579. Trump’s Public Execution Order and Burnham’s Brexit Intervention

Welcome to the rest of us politics with me Rory Stewart and with me Alastair Campbell and Rory we're going to talk lots about America lots about Saudi and Yemen and India and we will also have a discussion about our interview with Andy Burnham and the political consequences thereof which appear to have dominated life in the House of Commons yesterday. But let's kick off with your friend Donald Trump. Well it's been quite a week hasn't it? This is the week in which Donald Trump failed to win the Nobel Peace Prize and told Norway that there would be consequences. This is the week in which his Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has announced that he intends to hold a public execution making the United States one of very few countries along I think with Iran and Afghanistan that still wants to do public executions. This is the week in which Marco Rubio stood down in front of the Parthenon on Penix at the Acropolis and made a great claim for the superiority of Western civilization inviting Europe to join America in its civilizational project. And I think it's also the week in which we've seen again the extraordinary move of Trump to announce that diesel restrictions will be lifted on Putin after I think a 90-minute call with Putin massively helping the Russian economy making probably a much smaller contribution to the American economy ahead of the midterms seriously weakening Ukraine and when Zelensky complained saying well they should get rid of Zelensky and get another president in. So I'm interested in this because this is just a seven-day period and I think we're moving now from what might be called Trump derangement syndrome to Trump reality syndrome and really getting people to sit with what this is because one of the things that you and I often encounter when we talk to business people particularly American business people is that there is still a remarkable number of people out there wanting to be contrarian and saying he's not as bad as everyone makes out and it's all going to be fine and there's no reason to react in any radical way to this and I just would like us to sit with the last six days as a way of reminding people just how serious this is. Over to you. This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. Most energy companies are counting on you doing absolutely nothing, not questioning what you're paying, not switching, just letting your tariff roll on which is costing you hundreds of pounds every year. But the apathy goes deeper than our bills. We've almost given up on energy itself. We seem to all be accepting energy is expensive, the system's outdated, but that complacency is costing us. Fuse Energy does not accept that because the energy transition is not something that just happens somewhere else. Fuse is building an energy company which is designed to bring down the cost of energy and right now its tariffs are up to £100 below the Ofgem price cap. So switching isn't just about paying less, it's about expecting more from your energy company and it only takes you three minutes. Switch to Fuse at fuseenergy.com slash politics. Use the code politics and you'll get a free trip plus subscription allowing you to hear all the extraordinary members content that Alistair and I are now producing for you. Visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions. There's so much goes on in Trump land that sort of turns our heads. The other thing was fresh sanctions on the International Criminal Court. He was obviously very, very upset. Not only that he didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize, but it was given to a woman of colour from South Africa, whereas you know, if you're Donald Trump or Elon Musk, the only people to be concerned about there are the poor persecuted white South Africans. And this is a woman who has fought for justice, the rule of law and all of the things that he doesn't believe in. And then the other thing is this extraordinary story about members of his family who've been involved in this attempted interference with the elections in Bosnia. So there's so much stuff going on. Oh, and then the other one that I forgot was, of course, him coming out in favour of these young men as part of a university frat club who are being, some of whom are being pursued for rape charges because a woman that he now calls a dog is involved in the prosecution case against them. So I agree with you. I mean, I'm up in Scotland and I've just been talking to an event where there were Americans there as well as Europeans. And I think I find it impossible now to talk about Trump without really getting offended that we even have to talk about him so much because he's so poisonous, so damaging to so many of the things that I think most British people care about. And yet there he is. We're coming up to the midterms. The thing with the diesel, I mean, if he'd have done a deal with Canada, he could have got more diesel cheaper. But of course, Canada is an enemy because it doesn't want to play his silly 51st state game. The amount of diesel that he's actually getting out of Putin is, I think it will last about 14 hours in the American economy. It's not that big a deal. So you've sold out. You've upset the Indians because don't forget, it's not that long ago, Trump was sort of talking about sanctions on India because they were taking Russian diesel and helping keep the Russian economy afloat. So this is all this mad, crazy stuff. Just quickly, I mean, just while you're on a roll, and maybe you're about to say this, we were with Kellyanne Conway last week, who people will remember was Trump's campaign manager in 2016. And like many of his closest allies, the frequent appear on Fox News, in which she got really angry with both of us, and I think particularly with you for suggesting that Trump was not fully supportive of Ukraine and Zelensky and told this extraordinary story saying, you know, he told Putin where to get off and he'd been, you know, he'd been very supportive of Zelensky and Zelensky keeps saying nice things about him. So just sort of develop that for a bit and what you felt listening to Kellyanne Conway and that whole account from the Trump administration of them being pro-Ukraine. Well, at one point, she accused me of being Trump derangement syndrome level five. And I proudly said, no, I'm much worse than that. I'm at least level six or seven. It was a pretty, I find it like almost like a sort of out of body experience, because I thought we were talking about parallel universes. You know, just to give you one example, she was basically talking about the midterms. And she was saying that if the Republicans don't do very well, and by the way, Trump's always been underestimated. If they don't do very well, it's because they haven't used Trump enough. And they know that if they use Trump properly, it helps them. Okay. Get this Rory, 1% of Republican campaign materials in this election mentioned Trump. 20% of Democrat materials mentioned Trump. They know that he has become a problem. And yet you listen to her and everything that he says is right. Everything he does is good. And for her to sit there when we remember the way that Zelensky was treated by Vance and by by Trump, and the fact that he's met Putin so many times and Zelensky, she got very upset when I talked about Kushner and Whitkoff being these clowns who go and do their own deals rather than make progress on Iran and Ukraine. But she talked, she talks of Trump like he's some kind of God. And of course, there are people who think of him in those terms. But I don't think you and I were amongst them. You were very polite, though, Rory, and at one point, you were having to calm me down a little bit. You kept whispering on the platform, talk about France, talk about France. Oh, dearie me. Listen, maybe the thing that sat with me most amongst all these things was that speech in front of the Acropolis, in front of the Parthenon given by Marco Rubio. And it's weird saying that given what's happening, because just to develop a couple of points you made, you reminded us about the International Criminal Court. What's interesting about the International Criminal Court is that Trump has made it clear that this is purely because they went after Netanyahu. In fact, he says this in a press conference where Rubio was trying to say it's about a broader international principle. And Trump interrupts the Secretary of State and says, no, no, no, he's being a bit fancy here. This is about one thing and one thing only. It's about the fact that they're going after Netanyahu. He began his sanctions against the International Criminal Court some months ago. And what happened is people lost access to their Google accounts and their Microsoft accounts. And then one of the judges lost access to their bank accounts. And this was a really interesting moment because what happened is the US President said, signaled that he thought these were unfriendly people, and the companies fell over themselves to disable the access. And one of those companies had just made a statement reassuring Europeans that if they bought their products, they had full sovereign control and there was no way the United States could disable. And this is important, right, because we're building our entire economies on cloud computing, on Google, on Microsoft. And what we found with the International Criminal Court is that first moment where America is weaponizing our dependency on cloud computing and basic software against European allies, and in this case, a big international institution, right? This is not how this started. This started back in the day. And I did this, in fact, for people who've been listening to the miniseries. I did a long bit with Ed Fishman, which I thought was fascinating on the beginning of the story of America weaponizing this stuff, which begins with 9-11 and Iran and how do you chase down terrorists and unfriendly states? But it's the moment at which it turns against us. So I thought that was really interesting. And I'm sorry, I didn't talk about it enough. And it goes to everything that we are going to go on and talk about in terms of middle powers and how Andy Burnham as a new prime minister gets any kind of sovereign independence for Britain, if in the end, the US president is saying that almost everything we've built on American platforms can be switched off at will. And of course, you've made the same point with Ukraine, because he's threatening to turn off the satellites again, threatening to suspend the ability of Europe to even purchase weapons for Ukraine. I mean, remember, again, this is what Kellyanne Conway didn't want to take on board, which is America has stopped paying, stopped $50 billion of payments. So it's European money paying for all this stuff. But America is still somehow managing to dominate a loss of the command and control from places like Germany, where American generals are overseeing a huge amount of the targeting and things with Europe paying for it all. But it's the Athens speech that worried me most. Did you see the Athens speech? Yes, I did. Yes, I did. I did. And I look, I agree with your assessment of it. I sometimes I actually said at this event, I was at this morning, I look at, I mean, JD Vance, I think we've always kind of known what he is. I look at Marco Rubio. And I just, I sort of wonder where his soul has gone. Um, I thought, and that speech fitted very much into the frame of European civilizational erasure. It was essentially saying, look, here I am in Europe, you guys used to be really good at stuff. You had the Greeks and you had the Romans and Europe was pretty cool for a while. But let's get with the program. It's all about us now. And you're not really very smart anymore. That was kind of, you know, if I, if I drill down into the, into the rhetoric, and just on the, um, this diesel situation. So he criticizes Zelensky for hitting Russian oil install a diesel installations much more than he ever does Putin for dropping the bombs left, right and central civilian infrastructure and on kids and on hospitals. It was one on kindergarten the other day. I mean, maybe let's come back to, um, America and talk about the midterms, but maybe this is the place to talk about the interview with Andy Burnham, because I found this, you know, he clearly, I don't know what your impression was of the interview overall. But my sense was that that we didn't sort of press him on this Russia thing. It wasn't as if I was saying as I might have done, come on, Andy, for God's sake, call it out for what it is. This was the bloody Russians getting involved. They were manipulating the media left, right and center Farage and Aaron Banks, they were right at the heart of all this, etc, etc. He I think, as part of what is clearly I think, a plan to get the country re re litigating or re debating Britain's relationship with Europe. He put this out there. And the way that I mean, for Johnson, for Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, both to be bleating about Brexit and lies in the same sentence is quite a thing. Given that, you know, they told more than anybody. Yeah, just just to bring listeners in. This was our interview with Andy Burnham went out on leading. It was a really I mean, I'd love people to listen. Shoshana felt that he came across very, very well. I mean, she just began by saying what a relief it was to hear someone who sounded like a human. She thought maybe some of the answers around AI and things were a bit duller and quite got that. But basically, she had a very, very warm sense of him. But the reason it's gone really viral, I mean, this is this is the biggest thing we've done in some time, right? Since Al Shara. We mentioned Pierre in the House of Commons, where both Kemi Badenoch and Andy Burnham were quoting the rest of his politics and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is partly because of this big, big claim that there is evidence that Russia was involved in the Brexit referendum, which is something that your friend Carol Curwalla has been saying for some time. That's one of her campaigns Absolutely. And they squeal like hell when you even sort of mention it. And what's even funnier is that they they use a combination of the Kremlin line. This is all a lie. We don't interfere. And the Trump line, which is it's the Russia hoax. So Nigel Farage comes brings them together and says, Andy Burnham's a liar. This is the Russia hoax. Why do when Andy Burnham stands up at the United Nations General Assembly and says that Russia spends over a billion dollars a year on manipulation of information in democratic countries? Why do they do that? They've got hospitals they need to service. They've got roads they need to build. They've got an economy needs to run. They've got a war they need to pay for. They do it because it fits their strategic purpose, which is trying to divide Europe, break Europe apart. And the tragedy for the period we're living through is that Trump's playing the same game. But I thought it was very deliberate. And it's interesting you mentioned Shoshana. Fiona said that she said her reaction was just great to hear somebody being a bit bold about this stuff, not being on the back foot the whole time. And I'm just so relieved that we're no longer pretending that there's any attempt to quote make Brexit work. You can you can live with it, and we have to live with it for now. But you can't make it work in the way that the liars who gave it to us said that they would. It's interesting also that we got a lot of coverage on the fact that in the interview, he said that he thought that the live execution was abhorrent. And I was thinking about that, because Iran and Afghanistan have live executions, but the Taliban live executions feel more as though it's an attempt to reimagine an early medieval world. I mean, that's people literally gathering a crowd in the way that you would have done in medieval England around an execution. When Pete Hegseth does it, it's the cruelty of the modern social media. I mean, he's implying that this is going to be live streamed. And something that could be seen, a man in a wheelchair being shot by 11 or 12 men, presumably in a firing squad, live streamed and presumably seen by hundreds of millions of people as the snuff movie. Yeah. So I'm interested in that also, because in trying to pin down what the problem is in being too reliant on the United States, which is an argument we keep having, and it was something that we were pushing into with Andy Burnham. And he was slightly, I think, still avoiding, he's not prepared to quite be as clear as Carney is about the fact that it's broken, and we have a problem, and we really need an intentional project to get away from this. But one of the things that we have to keep using these examples to illustrate is it's not just about America doing really big damaging things. It's more a style often of humiliation, bullying, cruelty. So there's the big stuff, right? We're going to try to take Greenland from you, or we're going to cut off the satellite access to Ukraine, or we're going to lift Russian diesel. But there's just the continual abuse, humiliation, for example, the video that Trump made the AI video of him beating up Carney on an ice hockey pitch with Carney, begging for mercy, and now this live streaming of a public execution. And so in working out why we need to now separate ourselves more from the United States, it's partly about that we have to begin to separate ourselves from a country that can do that. I mean, that's so far beyond our disagreement with the United States being that we didn't have the death penalty and they did. This is getting into a different world of indignity. Yeah, it took, I said that we didn't sort of push him on Brexit. He came up with the Russian stuff. But actually, on the Trump and the hex of execution, that was a little bit sort of kind of second, third time of trying, he said, you know, I find it abhorrent. If you think about the other things that he said, I think that even those things that he said on on Europe, I think would not necessarily have been fed back to Washington with sort of, you know, roses and whistles and bells. So I think what he's doing, I think what Mark Carney is doing is both showing and telling that there is a totally different world, and we're going to have to deal with it. I think what Andy Burnham is at the stage at the moment is showing and not so much telling. But there is, I think, quite a lot quite a lot of show. We should just say, we started and ended the interview with a mention of Steve Rotherham and the series we did on becoming Burnham, the miniseries. I really think that is a both the book they wrote together, but also that series with Steve Rotherham, I think they will be useful resources about Andy Burnham as we go through his premiership, because I think Steve Rotherham said so many interesting things that we're now seeing play out. So all you have to do is become a member at therestispolitics.com. Just on the on the midterms, Rory, I've been looking at the betting markets and the polls. So back in July, you and I said that we agreed that the Democrats were almost certainly going to win the House and that to win the Senate was going to be a very tough fight because they're going to have to win five of these seven states, Alaska, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Maine and Iowa. That was the conventional wisdom three months ago, wasn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And as things stand on the current polling, the Democrats are leading in all seven. And in the betting markets, the betting markets, they're doing not quite as well as in the polls. I don't know what that reveals. But in the betting markets, they're clear favorites like clear 70 percent, 65 percent, that sort of thing in six out of seven. And the only one where they're behind is Iowa, where they're slight underdogs on the betting, but they are ahead in the polls. So just a North Carolina, the polls, 95 percent, the betting markets, 95 percent. In Texas, the polls, 70 percent, the betting markets, 60 percent. And Texas, Texas, I mean, Texas, the state, the obvious is huge. I mean, that's, you know, real deep, deep Republican territory. Well, Trump had a lead in Texas in 2024 of 14 points. He had 13 in Alaska, he had 13 in Iowa, he had 11 in Ohio. And the other thing that's happening, I mean, Trump went to some very strange places on his little tour. He went to some of the most Republican states in America. Now, was that because the candidates in the in the marginal states were saying, please don't come here, please make sure he goes to, you know, somewhere where we're never, ever going to lose. But people are now talking about Kansas and Nebraska as being kind of within range, as it were, which would be. Now, I don't think we should get too excited, because as you may recall, Rory, there were people who were absolutely nailed on convinced that Trump was not going to win. Absolutely. If there's a big, big lesson for me in any of this, it's that trusting the polls or even the betting markets is pretty dangerous in the modern world going up to any election, because it changes very quickly. But it's worth mentioning that I'm going to be going with the team to cover the midterms in the states. So, I'll be in Clinton, Ohio and in the loss of the more rural areas. So, in order to compensate for my over focus on the cities, I'm going to be back in the rural Midwest of America trying to cover some of these marginal seats. So, I'll be there from next week. That's good. I would, of course, be with you, but I'm sticking to my not going to America during the four years of the second term. Just on Nate Silver, the guy who everybody talks about as being the sort of, you know, the one who's kind of, I don't know whether his record bears up the sort of sense of this being the sort of the guru. It wasn't so clear on the last one. I don't know. He gave us the very, it was not very helpful towards those of us that were not sure whether Trump was going to win. Yeah, yeah. But on this one, he has got Democratic control of the House, 92.9%. That's up from 85 at the start of August. And the Senate, 73.8, which he had at 50-50 on September the 6th. And Trump's ratings, Rory, they're just, they're in the tank. I mean, Kellyanne Conway talking about him as though he's this amazingly popular and we're all underestimating him and blah, blah, blah. But, you know, we have to, we have to assume that these polls, when they say to people, do you approve or disapprove? And people tend historically, even if they didn't vote for president, they tend to lean towards giving them the benefit of the doubt. He has got the lowest ratings now since ratings began. And right across the issue of the economy, immigration or trade or Iran. So he's in trouble. Rejoice. He's in trouble, which brings me back to Rubia, because the temptation will be to say, as people said after the first Trump, that the guy's finished, he's going, he's not standing again, thank goodness. And we can all go back to normal with the United States. So I think it's worth looking at JD Vance and Rubio, who are two of the leading contenders to replace Trump as president to show what United States could be like after Trump. And it's worth looking at that part of the speech a little bit, because it's a speech which will have fooled and charmed some listeners, because it's quite complementary towards Europe. As you say, the undercurrent of it is actually slightly strange. The undercurrent of it is essentially to say, Greek civilization is about greatness. Greek civilization is about heroism. Greek civilization is about excellence. Greek civilization is against mediocrity. And it's about knowing that when we're great, we deserve it. And the general sense is America in his vision is really, really kind of great in that sense, big, kind of muscular, successful, and we deserve our place in the world. And the implication was that if Europe pulls its socks up and becomes kind of grand and great and competitive, and more like Trump's America, then they might be allowed to join the club and come along. And this is the kind of offer that Rubio is making. It is the most astonishing speech, I mean, because it is so much more radical in terms of its vision of the world than I think people understand. It's very, very, very familiar, unfortunately, to people like me, because it's essentially the sort of speech that a Victorian headmaster made to English public schoolboys going out to govern the empire. It's a speech, and I think it's lifted from that stuff, because the genealogy goes from Victorian empire to people like Theodore Roosevelt writing in the late 1890s. And it's absolutely, we are the heirs of Achilles, we're the heirs of the ancient Greeks, we are the great muscular Christians going out to rule the world. And he, you know, he cites Cortes, the conquistador in Spain, as you know, one of these great figures, Christopher Columbus, these kind of people. And the story that the British told themselves the 19th century, which is the story Rubio is repeating, is that, you know, Britain had a right to rule the world, because we know we were kind of excellent and advanced and civilized, and other people should sort of accept that we deserve our greatness and put up with our control. Now, this was not the American Republican tradition, which is why this is so sinister, because it sounds much more like empires, the 19th century sounds much more like justifications of slavery sounds much more like some of the language of the 30s and 40s. The American Republican tradition was completely different. I mean, Kennedy famously in his inaugural doesn't say, you know, there are great civilizations, and by implication, barbarians, he says, you remember, he says, we all breathe the same air. We all have children. We're all mortal, right? He's trying to make this universal. Clinton, in his inaugural is all about shared global goods. Eisenhower is all about warning people about the dangers of American power. John Quincy Adams would have said, and this is right back in the 1820s, would have said to someone like Rubio, you know, the danger is America could become the most powerful mistress of the world, but lose control of itself, right? I mean, it's the corruption of power. And it's really troubling, really, really troubling, because it keeps coming back to the central theme, which I think a lot of the episode today is about, which is that we are increasingly in an abusive, coercive relationship with somebody or a culture expressed through the Republican Party that appears to want to say their way or the highway, they're the civilization, the other people, barbarians, and have actually lost all history. I mean, their description, the whole description that Rubio gives is not really a description of an ancient Greek. Aristotle would be horrified by this stuff. It's actually a description of an ancient Iranian, an ancient Persian, right? They were the people who were all about, you know, riding horses, shooting bows, speaking truth, warrior people. Anyway, I wonder, look, what what happens post Trump is fascinating. But I can't work out the extent to which Vance and Rubio, who, as you say, are right up there as sort of potential leading potential successors, as the as the Republican nominee. I can't work out whether they're trying to stay close to Trump or in certain ways, depart from him. It was very interesting that Vance and whether this is his Catholicism or his worries about the Catholic vote or whatever, but he didn't sound very keen about this public execution. He said he would not be watching it. He sort of gave an indication that he thought that Peter Hexler was shooting from the hip and he should have kept his mouth shut. Rubio's speech, I felt in front of the parliament, I felt was much closer to something that he would think, even though he's a bit too airy fairy for Trump, that actually if Trump was watching TV and we've talked to people in the administration before, he said, as you just got to understand, these guys operate on the assumption that Trump might see them on television. OK, and he would have thought this is much more in kind of Trump territory. I can't help thinking there must be a natural law of political gravity that says that who actually eventually emerges won't be from the Trump orbit. I think the problem, though, for the rest of us is that it's not clear that there is a big constituency anymore for the old American vision of rules and alliances in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, really. I'm beginning to think that that whole world from the Second World War through to 2016 will begin to seem like a strange exception in which Republicans and Democrats together assumed that there were Western alliances, that Canada was a friend, Russia was an enemy, that their job was to try to underpin NATO or United Nations institutions, keep open the sea lanes, and that they needed to accept restraints on their power and talk about universal values and say that they're not just there for American power, they're there for helping other people. Because I think there's the Republican version that we're seeing, and it's not just Vance and Rubio. I mean, Elbridge Colby has said about the middle powers, it's a complete waste of time. They're never going to be able to do it, and they don't have the resources to do it, which is essentially, I keep coming back to this, it's the abusive spouse saying, I can humiliate you and abuse you, but what are you going to do about it? You're not going to be able to, what are you going to do, get your own house, get your own job? I mean, it's this very contemptuous attitude. But from the left, it will be different. From the left, it might be isolationism driven by guilt, driven by a sense that America just makes everything worse, given by a sense that they have priorities at home. But none of this adds up to providing a reliable alliance structure for the future, which is why getting with the Carney program and trying to work out how you talk about that, how you design for that, how you get to that, and how difficult that is, because you're doing it in the face of, I mean, if I continue with my abusive spouse analogy, in the face of an abusive spouse, that's going to make it as difficult as possible for you to leave that house. Your point about whether the Republican Party is absolutely locked into this worldview, and whether the Democratic Party might be closer to it than we might think. The only thing I'll say about the latter is that it is interesting to me how some of the real leading lights, the better campaigners, really are focused on the nature of the governance, on the corruption, on the values. I think there's definitely a spark still there for that kind of thing. And also, particularly in relation to Ukraine, I think the internationalism. But also on the Republican side, I think you're absolutely right. I've got a friend in the States who regularly sends me extracts from Ronald Reagan's speeches. Now, Ronald Reagan, who was, you know, Thatcher's best buddy, and in our world, very much seen on the right of the political scale across the world. And the one that this friend of mine sent me this week was this one. I don't know where the speech was made. Oh, it was in 1979, before he became, in one of the campaigns. And he said this, the key to our future security lies in Canada and Mexico becoming much stronger than they are today. It's time to stop treating our nearest neighbours as foreigners. So there's a right-wing Republican presidential candidate who becomes president saying, essentially, Canada, Mexico, friends. Trump is doing the exact opposite. And if you talk to people like Kellyanne Conway, people who are really in the kind of MAGA Trump world, they do now speak of traditional friends as though they were enemies and traditional enemies as though they were friends. It's a very, very, very strange world. To be fair, she's quite strong in Ukraine. To be fair to her, she's quite strong in Ukraine. You can't build alliances around that, because even if you were right that the Democrats might come in and be more progressive and embrace progressive governments in Europe, the Republicans could still come in four years later and switch and start embracing the AFDs, the world and the Farages as well. So once you've seen it, you can't unsee it. I mean, the point about the post-war order was that the values were remarkably stable. I mean, America restrained itself in relation to Europe and Canada, particularly from 1945 onwards, and essentially said, we're not going to interfere in their internal politics. We're going to be generous to them. We're going to treat these people as though they're part of our alliance. Now, that doesn't mean the United States wasn't frequently very, very brutal and intrusive in places like Latin America, which, again, is a weird thing going on with Rubio, who, of course, is of Cuban ancestry. I mean, it's very strange for somebody whose family comes from Latin America to be celebrating this kind of vision of American civilization in which the Latin Americans were usually the barbarians or celebrating Cortes and the conquistador, because who's on the other end of that is the indigenous people. So there's something very, very strange. It's as though Rubio has got so excited by his vision of what he calls atrophy and servitude, which is what he's predicting for Europe in Latin America. And now he's in the other position. Now he's become the master. So let's take a break. And then when we come back, we're going to talk about Saudis and the Houthis. We're going to talk about these extraordinary protests in India. And we're also going to have a little chat, you and I, about your stand-in replacement last week, the Right Honourable Michael Gove, and what you and I and our listeners and viewers thought of it. The Great Game. Strategic struggle between Britain and Russia. We assessed the Prime Minister with high confidence it was Russian. Holding the Russians accountable is World War Three. They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people. Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. You've got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing. Are you prepared to comment? We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO. A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia? Yes. News from Goulhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off? You're my soldier, are you? Sergeant Topham Duff. Duffy. An audio drama journey like no other. Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapon. Devised as a technically rigorous, geopolitical action thriller. We have two tight, friendly KIA. Where Britain plays its strongest hand. He's the best. Against its strongest foe. Don't do it, Duffy! Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Marina Hyde, host of The Rest is Entertainment, and let's face it, if you have heard me on the show, you will know that I am always on. Now, I have tried switching off and not listening to all the news or not watching all the videos on the internet, but unfortunately, I just can't. So, why not join me for my new show, titled Always On. It is home to my writing and also my new YouTube show. And each week, I'm going to be sublimating all of my thoughts on culture, entertainment, politics, sports, media, into comment across YouTube, Substack, MarinaHyde.com, and socials. So, wherever it feels best to talk about something or to have a laugh about it, most importantly, I will be there. Imagine the bat signal going up. I don't know that we need this new superhero, but we've got her. You can subscribe now by searching Always On with Marina Hyde on Google, Always On YouTube, Always On MarinaHyde.com, Always On with me, Marina Hyde, never off, never off. Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. So, Rory, you want to talk about Saudi Arabia and the latest attack on the main airport in Riyadh. And it's pretty obvious why the Houthis are hitting an airport because they've had their own airport hit. And I think they're kind of deciding to show that, in a way, an attack by them on their airport is going to do a lot more damage to the Saudis than an attack on their airport has done in the past. I mean, firstly, these have been very, very dramatic attacks. They're attacks that have killed civilians. And you can see footage of Muslim pilgrims fleeing from the site of this attack. This is on a civilian airport terminal. They attacked Riyadh, they attacked Daman. And it's come right at the worst moment for Saudi because they were hosting the World Petroleum Council and the chief executives of Total and Shell cancelled their arrival. And they're just going into their big international investor conference, the FII, which is where they're trying to convince the world to come in and Saudi to diversify and build data centers and everything. And the Houthis have chosen this moment to fire rockets. And the Houthis must be calculating. So, to remind people, the Houthis, of course, are this group in Yemen who have been funded in the past by the Iranians. They probably at the moment, or many of the people I was talking to in the last few days, think are overstepping what the Iranians want them to do, that the Iranians are trying to get the Houthis to hold back at the moment because they think they're going too far. But anyway, the Houthis are this originally religiously inspired group of Zaydis from northern Yemen, and they're firing these rockets. And they can also, it seems, have the capability of hitting Israel, hitting UAE. So why are they doing it? Well, they're doing it because they must be gambling that this will convince Saudi to stop its current support for the other faction in Yemen, the recognized international government, which is trying to retake the Bab al-Mandab, retake that control of the Red Sea corridor. Because at the moment, Saudi is crushed. Iran has made real problems getting stuff out of the Strait of Hormuz, and its other major route out to Asia has to go through the Red Sea. And that's effectively closed if the Houthi control the Red Sea. So Saudis was flying 50 air sorties to try to get rid of the Houthi. And this is the Houthi response. And they will also be calculating, perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly, that Donald Trump won't want to get involved in another war before the midterms, so that he's not going to provide the support to Saudis that he wants. Now, anybody who thinks they can predict what Donald Trump will do is for the birds, because I've got friends in Saudi saying that they've got private assurances from the US that Americans are going to come in on the Saudi side. And I've got other people saying, no, Trump isn't interested at all. And a lot of disagreement about whether Saudi is going to go ballistic and say, this is unbelievable, and we're going to wipe you out, or try to wipe you out, or whether they're going to say, well, in the middle of our conference with midterms coming, and with all these problems in the Strait, we're going to try to get to a deal. Was this one of the wars, one of the eight wars that Trump claims to have stopped, and that was why he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize? It was just last year, wasn't it? When the Americans were intervening against the Houthis, and declaring, I think they did, they declared a victory and an end to this war. And at the time, they were spending about over a billion dollars a month on the weaponry and munitions that they were that they were using. And yet now, it does look like he's basically said to the Saudis, look, you know, we've got our own problems at the moment, we can't we can't really help you out much here. And that does you you dropped in something very interesting there, where you basically suggested that the Saudis would be tempted to obliterate the Houthis. Now that's that's the language of Trump and Iran. Is that realistic? It's of course, it's not very realistic, which also people will be pointing out to the Saudis, because of course, Saudi and UAE fought a long war against the Houthis in Yemen unsuccessfully. And this was one of the early moves by Mohammed bin Salman wasn't successful, and they withdrew. And they have been telling the Trump administration and others that they're on the verge of victory against the Houthis for some time, which is why the US did that bombing, it didn't work. So the Houthi may be fragile in some bits, they seem to be being pushed back a bit along the coast, but they're making advances elsewhere. And again, getting realistic information from the ground is so difficult, because everybody who's talking to you has a dog in the fight. You know, it's a bit like you'll remember this from Afghanistan, when people asked, how strong or weak were the Taliban, you know, you would have generals who would say, oh, the Taliban are, you know, nobody likes them, they're corrupt, and they're miserable, and they're on the verge of collapse, and one more heave, and we'll get rid of them. And other people saying, no, no, no, these people are very embedded in rural areas. And they'll actually outlast us. And how do you answer that question? I mean, there's not opinion polling you can do, you can try to assess how many fighters the Houthis have got. But all you can say is that they've been much more resilient to much more successful than anyone predicted. So the idea that one more heave is going to wipe them out doesn't make sense. Another thing I think we need to update our listeners on is what's happening in the Strait of Hormuz. Because one of the weird things I think that happens with reporting in newspapers is I don't know if I did a maybe this is a mean thing to do. But if you're listening to this, ask yourself, what do you think has been happening in the Strait of Hormuz over the last two months? Do you think that there have been continual American strikes against Iran? Have there been Israeli strikes against Iran? Have the Iranians been striking many US bases in the region? The answer is no. Oddly, of course, what happens is you don't report what isn't happening. The last two months has been a sort of fragile almost ceasefire in which there's been some tit for tat because the Iranians have attacked vessels, but the Americans don't release that. So there was a vessel a long way from Strait of Hormuz on the edge of the Gulf that was attacked successfully by the Iranians that the Americans haven't even commented on. But there haven't been that many strikes against US bases. And there haven't been strikes against Iran. And there haven't been Israeli strikes going on against Iran, instead of which what we have is a few vessels getting crude oil out around the Omani coast. The Americans claiming they're back to the full numbers. That isn't true. That's total spin from Trump with some of these states flattering him by pretending it's true. And we still have a negotiation going on where, again, we're on the nuclear stuff. And it looks like there is some common ground emerging around what a nucleophile could look like. But there isn't really the American negotiating machine there used to be. There isn't a full State Department. I mean, you go and see the State Department. I mean, you'll remember the days where the American government was this formidable machine. You know, we interviewed Rob Malley, and he was talking about, you know, 25-person teams right in the middle of the Middle East peace process, all of them with doctorates, all of them speaking local languages fluently, all of them intensely involved in the technocratic thing. Now, basically, it's Jared Kushner, Steve Whitcoff, occasionally J.D. Vance flying around with four or five staffers. And so how do you get an Iran deal on that basis? The other thing to say about the Strait of Hormuz, there are 20,000 people there that are just trapped, they're stranded, and they're trapped. And, you know, can you imagine what it's like living on one of these ships at the moment? I mean, for a start, there is, as you say, it's reasonably quiet. But you know, there are mines around the place, there are drones flying around, it is very, very unpredictable. But can you imagine the levels of stress and anxiety as you're stuck there, away from your families, away from your own country, and you're stuck? Or even worse, if you're one of those very few, very brave captains and crews that are trying to run the gauntlet, because there's no insurance available. But the UAE seems to be pushing through vessels saying that they'll cover the risks. So you're taking a, you're trying to sail a vessel at night with its radar off, sometimes with an American vessel in front of you hugging the Omani coast. By the way, we got told off, I was at an event recently, there were some people from the insurance industry who said that we'd been saying that they were becoming uninsurable. They said that we'll always find ways of ensuring the situation. So there you go. Listen, before we go, should we talk about India? Yeah, can I do a transition to India just quickly, though? Because there was one thing I've been feeling guilty about, which is, your friend, Ed Miliband, I've been hearing a lot of positive things about from the UN General Assembly. People who were at the UN firstly commented on the complete absence of the United States. I mean, it was extraordinary. You went to UN General Assembly meetings chaired by other P5 members, and the American seats were literally empty. It was just nobody sitting in these meetings. But Ed Miliband was the, I heard from some people, they felt was the only foreign minister that anyone wanted to talk to. He gave the impression that he had genuine authority, genuine latitude, was a genuinely original thinker, was genuinely engaged on Sudan, genuinely engaged on the Gulf, genuinely engaged on Israel-Palestine. So apart from the small wrinkle that we haven't covered, which I am deeply distressed about, which is that Israel basically bullied Britain into closing or halving the size of our consulate in Jerusalem, which is extraordinary. I mean, that was really humiliating, because that is territory that we don't recognize as being part of Israel. It's meant to be occupied Palestinian territory. We've had a consulate there forever. Other people have consulates there, and we've taken the sign off the building. We've halved the number of our diplomatic staff, and there was no tit for tat. We haven't responded. That, I think, was not impressive. But that wrinkle aside, I think Ed Miliband is really making a really impressive appearance, and that's worth watching. Anyway, over to you. Good. Well, I was fascinated by what was going on in India last week. We probably don't talk enough about Modi and India, but just to fill people in, the cockroach. There was a judge who referred to these young people as cockroaches, and they decided to turn that into starting this cockroach janta party, which is to sort of play on words of the cockroach, but also the BJP, which is Modi's party. And this guy is really interesting. Our leaders emerged in this way. So this guy, Abhijit Dipke, who spends a lot of time overseas, not always in India, gets on a plane. He flies back in. He's going to do this big protest. The police, they arrest him and two of his associates. They're taken away. They're locked up for a bit. And meanwhile, there is a security operation around New Delhi that is absolutely extraordinary. Layer upon layer of security, streets are empty, and they're just making sure these protests will not happen. And the reason for the protest is the fact that this new elections commissioner, a guy called Gyanesh Kumar, has overseen this thing called the Special Intensive Revision. And the Special Intensive Revision is a bit like Trump saying he needs to sort of clean up the voter rolls, as a result of which 130 million people were removed from the electoral rolls. Now, I know India is a big country, but that is a lot of people who are suddenly falling off the direct roll. 130 million is the population of Britain and France combined, but actually much more because it's only the voting population. It's not including the children of Britain and France. Yeah, exactly. So there's no kids in there. And so this has led to, well, it led to the attempt to mount a huge protest, not just by the cockroach guys, but also by other organisations. But the level of put down, the cracking down on it meant that it has been suppressed. But it's pretty amazing. I mean, they were arresting the former chief ministers of West Bengal and Delhi. They had, I think, 25,000 police and militia in Delhi, barricades, thousands of people being arrested. The Indian Supreme Court stood up for itself in an encouraging way, given how much Modi has been eroding institutions in India, but did say the government must release these protesters, must open the internet again, must let the metro go and support a freedom association. But it's got to be trouble for Modi this. I mean, Modi has been so Teflon and has been so successful in over the last 12 years, consolidating his power. But this allied with the thing that we covered earlier, which was the education results. You never trust the government when it redoes electoral rolls anywhere in the world. I mean, remember, you weren't particularly trusting when the conservatives decided to up the ID card requirements on voting. But this is a different scale. And presumably Modi is in trouble now. Well, we'll see. And we thought he was in trouble with education. He got rid of his education ministry and it calmed down again. So whether he might do the same on this, I don't know. But this does seem like it's got to sort of, the protest will have to come back at some point or they'll have to find a way. It is really interesting how this guy's emerged as a leader because he doesn't look like a leader, doesn't sound like a leader, but he really has become the symbol of this thing. Would you say, Rory, if you were back at your, you mentioned being back at school, being given lectures about ancient Rome and ancient Greece. If you were given an essay question, is Modi a dictator? What would you say? No, he's a real, he's your full populist. He's your full, I think, I don't know what you think. I think he's your full Latin American style populist. Is he an electoral autocrat? Yeah, he's an electoral autocrat. India is a proper mass democracy. It still has institutions. I mean, he's done huge damage to the media and civil society. He's screwed around the voting rule. There's a lot of, you know, it's very problematic what he's done on citizenship and the way that he's treated Muslims and their access to society. And Hindu nationalism is absolutely to the fore. But yeah, it's a populist autocratic democracy. I mean, it's reminiscent of Orban. And I think like Orban, he could be booted out. Okay, listen, finally, before you go, what did you think of your stand in last week while you were away, Mr. Gove? Well, I've heard about it from all over the world. I was literally, I was literally, I was called by a friend from Qatar. I called him Saudi. Where are you going? Where are you going? Well, I thought it was slightly terrifying, because I think what I saw is the rather odd way in which very fluent sort of polite sounding language can defend the indefensible. He managed to suggest, for example, at one point, for people who listened all the way through, that Israel had done nothing worse in Gaza than British and American troops had done in Iraq. Yeah, and it was based on a report which turned out not to be what he said. He basically implied British American troops killed 25,000 civilian children. I mean, themselves bombed and killed 25,000 children. How can Michael Gove possibly think that's true? What is he thinking about? I mean, look, there are a lot of things to be said for the way in which the British Americans behaved in Iraq, and there were a lot of civilian casualties. But the idea that the Black Watch or the US Marines killed 25,000 children is insane. And actually, you know, if you want to keep developing this, the population of Iraq is far larger than the population of Gaza in percentage terms. You know, it would be like killing 400,000 Iraqi children. I mean, the fact that he can't see that, and he also nominated, am I right, he nominated the IDF for the Nobel Peace Prize? Yes, he did. Yes, he did. Yes, yes, yes, yes, he did. And why did he nominate the IDF for the Nobel Peace Prize? I mean, of all the people, I mean, along with Donald Trump, why would the IDF be the best candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize? What's he doing there? Well, I guess his argument is that Israel, he makes the point that Israel is in this very, very special place. It's the only democracy. He said, here's the thing where, you know, if he loses his election, Netanyahu could be sort of end up in court, go to jail, that shows what an amazing democracy it is. And the IDF is part of keeping peace. I don't know. But you know what I found really confusing? Because I'd been giving these figures, where, you know, I was desperate, you know, not desperate, I wanted to know why he cannot bring himself to say a word of criticism. He criticizes his own government. He criticizes the Tory record, he criticizes, you know, the Labour government at times. But he cannot bring himself to utter a word of criticism. So I give him these figures, where the Israelis themselves are saying there's an 83% civilian death rate in Gaza. Okay. And then he comes back with this report. And he talked about this House of Lords report that had been gone to the APPG. And I'm thinking I'm not as fast as you at the old sort of chatty PT trying to find this. So anyway, it took us ages to find this report. You're also not as massively paranoid and cynical. I mean, almost everything Michael says to me, I will just challenge for the sake of challenge. I just assume it's wrong. But I couldn't find this damn thing. And it turned out this report was not about civilian deaths in Gaza. It was about the death toll following the October the 7th. It's a report about October the 7th. So I don't know. It's interesting. I got what sort of reaction did you get when you said you were slightly terrified by I wonder whether you thought it was so good that you know, would we decide actually, Michael Gove should permanently replace Rory Stewart? I absolutely I think it'd be a top top winner. I think I'm stepping aside. I'm gonna I'm gonna dedicate myself to monastic life. And it would be unusual cruelty that you would have to spend every week. You and Michael Gove. Being told you're absolutely right, Alistair, but you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right, Alistair. Absolutely. You're absolutely right. So that's a very good observation. And Alistair, one of the things I've often noticed about you is your unusual courage and perspicacity has allowed you to Perseverance. Perseverance. Perseverance. You're demonstrating your perseverance again, Alistair there. And of course, you and your very distinguished career of public service. There was a great moment when I was when we were in parliament together. And in that brief moment when Michael Gove had decided to campaign for Boris Johnson, when Johnson was running for leadership, and he called me, he called me outside the library on my phone, and he said, Rory, we really need you on Boris's team, because I think you haven't been properly recognised by the Cameron government. And I think leaving you off the field is like leaving the Duke of Wellington off the field at the Battle of Waterloo. He is. Listen, we got a very, look, expectedly, we got a very mixed response. We've got some people who loved it. A lot of people hated it. He is clever, though. He is clever. It's just that it's so hard to pin him down. I also think you're much nicer than me. I never understood this. You're much nicer than me. I mean, you accuse me of being grumpy with these people. Do you think I was I too soft? Was I too soft? Well, it's very interesting. So you quite rightly, you know, have a go at me because you think I get cross with Bridget Philipson, or I get cross about the wealth tax, or I get cross with Michael Gove, or I get cross with these people. Your interview style, given that you're such a reputation as a bruiser, is much more gentle. You're not really getting as wound up and cross as I do. I get, look, I got very wound up about Brexit. I've been wound up about Brexit for 10 years, and I'm glad that we seem to be moving back in the right direction. I get very wound up about, I got genuinely wound up about his views about Israel, but I was more interested in just trying to push him to say just the slightest scintilla of criticism. Would have been interesting. Just on final, final thing, Roy, your mini-series on existential threats, which has been absolutely superb, but this week for our members, we're going to be slightly more positive with the start of our series about perseverance, the word the world needs now. And you have interviewed me, and that will be out for everyone on Friday, and then we've got a series following that for members, which if people want to get the whole thing, they just go to therestisapologies.com. But thank you in your busy, busy life for taking that time out to talk to me about my new book, which is out next week. Something a bit different tomorrow on Question Time, we're going to be talking to Alan Milburn, who is in charge of the review ordered by the government into NEETs. That's the one million young people who are not in education, employment, or training. We asked you for your questions. They've come in in their hundreds. We'll be putting some of those questions to Alan Milburn tomorrow, so stand by for that. Very good. And just before you go, here's a brief glimpse of the forthcoming Perseverance series with Alistair. Hi there, it's Alistair here, and this is a mini-series about my new word, Perseverance. No, not perseverance, not resilience, Perseverance. It's how do you take everything that happens to you and turn it into an opportunity to move in the opposite direction, to move forward, not backwards. It's a bit pompous that, isn't it? Is it? How do people overcome extraordinary challenges in life? Ten years ago, nine years ago, I was sat in a psychiatric hospital on the edge of life, and now I am here. Ellie was diagnosed with the same form of cancer when she was nine years old. And knowing that someone you love was murdered. Joe Cox, MP for Batley and Spenborough, has died as a result of her injuries. Jill was killed because of who she was. People said, why weren't you bitter? I said, you can't send bitterness like an email. All it does is corrode and erode you. It destroys you from inside. I'm becoming conscious of losing control of my own mind. And what does that feel like? I know this is an insane thought, but I thought I was going to be killed. How can you heal and grow from unimaginable trauma? What we see when these horrific things happen is the true strength of human resilience, and it is outstanding. How can we build more perseverance, both personally and in our politics? I used to walk up that lane and breathe fresh air and think, I'm still alive. Greek mythology, Pandora's box, and all the terrible things fire up. Hope is hard and hope is what's left at the bottom of the box. So to kick things off, Rory will be interviewing me about my own story. You're both a kind of tough guy and you're somebody who takes things unbelievably hard. I don't know how we got through it, to be honest. So I don't care how I'm defined anymore. Yeah. As you know, I think young people get a very bad rep. I think the world is a pretty messy place and a complicated, difficult place. That's why I think it's the word the world needs now. Very good. If you want to hear more about perseverance from people who I believe really have it, head to TheRestlessPolitics.com and become a member today.