468. Starmer in Crisis: Sabotage From Within? (Question Time)

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Speaker 2 Welcome to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Roy Stewart.

Speaker 1 And me, Alastair Campbell.

Speaker 2 And we're recording this on the 12th of November, just after news has broken of a challenge to Kiers Salmo within the Labour Party. And we're going to begin with that, obviously.

Speaker 2 And we're recording slightly later. But we're also doing some other very interesting things in this question time.

Speaker 2 We're looking at issues such as votes for 16, 17 year olds.

Speaker 2 We're looking at the climate climate crisis, we're looking at what's happening in Mexico, and we're looking at some of the big questions around African democracy following the elections in Tanzania with a following reflection right at the very end on Dick Cheney.

Speaker 2 But let's begin with what's happening with Labour.

Speaker 2 And can I start, Alistair, with the thing that puzzles me. I look at my newspapers, I open it, and there's a very straightforward story going on, which is

Speaker 2 there is now a challenge to Kirstalmer's leadership and the Labour Party is expecting that shortly after the budget, West Streeting or some other senior Labour figure, the Health Secretary, is going to make a move to topple Kierstama as Prime Minister.

Speaker 2 And I take it at face value, but I immediately pick up somewhere under the surface that people like you who understand how Number 10 works and journalists

Speaker 1 know there's something else going on, that this isn't just a straightforward story that some journalists uncovered, that somebody's pushing something anyway over to you well so you and i yester last night were at hammersmith apollo talking about all sorts of things with two and a half thousand people and we were asking them all sorts of difficult questions well some straightforward questions but the one that really sort of hit home to me we asked them if in the next election kierstarmer is leading the labour party and nigel farage is leading the reform party

Speaker 1 Which of those two do you think is going to be Prime Minister after that election?

Speaker 1 And I was expecting something around, because it was a pretty progressive, London-y, probably quite labour-y audience. I was expecting something around about 80-20.

Speaker 1 It came up at 55-45, Starmer Farage. As you keep saying, Keir Starmer has the lowest ratings of any Prime Minister, with the possible exception for a few days of Liz Truss,

Speaker 1 that we've ever had and ever known.

Speaker 1 So, into this

Speaker 1 febrile mix, deliberately to insert

Speaker 1 this story that if the budget goes tits up and the public don't like it, West Streeting is maneuvering to make a challenge. When you say,

Speaker 1 you know, I know how this works, you have to stand back a little bit and think, okay, what's going on here? The first thing I do is I look at some of the bylines.

Speaker 1 So the byline in The Guardian was Pippa Carrera.

Speaker 1 Now, a lot of political journalists, and including on the broadcasts and the broadsheets and the tabloids, they're only really interested in trivia, they're interested in personality spats.

Speaker 1 They're interested in all the ups and downs. Pippa career tends not to be like that.
So I thought this is not just some lunch that she's sort of, you know, teased out a few sexy quotes.

Speaker 1 Somebody has made this decision. And then it gets spills out onto the BBC and they say, you know, number 10, allies of the prime minister saying this, that, and the other.

Speaker 1 Now, my point is that number 10, the prime minister, most important job in the country, the team that works for him should 24 hours a day, including in their sleep, they should understand

Speaker 1 their words are his words. You cannot, and sometimes I went over the top, and sometimes I would say things in a way that Tony Blair wouldn't afterwards have liked, or whatever.

Speaker 1 But what I never did was push an agenda of my own. So Keir Starmer stood up in the House of Commons today and said, I have never authorised briefings against colleagues, and it is unacceptable.

Speaker 2 Okay. Can I just pause a second? Because

Speaker 2 I'm already getting confused, and I think the audience will too.

Speaker 2 So is the story actually that rather than what we expect, which is that somebody's picked up from, I don't know, Wes Streeting's camp that he's about to lead a rebellion against Keir Starmer, which would have been the story with, you know, Theresa May, some ambitious person like Boris Johnson, on manoeuvres, leaks, I'm going to move against.

Speaker 2 It's actually the other way around.

Speaker 1 That would be a very different story.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Just to be really simple, the story here seems to be that number 10, for some reason best known only to itself, has let it be known off the record to journalists that they think there's going to be a challenge to Kirstama.

Speaker 1 More importantly, what they were trying to communicate is if and when there is a challenge to Keir Starmer, he is not going to walk away, he is going to see it off, he is going to fight.

Speaker 2 For Bears of Small Brain, I agree that you totally disagree with this strategy, but what in the best case scenario did they think they were doing? Because it doesn't make any sense to me at all.

Speaker 2 What were they hoping to achieve?

Speaker 1 It doesn't make any sense to me either.

Speaker 1 I guess the only thing you could say might be, well, West Streeting is up to something, and we're going to smoke him out so we have to get him on the radio and the television, as he was this morning, to say this is completely ridiculous.

Speaker 1 The trouble is, it's a bit like the thing with the BBC.

Speaker 1 It's a game that's just gone too far. And to have, I mean, look, I was regularly raised that Prime Minister's questions.

Speaker 1 It is never good for a Prime Minister when the people that work for them, the officials, are being banded about in the House of Commons. So when Kemi

Speaker 1 today said to Keir Starmer, Do you have faith in Morgan McSweeney? That is not a good place for the Prime Minister to be, and it's not a good place for Morgan McSweeney to be.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I think what's happened is I think that there is

Speaker 1 this line that's run against Keir the whole time.

Speaker 1 He doesn't really understand politics, he doesn't get politics, and he's sort of subcontracted it all out to these sort of young guys who run around the place, and they're the ones who are doing all the sort of dark art stuff.

Speaker 1 But I go back to my central point: Downing Street is not a playground, Downing Street

Speaker 1 is the center of our government. And the worst thing, you and I were at an event this morning, Rory.

Speaker 1 And if you remember the very first question that we received from a member of the public, she said, I turned on the radio this morning and I was in despair. I want this government to do well.

Speaker 1 I want it to succeed. There is so much in the country that we need to fix.
And this sounds like the Tories.

Speaker 2 So to quote my mother, who's always to be quoted in these situations, so very long-term strong Tory supporter, she's completely shocked.

Speaker 2 She said to me this morning, darling, we cannot keep getting rid of prime ministers like this. This is ridiculous.

Speaker 2 You know, we've been through whatever it is, five of them in the last few years, and it's mad.

Speaker 1 We've had seven since the invention of the iPhone in the week that Gordon Brown took off, his seven prime ministers.

Speaker 1 And the seven prime ministers prior to that covered 43 years. And I do think this is partly the media, in that the media is so used to the change.

Speaker 1 And let's have another battle, let's have another challenge, let's have this sort of trivia to talk about. But the point is, if you're the government, you don't feed it.
Don't feed that agenda.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry if I'm not explaining this very well, but I'm very angry.

Speaker 2 You're doing your best, but as I understand it,

Speaker 2 somebody like Morgan McSweeney or somebody pretty powerful in the number 10 machine.

Speaker 1 Pippa Carrier wouldn't take it from, you know,

Speaker 1 the cleaners or the messengers. It's got to be somebody with real authority.

Speaker 2 Somebody with real authority, a number 10 machine, decided to tell the journalists that somebody was on manoeuvres against Starmer, almost certainly West Streeting, and there was going to be a leadership challenge.

Speaker 2 And their hope was that that would force West Streeting to deny and would make the whole party gather around Keir Starmer, and you'd see off the leadership, and it would somehow strengthen his position.

Speaker 2 Whereas, of course, I read the newspaper and I think, ugh,

Speaker 2 now he seems really weak. Doesn't seem to strengthen his position at all.

Speaker 1 My phone on the way back from Oxford was because I switched my phone off for the thing that we were doing. And it was just,

Speaker 1 it was MPs, it was party members, it was ministers. It was like, and it was like, you know, what do the FUCK was basically what they were saying.

Speaker 1 what is going on here and i was asking some of them what is going on and really senior people in the government were saying i honestly don't have a clue now i think we they keep having sort of you know these what what i would classify as own goals you know winter fuel payments uh some of the sort of you know overseas aid all sorts of things and i would say why did you do that and then we say well okay let's you know maybe they'll learn from that maybe the operation will improve maybe things will change my fear is that they'll just think this is

Speaker 1 those who are playing these games will just think oh well you know this is just the old sort of timers wanging on about this stuff but actually we're delivering this that and the other and i heard of an interview before i did the world at one One just now, and I was listening to an interview with Clive Efford, Labour MP, and he was basically saying, Look, there are a lot of things that this government is doing that I'm very, very proud of.

Speaker 1 And I can say to my constituents, these are good things. There's things that you wanted us to do.
We're now doing them. Nobody's talking about this stuff.
We're talking about all this crap.

Speaker 1 And this is what happens when there's no driving narrative. There is no clear, coherent strategy that everybody understands.
There is no real sense of teamship and unity around that shared purpose.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 in this incredibly febrile atmosphere.

Speaker 2 Strategically, just a step back, if I was talking to Morgan McSweeney or whoever this is,

Speaker 2 I would say this is an unbelievably dangerous game to play. Keir Starmer's on a net popularity rating of minus 52.
I mean, Donald Trump's like on minus 15.

Speaker 2 This guy is in a very vulnerable, weak position.

Speaker 2 At Bournemouth, when we did a show of hands on how many people think Kirstama is going to lead Labour into the next election it wasn't the majority of the people right so this is not a good time when you have a leader in that position to be raising more questions and getting people talking about whether Wes Streeting would or wouldn't be a better leader than Kierstama this is exactly the wrong time to do it you're not going to strengthen Kierstama's position you're going to weaken it and listen don't get me wrong I said this morning I think government is harder than it was I think the way the media has developed social media on top of it

Speaker 1 you know, but but let's be frank, the rise of reform.

Speaker 1 I can blame, as I often do, you know, the over-platforming on the BBC and the sort of soft ride that Farage has ever had since the Brexit referendum. I can blame all that.

Speaker 1 But the truth is, it is this operation and this strategy that has led to, in part, the rise of reform because there was nothing that was driving it off the agenda.

Speaker 1 And I'm not underestimating how hard that is, but

Speaker 1 if I was speaking to these guys, I would be saying, for God's God's sake, you've got three years.

Speaker 1 Governing is not the same as campaigning. You need different sorts of skills.
You need a campaign mindset all the time, but you need different skills for effective government. Govern for God's sake.

Speaker 1 Make the changes you said you were going to make. Use this massive majority to positive effect and have a positive, compelling narrative story about the future.
That's what I would say.

Speaker 1 And I've been saying it till I'm blue in the face, which is why I'm getting really pissed off.

Speaker 2 Final thing. If you were Keir Starmer,

Speaker 2 what would you say to the member of staff who'd leaked this?

Speaker 1 It's not a leak, is it? I mean, a leak is where you've sort of got a piece of information, but this is somebody briefing a concept and an idea. Look, I'll tell you how these things sometimes work.

Speaker 1 There are sometimes situations,

Speaker 1 let me take to a, rather than the personality stuff, which I'll be honest, sometimes happens, but let's take it to something like the Northern Ireland peace process,

Speaker 1 where you think we can actually make something

Speaker 1 happen that we want to happen by briefing a chosen journalist or group of journalists a particular story that we feel confident they will project in a way that helps us meet our objective.

Speaker 1 That goes on. Okay.

Speaker 1 I wouldn't have done stuff like that without talking to Tony, probably talking to Jonathan Powell and saying, what do you think? Should we do that? And they'd say, yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 Or maybe be careful or do this or whatever. So I'm imagining when I saw this, I thought, sure, look, because Kirstym hates this stuff.
That's one thing I know about Kier.

Speaker 1 He doesn't actually like doing much media.

Speaker 1 He thinks that politics is far too much about the media and what the media says and does. So I don't believe he would have said, yeah, I think it'd be a great idea to do this.

Speaker 1 So if somebody has done that without any sense of reference to the Prime Minister, representing him, representing the institution of the Prime Minister's office in Downing Street, I would say.

Speaker 1 I would probably say that is the last time you ever do that. I might even go further and say, assuming that's the first time you've done that, which I suspect it isn't, it is now the last time.

Speaker 1 Cheerio!

Speaker 1 I would not piss about.

Speaker 2 And you'd make that clear to all the staff, wouldn't you?

Speaker 1 Whoever did that. You would, and therefore, it would become clear to the public as well.
And you have to understand that's the world you're in.

Speaker 1 And look, I have some sympathy for Morgan McSweeney because I was for many years as a kind of lightning conductor. I had way more press attention than he gets, and way more media attention.

Speaker 1 And it was stuff, it was attention that most of the time I did not want. Okay.
But I always understood

Speaker 1 there's a merit in this happening to me because it means I'm a lightning conductor and it's not happening to Tony.

Speaker 1 And Tony can fly higher and be more attractive and be more compelling and be better at what he does and all that stuff. Okay.

Speaker 1 The problem with this is that it weakens Keir Starmer.

Speaker 1 And once the people who are working for Keir Starmer are weakening him, in the eyes, and forget the public, in the eyes of his colleagues, the fact these cabinet ministers can say to me, I don't have a clue what the fuck is going on, that is a bad, bad position for the leader of a cabinet to be in.

Speaker 1 So it's got to be gripped, it's got to be sorted, and he should do it pretty damn quick.

Speaker 2 Okay, Alistair, thank you. I think enough of that for now.
Let's get on with question time. And do you have a question for us?

Speaker 1 This is a question from Gabriel. Dear Rory and Alistair, Gabriel, please spell my name right.
I'm a year 12 student and have recently begun studying politics at A-level. Good, glad to hear.

Speaker 1 As part of my studies, I'm required to spend time reading the news and informing myself on recent events. Before, I would have considered myself someone who's relatively politically informed.

Speaker 1 However, I now realise how much of what I knew was only from social media and word of mouth.

Speaker 1 How can schools, parents, and students ensure young people are politically informed, can find reliable and accessible news beyond social media and learn to question online information, especially as politics becomes more relevant to them post-16 and with the potential lowering of the voting age.

Speaker 2 Well, I think there's actually been some really interesting work done worldwide on 16 to 17. It was very relevant for you.

Speaker 2 You've been a big campaigner for 16, 17 year olds getting the vote, which I we really did disagree on agreeably. I was very against 16, 17 year olds getting the vote.
My view being that

Speaker 2 often when I turned up in schools, 16, 17 year olds wanted the vote, but didn't seem to know very much about politics and be very uncertain about how they were going to vote.

Speaker 2 And you had this very romantic idea, I felt, felt, which is we're going to give the votes 16, 17 year olds, and then we're going to reshape the entire society curriculum and culture to give them a completely different civic education they don't have and then it'll all be fine.

Speaker 2 Anyway, tell us what you found out about 16, 17 year olds and voting. Well,

Speaker 1 you have absolutely put your finger on my general position.

Speaker 1 Always been in favor of lowering the voting age, but I've always felt it had to be accompanied by an improved political debate and improved political education.

Speaker 1 But what's been interesting this week, you may have seen stuff in the media about this, and my old friend and colleague Peter Hyman has been out on the road with a young black guy called Schwab Gamote.

Speaker 1 So two very different people, generationally, professional background, social background. They've gone out together and they've spoken to thousands, thousands of kids of this age.

Speaker 1 And they've written this report inside the mind of a 16-year-old.

Speaker 1 You know, as you sometimes sort of take the bicky out of me of this because you think I'm too sort of, you know, romantic about the views of kids, but actually it is quite hopeful.

Speaker 1 So for example, one of the things that they do watch a lot of, these kids are watching a lot of video content.

Speaker 1 They are playing 96% of boys are playing video games in some form. But for example,

Speaker 1 in their eyes, this generation, Andrew Tate is kind of irrelevant. He's just not a big part of their lives.

Speaker 1 Whereas our generation obsesses about the impact that we think that he's having and so what they've explored is that is a very very

Speaker 1 different media landscape that they're in and it does have a lot of challenges within it and there are some very strange sort of you know role models that develop but that one of their conclusions is actually this sort of moral panic which suggests that they're all hungrily absorbing and sharing lies and fake news and the rest of it just isn't borne out.

Speaker 1 That there's a lot more questioning going, that there's a lot more understanding.

Speaker 2 I'm really interested in this because my sense is that in some ways 16, 17 year olds are an exaggerated version of all of us.

Speaker 2 And I find this even with my kids that actually we're, it's not quite that people are childlike. They're increasingly kind of world-wear and cynical about almost everything.

Speaker 2 Even at quite a young age, my children are incredibly good at poking fun at traditional narratives and questioning teachers and questioning authorities and being very skeptical of advertising.

Speaker 2 You know, they can do a good imitation of you and I promoting brands. And so I think 16, 17 year olds are obviously incredibly smart, very logical, very consistent in their thinking often,

Speaker 2 and very aware of a media landscape where everybody's trying to sell them stuff. But the problem is that

Speaker 2 it can end up in a slightly nihilistic worldview where you end up almost trusting nobody.

Speaker 2 You've become so knowing, so cynical, you know, you can, you no longer trust the BBC, you no longer trust, you know, I don't know, whatever,

Speaker 2 because everything is up for grabs. And sadly, that's actually quite an opportunity for the populists.

Speaker 2 Even though they may be equally cynical about Farage, Trump and Andrew Tate,

Speaker 2 the general atmosphere that it creates isn't very good for thoughtful discussion around politics.

Speaker 1 That's true. That's true.

Speaker 1 However, one of the conclusions that Peter and Schraub's report comes to is that when you compare their views of the stuff that they're consuming, when it does relate to politics, with, say, the views of an elderly person who has spent their whole life reading a tabloid newspaper of a certain political slant, that they will have

Speaker 1 much more informed and reflective views than the Daily Mail or Daily Mirror reader who relies entirely on one political viewpoint.

Speaker 2 Except you've also been sharing other stuff that we've seen over the last few months about how there is a disproportionate number of young people rejecting democracy, favouring authoritarian governments, interested in military rule.

Speaker 2 So it'd be interesting to see how that all comes together. One final thing just before we move off this.

Speaker 2 When people often ask us,

Speaker 2 for example, we're doing live shows at the moment, London, Manchester, Glasgow, and people will say, you know, what should I do as a young person? How do I change the world?

Speaker 2 I'm not saying everybody should do this, but I'm quite interested in what somebody like Peter Hyman is doing and indeed what Geral Kanalsk is doing, which is these figures who are beginning to, without being in government, leading policy debates in really quite interesting ways.

Speaker 2 And often, in the case of Peter Hyman, pretty good at getting media attention.

Speaker 2 I mean, he's he's a former, I think, head teacher, was an advisor to Starma, but instead of working in number 10, what he's been doing is out on the road with Trump supporters.

Speaker 2 Then he got very interested in the grid. Now he's very interested in 1617 Euros and he's quite good at sort of shaping policy debates.

Speaker 2 And I wonder whether that's also interesting, the way that people can now use things like Substack

Speaker 2 to help develop arguments.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, Peter worked with me and as part of our team when we were in power, and he was with us in opposition as well. And he's a very, very bright, quirky guy.

Speaker 1 I think it's a shame he's not still with the Kier Starmer team, because I think it's his sort of thinking that we need more than the sort of thinking that we seem to be that seems to be dominant there now.

Speaker 1 I also do think you mentioned the thing about strong, you know, the desire for strongman leadership. One of the things that comes through this,

Speaker 1 this report, is that there is a desire for strength in leadership. And there is a desire for clarity in communication.

Speaker 1 We talked on the main episode about Mamdani and we talked about Farage and Polanski as these two sort of poles of this sort of communication. And I think

Speaker 1 they do need more of that.

Speaker 1 And the other thing, they're very, very, very focused on knife crime. Can't understand why governments can't do a better job of dealing with it.

Speaker 1 But here's the thing to sort of maybe cheer you up: because we have a sense of, and I often say, look, why shouldn't young people be pissed off?

Speaker 1 They're the first generation in history to grow up without a guarantee they're going to be better off than their parents.

Speaker 1 But of all the thousands that they have talked to, 84%

Speaker 1 are optimistic that they will have better opportunities than their parents had. So I think there is more optimism out there than maybe we think.

Speaker 1 But listen, we'll put the full report in the newsletter because it's quite long, it's quite chunky, it's got a lot of data in it.

Speaker 1 But it's a good read. And I promise that next week we won't mention Peter Hyman, okay?

Speaker 1 And I won't send you anything that he sends me to say, could you talk about this?

Speaker 2 So, Alice, a question for you, Georgia Tipper, what does it say about the state of women's safety in Mexico and around the world if a president is being subject to public groping and harassment?

Speaker 1 Well, it says a lot. And the reason that Georgia's asked that question, I suspect, is because there's an extraordinary incident in Mexico a few days ago when the president herself was groped,

Speaker 1 sexually assaulted during a public walkabout.

Speaker 2 And she was on a walkabout, and am I right, a man reached out, groped her, tried to kiss her, and she's now decided to take legal action against him. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And this has got bigger symbolism because Mexico is the great home of machismo.

Speaker 1 Correct, correct. And also because she made a big thing of it in her campaign that we've got to change the culture.

Speaker 1 I was with somebody last night who's recently been in Mexico, was telling me that she'd gone on a train in Mexico and there were women-only carriages.

Speaker 1 And the reason for the women-only carriages was because most women on trains have reported being sexually harassed. This was quite an extraordinary thing.

Speaker 1 And the other debate that it sparked off in Mexico is a debate about security because she's got this big thing, as did her predecessor, Amlo, that you've always got to be out with the public.

Speaker 1 And she doesn't have very heavy security. So this guy had no trouble whatsoever.

Speaker 1 And it wasn't just the, you know, he basically went up there, tried to kiss her, tried to grab her breasts, tried to touch her on the hip.

Speaker 1 And she came straight out and said, if they do this to the president, what will happen to all the young women in our country?

Speaker 1 And femicide, which is a really big problem, I think there's like 800 women killed, four being women. And 98% of gender-based murders go unpunished.
So this is a real problem.

Speaker 1 What's happened is I think she's done this deliberately in saying, I'm taking this guy to court. I'm going to press charges.
I think she's doing it as a way of showing I'm taking this issue more.

Speaker 2 Also, because in many ways, Claudia Chambaun is seen as a sort of protégé of AMLO.

Speaker 2 And so there's a narrative which would say it's a sort of left-wing populism, that there's some very worrying moves against judges in Mexico, attempts to control the military in Mexico.

Speaker 2 But there's something that she's doing here which is different.

Speaker 2 And that's particularly on these kinds of socialist use and issues around women.

Speaker 1 Now, Rory, we've got a question here, which, unlike most of our questions, is what we call deliberately anonymous. In other words, this person does not want their name to be read out in public.

Speaker 1 You'll understand why. Please talk about the desperate situation in Tanzania.
Post-election violence has seen over 1,000 protesters murdered by security forces.

Speaker 1 President Samir's implausible 98% election victory on October 29 followed months of her main opponents being jailed, abducted and disappeared. Curfew, internet blackout, and chaos ensued.

Speaker 1 It is now illegal here to share video and photos of images likely to cause distress. Few international journalists are in the country to report, so the world is now silent and ignorant.

Speaker 1 It is a total crackdown on dissent. What next for this normally peaceful country?

Speaker 1 Well thank you for that question and Rory this is part of the world you know pretty well so why don't you answer this one.

Speaker 2 It's very very troubling and it's part of a much bigger story in Africa.

Speaker 2 Broadly speaking, for listeners who don't follow sub-Saharan Africa all the time, in the 1970s, Africa was dominated basically by authoritarian rulers and military governments.

Speaker 2 During the 90s, there was an amazing explosion of democracies.

Speaker 2 There were these transitions in Zambia and Malawi and Ghana and Mozambique and Namibia and Tanzania, where the end of the regime of Julius Niere was followed by multi-party elections.

Speaker 2 Tanzania in some ways was a bit of a success story. It was a place which was showing good results on education, quite good results on development.

Speaker 2 When you were being optimistic, when you were in office in the 90s, you would have had a story that Nigeria had transitioned from military rule, Kenya had transitioned from basically strongman rule, East Africa, southern Africa, of course, South Africa, going through this democratic transition.

Speaker 2 Now, fast forward to today, Africa is in a very, very different situation.

Speaker 2 There are still some countries which are fully, you know, going in the democratic direction, including really big cornerstone countries like Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa.

Speaker 2 But there is the authoritarian story. You know, you were talking about how much you liked Ethiopia.
Ethiopia, very much authoritarian, just coming out of civil war.

Speaker 2 Rwanda, authoritarian, where again, you get election results like this up in the 90s and percent for Kagame.

Speaker 2 Other countries, we've talked about Sudan, Somalia, Congo, Central African Republic, which are on the edge of civil war. There's been the coups in the Sahel.

Speaker 2 So that's Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Gabon. being taken over by military coups.

Speaker 2 And Tanzania being a kind of representative of, yeah, elections take place, but basically the opposition is intimidated, driven back, and it's essentially forms of one-party rule.

Speaker 2 She followed on from somebody I knew reasonably well called Magafuli, who I went to visit in Tanzania and who I stayed in touch with, who became a COVID denier.

Speaker 2 He had a scientific background, but he appeared on television, I think, testing a watermelon for COVID, saying COVID was all a fake, and then managed to

Speaker 2 died of COVID himself. Here's a final thing for you just before I come back to you on Africa.
Tanzania only went, became independent from Britain four years after you were born.

Speaker 2 And by 1961, the population of of Tanzania was 10 million people, when the population of Britain was 53 million.

Speaker 2 By 1989, when the fall of Berlin Wall happened, the population of Tanzania had already doubled to 24 million.

Speaker 2 By 2004, when you were in the Labour government, the population was at 37 million, when the UK population was then at about 60 million.

Speaker 2 Fast forward to today, 2025, the population of Tanzania is 70 million. It's larger than the population of the United Kingdom.
So it's gone from 10 to 70 million in your life.

Speaker 1 I'm loving the way that you're sort of making it sound like I'm somehow responsible for this.

Speaker 2 You're responsible for the whole thing. And I hold you particularly responsible for the fact that in 2050, the population of Tanzania will be 137 million.

Speaker 1 Wow, and what's your amazing stat about Nigeria, which I always quote?

Speaker 2 So one in 10 children born in the world will be born in Nigeria by 2050, and 40% of the world's population will be sub-Saharan African by the end of this century.

Speaker 1 Yeah, actually, one thing I do want to come back to at another point, it's too big a subject just to sort of cover off now, but is this issue of what's going on with Christians in Nigeria and why the American right is getting so engaged and and so involved in this.

Speaker 1 Your point about

Speaker 1 the one-party state. So, the opposition leader, a guy called Tundu Lisu, he was arrested prior to the vote, so he couldn't stand.
His deputy had already been charged with treason.

Speaker 1 And although there's not been an execution since the mid-90s, treason can carry the death penalty. And as our anonymous question has said, there have been hundreds being charged with treason.

Speaker 1 So, that is a pretty firm, keep your mouth shut, sort of charge. And now, the second, the deputy Secretary General of the Opposition Tadima Party, he's also been arrested.

Speaker 1 So, the top three of the opposition party are now basically in jail. So, it's grim stuff.

Speaker 1 I was going to say, Rui, if you perish the thought, if you were a dictator running a sham democracy, what proportion of the vote would you tell your people to give you? I mean, 98%.

Speaker 1 It just is

Speaker 1 too much.

Speaker 2 I remember talking to a friend of mine who was a journalist visiting Iraq in 2003 when Saddam had got, I think, 99.8% of the vote.

Speaker 2 And he said to the spokesman, pretty impressive, 99.8% of the spokesman said, in fact, this may be an undercount. He may have got more.

Speaker 1 Okay. Well, listen,

Speaker 1 that's a very, very sad story. Thank you, questioner, for bringing it to our attention.
And they're absolutely right, Roy, that these are stories that just don't get any ventilation. No, no.

Speaker 2 And I think we've lost the whole bigger story. We've lost this whole arc of remembering how Africa came out of a lost decade in the 80s, went into this incredible period of democratic transition.

Speaker 2 Even when I was Africa minister, there was still so much optimism about democratic transition.

Speaker 2 Of course, you know, American administrations were really important in getting behind human rights and liberal democracy and governance.

Speaker 2 And of course, USAID funding, DFID funding, trying to support these transitions. And basically that's all fallen away.

Speaker 2 And Africa is in a much more, in democratic terms, a much more authoritarian place than it was 20 years ago.

Speaker 1 All right, let's take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk about the climate.

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Speaker 2 Welcome back to the Restis Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

Speaker 1 And me, Alistair Campbell.

Speaker 2 So, Alistair, next question,

Speaker 2 which I think is directed to some extent towards you. Rachel DeHayes, London.
Dear Rory and Alistair, I am the woman from the Hogan Lovells event on Thursday night.

Speaker 2 As I mentioned, I'm a super keen and regular listener, but I'm dismayed at the lack of attention and engagement you gave to climate issues.

Speaker 2 When I brought this up, you reflected that it's a valid concern that climate issues should penetrate your discussions more. You further explicitly committed to ensuring this will happen in future.

Speaker 2 My goodness, she may be a lawyer.

Speaker 2 These are complex issues, full of misinformation, and listeners would benefit enormously from some of the insights and clarities you can give to this most imperative issue.

Speaker 2 You promised a room listened and applauded. Look forward to hearing more.

Speaker 1 Well, listen, Rachel, thank you. But Roy, I love the way you said that was pointed at me because actually we were both in the room and she said that the podcast generally

Speaker 1 and she actually felt that you were the one who'd had the sort of slightly unsound views on climate.

Speaker 2 A view which was which I was by far the least sympathetic in the room.

Speaker 2 You were in your full 16, 17 year old mold.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, you're completely right. We should do more on this.
And I was like, there's all these other issues we need to talk about.

Speaker 1 I think she's right.

Speaker 1 And what was,

Speaker 1 we should tell our listeners and viewers who weren't at this event, as she introduced herself, said, I'm a Trip Plus member.

Speaker 1 So we both sort of grovel and say, well, we'd love you more than everybody else in the room. But then she sort of basically said, well, I...
don't have a question. I have a point.

Speaker 1 You don't talk about the climate crisis enough. And I think she's right.
Anyway, Rory, guess what happened on the following morning?

Speaker 1 The following morning, as I was thinking, how can we talk about the climate next week? I was sitting there and my phone pinged with a WhatsApp message from none other than Jonas Garstora, one of your

Speaker 1 heroes, the Prime Minister of Norway. And he said, greetings from early morning at COP in Belém.
This is the COP that's been going on in Brazil. Just heard your latest on climate.

Speaker 1 That was you and I talking about climate, where you said some very kind of non-progressive things.

Speaker 2 That's me, Rory. You, Rory.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And yeah, I've said that.
That wasn't Jonas saying that. That was me saying that.
Jonas goes on. I am persuaded that progressives make a huge mistake, Rory.

Speaker 1 That's me saying, Rory, if they glide with populists away from targets and away from constantly innovating the methods and means. So here is an example of innovation from this cop.

Speaker 1 Rainforest preservation, probably the most significant climate measure to date.

Speaker 1 He then tells me about a new kind of cooperation that Norway launched with Indonesia and Brazil back in 2008 when basically essentially you were paying countries for not logging.

Speaker 1 And he says they've spent 5 billion American dollars since then.

Speaker 1 Despite some ups and downs, downs under Bolsonaro for example, 50% decrease since Luda came back, this joint effort with several states has had huge effects.

Speaker 1 We estimate the climate gas emissions saved represents several times Norway's annual emissions. He then goes on to explain a new fund, the TFFF, which is being

Speaker 1 launched alongside other partners including the World Bank Tropical Forests Forever Facility and he goes on explains what it is but the point he's making Maury is that just because Trump's not there just because Putin's not there just because Modi's not there just because Xi Jinping's not there we shouldn't back down from the fact that those who do believe the climate crisis is real do believe that governments have to take a lead they have to bring up with initiatives like this 100 I think this is a really really interesting subject.

Speaker 2 I've been mesmerized by what Norway's doing here. Norway is an interesting example of a relatively small country and therefore a relatively small development budget,

Speaker 2 even when it's trying to get to 0.7%. But what they chose to do is specialize.
And they really chose to lean into this question around forests. And you're always posting your trees the day.

Speaker 2 But at the back of this story is, of course, the fact that particularly the Amazon rainforest, but also the Indonesian forests in places like Borneo, are the lungs of the world.

Speaker 2 And if we lose those forests, the effect on climate is unbelievable. The effect on carbon is unbelievable.
The effect on biodiversity is unbelievable.

Speaker 2 One of the things that's been happening, of course, in Indonesia is a lot of logging for replacement with monoculture palm oil plantations.

Speaker 2 And in the Amazon, logging in order to grow soybean or to pasture cows, which we all eat in Britain.

Speaker 2 And we come back to this issue that one of the things that fundamentally is so wrong with what we're doing in Britain. is we're setting fake targets on our own production, not on our consumption.

Speaker 2 Basically Basically what we do is we pat ourselves on the back by deindustrializing Britain and pushing our food production to other countries.

Speaker 2 But we continue to consume just as much energy and eat just as much.

Speaker 1 Are you not repeating the same huge mistake here, Rory, that Jonas says you made last week?

Speaker 2 Well what I'm trying to do is say what he's doing is the right thing to do and it would be wonderful to see Britain doing the same.

Speaker 2 Because one thing that we really need to think about in the Amazon is often when they log and then put intensive agriculture in, forest soils are incredibly thin.

Speaker 2 You imagine because we're rainforest that it's very rich soil. It isn't and it's exhausted very quickly.
And so the land is then abandoned.

Speaker 2 So about a third of what was previously rainforest has just been abandoned. It's kind of empty land.
So reforesting, replanting the rainforest there is absolutely vital.

Speaker 2 And this is one of the things that I really was proud of when I was the Different Secretary State. I doubled our international development spend on climate and the environment.

Speaker 2 I put that in the single departmental plan. I made that my big launching thing.

Speaker 2 What we should see as the British government, given that we've shrunk our aid budget so much, is to take a leap from Norway's book.

Speaker 2 And I'd almost like them to go and say, on the basis of this question, okay, we're getting in behind Jonas Garstora, we're going to focus on reforestation.

Speaker 2 We have huge expertise in the Forestry Commission, in our universities around this.

Speaker 2 Why don't we get into the single big play, which I think is not just stopping deforestation, but replanting the Amazon rainforest.

Speaker 1 Well, he did say in his message that the UK was one of the countries that is working with him on this. He also says, Rory, here's another opportunity for you to plug a new book.

Speaker 1 One of the conditions that Norway is stipulating about the fund

Speaker 1 is that at least 20% of the new fund must go to indigenous peoples and local communities, Rory. Q plug middleland.

Speaker 2 Q plug middleland. Absolutely.
Thank you very much. So, yeah, thank you for everybody who's buying middle land.
And thank you for always taking an interest. It is not just about local democracy.

Speaker 2 It's about local communities, indigenous communities, working landscapes, small farmers, and the ways in which we think in Britain as much as elsewhere about what we can do to make this thing that's so precious to our culture, so vital for our food systems, properly understood and supported by governments and loved by us.

Speaker 1 I've got a little bit of news for Rachel, partly inspired by you, and also partly because I went into a bit of a defensive mode afterwards.

Speaker 1 I thought, well, yeah, she's got a point, but also we have done quite a lot of good interviews on leading. with a very, very strong environmental theme.

Speaker 1 Ed Miliband, most obviously, I guess, but also Bill Gates actually was to some extent about climate and the environment. So was Kate Raworth.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 And also

Speaker 2 Dieter Helm, the energy economist, Cristiana Figueres who set up the COP process and Emma Pinchbeck who chairs the Climate Change Committee.

Speaker 1 Here's an idea for you Rachel. We'll put together a single episode package of some of those interviews.
I'm not saying this is an excuse for us not to talk about climate.

Speaker 1 We are going to talk about climate more. That is a promise.
Promise made, promise kept. Just remember, I'm Labour.
And

Speaker 1 there we go. We'll do that.
We'll put it out soon.

Speaker 2 Very good. Okay, well, here's my final question for you, Alistair.
From Alex Frobes. Alistair, what are your memories of Dick Cheney?

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 I have many.

Speaker 1 Alex, go to volume four of the diaries.

Speaker 2 Younger listeners, just remind people, he was famously a Secretary of Defense and then Vice President for George W. Bush and has just died.

Speaker 2 And the father of Liz Cheney, who was the Republican who stood up against Trump.

Speaker 1 He was also, prior to his own political career, the youngest White House chief of staff, age 34. He was Mamdani's age when he was chief of staff.

Speaker 1 He was one of the most consequential figures of the Bush era, no doubt at all.

Speaker 1 You've heard me say often, Rory, because you know how obsessive I am about punctuality, except when I'm very occasionally late.

Speaker 1 But George W. Bush had a real thing about punctuality and didn't let people late into meetings unless they were dictating.

Speaker 1 He had a lot of power. I found him, it's interesting, I've actually written a piece about him for the New World because I do think he's a consequential figure.
And I think it's also very interesting.

Speaker 1 At the time, we thought,

Speaker 1 my God, this guy's so right-wing. He and Bush have emerged as sort of voices of calm, temperate, moderation compared with what has followed.

Speaker 1 And I guess that's that shows you a trend because I think you can probably make the case that Reagan was to the right of Nixon on many issues and then Bush was to the right of Reagan and now what we've got with Trump is way to the right of anything we've had.

Speaker 2 The one that I knew in that period a little bit and corresponded with a bit was Donald Rumsfeld.

Speaker 1 Well, they were very much a pair.

Speaker 1 You've got to see them together.

Speaker 2 And Rumsfeld, I think, was the youngest sexual defense and then the oldest sexual defense.

Speaker 2 So there was this weird thing that with both of them, he'd brought in these people who'd been young stars and were now very old and had gone into the private sector.

Speaker 2 One of the things that always made me a bit uneasy about Cheney was that he'd been connected with Halliburton, which became the big American contractor on the ground in Iraq.

Speaker 2 And I remember when I was stuck for stuff in my office in Iraq, when I was living in Iraq, you had to go to a little shipping container where there was a Halliburton contractor who would charge you an unbelievable amount of money to get a new broken plastic chair to come in.

Speaker 2 Everything had to be done. It was like a sort of one of these ghastly sort of privatization contracts where they'd put a cost past 30% and a plastic chair which you could buy in the market for $30.

Speaker 2 So I I wasn't allowed to buy in the market for $30. It had to be delivered by Halliburton for about a cost of $300 taxpayer.

Speaker 1 We're back to the stuff you talked about in the main podcast about this sort of this mixing of politics and business that we talk about in the Czech Republic.

Speaker 1 I mean, we're seeing it in America now, but it's always been there to some extent.

Speaker 1 I went through, as I often do when

Speaker 1 people die and I'm asked to sort of talk about them or write about them. I did go and look through my diaries.
And so you like this, Roy.

Speaker 1 After our very, very very first meeting with Cheney which was at Blair House you know the official guest house in in DC and I said if this if he was a Brit you'd say total Tory

Speaker 1 so he obviously did make a great impression and then there was another point after 9-11 because I'd been involved working with the Americans on a sort of coordinated communications and strategy following during the Kosovo war Karen Hughes who was

Speaker 1 working in Bush's team, she asked me to send out all the papers that I'd written at that time.

Speaker 1 As a result of which, she asked me to go out and speak to the Pentagon and the State Department and others.

Speaker 1 But it was, and I also had a meeting with Jack Straw was in Washington at the same time, and we had a meeting with Cheney, partly to discuss this new proposal that I was putting forward.

Speaker 1 And it was really interesting talking to Karen and talking to the people in the State Department and everybody else. They were saying, are you seeing Cheney? Will you be seeing Cheney?

Speaker 1 Does Cheney know about this? There was very much. He was a kind of, so it was made obvious to me, if you didn't have Cheney on board, this was going to be quite tricky.

Speaker 1 So we had this meeting and I said,

Speaker 1 this is what I wrote. He had cold, slightly menacing body language, listened very intently without giving much away.
Now, as it happened, he did kind of put a tick on it and away we went.

Speaker 1 But then we had this, one of the most extraordinary meetings I've ever been at was at Camp David in the build-up to the Iraq war when

Speaker 1 Bush had accepted Tony's argument that they should try to take the whole thing back to the United Nations and at least try to get another resolution.

Speaker 1 And Cheney and Rumsfeld thought this was an absolutely terrible idea. And we didn't know that Cheney was going to be at this meeting.
And what it dawned on is that Bush wanted Tony to persuade Cheney.

Speaker 1 And it was fascinating. And he sort of did.
He wasn't, listen, he was pissed off. There's no doubt about that.
But he did, in the end, agree.

Speaker 1 And there's one bit where one of the things I quite liked about Bush, he always, he didn't just sort of do the talk with the fellow leader.

Speaker 1 He would always try and bring other people in and say, and at one point he said to me,

Speaker 1 he said,

Speaker 1 you're always going on anti-Americanization. What is all this

Speaker 1 anti-American? What is it all about? This anti-Americanism. I see it everywhere.
And I said, Well, I just think sometimes when you say democratization,

Speaker 1 people think you actually mean Americanization. You think the whole world should be like America.
And Cheney would say very little. He's just sitting there with his arms full.

Speaker 1 He said, So we stopped talking about democracy, huh?

Speaker 1 I still know.

Speaker 2 Well, well, well. So he said, totally missed the point.

Speaker 2 Or wanted to only select a few here.

Speaker 1 Very grouchy. Very, very, very grouchy.
But I mean, a huge figure and probably the most powerful vice president there has ever been.

Speaker 2 Also, want to just recommend for people who want to get deeper into it, there's an extraordinary documentary called The World According to Dick Cheney that takes you all the way back to his childhood, his time working on pylons.

Speaker 2 And we'll put a link into it to the newsletter. But my favorite bit from it is that he's hired to take the vice presidential search forward by George W.
Bush.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 That was his job. He was meant to be finding who the best vice president would be.

Speaker 2 And he concluded, not very surprisingly, after a few weeks of searching, that the only man amongst 300 million Americans who could really do the job was himself.

Speaker 1 I don't think he quite put it like that, but I think he managed to persuade, drop the seed into George Bush's head.

Speaker 2 I think the way he did it actually was to produce completely implausible candidates till eventually Bush in total horror fell back and said, why don't you do it yourself?

Speaker 2 And Cheney was like, oh, I'd never thought of that.

Speaker 1 Well, if you're serious. The other thing, whenever he came over to see Tony, because John Prescott was a deputy prime minister, so, you know, technically Cheney's opposite lumber.

Speaker 1 So JP would often want to make sure there was a, there was a bilateral with Cheney before he saw Tony. And I mean, some of those conversations were absolutely brilliant.
I mean,

Speaker 1 that was chalk and cheese in so many ways. But it is extraordinary that, and did you notice this goes to the small-mindedness of Trump? Trump didn't put out a single comment about Cheney's death.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. Not a thing.
Not a word. Okay, Rory.
Well, I'm seeing an awful lot of you at the moment, aren't I? Because we've got another show tonight in Hammersmith, Tuesday.

Speaker 1 We've got another one tomorrow. Then we're off up to the best country in the world.
That's true. What did you say your favourite country in the world was the other day?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I got a bit of trouble.

Speaker 2 But that was you absolutely sucker punching me. You were like, what's your favourite country in the world? This is on Bournemouth.
And I said, Afghanistan. You went, oh, well, mine is Scotland.

Speaker 2 And I thought, you politician. This time I'm going to remember when I'm asked what my favorite country in the world is, I'm going to say, Cumbria.

Speaker 2 And if you read my book, Middleland, you'll discover it is in fact an independent nation.

Speaker 1 Very good. Well, see you soon.

Speaker 2 See you soon. Bye-bye.