Rory Stewart

Somebody's pointing out to me when I said, why do you take it as a personal donation rather than speaking fee or something?

Apparently, the answer is income tax.

If Chris Harbour decided to pay him five million pounds to give a speech, he'd have to pay income tax.

Gifts, there's no tax on it, so it's worth twice as much to him.

But he'd need to earn effectively 10 million pounds to end up with 5 million pounds in his bank account, which is sort of money well beyond a kind of partner in a fancy law firm or any of this kind of stuff.

Well, well beyond.

So he's putting himself not into the category of...

I want to be financially secure and live a middle-class lifestyle, he's trying to put himself in the category of, I suppose, the top 0.01% of the British population.

Yeah.

So you're pointing to something which is about structure.

So there are different ways to think about populism.

One of them is about the underlying drivers of people voting for the far right and the far left, which is anger about immigration, anger about cost of living, anger

anger about what's happening to local communities.

But another way to think about it is in terms of the structures of social media, electoral systems, and campaign finance.

So if you were a man that we both admire a lot, Premier of South Australia, Peter Malinowskis, you would say, look, if you're bold and serious about this, let's take two of these things.

Let's take social media.

And let's take campaign financing.

And let's say we're going to fix the structure.

And actually, if you're going to be Australian, you go further.

You'd go for an Australian electoral system.