Luke Harding and Alastair Campbell: Trump, Putin and the New Age of Conquest (Part Two)

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Mia Sorenti (0:53)

Welcome to Intelligence Squared where great minds meet. I'm Senior Producer Mia Sorenti. In this episode, we return for part two of our recent live event with Guardian Foreign Correspondent Luke Harding and former Downing Street Director of Communications Alastair Campbell. Together, they examine Trump, Putin and the return of great power politics and what the changing balance between power, alliances and international law could mean for the future of global security. If you haven't heard part one, do just jump back an episode to catch up. And a quick content warning before we get started, this episode contains some explicit language.

Now let's return to the conversation live at King's Place in London.

Alastair Campbell (1:36)

The thing is that, so he, Donald Trump was a very, very well known business figure, somebody of an enormous profile for a very, very long time.

And the Russians developed an interest in him and then a relationship with him. And when we were, you know, when I worked for the government, whenever we went to Russia, they basically said, listen, don't do anything and don't say anything that you wouldn't want to, you know, see, have your people closest to you seeing, because they are filming, taping absolutely everything that you say.

Luke Harding (2:10)

That was the secret briefing you got, that you've just told them. Yeah. But I mean, you're right. And, you know, I know from my, I mean, just to spill back, when I was in Moscow, I, one of the stories I investigated was the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, which was done by the FSB. So I was looking at the success of agency to the KGB, you know, writing stories and trying to investigate why the Russian state might kill him and the role of the security services. And, you know, within a few weeks of my, kind of going off on this story, we had mysterious break-ins at the family apartment where I was living in Moscow with my British wife, Phoebe and our two small kids. And, you know, open windows next to our six-year-old son's bed with the implication that he might fall out 20 meters to the courtyard below.

Strange alarms that went off into the middle of the night. And really on-off harassment for, up until I was kicked out in 2011 And I went to go and see the British Embassy and I said, what the hell is going on?

And they took me into their kind of secret briefing room, which looked like a music studio. You had to leave your, you've probably been in it, phone outside and they said, look, it's the FSB. It was rather spartan when I was there. There was a big map of Russia on the wall, but not much else.

Alastair Campbell (3:26)

Yeah, there's not a lot of bugs.

Luke Harding (3:27)

You remember it, yeah, okay. Rather spartan. They said, it's the FSB. And I said, well, does that mean that we're bugged? And they said, yeah, you're bugged. And I said, could you do anything about the bugs? And they said, no, well, first of all, you don't work for us. And secondly, if we remove them, they'll just come back and replace them. And then I said, does that mean they've got video in our apartment to which they said possibly, would you like a biscuit? You know, it's gonna...

Kind of thing, you know, we'd like... But basically, as you know, Alastair, Britain is no longer a power that can do great things around the world, but...

Alastair Campbell (4:03)

I think they could have got the bugs there.

Luke Harding (4:05)

We can offer tea and biscuits.

SPEAKER_1 (4:06)

I think they were basically saying that they don't care about your bugs.