272. Sunak’s betting scandal, Farage in trouble, and will Rory vote Green?

22:42And this was West Streeting saying something about Diane Abba that it turned out his words were being doctored. And another one where a teacher in Dudley was delivering leaflets for Labour and the footage from a doorbell video was taken and doctored. And then it was distributed. So it looked like this person was racially abusing somebody. So you do have to watch out for this stuff. And Bill Browder, who people will know has been the right at the forefront of challenging Russian disinformation and bots and all this stuff, he is pretty sure that the Russians will be active in our campaign. At the moment, I suspect this is why Farage is so sensitive about being accused of being pro -Russia, pro -pugin, etc.

23:27And interestingly, as you know, I don't like the day in the mail, but interestingly with the day in the mail, the forefront in trying to put the boot in term over it. But I think that's why he will be worried about this because we know the Russians did get involved in the Brexit referendum. Well, the examples that we're finding at the moment, the two that you've just given us, are not actually the examples the major parties leaning into this. That's examples that actually left wing pro -Garza anti -labor candidates to the left of the Labour Party generating this stuff themselves. Also, Roy, I saw a trailer yesterday for a channel for a documentary which Kathy Newman is presenting, can AI steal your vote, which is about the potential impact of AI on people's voting intentions?

24:05And it looked very, very interesting. So Thursday night, 20th June. Very good. I mean, this is again an election where everything's changing. And I think one of the things that's changing is actually audiences are changing. So we've talked about the fact that very, very few people are now tuning into the leaders' debates. So there was an attempt by the sun to try to, I guess, learn from the format of people like us by doing like a live YouTube interview with Rishi Suneak and Kierstama. And it was probably quite a coup for them. It was slightly chaotic. Some of the tech seemed to go wrong. People were then trying to type in sun YouTube and getting images of Solas, the kind of the planet.

24:45But ultimately, there were 7 ,000 viewers for Rishi Suneak and just over that maybe 8 ,000 viewers for Kierstama. Now, to put that in context, when we have a successful live YouTube, we're getting like 27 ,000 people. So nearly four times as many people live and then we'll get many, many more, you know, into the hundreds of thousands. Do you know what's because we're more popular than the sun or we're more popular than... Well, I think it's... I think before our heads get too big, I think the real thing is people have completely lost interest in this format of leaders' debates. And I wonder what that means for the future because I would have thought in five years' time some of these parties trying to avoid the debates might just be like, listen, pointless.

25:27The reason I'm not doing it is only 7 ,000 people are watching. So what, but why would I take the risk? Yeah, that being said though, I didn't watch it. But I did follow it and I followed the coverage of it, which was huge. And actually, there was a whole infrastructure around it, like all the other debates. There was a spin room. There were politicians from the cabinet and the shadow cabinet. Your friend, Julian Keen did not cover so often. Glory, I'd say, come back to that maybe. So I think that's where... That's why they're probably... They will think they were to... I actually think of the formats.

25:54The best debates have been the ones where the leaders of not necessarily going ahead to head apart from. I thought the best moderating was by Michel Hussain in the one where the seven... Some of the mix of non -leaders and leaders... It's very good, wasn't she? But I also think that... I did think that Robinson's interview with Farage was very, very good. But I think for the next head to head between Sunak and Keir Starmer, I really, really, really hope that both of them do not go back into that. You said, you said scrap, scrap, scrap, because the people are turning right off of that. So let's come to five years' time again.

26:27I would say that if you were the campaign director, you would probably say, listen, there's very little upside, only 7 ,000 people watch. And the Nick Robinson, Farage example shows that it's considerable downside. If you say anything wrong at all, that's where you get the coverage. Well, I think if I was the Tory campaign director, I'd be down at William Hill saying, we could have a thousand quid, a hundred to one, there won't be any TV debates next time. Now listen, Roy, we're going to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about some of the manifestos of the smaller parties, including the green party, because I want to know whether you're really going to put your cross in a ballot box that's putting forward some of their policies back in a minute.

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28:18Welcome back to rest politics and me, Honest Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. Now, Rory, we only have one vote in the selection for one candidate. We can't vote for an outcome. We can't vote for 28 % there's 33 % now. We can't do that. You just got one vote. And I read an interview where you were yet again promoting your book, where you suggested you might vote for the Green Party. I just want to ask you, these are all yes or no questions. You are happy voting for a party that says it will immediately restore pay for junior doctors and give them a 35 % increase. Is that affordable? Yeah, these are good questions.

28:51I know where this is going. You're going to do this to me with every bit of their manifesto. Just tell us about their manifesto rather than dragging me into the yes and that. Well, as we go through it, so they're going to raise tax by 151 billion pounds a year. Okay. New tax on the wealthy. That includes you, obviously. 1 % a year on the assets of people with more than 10 million, 2 % on those with more than 1 billion. I actually quite like that. 8 % national insurance rate on income in the upper earnings limit. They're going to get to net zero by 2040, bit vague now. They're going to remove VAT for all cultural activities.

29:24Again, I would love to see that. They're going to move forward to the second stage of levison inquiry. I would vote for that. They're going to time the loss so that no individual company owns more than 20 % of a medium market. Yeah, I can see well, that's they're going to get rid of Trident. Rory? Yes or no Trident? Well, they would come into that. But let me just step back for a second. Oh, sorry. 20 billion for social care. Frequent flyer levies. Frequent flyer. Let's get to hit you hard. Sure hall flares. Sure hall flares up to Scotland. I was talking to the Labour candidate in my constituency in London, which is a wealthier and central London.

30:00He's running Joe Pau. He's a guy who I'm very fond of. He managed to actually help evacuate a lot of the Afghans that I was working with in Kabul. Serious. Good guy. We like Serious. We like Serious. We like visits. Some of our staff from our NGO in Macedonia. He's married to a woman who works at Gates Foundation. He said terrific guy. But he was commenting that I represent quite a large group of people that he's been speaking to in Kensington who are happy to pay more tax. Well, see a people who are happy to pay more tax. And one of the interesting things he's finding and actually there was a good article in Times Valley from somebody who'd been following him around is how often he's in meetings with wealthier London residents who are saying, Labour, why are you not increasing tax on people like us?

30:39Now, of course, many of us would say we would like income tax up because that means that if our income drop, our tax goes down, if our income goes up, we can give more, giving up censorship, your income is charity. Wealth tax is more difficult because then you're tied in for the rest of your life. You retire. You're still paying a huge, huge wealth tax. And final thing to set back on is the reason why this is important is that if Labour wins a very large majority, a lot of the challenge to Labour may not come in the future from the right, may come from the left. And so green, SMP, plied, libdeh manifestes, these smaller parties represent the more left wing position now in British politics.

31:19And that position, as you say, almost all their manifestes are the same. So SMP is also in favour of abolishing tried and plied as some favour of abolishing tried. All of them want to put more money into the NHS. All of them are signaling that they're going to spend billions of pounds more. All of them are going to try to, or almost all of them are trying to get rid of the two -child limit on child benefit. Almost all of them are trying to provide free adult social care. So I think if you look at the manifestos together, SMP plied greens, you can sort of see now a loss of the issues that matter to millions of voters, which neither Labour or Conservative are offering.

31:58Burrow, you have not answered my question. Are you going to vote for that platform? Because ultimately that's what you have to do. Yeah, probably not, is the answer. Okay, so you were just trying to flag your butcher observer readers. Probably not. If it's a telegram, if it is a new vibe to vote for Tory. Probably a step too far, but let's just get back to it again. So all of them are trying to bring the net zero target forward. So greens to 2040. But the greens more sensible than plied. Plied has put their net zero target at 2035, 11 years away. And the major parties are, you know, Conservatives, 2050, I think, Labour and Lib Dems 2045, I think.

32:36So the question for me, I guess, is if Labour wins the because of this, do these parties then represent the thing that's going to be a challenge to Labour and will a new Labour government be looking at this thinking, huh, we have a problem here. Oh, the other thing is they're all in favour of media sees foreign Gaza. These are manifestos, which when I read them, are directed more against the Labour party. Yeah, I agree they're against the Conservatives. So when Farage did his contract with the people, let's not call it a manifesto, he said that when he was sort of picked apart on the sort of unfunded promises and all this so well, these these are things we're going to do.

33:15This is what we think. This is what we believe. I think once you get into manifestos and it's okay for parties to say as they all do fully funded, fully cost it, but you've been around long enough, you know that stuff I read out from the green manifesto doesn't stand up discreetly in terms of being deliverable on the time frame they're talking about. They could raise 151 billion pounds more tax, but it would have the most intense impact on the British economy because the only way they could get it is not through these wealth taxes. They don't generate that money by hitting income tax would have to go up and not just income tax on the wealthy to get that 100s of billions of pounds you have to get in tax across the board.

33:52I also think that it's interesting that the Lib Dems who often get a lot of credit because they get lovely pictures themselves on a water park are talking about 27 billion pounds a year more spending. And again, when you ask them where their money's coming from, they say we're going to crack down on tax of the way. But I'll tell you why I worry about this whole thing. Just on the way here I had a coffee in a playstrike in the corner and a guy came and sat next to him with a chat in a way and he said that he'd been talking to one of his kids and they were a labor family but he said now I think I'll come vote green, I vote green, I like well you know because it's the climate etc and labor are going to win anyway and this is what I really worry about.

34:31I think the Tory strategy at the moment is I say it's not stockable. It's a great strategy. It's a great strategy. What they're trying to do, they're message. As I said in one of my campaign notes that I spooked, essentially they're saying we're shit and we know we are. The government has had a terrible record. Our leaders have been hopeless, we've got no real plans for the future. The only way we might sneak in is by saying we've lost but don't give labor a supermajority. Supermajority does not exist in our constitution. Supermajority is what we should have had for Brexit where you say because this change is so big it's got to be a supermajority.

35:10Two thirds of it. Agreed, it's ridiculous but why would that strategy work? Why would it not just make people vote for the Greens enough for the Conservatives? That's the point. It will make them vote for the Greens. It will make people that help the Conservatives. Well no it might because it stops labor when he's so big and also it splits votes everywhere. I've honestly had reports from people I had a chat with a Scottish candidate the other day who said that they'd met somebody who said I'm going back to the SMP because I don't want you to get a supermajority. I've had chats with the Labour candidates in marginals saying that they are seeing a shift back from Tories to don't know and I think that there was I think it was the times did an analysis, a sort of analysis that if a bit like the American situation here 140 ,000 votes shifting from Labour to Tories in the right places for the Tories would see a Labour landslide become a later parliament.

36:03It's amazing and perhaps the biggest illustration because we're talking about some parties this Scotland. So you had one poll showing the SMP would get 34 seats and Labour would get 17 and then a day later three more polls showing exactly the reverse 34, 15 in the other direction and the fact that it's that tight and this is all about whether Labour's going to get 36 % the SMP 32 % or SMP 36 and Labour 34. These are you talking small numbers, particularly smaller constituents, could mean that they get double the number of votes and out in a spoiler alert the conservatives and the Lib Dems end up doing very badly in all these polls but it's a huge difference in Scotland.

36:44But there are places where the goal of the conservators will be stop people voting other parties who would thereby see the Tories fall so they want to split those votes and that includes getting people who'd say, sorry I'm not going to vote. So let's look again at the SMP thing. So they're looking at that. Few thousand votes could make a huge difference. They could get double the number of Labour seats if they get it right. How do they do it? So SMP manifesto is against the Westminster consensus on cuts. So that's reminding people that Labour's basically signed up to 18 billion pounds worth of spending cuts and not telling us where they're coming from.

37:19Rejoin the EU, right? Very popular with voters like you, you famously voted Lib Dem because you were so angry with Labour's position in the European election. So angry with Labour's position on the EU. Got expelled. Put much more money into the NHS. Again, which Labour has not committed to put this sort of, they're talking about 16 billion pounds. This is how it is because they are in government when it comes to health. ceasefire and Gaza. No arms sales to Israel. Again, that will appeal to people who are unhappy with Labour's position. Scrap the two -child benefit cap and scrap trident which appeals to you.

37:49I've got to say, you've always been a big pro -try and guy haven't you? You like trident? You like nukes? I cannot believe that you've been a pro -try and you're going to have a strange laugh. I cannot believe that you're going to have a greed with that. Anyway, that defence policy. I've just come back from Germany's, you know, and I saw John Swinney in Munich, the Scotland Germany in his guilt, and he said he'd done a lot of canvassing. And at this game, the last game, I bumped into our old friend Victor Alban. I think he's going to be a no for the podcast, by the way. I also Angus Robertson, S .M .P.

38:19and I met a lot of Scottish voters. And what I would report back from my very extensive, in many cases, slightly inebriated, focused, large focus group to whom I, who might entertain with my backbibes, I know I've sense that the time for a change thing is happening in Scotland even with people who remain committed to independence. I'm here one guy, very intelligent guy, and he said, look, I'm telling you, I'm absolutely 100 % for independence. I think, I think, the sooner we get out of the UK, the better. But for this election, I just want to be part of seeing the Tories now, and I'm going to work it out.

38:56So you're, there's a lot that going on. The polls suggest this. So the polls suggest still almost half the population of Scotland's in favour of independence, but of those, only 64 percent, maybe about a vote of S .M .P. And that's partly about getting the Tories out. It's partly that the S .M .P. just hasn't been performing. And remember, Homsiusov resigned only two weeks before the elections. So John Swinney's had a tiny amount of time to turn the party around, and we've had all this chaos around Ecclistertion and her husband. Yeah, I think John Swinney has stabilized things a bit, but it was interesting.

39:24I got a lot of people who were basically saying, just got to work out, we'll get rid of the Tories. And I think it's really important for Labour that if there is tactical voting, and I think they should be encouraging, I know it's hard. I mean, the reason I haven't rejoined the Labour parties, I can say vote tactically, so I can say Tory and Collector, if that's the best way to stop Raj, I can say, by the way, your man in this trust is constituency. Yeah, James Bag. Yeah. I'd been having a little exchanges with him, Rory. It's now it's a three way. It's trust him or Labour. Well, Labour are very strong in Thetford.

39:56Right. I had a wonderful story, not from him from somebody else. He got kicked out of a Trophy and Chip Shop the other day, because the people she walked in and people just said, don't want you in here. She's in real trouble. On our poll, she is now the least popular politician in the country. This is the only good news for soon I can in the poll. He's 20 points ahead of this trust. He's still minus 31. Right. The other bad news from, by the way, is the three politicians who have gone up most during the campaign are Rachel Reeves, Angela Rainer and your friend Ed Davie. And the one who's out of the worst week last week was..

40:30No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. They're dropped dramatically. Right. Well, we'll now go into probably the most dramatic electorate of all, which is France, which could change the whole face of Europe. Where you've just been for the last few days. I mean, you are a French correspondent and you've turned up with the French newspaper. Gunk, give us a sense of what you've been reading the French. Translate for those of us who are not quite as fluent in French. Well, I found it in Libertassion. I found this interview with Jacques Attalim. Who is a friend of mine, very, very close advisor to Fonswell -Mité -Mal, when he was president.

41:02So you live through that co -habitation with Shiraq, when you have the president of one party in the prime minister of another. And just sorry, for this instance, this is very relevant because in France, there's two totally different elections. There's the election for the president and then the election for the national assembly of parliament. And it can, as it did with Shiraq and Jospand, go wrong. So you are dominated by another party. He's a prime minister of one party president for another. And then you have really interesting challenges in terms of governing France. And Attalim says what Macron has done is a disaster.

41:35It's a farce. He says that he's putting at risk the future of the Republic. And just again, to remind people what Macron has done is without having to, he's triggered an early election. But he didn't need to do it. And what he's done is I got, I got actually a message from a French friend of mine who said, this is absolutely typical. It's disgusting. Initially, I sympathize with him. But now, you know, he said, I agree with you, Rory. Macron's going around saying, you're going to vote for me whether you like it or not. I'm the only adult in the room. And this really irritates voters. I think I told you before that when he first got elected, I went into the talk with all the new MPs.

42:11So I got to know some of them quite well. I just say some of the things they say. One said, he's not just dissolved parliament. He's dissolved himself. He smashed his own brand, gone into a ditch, and he's taking us with him. Another one who said, Macron is not my leader anymore, Edward Philippe is. But these are all people getting touched. You're privately. Yeah. All the people I was talking to you. Yeah. And the other thing, there's a word that has now entered the language, which is de macho, ni zation, de machonization. You've had at all the Prime Minister, Bruno, the economics minister, Dalman and the Interior Minister, all just making it clear, this wasn't my idea.

42:44Now, all that being said, the only party that has shifted upwards in the polls since it started is Macron. But the numbers are, you know, Le Pen's party are way, way ahead. And what Jack Atteli is saying is that, you know, part of Macron's strategy is to say, if the national front, the Vassalm Blomondas, you know, I'll do get in. And Bardela, this young 28 -year -old guy, does become the Prime Minister, then people can see that when they do have power, they balls it up. And Atteli makes the point. There was a lot of that in 1933. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just be careful. You'll be very, very careful there.

43:20Because if they don't balls it up and they do well, then you end up as all appear to do well, then you're in a roll. Post at the moment, it looks like, marrying Le Pen's party, which is the old far -right party, the old national front party, seems to be on 36%. This left -wing alliance, this popular front, seems to be on 27%, and Macron seems to be on 20%. And there's many, many things to talk about here. But one of them is, again, people getting touched by, and I know whether you've found this in Paris, but that you're now beginning to see senior civil servant senior professionals who in the past would never have admitted voting for the national front.

43:58Now, prepared to say openly that they would support Le Pen's party. And in the presidential election, the majority, by a small margin of the police and the military, appear to have voted for Le Pen. So she's becoming more acceptable. And this is very strange because this is a party whose roots included a treasurer who'd been part of the Vafon SS, Charlemagne Division, her father was somebody who said, you know, the Holocaust was a minor detail, who said the Nazi occupation of France hadn't been that bad. And a lot of this is also about a trend in French politics, which, Michael Julian Jackson's written a beautiful book about called the case of martial petta.

44:36They're people who support Vichy, they support the legacy of petta who was the second mobile ruler. I think the financial times yesterday led on a survey showing that the Le Pen's party was now ahead on the economy. Now, you talk about the Green Party and Farage's party with unfunded promises. I mean, Le Pen's law off the scale with it. So what people are saying is even at the risk of smashing the economy, and as I said to you last week, let's trust figures large in this debate because they're basically saying let's not risk a regular amount of trust. So I think we're in that place where he hasn't got much time.

45:10I mean, the first round is this weekend. And the other thing where he's really, really, really taking ahead politically is the fact that this is happening on the eve of the Olympic Games, which was meant to be about bringing the country together. I mean, that's really kind of people are really angry about that. Another dynamic is people's suspicion in France of this left -wing coalition. So you can talk a bit about Jean -Luc Melanchand what he represents. But this is a coalition that is doing things such as saying we're going to reduce the retirement age back down to 60. They're talking about big wealth taxes.

45:42They're talking about freezing prices, you know, price controls. So the question for some voters, including businesses, is who's the best to take on the left?

45:59And what's happening with the, I'll listen to a few interviews with some of these guys in the popular front, this left -wing coalition, which goes from absolutely right out there far left to kind of, you know, social democrat form, socialist party. And Falswell along is now, you know, in the mix. But what is interesting about that is that all that's happening in these interviews is basically it's like somebody from the Greens goes on and gets asked with they agree with something that somebody on the right of the socialist party has said, somebody on the right of the socialist party gets on and they're thrown statements by one of the menal shomps.

46:33Like what you're just doing to me on trend. You're like, are you really signing up for that? Yeah, yeah. What I'm really about is the Tuchel benefit cap or something. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. The one at the point which I picked up, I'm sure some of our listeners and viewers will have watched a wonderful French drama called Bainon Noir. I don't know if you watch Bainon Noir, but it was very, very popular thing. And it was about essentially the big story, the big centrist who brought together a team based of left and right and swept all before. So it was Macron. Yeah, but and won the Parliamentary as the Assembly elections.

47:09So this guy is called Eric Benzeki. And he basically wrote this baron Noir, president, the Macron. And now the follow up is this story of a black footballer, falls out with his trainer who's white, becomes a massive issue, becomes a massive culture war, spills out into politics, and then this depressed communications director, which is you, tries to take over and an interior minister decides the way to get a grip of this is to bring the right and the left together. Okay, anyway, one of Macron's people apparently helped on the detail of the screenplay. They allowed them to film a scene in the Alese.

47:44And this piece in the La Figueo, essentially says that these, this guy who's a mellanchonist, who wrote this thing, has been influencing people in the Alese. That is why he called this stupid election. Well, there is a sense. Isn't it all the time of media sort of drifting up? I mean, you will have experienced this in government with, certainly I did felt this with Cameron's government. They're going to be watching the West swing and thought they were going to perform like something I was westing. Zalensky in Ukraine was of course a comedian and an actor who created his career around a drama, fictional, fictional, present, fictional, present.

48:19I don't know. I think final thing is just to take seriously the policies that Bydella and the pen from the far right are proposing in France, given that it looks like they'll get most votes. It's a classic, populous move that we may see, you know, maybe with Trump, maybe spreading across Europe. So it's not in the way you think about far right as being all about, you know, cutting taxes. And fat, what they're talking about is putting salaries up in companies by 10%. They're talking about cutting in -contacts as for the under 30, so they're trying to appeal to the young. They're talking about slashing energy gas and electricity bills by getting rid of green taxes.

48:52That's going to be a common theme. But above all, the cent of it is of course immigration. And that's where they have this idea of, you know, France for French people and that if you're in a legal immigrant, you know, you can't access the health system. And if you're an immigrant who hasn't had work for six months, you're going to have to leave the country. This is a lot of the core of the whole thing. Right. It's going to be very hard if Bydella becomes Prime Minister and Macron is president because he stays on. And the other issue that's really going to come together is he can't dissolve parliament again for at least a year.

49:19Yeah. So be hard for Bydella to get it through, but it also allow him to say the thing that's holding me back is, is this horrible president, give us a proper majority next time and we'll show you. Now before we go, as we speak so negatively about so many people on this podcast, can I say something totally positive about somebody who just died? Very good. Howard Bernstein, who was the chief executive of Manchester City Council and who with Richard Lease was a massive part of rebuilding Manchester after the IRA bomb. And he died a few days ago. And I think when we talk about people in public life, that is a guy whose legacy is beyond most politicians.

49:52Amazing. Amazing. And I remember this because he's somebody who's had a real cross -party respect. I remember George Osborne, very polarizing figure being a huge admirer of her bouncing and then working together very closely. Yeah. So it's very, very sad. So there we are. Howard Bernstein, RIP, best of public life. That's it for this week. So we're recording this one Tuesday and it's going out today. Later, we're recording a question time which is going out tomorrow. And then tomorrow night Wednesday, we'll do a live after the TV debate between Sooner and Starmer. And maybe get even more listeners than the sun, date.

50:23Very good. Next week will be the last one before the general election. Can't believe it. Get closer and closer. And we may find out how you're going to vote because I am frankly confused, Rory, about where you're standing right on what actually good view. What an election it's going to be. And I also would like us very much to talk about the most important debate this week, which is going to be the Trump Biden debate, which is going to be absolutely critical to the future of the world. See you later. See you later. You're looking very smart. Thank you for for listeners. He's wearing his burn the tie and a suit today.

50:50And Rory is probably being a greener is looking like a James Bag Badger beta. That's a very inside. James Bag at the independent conservative candidate against Liss Trust and Norfolk. He's a very shy man. Thank you. Bye.