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

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1:33Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And we're recording this on the 12th of November, just after news has broken of a challenge to Keir Starmer with the Labour Party. And we're going to begin with that, obviously. and we're recording slightly later, but we're also doing some other very interesting things in this question time. We're looking at issues such as votes for 16, 17 year olds. We're looking at the 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.

2:12But let's begin with what's happening with Labour. 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 there is now a challenge to Keir Starmer'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 Keir Starmer as prime minister. 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 know there's something else going on, that this isn't just a straightforward story that some journalists uncovered, that somebody's pushing something.

3:00Anyway, over to you. Well, so you and I yesterday, 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 Keir Starmer is leading the Labour Party and Nigel Farage is leading the Reform Party which of those two do you think is going to be Prime Minister after that election and I was expecting something around because it was a pretty progressive, London-y, probably quite labour-y audience.

3:34I was expecting something around about 80-20. 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 list trust that we've ever had and never know. So into this febrile mix, deliberately to insert, 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, you know, I know how this works, you have to stand back a little bit and say, okay, what's going on here? The first thing I do is I look at some of the bylines.

4:19So the byline in The Guardian was Pippa Carrera. 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, they're interested in all the ups and downs. Pippa Carrera 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. Somebody has made this decision. And then it gets spills out into the BBC. And they say, you know, number 10 allies of the prime minister saying this time the other. 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 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 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 authorized briefings against colleagues and it is unacceptable Okay.

5:25Can I just pause a second? Because I'm already getting confused, and I think the audience will too. 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. It's actually the other way around. That would be a very different story. Okay. 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 Keir Starmer.

6:06More 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 us off. He is going to fight. 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. What were they hoping to achieve? It doesn't make any sense to me either. I guess the only thing you could say might be, well, West Streeting is up to something. Oh, 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.

6:39The trouble is, it's a bit like the thing with the BBC. It's a game that's just gone too far. And to have, I mean, I was regularly raised at Prime Minister's questions. It is never good for a Prime Minister when the people that work for them, the officials, are being bandied about in the House of Commons. So when Kemi Badenow 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. And, you know, I think what's happened is I think that there is, there's this line that's run against Keir the whole time.

7:16He doesn't really understand politics. He doesn't get politics. And he 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. But I go back to my central point. Downing Street is not a playground. Downing Street is the centre of our government. And the worst thing, you and I were at an event this morning, Rory, 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.

7:47I want it to succeed. There is so much in the country that we need to fix. and this sounds like the Tories. 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. She said to me this morning, darling we cannot keep getting rid of prime ministers like this, this is ridiculous. You know we've been through whatever it is five of them in the last few years and it's mad. We've had seven since the invention of the iPhone in the week that Gordon Brown took of is seven prime ministers. And the seven prime ministers prior to that covered 43 years.

8:26And I do think this is partly the media, in that the media is so used to the change 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. I'm sorry if I'm not explaining this very well, but I'm very angry. You're doing your best. But as I understand it, somebody like Morgan McSweeney or somebody pretty powerful in the number 10 machine. Pippa Creera wouldn't take it from, you know, the cleaners or the messengers. It's got to be somebody with real authority.

8:59Some 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. 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. Whereas, of course, I read the newspaper and I think, oh, now he seems really weak. Doesn't seem to strengthen his position at all. My phone on the way back from Oxford was because I switched my phone off for the thing that we were doing.

9:38And it was just it was MPs. It was party members. It was ministers. And it was like, you know, what the F.U.C.K. was basically what they were saying. 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 they keep having sort of, you know, these, what I would classify as own goals, you know, winter fuel payments, some of the sort of, you know, overseas aid, all sorts of things that I would say, why did you do that? And then we say, well, okay, let's, you know, maybe they'll learn from that.

10:13Maybe the operation will improve. Maybe things will change. My fear is that they'll just think this is, 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, I did The World at 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. And I can say to my constituents, these are good things.

10:41They're things that you wanted us to do. We're now doing them. Nobody's talking about this stuff. We talk about all this crap. 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. And in this incredibly febrile atmosphere. Strategically, just a step back, if I was talking to Morgan McSweeney or whoever this is, 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.

11:22This guy's in a very vulnerable, weak position that, you know, at Bournemouth, when we did a show of hands on how many people think Keir Starmer 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 West Street would or wouldn't be a better leader than Keir Starmer. This is exactly the wrong time to do it. You're not going to strengthen Keir Starmer's position. You're going to weaken it. Listen, don't get me wrong. I said this morning, I think government is harder than it was.

11:55I think the way the media has developed, social media on top of it, you know, but let's be frank, the rise of reform, I can blame, as I often do, 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. 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. And I'm not underestimating how hard that is. But if I was speaking to these guys, I would be saying, for God's sake, you've got three years, governing is not the same as campaigning.

12:34You 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, 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. And I've been saying it till I'm blue in the face, which is why I'm getting really pissed off. Final thing. If you were Keir Starmer, what would you say to the member of staff who'd leaked this 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 there are sometimes situations i'll take let me take to it 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 where you think we can actually make something happening 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.

13:38That goes on. Okay. I wouldn't have done stuff like that without talking to Tony, probably talking to Jonathan Powell and say, what do you think? Should we do that? And they'd say, yeah, okay. Or maybe be careful or do this or whatever. So I'm imagining when I saw this, I thought, look, because Keir Starm hates this stuff. That's one thing I know about Keir. He doesn't like, he doesn't actually like doing much media. He doesn't think the politics, 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.

14:12So if somebody has done that without any sense of reference to the prime minister, representing him, representing the institution of the prime office in Downing Street, I would say, 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. Cheerio. I would not piss about. And you'd make that clear to all the staff, wouldn't you? Whoever did this is in trouble. 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.

14:44And 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, way more media attention. And it was stuff, it was attention that most of the time I did not want. Okay. But I always understood there's a merit in this happening to me because it means I'm a lightning conductor and it's not happening to Tony. 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. the problem with this is that it weakens Keir Starmer 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 so it's got to be gripped it's got to be sorted and they should do it pretty damn quick.

15:46Okay, 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? 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 polities at A level. Good, glad to hear. 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. However, I now realise how much of what I knew was only from social media and word of mouth.

16:18How 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 a potential lowering of the voting age? Well, I think there's actually been some really interesting work done worldwide on 16 to 17. Those are very relevant for you. You've been a big campaigner for 16, 17-year-olds getting the vote, which we really did disagree on agreeably. I was very against 16, 17-year-olds getting the vote. My view being that 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.

16:57and you had this very romantic idea i felt which is we're going to give the vote 60 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 anyway tell us what you found out about 16 17 year olds and voting well you have absolutely put your finger on my general position 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. But what's been interesting this week, you may have seen stuff in the media about this, my old friend and colleague, Peter Hyman, has been out on the road with a young black guy called Schwab Gamote.

17:40So 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 and they've written this report inside the mind of a 16 year old i you know as you you sometimes sort of take the bicky out of this because you think i'm too sort of you know romantic about the views of kids but actually it is quite hopeful so for example one of the things that they do watch a lot of these kids are watching a lot of video content uh they are playing 96 percent of boys are playing video games in some form but for example in their eyes this generation Andrew Tate is kind of irrelevant he's just not a big part of their lives 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 different media landscape that they're in and it does have a lot of challenges within it.

18:41And there are some very strange role models that develop. But 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. So there's a lot more questioning going. There's a lot more understanding. 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. And I find this even with my kids, that actually it's not quite that people are childlike. They're increasingly world-weary and cynical about almost everything.

19:18Even 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. They can do a good imitation of you and I promoting brands. So I think 16, 17-year-olds are obviously incredibly smart, very logical, very consistent in their thinking often, and very aware of a media landscape where everybody's trying to sell them stuff. But the problem is that it can end up in a slightly nihilistic worldview where you end up almost trusting nobody. You've become so knowing, so cynical, you no longer trust the BBC, you no longer trust, I don't know, whatever, because everything is up for grabs.

20:10And sadly, that's actually quite an opportunity for the populists that even though they may be equally cynical about Farage Trump and Andrew Tate, the general atmosphere that it creates isn't very good for thoughtful discussion around politics. That's true. That's true. However, one of the conclusions that Peter and Shrub'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 much more informed and reflective views than the Daily Mail or Daily Mirror reader who relies entirely on one political viewpoint.

20:57Except 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. So it'd be interesting to see how that all comes together. One final thing, just before we move off this. When people often ask us, 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? I'm not saying everybody should do this, but I'm quite interested in what somebody like Peter Hyman is doing, and indeed what Gerald Knauss is doing, which is these figures who are beginning to, without being in government, leading policy debates in really quite interesting ways.

21:44And often, in the case of Peter Hyman, pretty good at getting media attention. I mean, he's a former, I think, head teacher, wasn't advised at a Starmer, but instead of working in Number 10, what he's been doing is out on the road with Trump supporters. Then he got very interested in the grid. Now he's very interested in 16, 17 years, and he's quite good at shaping policy debates. I wonder whether that's also interesting the way that people can now use things like Substack to help develop arguments. Well, I'll tell you, Peter worked with me as part of our team when we were in power, and he was with us in opposition as well.

22:20And he's a very, very bright, quirky guy. I think it's a shame he's not still with the Keir Starmer team because I think it's his sort of thinking that we need more than the sort of thinking that seems to be dominant there now. I also do think you mentioned the thing about the desire for strongman leadership. One of the things that comes through this report is that there is a desire for strength in leadership. And there is a desire for clarity in communication. 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.

22:57And I think they do need more of that. 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. 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? They're the first generation in history to grow up without a guarantee they're going to be better off than their parents. But of all the thousands that they have talked to, 84 % 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.

23:37But 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. But it's a good read. And I promise that next week we won't mention Peter Hyman, okay? And I won't send you anything that he sends me to say, could you talk about this? So, Alistair, 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? 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, sexually assaulted during a public walkabout.

24:21And 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. And this has got bigger symbolism because Mexico is the great home of machismo. Correct. Correct. And also because she made a big thing of it in her campaign, that we've got to change the culture. 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. And the reason for the women-only carriages was because most women on trains have reported being sexually harassed.

24:56This was quite extraordinary. And the other debate that it sparked off in Mexico was 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. and she doesn't have very heavy security. So this guy had no trouble whatsoever. And it wasn't just, you know, he basically went up there, tried to kiss her, tried to grab her breasts, tried to touch her on the hip. 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? And femicide, which is a really big problem, I think there's something like 800 women killed, four being women, and 98 % of gender-based murders go unpunished.

25:39So this is a real problem. What's happened is I think she's done this deliberately and 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 really seriously. Also, because in many ways, Claudia Sheinbaum is seen as a sort of protégé of AMLO. 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. But there's something that she's doing here which is different. And that's particularly on these kinds of social issues and issues around women.

26:18Now, 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. 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. 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. It is now illegal here to share video and photos of images likely to cause distress.

26:58Yes, few international journalists are in the country to report, so the world is now silent and ignorant. It is a total crackdown on dissent. What next for this normally peaceful country? 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? It's very, very troubling. And it's part of a much bigger story in Africa. 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. During the 90s, there was an amazing explosion of democracies.