504. Is Trump Losing His Tariffs War? (Question Time)

18:45Rory Stewart:And I guess, you know, 250 years of American democracy is really paying off here. In the end, these institutions are holding better than people feared.

18:53Alastair Campbell:Well, I don't think we should get too cheered up because I think this is getting such attention because, as you say, it's so fundamental to his overall foreign and economic policy. But they've let quite a lot go by. And I was reading a piece at the weekend, one of the progressive think tank had done an analysis of Project 25. And it is pretty amazing when they go through line by line, just how much of Project 2025 has been carried out, stopping foreign aid, stopping the DEI stuff, the really tough stuff on immigration, going for the public broadcasters, Venezuela, a big, big thing, part of this.

19:35Alastair Campbell:So I think we should still be worried because Trump is doubling down. The fact that he could have that response, a normal response of an American president would have been, well, I'm very disappointed by the judgment. We now have to make sense of it. Instead of which, your family's ashamed of you. You're a disgrace to America. Now, hopefully, that will shake up the legal system and these media cowards to think, hold on a minute, we really are now looking down the barrel of somebody who wants to run this country like Putin runs Russia. That is what we're getting to on this. And so that's why I think it was so significant.

20:14Rory Stewart:I guess in the back of their minds, in the Supreme Court's justice minds, is they're balancing two things, aren't they? They're balancing what they think is their responsibilities and constitution and the law. But the background, and I think you're right to raise Project 2025 here, is that the big narrative, the big populist narrative in the broad sense, is that we're being crippled by the law. And you hear it from the right in Britain. You hear it from the right all over the world. The story is that we've become too slow moving. Somebody who I saw in Munich said to us, we've gone from a world where the people running our countries were engineers to a world in which the people running our countries are lawyers.

20:56Rory Stewart:And we talked about the fact that every democratic presidential and vice presidential candidate for 40 years, with one exception, was a lawyer. And of course, Keir Salman is a lawyer. And there's a general sense that governments find it very difficult to get things done. You talk about how come China can build all these airports, we can't, why are we still talking about the third runway since 1997? And so there's a general sense in modern politics that we're being outcompeted by authoritarian states like China, because they don't have to worry about public inquiries, consultations, planning processes, and above all, lawyers.

21:33Rory Stewart:And of course, ministers, you know, when I was a minister, I felt this a lot. When I wanted to try to put metal detectors at the gates of prison, the first thing I was told by my civil servants is it's illegal. You know, the lawyers won't let you do this, right? And you have to spend a lot of time endlessly talking about what's legal and what isn't. So I suppose the Supreme Court, and we get a hint of this in their decision to say, we're not going to double guess whether or not something's an emergency we're going to look at this narrow subject around tariffs is they don't want to be drawn into the culture wars of being accused of the lawyers and the blob stopping governments getting on with things yeah anyway we will doubtless be coming

22:11Alastair Campbell:back to trump and his tariffs because uh he is not going to let this lie but i i think you're right i think the world was broadly cheered up by this you certainly saw a lot of positive reaction from different parts of the world, albeit worried in terms of whether they can now waste lots of money trying to get their money back or whatever it might be.

22:30Rory Stewart:Final thing they're worried about, I think, is that we had sort of settled into the mad old system. We were beginning to get a sense over a year of what he was doing with his IEPA powers and how to deal with him. He's now going to be working with his own teams to try to come up with other ways of torturing the world with tariffs. And so there's going to be a moment where countries and businesses are going to be lurching around trying to understand what this means, what other tricks he's going to try to pull out of the back of his pocket. And if he decides that somehow he can't quite continue using tariffs as his tool of torturing people, what other things is he going to try to find?

23:13Rory Stewart:Because he's going to want to continue torturing people. He's going to want to continue to have short-term transactional things that allows him to humiliate, bully, extract concessions, threaten, intimidate. So what's next? And that's where I begin to worry. What's he going to do with American control of tech, cloud computing, AI, sanctions policies, and others at the dollar, payment systems, other tools that he could have to torture people?

23:39Alastair Campbell:Yeah. Or move to the sort of dropping people out of the window phase. I mean, don't forget, we have got eyes out killing people on the streets and Trump defending it. So, you know, we're on a very dark path, I would say. Should we take a quick break? Yeah, quick break and then back for more. Now, just a quick pause in the podcast to mention our sponsor, NordVPN.

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26:03Rory Stewart:You can even sign up for a free 30-day trial. so you can try Whoop risk-free and start your year with a bit of momentum.

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27:10Rory Stewart:To get the best discount on your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com slash restispolitics. You'll get four extra months free on the two-year plan, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee. The link's in the episode description.

27:29Rory Stewart:Welcome back to The Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

27:32Alastair Campbell:And me, Alastair Campbell. Dave Maglade is a TripPlus member on Discord. There are few dramatic changes in the relationship between monarchy and parliament. Is the arrest of former Prince Andrew of such a scale, it will be seen as a similar sort of change. and be in school history books a century from now? Or will it be forgotten except by specialist historians? Now, you always sort of, I think, get the feeling that I get very emotionally disturbed when bad things happen to the Labour Party. I get the same feeling with you at the Bodarchy.

28:04Rory Stewart:I'm sure that's right. I'm sure that's right. I think it's a good challenge. And I think it's certainly true of you and me. I suspect it's probably more true of the whole world than we want to acknowledge. There are certain kinds of things that are outrageous and certain kinds of things that don't. And a lot of that is to do with where we're coming from. So it's easier for the two of us to get really outraged by Boris Johnson's conflicts of interest. We agree violently on that. And then once we get on to Peter Manelson or the monarchy, we tend to differ.

28:35Alastair Campbell:Well, I think I was fairly frank about Peter Manelson. What did you make of Charlie Faulkner's take on the emergency podcast he and I did, where he basically said he thought this was potentially a real crisis for the monarchy.

28:48Rory Stewart:Yeah. So I think, firstly, if anybody's not listened to Charlie Faulkner and you, they should. I thought he was great. I mean, you know, this is a guy who was the Lord Chancellor, and boy, he knows his law, and he's extremely good at expressing complicated ideas powerfully. So what did I think? I don't know. I mean, what's your instinct? I mean, And my instinct, but again, this may be my prejudice, but my instinct in relation to Dave McGlade's question is that it's not something that will be in school history books a century from now. My suspicion is that actually it will be forgotten except by specialist historians.

29:24Rory Stewart:And that that's because in the end, I think institutions survive scandals. And I think that will be and i so i'd be very very surprised if in a century's time people were going to be studying this in history books what do you think i think they might be um i mean obviously a lot

29:45Alastair Campbell:depends on what now happens i mean you've you've got a you've got the situation where until recent quite senior member of the royal family has been arrested is being investigated for really serious offenses misconduct in public office which could lead to him being imprisoned that's not impossible They arrested him. They're still searching his properties. They've taken away electronic devices. And this is not about the sexual offences, which he's always denied. This is about misconduct in public office when he was a trade envoy.

30:18Rory Stewart:And in particular, the allegation is that he, within five minutes of receiving his government briefing for his trade trips, forwarded them on to Jeffrey Epstein.

30:29Alastair Campbell:And I should say, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has consistently denied any wrongdoing. Charlie did make the point, and he's right, there's a very, very high bar. This is a really, really difficult thing to prove. But my point is, if it does go down that route, if it does go to what Charlie calls the trial of the century, and it does lead to conviction, I think that is a really big problem for the monarch as a whole. You're right that they've survived a lot of scandals, but I think this has the potential to be more serious. Now, the other thing, Rory, which I think we should, you know, I spend a lot of time criticizing our beloved media.

31:09Alastair Campbell:But the other reason why I think this might be studied in history books is because sometimes a photograph will be central to history. The photograph taken by this Reuters photographer, Phil Noble, who'd waited. He got a tip off that Adrie was at Aylsham Police Station. There are any number of police stations he could have been taken to. He gets taken to this sleepy police station, this sleepy part of Norfolk. This guy, along with others, gets a tip off. That's where he is. He spent six hours or five or six hours waiting. He drove from Manchester. so he five hours drive from mantras to the north he gets there and i've worked with photography a lot of photographers in my time and sometimes and he's honest enough to admit it sometimes it's just luck they see the cars leaving and he gets this he just bang bang bang bang bang using flash which is why you've got the red eye in the picture bang bang bang bang it turns out most of the pictures were of the police or whoever was in the front one of whom had remarkably looked like the driver looked remarkably like steve whitkoff trump's special envoy don't know what he was doing that anyway there's andrew in the back and it is just such a picture of panic devastation and the guys admitted it's luck he just banged him off he didn't know whether he was sitting in the front or the back it was getting dark and he gets this picture that picture was on every single front page in the uk and hundreds of front pages around the world that i think is one of the reasons why this because it captured something truly phenomenal.

32:51Alastair Campbell:This is a guy who spent his entire life being entitled, obnoxious. That's the generous description of most of the people who've ever had anything to do with him. And he's suddenly like a mortal human being in the back of a car filled with absolute panic about what he's just been confronted with and what that might mean for the rest of his life. So I think this has the potential to be really serious. Now, where I, Charlie and I both agree that your friend, the King, I thought his statement was very, very well put together. And the timing was right, because what they're obviously trying to do is to build a total firewall between the institution and Andrew.

33:34Alastair Campbell:And that, I think, is the right approach.

33:37Rory Stewart:In terms of media management, I guess one of the lessons, at least as far as I understand it, is that you need to try to move as quickly as possible and get ahead of these stories. So I guess if we go back on how they've tried to do this, the first step, and this is some years ago, was to sack him from his trade envoy role. I think that was maybe 10 years ago. Then he was taken off public duties. So he ceased to be a kind of public member of the royal family, became a kind of private citizen. And then in, I guess, September, he was stripped of his titles. Then he was evicted from Royal Lodge, stripped of the Night of the Garter.

34:17Rory Stewart:So I guess what they've been doing is to try to move quite quickly. The temptation in all these scandals is to hope that it can pass over, to try not to comment, to just be like, well, let the law take its course. In which case, there would be a continual drip-drip of people saying, how come this guy's still a prince? How come he's still in this grace and favor lodge?

34:40Alastair Campbell:Yeah, you see, I think you could make the case that they've actually been very slow to deal with this, because it's not as if Prince Andrew doesn't have a certain reputation. I think there were lots of sort of rumours and stories about the way that he conducted himself. And so once the Epstein thing started, and this is where I think they will be perhaps a little bit worried, is that there will be, I mean, I don't know what the police will be able to have access to. You know, there was a time, and finally, there still is a time when the police are not meant to enter royal palaces without permission.

35:17Alastair Campbell:That's why Charlie and I had the discussion about was the king tipped off? And Buckingham Palace was clear that he wasn't. but the precedent was that you couldn't go into a royal palace without being invited or being someone i don't know if you know this roy this is why it's good that you spend so much time with the king if you ever get up to anything wrong you're still not allowed to arrest somebody in the presence of the monarch i'll be looking at some of these crazy laws i tell you this is

35:42Rory Stewart:one of my favorite extraordinary moments in my early time in parliament where a labor mp had got really drunk in the bar and had started hitting some Tories. And someone called the police. And the police came and they grabbed him and he turned on them and he said, you are not allowed to arrest someone within the Palace of Westminster. And they were so punished. This wouldn't have been Eric Joyce, would it? It was Eric Joyce. And they let go of him for a second, giving him just time to get across and headbutt one more Tory MP before they finally brought him down. Anyway, he was making the same argument about no arresting in palaces.

36:20Alastair Campbell:Well, the other one, the Cultural Property Armed Conflicts Act 2017, so that's less than a decade ago, that forbids police from searching royal estates for any stolen or looted artefacts.

36:34Rory Stewart:But just to come back to this, I think what has happened is that instead of hiding behind those kinds of laws, they have moved very, very quickly to say, A, we weren't informed, B, let them in, let the police do their job. And in that statement, the rule of law must pass its thing. So I think the one thing that they're not doing is trying to claim royal privilege and exemption on Andrew.

36:55Alastair Campbell:I would argue that they've moved very quickly in relation to what happened last Thursday. I think the more this goes on, the questions that will be asked, and heaven knows what evidence is going to emerge from from andrew's phones and laptops not just in relation to epstein but in relation to everybody else that he's had dealings with and of course the other thing that's happening rory the liam burns select committee business select committee they're looking at the whole issue of trade envoys because you know as you well know we keep bumping into people say oh because i was appointed me trade envoy to this and the other and sometimes it's to it's to let somebody down who thought they were going to get a different job or always in in the tory system

37:36Rory Stewart:always. It was about managing backbench rebellion. And Cameron ended up appointing dozens of these people. Some of them were backbenchers who were going to cause trouble. Some of them were ministers who'd just been fired. And it was a really disturbing thing, because almost every little country ended up with a trade envoy, countries with whom we did almost no trade at all. And the embassy would then have to deal with an MP who wasn't considered by the government to be the kind of person they actually wanted as a minister, suddenly rocking up, taking the ambassador's time trying to get a meeting with the president and claiming what they're doing is promoting British trade with their country.

38:13Alastair Campbell:So there are currently 32 trade envoys covering the world. And according to the government website, they play a crucial role in supporting the department's growth priorities. Well, they don't get paid, so they might get their expenses paid. But that, to me, is an open door to say, well, okay, I don't get paid, but what I've got these other business interest going on. I'm not tarring them all with the same brush. Some of them will be genuinely driven by a desire to support the government, support the country, etc. But you can't say to me that there isn't at least the route to conflicts of interest, which, you know, I suspect Liam Byrne will get to the bottom of.

38:52Rory Stewart:The final thing, which I hadn't taken on enough, which you're completely right on, is if they get into all of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's emails, WhatsApps, it's going to be terrifying. It's going to be a monstrous hornet's nest. I mean, even before you get on to whether there's crime, as soon as you start going through the emails of somebody like that, it's unbelievable what you'll find. I mean, it sort of brings me back to my main point, which is at the heart of the Epstein scandal, is that for the first time, we were actually released to the public 3 million emails of this almost billionaire who knew all these presidents and billionaires and tech people.

39:35Rory Stewart:We don't normally get to see that. And as soon as you get to see it, it's very, very, very nasty. Even, I suspect, for people who aren't engaged in criminal activity, and I don't know whether this is going to continue to happen, you know, are all of Mandelson's emails and WhatsApps seized? Are they all going to be released? Because that's going to be not pretty. Because, you know, what do we know about all these people? they are flatterers, networkers, pushing the boundaries, striking deals, trying to get themselves invited to parties. I mean, I can think of another 20 people in public life whose emails you would not want to see released to the world and the number of people they would drag down in the context.

40:14Rory Stewart:Yeah.

40:14Alastair Campbell:Oh, yeah. And of course, what happens sometimes when people are being dragged down is they want to take other people down with them. You know, you and I, Rory, at the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. We were in Belfast. We were there. We interviewed Senator George Mitchell, sort of hero of the peace process. We were there for the unveiling of his bust at Queen's University. They're taking it down because of what they say has been revealed about him in

40:36Rory Stewart:the files. I think I've talked before about the fact that so many of the people we've interviewed and leading have turned up in these emails. It would be interesting. I don't know whether he'd be prepared to come on, but Michael Wolfe seems to have been very, very close to him and sending an incredible number of emails to and from Epstein. Now, none of this is an accusation of wrongdoing, but one of the things we're not getting, and maybe if Wolf were prepared to come on, he could tell us, is what was it about Epstein that seemed to make him so sort of magnetic for these people? And I've been reading these biographies trying to understand it.

41:11Rory Stewart:And because he was this extremely evil, criminal, abusive man who did horrifying things to numberless underage girls people are not trying to understand what it was that was attractive about him because you don't want to talk about that but clearly he must have been a man with an incredible charm sense of humor i mean who knows what it was but there was something that was

41:36Alastair Campbell:that was trapping these people in well i'm as i've said to you before on my one meeting with it definitely passed me by he absolutely gave me it absolutely and this isn't hindsight this is this is recorded in in my diary at the time he absolutely gave me the creeps yeah he gave you the creeps no he gave he totally gave me the creeps but i'll tell you my final point on the story is is i think that i still am troubled by the extent to which the american angle and all this is so underplayed here we have we have uh glane maxwell in jail peter mandelson disgraced andrew now disgraced now there have been some people as charlie said larry summers george Mitchell I've just mentioned.

42:17Alastair Campbell:But there is some stuff in here about Trump that for some reason, the media just seem not to want to cover too much because there's so much material. So the economists have got a full-time team on this. The New York Times have got a full-time team on this. They're still digging in and sort of finding all these stories. And this is happening, by the way, because what we're seeing with Epstein is not just the criminality, it's the cronyism, it's the corruption. It's the total corruption of public life in a way. I mean, when you look at some of the stuff that I was reading over the weekend about the way that the markets were moving on the back of some of the, including the Supreme Court, where people were making money out of the expectation.

43:00Rory Stewart:Allegations that Lutnik's children anticipated. So the Trade Secretary for Trade Commerce is children somehow anticipated that the Supreme Court might overrule their father's policy and therefore took huge positions to benefit themselves and their clients on that assumption. Now, that's pretty extraordinary stuff.

43:23Alastair Campbell:Totally agree. And we've seen the same. I saw an interview with Trump's sons, Don Jr. and Eric. Their inability to think that there might be such a thing as a conflict of interest, given their nature and what they're all about and given the nature of their father and what he's all about so in a week when he says i don't care about congress i don't really care about the courts i'll do what the fuck i want and they're basically saying well there's no problem with that as they go around the world doing deals making billions etc so alison next question for you connie trip

43:55Rory Stewart:plus member from magister will descend reforms so for internationalists special educational needs reforms in the schools, white paper, strengthen inclusion in mainstream schools or risk stripping essential legal protections from children with special needs. Can you explain briefly what it is that England, and I guess it's only England, right, because Scotland will have a different policy, is trying to do in terms of children with special educational needs in schools?

44:21Alastair Campbell:Well, the direct answer to the question is that I hope that it will lead to greater inclusion without compromising standards, either for children with special educational needs or for children who are being educated alongside them?

44:36Rory Stewart:Yeah. So in the current system, many parents feeling that there isn't good provision for their child that has special educational needs is frequently pressing for them to go to a specialist school, which is costing the government an enormous amount of money. And also many educational people would say isn't good. They'd rather have these children in mainstream schools. So the idea is to try to have fewer places in specialist schools and more children with special educational needs in a normal school, supported in a normal school. Is that right?

45:07Alastair Campbell:Yeah. And also, just to point out that private equity has got into this space in a massive way. And, you know, we mentioned this last week, Georgia Gould is the school's minister. She's been given the task of reviewing the whole policy on SEND. What they're trying to do is to get far better teacher training. There's£200 million going into training teachers on how to deal with children with special educational needs, what they call an inclusion premium, new funding for mainstream schools, conditional on them showing that they can accommodate more children with special educational needs.

45:42Rory Stewart:The challenge back, I guess, will be people saying, uh-uh, the schools are no good at this. My child has real needs. And I'm in no doubt as a parent that I can get better care and education for my child going to a different provider. Could be a charity, could be a private school, could be a private equity funded school. But what I care about is my kid and the government's not good at this. And here's somebody who is good at this in the local area and the council can pick up the bill.

46:14Alastair Campbell:Right. And the councils at the moment have got a massive double figure billion cost that they have been struggling with. So, look, this is a system that I think both the main parties accept is pretty broken and in need of fundamental reform. And just to give you some of the stats underlying this, 1.6 million children now identify with special educational needs. The cost of educating a child with special educational needs in the state system is about worse out at£26 ,000. This private equity running independent system, we're talking£63 ,000. the other point that i think is worth making that comes through the the arguments about the special education debate is that where children are accommodated even with all the difficulties that might apply to school as a whole the school as a whole you are seeing a better performance both of the children with send and children without so i think that what the argument the argument bridget philipson is putting forward is that inclusion and standards need not be in conflict, provided you have the resources.

47:25Rory Stewart:I'm really sympathetic towards this just personally. I mean, so as you know, my little sister Fiona has Down syndrome and my parents put a lot of energy into making sure that she was in mainstream schools. And these schools were very, very supportive and flexible because obviously her reading and writing skills would be similar to maybe a six-year-old. And it worked really well for her. And they felt that that was a much, And many parents listening to this will have different views on their child and their child's needs. And this is going to be why, presumably, this is going to be violent politics on the back benches, because there'll be a lot of constituency MPs under pressure from parents who disagree with my parents and who feel that their child would do much better in another system.

48:06Alastair Campbell:There will definitely be people who are worried that what they feel has been a real struggle to get the support they need, often involving the law, that any worry that that's being taken away, I think, will provoke a huge debate. However, I think you provided the resources there and the numbers they're talking about in terms of money are good. Where that money is coming from is another question, whether that affects other parts of the education debate. That will also come out as well. But I think the principle of trying to accommodate as many children who identify with SAND in the mainstream, I think is a good one, provided that those who cannot be accommodated have the support that they need for the very, very complex needs that they have.

48:52Rory Stewart:This is probably one of the biggest problems that government faces well beyond children with special educational needs, because it also echoes the fact that government is spending an unbelievable amount at the moment on disability benefit. Yeah, correct. And without sounding too much like a Tory, we're spending more and more of our GDP on services. We're not as productive as we should be. Our economy's not growing properly. We've got to find some way of rebalancing our books. And we've got to get out of a cycle, which is very understandable, but which the Labour Party is going to be particularly vulnerable to, which is hard cases making bad law, which is endlessly Labour backbenchers pointing to really moving and terrible individual cases where people with disabilities or special educational needs aren't getting the support.

49:48Rory Stewart:simply because you just, Rachel Reeves isn't going to be able to run a government if the bills on these things keep going up and the way they are. So it's good. And the result will be, unfortunately, that either you're too generous or you're too mean. And if you're too mean, there will be people who are affected. But the government's, our economy is not growing fast enough. It's not big enough, I fear, for us to continue to keep our spending on these things going up. And that's a tough conversation with the back benches.

50:15Alastair Campbell:Yeah, but that's why all this other stuff that's going on pat mcfadden's welfare reform alan milburn's review on so-called neats not in employment education or training all has to wrap into this what i like about the the way that the government is thinking in relation to this school's white paper a lot of the focus no doubt will be on both politically and media will be on send but what i also read within this is an attempt to reframe a really important debate about childhood there's some there's some stunning awful facts in there so one in five children between the ages of eight and 16 now has a what's called a probable mental health disorder that's up from one in nine in 2017 so whether that's due with covid we don't know whether it's due with social media don't know but there's something going on another the stat, Rory.

51:06Alastair Campbell:I mean, I don't know. You know, I can remember growing up. I walked to school on my own to primary school. I don't remember what age I was, but I did that. In 1971, 80 % of 70 and 8 year olds walked to school alone. By 2020, and it's probably got worse since, it's one in four. And here's one. You'll like this, Rory. Well, you might, you'll hate this, but given your interest in prisons and my interest in prisons, children now spend less unstructured time outdoors than them prisoners and have 50 % less free playtime than their counterparts in the 80s.

51:41Rory Stewart:I'm guilty of this too. So we live only 10 minutes from school and I keep trying to cross that threshold and get our eight-year-old and 11-year-olds to walk to school. Of course, every time I try to stalk them and follow them to school to let them do it independently, I see them not looking as they're crossing the road. And I'm just like, they're such space cadets they're going to be talking about pokemon and they're going to step in front of a truck and i mean but it is very very tough as you can imagine as a parent to think yeah listen if this idiotic child doesn't look properly for across the roads and get flattened i would feel

52:21Alastair Campbell:really i hope they don't listen to this episode if this idiotic child i mean this is your son you're talking about i do but i i think there is something about there's a line in the in the white paper about, you know, getting children to regain their childhood. And I'm sorry, I mean, I was on a train in France yesterday, and I was sitting next to these two girls that had been, what, 13, 14. The entire journey from Nîmes to Paris, they spent on Instagram, the entire journey. But now, that letter we had last week from Serafina Jennings, you know, there is good on social media. There's no doubt about that.

53:02Alastair Campbell:There is good in the mobile phone world. But I hope that part of this reclaiming childhood really does step up the debate about how children are spending their leisure time consuming the addiction to phones, the addiction to social media, and what have you. There's a few other things which I thought you'd be interested in, Rory. There's a thing called RISE, Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence. When we were in power, we got a lot of credit but some opprobrium outside london but we really tackled the educational problems in london and it really had an impact and this white paper is targeting the northeast and also coastal england and i think that identifying where there are particular problems and then taking the best people and taking the best practice and trying to integrate that into the system there there's good stuff on school building there's good stuff on sport there's good stuff on inclusion and creativity but and it reads to me bridget phillipson gets quite a lot of flack for being seen as a bit sort of you know i think this is your view generally a bit sort of you know pro-union on the left all that stuff but this this reads very much like a sort of david blunkett approach to education but i think the big issue will be money both in terms of the new teachers that they're promising the new teacher training they're promising some of the hubs that they're promising there's a lot in here that will require money.

54:25Alastair Campbell:But I think as a vision for education, I think there's a lot to commend it.

54:30Rory Stewart:Lovely. Well, Alison, listen, we've run relatively long. So I think maybe we should wrap it up. But I think there's three great things. We've done tariffs, we've done Andrew and Epstein, and we've done, I think, quite a thoughtful piece on education schools in Britain. So thank you very much. And you're about to go on travels, but I look forward to seeing you on your travels in a couple of days time.

54:52Alastair Campbell:Yeah. So this week's main episode will be devoted entirely to Ukraine, four year anniversary of Putin's invasion. Should also give a shout out to Olaf Scholz, who is this week's leading episode and also to part two of our mini series with Ken Rosen on the Arctic. But anyway, and Rory, I've been enjoying your skiing videos, but I want to test your knowledge. Who is Johannes Husflut Klebo?

55:22Rory Stewart:Well, he's the great hero, hasn't he? Who's just got all these gold medals.

55:26Alastair Campbell:Well done. How many did he get in his single Olympics? I don't know. Is it five?

55:31Rory Stewart:What's he done?

55:31Alastair Campbell:He got six. He got every gold in cross-country skiing. He's a Norwegian. And he would be, he as an individual, would be in the top 10 of the medals table. But Norway are winning the medals table by a mile.

55:44Rory Stewart:My only boasts, I once skied with a guy called Tony Seiler, who's from Kitzbühel in Austria, who got, I think, three gold medals or certainly three World Cup prizes in a single thing. This is the mid-50s. But it's funny how these kind of legends are kind of forgotten. You know, by early 90s, you could still say to people, I skied with Tony Seiler and they sound a bit like people who say you played football with Maradona. But nowadays, you say it to a young ski instructor, they've got no idea who he is. I guess that happens eventually.

56:18Alastair Campbell:What about Jean-Claude Keeley was the one that I always remember as a child?

56:21Rory Stewart:Yeah, Keeley and Val d 'Isère. He's from Val d 'Isère. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Franz Klammer. You remember Franz Klammer, the downhill guy? I remember Franz Klammer. Yeah. But we're dating ourselves here.

56:30Alastair Campbell:I'll tell you what I've really enjoyed, though, Rory. There's two things I've really enjoyed. One is Mark Carney's social media congratulating every medalist and just clearly loving it. But the other thing I've really enjoyed is these sports I didn't know existed. some of the kind of acrobatic stuff but uphill mount uphill skiing what is going on yeah they're

56:50Rory Stewart:going uphill and at such speed i mean at such pace i mean i i i do a bit of uphill stuff and boy it's not like that um anyway thank you and we maybe we could even share my ridiculous new video of me in the trees because the snow here has been unbelievable yeah it's just snowed and

57:07Alastair Campbell:snowed and snowed and a lot of avalanches sadly no i listen you'll be pleased to know you talk You talk about your mother a lot. I talk about Fiona a lot. Fiona was moderately impressed by your skiing video. Moderately impressed.

57:18Rory Stewart:And it takes a lot to moderately impress, Fiona. But you be. Oh, very good. All right. Have a great day. See you soon. Bye. See you soon. Bye-bye.

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