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Well, hello, and welcome back to episode three of The Rest Is Politics with me, Alistair Campbell,

and me, Rory Stewart. I don't think there's any getting away from the fact. We've got to start with Ukraine.

And there's a couple of things on that. One is, could you give us a bit of a sense what you're up to today?

Because I believe you were at something related to Ukraine, or maybe indirectly related to Ukraine this morning.

Well, it was very indirectly in a way, because it was the grandly titled Soft Power Global Summit,

and at the Queen Elizabeth Centre in London. And actually, I saw somebody on Twitter

took a picture of the huge banners outside and said, satire is dead. How can they be talking about

soft power when all this hard power is going on in Ukraine? But actually, it was very, very interesting

to get a sense of, the audience was mainly, I think, diplomats and media and think tanks and so

forth. We're quite a few ex-prime ministers there. But what was interesting to me, America came

at top, as it often does, but it actually fell down the soft power rankings during the Trump

period period. It was back up from number six to number one. We and Germany were second and third,

but what I found really interesting was that China had jumped from eighth to fourth, and it had

passed in the process, France, Japan and Canada. And Russia had made the top 10 for the first time,

it gone from 13 to 9. Now, bear in mind, this is the work on this. It's over 100,000 interviews

around the world. It was done before you, Ukraine. Ukraine, by the way, is 51st. I suspect if

you did it today, it would be right up there. But what was interesting to me is something we talked

about last week is that the dictatorships have been exploiting and using soft power very, very

well. It's amazing, isn't it? I think it's extraordinary how much has changed just in the last

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