it has to be sorted.

It has to be cracked.

Now, I worry that the kind of the populist agenda is,

as you know, I've always disagreed with the sense

thinking that you fight reform by sort of making people think you're a bit like reform.

I just don't think that is the right strategy.

However, the policy now has got to deal with that.

And whether she can step up into the sort of communications role you're talking about, I don't know, because she's never really done that.

And the hope would be, presumably, and

you're absolutely right.

You disagree with the strategy, but that clearly is the strategy.

Morgan McSweeney's clearly decided he wants to go for the classic working-class red wall voter, and he's going to do it by being tough on immigration, demonstrating control of borders.

He cares about that and that's the policy and i think starma's behind that right

by the way i absolutely support controlling the borders right i just think that the strategy the political strategy around this to my mind has not been effective because it sounds too much like reform and also the other thing we sometimes hear is that you guys would have done it by sounding tough on asylum on immigration but balancing it with progressive language to make sure that you reassured labor mps who care about equality and diversity that you're on their side and you're making progress for them

so one story is that what's missing in the chemistry is that Starmer is hitting the kind of right-wing talking points, but he's not good enough about articulating the progressive message.

And that goes back to the point I made the whole time, which is about, you know, having this bigger narrative for the country and the type of country we're trying to create.

Okay, so let's now get back into this question of party discipline, which is really beginning to shock me.

For listeners who aren't right in the political swim, the number of people now producing off-the-record briefing, the developing view that if things go badly in the May elections with Wales, Scotland, local councils, Stalmer will go, then the increasing conventional wisdom that he can't lead the party into the next election.

This is very, very weird.

I mean, if I think back to my time in office, the response of the Whips and the Prime Minister, if a year in to Cameron's government, senior backbenchers were going out on the Today programme saying, well, you know, we'll have to see how he's doing when he comes to May.

I mean, it's kind of unimaginable.

In fact, I remember the first people breaking cover, and they were well out on the far Brexit wing of the party, about to defect reform ERG types, and they were totally shunned.

Everybody turned against them, you know, in the tea rooms, you know, this person's unbelievably disloyal.

What a wanker.

How dare they do this?

And that was a long way into these governments.

And the thing we kept hearing again and again, and I guess you would have reinforced this, is the way that governments lose is when the public starts seeing infighting.

The public hates infighting, it hates dissension.

So we would have had monthly meetings with the Prime Minister, with the chief whips, and often with people like Lyndon Crosby, who was then doing the election thing, just hammering home anybody who steps out and who dares to appear on the Today programme saying the Prime Minister has been.

But this is where the Goodwill Bank comes in and the reputational bank comes in.

I said last week that if a government is kind of doing well,

then MPs who might not like some of the things that are being done, they'll go along with it.

If the government is thought not to be doing well, even by its own judgment, and there's lots of things the government pointed to say that they're doing well, this five billion pound today with Google, somebody's worked very, very hard on that and so forth.

And was a surprise because

I remember hearing Ed Ball saying last week he didn't think any tech deals would be in place.

And he notes, I mean, his wife, you know, was the home secretary and has just become a foreign secretary.

Even surprised him that it got done.

Yeah, so, you know, and likewise, the stuff in relation to the health service is improving, and there's lots of things they can point to.

But they cannot get away from the fact that as you go around the country and you talk to people, and they know this because they talk to lots of people, the general sense is not a positive one right now.

Now, to turn that around is going to be very, very hard.

And I think that the point you're making there, I think there's another point here that's worth making, which is about the speed now, the speed with which news moves, the kind of sense of every day something big and bad happens and we don't rest on it.

So it's just on to the next disaster.

And that's a very difficult landscape in which to operate.

Trump operates in it by flooding the zone with shit, to quote Steve Bannon.

And Johnson did it too.

I mean, there were times with both Boris Johnson and Trump where actually you feel it advantages the incumbent that because there's so much of this stuff that the public can barely remember the scandal of last week.

And so

it can cut both ways.

It can create for Starmer a sense of, oh my goodness, this is total chaos.

Or it could create the sense of public after a couple of years of this of, oh my God, I can't even remember.

He was this guy, Mandelson, where there was something about Angela Rayner and I don't know, and somebody resided in the city.

That's kind of what happens.

But that's not a strategy.

Hoping that people forget all this stuff is not a strategy.

Where he is now, he's obviously not where he wanted to be when he started out.

And there has to be, and you mentioned on the emergency episode we did the other day, that after the reshuffle, the whips office, you mentioned the whips office, the whips office now is seen very much as a starmer kind of operation.

You mentioned Morgan McSweeney's wife is now a whip, for example, she's an MP up in Scotland.

And the thing is, again, that I think only works if there is that sense of reputation and goodwill out there.

So

one of the worries I have out of that approach is if you think about the criticisms that are levelled at number 10, and this comes from, we would call control freaks the the whole time.

Yeah.

Right.

But what you get from MPs is actually

this really is a sense of you're either with us or against us.

Well, the natural sort of conclusion of that is that once people find reasons to be against, they might stay there.

So like...

wasn't remotely surprised to hear Richard Bergen, but I wonder whether part of the consequence of the expulsion of Jeremy Corbyn, was there a way back then of actually keeping him in?

Which you did.

I mean, this is something, unfortunately, that all the labour mps i talk to keep referring back to your time in office and saying well you know they didn't sack jeremy corbyn they have a significant

morgan's approach was very much for reasons i completely understand because of what the damage the hard left has done to the labour party through history was basically the labour party almost came an existential cropper with jeremy corbyn even though he had strengths and he brought young people into the party and so forth therefore that is the fight we now have to engage in and that is a fight to the death that we have to win.

That's the kind of thinking.

Now, once you're into government,

the fights are different.

And the point I would say about our politics at the moment, and listen, don't get me wrong, this is a really hard landscape in which to battle.

So, we've grown up, you and I have kind of grown up in a country and in a politics where basically you've got Labour's the main party on the left and the Tories are the main party on the right.

You've now got on the left the Labour Party fighting for the same support with the Greens, now with Corbyn, in Wales with Plyde, in Scotland with the SNP, and on the right, Lib Dems or sorry.

And the Liberal Democrats.

Sorry, we, sorry, yes, you're absolutely right.

Rory, please, Ed Davy, note, it was Rory who got the Lib Dems in this time.

And then on the right, this battle between reform and the Tories, which right now the momentum seems to be with reform against the Tories, not least with this Danny Kruger defection.

Let's just talk a little bit about them.

Yes, well, let's do that.

Let's take a break.

And then I'd love us after the break to come back to talk about reform and maybe also talk about the Tommy Robinson demonstrations, what's going on on the right in Britain.

If that's okay, let's take a quick break and come back.

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Welcome back to The Miss Parties from me, Alistair Campbell.

And with me, Rory Stewart.

Now, Alistair, the other thing that's been very central in the news in Britain over the last week has been this big demonstration in Trafalgar Square, where Tommy Robinson managed to get 100,000, 130,000 people.

And there's some very dramatic images of people all over Nelson's Column and the Lions and crowds up and down Whitehall.

I think firstly it's a lot of people and it's a lot of people behind somebody who is considered so right-wing that Nigel Farage is distancing himself from it.

He stood up there with Eric Zemour, who we've talked about, who's this far-right French politician who really is well beyond the French.

Again, he's sort of beyond Le Pen, and he was talking about the great replacement by Muslims, the way they colonized by our former colonies.

And then in the centre of it all is Elon Musk, who is projecting on an enormous screen in Trafalgar Square.

He's clearly increasingly close politically to Tommy Robinson, and he produced this extraordinary statement: to this crowd of right-wing, predominantly male, predominantly white British working-class people.

Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you, fight back or die.

What was your sensibleness?

Well, I found that part of it absolutely repellent.

And of course, Musk is a classic example of one of these super wealthy people

who

now has the platform, X, and has the politics to be very well placed to help somebody like Tommy Robinson exploit what Tommy Robinson is trying to achieve.

And from, I think they've actually got different objectives.

I think Musk's objective is to have chaos wherever it can be, to weaken democratic government so that he can absolutely be above any kind of democratic or political control.

And that's part of what he's about.

The event itself was, there's clearly a lot of money behind Robinson.

And I shared with you a piece that I think was from The Observer about this very, very wealthy American guy, Schillman,

who has partly been a funder of Robinson.

They're tied in, real name, Stephen and Yaxley Lennon, just to remind people, never trust somebody who changes their name unless they're spies.

Even then, maybe don't trust them.

Well,

it depends who they're working for, Rory.

I once, just on that, I once had a

relationship with this guy who worked for one of the better loaded security services in the world.

And

he kept getting his business cards bottled up.

He had about 11 different business cards in his wallet.

Anyway,

just quickly on that, two quick things, and then we'll go back to the more serious thing.

One thing is, again, I'm overly plugging leading because I'm so proud of it.

But one of the things that Sir Alex Younger points out, the former head of MI6, is how much that world has changed.

How technology and

iris scanning and new digital records has completely changed that world, that there is no longer a world of traveling under false identities.

All those things things that you read about in the standard spy novel of somebody reaching in and having seven passports, and it doesn't work, right?

If I travel-some of it's still going on.

If I try to travel now anywhere in the world

with another passport and I land at their immigration and they do their iris scanning and their facial recognition, suddenly alarms, I'm arrested, right?

So that's a big old change.

The other thing.

Oh, spying's not what it used to be.

Make spying great again, I say.

The other thing about this thing about names is very interesting because you have to train very, very hard to remember what your new name is.

And one of the ways famously, and I think people remember this from war films, that people get caught traditionally was with their signatures, particularly when you had to sign credit cards or when you sign, when you book into a hotel.

Because it's very difficult if you've signed your name 7,000 times, remembering that today, you know, you're called

Bob Wentworth instead of Alistair Campbell.

Right.

Well,

back to Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who now signs his name as Tommy Robinson.

Or does he?

And well, who knows?

And there was also, there was a, you mentioned Zamor, there was a very far-right Dutch guy there who was

up there and said, said, we're all Tommy Robinson now.

There was a New Zealand guy there, far-right guy, who basically said that burkers should be banned in the UK, mosques should all be shut down.

So this was really heavily extreme stuff.

Just

on the sense of it, because I think the other thing that's going on, look, when we did the people's vote marches, we had about a million.

So that's a perspective.

The biggest march against us

when Tony Blair was prime minister, there were two that spring to mind.

One was the Iraq War, and the other was the Countryside Alliance.

If you're well organized, particularly in the modern age with social media and so forth, you know, it's not that hard to get big crowds together.

However, I think people were genuinely taken about that on a Saturday afternoon when there are five huge football derbies going on in London and that

over 100,000 people turned out for that.

Now, what we've seen since is a lot of commentary on the crowd.

Inevitably, a lot of media focus on the violence, which was pretty horrible.

There was a lot of policemen being attacked, police officers being attacked, quite a few ending up in hospital, not that many arrests.

I imagine that was a police strategy.

Let's just get through the day.

And then lots of journalists sort of going around saying, oh, well, they all had this to say and that to say.

They weren't all Tommy Robinson fans.

They weren't all Nigel Farage fans.

They just sort of feel that the country's being lost.

I think to turn out to a march rally that you know is being headed by a many times convicted far-right thug,

you're making a statement, I think, just by being there.

So I don't think we should kind of we should we should forget that.

However, that there are issues that are driving people to feel exasperated about the state of the country, that is also also true.

In terms of journalists and how we understand these issues, so Peter Carl had this phrase, you know, this is a Claxon call to wake up and focus on what that crowd was saying.

Trevor Phillips in The Times

said this was a crowd and he walked around interviewing them, which was about three things, stopping immigration,

defending free speech and reviving Christianity.

And I just felt reading this, come on, Trevor, let's go a level deeper and ask, what do you mean?

What do you mean by reviving Christianity?

It's not 100,000 theologians on the street.

I'd love to know how many of them went to church on the Sunday.

Yeah, exactly.

Certainly with that many.

So what is happening when journalists are doing this?

Is Trevor prepared to go the next line and say, okay, you've said this is a crowd that's demonstrating to revive Christianity.

What do we really mean here?

And I guess what we mean is we don't like Muslims.

It's not that these are religious believers.

Correct, correct.

And I think going back to this guy, this billionaire billionaire American, Robert Shillman, who funds a lot of this stuff and funds it around the world.

He funded Charlie Kirk.

He funded at one point Katie Hopkins, who also spoke.

He funds Laura Loomer.

Candace Owens.

Until she came out and said Israel was committing a genocide.

Correct.

Because there's a very, very strong connection.

And this is a great article, actually, I thought, from The Observer by John Simpson.

Great piece of reporting.

But what he points out is that there is this connection between Robert Shillman, something called the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Pro-Israel think tank type thing.

Exactly.

Horovitz is now dead, I think.

And their story is that what they're fighting against, and this becomes more and more relevant when we talk about Charlie Kirk and the fight back around Charlie Kirk, they are fighting radical left and Islamists.

And of course, that has a big application, Israel-Gaza, where the radical left and the Islamists are considered to be the people who are making anti-Semitic criticisms of Israel.

But it also really spills into this story about the UK spelt Y-O-O-K-Y, which is now a big meme, which is in the vision of people on the West Coast taken over by Islamists, where you're sent to jail if you criticise Sharia law.

You know, I had a friend over from Singapore yesterday who was saying to me, Well, my friend said, Do be careful when you're in London because all the social media stuff is giving this impression.

It's kind of literally, you can't step out of your door without being rugged.

So all of this stuff is driven, a lot of it, as you say, by international funding.

Yeah, if you look at some of the people in the Trump circle, so this guy Shulman, according to John Simpson's piece, this is not John Simpson of the BBC, by the way, this is John Simpson of the Observer.

Laura Lumer is another one.

Well, she's now this kind of, you know, Trump whisperer inside the

Madden crowd.

Kurt Wilders and the Netherlands and other ones.

And he's paid his legal fees.

The Middle East Forum, again, largely focused on Israel, paid for Tommy Robinson's stage outside the Old Bailey.

So what is it that's making a fundamentally pro-Israel movement fund Tommy Robinson's stage outside the Old Bailey?

Yeah, and then you can also, some of it, there was a lot of sort of football style chanting going on on the march, a lot of it about Kiestama,

but also quite a lot of it about Israel-Palestine.

Can I ask you about the football stuff?

Because I had a friend who was watching this and he said basically it reminded him of 1980s football matches and that it felt like it was fun for a lot of people.

People were having a great day out.

A lot of them were drunk.

A lot of them were shouting stuff that they felt they're not allowed to shout in the football stands anymore and they were having fun shouting this stuff.

It seemed

the way he described it, it almost sounded like a pride march, not in this case a gay pride march, but a kind of pride march for guys, many of them probably not from very diverse mixed communities, many of them actually paradoxically from quite white communities coming in to demonstrate against multiculturalism.

Did it have a feeling for you of a sort of 1980s football match?

Oh, I think if you saw the stuff with the police, it was absolutely classic.

You're trying to get to the other side, your opponents.

This is the the anti-fascist demonstration that was in Whitehall, and the police are stopping you.

And therefore, the police become your enemy when you ever find it.

But the other side traditionally was the other football team supporters.

Yeah, and the police's job is to try and keep you apart.

And that still goes on.

I also think the other thing, a lot of

the old-style football hooligans say that football has become much more sanitized.

You can't get into a ruck as easily as you used to be able to.

And the other thing, which feeds into this sense of inequality in the world,

we mentioned Clive Lewis last week, the Labour MP who wrote a very thoughtful piece about Andrew Rainer's resignation.

He had another one.

I don't know if you saw, he wrote a piece on the social media this week where he said that a friend of his that he went to school with, who'd been on the march, was telling him why.

And I think he mentioned football, that football is now a game for billionaires played by millionaires.

And so there's that sense of, you know, we've lost football.

Now, I think is nonsense and is overstated.

You can still enjoy football, although not when Liverpool get a penalty against you in the 94th minute, Roy.

That was pretty hard.

Not enjoyable.

Although I've got to say, by the way,

I went to Burnley on Sunday and going through those,

I got picked up at Preston with a friend and was driving through.

Flags everywhere.

Flags everywhere.

And driving into Burnley, there was a union flag on half mast on every single lamppost going down.

And apparently half mast because they can't climb to the top of the mast.

It's not designed as a half-mast thing.

Oh,

I thought it was half-mast as we've lost our country.

There's this

amazing conversation going on about it.

I mean, as you say, it's a very interesting combination of spontaneous and non-spontaneous.

Article by Will Davis, and I actually spoke to him at some

length yesterday, is an amazing analyst of TikTok in particular, who now teaches at Goldsmith and wrote a great article in the LRB.

But he made a...

a particular project of focusing on pro-Farage

right-wing TikTok media in Britain.

And what he found is, firstly, TikTok, as you know, is quite unlike other media because people who don't use it, it's much more about video content creation.

Something like 80%

of people who like TikTok posts have created five or more videos themselves compared to 20% on other media.

So it's very easy to create video and people like it.

So what you see if you end up getting yourself into these algorithms, it's very easy to get into these algorithms, is a sense of somebody sitting in their car looking at their phone saying why is this country such an effing joke and then somebody else walking through a wood have you had enough and someone else standing with their Greg's coffee saying guess how much I paid for this coffee and someone else saying why are we not in civil war and it's a sense of despair a sense that everything's too late that Britain's gone to totally ruined there's nothing to be done cost of living's out of control everything's a scam

and how come the government keeps saying there's no money when they're wasting all this money on asylum hotels and they're spending all this money on Ukraine?

And this matters, and I do, this is quite sort of a long way around, but this feeds the Tommy Robinson thing because it feeds this sense that you then get Tommy Robinson saying a civil war is coming, or Robert Generick saying Britain is like a tinderbox, or Nigel Farage saying, if you want to know how bad Britain is, have a look at your phone.

And I'm intrigued by how social media is generating this image, both for the visitor from Singapore, for the person going on the demonstration, for the future of the world.

But it's all wrapped up, isn't it?

Because the same people,

and even though Trump is very nice to and about Keastama, I mean, this is a guy who, ever since he became president first time round, has spread messages about crime in London and Sadiq Khan that is all feeds into the same thing.

And I think what you've got to be very careful here is understanding that your phone is not the real world.

I mean, I'm very conscious of this.

So that, you know, what does the algorithm send me the whole time?

Lots of politics, lots of right-wing stuff, lots of left-wing stuff, and lots of football.

So, we're all being fed this stuff.

Musk knows that.

Musk controls that.

The thing that really leapt out at me from that article in The Observer was the Israel stuff.

And by the way, we should say to listeners, we'll talk about what's happening today, Tuesday, in Gaza.

We'll talk about that in question time because it's pretty horrific.

But so, I think what we're seeing here is the consequence playing out of stuff that has been developing technologically, politically, socially, economically over the last sort of couple of decades.

And what you've got is the political process and the political class that is still moving at the old pace.

Trump is an exception.

And the news and the endless kind of sense of being overwhelmed by bad stuff in the world is is moving very, very quickly and leading to this people being able to see in what is a great country.

And this was the irony of the march, unite the kingdom.

Why can't you just be proud of your country whilst all the time seeing how terrible everything is?

There's a massive irony at the art of it.

And proud of the police while attacking them more explicitly.

Just on your point about social media, because it is politics is more and more about this.

One problem that people like Will Davis who study this stuff have is that even they can't really understand how these algorithms work because TikTok won't release the nuts and bolts of it.

But what they see is pretty disturbing.

So an experiment was just done recently in Germany where people registered five new TikTok accounts and they followed each one of the major political parties and they watched five videos from those political parties and then just stepped back and let the four you feed generate content for them.

75% of the content they saw came from the AFD, the far-right German party, despite the fact that four of them weren't supposed to be registering to support other parties.

We still don't know why.

Is it that AFD supporters generate more content, share more content, like more content, or is the algorithm driving people towards far-right content?

But whatever the cause of it is, there's no doubt that the far-right, in that case, is getting far more visibility than anyone else on social media.

Well, I think it's both of those things.

It's the content and the algorithm.

This is not just UK.

I'm reading this book.

I think even you can work out that.

Yeah, yeah.

Right, The Last Chance and The New Chancellor and the Fight for Democracy.

And there's a picture of Mertz and Trump and Vidal, the leader of the AFD.

And this is a guy, Robin Alexander, who's a really well-known kind of political journalist and thinker.

So this is not just the UK.

Now, can I do a transition from this to Danny Kruger, which is just to finish off this episode.

So Danny Kruger is a Conservative MP who has now

defected to reform, saying Farage is the best hope, the last hope of Conservatism.

Now, I'm really intrigued by this.

I've known Danny Kruger.

He was at school with me.

So I've known him.

Eaton, another bloody old Etonian.

Enters our political landscape.

Known him since he was 13, and he's a really interesting figure.

A little bit like Jacob Reesmog, because he's very, very courteous, very polite, makes a great deal of the fact that he's very serious about religion.

He spent years volunteering and supporting prisons charities.

And he gets a very easy ride actually from left-wing journalists.

I was very struck.

Because he doesn't fit the caricature.

Yeah, I was very struck, for example, that journalists who would have a real go at people like you and me, kind of centrists, are extremely deferential towards him because he's considered to be sort of authentic, not hypocritical.

And they get very impressed by the fact that, a bit like Jacob Reesmog, he can use long words.

He, you know, quotes Roger Scruton and Alastair McIntyre and talks about Greek gods and things.

So you can see these actually surprisingly sort of positive profiles of him being written, and they seem a sort of great intellectual leader.

I, though, have always been very aware that along with all these positive qualities, and this is true of Jacob Rees-Mog too, there is something very, very disturbing for me, which is firstly the right-wing views, and secondly, the way that those right-wing views then drag them away from stuff which, if you say it quickly, I sort of sympathise with, you know, tradition, conservatism, the church, the countryside, quite quickly becomes, oh, and by the way, I'm going to be Boris Johnson's, you know,

parliamentary secretary.

I'm going to support Nigel Farage, which is the journey that Kruger has been on.

And I saw it first myself with him in 2019 when I was running for the leadership.

We were having these conversations about community, society, communitarianism.

And next thing I know, he's picking up the phone to me saying, I'm very sorry, Rory, but because you have voted against Boris Johnson's hard Brexit deal, we are expelling you from the party, stripping away.

And we're very sorry about it because we thought you would be a great, you know, intellectual leader of communitarianism.

Solomon, you were fired by Danny Kruger.

Pretty much, yeah boris johnson did not call me it was it was danny krue danny kruger and fired you i mean it's a pretty humiliating i think we need to get a new podcast part here this is pretty

this is so low rent it's so low rent and and when i tried to talk to him i mean maybe i'm making too much of this but when i tried to talk to him about what he was saying what he's essentially saying was that he was going to work to turn the local party against me He'd been calling my party chairman in Penrith and the Border to tell him.

And my party chairman, to be fair, very bravely stood up for me and said, bog off.

You know, we like Rory Stewart, we're sticking with him.

At which point, some very complicated shenanigans went on to try to find other people in my local committee to deselect me.

And that was run by Danny Kruger.

So my sense was, Danny, what happened to all this sort of noble, high-minded friendship, loyalty, belief?

Now you are conspiring with Boris Johnson in a pretty peculiar way to do all this stuff.

And that was already a journey, wasn't it?

Because he started out as a sort of Cameroon, didn't he?

Started out as Cameron speechwriter, yep.

Then he goes to what was he, what was he under Theresa May?

Well, he wasn't really going anywhere underneath.

And then Johnson is the BPS.

It becomes very close to Johnson.

And again, I couldn't understand it because how do you, it's again the question with the Christian right and Trump.

How on earth do you make this whole deal out of honor, rectitude, social morality and all this stuff and get behind Boris Johnson and say he's the guy that's going to lead the country and change anything around?

And now behind Farage.

So I'll finish this just by saying this is the the thing that is so disturbing and troubling about the right.

And I'm afraid it's true of political commentators too.

You know, Douglas Murray would be a big example.

Sometimes I worry about this with David Goodhart, that

they get on a journey where they begin by saying perfectly reasonable things which are wrong with Britain and modern society and end up being pulled into a whole universe of stuff which is anti-democratic.

You know, Farage, let's be honest, Farage has now announced that he is going to deport 600,000 people out of the United Kingdom in complete contravention of UK law, international law, any kind of treaty.

And Danny Kruger has just endorsed him.

And this Christianity thing is fascinating because, I mean, I don't know whether Danny Kruger is one of those people who went to church on Sunday.

And of course, Christianity isn't just defined by going to church.

Somebody sent me this.

I don't know who this guy is.

He's called Rain Wilson.

I think he's American.

And he did a very interesting post.

The metamorphosis of Jesus Christ from a humble servant of the abject poor to a symbol that stands for gun rights, prosperity through theology, anti-science, limited government that neglects the destitute, and fierce nationalism is truly the strangest transformation in human history.

And of course, we've seen this on the back of the Charlie Kirk assassination, which is horrible on so many levels.

But the way that it's now been weaponized,

so that unless you're out saying it is absolutely right that we bow down before everything Charlie Kirk ever said and did and we lower the flags, then somehow you're just a really, really bad person.

And, you know, Trump was asked yesterday about the Democrat politician who was who was shot and why weren't the flags lowered for her.

He didn't know what the person was talking about.

He said, who are you talking about?

It gave him the name.

And he said, oh, the governor never asked for that.

It's like, all left is bad.

All right is good.

All right is Christian, all left is somehow

we should return to this and maybe finish with this, but Stephen Miller, who is Trump's real dark art specialist, his real ideologue, his deputy chief staff for policy, has now gone on what used to be Charlie Kirk's podcast and said, this is the moment where we will unleash against this far-left terrorist conspiracy in the United States, and they better be ready.

We're going to deploy the entire organs of the state to go after these people.

Now, why have we got to return to this?

What is this?

What is this far left terrorist conspiracy, right?

We don't know very much about him yet.

He might well be an extremely disturbed young man.

On the killer.

Yeah, the killer.

The killer might well be an extremely disturbed young man who's been on far right websites before he went to the far left, might have been the kind of person who in another context could have done school shootings and who's now been, his ego and his brain has got involved involved in making this sort of public political assassination.

But the idea that that means that suddenly the entire forces of the state are going to be unleashed on this completely undefined, vague far-left terrorist conspiracy.

And what does that mean?

When someone goes to the United States and gets arrested at the airport, is that part of going after the terrorist conspiracy?

When you shut down demonstrations at university, is that also about protecting the Charlie Kirks of the future?

When you go after Democratic Party politicians, is that when you shut down newspapers?

Because once you have a completely ill-defined conspiracy and a moment like that, that is often where the fascists take all their strength.

That's what the 1930s was all about.

You find a moment, the Reichstag's being burnt down.

Now we have to go after this huge conspiracy that's behind the burning of the Reichstag.

And if you saw Stephen Miller the other day on the back of the Charlie Coke thing, for example, saying his last message talk to me was, we've got to take on these evil forces of the left.

Well, yeah, was it really?

And then you have Trump yesterday saying he's suing the New York Times because they were against him in the election.

You have him making increasingly authoritarian statements.

You have somebody, a group of people the other day getting up a restaurant, start shouting at Trump.

They say free DC, free Palestine.

Trump is the Nazi Hitler of our time.

He says yesterday, they should be in jail.

I'm talking to Pomp Pam Bondi about it.

So it's shutting down any force of criticism.

And of course, what's so difficult to come back to the main, the start of the podcast for Kirstama right now, I mean, there's going to be a demonstration tomorrow, Wednesday, I think it is, because a lot of British people feel deeply uneasy at the fact that Trump is here and the king is being wheeled out, you know, show him how seriously we take him, etc.

Now, on the one hand, we have to do that, but on the other hand, it doesn't mean that he's not deeply unpopular.

Final thing, Rory, which we should put in the newsletter, very interesting piece in positive news.

We're always getting told we don't have enough positive news.

But it was an interview with a guy who was in the far right for a couple of decades, Combat 18, and who's now come out and is sort of going around the place trying to sort of de-radicalize.

But, you know, so there is, it is possible to get into the rabbit hole.

This is a guy who's managed to get out.

Very, very final point from me then.

Also, the Americanization of British politics.

Somebody pointed out to me that actually half my friends at the BBC hadn't even heard of Charlie Kirk last week.

And suddenly now he's absolutely the centre of the news.

Everybody's carrying big sides.

It's true that many people under 30 knew about Charlie Kirk because they didn't count him on TikTok, but it is really, really interesting how pretty well-informed people

suddenly have to talk as though they've always known who Charlie Kirk was.

When, in fact, half my friends at the BBC were calling me up saying, Can you tell me who he is?

Had you ever heard of him?

So, question time tomorrow.

We're going to talk about Gaza, we're going to talk about Nepal.

If we've got time, we'll talk about Russia-Poland.

We're also going to come back, as we said we would, to the subject of rape, because this speak is Freshers' Week at universities, and we've had a lot of questions about it.

Well, thank you, Anastasa.

Look forward to speaking to you very soon.