Thank you for listening to the RESTISPOLITICS for ad-free listening, early access to episodes, membership to our chat community.

Please sign up at theRESTISPOLITICS.com.

Or, if you're listening on Apple Podcast, you can subscribe within the app in just a few clicks.

So, welcome to another episode of the RESTISPOLITICS question time with me, Alistair Campbell.

And with me, Rory Stewart. And we're here in Belfast, but I wanted to start with one question.

So, what do you make of the current crisis before the CBI?

What does it say about corporate Britain?

Is there a better way for the business community to be represented and have their voices heard in Westminster and Whitehall?

Is that a question about Tony Danker's support of Labour, or has he done something else?

This is just a classic Tory party, negative campaign, sort of sinister smeary that you build.

No, I think I'm sure this is about the allegations against Tony Danker, the head of the CBI, that are let him departing his post.

So, I'm guessing that's quite serious. And then whether there is something deep about the culture there or not, I don't know.

I'm a very, very close friend of his predecessor, Carolyn Fairburn.

Oh, I think she's great. And she was one of the few people who was prepared to make really constructive detailed proposals on a soft Brexit, which I thought was absolutely vital.

And businesses failure to do that, and I really think business did fail to do that.

I kept saying you guys have got so much riding on Brexit, you've got untold resources, you could be spending millions,

funding think tanks and campaigns to come up with a really constructive proposal on a good compromise customs union Brexit, and none of them did it.

They either privately backed second referendum remain, or they just kept quiet, and that was terrible I felt for someone like me trying to campaign for something more like a customs union Brexit,

that there were no voices out there really producing the papers by the ERG had them. They had Brady arrangements and multi house compromises and sanguera agreements and all these weird things that we've now, fortunately forgotten,

being produced a lot of them by Tuft and street think tanks. But Carolyn Fairburn was one of the few people prepared to engage in trying to produce concrete details on what a better Brexit deal would look like,

even she didn't actually produce what we wanted, which was the 500 page chapter and verse campaign, which would allow us to go to the Guardian and the Times and others saying, this is what it looks like.

I'm very pleased that you fell into my little jab there of turning a question that you were pushing to me, trying to suggest that anybody who supported the Labour Party was involved in some sort of terrible sex scandal into a discussion of how grew brilliant by very good friend Carolyn Fairburn is.

...