166. Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, and absolute populist power

26:59There have been suggestions that the Sikhs are very closely connected, but it's essentially these are different ways of translating sectarian politics over into British politics, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and his wife, who's of course the daughter of a very wealthy Indian businessman, incredibly successful Indian businessman, will be making a visit to India partly to try to get this trade deal with India together. And many of the questions around Modi's government, around his closeness to Indian diaspora, the fact that I think as he mentioned, he does these extraordinary speeches in France and the US, the UK, where he can fill stadiums like no one else.

27:38Very close to Priti Patel, I remember when I was working in with Priti Patel Closie, how much she leveraged that relationship with Modi, she'd often talk to David Cameron about the fact that she was the end to Modi, and even as a back venture, a company to Montreux to India. So I think this will all become much more into focus if and when Rishi Sunak does this trip to India. I think the chances of a trade deal are pretty slim. Also, although as you say, Rishi Sunak's father -in -law is an incredibly successful businessman, you have to be close to the power, in some extent, but I think he's seen as quite a liberal by comparison.

28:13By the way, Rishi Sunak's grandfather was a member of this RSS. Well, hopefully we don't all have to carry this sense of our grandfathers. No, we don't have to carry the ball Roy, but there is a bit of the old yay into the middle ages. By the way, I met at both at your party and at the Traquaire Festival, Willie Dalrymple, and of course, one of our sister podcasts, Empire, which he hosts with an eater and anand. I mean, he knows more about Indian history than any guy I've ever met in my life. He was reminding me, by the way, that there is a country in the world which celebrates independence from Britain every six days, which is a reminder of how powerful we once were.

29:01Great to see Willie Dalrymple out there dancing with us on Saturday night, dancing in a splendid fashion with Dalrymple and phrases all our lives with the stewards and not being too aggressive towards the Campbell's. Actually, his family were very close to the Campbell's, of course, so you'll be pleased with that. They organised the massacre of Glencoe, which you guys executed for them. You were like the pregusion and they were like the pluton at the time. Thank you. Thank you so much for that comparison. Very, very nice. I once got asked to leave a pub in Glencoe. The only thing I'd say always, you may not want to hear this, but you raised the whole sort of the clan battles.

29:37There was, I don't know how to describe it, but a member of your family who did say that of all of the people wearing a kilt, which included you and me, she thought, I wore the kilt best. My goodness, that's probably just the, you would be charming in an excessive fashion. I can imagine. So, yes, Willie Dalrymple's Empire Pod's got a great section on partition, and he's now doing something on Russia in the Great Game, which I can't wait to see. I actually, for people who are really nerdy about this question of Russia in the Great Game, which was the standoff with Britain and the way in which Afk Anastana was in the centre of world politics in the world of Willie Dalrymple that you can see, but I'd also encourage you to listen to their podcast, which is going to focus on Russia in Great Game in the future.

30:24And I should also say that both he and Anita and Anne, we have a great team producing our podcast, but they were absolutely singing the praises of young Kalam, who does for them what Don and Nicole do for us. Thank you, Ma 'am, Odin, watching him, and I do love watching people, because I think you can learn so much more, even if you can't understand what they're saying. But I think in some ways, Modi is the politician that Trump would dearly love to be, because he gets away with more. They've got the G20 coming up next month, and where it is, where it's taking place, everywhere you go now, you're just seeing these massive posters of Modi welcoming the world leaders.

31:07And Geo strategically, he's in a pretty smart place in a way, because he doesn't have to choose there. He was at Bricks with the chat with China and Brazil and Russia and South Africa. And then he'll be hosting the G20. And whereas, you know, China and Russia has seen very much on one side, he's very, he's close to Putin. They get most of their arms now from Russia. India's actually bought more Russian oil since the invasion than before. And it's at the same time, as you say, soon at wanting the trade deal, Biden not wanting China to have all the kind of, you know, support that it's trying to get.

31:43He gets a pretty good relationship with a lot of, a lot of the Western countries as well. I think it's something we've got to keep watching. And we've also obviously got to acknowledge that he has brought through some impressive economic reforms that the Indian economy is booming, growing very fast. It's done incredible. I mean, it's gone from 60 % to the Indian population, living in extreme poverty in 1981 to only 10 % today. So, there's a lot to be said very positive on the economic, more clearly than yet. Well, though, although they're really struggling with, I think they're really struggling with inflation at the moment.

32:14I saw many, many countries. I just, while you were talking to that, I just remembered that I wrote about Modi in my book, Winners, because I thought his campaign, the first campaign was one of the best campaigns I've ever seen. You know, this thing I've gone over at Abba with the holograms? Yeah. At the abatars, Modi was using holograms of himself to do speeches in India to vast crowds all over the country simultaneously. So, he would come up on a truck with a big crowd, and that would be him real. And simultaneously, in different parts of India, there were trucks that were, and the technology was portraying him.

32:54And he was getting bigger crowds for the hologram, because people were so fascinated by it. So, I wrote about that in the book. Oh, my goodness. You were going to be his biographer. A biographer or right about the campaign? I can't remember. Anyway, I was very, very, very tempted. And I'm so, so glad I did do it. I give them where the Modi story has gone. Couldn't agree more, but as you say, I mean, incredibly, powerfully placed now. And in some ways, as China runs into economic headwinds, which we got again, and something we're going to have to get into a bit, India's going to be in a very interesting poor position.

33:33But on that, I think, let's take a break and see you in a minute.

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34:51Welcome back to The Restist's Polities with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. How's your artificial intelligence development going on? Well, so we've been doing a lot on AI, as I think we should. And we've got an interview out both of us with Mustafa Suleiman on leading, which I'd encourage people to. So listen to Mustafa Suleiman is unique. I mean, he's the only man who's now founded two of the most important AI companies in the world. He was the co -founder of Google Deep Mind. He's a really interesting Brit from a working class background, half Syrian, who has become one of the central figures in the artificial intelligence revolution.

35:32And we had an interview with him on leading. What have you thought about it, reflecting? I mean, have people begun listening? Have you got any feedback? Yeah, good feedback. Driving back from your party, Fiona and I listened to it. And Fiona, her reaction was very, very interesting, because I think I was so sort of deep into the whole AI thing. A couple of points. She said, this guy ought to go into politics. He stands to me like he's got real values and principles. And I think the point that really struck her was when he was saying that, you know, that politicians at the moment just don't have that kind of long -term vision, whereas perhaps it can emerge from his world.

36:08Another friend of mine got in touch with me and said that they found it absolutely fascinating, but felt there was always this tension with these AI guys. On the one hand, they're saying this is really dangerous. This is really terrible. And on the other hand, they're saying, but it's by world, so I was going to keep going with it. But now I think people will find it really, really interesting. And, you know, I'm with you. I want to try to understand this thing much, much, much better than I currently do. Well, very good. So we've had a lot of stuff to talk about. There's just one quick thing that occurred to me as we went into the break, which I didn't mention.

36:43And maybe we could do a little bit more on some day. Modi is beginning to face challenge and defeat in southern India. And state elections are incredibly important. It's a federal state. And in many ways, the chief ministers of individual Indian states, many of which are obviously much larger than the United Kingdom. Yeah. Are huge par figures. He lost Kanataka to Congress. Kanataka is right at the heart of the tech revolution. And southern India is proving to be more progressive, more liberal, more anti populist, more anti -Modi. So that's the story I think that maybe we can continue to watch.

37:16Yeah. Well, we talked recently about how sometimes the best way to deal with those challenges, to get your political opponents out the way. And of course, Rahul Gandhi has been, he's been put out the way through the legal process. The legal process again, yeah. Which we're seeing again and again, these legal challenges. I mean, as you say, I mean, against populists in the case of Trump and done by populists generally as a way of with Adedwana Modi taking out their political opponents. Rahul Gandhi being, of course, the leader of the Congress party. Shall we move to another giant figure in the world scene, which is the sterabend, is it?

37:52No, no. I think Darabend, I think Darabend's contribution to Westminster in the last few months has been at least on a par with the bean doys. And now she's having said months ago, I think it was even before the pregozion coup that she was resigning in protest at the Orphor horrors that had been inflicted upon that saint, Boris Johnson. Finally, she has said she's going, taking the Chilton hundreds, one of those ridiculous quaint phrases that we still allow on to. And she was supposed to go with all the other biomelections. So she completely astonished her colleagues and the whips in number 10 by not having her biomelections at the same time as Actress Pishnada's, but holding off.

38:36But we now see why, because what she's actually doing here, she's got a book coming out at the end of September. And she has timed the biomelection and her resignation, which basically is a press release for her book. And the people, her voters, who've barely seen her in parliament, now have to celebrate the politics has finally become PR in the most extreme sense possible that their entire democratic future is in the hands of the schedule of her book publication. Can I take some else, all right? Just to cheer this, this should really cheer you up, okay? Yesterday, I had a little look at Amazon to see how politics on the edge was doing.

39:13And it was at number two in democracy. Oh, that's very good. You know, they have all these different categories, right? And it's not was number one. Oh, no. Could it be, but what can I do? No, no, no, no, I was four or five. I've already been number one. I'm now trying to help you, okay? Okay. Now, what's number one? Well, number one yesterday was the plot by Nadine Dorees. Oh, no, you're kidding me. But I thought, oh, God, it was going to be really upset about that. So I looked again this morning and hey, presto, this may have been the result of the interview. Did it the weekend or I don't know what, but anyway, you I've now ousted her from that top spot in the democracy section.

39:51Well, it's going to be pretty intense September because my book is coming out this exactly the same time as Theresa Mays and exactly the same time as Nadine Doris. So hopefully we're appealing to different parts of British readership, or we're all going to be in trouble, aren't we? Now, by the way, I made the mistake there of mentioning the children hundreds, which is what you apply for to call a by -election. And it seems that some of our listeners want to know the background to this phrase. Under a resolution of the House of the Second of March 1624, members of Parliament cannot directly resign their seat.

40:28Death, disqualification and expulsion are the only means by which a member's seat may be vacated during the lifetime of a parliament. There are two such officers that are used for disqualification. Crown steward and bailiff of the children hundreds hand of the manner of Northsted. So basically, you have to you have to apply for an office that doesn't really exist. Yes, so I think the point is that you're not allowed to have something called an office of profit under the crown at the same time as you're an MPs. And the steward of children hundreds is one of these officers of profits. So it's a legal fiction first introduced by a man called John Pitt, 1750s, that the elegant way out because you apparently, I think, yeah, as you say, you can't resign, but you can disqualify yourself by taking an office of profit under the crown.

41:17Really interesting thing also, there's been some good studies on bail actions. There used to be prodigious numbers of bail actions. I think over 80 an parliament were normal at the beginning of the century because members of parliament then were not paid. Are they older? And they were older. So many of them died, but many of them were just resigned. I mean, they'd move on to other things. And it reduced very, very dramatically as parties became more professional, as we got professional politicians. People tended not to leave between bail actions. You can see this very, very steep, steep decline.

41:46So it's a big change in British politics. People would have been applying for the children hundreds again and again and again if we'd been back in 1900s. I think Nadine Dorees was first because I think this is the first time there's ever been a resignation letter to the prime minister that wasn't actually sent to the prime minister. And what was it sent to? It was sent to the Daily Mail. So it was published in the Daily Mail. So I don't know whether it's you soon, I guess time to read the Daily Mail, but that's how people found out about it. It's completely astonishing speech. Essentially the resignation letter is, I mean, it's the most outrageous resignation letter you've ever read.

42:22Normally you leave with a pretty short statement. I mean, yeah, go on. Give us a sense, Alistair, of what the normal standard resignation letter would be about a page long and what points would it hit? What's the normal resignation letter? I'd say normal resignation letter would be a factor of resignation, reason followed by brief assessment of contribution to political and public life, followed by nice words about the prime minister if you're leaving nicely and not very nice words bit neutral if you're feeling you've been booted out unfairly. And generally speaking, not brutal towards the prime minister.

43:01So you can hint at it with a bit of, you know, we've had our policy differences, but I remain loyal to the party and my constituents and all this kind of stuff. Yeah, although I guess, I mean, it's ludicrous to put Jeffrey Howe who was at least a serious figure in the same breath as Nadine Dorries, but people were comparing her letter, not to his resignation letter, but his resignation statement in the commons really was devastating against Margaret Thatcher. I think that Nadine Dorries made some pretty powerful points, but I remember when I did my first volume of diaries and I was doing an interview with Al Gore in the process while I was editing them and and I was, we were talking about it and he'd done some really good books and mainly about the environment, but and I remember he said this thing to me, he said, you know, the most important thing about a political memoir, don't use it to settle scores.

43:54And I think that's quite a good piece of advice, you know, don't explain things, but don't use it to settle scores. And the trouble with her letter is that and clearly, as you say, it relates to her book, it's all about settling scores and it's all about feeding this mythology that somehow people like Johnson and her are victims of some terror. Even the title of the book, the plot. No, it's incredible. So one of her central claims is that there is a shadowily elite that is running a conspiracy. So she says, why is it that we've had five British prime ministers without an election answer a shadowy elite is undermining them?

44:35It's a completely mad, right? I mean, the reason we've had five British prime ministers is David Cameron lost the Brexit election. To resume couldn't get her deals through and indeed Nadine Dorries was one of the people who brought her down at Liz Truss, bankrupted the economy and Boris Johnson got involved in a scandal. So the idea that the reason they're not there is because a shadowy elite is somehow kind of pulling the strings. Instead of which, what we have is very, very open politics in which you can see the members of parliament who are obviously elected members of parliament going through voting procedures to get rid of their leaders for quite different reasons, all the leaders are resigning.

45:11But Nadine Dorries has been involved in bringing down some of these people. So it's completely weird, but no, sorry, one word. I think it's actually sorry, I'll go further than that. I think it's disgusting. I think it's deeply dangerous. I think in the modern landscape, to go around claiming there is a conspiracy of shadowy elites underlining our democracy is not just populous nonsense. It's deeply, deeply damaging to our whole state and she should be very, very careful doing that. The other thing to say is that the idea that any other cap prime minister in our history would have put Nadine Dorries in the cabinet is absurd.

45:46I remember once being on Robert Pestin's show with her, you can probably find it online because I think there's at one point where I literally always bagging my head on the desk because I'm realized I'm with somebody who literally just, and I say at one point, you literally are just talking utter nonsense. It was about Brexit, but she was talking absolute factual gibberish. I think she's got to, she's not stupid. She's got to sort of street wisdom about her, I think. She's obviously very good at manipulating people like Paul Dager to get him to treat a like a serious politician. She's now got this TV show.

46:23She's obviously a very successful novelist and all that stuff. But I just thought in terms of politics, this is just a sign of how low our politics has fallen, that she was in charge of our culture. And you remember that, you know, the other thing we should put in the newsletter, that clip of her at a select committee, when she's having an exchange about the governance and the financial standing of channel four, and it's perfectly clear, that's one of her big responsibilities. They've got this big plan to quote privatize it. She doesn't know how it is meant to operate. Big part of her grief. She's making radical policies and doesn't understand it.

46:58Anyway, I do think it's completely disgusting to have delayed the date for bi -election purely in order to do publicity around her book. This is completely horrible. Now, meanwhile, I am, obviously, touched me because I'm also publishing a book. So you're not. I am politics on the edge, apparently. The reason I've been thinking about it is I just, for the first time in many, many months, did a big interview. And it's something that obviously I was much more used to doing when I was a politician. Now I'm not a politician. I find myself really out of the habit of it. And I was reminded of how bizarre it feels to suddenly wake up to a whole series of WhatsApp's from friends and former colleagues talking about an interview and then read it and realize the way in which you're being presented to the world.

47:48So just to quick contest Janis Turner, who's a Times journalist, traveled to Jordan to interview me, which is pretty surprising. The Times still has the budget to send people to Jordan to interview someone. And on the basis of, I guess she spent probably an hour and a half with me produces a complete sort of psychological analysis of me of my daddy complexes, of my relationship with women, of, you know, and I sort of said, I want to start with that and say for you as a journalist, do you guys not feel sometimes that maybe spending an hour and a half with someone doesn't really qualify you to give a full psychological analysis as their character?

48:29I don't consider myself to be a journalist. I consider myself to be a former journalist who now does a bit of journalism. In the interviews I do for, well, the interviews I do with leading people know about, I do those with you. In the interviews I do, for example, for GQ and now men's health, I do them as Q &A. And I'm genuinely interested in what they have to say as opposed to necessarily to what I have to say. I've got to be honest, I read it and I didn't think it was bad. I thought the headline was bad. The headline was that I have a daddy thing about you. Yeah, yeah. And I've got, when you were sitting there with your publicist for the book, right, you did this interview because you got a book to sell.

49:10That's a perfectly noble thing to do. I've done many interviews to try to sell books by 18 books. I've just finished my 19th. Making health to really plan them and be careful about how you land it. And sometimes it means going over the top. Sometimes it means that you want to get to a point where the interviewer is saying, oh God, and he mentioned his bloody book for the 15th time, big theme, et cetera. By the way, you did a fairly big interview. We did an interview together for the observer ahead of our Harrogate show. And I thought that came out really, really well. But that's probably because I was driving the strategic message and you were just difficult to know.

49:46Exactly. No, no, my problem is that I find it very difficult to avoid fully answering the questions. And now that I'm not a politician, I'm even more embarrassed about trying to get back on message. So, and I think the less than I've taken from it sadly, is that you can't be naive and that you have to accept that these are artificial structured things. You're doing it for a reason and you've got to approach it quite cautiously and not think that you can completely lay back and just chat in the way that you can't do a front. I mean, it's a stupid thing to say. But the public should be aware of this.

50:20I don't think you came out of that badly. And I think what happens a lot often with these interviews is that your wife reads it, your mum reads it, your friends read it. And they'll sort of highlight one or two things and say, well, that was wrong. People get really offended. Something's factually wrong. So, for example, there was a bit where he talked about me at the Albe Hall and I's turned to you and said, that's where I'm living. I killed myself. And she said it was at Phil Collins. Right. No, in fact, he was very claptorn. So when my daughter Grace read it, she read it and she was sort of sitting on the sofa reading it.

50:55She sort of laughed a couple of times and then she said, actually, I think that she really stole it. Why did they get that wrong? Right. So that's how people react if they know. And then my mother's not that happy to have her husband portrayed that the reason he died at 92 is that he was a heavy drinker and a smoker. I mean, as she points out, he made it to 92 and actually he wasn't particularly heavy smoker. He had a cigarette catch it. But here's the thing, Marie, did a person who doesn't know you, but who might buy a book, and might be interested in politics, and might be interested in what you have to say about the world, did the piece as a whole give a sense that you were quite interesting?

51:33The answer to that is yes. So it's fine. One of the things that I noticed is that the first thing that you realize that something odd is going on is that all my former political colleagues, including current members of the House of Commons, immediately, what's happy? Saying great interview, well done, really great. And then you begin meeting ladies in the street and cry for like, like, I was horrified by that. Rory, because they are still in that mode that you confessed recently you got into when you texted David Cameron to say great speech. And the best thing to do is ignore all of it and say, here's the thing, the only thing you can control in life are what you do and what you say about what you do.

52:14That's it. So focus on that. And I suspect what happened. You were quite pleased and flattered that they bothered to put somebody on a plane to come out to Jordan. You were probably quite relaxed because you knew you were coming home. And I think people like the fact that you just answer the question. But sometimes, as the question is asked, a little part of your mind needs to think, why is she asking this? And how do I get this back onto something that I want to talk about? And I guess the only final thing that's my problem, and we'll move on to this one more interesting subject. But it's just that is the, I think the thing that threw me most back is that she said Rory doesn't like women and that she had friends who'd sat next to me at dinner and I hadn't asked so many questions.

53:00And I just thought that's a bit of a cheek. I mean, I'm not sure that I fully understand people on the basis of meeting them briefly. Who knows why she thought that, but I don't think that's fair. In your defence, I met somebody a woman from who works for the times, who said to me that she knows you quite well and really found that line quite strange. Look, I think interviewers like to make interesting observations, but I just wouldn't take it too seriously. Just enjoy the fact that at the end, it said, if you want to buy the book, this is where you go. Because that was the only reason you would do the interview.

53:35Very good. Oh, by the way, before we go, before we go, before we go, before we go. And I think as we've gone on so long about a pregojian emoticon, now your bloody interview is right. I think we should do Ruby Arles as a number one question because we got lots of questions in question time. But what did you mean in the interview when you said that you didn't think that the podcast would survive a Labour government? Because I have to say Rory, I have to say Rory, I got lots of what's not messages about that from Tory MP saying, by the way, if Stuart decides he can't do it in a Labour government, I'm available.

54:06So that's the way to say that's a great great. No, so obviously, I'm worried that your tribalism will become so intense that every single conversation will become really, really fractious because the point at the moment is you lay into Rishi Suner, can I slightly half -heartedly defend him and we sort of move on. But I think by the time Labour's in power, as soon as I raise every week something that's going wrong with what Kirsta Amas done, I think you're going to jump down my throat like a like a rock fighter. No, I won't. I think you are finding it quite difficult to criticize soon, I can't wait that I think you should.

54:38Look, for me, you may think I'm tribal, but I'm very critical of Labour compared to what I used to be with regard to Brexit, with regard to not being bold enough, with regard to my dislike of the Ming -Var strategy. And I think in government, don't forget in government, you've worked inside a conservative government, I've worked inside a Labour government. I think I'll be able to give a perspective that is interesting in sight for with a bit of experience. And also, don't forget, Rory, maybe one of the reasons why I sometimes I'm a little bit cautious is because I am very, very friendly with some of the people who would be part of the government.

55:17Anyway, listen, David Gorg, Johnny Mercer, William A. Andrew Mitchell, there's lots of juries out there we could get. Don't worry, Rory, if you feel you can't hack it, it's fine. I'm going to quote back to you, I'm just going to say that you said sometimes I'm a little bit more defensive about Rishi -Sinai, I should be saying, I'm going to remember that when we're doing when Labour's in power, just see whether I can occasionally say you're maybe a little bit more defensive of Kierstown. That's fine, absolutely fine. So David Gorg, if you're listening, I really enjoyed the chat we had the other night.

55:47Hey, I've got an idea, listen, one of the things I thought is we could occasionally bring in a third person in our conversation and we could have a sort of conversation who it could be, we'd have a guest trilogy from time to time. Well, I did an interview the other day and one of the questions I've assessed was on leading who was your dream interview EB? And I chose, you'll be very pleased. I ended up with three. I said, King Charles, because then I could take the Mickey out of Rory's upseek business, Angle and Mirkel, I'd love to do Angle and Mirkel, which is why I ping off a message at least once a month.

56:23And the third one, and this was born by listening on the long drive up to Scotland to a ten -part podcast series about Banksy on the BBC. I'd love to interview Banksy. All right, good. Well, well, let's put them in behind Darren Bent. Right, question time will follow. We'll do Mr. Rubialis in that. Love you to short your Rory, speak soon. Thank you. Bye -bye.

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