The Rest Is Politics - 575. Alastair Reacts to Burnham’s Speech and Rory’s Viral Stare

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

Will scrapping the triple lock be electorally perilous for Burnham, or can his vision of a national care service convince the public and his party that it’s time for pension reform? Did being Mayor of Greater Manchester make him a better orator? And what is Rory’s explanation for his viral Newsnight stare? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. __________ Enjoy Rory and Alastair’s interview with Mustafa Suleyman by searching ‘Leading’ on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. Sponsored by Lloyds. Move faster with daily global market analysis, the download on tokenisation and how to manage your company's energy transition all from Lloyds Corporate & Institutional Banking. Search Lloyds Corporate. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee ✅ __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [e-mail] __________ Research: Evie Townend Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: James Clayden, Louis Mealing Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Bella Soames Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We like to say we want our politics to be about big issues, and Andy Burnham has just given us all, friends and enemies alike, plenty to chew on. The building of a national care service, reform of the pensions triple lock, education reform, electoral reform of VAT, cut on electricity bills, greater public control of utilities, more council homes, leasehold reform, reformed reformed right to buy, a warning to absent landlords. some pretty big claims on AI leadership and clarity that Brexit has gone wrong and therefore plans for a new relationship with Europe. Barely a mention of the opposition parties as he renewed his call for a more consensual politics. Plenty of mentions of his deceased father recently passed away and a lot of emotion as he promised to dedicate his leadership to building a country his dad would be proud of. He got a genuinely rapturous reception in the conference hall here in Liverpool, but, given the number of big debates, he has launched on so many big issues, what matters is the reaction outside? How do the other parties respond as the debate unfolds and the detail is thrashed out?

And what does the great British public make of it all? So many big promises at a time of so many big challenges. This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. 100 pounds. That is what one message to a friend could earn for you. Fuse Energy has one aim, keeping energy prices down for everyone, not just for those who ring up and threaten to leave. Their tariffs are already among the lowest on the market, and now they're doubling their referral offer. Refer one friend and you will get £100 off your bills. And that's each of you, £100 off your bills. So the maths does itself. You save on the tariff, and then you both benefit from the referral on top.

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This episode is brought to you by NordVPN. And I must thank NordVPN because on my grand European tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorne's for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go. I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Kreef, and of course the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN.

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Welcome to the restless politics with me, Alistair, and me, Rory Stewart. And, Alistair, you are in Liverpool at the Labour Party conference. You were there for the big speech of Andy Burnham. Give us a sense of what it was like. And how many conferences have you been to? You must have been to 30, 40, right? Oh, my very, very first conference was Neil Kinnock's big speech in 1985. That was my first Labour conference. I've been to most since, not all. That's a good 40 years of conferences that you've come and gone. It's a lot of comments.

We'll come on to that. And in addition to talking a lot about the conference and the Burden speech, we are going to have to at some point, perhaps towards the end of the episode, reflect on your meme virality, I believe it's called, of the, that. We're going to talk about that. Anyway, let's start with Andy Burnham. I was there. It was a very, really interesting speech.

And I thought very, very powerful. I mean, it felt incredibly powerful in Liverpool, in the hall. It really felt like the guy was connecting in a way that very few speakers do these days. And I think partly that was because they really wanted him to do well. But also it was a, I thought it was a well-crafted speech. It was well delivered. I did think that it was chunky, it was meaty. And so, yeah, I counted 11 standing evasions.

And before we get onto the content, which is obviously what people can, you know, see a little bit more of on the BBC. Give us a sense of feeling of it. I mean, watching it on television, it looked like it was very, very, very natural. I mean, he was walking up and down the stage, but it wasn't sort of stagey. It sounded incredibly sort of relaxed. He managed to almost catch the tone as though he was speaking to a much, much smaller audience working his thoughts out when in fact he had this enormous call.

Well, it is, of all the conference venues, I mean, they're all pretty big, but Liverpool is big and it's very wide, and it's quite cavernous. He didn't have a lectern, and therefore he didn't have a traditional auto queue. I think he had a kind of Ed Sheeran-type auto-cue somewhere down below. So he's kind of looking down a fair bit. But he was very natural.

And also there were points of the speech where he allowed the kind of just very, very simple thought or concept, just to land. He really only did the kind of rousing rhetoric when he was either coming to the climax or when the audience were kind of, you know, were getting going as he was speaking. No, listen, I've got to say, one of the things I've said, I said this one, we did the Becoming Burnham series with Andy, with the St. Rotherham, the Liverpool mayor. He has grown so much as a politician. He really has. That was a, it was a pretty formidable performance, I thought, and so many kind of interesting angles to it as well.

It's a speech. I wonder whether it's not a speech that really, a style that really benefits from having been mayor of Manchester, that it's not a House of Commons style. Nobody will let you make a speech like that in the House of Commons. Any pause you put, be interrupted by someone shouting from the back. It's not even the kind of speech you give to business people or fundraisers. It's the speech of somebody talking in a much more relaxed way to their constituents or their electors. I mean, it was, and you get a sense of real confidence that he's not worried about where the laugh lines are. Or he just trusts that his vision and story is going to be enough to carry. I also think he, he, maybe this is unfair, but I get.

impression that he's also quite good at judging the eyes in the room and the reactions in the room and timing his rhythms to what he's getting back from the room. Yeah, there's a couple things I'd say to that. The first is I spoke, I did an event last night with Hamish Faulkner, the government minister in charge of Europe. And he was saying that his generation, younger MPs, he's in his early 40s, don't really think about big speeches as much as maybe my generation let alone sort of, you know, previous generations did. But I think Andy's always been somebody who actually does think a big speech matters.

I can remember when he became, I think it was Shadow Health Secretary ages ago and he was really worried about making his first big speech. You know, that was a really important moment. And so this was an important moment, but the style is very interesting. It's kind of, it's quite foxy. It's very emotional.

I mean, there was a point at which I think everybody in the hall thought he was about to start crying. And he is somebody, again, back to the chat with Steve Rotherham. Andy Burnham is somebody who really wears his heart on his sleeve. And you've probably had moments like this where you're making a speech. I get this maybe doing euloges in particular, where you, there's a bit maybe when you've been practicing, rehearsing, as it were, that you know there's a bit that can set you off. And you could see that he was coming up to a bit.

It was obviously going to be about his dad. Everybody in the hall thought he's about to talk. talk about his dad. But what was so interesting was the point that he made on the back of it. He mentioned John Swinney, the SMP leader who said on, coincidentally, he didn't know that Andy's dad had died, but he said that Andy Burnham will be the last prime minister of the United Kingdom. And he just, you went into this really, and I thought you, I actually thought of you, I thought, Rory will love this bit because it was so powerful about kind of feeling for the union. And that sort of, that emotion kept coming out.

And I don't know whether you could see it, but he was, when there was a lot of applause, he was kind of walking over to where there was a kind of podium, just sort of taking a sip of water and coming back. And he didn't mind long pauses and quite long pauses. No, I thought as a, I thought there's a performance as a speech. We'll come onto the content, but I thought he delivered it extraordinarily well. And look, we spent the first five minutes talking about the,

performance and I know there will be people who will say, well, that's not the point. And in fact, a lot of journalists, when I was looking at some of the reporting, have tended to ignore that and focus largely on, you know, what are the policy announcements in it. But I would say that it's incredibly important. I mean, what in the end brought down Kiyosama? It was the inability to communicate. What do we know about Donald Trump? He is an extraordinary communicator. And so I think so much of modern politics is about this. Look at Mamdani. It's not exactly as though he's actually brought through an incredible number of radical policies yet in New York.

It's the feeling of the guy. So I would begin by saying actually that communication thing is worth sitting with because policy analysts are going to miss this, that one of the reasons why Andy Boner might be in a position to win the next election is if he can keep that degree of confidence and communication. Because the fundamentals, and this is, I suppose, where we can flip it around to policy, the fundamentals remain unbelievably difficult. So let's sort of step back and take a policy one, look at the position he's inherited. Britain has had basically zero growth since 2008.

Yeah. Basically zero growth for almost 20 years. It's unheard of. Britain's not been in that position since probably the Napoleonic Wars, like 200 years. and at the same time, median incomes have stagnated, and inflation has grown, and debt has grown, and in the last five years, particularly, the amount of tax we take as a proportion of our national income has gone up by 5% of national income. It's huge increase in tax, which again is without any peacetime precedent, massive transformation in the British economy. And he's stuck with a situation

where broadly speaking, people don't really believe that the British economy is going to be able to get growth, and we can come on to that later, where he can't borrow because they've maxed out the borrowing and already they're paying, you know, they've added about 180 billion in tax revenue, they're spending about 160 billion just in servicing their debt, incredible amount of money. And he therefore has basically to raise taxes a bit, cut services a bit. And then on the side, he's trying to deliver a project of transforming and changing Britain and rebuilding the Britain that his father was proud of. The thing that really struck me as well, I was at a business event last night, and I was talking to this business woman. And we were talking about this vibes thing. And she said what you've just said. She said, it really does matter because you need confidence breeds confidence.

And she said, we have felt just a bit more confident since. Andy Burnham has replaced the rather sort of doom and gloom, everything's going to get worse before it gets better, et cetera. And so I thought with all these big challenges that you set out, and I listed them at the top, there's some really big challenges. I mean, every single one of them, you think there's a lot of details got to come out on that. But on all of them, it was this kind of, you know, we can do this. We've done this sort of scale of thing before. We can do it. And I think that is a very, very important message. And I also thought, I thought, you know, we'll come on to the big policy stuff. I also thought it was genuine

interesting that he, I think the only non-Labour politicians he mentioned were John Swinney, who I mentioned, List Trust as a bit of a gag, Boris Johnson, because of the Boris, so-called Boris Wave on Immigration, and Margaret Thatcher, in basically saying, I'm going to roll back a lot of the Thatcherism in relation

to, you know, public control and public ownership. And he did it, as you say, with such kind of confidence and not, I think, not caring. People sort of say he's a people pleaser. And I was actually watching some of the journalists who were kind of, you know, nodding to each other, talking to each other, whatever. And I could see them not quite knowing how to go at this speech. It would be very interesting to see how they try to.

But one, I saw one journalist saying, actually, I think they'll have a go at him for almost crying. Well, of course, the public won't mind him almost crying at all, because what it shows is a man who, you know, loved his dad. We talked this week on the podcast about the triple lock. And, um, I come up as you or I, but I know we both discussed before this idea that, you know, if you're going to do the triple lock, don't just do it by saying, I'm getting rid of the triple lot, link it to something big, and he's done that to social care. Now, I think that will settle down, maybe settle down the bond markets a bit. But again, a lot of detail still to come, and it's a long-term thing.

And he's putting it into the next parliament. Let's start the triple lock, because it's a good central place to start. So the triple lock was this weird thing introduced by George Osborne. And it meant that pensions were always going to go up, whichever was the higher of the three measurements. And over time, that is adding 18 billion pounds a year more than might have been projected. And ratcheting and ratcheting and ratcheting and ratcheting. And one of the reasons why Kemi Badernock didn't want to get rid of it is that in the short term, it doesn't deliver huge savings. somebody calculated potentially in the next year or so it would only cost 600 million.

So she maybe looks at that and thinks, well, is it worth having the biggest political fight of my life, despite the fact everybody in her party, you know, people like me have been against the triple lot. David Gork's against the triple lock. Tom Tuggenhardt called it a Ponzi scheme and he's now her shadow foreign secretary. So she ducked that. She ducked that because she could see political pain and not a great deal of gain. he's done it. He's done it 2030, which is, you know, unfortunately not as soon as it could be, but it's a good, bold statement. And he's come up with a formulation, a double lock instead of a triple lock, which softens it a bit. And the Institute for Physical Studies has come out and said, well, may not be perfect, but it goes a long way. And as you say, it's something more than vibes. It's a responsible, if you wanted to sell it, it's a responsible long, long, term move that the other political readers have ducked. Yeah.

So that's good. That's brave. And he did it. I don't know. We were all woke up with today program this morning with one of the heads of the trade unions saying, on no account is he to get rid of the triple lock. And the Lib Dems, you know, Ed Davy, your friends saying this was terribly regressive and pension is going to pay the cost.

So that's an interesting beginning. And Farage has come straight out and said, he will cut your pension. I will stop the boat. I will cut the immigration, blah, blah, blah. And I'll cut international aid, which incidentally barely exists anymore. There's basically no, yeah, yeah. And I do think this will, if I were the opposition parties, they all come straight out with a kind of instant response on this

because they know that it's going to be a sort of big deal and getting huge media coverage. I'd be wary about this if I were there. I would go away and think very, very carefully. Because I think the other thing that he did, I really know, why are you asking at that? Well, no, can I just come in on you with that? Because I'm fascinated by this problem.

Imagine you're a Tory. So imagine you're Cammy Bade, not, and you really wanted to get rid of the triple lock, and you ducked it, and your whole party wants to get rid of the triple lock. And he does this. What's your best case scenario for responding? Are you able to ignore it? Are you able to welcome it? I mean, what the hell can she do? I wonder if you don't go. You see, there was so much in the speech. So I wonder whether, for example, given that Margaret Thatcher has this hallowed status in the conservative party, whether they go into the whole housing agenda. But then, you know, are the water agenda? but I mean, you know, standing up for the water companies, that's sort of a very good position. Arguing as more council houses. He's arguing it's leasehold reform. I think he's, I think these, I think, I think, because they could go in Europe.

They could sort of go big on, you know, do we really want to revisit this? I actually wanted a little bit more on the European front. I kind of all, I knew he was going to say something about Europe. But it is, it's a start. Because he's basically saying he's going to set out all the options. Well, the option does include, can we get back in? Yeah, well, let's do that as the second thing, because I guess that's the second big headline, which is that he stood up, totally unembarrassed on that stage and said Brexit did more harm than good. And he basically dated the decline in the British economy to 2016, the Brexit referendum.

And he declined. And the political instability of 10-7 prime ministers and such. And he blamed all the immigration that people hate on Brexit, which is quite a sort of clever jujitsu move. He's basically saying to the far-right voter, the immigration that you're complaining about was delivered through leaving the European Union. And as you say, he's letting out all these options, which certainly should include a customs union, potentially single market, potentially a route back in. And it's a good time to be doing it. I would say geopolitically, given Trump and China and all this thing, we do need that third leg, that middle power leg. But wow.

I mean, why was Kirstama not able to do that? I never heard Kirstama stand up and say Brexit did more harm than good. I never heard him stand up. Say all options are on the table. make Brexit work. I mean, make Brexit work. And the reason I was always so angry about make Brexit work, because I just felt it conceded a reality that just isn't real. It conceded that you can make Brexit work. I mean, you can live with Brexit, but you can, I don't think there's any way that you can say that Brexit can be good for the sort of things that both Kyr Starmer and Andy Burner said. I got everybody after these speeches

always sort of pinging messages at each other and all that. And I got one message from an MP who actually was, you know, kind of pretty loyal to Kirstama to the end and said, you know, it actually underlined just how little vision we really had for two years. These changes are all hard to do, but it surely demonstrated why the change had to be made. And so I think there was that feeling as well that, I mean, look, you've got to be very careful. You've been to lots of Troy Conferences. I've been to lots of conferences of all the parties, but you do get this extraordinary kind of, well, first, you're in a bubble, you've been in the bubble for a week, sort of trapped inside a secure zone,

you then have the bubble of the event with the sort of buildup and what have you. But this one, and I've been involved in a few speeches where you come out thinking that was amazing, and it turns out it was, and the public felt as well the same, but other speeches were not the same. But it genuinely felt people coming out sort of just, wow, where did that come from? And I'll tell you the other one, Rory, that came on, which maybe a little more surprising was electoral reform. Now, we've always known he believes in that, but that's another big fight.

It's another big fight and another big debate. But you see, I think that now that he's done them, and it's interesting because he's couched off and this is people please there are now. You know, he wants to make everyone happy. Coming out that firmly on Brexit doesn't make everyone happy. In fact, the risk-averse thing to do is to do what Kiyosama did, which is sort of waffle around in the middle, pretending he's going to make Brexit work while signaling that actually he'd rather we remain, but he's not going to say.

it, right? So I think there's something interesting about Burnham, which is that the sort of vibe, charisma, confidence gives him a form of political courage, gives him, and what it then does, and I don't want to sound too much like the Alistair Campbell disciple here, but one of your moves here, maybe, is that you're then setting up an argument with the other side, which I think you're going to win. I'd really like to see the Brexit. come out and make a whole series of passionate arguments for Brexit at the moment. Because it's not that easy, 10 years on, to make the great arguments for Brexit. I'd love to see people make a great argument for our electoral system

when everyone thinks everything's broken. And as you said, I mean, you've made the point on the water companies already, but even the housing stuff, look, I am somebody who thinks that there was something, very empowering for millions of people buying their houses, but that's something that happened a long time ago in the 1980s. There are very, very few people around today for whom that's current thing, what people feel today is a million people on a housing waiting list, unable to get houses. So even if it transformed a lot of working class lives, then it did.

I mean, there's good evidence that actually it delivered a lot of wealth to people on low incomes in the 1980s in an extraordinary one-time fashion. I don't think there's many people who are enthusiastic about it now or defending it now. I thought it was also quite clever the way he's quite cleverly linked to the one million people who are currently on the homeless register with the one million who got their own homes. And also the loss of power and the loss of control for councils. The other confident bit that was shown in relation to Brexit wasn't in the Brexit section, but it was through the speech this use of taking back control.

And the only really kind of very harshly sort of Alistair Campbell-style go for your Eddie be hard line was when he said, you know, the people who lost control were the with the right, not the left. And so I thought that was a kind of another little judo move that he worked quite well. Well, so let me now channel my inner Tory. And I think there will be a lot of people from the right listening to that who will be a little unsettled. There were moments on it where there were a little kind of hints of the pitchfork. Too much working class aspiration going or read or what that.

A lot of that. Not a laugh to talk about what in America we'd call the middle class. That's right. And actually, it's really interesting. It's still such a powerful dynamic when actually Britain is in traditional social class terms, a predominantly middle class country that we talk about. I mean, Britain is very interesting compared to America. People on similar incomes in America identify as being middle class.

They overestimate their class. and in Britain people underestimate their class. They like to call themselves working class. When in sociological terms, they'd be different. And we've got a great interview coming next week where we get into this discussion with a fantastic labour. And she is with Shabana Mahmood, the homosexual, and she gives you a very good slapdown, Roy.

I'd really enjoy that. Very good slap down by there. Anyway, let me make the critique there more serious, which isn't this sort of tone. It's that the 1970s, which he's implicitly seems to sort of jess gesture towards. And that's where he's quite clever because it's a little opaque. But if he's saying the problem was neoliberalism and basically Thatcher, it's worth remembering the 1970s were not

that great. At 1970s, we had effective top rates of tax at 98%. We had inflation running at 25% a year. We lost 75% of the value of the British Stock Exchange in the early 1970s. We had a core. We had a call in the IMF, and incomes grew pretty steeply during the 1980s. And actually, this last 40 years, if you took the snapshot of 1991 to 2008, which was the kind of height of the neoliberal consensus, was the first time since 1870 when British GDP per capita was growing faster than that of the US, where our productivity was the second highest in the OECD. And most economists looking at the glory days that he's talking about in 1945 to 1980, would say that, yes, there were great strengths

in terms of equality. Britain became a much more equal society. The NHS was created. But it was also a moment where British industry really struggled, innovation struggled. We got stuck in some very strange situations with unions.

And people were pretty depressed about the future of the British economy when many other countries, Germany, Japan, and then increasingly the Asian tigers were shooting ahead. So there's something which if you're

you know gentle soft right pro business person you're sort of slightly thinking well you know because he also said one of the things he was against with Thatcher was deregulation

most businesses in Britain feel we are much much too regulated and that one of the ways in which we could get growth is by quite a lot of deregulation so that would anyway that's over to you no I that's why I said I think that is maybe where the tour is

will try to go. But it'll also be very interesting to see whether Farage, who from his initial reaction, seems to think, well, I just carry on banging my old drum. I don't need to adapt to this. Whether actually that adds to this sense that I think is developing about Farage, that he's slightly yesterday's man in the political debate, which is why I thought it was clever that Andy Burnham didn't even mention his name. There has been a lot of talk of Farage at this conference. I've heard lot of people say, oh, Farage, there's, Farage, that, but not so much in the speeches, but just around the place, because he's still probably a bigger threat than, than the Tories. But, no, I was, I left kind of pretty energized by the whole thing.

And, but I think on the, the electoral, just to go back to the electoral reform, that, that is another, by the way, where you shouldn't think, despite the fact it was one of the 11 standing evasions, it was one of the 11 standing evasions, because people were just loving the boldness of the whole speech, right? But I saw quite a few people study up, who I know are very much opposed to electoral reform. But your point about winning arguments is, this is what to me is what politics is at its best it's all about, is having really big arguments over time. And that's why the chatter had to be Amish Fortner about, you know, they're the TikTok generation. Well, Andy, Andy Byrne's very, very good on social media. But what he's done today is shown

that there is a lot more to him than that. And you and I have always known that there is. And the other thing I like about this, going back to the, and if people haven't listened to the series with Steve Rotherman, he really does understand Andy Berman. And what I like about

the sort of Andy Byrden and Steve Rotherham story, is they wrote that book, Head North. And so much of what we've seen today that we're sort of saying is new, and it is new a lot of it, but it's actually stuff that he was writing about back then, including electoral reform, including how,

including pensions. Yeah, maybe the speech was so confident, so fluent and so authentic, because basically he's been giving versions of that speech in Manchester for many years now. Yeah. And he's really sat with it, and he really knows how those values and ideas connect. On the working class point, Roy, did you, were you sort of thinking that actually there's a middle class, a middle class out there that maybe thinks this isn't speaking to them? Because the care service speaks to the middle class as well as working class people.

Well, I think what spoke to everybody and would speak to the middle class and would speak to someone like me is the idea of solidarity and unity and union. You know, the strongest bits for someone like me is that he's describing a society where we all have obligations towards each other. I mean, I'm very happy to pay the top rate of tax so that other people can have good public services. I'm very happy. And I think many people will feel like this. Maybe not the full libertarian right. But I think a lot of gentle, soft right people feel that it's right that they pay 45% income tax. And I think we all share his horror with homelessness. And a real sense that that's something that's fixable and that he pretty much fixed in Manchester.

I mean, there's been some debates around that, but he made a lot of progress. Well, part of what happened in Manchester is that because people knew that Manchester had this scheme to get people off the streets and give them accommodation that people were coming from outside Manchester. So the numbers went right down and they went back back up again. There's a really, you know I mentioned in the, was it last week? I talked about James Graham's new play about Keynes. Yeah. Yeah. I know Keynes was a liberal, but I really do think Labor ministers should go and watch this play, but it was really interesting how Keynes's big thing was about the purpose of economics being to have a good life for ordinary people. And I don't

know whether he's aware of the play, but he used that phrase twice about, you know, about giving people a good life. And I just think that is, that should be their guiding light. I'm putting housing at the centre of it. I mean, one of the things he does in his speech is it's not all, um, a sort of complete logical argument, right? It's not actually true that maybe, that maybe housing does quite as much work as he thinks it does. But it's a good idea. It's a lovely thing to get behind. and it's an offer. I mean, if you can, I do think that the universal offer, he's got an instinct for that,

that if you can say to everybody in the country, look, we may not be able to sort out inequality, we may not be able to sort out growth in the way that you want, but we can say that you're going to get a good house, you will get good health care, you'll get a decent care system, you'll get good education. That's my sort of,

That's where I hear Tessa Jal. I mean, that's what she was always saying to me, her endless test around saying, would I put my mother or my grandmother in this school and this house? And he, of course, started as her researcher. Can we take a quick break though, Alastair? Maybe after the break, I'd love to talk to you about the Labour Party politics and where he might get into trouble. Because in the end, that's what undid Kiyahir-Sama. It wasn't the public.

He had this huge majority. It was the party itself. So maybe quick break in there back for more. Okay. see you surely. This episode is brought to you

by Lloyd's. One thing that politics teaches you is that certainty predictability is often an illusion. At Lloyd's Market Summit early this month

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and me, Alastair Campbell. Okay, Alsa, this is the thing that worries me. So, Kiyah Stama won a stonking majority. He had a majority of over 100, and he was taken down because the Labour Party turned against him. And actually, I got this, I had a conversation with one of the whips, shortly after Stama went, he's actually a Tory whip, who said the point is that they don't have a working majority anymore.

In fact, nobody has a working majority. Politics has changed so much that none of us can tell any of our MPs, what to do. So his implication was Andy Burnham was absolutely screwed because he doesn't have a working majority. He doesn't matter what the figures look like. He's never going to be able to get anything done. Has something changed, and if so, how? You almost pulled one of your faces there, Rory, which I will promise our listeners of yours, we will talk about it. essentially, if I may plug my splendid book Perciviliants coming out soon, I actually write about Blair Stama Burnham in the context of who's got Percivilliance as opposed to resilience. And I make the point that

Keir Stama, in large part, became Prime Minister with such a majority by not being the Tories. Andy Burnham has become Prime Minister in the way that he did, to some extent, by not being Keir Stahmer. So you are right that the Labour Party, as it were, turned. But I think the Labour Party turned because, for two reasons, MPs didn't feel their views were valued and respected. They did think there was a kind of number 10 operation that held them rather in contempt. But the most important thing was that Labour MPs were going out into the country and getting the dislike of the government, the new government, from the public, from their electorate.

and starting to think, I'm in trouble here. And the reason why I think it was, and I said this event I was doing last night, somebody was asking, you know, what should we know about Andy Burnham that we don't know? And I honestly didn't mean this as a criticism of Andy Burnham at all. I said, what you need to know about Andy Burnham,

he's really ruthless. He has become privateist to inheriting somebody else's majority. when he listed the great election wins of the Labour through history, he didn't even mention 2024, 1945 to 1997, then it stops. In other words, the next one is the one that he's thinking about. So he, he, that, and that was an extraordinary thing, but that was him.

And look, I think I've told you in the back of a car once, that I did have a conversation with him in Manchester a while back. Quite early on in Kirstarmer's leadership, he was basically, this isn't going to work. It's not going to work. They don't do politics properly. So he's basically going to take the MP seriously, and that means they're more likely to stay inside. I was really struck when we interviewed him on leading the first time.

We were the way that you two were talking in the margins of that. And just how bleak his vision of what was going on was. And the ruthlessness thing. I mean, I think I'm right in saying that he basically turned up at last party. conference as a fringe speaker, basically leading a kind of rebellion against Kirstama, with all Kierstammer's loyalists saying, who the hell is this guy? So this idea that he's a sort of people-pleaser who doesn't like making anyone unhappy, that takes a hell of a lot of balls to turn up at your party conference against the wishes,

the national executive and run fringe meetings, basically plotting how to topple the sitting prime minister. No, I mean, if you think about it, the main narrative around the conference, year, one of them was Andy Burnham's on the prowl. And the main outcome was Keir Stahmer has seen off Andy Burnham for good. A year later, he goes through the by-election where he was blocked. He then goes through, re-engineers another by-election, which he wins, and wins it in such a way that even Kier-Starmer is sort of saying, well, it's obvious now I've got to go and he comes in. And people then saying, he won because he's a nicer guy. It's an incredible.

No, it's very weird, isn't it? It's very weird. And actually, yeah, very weird. And a lot of the, he's all about the vibes and he's not serious wasn't initially produced by the Tories. It was produced by Stama loyalist trying to write him off a year and a half ago. Yeah. Yeah. He doesn't. And you sometimes got a bit of this from Stama. He gets sort of impatient that Burnham, you know, didn't understand some aspect of, you know, fiscal policy or got his numbers wrong or, you know, nobody can be prime minister if they, you know, say whatever he said about waspy women. Oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, no, I think it's, I think he's, I think he's, yeah, there's something, there's something going on there. Okay, let's lean into the Labour Party, though, for a second. So my big idea that I had today, I was just up in Dumbarton and Loch Lomond. Okay. And I was with a conference, in one of these big conferences that you go to, and a friend of mine who admire very much, he's an economist.

was saying all the politicians in Britain know how to create growth. They're just too afraid to do it. They quoted, I think, Jean-Paul Juncker, who said, we all know what to do. We just don't know how to get re-elected once you don't know. And I said, and I want to try this idea on you, that that's wrong. The reason why the politicians are not doing what the economists want them to do is that they are prioritizing other things overgrowth. Let's take a couple of examples.

So, you know, why did the Tories not push through radical planning reform? Well, because actually, as conservatives representing rural constituencies, they actually were really on the side of the NIMBs. It wasn't that they were afraid of them. They agreed with them. They want to keep their greed and pleasant land. Why does Labor stop big cuts to welfare or changes to the winter feudal lines? Well, because, broadly speaking, they're on the side of the people getting winterfail rounds

and welfare payments, and they're putting that ahead of growth. And you can keep developing this. You know, why is it that Ed Miliband stood behind his energy policy? Well, because he believed in what he thought he was doing to combat climate change and be an ambassador for the world on climate change. So this idea that there is a sort of range of options, which a lot of the economists are peddling, which is cut the energy costs, build, drill, deregulate, liberate. liberate the capital markets, and we all know what to do, it's just the politicians too cowardly to do it, isn't catching the actual reality of the values.

And I think in many ways, the values of our politicians are not actually about growth. Let's take another example. Let's say that we actually needed some immigration for our economy. Well, Nigel Farage is going to put curving immigration above growth, right? So let's center in on the Labour Party. I think the bit that I find easiest to believe that he's going to get through is social housing and more control over water. I don't think he's ever going to have the money to buy back the water industry.

I find it much more difficult to believe he's going to be able to deliver growth in every postcode if growth means cutting welfare spending, cutting taxes, deregulating, because I just don't think his party's up for all that stuff. well we shall see because i spent quite a lot of time up here with alan milburn um i did an event with him yesterday which is about young people and mental health but i also was talking about a new campaign on getting involved in about young people and their well-being and he of course he was really funny being with it because uh and i've got to tell you roy that the whole selfie thing is out of control of these press at these conferences now it is absolutely out of control we're wandering around and Alan was being seen like this

sort of, you know, oh, it's Alan Milburn, he's doing the neat review. And the neat review was becoming like, and it was like, go on, Alan, you could do it, you've got to do it, or have you?

But what's interesting about the way that, and this event I did with Alan was kind of as an audience, was public. It wasn't as if he was just, you know, talking to me. And he's going to be coming up

with some big stuff. He's going to be coming up with some big, you know, really big change, which fits, I think, with a lot of the stuff that Pat McFadden's been talking about on welfare and that Andy's been talking about on welfare.

And I think with that, you see, the other thing that's interesting about this, where we are in the parliamentary timetables, we've had these two years. We've actually, you know, he mentioned Shabana Mahmood getting the small boats numbers down and getting, you know, the migration numbers more under control. They have done a lot in the first two years. But Andy Burnham is basically saying, right, we've got a new government now, but it's got a very short life. Now, what that means for the MPs, you've, know this is you get closer to an election, you've got to be very, very careful about the choices

that you make. Some of the choices, and including the weakening of your own government at a time, and it could be very, very crucial. So, and I wouldn't underestimate, you mentioned, you know, talking to a whip. Some of the whips I talked to under Kirstama said it was, it was just, they felt they didn't have enough to material to keep the MPs on board, not enough arguments. And I think what Andy's doing is showing, he's taking them serious. One MP I saw said that I've seen Andy Burden more in the 10 weeks he's being prime minister than I saw Kirstama during two years. So he's doing politics.

He's doing politics. Let's take the idea that Alan Melbourne's going to come in with some radical stuff and that Panuk Phantom is going to come to radical stuff. What that means for listeners, or at least what I think the newspapers think that means for listeners, is that they're going to make significant cuts to welfare and that they're going to try to restore the public finances by changing a system which impairs to have contributed to a million people being out of work

who shouldn't be out of work. But that will mean that if you're a Labour MP in a constituency where a lot of people are out of work and a lot of the traditional Labour heartland are places where there are far more people on these benefits that would be true in a traditional prosperous Tory suburb, they will have a lot of people coming into their constituency surgeries. And of course, any cuts are either slightly too generous or they're slightly too mean.

And these will be slightly too mean. And there will be lots of people saying, this is completely ridiculous. How the hell am I supposed to live on this? How could I have this cut? Yeah, but Roy, how can it be that we now have one million young people not in education, employment or training. That is a failure of,

and this is where systemic failure has to come into it. A million young people. And I'd say that the arguments that Alan Milburn, I felt, was starting to make was that we've got, we can either just sort of carry on paying the benefits. And if you're on benefits, say at age 18, the chances of you being still being on benefits at 30 are so much higher than if you actually go into bed,

benefit system later. Now, I think, so I think what he's saying is, you know, we, and Andy was starting to talk about this. I thought one of the most interesting things, he did a big thing about older people, and then he just had a line, which I don't think he was expecting to be a claplide, and he basically said, you know, but we've also got to put right at the heart of our politics, young people and their future. And, and I think this sort of idea of investing in young people, so it is going to be welfare to work. It has to be welfare to work. And again, to go back to his Manchester experience, that is where, and you're sort of, you know, the way he talks to the business and talks about business. A lot of the business people felt, I suppose you felt they weren't getting enough out of this conference, but it was very much, you know, I think his message is going to be that they are going to be a big part of this as well.

So, look, the Milburn stuff is going to be very, very interesting. And I think we should, I think you and I know you were impressed when we had him on the podcast first time around. We should get him back. Of course, I think his report is going to be seminal to this government. Let's get him back. Because I think that'll be one of the big things that people will be looking at. And then the second thing is going to be this question around business, whereas you say the business isn't yet fully won over.

They don't feel the love quite yet. I'm sorry, but I have to raise something else. Because, well, virtually everywhere I went, two things are happening. Most people under 30 saying, can I have a selfie? because it seems to be obligatory now that if you're a national treasure like what I am, you have to have a picture. Which must have been slightly annoying

for the Labour ministers and MPs if you were getting more selfies than they were. Yeah, but I tried to do it in a low-profile Soto-votchary kind of way. But the other thing that was happening, Rory, is everybody, everybody was say to be what at earth was Rory doing

with the swivel and the stair on Newsnight? Now, did you see? Did you actually see it on you say? I didn't see it live, no. No, but you saw the clip, right? Sorry, Rory, let me just tell you something. I was doing an event 24 hours later with 2000 for the wonderful 93% club, which is for the state school network against U.S. 7% Bosch Boys.

And there were 2,000 teenagers, right? Somebody asked me about what on earth was going on with Rory on Newsnight. And I said, well, before I answer that, who's actually aware of that? who's aware of what that question is about. 2,000 hands went up. Everybody saw it. No, it's absolutely unbelievable. And one single post on it got

22 million views. Was that J.K. Rowling? No, that wasn't even J.K. running. It was someone else on a meme. I mean, Rowling got a lot, but that was another meme. And then my godson decided to just put up on social media him doing it without even referring to me and got 850,000 views immediately.

I mean, it's really extraordinary. And but presumably you've seen me do that head gesture before or something like it. I mean, did it seem totally? Not as dramatic as that. I was on stage today at this conference and I noticed actually when I was on stage of conference, I do actually do that all the time. I'm like, okay, somebody else spoke to. No.

No, you don't do like that. You don't do quite like that? The thing you do more. And I, and I, again, what do I do more? You sometimes go. You know, I grimace. I do a lot of grimace thing. You seem to go without anything going on.

You go, yeah, I grimace. Like that. But this was like, anyway, they made me mimic it. They made me sort of trudge it. But I found it very hard because I felt you had to go like that before you go like that. But you just go like that. What were you doing? Well, I also think a little bit like Ed Miliband.

I'm kind of a bit weird. I mean, I think my body language and the way that I move is a bit weird. I mean, remember poor Miliband got in terrible trouble. Was he eating a banana or was that? Yeah, he was eating banana, wasn't he? No, bacon sandwich. Bacon sandwich. Bacon sandwich.

I think I just, my physical energy and the way that I move is a bit, I mean, you pointed out the grimacing. And this, I think, is part of the same thing. But it's then that you lent into that poor woman. You were like, you were sort of almost in her space as she was trying to contribute to the debate. Let me, let me, because she very, very sweetly wrote to me immediately afterwards. And I don't know her at all. And this is what she said, which I thought was really kind. Rory High just wanted to say solidarity on becoming the main characters, the internet today.

I hope it hasn't bothered you, but I just wanted to reassure you in case it has that I didn't mind and knew you were just being polite and attentive. Take care and all the best. Oh, that's very nice. That's very nice. She's from the new statement. Yeah. Certainly in the studio, nobody thought I'd done anything weird. It's only when it appeared on television that it suddenly looked unbelievably weird.

Yeah. Well, it was, I had people all over the world sending it to me. Completely friendly. And if you think about, and New Zealand, that they've released, you know, it went totally viren in New Zealand. Every clip of the New Zealand Parliament had me going like this through every single clip of the New Zealand Parliament. I know it's, it's amazing because we put all this energy into doing some of the greatest

rest of politics shows. And we might get three, four million if we're really lucky. I think there must be, put them all together, 300, 400 million views for me doing this. And it's become like a permanent meme. And a meme also that like all memes, people sort of get, but they can't completely explain. Yeah, I think you're, I think you pretend to be very naive,

but I think you're a genius and this is a totally deliberate thing. You thought, because my friend, my friend Dan, who's one of the swimmers in the morning, He actually said to me, he says, listen, mate, you go up your game. We're always getting all the attention these days. Well, it's also true that it's also true that it was rather ironic because he said, why the hell are you going on news tonight? Nobody knows this is anything that happens on news night.

And then sure enough, there you go. Well, anyway, Andy Burnham will get almost as much tension as you in the next couple of days as people digest what I think is a very, very consequential speech. I really do. Well, really interesting, really exciting. And just to wrap up, I think you gave us the sense of what it was like the room. You've given us the sense of some of the questions about how the Labor Party responds. You've set out whether there are going to be big cuts of welfare. We talked a bit about housing. We talked about

adult social care. We talked about this amazing story around the European Union. But above all, I guess, the story that you're communicating is at the moment, it feels as though there is a sense of leadership, a sense of vision, a sense of appeal still to the Labor heart, which means that in the short term, it doesn't feel as though the honeymoon's over. He may only have added, you know, a few points to Labour in the polls, but if that allows him to have a working majority and get stuff done, business may cheer up even without the deregulation tax cuts if they think this is the government that's here to stay

and that they can trust them to be pretty steady. In other words, he may be able to deliver that thing that paradoxically was the one insight of Rachel Reeves and Kirstama, which was stability, which they couldn't deliver because stability relies on charisma. Well, there you go. And we've got question time tomorrow. We're going to talk about USA China

on the back of the Trump-Ji visit. We're going to talk about these really alarming events in Drum Korea and Northern Ireland. Ethiopia, equally alarming. Brazil election on Sunday. Juergen Klopp and the Bayer Tapestry. And as you said, on Monday, we've got a fabulous interview with the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.

And there's also your interview with Mustafa Solomon is out on leading now, and I shall be writing from the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool for this week's newsletter, restis politics.com forward slash newsletter. And for those of you who are really absolute restless politics super fans, the mini series on existential risk is out at the moment where you can hear Yuvon O'Harrari, you can hear Carlo Rovelli, the great physicist, and many, many more to come.

So I'd be fascinated to hear what listeners think of what we're doing there. And you and I getting really enthusiastic about miniseries. We're producing so many. I noticed they put out two of my interviews on a single day to try to get them out of the way. Very good. My wife is drowning under trying to keep up with it all.

Okay, very good. All right, well, see you soon. Thanks. Bye-bye. Speak soon. Okay, bye. Bye. name is Siaiaa and I live in the most beautiful place on earth.

Seven months ago, I blew up my life and a lot has shifted since then. Everyone is moving forward. I'm still working on that. And that's me. Welcome to Ice Cove. Where are the penguins? That's Antarctica. We're the other one.

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