543. The Disaster Britain Still Can't Escape and Trump’s Iran ‘Deal’

What is the true cost of Brexit? How have British and European far-right politics evolved since the historic Brexit referendum, and can liberal democracy survive it? Is it possible to see Trump’s Iran ‘deal’ as anything other than a defeat for the US? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. __________ Enjoy Rory and Alastair’s interview with James Cleverly by searching ‘Leading’ on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. Father’s Day discounted gift memberships available HERE. Treat your dad to early access to Question Time, members-only miniseries, and much more. Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter ⁠HERE⁠, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at ⁠therestispolitics.com⁠ to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at ⁠fuseenergy.com/politics⁠ and get a free TRIP+ subscription. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ ⁠nordvpn.com/restispolitics⁠ It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ __________ Instagram: ⁠@restispolitics⁠ Twitter: ⁠@restispolitics⁠ Email: ⁠[email protected]⁠ __________ Social Producer: Emma Jackson Video Editor: Josh Smith, Bruno Di Castri Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Chris Sawyer General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Alastair Campbell?

  Happy anniversary! Ten years since we voted to leave the European Union. How has Brexit been for you? Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage may be a lot wealthier than they were, but they are the exception. A decade has been long enough to establish Britain is poorer and weaker, and Brexit is one of the reasons. An economy 6% to 8% smaller than it would have been, investment lower, productivity lower, and businesses who were promised an end to Red tape drowning in the stuff. And yet, the divisive populist politics that helped fuel it is far from dead. We've seen the worst of it on the streets of Belfast last week. A horrible stabbing by an asylum seeker whipped up into riots and a house-to-house hunt for immigrants. We've seen its exploitation by Russia in the evidence that arson attacks on Keir Starmer's

• 0:43Alastair Campbell?

  home and car were organised by Moscow, then backed by the far-right here. And even in quiet, wealthy Switzerland, their weekend referendum on whether to have a population cap was the brainchild of their right-wing populist party. And in Germany, I'm hearing of fresh legal moves to establish that their far-right party, the AfD, is in breach of the country's constitution because of its commitment to what they proudly call 'remigration'. So, a decade on from the toxicity of the referendum campaign, how worried should we all be about the far-right's continuing influence on our lives and what hope is there of liberal democracy fighting back? All this and more to come in today's episode.

• 1:24Speaker 01

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• 1:26Rory Stewart?

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• 1:38Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:58Alastair Campbell?

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• 2:08Rory Stewart?

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• 2:17Alastair Campbell?

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• 2:26Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 2:28Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 2:41Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve, and of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN, and it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 3:04Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, are you not already sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 3:11Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/rusthispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rusthispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 3:27Speaker 04

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• 4:05Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alastair Campbell. Today, we are at the 10th anniversary of Brexit, and we're really going to get into how did that go? And in the second half, extraordinary news, which is that it seems as though finally, despite all our skepticism, we're on the cusp of a proper deal in Iran. I'm still skeptical. And you're still skeptical. Let me start you, though, with Brexit. So 10 years on, a bit of post-traumatic stress. I was a member then of David Cameron's government, an environment minister campaigning for Remain. So I was... Not hard enough. Not hard enough. And I was at the Great Royal Show in Edinburgh, the agricultural show.

• 4:47Rory Stewart?

  Royal Highland Show, up all night in my hotel room, watching the results. David Dimbleby coming on. And then, of course, as somebody who then went to Theresa May's government, I was right in the heart of this fight where you and your friend Tony Blair were very much saying, this is ridiculous. We need a second referendum. And I was trying to say, let's make the best of it and try to get a customs union or a single market compromise out of this. Let me, though, just take us back to where I think the fundamental arguments were and how weird that moment was. Fundamentally, you had the Brexiteers saying two things.

• 5:28Rory Stewart?

  One of them was Singapore on Thames, which is, if we leave the European Union, we can deregulate, cut taxes, become more pro-business, more pro-innovation, and Britain will boom like Singapore GBI. And the second argument was the global Britain argument. Europe's slow and sclerotic, all the growth in the world is US, China, India, and we need to lean into those places with new trade deals, new relationships, and throw off the shackles of this old place. And the problem with it is twofold. Number one, Britain didn't want to be Singapore on Thames. Turns out, actually, if you look at the last 10 years, we haven't deregulated, we haven't dropped taxes. In fact, corporation tax has gone up. Why? Because actually, we're much more social democratic and European than anyone wants to acknowledge.

• 6:13Rory Stewart?

  But it's the global Britain thing which has been the biggest disaster. Because, of course, that story, we can rely on the US, we can do wonderful integrated trade deals with China, looks much bleaker 10 years later because we've understood how vulnerable we are to being exploited by our dependents on the US, how vulnerable we are to Chinese supply chains, how vulnerable we are to Russia and gas, and how actually, in Ukraine, in energy crises, in the economy, with AI, we need to be much closer to the people right on our borders, which is the European Union. In other words, a whole security argument has emerged that has wrecked global Britain. And on the other side, we had Remain.

• 6:53Rory Stewart?

  And Remain had its fair share of pretty extreme apocalyptic predictions, some of which didn't come true. Total collapse of the City of London, World War III, total inability for Britain to survive. And actually, the reality, and this is what I want to provoke you with. Is damaging, underwhelming, slow decline, you know, maybe three percent, maybe eight percent. So it was neither the heroic, certainly not the heroic future of the Brexit years, nor was it quite the complete extreme catastrophe of the total breakup of the European Union, the collapse of our financial sector, et cetera, that some on the Remain side predicted.

• 7:30Alastair Campbell?

  Look, I think going back, it was a terrible campaign on both sides. I thought the Remain campaign led by Cameron Osborne was pretty complacent. It allowed itself to be projected as Project Fear and the Leave campaign was just riddled with charlatans and chancers and liars. I did a debate at Bloomberg the other day with Jacob Rees-Mogg, who, they can't even bring themselves to admit there's any downside to any of this stuff. That's what I find extraordinary. Even though the audience, and of course he immediately said, ah, we're in London, if you went to Cornwall or Wales, it would be very different. I don't think it is very different. As you know, I'm obsessed in audiences of asking them what they think. And fair enough, people who come to hear me speak might be sort of

• 8:14Alastair Campbell?

  less Levy than Remaney, but I think the country has decided it's been, you know, you're right, it wasn't apocalyptic. But when you say sort of quite casually, well, might be three percent, might be eight percent, three percent is bad enough, take that out of your economy. But if you go to the latest analysis by the government's official kind of data people, they're talking about between six and eight percent to take out of GDP, twelve, between twelve and eighteen on investment, three to four percent on productivity, exports down, red tape massively up. And I thought that, I mentioned Rees-Mogg as, you know, one conservative on, on one side of the argument, Michael Heseltine, who was our first interviewee on Leading four years ago.

• 8:59Rory Stewart?

  And who I was just up at the Lake District Book Festival with.

• 9:01Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, very good.

• 9:02Rory Stewart?

  So still firing on all cylinders.

• 9:03Alastair Campbell?

  He's amazing. So was this a book about trees?

• 9:05Rory Stewart?

  Um, uh, yeah, but he talked a lot about Remain.

• 9:07Alastair Campbell?

  Of course he did, of course he did, because he's passionate. But he wrote a piece in The Independent of the weekend, which I thought was absolutely brilliant. But just this one line, never have so few done so much damage to so many with so little a Ability to execute what they lied about. Where are the peons of praise to Brexit from Johnson, go Farage, Cummings and their accomplices? For the land of milk and honey they told us it would deliver. They don't normally hold back from giving their opinions. The reason is obvious, their scandalously false prospectus has turned to dust and ashes. They are the guilty men and should hang their heads in shame. It has all proved to be a con.

• 9:44Rory Stewart?

  And yet, very interestingly, as you keep pointing out, Farage is actually not very damaged.

• 9:49Alastair Campbell?

  This is so weird.

• 9:51Rory Stewart?

  So he remains very popular.

• 9:52Alastair Campbell?

  Popular, very is, I would delete the very and say quite with some people.

• 9:56Rory Stewart?

  More popular than most of the other leaders, given what he delivered. I mean, given all that, I mean, I agree with you on all of that. And there is still a sort of fondness for Boris Johnson out there in the country that you sometimes encounter. People thinking it's funny, yeah, yeah, I've found it on the train on my way up to Cumbria. And Dominic Cummings, I was talking to someone yesterday, absolutely on our side. But the cliche with Dominic Cummings, they repeat again and again, is he may be a bit radical, but my goodness, he's right about a lot of things. And in general, he's managed to reposition himself. Well, that's this kind of profit on technology, defence, the civil service, et cetera. And Michael Gove, you just mentioned, he did a whole podcast laying into us in which he, basically the thesis of the podcast is why is Dominic Cummings more right than we are about things?

• 10:38Rory Stewart?

  And the story was because Dominic Cummings is such a brilliant historian and so much cleverer than we are and et cetera. Actually, wasn't so much clever, it's because he had a sort of different form of intellectual education. And oddly, at no point does anyone say, well, it's like if Dominic Cummings is such an amazing prophet and a genius, why did he decide to lead us into Brexit and inflict all this damage on us? Why is he not judged by that one big scrub? Why is Michael Gove not?

• 11:01Alastair Campbell?

  Why none of them judge?

• 11:02Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Alastair Campbell?

  Well, and the answer in part is it's, this is a form of madness in our politics and in our media. That these people who have done so much damage, I mean, Heseltine is right about this, they've done so much damage. And in any other political environment, I think they'd be done. I think they'd be, I think Johnson's finished. I do, I really do think he is. But Gove's moved on back to the world he loves, right wing media pontificating. Cummings, I'm not sure what he does, but as you say, he sort of parades as this great sort of tech guru. And Farage is, is kind of still doing the rounds. And if you look at the polls, may think he's going to be the next prime minister. It is utter madness. I must plug Rory. This is in fact, this is literally just off the press. I'm going to give you this copy.

• 11:48Alastair Campbell?

  I've written the foreword, so I declare an interest. The new world, the new world has done this. A history of Brexit and 256 disasters. And I think we should get the cartoonist Martin Rose into, I mean, there's Paul Dacre, isn't he beautiful? We've got in between the factual analysis, we have these chapters on Brexit bullshitters. And I've got to say, it's, it's the, it's the finest, there's Cummings, there's your friend, the genius Dominic Cummings, looking absolutely, absolutely awful. And then we have.

• 12:16Rory Stewart?

  Could, could we get the quote from Cummings? That's quite interesting.

• 12:18Alastair Campbell?

  The quote from Cummings, would we have won without immigration? No. Would we have won without 350 million pounds for the NHS? No. Would we have won by spending our time talking about trade in the single market? No way. They're all real quotes, these. Michael Gove, I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations, with acronyms, saying they know what's best. Well, we know where that landed. But this is the best one. I mean, there's Nigel Farage. If Brexit is a disaster, I will go and live abroad. I'll go and live somewhere else. And he's still sort of, you know.

• 12:45Rory Stewart?

  But what, instead he came up with something else. He decided he'd instead, he'd send his donors to go and live somewhere else.

• 12:51Alastair Campbell?

  And then he could get their money in time. David Davis, there'll be no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside. So they are utterly shameless.

• 12:58Rory Stewart?

  Let me now, let me now do the boring thing of playing the devil's advocate, right? And because obviously we, we agree on this stuff. We were both remain voters. We both think it was the wrong thing to do. And Britain would have been better off in the European Union. So what would they say? What they would say, I think, and I don't know whether, and tell me, tell me whether I've misunderstood this or whether Jacob Rees-Mogg said something different. So here are the arguments that they'd make. First argument, I think they'd say, it wasn't all about the economics. It was about sovereignty and control. So they'd say it's no accident that actually Dominic Cummings' campaign was. Take back control.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 13:32Rory Stewart?

  They would say probably on the economics and anyway, the economic data is clouded by the massive impact of Covid, the Ukraine war and all the sort of thing.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  They say all that, yeah.

• 13:42Rory Stewart?

  Makes it quite difficult to count, right?

• 13:43Speaker 01

  And they also say the European economy is not doing so well. So what you're about.

• 13:46Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely, which is what we got from James Cleverly, European economy not doing so well, etc. Now, so I was going through a little checklist and I think the argument doesn't quite work because fundamentally, the problem of Brexit is on the Singaporean terms, there was never any public willingness to exploit those kinds of opportunities.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:11Rory Stewart?

  And on the global Britain, the globe changed, right? So let me just try those two. So on Singaporean terms, look theoretically, yes.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  I thought you were going to put their case here.

• 14:21Rory Stewart?

  Well.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  But you know, you've now quickly gone straight back to why they were wrong.

• 14:25Rory Stewart?

  Well, let me try and put their case once more then. Okay, I'll put it in the strongest form. The strongest form would be this, it wasn't done right. So I guess if you're Dominic Cummings or you're Jacob Rees-Mogg, what you really think is actually if you leave the European Union, you could develop a real niche for yourself, being different from the European Union. And what would being different from European Union mean? Well, exploiting all the opportunities, you could cut your corporation tax down, you could change your VAT, you could get rid of all the regulations. And and here's the here's the model, the optimistic vision for the next 10 years of Brexit. Let's imagine a massive Brexiteer got in. What they would say is we could become the technology innovation testbed of the world.

• 15:08Rory Stewart?

  So let's say AI, they'd say, look, European Union's just passed a whole series of very restrictive regulations on AI.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Nothing to do with it.

• 15:16Rory Stewart?

  Uh, American companies are going to be reluctant to invest because of all these data restrictions. We could become the great testbed and partner for the US for pioneering the most exciting. Cutting edge AI models. We could do the same on pharmaceuticals, you know, all their regulations might stop them. We could cut taxes massively, we could bring in global wealth. We wouldn't need to worry about state aid rules. So we could do an enormous investment programme where we could bet the house on certain kinds of things. We don't need to worry about fiscal rules, et cetera. So that'd be the story. What would be your response to that?

• 15:49Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that is kind of what Nigel Farage says, isn't it? He says that, and because he's the, in some ways in this contest, the uber charlatan, because he's absolutely getting away with it, unlike Johnson, who's out, unlike all the rest of them, you know, Rees-Mogg lost his seat, Gove's out, et cetera. What would I say to that? There is an argument that says that the the politics of the Conservative Party, which is what gave us this mess in the first place, then went post referendum, whereas you say Theresa May doing her best, trying to make sense of this, David Cameron's off in the wilderness, Johnson's sitting there trying to sort of, you know, wait to pounce, which eventually he does. And so their argument, Farage's argument is, we didn't do, we didn't actually do Brexit. We haven't had Brexit. We haven't really left. And now you've got people like, you know,

• 16:33Alastair Campbell?

  Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, trying to get us closer. And that's the argument that they run. But I think that overlooks, and this is the argument I tried to have with Jacob Rees-Mogg, and it was very interesting with Rees-Mogg, because you know how normally he prides himself on being very polite and very charming?

• 16:47Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 16:47Alastair Campbell?

  He absolutely, I think because he knew he has no real argument to go on, he went absolutely into, to me, you're a liar, we can't believe anything you say. It was really interesting.

• 16:59Rory Stewart?

  You're right. Normally, he's super courteous.

• 17:00Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely cautious. And so, because I said, as I always do, you know, these people lied and they think they've got away with it. And he came armed, sort of rather dramatically, a bit like Keir Starmer with his, with his, you know, I've got a letter to give to Travis. He said, ah, I've got notes. I've taken notes from Peter O'Boards book, and his book has footnotes. So he goes through it, and I couldn't get him off this thing.

• 17:23Rory Stewart?

  And this is, this is Peter O'Boards criticizing about Iraq?

• 17:25Alastair Campbell?

  Not just Iraq, but, you know, my life as a journalist.

• 17:28Rory Stewart?

  Okay. So he'd come, he'd come prepared to attack Alastair Campbell.

• 17:31Alastair Campbell?

  He decided that was the, and to be fair, and poor old Michelle Hussein, who was moderating. This audience had come along to hear about what we thought of Brexit and it got sort of very, but I thought that was really interesting.

• 17:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 17:43Alastair Campbell?

  Because Jacob Rees-Mogg's normal modus operandi is very calm, very sort of faux factual.

• 17:49Rory Stewart?

  Doesn't, doesn't play the man.

• 17:50Alastair Campbell?

  Doesn't play the man. And so I, and that said to me, I was rather quite pleased by it. And I'm so used to being called a liar by Tories that I didn't, didn't, never bothers me. And I didn't even really bother rebutting with all the public inquiry and all that stuff. Cause he just said to me, you've got no argument. You, and you know, when we, I then said to the audience, Brexit, success or failure, it was a hundred percent failure, hundred percent. So then Jacob Rees-Mogg just goes, oh, well, this is because we're in Bloomberg. And if we went to Cornwall, or if we went to South Wales, it'd be very, very different. It was like this in the referendum. And I'm sort of saying, well, are you saying these people have got no, they know the economy, they're all working in the economy.

• 18:30Alastair Campbell?

  And then he said, yes. And then I gave the figures, eight percent, six percent, whatever it would be. Well, there are very different figures. We're into alternative facts territory.

• 18:37Rory Stewart?

  Okay. Let, let me try another argument against Jacob Rees-Mogg, which is.

• 18:41Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, good. You're back on my side.

• 18:42Rory Stewart?

  Okay, back on your side again. Which is that actually the fundamental problem is that the, this vision of Singapore on Thames, misunderstood what kind of country Britain is. That actually the British public, including most of the red wall Brexit voters are not actually up for our low tax, highly deregulated. I mean, let's look at the actual debates. What, what could you have done by leaving the European Union? Well, you could have said, we don't need to waste billions of pounds meeting EU water standards. We can put poo into our lakes. We can save.

• 19:12Alastair Campbell?

  We've done that anyway.

• 19:13Rory Stewart?

  We can save all that money and we can put it into something else. You could say, listen, now that we've left the European Union, we can cut our tax rates down at a very minimum. We can get rid of all the workers protection.

• 19:24Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 19:25Rory Stewart?

  We can get rid of all that stuff because we really can become this like American Singapore.

• 19:27Alastair Campbell?

  Well, this is the fragile agenda. This is the fragile agenda.

• 19:30Rory Stewart?

  But the problem that they face is that. All the polling suggests there is almost no support amongst the public. There is support amongst a small group of entrepreneurial businessmen who love Singapore, loved Dubai, that's why Rishi Sunak was quite interested in this. Obviously, this was Liz Truss's vision. But what did Liz Truss discover over her 49 days? She discovered there was no support from the public or the markets for turning Britain to that kind of thing. In fact, the problem actually is that Britain isn't Singapore or Hong Kong or even the United States being held back by a European manacle. In many ways, our cultural, social attitudes are very Scandinavian. They're very sort of European. And so it turned out that what stopped us doing this wasn't being in the European Union, it was us.

• 20:15Alastair Campbell?

  But also, if you go back to that cartoon about Cummings, it's not for nothing that they decided that the National Health Service, and it was a massive lie, but not for nothing that they decided actually money for the National Health Service was the way to win the referendum. Okay, so you're right.

• 20:31Rory Stewart?

  Not cutting the National Health Service.

• 20:32Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. So this is why the whole thing is this kind of network of myths and mythologies. So one thing Rees-Mogg and I agreed on is that I don't sense in the public an appetite to sort of have another referendum anytime soon. But I do sense in the public a growing acceptance that Brexit has not been good for the country. And therefore, this government has to, in my view, do more to get us back to that closer position. But politically, it's very, very difficult.

• 20:58Rory Stewart?

  Another paradox. I absolutely resonated with one of their points, right? Totally want to grant one of the Brexiteers' points, which is that as an MP, I observed that we were blaming Europe all the time. And there was a problem, I don't know, with sovereignty or accountability. But again and again, if the public complained about something to the local council or their MP, they were told we couldn't do it because Europe wouldn't allow us to do it. And civil servants would frequently say, you can't do that because European laws won't allow you to do it. And I felt that was bad for our democracy, right? I'm standing up as a member of parliament, you've elected me, I'm going to be a dynamic government, I'm going to get things done.

• 21:35Alastair Campbell?

  What real issues were there where that applied?

• 21:37Rory Stewart?

  Well, it turns out, and this is the problem, that firstly, that many of those regulations we wanted to keep anyway. And partly it's dishonesty, right? So instead of saying... The reason why you can't, you know, do whatever you want to do on water quality is because of a European Union regulation on clean water.

• 21:54Alastair Campbell?

  They should drive up the quality of our water.

• 21:56Rory Stewart?

  We would have had to say, actually, we want clean water, we want dirty water. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or if they said, um, Minister, you can't plant all these trees because something in the common agricultural policy doesn't allow the use of the single farm payment for that. If they wanted the European Union, they would have had to be more honest and said the way we've designed our farm support package wouldn't allow you to use it for this, right? And the real indicator of why this went wrong is that we haven't got, I imagine one of the only benefits Brexit might be that we'd get a bit more accountability and a bit more trust in government. You know, if we go back to that fundamental idea that we love, the buck stops here.

• 22:38Rory Stewart?

  The only advantage Brexit is we might end up in a situation where ultimately ministers, prime ministers, councillors are able to say the buck stops here, I made this decision, it's not the fault of.

• 22:48Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Rory Stewart?

  But instead of which, we've just found another baddie, it's not the European Union. Instead, we blame laws, we blame uh, the European Convention on Human Rights, we blame processes, we blame civil servants.

• 23:00Alastair Campbell?

  They've moved on to a new set of lies.

• 23:01Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 23:01Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, let's broaden it out to other bits of Europe. So I mentioned in the introduction, Switzerland had this referendum at the weekend. Now, as it happens, it lost, but it wasn't, you know, people said it was a comprehensive defeat for this idea, you have a population cap, but it was fifty five, forty five. I mean, it's like, you know, it's a lot of support, quite a low turnout.

• 23:20Rory Stewart?

  Not a mad idea, right? Seems to be a perfectly sensible idea on the surface that you decide what kind of population you want and you plan towards it. But the problem is, the small print was, if you breach the population cap, you would leave all the European agreements on movement to people, etc.

• 23:35Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. So Switzerland would have had to completely reorder its relationship with European Union. And it was interesting how, you know, the immigration debate here tends to be about, you know, low labour cost, people who are working in kind of, you know, lower end of the economy. There, it's about the Swiss saying, why are these French Germans taking all our top jobs as scientists, as doctors? It's a very different sort of debate. But then the other thing that I think is, is worth talking about, which I, I, I'm going to bring together. We had this extraordinary story. I've been worried about this for some time because do you remember when we were in Poland? I was in Poland, Donald Tusk said. I'm really shocked that the Prime Minister's house and car get attacked.

• 24:17Alastair Campbell?

  And it's covered in the British media like Liverpool two Arsenal one, on the one hand this, on the one hand that. He thought it was truly shocking that the Prime Minister's house and car were being firebombed. And it now transpires and there was, you know, I have regularly criticised the BBC political coverage, but there was a brilliant investigation on the BBC yesterday. The background to this case of this Ukrainian and Romanian who have now been convicted on these offences. And basically they're organised by a Russian dirty tricks. And, and the far right are instead of, this is, this is Tusk's point about it, you see it as a football match.

• 24:59Alastair Campbell?

  So Tommy Robinson, Stephen Yaxley Lennon, who's just been in Moscow at one of Putin's jamborees. And he has been ventilating this conspiracy theory that what this case was actually about. Was that Keir Starmer was involved in sort of sexual relations with these three Eastern Europeans. Even posting fake pictures of them together. Okay. And if you, I don't know if you've been on across this.

• 25:25Rory Stewart?

  No, this is, this is.

• 25:26Alastair Campbell?

  This has been quite a big thing.

• 25:27Rory Stewart?

  The idea that Keir Starmer is like a kind of a threesome or foursome.

• 25:31Alastair Campbell?

  Well, all that he's, that he's, he has these Ukrainian rent boys.

• 25:35Rory Stewart?

  Oh, they're, they're, they're men. I'm sorry.

• 25:37Alastair Campbell?

  They're men.

• 25:38Rory Stewart?

  Oh, right. Okay.

• 25:38Alastair Campbell?

  And, and, and yeah. So it's like, you know, so.

• 25:41Rory Stewart?

  Does this really sit with our normal idea of Keir Starmer? It's quite an interesting thing to do. I don't understand these social media campaigns. I mean. Normally you find somebody who looks a bit dodgy and then you project these things. Is, or does it work better if the guy seems really respectable and then you're like.

• 25:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, totally. And also, and also, and it's, but the thing about a lot of these conspiracy theories, when they start online, they get ventilated. Is that the more outlandish they are sometimes, the, look, Hillary Clinton and the pizza.

• 26:06Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 26:07Alastair Campbell?

  You know, the, the, the, the sort of bloodline.

• 26:09Rory Stewart?

  QAnon, QAnon.

• 26:10Alastair Campbell?

  QAnon, all that stuff. So, so that's partly what this is about. And so you have, you have people. I felt this, you know, I mentioned the troubles in Belfast and we had this, we talked recently about Henry Novak's. Uh, murder and the, and the way that Farage responded to that. The instinct of a lot of our political base now on the right is to say, whatever happens.

• 26:33Alastair Campbell?

  Our job is to try to turn that into a problem for the government. So what Tusk is right, we should all, regardless of our politics, we all should be appalled if Keir Starmer's former house where members of his family are living gets firebombed.

• 26:47Rory Stewart?

  And, and listen, I, I, I don't want, I don't want to be pompous about it, but I imagine ten years ago, we would all solemnly have stood up in the House of Commons, given condolences, said we stand

• 27:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, ten years ago, for example, when Joe Cox was murdered.

• 27:03Rory Stewart?

  Regardless, yeah, of party, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

• 27:07Alastair Campbell?

  But, but Nigel Farage did not attack, condemn the violence. In Belfast, he said, this is gonna happen, this is gonna happen unless you deal with it now. The, the Belfast situation is very, very interesting because horrible, horrible stabbing, asylum seeker, stabs somebody, it's filmed, it's horrible. And again, I think ten years ago, yes, there'd have been a visceral reaction on so many levels, but you would have at least listened to the police, listen to the politicians for a bit. Instead of which, not least ventilated by people like Elon Musk and people like Tommy Robinson, et cetera. It's whipped up literally into a riot and also there's been some very interesting reporting.

• 27:46Rory Stewart?

  The hit list.

• 27:47Alastair Campbell?

  And then the hit list of.

• 27:48Rory Stewart?

  And then the use of checkpoints. I mean, one of the things that's, that's interesting in reporting you sent me is the sense in which they're using a playbook that goes all the way back to the troubles in Northern Ireland in the eighties and nineties.

• 28:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there's a lot of reporting.

• 28:01Rory Stewart?

  Checkpoints to delay people.

• 28:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 28:03Rory Stewart?

  And that then stops the police getting, and even the firebombing was another thing. I think there were tens of thousands of people displaced from their homes during the troubles through firebombing. So it's as though people are learning from paramilitary techniques.

• 28:16Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there's some very, I think the police are reluctant to sort of load it onto paramilitaries, but there's some very interesting reporting in the, in the Northern Ireland press from journalists who live there, who know this stuff inside out. Who are saying, without any doubt, in their mind, there were, there was paramilitary involvement to this. But my point, again, you're, you're, you're saying what would have happened ten years ago. Ten years ago, most paramilitary activity would have been condemned across the political establishment. But no, what you have on the right is, well, you know, they've got a point. They've got a point. They are having their jobs being taken. So these, what used to be kind of British National Party, BNP argument, is now with people like Low, Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore, centre stage in, in part of our politics.

• 29:00Rory Stewart?

  Well, let me see if I can sum it up in the way that I see this. I think what you're saying in both halves is our whole politics is about finding problems. Most of those problems are actually internal to do with us and blaming someone else. It's a classic nationalist move. You know, if Scotland's not performing well, it's the fault of London. If Britain's not going great, it's the fault of Europe. If my life's not going well, it's the fault of the immigrants.

• 29:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 29:26Rory Stewart?

  And what we found, if I just sort of, I maybe wasn't, I worried I wasn't structured enough in thinking through the European Union. If we go through the little list of arguments they would have made, they would have said 10 years ago, Britain was too regulated, too uncompetitive. Europe was growing too slowly and politicians weren't accountable. And I think it's possible for us to say all those things were correct. But leaving the European Union didn't fix any of them.

• 29:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, or, or you, what you could say is there is a point, that they had a point. Whether that point was sufficiently strong, in my view it wasn't, to say, let's tear up the whole thing.

• 30:03Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 30:03Alastair Campbell?

  And then pretend that we're going to tear up the whole of Europe.

• 30:05Rory Stewart?

  Because what it turned out would have happened is that we left the European Union, we didn't fix any of those things. So it would be a bit like, my life's going badly and I blame my friends or I blame my partner. And I imagine if I just leave my partner, I don't talk to my friends anymore, everything will be better.

• 30:18Alastair Campbell?

  Norma Percy, the veteran documentary maker, I couldn't watch the whole thing because watching Gove and Johnson and these people just sort of, you know, the whole thing was like a sort of boys' game, Cameron as well. But the end of Norma Percy's two-part documentary on Brexit essentially is, is Jonathan, Boris Johnson admitting there was no plan. And that's, that's the worst thing. Final point for Germany. There's really something really quite interesting happening there, which, and I'm really interested in your, in your take on it. So, Dmitriev, Putin's right-hand man, has been busy posting absolute peons of praise to the Alternative for Deutschland. And when I posted a reply to one of them, he came back straight away, war monger, you know,

• 31:00Alastair Campbell?

  you're, the change is coming. It was all, so they're very on this all the time.

• 31:05Rory Stewart?

  So, so Kirill Dmitriev, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, has his Alastair Campbell dossier.

• 31:08Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he seems to, well, it wasn't sort of, it was basically saying that the war mongering bureaucrats who opened the borders, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, they're the ones who need to wake up. Now, what's interesting though is, so that's the Russians openly, like J D Vance did in Munich, like Donald Trump does, you've now got MAGA and the Russians basically saying in Germany, AFD is our party, okay, at a time when the AFD is doing quite well. Now, if you're a German person who believes in the constitution, and they've got a written constitution unlike us, so there's something very interesting going on, which there are only three bodies that can refer anything to the Constitutional Court. That's the government, the Bundestag, the elected chamber, and the Bundesrat, which

• 31:53Alastair Campbell?

  is made up of the lender, okay. And there's a debate going on at the moment, the, the government is weak, the parliament tricky, as whether the Bundesrat should not refer the AFD to the Constitutional Court, because there are a lot of their leaders who are on record as saying things which go fundamentally against the constitution.

• 32:15Rory Stewart?

  Again, just to explain to the, to the audience, basically this is about banning the AFD.

• 32:21Alastair Campbell?

  Or banning parts of it.

• 32:22Rory Stewart?

  Parts of it. So, what you would do is you'd use this procedure to say, actually, this is a neo-fascist organisation that is a profound danger of the German constitution. These were the things that were put in place after the Second World War. You know, what are the lessons that, how would we have stopped the Nazi Party from rising? Well, we should have said in 1929, the Nazi Party is not a legitimate democratic political force.

• 32:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 32:43Rory Stewart?

  It's banned by the Constitutional Court, it can't run. So, all that stuff's there, and there are two questions, can they do it? And should they do it? Back over to you.

• 32:51Alastair Campbell?

  Well, can they do it? Yes. And the, and the Constitutional Court in Germany is, is respected, much more than most institutions are in most countries. And the case that I think would be made, and it all depends on, there are, there are two. Very popular leaders in the Lender. There's this guy, Özdemir, who's the new leader in Baden-Württemberg, and a guy called Wust in Nordrhein-Westfalia, who are, one's Green, one's CDU. And essentially there, if it happens, they are going to have to lead this movement within the Bundesrat. And they could do it because it's been done before. The thing is, it sounds extraordinary to us, you ban a political party from standing, but they did it twice under Adenauer, and then they did it twice with the neo-Nazi party that they're now called, the, we're called the NDP, they're now called die Heimat.

• 33:36Alastair Campbell?

  So it's been done before, but you have leading figures in the AfD. A lot of this is, you know, we've talked before about Martin Selmer, this Austrian identitarian guy. A lot of this is about remigration.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  And remigration is about people who generally are not white and generally Muslims being hundreds of thousands, being booted out of Germany, including, it seems, German citizens.

• 33:57Alastair Campbell?

  Including if they've been born in Germany and they have a German passport and German citizenship. So that says, in the constitution, they're all equal, okay? So that policy basically says, no, you're not equal, because if we get into power, you're gone. And the reason why these Lender elections coming up, particularly in Saxony and Halt, are so important is because they have policing powers. And the other thing that I read this week, the Björn Hucker, who's this very out there, very, very, I can call him a Nazi, a neo-Nazi on here now.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  And not be sued.

• 34:30Alastair Campbell?

  And not be sued because a German judge has decreed that that is a fair label for him. And by the way, Chiringia, where he is from, that's where Hitler got his first sort of electoral foothold. The AfD are going to be deliberately holding their, one of their main conferences on July the 4th, 2026, because on July the 4th, 1926, was one of Hitler's most famous rallies in Weimar. It's kind of deliberate trolling. But so I think this, I think this, you know, to us, it sounds like, well, let's say the government tried to ban.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Tommy Robinson.

• 35:03Alastair Campbell?

  Tommy Robinson.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Or Rupert Lowe.

• 35:05Alastair Campbell?

  Rupert Lowe, right. You and I both probably think, oh, that's not going to, people are going to think. But in Germany, I think it might be a little bit different, partly because of the history, partly because of the respect of the court, but also so many of these people are on the record. Saying things which on the surface are anti constitutional.

• 35:23Rory Stewart?

  And then the question, sorry, just to fast forward, is that if the AFD actually ultimately takes power in Germany and starts pushing ahead with remigration and eight hundred thousand Germans are expelled from the country, we would then be asking ourselves, shouldn't we have taken them to the Constitutional Court and banned them? Because it's too late by the time they're actually running a neo fascist state.

• 35:45Alastair Campbell?

  That is the argument. That is the argument. And look, even within the the people who absolutely loathe the AFD, there is that worry, that their big worry was you'd take them to court and you didn't win the case. But I think if you look at the, you don't have to say it's the whole party. So I think they're going to be focusing on Turingia and Brandenburg, where they've got some pretty extreme leadership, and also on the some of the youth organisations. But I I think we need to understand that this this stuff happening in Europe is linked. And and the point I make, you've now got Trump and MAGA, you've got Putin, you've got the hard right here, who are all basically pushing the same message that you sort of limp wristed European liberal democrats, you're done and we're coming for you.

• 36:26Rory Stewart?

  And my final thought, which I keep saying again and again, is when you see the same thing happening in America, Britain and Europe, it's probably not about any of the things we think it's about. We tend to think it might be immigration, European Union, economic growth. No, nonsense, right? America's growing strongly, it's got strong employment, Europe's not growing. Some countries got high immigration, some have got lower immigration, some have taken back control, others haven't. It's social media. The only thing that can possibly explain in such a short timeframe that thirty countries with completely different socioeconomic trajectories, constitutions, structures, end up in the same place, I'm afraid, is social media.

• 37:04Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, before we go to the break, a couple of plugs. You mentioned James Cleverly. He's the former Foreign Secretary for the Conservatives, still in the shadow cabinet now, and he is our current guest on Leading.

• 37:15Rory Stewart?

  And that's good, because if people want to hear a pro Brexit argument, don't rely on me to try to ventriloquize. Listen, James Cleverly, he's quite tough, he's quite clear, he's a Brexiteer, and he does his best to call us out and push back against our arguments on Brexit. So want to hear the other side of the story? Listen to James Cleverly on Leading.

• 37:31Alastair Campbell?

  Pretty half-hearted, I thought. Just Rest is Politics Leading, wherever you get your podcasts. And another plug, finally, before the break, is part four of our mini-series on Reform that we've done in conjunction with The Observer. And this one focuses very, very heavily on Mr. Farage. So just go to therestispolitics.com to find that. And now we'll have a break and then we'll come back and talk about Iran.

• 37:52Alastair Campbell?

  Hello, dear listeners. As many of you will know, Father's Day is coming up on the 21st of June.

• 38:01Rory Stewart?

  And we know that a good number of you will be wondering what to get your centrist dad this year.

• 38:06Alastair Campbell?

  And we have the perfect idea. Get him a membership to the Rest is Politics Plus and make the most of our 25% discount on a gifted annual membership.

• 38:18Rory Stewart?

  And that gives you access to all these members-only mini-series that we're making. It gives you early access to Question Time.

• 38:25Alastair Campbell?

  Just head to therestispolitics.com and click on Gifts. The gift will land straight in your dad's inbox on the day.

• 38:32Rory Stewart?

  It's the only present for a centrist dad.

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• 39:42Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 39:44Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart.

• 39:46Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, you sounded very excited about this Iran deal in the introduction, but I am far from convinced that this is actually a deal in the conventional sense. It's a memorandum of understanding. It seems to be that the really difficult stuff is now being parked for these negotiations. So we're going to have Vance and the hapless Kushner and Whitkoff up against the Iranian nuclear scientists again.

• 40:08Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so listen, it's far from resolved, but it's a hell of a big change because it's what we've been waiting for for two months, which is finally the Iranians and the Americans signed a memorandum of understanding with the Pakistanis. And they've both said publicly that they've signed off on this MOU. And the key point is that the Straits of Hormuz now look like they will reopen. Not immediately, and there's many things that could go wrong. Could be the Iranians, could be the Americans, could be the Israelis, could torpedo the whole thing. But it feels to me as though finally Trump and Iran actually want to get this done. My mother's theory is Trump wants to get it done before the 4th of July, 250th Independence

• 40:51Rory Stewart?

  Day celebrations. He doesn't want to be distracted by everyone endlessly grinding on about Hormuz. That's the Sally Stewart view. The Iranians, listen, they have really enjoyed the fact that despite the American and Israeli bombardments, 75% of their entire ballistic missile launch capacity and indeed their missile stockpiles are still intact, three quarters are still intact. This is some of the largest bombing on world record. I mean, the number of targets, they were doing sort of 500 targets a day. This was the highest precision weapons, the greatest targeting ever. And actually, it barely took out a quarter of what Iran has. So, big story there.

• 41:32Rory Stewart?

  But nevertheless, the Iranian economy is groaning. They're desperate for the oil exports. Trump's announced that he's stopping the blockade and they can go through and Iran's announced stop. Now, how could it go wrong? Many, many different ways. And I've been talking to friends in the Gulf about this and I've talked to a lot of people who were in Pakistan, people who've read the MOU. They think that one of the big sticking points, which is Lebanon, may be less than in the past, right? So the big sticking point there was Iran was saying, so long as Israel keeps attacking our allies, Hezbollah in Lebanon, we're not going to sign this deal. And that's why Trump got very, very angry with Netanyahu because just on the cusp of the deal. He struck Lebanon.

• 42:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but look at the response to this deal in Israel. The hard riot figures that we talk about a lot, Sputnik and Ben Gavir, they've come out and said this is bad for the world and bad for Israel. The politics of this Netanyahu are really, really tricky. He does seem to have lost that sort of grip on Trump.

• 42:23Rory Stewart?

  You've put your finger on it. How important is Israel? You're absolutely right. Israel's furious. They want to continue the war with Iran. They want to continue the war with Lebanon. They're being stopped, not just in Iran and in Lebanon. So the question is, is that going to be enough? Will they be able to derail the US and Iran? They've been able in the past because basically they do things in Lebanon without US permission. The US feels forced to support them and the Iranians are outraged. I think, though, what happened with this deal is finally the US and Iran decided we're going to get beyond the Israel thing. We're going to see Israel as a spoiler. Netanyahu tried a last minute attempt to derail with yes, another attack in Lebanon. And actually, it just hurried up the MOU, which got it out.

• 43:06Rory Stewart?

  I think the sticking points that could unravel it are firstly, that there's a lot of legal argument inside the MOU, literal legal language on a non-aggression pact between the US and Iran.

• 43:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 43:17Rory Stewart?

  And on sanctions relief and release of assets.

• 43:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 43:21Rory Stewart?

  And my guess is Trump will probably not follow through, particularly on the latter. And then what is Iran going to do if he doesn't lift sanctions? If he doesn't release assets? Do they return to war? Well, the gamble is they might not.

• 43:33Alastair Campbell?

  Or do they just turn the tap off in the streets of?

• 43:35Rory Stewart?

  Or they turn the tap off.

• 43:36Alastair Campbell?

  That is the terrible thing about this. They basically have been handed a tactic that they probably, I'm not sure they thought of using before. If they thought of it, they never did it. But they now realise they can do it with catastrophic consequences and that Trump doesn't have the global support that he thought he would have. So I think, look, I, I, I think this deal. Well, we haven't seen it. The memo, the memorandum of understanding is pretty short.

• 44:06Rory Stewart?

  Page and a half.

• 44:06Alastair Campbell?

  Page and a half. The JCPOA was like hundreds and hundreds of pages backed by incredibly detailed documents. So it feels to me a little bit like the Gaza plan that was projected as this is peace in our time, but then the detail wasn't there and we're still in a complete mess there. And I think with this, I think there's so much that can go wrong and go wrong quickly. This is fascinating because, because if you go back, and I know Trump's rhetoric, you've got to, so he basically said that the attack was to deal with an imminent threat. Okay. Well, it wasn't. We're going to destroy their missiles and raise their missile industry to the ground. You've pre-rebutted that one. It will be totally obliterated. We're going to annihilate their navy. They've done a lot of

• 44:51Alastair Campbell?

  damage to the navy, they have. We're going to ensure that their terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack all forces, no longer use their IEDs or roadside bombs.

• 45:02Rory Stewart?

  Well, on that one, the key two proxies are Hezbollah, Houthis and probably add the Iraqi militia. And actually what we found oddly is that despite Israel's amazing intelligence operations and attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon, the pager attacks, which killed 1500 people, Hezbollah remains surprisingly resilient and they're now managing to manufacture their own drones. And it turns out they can manufacture them without Iranian backing. Furthermore, the Houthis, who are their proxies in Yemen, fired a missile, reminding people they can still shut that down. So they did not achieve the objective on the proxies.

• 45:34Alastair Campbell?

  Right. So, and then let's go into the, what I think is the big one. I'm going to read the whole thing. To the members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the armed forces and all of the police, I say tonight, you must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity, or in the alternative, you face certain death. Lay down your arms. You will be treated fairly with total immunity, or you will face certain death. Finally, to the great proud people of Iran, tonight, the hour of freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don't leave your home. It's very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will probably be your only chance for generations. In other words, regime change. And that has not happened. The regime was toppled in terms of the top people, but the regime is still in place.

• 46:19Rory Stewart?

  It's had it stronger. And so just in that final one, there was always a fight, even at the top of the Iranian state, about where their security lay. Did their security lie on reaching out to the international community, getting support in the UN, getting peace deals in place, making agreements on sanctions or nuclear, or did their security lie in rearming, building up massive missile bases, pushing ahead with a nuclear programme? And the problem is, it's the hardliners who've won, because every Iranian will have concluded the one thing that saved them was not being nice, being moderate, negotiating. The only thing that saved them is that they buried their missiles a long way underground and they were able to disrupt the Straits of Hormuz. And the Revolutionary Guard has been

• 47:04Rory Stewart?

  completely vindicated, narrowly in their view, that actually what stops regime change is being armed to the teeth and refusing to cooperate.

• 47:13Alastair Campbell?

  If you're an average Iranian, I don't know what an average Iranian is, but if you're a kind of middle-of-the-road Iranian, not a massive fan of the regime, but you're just kind of keeping your head down, what do you think in terms of who has won or lost this? I think the Iranians think that survival is winning, and they've survived. They now have a strength because of the way they've handled the Straits of Hormuz that they didn't necessarily have in the same way before. They've shown American power to be weaker than the Americans projected. And the Americans keep saying that the great triumph in this, I saw an interview with Pete Hexeth, the Secretary of War, and the great triumph is that, you know, they've made sure Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. But that was

• 47:57Alastair Campbell?

  signed up to in the Nonproliferation Treaty, it was signed up to in the JCPOA.

• 48:03Rory Stewart?

  And in fact, there were moments when Ayatollah Khomeini suggested that he thought it was un-Islamic to have a nuclear weapon in the first place.

• 48:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And 97% of the stuff was kind of moved out of the country. So I think it's very, very hard. Unless you are absolutely believing every single word that Donald Trump says says to you to see this as a as a victory, even by the objectives he sets out of results.

• 48:24Rory Stewart?

  And so I think the answer on Iranian people is ninety percent, eighty five, ninety percent of Iranians absolutely hate their regime. They think they're a bunch of violent, corrupt, theocratic people who've locked them in a horrible, isolating world, and they would be hugely relieved if this regime went and Iran could become a normal country. They're totally fed up with the Revolutionary Guard trying to turn their whole country into a crusade against Israel and the US, and they think this nuclear programme is mad, and they think that this regime has invited war and horror. But also, they are so furious with what US and Israel did. Why? Because what they did is they bombed Iran, they

• 49:07Rory Stewart?

  killed hundreds of schoolchildren, and they did not topple the regime, right? So all the people who were supporting the Crown Prince, the former Shah and everyone who were promising that if we're nice to the American and Israel, there's going to be a lovely toppling the regime and a democratic future is going to emerge, all nonsense, right? So I think they're in the sort of bind that you would feel in if a government that you really, really hated and that you'd been trying to get rid of, um, suddenly vindicated you in a war against someone else.

• 49:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I think I think you're right. I think Israel is has the potential to be the real difficult thing, because the Iranians will be on the lookout for Israel trying to undermine this. The Israelis, it seems to me, Netanyahu will be under pressure to undermine it, including from within his own cabinet. And then the question is how Trump reacts. And we're talking about a sixty day period where these continuing negotiations go on.

• 50:01Rory Stewart?

  And we've also talked a lot about the economy and the impacts on the economy, and we'll be doing some more episodes around this. And the honest answer is the economic damage of this is very, very lasting. In the best case scenario, vessels might start moving through the strait next week. But you can see all the ship owners saying we need many, many more assurances before we start selling our vessels. There's going to be a massive logjam because there are thousands of vessels and it's quite difficult navigating them through. There are thousands of sailors who need to be evacuated from these boats. There are certain bits that are ready to move. Fertilizer, for example, is ready to move. It's stockpiled in places like Qatar, but it's missed a lot of this year's growing season.

• 50:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 50:40Rory Stewart?

  So the impact on this year's growing season is dramatic. Oil can be moved relatively more easily. Gas is a problem, partly because the Iranians attacked some of these gas fields. Some of them will take two months, four months. It's difficult to put a number on it to get going again. Some percentage of it won't be able to get going again for some years. And none of these states still quite know, are Iran going to charge tolls? They're going to try to charge a million dollars a vessel. They've said they won't, but there's some weird ambiguous language in the MOU. And we don't know whether, and nobody can model this. Nobody knows whether the impact of Eurocatry, is it going to be in the best case scenario? Okay, there's been a bit of disruption for a few weeks, but we'll be able to get back to where we were within a year or two?

• 51:22Rory Stewart?

  Or is it going to take three years or seven years as your economy contracting seventeen percent this year, ten percent this year? Dubai, I was talking to someone in the UAE who was being very optimistic and saying, listen, yes, Dubai is suffering, but people wrote us off in two thousand and eight. They wrote us off in Covid and we bounced back, so we'll bounce back again. But to be honest, nobody knows. And it isn't just the Gulf, as we've said before. The Asian economies are shattered by this. The European economies are shattered by this. And it's going to take a long time, even in the best case, to untangle.

• 51:55Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there we are, ten years on from Brexit and now a few months on from the launch of the Iran war. Both of them pretty difficult, big subjects, but more difficult big subjects to cover in Question Time. We're going to talk about defence. We're going to talk about AI and in particular, this extraordinary decision by the Americans to say to Anthropic, you cannot give your latest frontier model stuff to anybody who is not American. You know a lot about that and we'll hear about that. We're going to talk about an astonishing election, close election in Peru. And we're going to reflect a little bit on possibly the greatest, well, Donald Trump said it was the greatest sporting event in history. That was the UFC fighting on the lawn of the White House, which made me throw up.

• 52:36Rory Stewart?

  Brilliant, and I'd like to do a bit of a deep dive also into what is actually happening with British defence spending. How should we be spending this money? Why did Healy go? What's this new man gonna do? Yeah, cool. See you there.

• 53:25Speaker 07

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 53:35Speaker 08

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 53:42Speaker 09

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 53:46Speaker 08

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 53:49Speaker 09

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 53:50Speaker 08

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 53:56Speaker 10

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• 54:04Speaker 11

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