359. Starmer vs. Musk: Why the richest man in the world turned against the Prime Minister

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Welcome to the rest of this politics with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell. And loads and loads to talk about, Rory. I mean, I'm sick to death of hearing and talking about Elon Musk, but I think we have to. Not least because of what's happened with him and Keir Starmer, him and Jess Phillips, him and Nigel Farage, and the ups and downs and all that. And the grooming gang story, which Elon Musk, frankly, has driven to the top of the political agenda. And it's him, it's not anybody else, it's him that's done that.

I would like to talk a lot about Canada. Justin Trudeau, who I think you, going back to just before Christmas, you labelled as one of your worst politicians of the year. And both of us have been saying for some time he's got to go. Well, he's now gone. And we'll talk about what's going to happen in Canada.

And Austria is the other country I'd like to talk about, where the far-right leader, Kicill, has finally been asked by the president, who really doesn't like him, to try to form a government because the other parties have failed to put together a coalition.

So where do you want to start on the whole Musk thing?

And Keir Starmer has to, and the government has to fight back on this. And I actually thought that, I don't know if you saw Keir Starmer's press conference yesterday, but I thought he handled it incredibly well. Because if I texted Tony Blair beforehand, I said, if you were Keir today, how would you handle questions about Musk? And Tony just said, be clear, be calm. And by the way, before you say, no, I didn't pass that on. But that being said, he was very clear and very calm, but he was also very steely. And I think a lot of people sense that, one, he defended his record as DPP because that's come under attack. He also explained why he didn't think it was the right thing to have a new national inquiry into this because of the inquiries that have already happened.

Can I just comment on that speech? Because I did watch it. And I thought it was interesting because it's the first time we're really beginning to see Starmer communicating effectively. As you say, he acknowledged the horror of the abuse. That was the first thing he did, which is absolutely right. Didn't try to cover up the fact that this was predominantly the abuse of white girls by British Asian men. Didn't cover up how horrendous it had been, but then moved on to talk clearly about what he'd done as Director of Public Prosecutions to reopen investigations which had been closed. And then moved on, as you say, to defend Jess Phillips. And did it without name-checking Musk too much, but making it very clear that at the heart of this is something authoritarian. Essentially, Musk is trying to get rid of anybody who disagrees with him in any way. He's got no interest in democratic process.

Well, we saw that as well in relation to Nigel Farage. So, Nigel Farage, to my surprise, frankly, was the main interview or the first big interview on Laura Koonsberg's programme. I don't know whether the Prime Minister or the opposition had said they didn't want to do it, but certainly, usually that programme is a kind of platform for one of the main party leaders to set out their store for the new year. Farage was the interviewee. It was done not in the studio where minor party leaders might normally be expected to do it, but he was given the status of it being, out on location at one of his rallies where it was set up with a succession of interviews with supporters of his saying, effectively, why he should be Prime Minister. It was literally like a party political broadcast that bit. And then the questions were really just giving him the platform that he wanted.

Now, it backfired for him because he talked about Elon Musk being a hero. He'd brought free speech back onto Twitter, etc., etc. But because he didn't echo Elon Musk's support for Tommy Robinson, about whom I suspect Elon Musk had not heard of until a couple of weeks ago, Elon Musk turned on Farage out of the blue. He just did a tweet saying, Nigel Farage doesn't have what it takes. He should be replaced as leader of reform. Now, that is exactly to your point. If you are somebody in his orbit who is not echoing what he says, not echoing what he does, supporting what he does, he's going to use his platform to get a megaphone turned against you. And it was very interesting how many, lots of support for Nigel Farage on the right, but also lots of people saying, yeah, he's right.

And of course, so we've said before that the battle on the right, this is why I think the Conservatives are making a terrible mistake, if they think that that's the ground on which they have to compete. Let Farage fight out that space with the likes of Tommy Robinson. He thinks Farage is doing the right thing in not echoing Elon Musk on this, but he's obviously paid that price. But this says to me that Elon Musk has become, he is a narcissist, he is a megalomaniac. He thinks that because he quotes the richest man in the world, he should not be held to account by anybody.

Now, what's been interesting to me in this, Rory, is how quiet Donald Trump has been. I was listening to the Mooch. Now, we have to bear in mind the Mooch was wrong about Trump never going to win the election. And I'm beginning to wonder if he's wrong about the idea that Elon Musk has already been ostracized, because when you look to the pictures around New Year, they were like a couple. They were literally like, you know, dressed identically, dancing together. But I wonder whether the reason why Trump has got a little bit quiet in the last few days is either because he genuinely is now busy preparing for the inauguration, or he's just, maybe he's giving Musk a bit more rope and he's just letting him do this stuff. But he's been very, very quiet about all this stuff. And I suspect he's reaching that point of thinking, this guy is not doing me any good.

Well, just to take it right back to the beginning. One of the strange things, and as you say, I got a bit of abuse online for saying this, is that Twitter is not actually a particularly large platform. If you were trying to take over the platform which most voters respond to, you wouldn't really be going for Twitter. And what Musk has proved is the power of something that was often underestimated. The reason Twitter has often been underestimated is that Facebook has 3 billion users, YouTube 2.5 billion, WhatsApp 2 billion, Instagram 2 billion, TikTok 1.5 billion, Twitter 600 million. Including virtually every journalist and politician on the planet. Correct. So that was the interesting thing.

So when we were beginning to get into digital campaigning when I was an MP, and people like Jim Messina, who'd run Obama's big digital campaign, came over to talk to us. The story from him and from Lynton Crosby was, don't focus on Twitter. Twitter's only really read, they said, by journalists. And actually, if you want to reach voters, they're much more likely to be on Facebook. And if you look at the way that the Labour Party spent their money campaigning, it will have been on Facebook and TikTok ads, not on Twitter.

So when Musk bought Twitter for a very large amount of money, people underestimated the extent to which it was going to have a massive political impact. Partly because of this story that it's about a quarter of the size, or a fifth of the size of these other platforms, and its demographics are not skewed towards voters. But my goodness, he's made it count. And as you say, that's partly because the politicians and the journalists are on it.

Just another reminder quickly for people, because it's so bewildering what he's doing. He's now calling for Nigel Farage to step down. And he's calling for Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips to go to jail. Absolutely. So this started with him saying that Keir Starmer should step down. And that's where you really get a sense. I've called him a fascist. Maybe an authoritarian is another way of looking at it. He is prepared to say the king needs to dissolve parliament and get rid of Keir Starmer. Now, obviously, that's not because he's a monarchist. Elon Musk presumably doesn't have any particular affection for the king. And if the king ever said anything that he disagreed with, he'd be attacking the king tomorrow. It's simply, it's his way or the highway. And everybody must get behind his vision of the world.

And final one for you, which is my question when I keep reading his tweets. What do you think's going on? Where's he getting all this stuff? You can never have heard of Jess Phillips. There must be somebody in reform, some British ally of his, who's feeding him this stuff and who's turning him against Starmer, Phillips, now turning him against Farage and getting all this stuff going. No, there's no doubt there is somebody. I don't know whether it's true. There was talk at a certain point that Dominic Cummings was the person. Then there was somebody else told me it was Michael Gove. I've got no idea. I've got no idea.

But I tell you what I think is interesting is that people who know him, I've never met Musk, but I know people who do know him. And I hate talking about this stuff because I think you've got to be very, very careful sitting here talking about something you don't know and analyzing them psychologically, as it were. But I think if you look at the kind of obsessiveness with which he's trolling somebody like Geir Starmer, and you look at the way that he is responding to even the mildest, vaguest criticism, that there's something psychologically really unhinged going on. He's like a toddler who's got this new toy, and the toy is the closeness to power. He's got this thing going on with Trump. That's what seems to have taken him from being this person that, you know, we've both talked to people who've known Musk in the past who say this version of Elon Musk is a totally different human being.

So he's had some kind of weird personality change. A lot of the people who know him say it was all about this child, this trans child, that he has a trans child, that he cannot accept that he's got a child who is, in his mind, not normal. And this is where he started the whole thing about the woke mind virus, and that's what's taking over the world. That's what's radicalized him towards the right. But I think the thing with Geir Starmer, is it about the online safety bill? Is it about the fact that he thinks that Britain has got some sort of, you know, appetite to control social media? But if that were the case, why isn't he going after the Australians in the same way? They're actually legislating on social media.

Elon Musk is obsessed with the fact that the birth rates in places like the United States and Europe are declining, and he doesn't think the solution to that is to bring in migrants from places like Latin America to fill the declining birth rates. And some of the language around this and some of the concepts around this are not a million miles away from the Great Replacement Theory, which, again, is an obsession with the idea that the birth rates in Europe and the U.S. are plummeting and we're all being replaced by immigrants. And he certainly has some of that going on in his head, even if he doesn't subscribe to the whole theory.

It was actually originally developed by a far-right French intellectual thinker who almost nobody's heard about and has then been taken up by many others. So there is now in Germany this identitarian movement, which, again, is on the edge of what Musk is doing, where essentially at the heart of it is a very, very profound racist view, which they dress up in a word they call ethno-pluralism. And ethno-pluralism basically says people should live in their own countries where they're naturally from.

Like South Africa. Like South Africa. And actually it's quite interesting. You've just put your finger on something quite interesting there. I mean, Musk comes from South Africa, grew up in an apartheid state. The other person who's been a big proponent of this stuff is Michel Welbeck, who, again, grew up in French Algeria, which was a semi-apartheid state. And all these people also have these words. You'll see them when you go on Twitter because a lot of their followers are now echoing it.

So they talk a lot about civil war, how Britain is collapsing into civil war, France is collapsing into civil war, America is collapsing into civil war. They've got this phrase, re-migration, which is very, very popular with Tommy Robinson, but it's also used by the AFD in Germany and is used by Kieckler on the far right in Austria, which is the idea that you're going to send people back to the countries that they came from. They're obsessed with rape. So they have this idea that Muslims are inherently rapists, and they connect this to statements about the Koran, statements about terrorism, statements about medieval views on women.

But at the heart of it all, and this connects back to stories that were thrown against the Jews in the 19th century and early 20th century, is this idea that they are a risk to our, in inverted commas, "white women." And what's happening is you can see Musk accelerating the drag to the far right. So suddenly Farage, partly because Farage won't support Tommy Robinson and Farage doesn't support the idea of re-migration, is now seen as too soft. So you'll suddenly now see an eruption in Farage's Twitter feed of people further to the right saying, "I've had enough now, I'm leaving reform, how dare you betray Tommy Robinson, you've sold out to the globalist liberal elite." And then there are people from the Conservative Party trying to outflank Farage by sounding more like Tommy Robinson.

And the big example of this is now Robert Jenrick. Robert Jenrick, who we talked about, who was the leadership candidate defeated by Cammy Badenock to become the leader of the Conservative Party, a man who started right in the David Cameron center of the party and has been on what could politely be called a journey, and is now putting out tweets saying, on the basis of what happened 10, 15, 20 years ago in Rotherham and Rochdale, that this shows that immigration to Britain was a mistake and he says hundreds of thousands of people were brought in in a disastrous experiment with medieval attitudes from an alien culture and we need to start sending foreign national offenders back. So this is basically a story that is getting very, very close now to the rhetoric of the AFD and Kiko, but it's coming from my own party.

Literally since, I'm afraid since Enoch Powell, we haven't had leading Conservative MPs trying to start on this kind of language. Well, this was the other thing on the politics, the UK politics of this that Keir Starmer did yesterday. He actually avoided a couple of questions about Musk. He didn't want to name Musk. He didn't want to make it about Musk. He actually said towards the end, this is about the modern Conservative Party and in relation to Jess Phillips, he was basically saying that 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago, if any foreigner or anybody had said about a British politician that they were a rape, what was the rape genocide apologist, a white witch, all this stuff that Musk was saying about Jess Phillips, Keir Starmer made the point that any politician would have condemned that.

Whereas what Badaloch and Jenrick have done is repeated this call for a national inquiry. There are two points on that. The first is, neither reform nor the Conservatives had any reference to the need for a further national inquiry into this in their manifestos in an election that was fought a few months ago. If this was the big deal they now say it was, why wasn't it the big deal then? It's a big deal for them because they're jumping on Elon Musk's bandwagon and they're being driven by the Elon Musk bandwagon.

The other point you made earlier about ITV and the King, Musk says King must dissolve Parliament. If that was deemed a story, which I don't think it is, the headline should have been, "Musk reveals unbelievable ignorance about UK constitution." And the media has a massive role to play in this. Listen, I'm not saying Musk isn't an important figure. He's the richest man in the world. He's very close to the incoming president. He's very clever. He's very smart. And he's decided to get engaged in politics. However, the fact that he says something does not of itself become news because he has said it. And what shouldn't happen is that when, this is the other point Keir Starmer made, this is a guy who talks about being a free speech absolutist. One, he's not a free speech absolutist when it comes to attacks upon himself on his own platform.

And secondly, he is not entitled, whatever the rules of free speech, to spread lies and misinformation about issues about which he knows next to nothing other than what, as you say, is being fed to him by somebody who's trying to crank him up within this. Interestingly, the Mooch having said, on the rest of his politics in the US the other day, he said he didn't think the European leaders should get involved in this. Keir did yesterday, but interestingly, I don't think there was any collusion or any sort of cooperation here. Both Macron in France and my friend Jonas Gastora in Norway, both came out and said similar things yesterday. Essentially, what I think they do is look, the guy's just a sort of tech billionaire. He's close to Trump. Let's ignore him for a while. But he's reached the point where he can't be ignored. It has to be challenged. And I hope this is just the start in terms of actually tackling, beginning to tackle the poison of the far right as it is amplified through what has become a very personal megaphone for a megalomaniac.

Maybe I'm getting overly wound up here because it's the party that I was a member of, but I don't think people have paid enough attention to what's happening in the Conservative Party again. So Generic's post says, this appalling affair, i.e. this affair between 1997 and 2013, so he's talking about something that happened more than 12 years ago, is the final nail in the coffin for liberals who still cling to the argument that Britain is an integration success story. This scandal started with the onset of mass migration, importing, says Generic, hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures who possess medieval attitudes towards women. And after 30 years of this disastrous experiment, we've now entrenched sectarian voting blocs that make it electoral suicides for some MPs to confront this. The foreign nationals must be deported, no ifs, no buts.

And the officials that cover it up must be sent to jail for their appalling cowardice. Now, I know Robert Generic. I liked Robert Generic. I think he has now gone well, well beyond the pale. I think he is now stepping into the edge of Enoch Powell territory, that there is a huge tradition that was important within the Conservative Party of senior politicians, and this is a man who is the shadow Secretary of State for Justice, watching their language carefully and suggesting that hundreds of thousands of British citizens are from alien cultures with medieval attitudes towards women and that they are somehow all complicit in what was done by some people, but we're talking about tens of people, not hundreds of thousands of people, is unbelievably dangerous. And it's much more dangerous, I think, than people will understand when they just read the tweet quickly, because many of those words are deliberately hitting the hot-button jargon issues of Tommy Robinson far right, because this is exactly what Tommy Robinson has been trying to say for nearly 20 years, which is, Muslims are inherently medieval and barbaric. They rape our women and they need to be sent home.

Yeah, and a few things to make points to make about Generic. The first is, it overlooks the fact that not just that his party was in power for the last 14 years, but also that he was a minister in the department that could have done some of the things that he's now saying should be done. Let's have the first mention of Brexit of 2025. The sort of people that he clearly despises who live in our country, there are now more of them coming to the country because of Brexit, all the European Union people who left, who are now being replaced from people from places like India, Pakistan, etc., that we talked about at the end of the year. And the other thing I'd say about Robert Generic, and this is why I think Keir Starmer was right, to try to make this less about Elon Musk and more about what British politics is becoming.

And I think this is a bit of a test for Kemi Badenot now as well, because she's got to make the judgment about whether she is going to just fight for that sort of space with Farage and now with Tommy Robinson on the hard right. And by the way, I don't know if you've noticed this, Rory, Andrew Tate has launched a political party called BRUV, B-R-U-V, British Restoration of Underlying Values. So that is where this sort of politics is going to go on. I think she would be doing herself a lot of good if actually she distanced herself from that, but she appears to me not to be able yet to decide which way she wants to go.

Just on your great replacement guy, by the way, the Frenchman, there's a guy called Camus, there's Albert Camus that everybody knows about, there's a guy called Renaud Camus, and he was actually, I don't know if you remember this, Rory, he was a candidate in the presidential election. You know the French presidential election, there was these candidates who get about 0.5% of the vote. He was a candidate in 2012, and his platform was repatriation of all foreign-born criminals, right to silence, abolition of all wind farms, banning advertising on roadsides, making sanctuaries of remaining unspoiled places, and stopping the production of cars that can go faster than the speed limit. He also wanted to recognize Israel, Palestine, and a greater Lebanon. So this is the guy who most of the people now sort of perpetuate the great replacement theory, probably don't even know that this is this French former socialist who's sort of driving them.

Maybe this is the thing to finish on as we go to the break, and we'll come back to this when we talk about Austria, but it's easy to go down a rabbit hole looking at the dozens of bizarre different views that people on the far right have, and they will disagree about road signs, and they'll disagree about silence, and they'll disagree about tariffs and trade. The one thing they all agree on is their hatred of Muslims, and this movement has become over the last 30 years essentially about Muslims. It's a racist movement, and it's about evicting Muslims from European countries, and that's the one thing that binds them all together with all these weird differences that seem to emerge. Yeah.

Just very briefly, before we go to the break, what did you make of what Keir Starmer was saying about the NHS?

So I think a couple of things, and I think it's good that he's being practical in terms of the use of the private sector. I think the risk with what he's doing is that his focus particularly on waiting lists is likely to make it almost impossible to bring through the long-term reforms. So I think he has decided understandably politically that the thing that really matters is to achieve something visible on waiting lists, but that will make it impossible to achieve the bigger thing, which is moving resources from hospitals closer to the front line, and he talks about that still, and he was talking about that still in the speech, but the resources can't flow so long as he holds on to his waiting list target.

Okay. Let's take a break, and when we come back, we'll talk about Austria and Canada.

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Hi, everyone. It's Katty here from The Rest is Politics U.S. Antony Scaramucci and I want to tell you about our new series that looks at one of the darkest days in modern American history, the Capitol riots of January the 6th. You know, four years have passed since Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building and tried to overturn the 2020 election results. Katty and I are going to explore the tensions and the personalities behind these riots. We're going to explore the tensions and the personalities at the heart of that storm.

Yeah, we're going to look at the whole story, starting off with, of course, the 2020 election result itself. Joe Biden's victory. Donald Trump's attempts to undermine that result right up until January the 6th and those horrifying scenes that all of us watched on television back then. So don't miss it. Go and search The Rest is Politics U.S. wherever you get your podcast to hear just how Donald Trump tried to defy American democracy. And we've included a clip from the series for you to listen to at the end of this episode.

Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Now, Rory, I must tell you something. Ben Wallace, as you know, my partner, Fiona Miller.

Yes. I don't know if you've seen this woman on Instagram called Divina Comedy who does these impersonations of you and me. They're quite funny. She's got your voice, but she hasn't quite got my voice. But she has got this thing about I'm always mentioned referring to sort of I was talking to Fiona. And it's usually I was watching the telly with Fiona. And as Tory came on, we threw things at the telly and we all hate Tories, blah, blah, blah. But Fiona came from her walking the dog yesterday and said, God, Ben Wallace was really good. So there you are. That's praise indeed.

Yeah, I encourage people to listen to it on leading. I mean, we've had a series, I think, of terrific recent interviews. I hope people have managed to catch up with our amazing interview, I thought, with the Georgian president right at the moment where demonstrations were breaking out in the streets, where she had three days left in office, where a Putin backed party was about to take it. And we managed to get an interview with her.

But I also thought Ben Wallace was brilliant because he was a sort of reminder that you don't have to always be a kind of politician out of central casting. There's a certain kind of good humour, straightforwardness about him, which I think is quite refreshing.

Also, we should say that this was the first interview we've done that I know a lot of people listen to our interviews. But this one you can also, the one we did with Ben Wallace, you can watch with our sort of multi-camera Spotify studio set up on Spotify and YouTube.

Let's talk about Austria.

Yeah, so the big story here, Alastair, which I want to push you on is this. So the far right in Austria, under their leader Kicill, who, as I pointed out, was leading a campaign with direct references to the Reich. He had posters up saying, thy will be done. And in German, thy Reich will come. Got 28.8% of the vote in the election, more than anyone else. But the hope was, for many Europeans, yes, yes, yes, he's got that, but he's never going to be able to actually be chancellor. And it was the same, remember, with the far right in Germany when the AfD performed well in Thuringia and Saxony. And the same when Geert Wilders, who's another one of these big anti-Muslim far right campaigners, got most votes in the Netherlands.

Everybody says, well, we've got these very complicated proportional representation systems. Thank goodness for them because we can always make a moderate coalition that excludes these people. Yeah. So why did that not work in Austria? What's going on? Because now it looks like he's going to be chancellor, and that is a big problem.

So as you say, the FPÖ, the Freedom Party of Austria, became top. Then the traditional Conservative Party, which is the governing party with the Chancellor Nehammer, came second. Social Democrats dropped a third for the first time in their history, even though their vote share didn't drop. But they came third. And this Liberal Party, NIOS, came fourth.

So the thought was, the Social Democrats, the Conservatives, and this Liberal Party form a coalition. NIOS dropped out first. They felt that they couldn't work. I think they had criticisms of both sides. And then even if the Conservatives and the Social Democrats had managed to come to an agreement, they would have had a majority of one. So not very, very stable. And they fell out over competition, over tax.

But I think if Kiekl does become chancellor, as you say, it's now looking likely because the president of Austria, Alexander Van der Bellen, he's a green. And he is somebody who absolutely despises Kiekl. So does the new interim leader of the Conservative Party, a guy called Stocker. He is on record as saying, I think he actually said in the parliament, nobody wants you in this parliament and nobody really wants you in this country. But they may end up having to work together.

So this is going to be now. He is now got to sit down and have talks with Kiekl. And this is somebody who in the parliament. I'm going to do a bit of simultaneous translation here. He said it's not just that nobody wants you in this house, in this parliament. It's also that nobody in this republic needs you. And he also he made some very, very heavy statements against him. And just as the president had to kind of eat humble pie and call him in and say, can you kindly go off and try and form a coalition? Now, this guy is going to have to sit down and try to see whether they can work together. I think that's going to be very, very difficult for both of them.

If Kiekl becomes chancellor and it could be, you know, they might end up with a builders type situation where builders won the election, but wasn't allowed to be in the coalition. But Kiekl is, I think, in too strong a position for that. So you're now going to have you got Austria. We've got Hungary. And of course, the big news in Hungary this week was the European Commission punishing Hungary for some of their kind of standing out against the principles of the European Union. And they withdrawn a billion euros to support the Hungarians respecting.

And of course, we've got this guy, Robert Fiso in Slovakia, who's and people should check out this really weird story about him disappearing to Vietnam, having spent a bit of time with Vladimir Putin. So the very odd going on there. Austria is going to be very, very interesting to watch now. And it could take quite a long time for this thing to be put together. It's not out of the question that they won't be able to work together. There's a lot of mutual hatred going on there. But the fact is, the votes that were put up, this is the result that they've delivered.

It may lead to a new election. And if it leads to a new election, Kiekl is actually higher in the polls than he was at the election. And this is where you're beginning to get people saying, oh, give him a chance. He's not too bad. So you can hear Austrian businessmen saying that, just as you can hear American businessmen saying, give Trump a chance. He's not too bad. And I've met some people in Scotland who said to me, Elon Musk is, you know, great businessman and terrific that he's going to cut two trillion from the economy and stop beating up on him.

And, you know, you should take seriously the fact that many business people support Musk and Trump. And I said, but many business people supported Hitler. You know, Henry Ford famously was an anti-Semite. He supported Hitler, to which this man said when I met him in Scotland, he said, well, you know, Hitler did some pretty good stuff on the economy, you know, really. So what's happening now is the normalization. And these are people who were in Britain increasingly very, very keen on Farage and very keen on the idea that Musk was going to give 100 million to Farage so that reform could win. But now may be tending further right still. But the really dangerous group, I think, amongst voters are what I would call the kind of useful idiots who are the sort of people right of center who think these guys like Kicill can't be quite as bad as they say. And you'll see in Austria people say, well, you know, he's just like Jörg Haider.

So Jörg Haider was the leader of this party, obviously, in the 80s, early 90s. And Jörg Haider was kind of all over the place. He would go pro NATO. He made friends with Gaddafi. He made friends with Saddam Hussein. He'd flip around, change his views on Austria joining the EU and change his views on Turkey joining the EU. Kicill's not like that. Kicill, to come back to our conversation before the break, is absolute central casting far right. His views echo very, very strongly. This man called Martin Selmer, who's Austrian, identitarian far right theorist, who's a big, great replacement theory man. And right at the heart of Kicill's campaign, like the AFD's campaign, is this idea of remigration, pushing people up, including Austrian citizens.

Yeah, well, because Martin Selmer and these think tanks have done calculations where they've decided, for example, in Germany, it's completely bizarre. They've put numbers on it. I think they've decided that Germany should have 800 Afghans, but unfortunately, it's got 800,000. Why 800? Because they've sort of got a weird mathematical formula where they've sort of decided that Germany, you know, with tens of millions of people can have a total of 27,000 people from foreign backgrounds of whom 800 can be Afghans. And the rest need to leave. Now, the problem here is that you can only do this if you challenge the constitutional courts, the whole framework of the Council of Europe, the European Court on Human Rights, the European Union itself, because all the system that we've set up since the Second World War has been about equal dignity of citizens. It's completely opposed to the idea of saying there are superior people, there are inferior people, and the superior people, in this case, white Christian Austrians, should be able to just push out Muslim non-white Austrians.

So if Kicill is serious about this, he is on his course for a massive collision with the central institutions of Europe. And it's worse than Orban. And I wonder whether the European institutions, as you say, they surely, we talked to Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister about this, on leaving a few months ago. They must have learned from the way that they allowed Orban to use those institutions to cement himself, to cement his positions within Hungary, but also much more broadly. He's a far bigger figure than just being the prime minister of Hungary, and particularly on the right. So I wonder whether they will learn those lessons, will have learned those lessons. But this is a guy who, this is democracy, isn't it? This is what the numbers have shown. He did win the election. The reason I think why he's gone up in the polls since is because of this feeling, even of people who didn't support him, that the establishment came together to try and stop him. The president should have asked him to try to form a coalition first. And maybe tactically, that might have been the right thing to do. Let him have a go. Let him show then that it couldn't be done. And then let the other parties take over.

And I think history, if this guy does become chancellor, history is not going to be kind on these three parties that couldn't get themselves to bring a deal together.

Can I ask you just on this, because I think this is part of the dangerous logic. If Kicill can't get things done, in other words, he tries to expel non-white Austrian citizens and is stopped by doing so by the constitutional courts or by the European Union. Is there not a really big danger then of a new form of fascism that says, I'm trying to implement the will of the people by expelling these non-whites from my country and I'm being stopped by a liberal global elite, including the European Union and human rights lawyers and judges. And therefore we need to brush those people aside.

There may well be, in which case you'd have to leave the European Union. But it's very interesting that Viktor Orban, for all that he rails against it, has never once suggested that because his economy wouldn't survive without them. Or Kicill could simply totally ignore the European Union and challenge them to expel him, which would be much like leaving the European Union without him having to do it formally.

Possibly. And that would put the European Union in a very difficult situation. Yeah. Because they'd be reluctant to expel Austria, wouldn't they?

The other thing, of course, that is unbelievably bad timing about this, is if Kicill becomes Chancellor of Austria at the moment at which Germany is going to the polls, this can give a new flush of confidence to the AfD, who are running a very similar set of policies and a very similar set of ideas. Backed by Mr. Musk. Backed by Mr. Musk, echoing Trump.

And, of course, what's happening all the time, and this is why it feels to me so much more dangerous than people acknowledge, why we are beginning to see now elements of the 20s and 30s coming through, is that they all give space to each other. There's this horrible phrase, the Overton window of what's kind of acceptable to say or think. They're shifting it.

Suddenly, as we said before the break, Robert Jenrick is saying things that no conservative cabinet minister under Theresa May or David Cameron would ever consider saying becomes acceptable. And as that shifts, then you get more and more slightly dopey people, voters on the right, beginning to think, well, you know, is it such a bad thing? And maybe we can just expel these people peacefully.

We don't need to actually round them up. And, of course, people forget what's going on here, which is that the early ideologues for the war in the Balkans initially talked about peaceful separation between Bosnians and Serbs. Not very long ago, in Europe, you know, during our working lives, that Eichmann was working for Hitler to peaceably resettle Jews out of Austria. The idea initially was not to kill them. The idea was just to push them out, I think, to Madagascar initially.

The fact that people are not processing that liberalism isn't just, and this is another thing I want to rant at you about, there's been a flurry of articles in UnHerd from Trevor Phillips, for example, writing this, articles in the Times saying liberalism's dead, the center's dead, the energy's now on the right. But liberalism isn't just Alastair and Rory with sort of mushy ideas and being too optimistic about Kamala Harris. It is moral. It's the idea that humans are equal in dignity and the lesson of the Second World War, which is that if you give up on the idea that humans are equal and you start saying there are better people, white Austrians, and less good people, Muslim Austrians, so many things follow from that, the collapse of your democracy and ultimately war.

Yeah. Well, the other thing to put into that, which I think relates to a lot of what we've seen happening in America, is that I would argue the rule of law is an essential part of the liberal order, but that was kind of universally accepted across right and left and center, rule of law.

But rule of law does not carry the weight that it did. The fact that we saw this week the peaceful acceptance of the presidential election result and the people arriving at Congress and taking their place and being sworn in and so forth and contrast that with what happened four years ago, that means that those people that pursued what I would argue was an offense against the rule of law and democratic institutions, they've won again. That undermines the liberal order that we're talking about.

By the way, though, Rory, I think although I agree with you that it's not just you and me talking about kind of mushy idealistic values, I still do think that one of the challenges for all non-extreme parties, this includes extreme left and extreme right, is how we do build a sense of excitement and optimism about the things that we believe.

This might be a good moment to switch to Canada because I was watching, we'll talk about what's happened with Justin Trudeau and some of the people that might replace him in a minute, but even before Trudeau went, because I kind of felt he was going to go, and I thought I need to get to know this guy Pierre Poitier a bit better. He's the guy who's the leader of the Conservative Party. We've talked about him a bit before. I've been watching some of his speeches and interviews over the last few days, and he is definitely not to be underestimated because he looks like the actor Martin Freeman. He's quite a good-looking guy. He dresses kind of casually, wears vests and jackets, and he looks cool. I think he might have had a bit of the mooch done too. He's pretty wrinkle-free for somebody who lives a stressful life, and he's not somebody who's bringing forward big positive policy solutions, but what he is doing all the time is speaking a language that is rooted in people's real lives and real existence, and he does it in a way that's very eloquent, very articulate. He's not to be underestimated, and, of course, he's 20-odd points ahead in the polls.

But what they all do, in a sense, is they all talk about a past that was better than the present. Politics used to be about politicians saying there is a much better future that we can have. Now, he is a better version, I would argue, of somebody like Farage because he's rooting it in people's lives. He's not hysterical. He does sort of go over the top a bit about the woke utopia and this kind of thing. But I recommend you take a good look at him because he's interesting.

You're right that you said this about Austria, that people are going to be pretty unkind to the opponents of Kikiller, how useless they were at coming together. This is basically a story now of useless liberal response, and I'm afraid Britain is part of this. The Conservative Party is being completely hopeless in working out how to frame its response to Farage and Musk and Tommy Robinson. The Labour Party has not been doing very well, in my opinion, over the last few months. The net popularity ratings of Trudeau, Starmer, Schultz, Macron are catastrophic.

What the hell is wrong with the Liberal Centre? Why is it not able to realise how high the stakes are? Is it just that we've got complacent? Is it that we've lost language? I mean, what's going on? Why, when the stakes are so high, and literally you have a far-right guy becoming the Chancellor of Austria? I mean, it's the first proper far-right ruler we've had since the Second World War. Are people not upping their game?

You know, when we were talking at the end of the year, at the end of 2024, I referred to a speech that I watched Justin Trudeau make to a party audience, and I was saying he was, you know, this rolling applause, and it was a great speech for that audience. And it reminded me of some of the speeches that Kamala Harris made during the campaign, which you and I both enjoyed as oratorical events.

But looking back, it's clear that, this hopefully answers your question, that both of those pieces of rhetoric were actually speaking directly to, we talk a lot about Trump talks to the base, they were talking to the base. What they weren't doing was speaking directly to the concerns that have really been driving people in their thinking about their lives and about politics. So if you have somebody like in Canada, Polly Everett comes along, and he does make you feel there is an elite there, and it's out to get you, and they don't understand you, and they don't understand your life. And that's why I'm traveling around the country, I'm talking to you, I'm saying this, and I'm feeling your pain, and I'm hearing it, and here's what I'm saying.

Justin Trudeau, impressive guy, he won three elections, that's not easy in the modern age, he's won three terms, but I think you used the word complacent, I think it's they got stuck, they got stuck in thinking that the way of politics that helped them win the first time around, they've not adapted to the other stuff that's been happening under the radar, that the others, the right in particular, have exploited very, very, very well. And so, when they say, when somebody like Polly Everett says that, you know, Trudeau is just giving you this unhinged, woke utopia the whole time, it kind of chimes in a way that it wouldn't have done 10 years ago. And therefore, I think that what the progressives have not done is take seriously the reasons for the advance that the right has made.

What's going on in Canada now, because this guy, Polly Everett, he's about 20 points ahead. So, whoever comes in, it's going to be a very, very, very, very tough fight. I was chatting last night to Mark Carney, who, you know, we should maybe repost our interview with him on leading. Of course, their system, Rory, they haven't yet announced, I don't think, how it's going to work. If it was just the caucus, if they could only choose between the MPs, then Mark Carney can't run. But if it's an open contest, outsiders can run, then Mark Carney is going to put his hat in the ring. And I think, you know, you and I both like him and know him and think he's a very, very smart guy.

Whoever goes in, it's going to be very, very, very difficult. But I think if you're looking for a serious grown-up to take, and don't forget, we talk a lot about Trump. Canada, the arrival of Trump, is like, this is a guy who say Canada should become an American state. This is the guy who's saying there's going to be 25% tariffs. And the reason why Trudeau eventually fell apart was because his chancellor and deputy, Chrystia Freeland, who is also going to be in the running, I suspect, she and he had different views about how to deal with Trump, and they just, they fell apart.

So what's your feeling about, one, about why Trudeau's gone, whether it's too late for whoever comes in? I think it probably, unfortunately, is too late. I mean, never say never, but Polyaev has been plugging away, building up this lead. Trudeau may well slightly have done a Biden, which is, as usual, these people cling on too long, which means that their successors don't really have the time to establish themselves properly. These Canadian races are amazing things. I mean, they're like one of those ludicrous horse races with 17 horses jumping over things. And my friend, Chris Alexander, who was the immigration minister, ran in one of these leadership things where, I can't remember, well over a dozen people leading.

We also did an interview on leading with Michael Ignatieff, who was a Harvard professor who came in and managed to become the leader of the Liberal Party through one of these things. Very, very, you know, big name internationally as an intellectual and a thinker, but took the Liberal Party to a catastrophic defeat, which Trudeau then turned everything around from.

Mark Carney will be doing his best to say he's not a Michael Ignatieff figure, but people opposing him will say, well, he's not been in politics enough. He's been governor of the Bank of England, which doesn't sound very Canadian. He's been the governor of the Bank of Canada. But I think he's taken seriously. I think he's got a decent chance. Many of the people I know who were members of Trudeau's cabinet or are MPs reckon Carney's a good player and has what it takes. But my goodness, I don't know how you turn around a 20-point lead, and I don't know how you re-energize. I mean, who's really managed to do this? Gordon Brown, I guess, struggled to do it. Theresa May struggled to do it. The only person who's really recently managed to do it, I guess, is Boris Johnson coming into a fading administration and then getting a big majority.

Yeah, I think the reason why Mark Carney might be a good choice for them, one is he's very, very experienced. He's serious. He's got a pretty good network. He's somebody that would immediately be taken seriously. Could you imagine that guy as prime minister? 100%. And he's not, you know, he's not of the Trudeau camp. I think one of the problems that Chrystia Freeland, even though they fell out at the end, you know, she has been the finance minister, has overseen comparatively against America economic performance that hasn't been that great.

Just to give you a couple of, there's some wonderful names of the other potential runners. There's François-Philippe Champagne. Very good. He's the industry minister. Whether he's going to run, I don't know, but people say he's like a commissar. Melanie Joly, the foreign minister, who has actually been a little bit quiet of late. So whether she's going to sit this out, I don't know. And another one, they've all got great names, Dominique Leblanc.

So all of these, in fact, this is the other thing would maybe help Mark Carney stand out. Mark Carney doesn't sound as French as Leblanc, Champagne or Joly. But I think it's also, we've got Joly, she's currently the minister of foreign affairs. And then there's another person, a former premier of British Columbia called Christie Clark. And there's talk about her going for it as well. I think Mark Carney's in with a shout to win it.

The question then is how does he fight a campaign against Polly Everett? And there, I think it is about a classic, you know, do you want a serious leader or do you want to kind of populist opportunist? But as I said, from having watched his interviews, Polly Everett, not to be underestimated, but in a campaign, he's got to be challenged to come up with a genuine policy prospectus to govern a country over its own. Because at the moment, what he's very good at is the kind of vibe and the mood music. It's kind of reversal of the Harris thing.

Can I finish then just on this? I mean, so remember again, Canada really matters. Canada is a huge economy. You know, one of the big G7 economies, big player in international aid, one of the five-eye countries, the intelligence relationship with the US. So it does matter where we end up there.

Just give me a sense of what Carney's strategy should be. What are his ideas? What do you think he should do if he wanted to win this election? Well, I think the first thing he can do, which incumbents who are part of the government can't do, is acknowledge more than Justin Trudeau and his team have been doing, that times are really hard for Canada and for Canadians. Cost of living, housing, wages. I think the other thing he needs to do is to make more of the fact that, like you say, Canada matters, but it's being made to feel small by the way that Trump has been related to it. So I think he does need to be seen to take on Trump in some of these big things. In particular, this nonsense about the 51st state, but also in relation to tariffs. I could imagine you building a campaign right now.

Who do you want to sit down in a room with Trump and actually talk about the detail of what the effect would be, not just on Canada, but on the United States as well? Who could you actually imagine turning some of these challenges into opportunities? So I think he can be the guy that says, we're not ignoring problems on immigration. They're real and here's how we're going to fix it. We're not saying that government spending hasn't got out of control. Here's how we're going to fix it. We are going to take on the housing challenge.

One of the most impressive bits of this Polly Everett interview, he was talking about housing. He was basically saying, how much land do we need? How much land have we got? Why can't we build houses? I mean, you can see in Britain, where we talk about changing the planet, you can see why it's so hard. Canada is saying, why can't we do this? And I think that I can see whoever wins and you and I both know and like Mark Carney. We don't know the other people. Let's say it's Mark Carney. I think it'd be good if he did. I actually, by the way, disagree with you about the way they'll attack. They'll attack him as kind of globalism, Davos man. That's all part of the kind of populist rhetoric as well. He's got to take that, own that, and push that out as part of his kind of experience message. But I could see Mark Carney putting together a good campaign. He's very, very smart.

But the thing that I'd say about Polly Everett is that of all these kind of populist leaders, he's got a, you should look at these speeches and interviews he's done. He's got a style about him that isn't sort of, he didn't have me gnashing my teeth. Right. He had me thinking, oh, this guy's quite interesting. I wouldn't like to take him on. But I'd like to see somebody Canadian who's really, really smart take him on. Very good.

Well, thank you, Alistair. I look forward to talking to you soon. See you soon, buddy.

As promised, here's a clip from the Rest is Politics US miniseries. Trump is naturally a conspiracy theorist fueler. He will fuel the fire of any conspiracy theory because he's always seen himself as an outsider and he wants to foment the people from the outside to attack the people from the inside. So he's developing these ideas that he eventually uses in January, on the 6th of January. And the ideas are, there's misinformation out there. There's lies out there. Let's use these lies as fodder to attack the people on the inside. He's doing it with COVID. I think hydroxychloroquine works. You may remember this. I took hydroxychloroquine. Mr. President, you took hydroxychloroquine? Yeah, yeah, I'm on it. I took it. And this is the beginnings. This is the kernels of what's about to come. And it all starts with COVID and it leads up to this insurrection, or as the president says, a very peaceful group of tourists descending upon the Capitol building.

If you want to hear the rest of the show, go and search the Rest is Politics US wherever you get your podcasts.