321. Question Time: Why do politicians leak to the press?

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0:50Welcome to the Restus Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell. So where do we start, Rory? So, Alistair, yes, I mean lots of things to talk about. Interesting news from all around the world. Austria, Switzerland, I'm going to start you on Austria. Lucy Archbold, election campaigning has been paused in Austria due to the recent catastrophic floods. Can you please offer some insight into what this means in practice ahead of the upcoming election, Alistair? Well, the election is very, very soon, later this month and you know, we talked about it briefly a couple of weeks ago.

1:25It's an election where the far right looks like it could end up in government. And I think the floods are having an impact because if anybody who's been following the floods, not just in Austria, but in Hungary and parts of Italy and all sorts of different parts of Europe, truly horrific, including in big cities like Vienna, where they thought they had sort of, you know, pretty well -perfected flood protection. And there has been a lot of life, there's been massive lot of property, there's been incredible costs and the clear up operation is still going on. And the reason why I think it is having some impact in the upcoming election is because a lot of these far right parties, including Trump, including a reform party here, there is this sort of, you know, climate crisis, denialism that goes on.

2:15And the Austrian far right parties, and indeed the not so far right parties, have been very much part of that sort of, you know, climate crisis is overblown, people can't afford it, all the sort of, you know, the popular stuff that's attached to that. And what this has done really has made the public, I think, more alert to the issue. And it's changed the nature of the debate. So whether it will fundamentally affect the outcome, I don't know, but what I would say is Lucy, I think it might. Let's stick with another election, Rory. Yep, other big news this week. This is from Dave Tumberidge. What are your thoughts on the results of the Sri Lankan election?

2:53And what this means for the country going forward in the wake of their recent economic crisis? And this was quite a big upset this one. This is amazing. So in Sri Lanka, people will remember a couple years ago, the great ruling dynasty of Sri Lanka basically collapsed when Rajapaskar fled. And you might remember images of the public breaking into his palace and kind of using his kitchen and stuff. President elections come out of that. And AKD, who is the leader of the Marxist -Leninist Communist Party, then JVP, has swept to an extraordinary election victory, picking up about 6 % of the vote on a turnout of 80%.

3:33Huge upset, both for, of course, the old ruling dynasty, an upset for the caretaker government that's been in place. But also a remarkable turnaround for a Marxist -Leninist Party, which in the late 1980s was involved in full -on Marxist -Leninist armed insurrection when he first joined that party. And has now become a party where even though he, in his campaign, it's been a bit critical of the IMF, Sri Lanka's been through a massive economic crisis, partly actually because they tried to go for a radical move to, there's a discussion, as you can imagine, about how much of a cause this was, but it was only one of the causes to factors.

4:10They tried to go to a very radical move towards organic farming. And in pushing through fully organic, their agricultural production collapsed. They found themselves on the edge of food shortages, exports collapsed. And that was one of the things that triggered the economic crisis. Anyway, he is an example of something that we see around the world, which is somebody from a very, very radical populist party, apparently now moving more to the moderate center, embracing the IMF and presenting himself as the candidate of moderation and good management with his opponents who were saying nothing's changed.

4:42We talked in the main podcast about the current labor government and how it was going to deal with the difficult economic inheritance. This guy's got a real absolute massive problem. And it will be interesting to see how much time people give him to try to sort some of the mess out. It's interesting how much incompancy in so many of these elections does appear to be like a really big problem. I mean, Modi won his election and is still the leader of India, but didn't win nearly as much of the vote as he thought that he would. And here, the incumbent president got 17 % of the vote. He was third placed and didn't go through to the the roll off in the second count.

5:21Interesting though. I thought he showed a lot of dignity in his kind of handover statement. He said, with much love and respect for this beloved nation, I hand over his future to the new president. Let's hope that if Donald Trump loses, you can show similar grace. But a lot of the things we talk about a lot are going to come through now because one of them is that he doesn't have any position really in parliament. They've only got a couple of seats in parliament. So he's got to dissolve parliament in order to try to get parliament majority behind him. And I think we do keep with Jordan Malone, the question is how she gone from being a far right politician to a politician at the center.

5:53Can you go from being a Marxist then and a student insurrectionist to being sort of moderate pragmatist? And I guess sometimes you can, sometimes you can't, says he without, without something. Yeah. We should probably, we should probably sometime in the near future take a look at Millay and Argentina because I use about a year now since he, oh, that's a great subject. We've got to do mill. Yeah, we should do Millay. Now talking of, yeah, I have a question for you. Yeah, Josephine Ampho, Swiss biodiversity, with the climate and biodiversity crises becoming increasingly urgent. Why is it that Swiss public have just rejected a proposal to force authorities to more to protect natural habitats from police and development?

6:31Was the farming lobby given to prominent voice in the campaign? Now we are anistered, Switzerland, which we love. This is one of those referendums that was happening because they have this sort of weird system. Their reference was all sorts of things. And the government wasn't backing it. Most of parliament wasn't backing it. And I think it does underline that this sort of whole nature protection climate change, that the arguments that it might affect the economy, agriculture, construction and energy production appear to have won out. This was not a close vote, 37%, that's only just over one in three voted to back the proposal.

7:07So this is I think part of this sort of the politicization of the whole climate debate. And I think that this sort of those who really believe in climate, the climate catastrophe will be a bit alarmed by this. Yeah, David Lamy has pushed to really get the UK government. I admire him for doing this, leaning more, not just in climate, but into biodiversity. Yeah. And of course, Switzerland is one of many, many countries in the world whose biodiversity is in crisis. British nature is in terrible crisis. I mean, it's been declining dramatically over the last 25 years, but the same is true in Switzerland.

7:40And regardless of how people vote, we're going to continue with very, very dramatic biodiversity last species last. But of course, as we've talked about in the podcast today, the challenge for labour is that on the one hand, we're trying to do stuff for biodiversity. On the other hand, they're trying to generate growth. They're trying to get houses built. And those two things were very rapidly. They find themselves running into conflict with each other. Just point out, they also had a same day a referendum on pension reform. I'm not going to go into the details because I'm not sure I fully understand them, but that got rejected as well.

8:10The other relation this week, Rory, there's just worth a mention. The question from Ella here, please can you provide some insight into the recent election in Brandenburg and whether it was a huge success for the far right AFD? Well, they didn't win. They came second. The SPD led nationally, federally, by Olaf Schultz, the chancellor, they won, but it was narrow. I don't think we should kid ourselves that it was a total rejection of the far right. But I think it certainly sort of gives them a little bit of breathing space. But Schultz is still under quite a lot of pressure as a result of phone symposium.

8:46Digby Walker, why MPs allowed to be on their phones in the House of Commons? If you're in the chamber, you're listening in the debate. Otherwise, quite frankly, you might as well not be there and be dying in for your home, you're considering. Well, I know, I know what you think about this because I heard you rage about it many times. It's ridiculous. There is no possible justification. If we're taking telephones away from children and schools, we should take them away from MPs in the chamber. There's even a very elaborate system of doorkeepers and notes. So you can, if you want to get a message urgently to someone in the House of Commons chamber, you can do so.

9:17There is absolutely no excuse being in there on your phones. And there's also no excuse for reading speeches. You and I were sitting down for a couple of hours with Chris Patton. And he was talking about the fact that when he entered the House of Commons, you wouldn't even have been called by the speaker if you were reading your speech, let alone a question off a sheet of paper. Well, I can, when I was a political journalist sitting up in the press gallery, if an MP so much has looked at the back of their order paper that they might just be holding there, their colleagues started to think they were reading.

9:49We were reading, reading, reading, and the speaker would step in and say, you know, the honorable member knows that he mustn't read from notes and... Oh goodness. Yeah. You would say because by time I got there, I mean, amongst the many turtid, horrible things about the House of Commons chamber, one of them is they were basically just reading out speeches written by some 22 -year -old research assistant who copied and pasted some nonsense from last week's economist. And they drone on mispronouncing the names of every person and country in the world. I think not being allowed notes is excessive.

10:24But I do think there's something about the use of phones and I'll tell you what you know as well. I mean, there may be that people are sort of, you know, engaged in sort of researching something that they've just heard or whatever. The truth is most of them you see, you can see from the movement of the thumb that they're basically just scrolling through social media, probably to see whether their intervention was sort of... Looking at pictures of tractors. Yeah. And I think getting rid of... What was he called? That was Neil Parrish. He was... His defense was when he was found looking at pornography and the House of Commons chamber said that he was trying to go for a website on tractors.

10:56He was a farmer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We obviously believe that excuse, didn't we? My low, here's another one. I'm interested in the subject of political leaking. Why do people leak? What happens if you are caught leaking? Oh, tell us about that, Alice, because that's something that is a bit weird. I didn't do it, even when I was in the cabinet. I didn't do it. And I'm very conscious, though, that my more widely colleagues would point out to me when we looked at newspapers that there would be descriptions of cabinet meetings I'd been in, where for some reason it would turn out that all the really good points were being made by this trust or all the really good points were being made by Gavin Wooden.

11:30In fact, it would give the impression that Gavin Wooden was in all this trust that's spoken for about 90 % of the cabinet meeting given the amount of coverage to their comments. Yeah. And this is something you must have been aware of because I think you suspected Charlie Weeland of doing it, is that right? Oh, yeah, sure. Tell us who Charlie Weeland was quickly. Sorry, I know you don't want to get dragged back into this stuff. He was Gordon Brown's press guy. You've got to be careful with this stuff. I mean, to me, a leak is where there is a piece of government information that is not being published and which you deliberately and willfully, for whatever reasons, put out into the public domain to a journalist.

12:08Okay, that's a leak. I think it's different. You say you never leaked, but you will have had conversations with journalists and who will have picked up on things you said and will have sort of picked up on tone and so forth. And then this would have taken that away. I think that's different. I think what often people talk about when they talk about leaking, that actually mean that politicians have talked to journalists or civil servants or special advisers have talked to journalists. And so I think you've got a different shape. There's sort of three things, something. This is the genuine breaking state secrets, which is what Gavin Williamson lost his job over.

12:40He was accused after an investigation by Mark Sebel of having revealed a debate about Huawei and the National Security Council so that he could appear in these groups. The second one is your very mild thing. You know, if you happen to talk to a journalist, you'll give it a bit of gossip. But the third thing, which is something that I hate, which is the sense that there's a sort of agreement from the journalist that if you will be very indescribable with them, they'll write you up as a great coming figure. And that was Liz Truss' trick. The reason she was always written up as the future leader of the Conservative Party is that in exchange, she would give all this information to journalists over lunch.

13:16And I was talking to a US congressman on this. He was approached by the political editor of probably the most prestigious newspaper in the United States who asked him to turn on his phone and record a private conversation between members of the US Congress and President Biden, members of the same party, the conversation which they were trying to persuade President Biden to step down. And this guy said to the political editor, you've got to be out of your mind. I'm not going into a meeting with my own party leader with a phone on the table recording a complete transcript of it and refuse to do it.

13:50Sure enough, two days later he looks at newspaper and one of his colleagues has done it. The newspaper's got a full transcript of the conversation between the congressman and Biden. And sure enough, again, that congressman has then rewarded by being written up as one of the future rising stars of the party. Wow, wow. That sort of thing does go on. You've got to be very, very careful. I always say to people, you know, in government life is on the record. You never quite know who's watching. You never quite know who's listening. You shouldn't be paranoid, but you should understand that an awful lot of people are out to get you.

14:23The question there, what happens if you're court leaking? Most leaking inquiries go nowhere. Most leaking inquiries lead to lots of energy being wasted. I think that you get a sense over time of whether people can be trusted. And I think within any given organization, if the judgment is reached that somebody cannot be trusted, then you have to get rid of them. Were you ever unfair? Because I know that there was always, when I was a minister, there were always rumors that certain people leaked all the time. Yeah. So it was, let's trust government, I think more recently, Kemi -Badenork has accused of being an investor at the leaker.

14:59But of course, it could never quite be proven and they themselves denied it. But everybody in number 10 was absolutely certain. Do you think when the number 10 press people are very certain that these people leaking, they usually are pretty certain about it, or are they sometimes unfair and accusing people leaking who aren't leaking? I'll give you a very good example of when I was unfair. And it relates to phone hacking. And this is why the phone hacking thing was so sort of insidious. And frankly, why I wish that the leverson inquiry had been properly and fully implemented. And I was unfair to Carol Kaplan, who was close friend of Shuri.

15:35Lots of stuff started appearing in the papers that I thought could only be coming from her. But of course, subsequently, I realized it was coming through phones being hacked. So that was a time of being unfair. With politicians, over time, you get a sense of who you can trust. And you get a sense of people that you're still willing to just sort of treat with, even though you might have a few suspicions that they're putting stuff out there. But I guess what's going on at the moment within the number 10 operation? We didn't talk on the main podcast about Sougre. But there's no doubt in my mind that there are people inside the system, including I'm afraid civil servants who are trying to do it in.

16:21And they're feeding stuff out about her. And I think that is just wrong. And what happens? So I noticed that, because I noticed that I think it was the Daily Mail had managed to get a photograph, which somebody inside number 10 had used their phone to take out of a window of Sougre having a rower with them. Yeah, that's actually raw. I saw that and was actually horrified. So I looked into it. Actually, it wasn't taken in the garden. It was taken, you know, when you're walking up Downey Street, to the, after you go past this sort of number nine Downey Street, and then there's a gap where sometimes cars part and there's a little bit of grass there.

16:55There's a smaller garden there. Yeah. And that's where it, when it was taken by a photographer walking up the street who spotted Sougre. Right. Goodness. Right. And that produced a story about her having a massive rower. A blazing rower. Which turns out to be complete bollocks. The photographer took the picture, gave it to the mail, and they then set a car remember it was Pearson, Letts or one of those people to sort of, you know, build an entire kind of fiction around it. Based on the fact that the photographer said she looked really angry and she stormed off apparently. So that's going to happen.

17:25There's a very good example. Yeah. If it had been somebody taking a picture inside Downey Street. Yeah. If going is on in the garden, that's happened during COVID to the juries, if you remember. Yeah. Yeah. Picture the more sort of lounging around. That is unforgivable. And that is worth trying to find out who is doing that. And then I think this is an important thing that we didn't touch on the podcast. It's a machinery of government points. So when David Cameron came in, he was very lucky to have inherited Jeremy Haywood, who'd been there all the way through from John Major, right? So Tony Blair and Gordon Brown said, this is not the case at the moment.

17:55What's happened is Keir Starmer is coming in. And I think it's one of things that's causing a problem for him. Here's Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, who was appointed by Boris Johnson when he was very young and has been off on medical leave. So I think it hasn't been in the office as much as as people would hope. Doesn't seem to have the trust of the incoming administration, but equally isn't going anywhere. So they've got a sort of sight feeling that they may have a lame duck right at the heart of their civil service machine, who they don't fully trust and who doesn't trust them. They've brought in Sue Gray as the Prime Minister of Chief of Staff, who was a very senior civil servant.

18:31And there's been this odd conversation around how much she's paid, where again, it seems as though it was a bit of a mistake because if she'd just been paid a few thousand pounds less, they wouldn't have been able to run the store as she's paid more than the Prime Minister. I don't know why she did that, to be honest. It doesn't seem to me rocket science, I think you might keep your salary to standard the PM's if it's only a few thousand pounds difference. Although there are plenty of presidents, by the way, you know, she doesn't set her own pay. There are plenty of examples you could have dug up from our time and also from the recent Conservative government where that was not an issue.

19:02It became an issue because at the moment there is a sort of get Sue Gray thing going on. And I think the important thing to bear in mind on that. And I remember this is something that gave me a lot of strength when I was getting, and I think Sue is to some extent playing the role that I played in terms of, you know, being the one that the press really want to try and get. And Tony Blair, I remember, it's taken me one side when I was really under the caution saying this, is this stuff getting to you? And I said, no, not really. And he said the important thing to understand is they're doing this to you because they know that you're important to me and they're trying to take you out and if they take you out, then they'll move on to the next one.

19:38So as long as you understand that and you've got fully got my backing and everything you do. And I think that's kind of part of what's going on now. Add it to which there will be people in the civil service who don't like the fact that Sue Gray went off and became a Labour Party person and is now back, you know, in a very, very senior position. And there may be some Labour people. I keep reading by the way. This is where journalists just sort of repeat their own stuff. I keep reading that the problem is Morgan McSweeney, the political strategist and Sue Gray not getting on. I know them both and have talked to them both and I don't think that is where the problem lies.

20:11I really don't. I think there are other people in there who are just sort of feeding out stuff because that's how they get their kicks. Now, when that happens, find out who they are and get them out of the system. That is the only way to deal with this nonsense. Okay, let's take a quick break and we'll be back in a minute.

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21:35That's a lot of work. Home birth advice. Georgia, I'm seven months pregnant. Planning a home birth. After hearing briefed about midwife Rory delivering his baby at home, I'd appreciate any tips. I definitely would not come to me for tips. The key thing, obviously, is that the work in delivering a baby was done by my wife, Shashana, all I was really doing was following the instructions down 999 in my ear, in a very easy birth. But it is a lovely thing. If it works, I mean take medical advice and you know, work out what your risk level is. If it does work, it is a really lovely thing, because we didn't have to go into hospital at all.

22:17Sasha was born here and Shashana was back in bed, our own bed, a couple minutes after the baby was born, and Sasha never had to go into the hospital, and it was lovely to be able to spend those first few days not in that sort of institution but in your home. So it's a lovely thing if you're if you're able to do it. Jacob Harris questioned for you. The annual Labour Party conference karaoke has produced some excellent social media clips in recent years. So it's one of either of you have a go -to karaoke song or any memories of politicians giving iconic conference karaoke songs. Are you good at karaoke?