539. Embezzlement, the Mandelson Texts, and Hasan Piker's UK Ban

Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com. This was the power couple right at the heart of SNP politics for years and years and years. Her husband's spouting a new £5,000 watch and she thinks what exactly? Peter Morrell, husband of Nicola Sturgeon, is currently in court, already being convicted of charges related to corruption. The police went in there, they put up those tents, it looked like a kind of murder scene, not a fraud investigation. I don't know what she thought. How do you explain to yourself how you've ended up with £450,000 of extra kit, right, after you've paid tax? How could you possibly think that's normal? There's something just wrong about having the leader who's married to the chief executive of a political party. That is just wrong. This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy. 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However, there's no minimum commitment and you can cancel after your free box. So that's beer52.com slash football to claim your free case of beers. Welcome to the rest of this morning's question time with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. We're going to get into the incredible scandal around the Scottish National Party and corruption. We're going to get into the revelation of emails from Peter Mandelson, our former ambassador to Washington. We're going to get into the decision of the British government to ban two left-wing American YouTubers. We're going to talk about our travels and surveillance states emerging. And we're going to finish with the question of who is the most good person, the best person, the most moral person that we've ever shaken hands with. Looking forward to it very much. Where do you want to start Alistair? So Rory, we are talking at a time that the political world is digesting a massive dump of documentation relating to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to Washington. And also at a time when Peter Morrell, former CEO of the Scottish National Party and husband of Nicola Sturgeon, is currently in court having already been convicted of charges related to corruption. So Clem wants to know, do the two Peter M's reveal that British politics is as scandal ridden as anywhere else? Are we becoming the next Italy? Bit of an insult to Italy there. It's a completely amazing story. Let me start with Peter Morrell. This is one of the absolute linchpins of the SNP. He was the chief executive of the Scottish National Party and was married to Nicola Sturgeon, who was First Minister of Scotland and the leader of the Scottish National Party. So this was the power couple right at the heart of SNP politics for years and years and years. And it turns out that Peter Morrell had been systematically taking party funds and using it to buy stuff for their own personal consumption. Now, the claim is that Nicola Sturgeon knew nothing about it. And she keeps giving interviews saying she's as disgusted and anyone as shocked as anyone. But let me just try to put it to you like this, right? The guy decides to buy a brand new, top of the range, £85,000 Jaguar. He buys it partly with SNP money, and he puts it through the accounts as buying Apple products, Apple business products. Then he sells the Jaguar a few years later, and he doesn't give any of the money back to the SNP. He pockets all the money when he sells it. He's buying coffee machines. He's buying £5,000 watches. He buys an enormous £110,000 motorhome and parks it in his parents' drive, right? Through all of this, we are supposed to believe that Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Morrell, who are on pretty modest salaries, I mean, she says they're well-paid. They're not that well-paid, right? These are people on public sector salaries. She looks out of her window, and there's a brand new £85,000 Jaguar sitting on the driveway. She goes to visit her in-laws, there's a brand new motorhome. She comes downstairs, there's three top-of-the-range coffee machines. Her husband's spouting a new £5,000 watch, and she thinks, what exactly? I don't know. I don't know what she thinks. I was trying to think what I would think if Fiona suddenly pitched up outside with a brand new motorhome. It was actually £124,000, Rory. You're selling it short, this motorhome. I think I would think – you see, let's be honest, Rory. You're with Shoshana, I'm with Fiona, Peter Morrell was with Nicola. None of us know what really goes on inside the dynamics of another marriage. You know, we can see, we can know people. So, I don't know what she thought. What she's depending on at the moment is the fact that – and she was humiliated. They were both humiliated by the fact that the police went in there, they put up those tents. It looked like a kind of murder scene, not a sort of, you know, fraud investigation. So, what she's hanging on is the fact that she was cleared. She was cleared by the police. The police investigated her as well as him. They've obviously decided that he committed a crime and that she didn't. So, I guess what we're being asked to believe is that she either paid no attention to the things that he was buying, or I wonder whether she realised that he had a sort of bit of a purchasing weird things issue. This is something I don't understand because I don't even have a watch. I would no more buy a motorhome than, you know, fly to the moon. My guess on this is that it's about the way – and this is really powerful for understanding political malfeasance and how corruption happens and how embezzlement happens. This is embezzlement. He's basically taking funds which people have given for the SMP. He's buying a motorhome and he later tries to claim the motorhome was for the SMP. But the day after he buys it, he's buying a tour guide for motoring around Britain. He parks in his in-laws' house. The SMP is not paying the insurance. It doesn't appear on the SMP accounts. So, I guess the only way in which this works is firstly, he is very, very, very important to her. So, she's not going to look too closely because she has an incredibly powerful setup where she's the leader and the first minister and he's the chief executive of the party. That's not power you ever want to give away. That would be like a chief executive having their own husband as the chairman of the board. You wouldn't want to bring someone else in because when you've got that control, why would you take a risk? Can I jump in there? This is to your credit and in your favour as it were. We've interviewed several leaders of the SMP including Nicola Sturgeon and I think I'm right in that all of them, you made the observation either to them directly, I think you definitely did with Humza Yousaf, making the point that there's something just wrong about having the leader who's married to the chief executive of a political party. That is just wrong. Now, in a way, it does all flow from that. You're absolutely right. And you can see why she would want that, right? You can completely understand why that's convenient for her and why she's not going to look, I mean, apart from that, she loves her husband. She's not going to look too closely at a situation that gives her absolute control over the SMP. One of them runs the party completely and the other one runs the government completely. So, it's a fantastic combination of power. The second thing is, I think, possibly self-deception and maybe a little bit of entitlement. So, maybe they think, because they're building this together, they're an incredibly successful couple. Well, you know, we deserve a good coffee machine because we need some coffee to keep us awake in the morning. And, you know, we're doing a lot of work driving around the country all the time. So, we deserve a nice car. So, the line begins to blur a little bit between what your public duties are and what your private duties are. But ultimately, it gets a bit more crazy because by October 2022, the auditors are resigning saying they can't sign off on the accounts. And she's got to be saying to herself, listen, really? On our incomes? She would have been paid just over £100,000. How do you explain to yourself how you've ended up with £450,000 of extra kit, right? After you've paid tax, that's earning an extra £900,000 in order to have that stuff. How could you possibly think that's normal? Surely, you'd say to yourself, darling, how do we afford that car? That's like a top-of-the-range Jaguar. How do we get this brand new motorhome? That looks like a really nice watch. Where do we get this new coffee machine from? Surely, you'd ask that question, wouldn't you? I think so. People will be staggered to hear that I let Fiona take care of absolutely everything in relation to the running of our lives. This is not a very good commentary on myself, but most things I wouldn't even be able to guess the price of what something costs because it's just not, I don't find it that, it doesn't motivate me. You're not the First Minister, Alastair. You're a private citizen. If you were the First Minister of Scotland, you would be absolutely, you know, when I was in politics, I think I'm completely paranoid about these things. And you know, you don't have to be in politics very long to realise that these are the things that bring you down. So I think you would, if she suddenly parked a Ferrari in the driveway and you were earning, you know, £150,000 a year, you'd be like, darling, what the hell is this thing? Where did this come from? No, yeah, yeah, you would. You would. There's very little future for the marriage, it seems to me. He is going to go to jail, possibly for quite a long time, by the way. And she's probably thinking, well, I've had my whole life torn apart. My marriage is wrecked. And she's also in that position where she's trying to set out her life story because she's written a book. So the first commentary she gave on this was in, I saw this when I was actually abroad and I was just channel hopping. And there she pops up, I think it was on Sky News, where she was being endorsed. She was talking at an event in County Kerry because she's promoting her book. So I guess she's thinking, quotes, I've been punished enough. And he may be thinking that he's being the noble martyr, that he's taking one for the team. The other thing we don't know, we don't know whether in the interviews that he did with the police, his line all along was, I was acting alone. My wife had no idea about this. We just don't know. So I think it's quite hard to make a judgment. The truth is, it's not going to go away. It's not going to go away for him because he's going to go to jail. But the other thing that's happening is that some of the old enmities within the SNP. So Joanna Cherry, who is no fan of Nicholas Sturgeon, was a big fan of Alex Salmond. And she's actually calling for John Swinney to resign as the first minister and the leader of the SNP because she's saying, well, he was part of the team while this was all going on. Jack McConnell, who is the former first minister, Labour first minister, he's actually had quite an interesting proposal, which is the idea that this should be investigated both by Holyrood's Public Audit Committee and Westminster's Public Accounts Committee. I don't know what the constitutional niceties of that are, but the MPs on the Scottish Affairs Committee have also said that if Holyrood doesn't do a proper investigation into this, that maybe they should take it up. One more problem to this, which is that the police claim that they presented the evidence to the prosecutors in Scotland a year before the election. And for some reason, the decision was made to hold back on this whole thing until after the Holyrood election. Now, presumably, this would have been devastating for the SNP going into that election. And John Swinney's ability to get as many votes as he did was partly because this decision was made to hold back. Is somebody going to ask some questions on why they held back that investigation? And that, by the way, was part of the chatter that was going on at the time. So we had the whole dramatic thing of the police sort of raid on the house, all the stuff being taken away, the investigation going on. And I can remember in the run-up to the election, people saying, well, of course, you know, they're sitting on this thing until etc. etc. So, look, I don't know. None of us know the full facts. What we do know is that he has been convicted of pretty serious crimes. And politically, she has taken a further hit on the back of it. And of course, it is quite extraordinary that a party that has been quite a scandal ridden, that they just have won this pretty extraordinary, remarkable win to keep themselves in power. They're becoming one of the longest running governments in the world at a time when most governments are sort of tipping left, right and centre. So that I think the point you've raised there is the most interesting question. Were the police put under political pressure to delay something which they actually felt they had a strong enough case to take earlier than they did? I don't know. I don't know. Well done on the police, at least for following through. Because I mean, some people were saying when they were putting up the white things that this was political persecution, that he didn't do anything really wrong. And what they've proved is that he was absolutely conscious of what he was doing. He was literally putting in false receipts, claiming that he was buying from Amazon when he was buying a Jaguar. He was putting his watches against codes against the party office. I mean, he really knew. I mean, this isn't naivety. This is a guy who had been the chief executive of this party for a very long time, understood inside out what the legal rules were, what the accountancy rules were, and set about very carefully and thoughtfully working out how to steal money. Yeah. And on Clem's question, whether British politics is a scandal ridden and are we becoming the next Italy? As I told you, I was in Italy last week. And actually one of the questions I was asked is whether we Britain are becoming the, we are becoming the new Italy, not because of this, but because of the way that we keep changing our prime minister. Giorgio Maloney is now one of the longer serving Italian prime ministers. And there's a distinct possibility that we're going to be moving to our seventh within a decade before too long. What did you make of the Peter Mandelson stuff yesterday? I mean, the thing that I think is likely to be leapt on to do the most political damage is actually deeply unfair to Pat McFadden. But sometimes politics is not fair. It is Pat saying to Peter in one of their exchanges that every time he has a meeting with Labour MPs, they're basically saying who can we tax to spend more on welfare? Yeah, just again to just do a little explainer for people who aren't following this. Mandelson resigned really about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, resigned as the ambassador to Washington. And now there's been a request to get hold of all his emails and WhatsApps. They don't seem to have got everything, but they've got a lot of it. And the Trove has now been released. And what it's now beginning to reveal is Mandelson networking to try to get colleagues to vote for him to become chancellor of Oxford. Mandelson networking around his dealings with Murdoch, and him gossiping endlessly with his friends and former colleagues about what a rubbish job Keir Starmer seems to be doing. And of course, entrapped in this net are his friends who are writing back saying, yeah, it's a bit rubbish and number 10. One of the problems, though, the whole thing just to begin with is your bloody Freedom of Information Act. I mean, a lot of this stuff is low level gossip. This is not stuff that is central to the good ordering of government. It's not particularly really in the public interest to know that Pat McFadden thought that Keir Starmer was doing a good job. Would it have made any difference if he'd said it to him on the phone and it wasn't recorded? Would it have made a difference if he had a disappearing WhatsApp message? All MPs now, when you get a message from them, their messages disappear in seven days. They don't want this stuff being dragged forward. In fact, it's extraordinary that Mandelson and Pat McFadden weren't on disappearing messages. Why on earth should the, I mean, I guess it's fun for us as podcasters and journalists to get to see the internal gossip, but why on earth should we be entitled to see indiscreet private gossip between people or even worse, you know, we're being asked to look at Peter Kyle's what he asked chat GBT. I mean, imagine how embarrassing it would be if I had to release every conversation I have with a large language model, every WhatsApp I've sent. Why is none of this stuff private? And what on earth has it got to do with the question of the vetting? You say that we find it fun. I didn't find it fun at all. I found the whole thing made me feel a bit sick in the stomach. The minute I saw, I mean, Pat McFadden is one of the most discreet, sensible, intelligent political operators you will meet. Okay. And yet that will be of all of the 1500 pages, whatever it is of stuff that's been published, that is the one that the Tories and reform and others will try to land as this is what the Labour government really thinks. They don't care about your taxes. They just want to, and what Pat was actually saying was whenever the Labour MPs are saying, you know, we need to do this, we need to do this, they're not saying, well, where's the money coming from? So he's sitting there thinking, well, we can't do that because you've got to put taxes. So it's actually something that in context of a private conversation, as you say, wouldn't stir the feathers, rustle the feathers at all. But in this context, it does. What it says to me is actually that given how much was published, there wasn't that much to get the press terribly excited. And I think the other thing it shows, so if you think about this story, and it's going to get massive coverage again on Wednesday, when there's the debate, Darren Jones is going to be, he announced yesterday, there's going to be a full debate in the House of Commons, which means that stuff was going to happen with the health service isn't happening. So it just gives the sense of the government being a bit of a bit of a mess. But I do think it's interesting you take that observation, if I'd have made that point, I think people would have said, Oh, God, you just, you know, you just can't stand it when Labour's getting, if this was the choice, you'd be kicking them all over the place. But I think there is a real danger that if people can't have private conversations in some shape or form, and what happened, you know, when we brought in freedom of information, you know, I broadly think it was a good thing. Tony Blair thought it was an absolutely stupid thing. And he said in his memoirs, it was one of his biggest mistakes, because it stopped the ability sometimes to have frank conversations. And it definitely led to a culture in some places where people were just writing stuff on post-its, which is nuts, you should be able to have those discussions. But I think what this showed is that ultimately, there are two reasons why this has caused such political damage. One is Keir Starmer made an appointment that now he knows he shouldn't have made. And the second is that the Jeffrey Epstein connection is so sort of toxic. The other thing that came through to me is how little Jeffrey Epstein appears at all, which says to me, nobody's really saying, hold on a minute, there's a very good letter from Ollie Robbins in there, by the way, where Ollie Robbins who, you know, lost his job over this thing, Ollie Robbins is actually saying to Peter Mandelson, he is saying, hold on a minute, what about these Epstein connections? But there's not enough of that driving through the narrative. And you're right, what it says about Peter Mandelson is, you know, this is not breaking news, is that Peter spent and spends a lot of time networking, looking after his own ambitions, as it were. And it is crazy to think that he thought he could be both Ambassador to Washington, and Chancellor of Oxford and that he was still lobbying. Yeah, incredible. I mean, absolutely incredible. But I think both with this and the other big WhatsApp trove revelation was around Boris Johnson, COVID, Dominic Cummings, Matt Hancock, which we went through on the podcast. These things will be interesting for historians, for anthropologists of government, it gives you a very unique glimpse into the private thoughts of people that we've never had before. So you know, if you're an analyst, it's a lovely thing to have. But none of it is really a surprise. I mean, the revelation that Pat McFadden and Peter Mandelson think that Keir Starmer isn't very good at communicating doesn't have a very clear policy and that the Labour Party has been taken hostage by left wing backbenchers who don't care too much about where the money's coming from. It's not a big revelation. And the same is true with the Boris Johnson stuff. I mean, surprise, surprise, it turns out that everybody sitting around the cabinet tables, Boris Johnson thinks that Boris Johnson is dishonest, careless, inconsistent, irresponsible, and can't be trusted to navigate his way through COVID. Well, yeah, well, and we kind of know this about these people. I mean, a lot of journalists who were yesterday breathlessly reporting that, you know, it's extraordinary to think that Pat McFadden might say this in private and this in public. I suspect he said versions of those things to the journalists as well, because they sort of all bump into each other, they're chatting the whole time and what have you. But the other thing it shows, it shows that, you know, yes, Keir Starmer accepts he made a big mistake, but also it shows that he just does not get any luck. And let me tell you, Roy, you know, for the last three years, you and I have done this event in Leeds for UK Reef, the investment infrastructure and real estate conference. I did it on my own last week, because you were away, or the week before. And I did one of my show of hands with them. And I want you to guess what the result was. I said, do you think Keir Starmer should stay or go? What do you think the result was? You know, the audience, because you've been there several times. Yeah, and it's the same audience that last year was pretty uninspired by the Labour government and pretty dismal about the whole thing. I bet what's happened now is they've reverted to thinking Keir Starmer should stay. They've got to cling to nurse for fear of something worse. Well, you're right. The result was 85% stay, 15% go. I was talking to Harriet Harman the other day, she was down at the Hay Book Festival. So that'd be quite a sort of well informed, broadly middle class audience, I think, probably quite, you know, Lib Dem-y, quite Tory in some respects as well, maybe. She said there were 600 people. And she asked them the same question. And 12 said he should go. I mentioned in the main episode that when I was in Budapest for the Champions League final, we had quite a lot of political discussions. There's a similar thing there, people saying, why are they getting rid of him? He's not great. He's not terrible. He's not like, he's not evil. Is it because they think is it sympathy now? Or is it what is it? Well, I think it's going back to your central point, isn't it? That when we had this argument in the first place, which is that, of course, it's a risk. Now, my view is that, you know, he's like a manager of a football club, who's never going to actually in the end, win the championship. So you might as well spin the dice, get rid of him and try someone else. The other view is perfectly reasonable, which is, well, listen, none of the other candidates seem very good. And what happens, we end up being even worse off than we are now. So it's a question. It's a question of how optimistic you're feeling. My view is, listen, I don't think Kiyosama can lead them into the next election. I don't think he's the prime minister that's really going to be able to transform the country. So however horrible the other options are, you know, my analogy is, you know, you're running into the Titanic, into the icebergs, and we're arguing about whether the lifeboats are going to be any good. I don't know whether the lifeboats are going to be good. We can't stay on the ship, right? But at the moment, I think when they see the other candidates, people are far from confident that Andy Burnham or Wes Streeting is going to be an improvement. I wonder though, I wonder, because, you know, look, I can see Tony Blair's anxieties, his anxieties are that Wes Streeting is talking about stuff that certainly for me as a pro business centre right guy, I'm a bit worried about. I don't like him suddenly saying he's going to put capital gains tax up to the same level of income tax. I think Blair's right to say people have looked at that and passed and rejected it for good reasons. And I think some of the wealth tax is a bit dubious and all that kind of thing. On the other hand, it's difficult for me not to believe that Burnham's got a certain vim charisma, and he's really grown in this role of Mayor of Greater Manchester, and he will bring something to the job that Starmer hasn't got. I was thinking yesterday, so buried in, I can't even remember where I saw it, but it wasn't sort of big on the news anywhere. But two stories yesterday, which in a normal day, I think, would at least have got some coverage that suggested the Labour government's doing stuff. That was several train companies that are now in public ownership, as promised. And also the UK government winning this case against Rwanda saving 100 million quid out of the madness of Johnson's crazy scheme that Rwanda said it was owed. So this is what I meant when I said in the main episode that Keir Starmer's essay or his substack in response to Tony Blair, he actually listed a lot of things. And even I, who follows it quite closely, when you put it together, they've done more than they get credit for, but they don't get credit because there's no, one, there's no real communication around it. And secondly, they just seem to sort of, you know, limp from scandal to scandal, problem to problem. This case being a case in point. Peter Mandelson, big news yesterday, and Peter Mandelson is going to be big news again on Wednesday when they have the Commons debate. And just while we've been talking about scandal, Rory, reform, funding of reform. We got some great feedback on the first part of the series that we're doing. This is a series that we're doing in conjunction with The Observer on where the money comes from that flows into Nigel Farage and reform's coffers. And I think it's time that the country took it a bit more seriously than it currently does. And it's a great series, and I'm loving some of the stuff that people are finding out about reforms finances. Episode two on Friday. So just go to therestorspolitics.com in order to sign up and follow up on our reporting on reforms finances. Listen, there's one thing I'm going to be very cheeky and do a plug here, and I'm not going to try to connect it too closely, but we're not doing so many live shows this year. There is a live show which people have kindly signed up to, and you've just done UK Reef. But I forgot to mention, and I want to mention that if people would like to have a chance to engage live with me, at least 13th September, Dominion Theatre, London, 15th September, Richmond Theatre, London, I'm doing two live shows on politics, which could be fun. So apologies for the plug. But if you're interested, 13th, 15th September, I'm doing it with Fane. Sorry, and presumably you're doing that because you want to promote a book as opposed to promote the podcast. Is that what you're telling me? Because I want to promote my book on politics in Cumbria and talk about it. Okay, excellent. You'd be, I would, of course, obviously love to have you on stage, but I think it's a bit cheeky to ask you on stage to promote my book. Yeah, well, I'm sure you'll be able to sell the tickets without any problem whatsoever. But if you do need any help at any time, then... Thank you. I really appreciate it. Quick break, and then we'll come back from the break. And we've got some great stuff to get into. We've got your trips to Hungary, some Middle Eastern trips, and the best person we've ever shaken hands with. So see you after the break. See you soon. It's nearly that time, everyone. The rest is football. We'll be on Netflix every day for the world's biggest tournament. Join myself, Alan and Micah for daily debates, unfiltered takes, and the most special of guests, all from the heart of New York City. Yeah, that's right. We're excited, too. See you soon. This is a paid advertisement for BetterHelp. Look, we tend to think about summer in really idyllic terms. They can have visions of sunshine and holidays and maybe even a bit of barbecuing. But in reality, summer can, like many other parts of the year, be a very stressful time. There's the frantic pressure, could be a social calendar, could be trying to get out in as many sunny days as possible, juggling childcare with a full-time job. And that's why it's crucial to look after yourself. But in the core of all of this, BetterHelp can be useful. BetterHelp are qualified therapists. They help you understand your needs, set boundaries, so summer can feel a little lighter. It's all very straightforward. They do the initial matching work for you based on a short questionnaire. So you get straight to the part that matters. You don't have to say yes to everything this summer. Find support in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash restpolitics. That's better. h-e-l-p.com slash restpolitics. This episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. So let's talk AI. People are starting to find out that though it's supposed to handle the parts of the job you hate, it doesn't actually do that. Instead, it sort of describes them, maybe suggests what to do about them, and then leaves you to do it. Which isn't really helpful. It feels a bit like homework. However, ServiceNow's AI specialists are different. They're not a tool. Think of them as digital teammates who actually do the work from start to finish. Cases get resolved, requests get processed, loops get closed, and most importantly, there's no extra work for you. And then when you can truly delegate to AI, you can get back to the work only you can do. The work that requires a human being with ideas, judgment, a pulse. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.co.uk. That's servicenow.co.uk. Welcome back to the rest of Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alastair Campbell. And a question here from Sanjith. Why have American left-wing YouTubers Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur been banned from the UK and do you agree? My answer is I don't know and no, I don't agree. It is a bit of a problem that we don't really know. I mean, it's really interesting for freedom of speech and all this kind of stuff. I mean, I think what we're beginning to see is legislation which in the past was really targeted at terrorists. I mean, so, you know, post 9-11, the government did intervene to prevent hate preachers coming to the UK who they thought would actually genuinely increase the risks of terrorism. But American citizens who, yes, admittedly, are very critical of Israel and its actions in Gaza, but being banned from coming in. And, you know, what would that mean for you and me? I mean, what happens if we go to the US and the Trump administration decides that we're left-wing YouTubers and we should be banned from the US? I mean, what kind of countries are we creating and who gets to determine this and what are the grounds for it? And is it explained transparently? Is the suggestion that these individuals are anti-Semitic and who's making that case? Is it a legal case? Some ministers making it or is it just happening behind closed doors? Well, there's this general phrase, you know, not conducive to the public good. And I am guessing, but I don't know, I am guessing that the judgment is that they are anti-Semites and that they might therefore be here to spread anti-Semitism. Now, they deny that. What they are definitely is very anti-the Israeli government. But I'm very anti-the Israeli government. You're very anti-the Israeli government because they do terrible things and they continue to do terrible things, not least in the last 24 hours in Lebanon. The circumstances in Gaza continue to be absolutely terrible. We talked last week about Ben Gavir and the awfulness of the way that he was treating people who were trying to get that flotilla that was trying to get aid to Gaza. Now, I don't know, I don't know much about these guys at all. There's no doubt, sorry, just so that to be fair, so that we can understand the problem that the government's facing. I mean, I think it was wrong to ban them, but to explain why the government's banning them, it's these guys, some are on record saying Hamas is a thousand times better than Israel. And other ones had to apologize for saying the United States deserve 9-11, etc. So the question is, though, are we treating people in these debates around the world in the same way, right? So how are we treating Israeli politicians who say that Palestinians don't deserve to get food? Exactly. And what is the principle here? I mean, I think, you know, one can think these people are unpleasant, regrettable, saying horrible things. What's the line between that, freedom of speech and banning someone from entering? Because certainly J.D. Vance is, you know, I'm not quite saying that kind of stuff, but he said a lot of stuff that I find pretty disturbing. Donald Trump has definitely said stuff that I find deeply disturbing. So what are the categories? And I think this is quite important for democracy to decide where we draw the lines on these, because traditionally, I think we tended to say, we can put up, particularly with YouTubers, influencers, comedians saying pretty outrageous and disgusting things, we can condemn them, we can be horrified by them, but we don't actually ban them from entering the United Kingdom. Well, Elon Musk appeared, admittedly by video, appeared at last year's Tommy Robinson rally. Okay. Saying there was going to be civil war. Correct. And that we needed to fight, fight, fight. Nobody's going to ban him coming to the UK, are they? Well, they should think about it because his influence on our politics and our debate is far greater than these guys. And added to which, the reason why I think it was, look, unless there's something we don't know, in which case they should explain it. These guys have now got a far bigger platform, including into the British political debate. I mean, I was going through social media last night, they were popping up every two minutes. One of them was at the airport explaining he can't believe this, this is how oppression starts. Then Jeremy Corbyn weighed in, Zak Polanski weighed in. This is actually for the South by Southwest conference, which I was invited to speak at on a panel on mental health, but I can't go because I'm not going to be here. But it's like they've ventilated the platform. And I just, I think unless you explain this and your point about, you know, where you draw the line, I think one of the worst things about this is it does allow people to say that Israel gets treated differently. And so the guy that he was, the uncle, this is an uncle and a nephew, and the uncle was standing at the airport saying, what I find most extraordinary about this is that it's another government persuading your government, the British government, to stop somebody from another country coming in. Now, we don't know that that's the case, but you can see why he might say that, because it is the Israel-Gaza comments that they've made in the past that prevented them coming in. I think the best and strongest articulation of the problem is actually made by a guy called Aaron Turr, who is the director of a big US nonprofit on public advocacy. He says it's one thing to exclude someone who poses a genuine security threat, or intends to engage in unlawful activity. So did these guys pose a genuine terrorist threat? Were they going to engage in unlawful activity? But if the government's decision was based purely on these individuals' views, then that should concern anyone who values freedom of expression. This guy, one of them said that, you know, America deserved 9-11. As you say, they made some very offensive comments about October 7th about equating Israel with Hamas, etc. This, I think, is where we have a problem, because I can't, I can think, I hate doing whataboutery, and I'm not going to do it, but I can think of quite a lot. Well, I guess I did it with Musk. I can think of quite a lot of whataboutery points that I could make from a different political perspective. So there has to be a proper explanation of the principles, and I don't think we had that in the communication yesterday, added to which the government, in a sense, allowed them to control the means of communication. They were the ones who were explaining what was going on. So I think, all in all, I think this is a bit of a bit of an end goal. Okay, next question. Nat from Swindon. This is for you, Alastair. What's going on in Hungary? You've just been in Hungary, just seen the Magyars going after the oligarchs, including with the Welsh text. Did you find out how to pronounce the leader's name, incidentally, on your Hungarian trip? Well, I asked several people. And, you know, you've been with me when we're traveling around. I do tend to talk to anybody I meet about, you know, what's going on in politics, and what you think, because it was a very interesting time to do that. In answer to your question, the closest I could get, I think, is Magyar. Magyar. Very good. Very good. And what did I find out? Well, I'll tell you the first thing that was, I'd forgotten just how beautiful Budapest is. It really is a beautiful city. It was very nice to seeing the European flags. They really have put out a lot of European flags. And the other thing that I saw were a lot of defaced posters. And I see that on this wealth tax proposal that Magyar is coming out with, and he's targeting people who have made a lot of money on the Orbán, in his view, you know, in very dubious circumstances. But one of the people who's complaining is the guy who owns a lot of the billboards, because he was getting loads of money from the government and from the Fidesz to plaster the place with billboards. And it is interesting just how many of them have been defaced. And they've covered up loads of them just announcing that Arsenal and PSG were in town as if we didn't know that. I'll tell you the general message I got from talking to people was sceptical hope. I think almost everybody said, it's got to be better. It's got to be better. We're really glad he's gone. Really hope he goes after them. But we've just been scarred by too much. And so Magyar's got a lot on his plate. He really has. And he's making, he's getting progress on the European front. He's made progress on the Ukrainian front. But I didn't meet any sort of massive enthusiasts. I met a lot of people saying, a lot of people saying I voted for him. I bumped into a young couple at a cafe and was chatting to them. And they said, you know, they hadn't voted before, but they felt they had to get rid of Orbán. And it was like, let's see, let's see what he does. And they quite like the thing about him saying he's going to fly economy and he's going to take a lower salary and all that. They quite like that. But they know that ultimately it's about a totally different change of direction. But the place felt really good. And I have to say they organised the final really, really well. And the other thing, Rory, something, I know you're not a football fan, but I find it really strange that the Parisians rioted on the back of winning in Paris, sufficient to have 700 arrests. And we, not far from where I am now, have this incredible parade that really did show kind of North London at its best. It was so kind of multi-racial, multicultural. The vibe was amazing. Hundreds of thousands, somebody even said over a million, I don't know. But even I, much as a football fan, even I don't fully understand why you riot when you win. They've now done it two years in a row. I don't quite get it. Just quickly before we get on, I'd love to tell you about where I've been. I've just been, I just drove, in fact, from Amman in Jordan to Medina in Saudi Arabia and just got back yesterday. But tell us a little bit about Hong Kong, because when were you last there and what was your sense of it? Well, I've only ever been, I've only been twice, I think, since the handover. My sense of it was real change and real change. And I mean, if you remember back in 1997, when we were there for the handover, and it was one country, two systems, I think you can safely say it's one country, one system. You'd have very little sense of being in a place that was once run by the Brits. So it doesn't feel, for a visitor, very different to going to Shanghai or Beijing now. It doesn't feel like a very different system. It feels a bit different. It feels a little bit different. I mean, for example, you know, in the hotel, you could pick up Western newspapers. I think that I did speak to some journalists who said that the freedom of the press has been almost fundamentally eroded. There was a journalist who was jailed while we're there. He'd been stopped by the police who asked him for his identity. He said, the last time you stopped with my identity, you live streamed it and I was humiliated and I'm not doing it. He was jailed, I think, for five days or something. And the other thing that was interesting, I did talk to quite a few Hong Kong Chinese people, some of whom were at the conference that I was speaking at. And the thing they said was that they're as interested in politics as ever, but they don't talk about it very much. And I think that was interesting. The other thing, that big news that was there when I, big news in Hong Kong, Hong Kong has now overtaken Switzerland as the world's biggest wealth hub. My goodness, because the story, of course, after Covid was Hong Kong was really struggling. So, and of course, Hong Kong's economy is very bound up with the Chinese economy. I mean, your point about not talking about politics and arrests is also connected to the thing we did yesterday on AI and the Pope, which is the nature of the surveillance, authoritarian security states is now being shifted a lot by technology. So, if you walk down the streets in Shanghai, there are cameras absolutely everywhere. Everybody is conscious that their phones are picking up everything they say, that their digital identities, there is no privacy at all about their data identity and it's all filtered through. I was talking to a Chinese friend recently, who was explaining that they couldn't get a job in the Chinese government and what that felt like. I mean, you can't get a job in the Chinese government if you've done an undergraduate degree outside China, to give you a sense. I mean, you'd be totally Chinese, but if you go and do an undergraduate degree in Europe or the US, you can't work for the Chinese government. So, we're getting into a world where this very, very powerful country, which in many ways, of course, is demonstrating more predictability, more certainty, more long-term planning capacity, but it still is very much an authoritarian security state. And as we're getting into a world of AI, autonomous drones, robots, I don't know whether you saw it in Hong Kong, but I mean, if you go to Shanghai, Beijing at the moment, you are beginning to see robots in the streets. Oh, well, I saw quite a few robots. And of course, at the conference I was at, there was a whole thing on robotics, some of which were absolutely extraordinary. You know, not just playing chess, but also, you know, which you see everywhere, but there was a presentation on how robots were being used in the workplace and what they could do. All that was going on. And the thing about the surveillance is like, you know, I mean, coming through the airport was as efficient as I can recall. But you realize that, you know, they've got the facial recognition thing pretty much as soon as you're there and the gates are just opening when they put your thing in and through you go. One fabulous story, Roy, I went out for a run one day to find my tree of the day. And it's not a great place for trees because it's so, so built up. But I found this wonderful banyan tree and I posted it. And I got an email from a guy called William Atkinson, who told me this story complete with a message from his dad, who's a retired squadron leader called Richard Atkinson. And he told me the story that these two trees used to stand on the jetty at HMS Tamar. And HMS Tamar, just sorry to explain to listeners who aren't, was the British military headquarters. It's actually where my father worked. So we lived, when I was born in Hong Kong, we lived in a little building just behind it. And that's where he went to work every day. So it's called a ship, but it wasn't a ship. It was the defense headquarters of the British government. Yeah, exactly. It was the headquarters. And so this guy, the squadron leader Richard Atkinson, who's now in his 80s and not very well, but he said that he could see the trees from his office window in the UK headquarters. And he learned that the Chinese had no plans to preserve the tree. So he fought a campaign as a result of which one of the trees, the one that I pictured, without knowing this story, was dug up. It was put on a 200 ton barge. It was towed across the harbor and it was replanted along with all the props that were needed, new water supply brought in. And anyway, I spotted it and we'll put a picture in the newsletter. It's absolutely beautiful. Well, how wonderful, because the joke when I was growing up in Hong Kong is, if it moves, eat it. If it doesn't, redevelop it. But I'm glad to hear that this energy was going into the trees. Yeah, that's lovely. Well, this tree survived. So tell us, listen, you were allowed into something of a sacred Muslim site, weren't you? Yeah, yeah. I mean, firstly, an amazing trip. So we drove thousands of miles down through the desert, from Amman, through Aqaba, down to Medina. People watching Lawrence of Arabia will have a sense of that landscape. We went through Wadi Rum and, you know, people remember that 1962 movie, this is where Abu Tayyib comes down the hills. And it is absolutely extraordinary historically, because if Scotland is the very northern edge of the Roman Empire, this is the very southern edge of the Roman Empire. And this is basically where Rome ran out. We went from Petra, which, you know, people remember the rose red city half as old as time, these amazing rock cut cliffs, to the Saudi equivalent of that, which is hundreds of miles south in a place called Al Ullah, which was closed until pretty, almost impossible for foreigners to access because it's a pagan site dedicated to pagan idols. And the Saudi government, for many years, Saudis and Wahhabi Muslims saw this as a pretty horrendous, infidel site. It's now been turned into a tourist location, which you can visit. Not many tourists around either in Jordan or in Saudi at the moment. In fact, there haven't been many since the first strikes on Iran last July. Heat, unbelievable. But then as you say, we got down to Medina. And Medina is, along with Mecca, one of the two great sacred sites of Islam. This is where the Prophet Muhammad is buried. It's where this great mosque was. It's where many of the early caliphs were buried. And firstly, Medina has become a completely modern town. So one of the things the Saudis did, the Wahhabis did, is demolish all the historical buildings, all the historical tombs, because they thought it was idol worship to maintain these great, beautiful, early medieval tombs around the caliphs and built this new concrete city in this oasis. But actually, the center of it is actually very beautiful. The modern architecture is quite sympathetic. There are lovely colonnades. The area around the mosque is there to accommodate a million, two million pilgrims. And for the first time in, I think, 1400 years, it's possible for me as a non-Muslim to get right up to the edge of that mosque, right into the center of the Haram area. We didn't, Shatana and I, didn't see anybody else who were non-Muslims there. But everybody was very friendly towards us. In the past, we would have been approached by the police and pushed out. There would have been big signs saying no non-Muslims can enter. People would have shouted at us aggressively. So it's a real sign of how quickly Saudi Arabia is changing something that hasn't really changed in 1400 years. It's still, of course, quite conservative. I mean, other parts, you go to Riyadh, you can see women now beginning to uncover their heads and drive cars and drive Ubers. In Medina, women are still very much in black abayas. But it was right at the end of the Hajj. So this is the moment where, you know, it's one of the great obligations of the two billion Muslims in the world to travel. So they traveled to Mecca and then to Medina, and that was all happening as we were there. But don't forget, just connect back to China. It is also a surveillance security state. I mean, never underestimate that in democratic terms or in surveillance terms, in terms of cameras in your phones, Saudi, UAE are closer to China than people understand. You land at Dubai airport, do not be very surprised if your telephone is beginning to report on every single one of your movements. Do not be very surprised. You know, for example, there was a little, seems to have been, a whip around in one of the Shia mosques in Dubai to raise money for people affected by the US strikes on Iran. And almost immediately after, something like 8,000 Shia Pakistani Uber drivers were expelled from UAE. I mean, it's a country where the expatriates, and I was with some people who live in UAE. We went onto a beach, leaving our phones hundreds of yards behind with the wind blowing and the waves crashing. And they still were very, very reluctant to say anything critical UAE government, people in Jordan reluctant to say anything critical of the Saudi government. And we also, final thing, we drove through the middle of Neon. And Neon was this amazing lineal city that he was going to build that was going to cost $80 billion, which was going to run across the desert for 125 kilometers. It was going to be taller than the Empire States Building. The whole thing has been abandoned. I mean, it's completely abandoned. They spent colossal amount of money on architects, planning, etc. Probably good that it's been abandoned. But again, it's something that nobody's talking too openly about. Unlike HS2. On the surveillance, Fiona and I have been watching Peter Capaldi's new series, Criminal Record, which is a police drama. And it's fair to say the police in this one don't lack for surveillance and phone tracking technologies. So I think we've got a fair bit of it here. Rory, final question. This is from Ali. After your discussion last week on your most evil handshakes, slightly more positive one, who is the most angelic person you've ever shaken hands with? And I've got to say, we've got some fantastic, we asked people to send in, you know, their most evil, there was lots of sort of interesting things. We also had a poll of our listeners on Spotify, asking them if they would share your use of the word evil to describe Boris Johnson. Ooh, 38%. 38% said they would. 44% of listeners said they wouldn't. And 16% were unsure. So there we are. I was hoping it'd be 52, 48, but never mind. So who's the most magical hand you've shaken? Okay, a small footnote. My mother will kill me if I don't point out that my father shook Chairman Mao's hand. She wanted to get that on the record. Oh, that's cool. That's cool. Yeah. I did Fidel Castro's. Fidel Castro, there we are. Chairman Mao though, great leap forward, great famines. I mean, that's quite, quite mad. Would he have been your dad's most evil hand? Yes, I think so. Yeah, I think so. I think he'd probably most disturbed by shaking Chairman Mao's hand. So I think this is very cheesy, but I, and he won't like me saying this, but I have such admiration for Rowan Williams, our previous Archbishop of Canterbury. I think he is the most extraordinary man. I think personally, his ability to listen, his humility, his prose style, his writing, but also his sense of what matters, his sense of silence, of work, of human suffering, of human dignity. I mean, if I'm looking for a guy who, you know, somebody on speed dial that I would want to ask advice from on almost every aspect of my life, it would be Rowan Williams. There we are. Over to you. Wow. Wow. Let's get him on. Let's get him on. I'm sure he'd be happy to come on. Yeah. We've had Justin Welby, who's a very fine man, both Shane and his aunt. I really enjoyed thinking about this question. I was tempted to say Maradona, but I just don't think people would believe me. That great moral exemplar. Well, it is the hand of God. It's the hand of God. And it would definitely, if I'd shaken the hand of the Pope last week, I would have said the Pope. I have shaken Mother Teresa's hand, but I never fully bought into the Mother Teresa legend. I thought there was too much stuff going on in the margins that I probably wouldn't have liked. I have been thinking, because obviously we want David Attenborough to live forever, but if and when he goes, then there has to be a replacement national treasure. And my short list of two, I have shaken both their hands. That's Paul McCartney and Michael Palin. I think Paul McCartney, and he's got a new album out, Age Whatever He Is Now, absolutely amazing. And Michael Palin is one of the most successful, nicest people on the planet. But I'm afraid the winner has to be a politician, because this is the rest is politics. And it is Nelson Mandela. He is, without doubt, the most saintly hand I've chosen, even though he had non-saintly aspects to him. But yeah, I'm going for him. Which is also selected by the Pope. And just final thing for me, and then back to you. We talked a lot about the Pope's usurner, but the thing that we didn't register, which is maybe his most radical thing, is he says that the problem with the way that tech bros think about the world is they think that human beings can be endlessly perfected, that death is like a sort of bug in the system they can get rid of, that suffering and pain can be got rid of. And he says that he's all for alleviating suffering and pain, but that in the end, suffering pain is not just part of the human condition. It's actually what leads us to relationships, humility and love, that without suffering and pain and death, we wouldn't really have desires, we wouldn't really have love, we wouldn't really have empathy. And this magnificence of humanity is about our capacity for good, our capacity for evil, but also our capacity for suffering. Yeah. Well, I sort of wanged on so long about the Pope's brilliant encyclical that I didn't actually read out what was my favorite section. Oh, yeah. Go on. What was it? I'll read it. It's this, so-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, they do not possess a body, they do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean, nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations or bear responsibility. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce for, they lack the effective relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. And he said, even when machines excel in efficiency, a human face that asks to be gazed upon remains the center of our history. Oh, that's pretty good. Wish I'd written that. It's pretty good. Well, I'm not going to ruin it. Let's end on that. A human face to be gazed upon remains the center of our history. Excellent. See you next week. See you soon. Bye-bye. This episode is brought to you by Lloyd's Business and Commercial Banking. We hear a lot of talk in politics about stability, as Gordon Brown used to call it. But I think that word means different things to different people. To me, it does mean new labor. For me, I might be tempted to say Theresa May, but it doesn't matter whether you're a business, small business owner, or a government. Stability is never about avoiding change. It's about being prepared for change and embracing it with confidence. The latest change, of course, that affects a lot of people listening is making tax digital, which is reshaping how income tax is reported. Lloyd's is there to support making tax digital for income tax with a free HMRC-recognized accounting tool built into your online banking, giving you an easier way to manage your income, expenses, and stay compliant without all the stress. 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