Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 237. Iran, Israel, and the Middle East: Stopping the slide into all-out war About this episode How will Israel respond to Iran’s attack? What is Joe Biden’s long-term plan for Ukraine? What has Liz Truss' new book revealed about her short spell in Downing Street?
Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more on today's episode of The Rest Is Politics.
🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅
TRIP ELECTION TOUR:
To buy tickets for our October Election Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com
TRIP Plus:
Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes.
Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics.
Instagram:
@restispolitics
Twitter:
@RestIsPolitics
Email:
[email protected]
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript 10,498 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 Alastair 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.
0:19 Rory 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. 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.
0:42 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?
0:49 Rory 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/restorspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restorspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
1:07 Speaker 02 Nordstrom Rack is celebrating 125 years of Nordstrom, with 125 of the best deals, up to 65% off, in stores and online. They're only here while supplies last, so shop today. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack.
1:32 Alastair Campbell? Welcome to Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.
1:34 Rory Stewart? And with me, Rory Stewart.
1:36 Alastair Campbell? And Rory, I suppose, big thing this week, Iran-Israel. I think that will have to take a fair chunk out of our podcast today, and quite rightly so. I'm also very interested in Biden's, his Biden's in-tray, which doesn't have that right close to the top, but also what's happening in South China Sea, which I think is something that's not getting enough attention. Lots of focus on Taiwan, but there's other stuff going on there that I think we should maybe talk about. And then down in that, also in that neck of the woods, very interesting election in South Korea last weekend, where the president's party got a real absolute drubbing.
2:16 Alastair Campbell? And I think we have to probably talk a little bit about Liz Truss. And if we've got time, maybe also Angela Rayner. They're both... Getting lots and lots of attention. Angela Raina probably doesn't want the attention. I think we can safely assume that Liz Truss absolutely is desperate for the attention and this rather absurd performance she's making of her new book. But shall we start with Iran-Israel? And why don't you actually give us one of your famous explainers, Iran-Israel, the history of in one minute by Rory Stewart?
2:52 Rory Stewart? One minute is actually, it's obviously a very, very ancient history. I mean, they're neighbours going back thousands of years. And there was very strong relationships between Persian kings and the state of Israel before the birth of Christ. But in modern history, in the 1950s, Iran under the Shah, the then king of Iran, Emperor of Iran, had quite a close relationship with Israel. It recognised Israel quite early on. Things changed, as you say, with the revolution, 1979, Islamic Revolution. So Khomeini comes in. And even in the 80s, because of the Iran-Iraq war, there was actually quite a lot of covert
3:32 Rory Stewart? connections between Israel and Iran, partly funding the Iranians against Iraq because Saddam Hussein was seen as more of an enemy. Things began to really change in the early 90s for a few reasons. I mean, one of them is that Saddam Hussein ceased to be the common enemy. Iran was leaning more and more into funding particularly Hezbollah, which we'll get to in a second, which is this huge, very, very active terrorist group based in southern Lebanon, dedicated to the eradication of Israel, was being increasingly funded by Iran. And Iran began to really lean into its nuclear weapons programme. So by about
4:13 Rory Stewart? 2010, Iran and Israel had entered a shadow war. And there were big upticks. So there was a famous attack which Israel mounted on Iran called the Stuxnet virus, which put this virus into their nuclear weapons programme. There was increasing assassinations done by Mossad agents on Iranian soil. So they were killing a particular Iranian nuclear scientists. There were Iranian attacks against Israelis worldwide. And then there was attacks on shipping began to see an uptick. And the rhetoric became pretty bad. So by about 2012, you had senior Iranian figures
4:55 Rory Stewart? making statements about the destruction of the Zionist entity or wiping Israel off the map. That's back about 12 years ago. And then occasionally Israeli response to that. So Shimon Peres said, you know, Iran itself can also be wiped off the map. And then seemed to change his mind a few years later, where he said, actually, Iran is not a massive enemy of Israel. So back and forth, back and forth. But it was sort of kept under control until about 2019, when people really began to worry that it was escalating and that both Iran and Israel were taking more and more risks. And you saw very, very odd things. You saw Israel not just mounting attacks against Iranian militias and proxies
5:39 Rory Stewart? deep outside the borders of Israel, but also the Israeli army posting stuff on Twitter, deliberately mocking the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and saying, what essentially, what are you going to do about it? We just attacked you. What are you going to do about it, etc. And of course, the final thing that we're getting to is that on April 1, Israel attacked an embassy. And embassies are traditionally seen as very protected ground. They're meant to be exempt. They're little bits of sovereign territory in someone else's country. They attacked the Iranian embassy in Damascus, and they killed some senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard members. Iran promised that it would respond, and it responded in a really unprecedented,
6:22 Rory Stewart? very, very dramatic way. It fired over 300 missiles and drones from Iran towards Israel. These were very, very dangerous things. If they'd got through, they would have created absolute mayhem and killed a lot of people. Iran telegraphed that it was going to do it. In other words, it announced well in advance that it was going to do it. And it seems to have done so expecting Israel's very impressive three-tier missile shield to be able to shoot these things down and after shooting them stated that it was going to be taking no further action. So Iran is trying to say, look, this is our response to your attack on the embassy and that's it. We're not going to do any more,
7:07 Rory Stewart? but we're just showing that we have teeth. Israel, of course, feels that this is an incredibly dangerous attack on Israeli territory and is promising to retaliate. Over to you.
7:18 Alastair Campbell? There you go. Now, Rory, if you want to know even more about relationship between Iran and Israel, our sister podcast, Empire, has done a very, very interesting episode on this very, very subject. So strongly recommend that. So they've had, the Israelis since then have had two very long meetings of the war cabinet. Early indications were that they were not going to react very quickly in that they sent out signals that, for example, schools that have been closed down could reopen. And but now I think you're starting to hear that maybe in the similar sort of timeframe. So it was pretty much exactly a fortnight between the attack on the consulate in Damascus and this response, which, as
8:01 Alastair Campbell? you say, was really well defended by this thing called the Iron Dome. I wonder whether the, you say they telegraphed it. I wonder whether they actually gave more detail than we realize. It seems that it's, the defense was pretty remarkable. They reckon 99% taken down, only one person injured, that was a child. The only ones that got through, got through to a military base. Now, the thing about that is if that had been the only thing that had happened, and let's just say one or two people had been killed, I think the pressure now on Netanyahu to respond pretty quickly and pretty brutally would be even more severe than it is. But in a weird sort of way, the pressure that seems to be coming
8:42 Alastair Campbell? in harder than anything he's getting internally is the external pressure from the United States and from other countries that were involved in this, including the UK, including Jordan, which I thought was very, very interesting. That they're basically saying, I mean, Biden came up with this very good phrase, I thought, take the win. And that seems to be putting Netanyahu in something of a difficult position because he will be under a lot of internal pressure. There's one guy who's pretty close to the coalition government saying Israel needs to go berserk on Iran. And what Americans are saying is, is look, take the win, calm down. And I wonder whether they actually knew a lot more about this than we realise, because they, they seem to be taking at face
9:27 Alastair Campbell? value the words of the Iranian, the Iranians, this is it for now. And, and of course, I don't know if you remember, I think it was back in 1998, when there was an attack on, I think it was an Iranian consulate in Mazhar El Sharif in Afghanistan. And back then, people thought there was going to be, oh, my God, they've taken out Iranians on it, on, you know, as you say, Iranian soil within Afghanistan. And in fact, they did, I remember they did a few little military manoeuvres and pretty much nothing else. So although we, we might sort of get a sense of Iran as being kind of, you know, absolutely extreme theocracy and so forth, they can be quite pragmatic when it comes to this stuff. So I wonder if for a while it will calm down a bit.
10:10 Rory Stewart? Or it could get very dangerous. I mean, I think the, and the problem in all these regimes is that you can cherry pick people who make unbelievably extreme crazy statements about the others. I'm afraid on both sides. I mean, there are definitely many senior Iranian figures on record saying they want to wipe Israel off the face of the map. And of course, you know, Iran is a very disturbing place. I mean, it is run by this theocracy, it's in the grip of these conservative hardliners, it's getting worse. I mean, we covered.
10:49 Rory Stewart? The demonstrations are following the killing of Shireen last year. And there have been, you know, when we've been covering the elections with these tiny turnouts. So it's a regime which is feeling under threat.
11:01 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
11:02 Rory Stewart? And that's always dangerous because when a regime is is feeling under threat of teetering, it can often want to lash out.
11:09 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
11:10 Rory Stewart? And on the other hand, on the Israeli side, there are some figures who have long believed that they are their biggest existential threat comes from Iran, and there needs to be a reckoning. And there are even figures who say there needs to be a preemptive strike against Iran.
11:27 Alastair Campbell? Netanyahu has always been one of those who's seen Iran as the biggest threat. So it may be that within the context of, I mean, who knows? I don't know what's been said at their war cabinet. It may be that within that context, he is trying to moderate others away from a view that actually he is historically held, because he will be, although he's been quite dismissive at times of the Americans, the fact is, the Americans are now pretty clear that although they have this kind of iron, what he calls his ironclad support for Israel, Biden is making clear that that will not go to a direct attack on Iran, much as he made the same, the same sort of noises about about Russia and Ukraine.
12:10 Alastair Campbell? So how Netanyahu reads that, and also whether Israel, whether Iran has done this partly to provoke these divisions, partly to know that these divisions are there and and further to provoke them. So I think it's very, very hard to read without knowing what they're actually saying to each other in the privacy of their own cabinet rooms is very, very hard to read.
12:31 Rory Stewart? Very hard to read. But but that's where we come to a theme, I think, of the whole podcast today, which is how you get the balance between deterring somebody. So, you know, being strong enough and powerful enough to say, don't screw with me.
12:44 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
12:44 Rory Stewart? How you stop that becoming escalation, how you stop that becoming a tit for tat, which just gets more and more crazy.
12:51 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
12:51 Rory Stewart? And the danger which everybody's been worried about with Iran, Israel for years, which is the danger of miscalculation. That one side oversteps. So, you know, there are people within the Israeli military establishment who think that attack on the embassy on April the first in Damascus was a massive miscalculation because there's been a long tradition of Israelis feeling that the way to deter Iran is to hit them hard. And if you keep hitting them hard, Iran won't respond. So there's been a lot of surprise from senior Israeli military figures that the Iranian response has been so extreme and so aggressive. And this is now making huge problem in strategic calculation. How do you get that balance right? And then again,
13:34 Rory Stewart? as you say, there'll be on both sides, one group of people saying, we are really going to have to hit these people very hard because the only thing they understand is force to stop them doing this again. And if we show weakness, this is just going to open the door to more and more attacks. And then of course, people on the other side saying, for goodness sake, don't escalate.
13:54 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. I mean, there's this phrase that always gets attached to Iran, strategic patience. And, you know, so this is the first time that they've actually directly attacked Israel in 45 years, almost half a century as the Islamic State. Now, strategic patience, I guess that is basically a clever way of saying that they play the long game. The question now is whether we just go back to these shadow wars being fought through all the proxies. And I've actually been quite surprised that the reactions on both sides have actually not been, I'm talking about the rhetoric now, not been more violent than they've been. And I just wonder whether there is, there is something going on within both of them that says, you know, we, that we can both see the reasons why you might want to fight
14:39 Alastair Campbell? a war, but actually, we really, really, really don't. And here, the American role vis a vis Israel is absolutely fundamental. And, you know, I so feel for Joe Biden at the moment. This is incredibly difficult. He's got this going on. He's got Ukraine going on, he's in the middle of an election now. Admittedly, his opponent is, you know, in front of a judge, so not exactly out sort of covering himself in glory. And it's happening at a time when it seems to me that the Americans still want to be seen as the big, most important country in the world, but don't actually necessarily want all the responsibilities that that entails, especially if that includes putting American soldiers in danger. And, you know, I saw a bit of criticism in some of the American
15:24 Alastair Campbell? media, not of the kind of, you know, the head banging Republicans, but of some sort of sensible Republicans who were saying that, you know, Biden made a mistake by signaling to Putin at the start, there was telling the Ukrainians, yes, we're with you, but we won't fight. And now he's sort of doing something similar. Yes, Israel, we're with you, but we won't fight. So we'll give you all the support that we can up to, but short of actually committing American forces and putting them in harm's way.
15:52 Rory Stewart? Yeah. Although, of course, you're completely right. But interestingly, in this particular case, US jets, British jets, Jordanian jets flew in a way that they wouldn't in Ukraine, shooting down these missiles, partly because in Russia, you're dealing with a nuclear armed adversary and people have calculated that we can't, can't do that. So just to lean into this a bit, because this is something that Ukrainians have been raising, they're saying it's the same Iranian drones being flown at Kiev as were being flown at Israel. So why is it that the international coalition is prepared to put planes in the air to shoot down these drones? And that's to do with the fact that we're more cautious in our
16:32 Rory Stewart? confrontation with Russia than we are with Iran. And here in the US, I was, I'm speaking to you from Yale again, I was at a meeting with some foreign policy people here who are beginning to say that we're being too cautious with Russia and that from the Russian point of view, we're pretty deep in this war anyway. We've provided tens of billions of dollars worth of military support and civilian training and we're not kidding anybody really. And actually, we should just keep signaling that there's no aggressive intent against Russia. It's just about defending Ukraine and we should be able to shoot down these missiles. But you can see why anyone else listening to that conversation would be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, there's a pretty good reason why we're
17:16 Rory Stewart? not flying planes, which is shooting down, down Russian missiles. And can I just, just on the, on the other thing, I mean, to Again, look at why this might develop into something much more dangerous. Iran's position in the region is, despite all its economic weakness, despite all the fragility of the regime, is much stronger or feels much stronger than it did 20 years ago. So 20 years ago, basically, Iran didn't have any, or 25 years ago, any presence in Iraq. I mean, Saddam Hussein was their great enemy, so they were excluded from Iraq, didn't really have any presence in Syria, didn't really have any presence in Yemen. What's happened is that the Iraq war gave Iran the opportunity to bring in, basically,
18:01 Rory Stewart? Iranian-backed governments into Baghdad and Iranian militias, forming the backbone of many of the forces in Iraq. The Syrian war gave them the opportunity to get in behind Bashar al-Assad and essentially control that regime and, in inverted commas, save that regime. The fight in Yemen gave them the opportunity to really get in and arm the Houthis. So from the point of view of Israel, they're now looking at a world which has changed a lot in 20 years, where Iran is now, feels much closer that these militias in Iraq, in Syria, in Yemen and in Lebanon are a big threat. And this, this brings us to Hezbollah, I think we've talked about this before, but hawks in Israel, of course, think that Hamas is a distraction, that Hamas is much weaker,
18:45 Rory Stewart? so that the force in Gaza that did the October 7th attacks is much weaker than Hezbollah. Hezbollah in southern Lebanon is anti-Israeli, has over 100,000 missiles, has 30,000 highly-trained and experienced troops that have been fighting all over the region. So there are people in Israel who say, we shouldn't have gone after Hamas, we should have gone after Hezbollah. In fact, there's good reason to believe that they would have gone after Hezbollah had Biden not intervened back in October, November.
19:14 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
19:15 Rory Stewart? And this attack will strengthen the hand of people who keep saying Hezbollah's the enemy, Iran's the enemy, this is our moment to get this done.
19:23 Alastair Campbell? Hmm. I was fascinated to watch, Zelensky did a broadcast, was it last night or the night before? And you get the feeling that, that they, they, I think, must be very worried at the moment, because there's a, it's almost like there's a, there's a hierarchy of alliance here. And you have a sense that the Israeli alliance is, for historical reasons, of fundamental significance to America and in particular to Joe Biden as president. Whereas Ukraine, I sort of feel that they're still talking the talk in terms of support. But if you just think about, if you're sitting there with Zelensky and you're watching what happened
20:07 Alastair Campbell? with the Iron Dome and its effectiveness and British planes going up and American planes going up. And, you know, they're able to say 99% of these things got stopped. And the exact same defenses that Ukraine say they desperately need at the moment, they're not getting them. So they're getting the rhetoric, they're getting the political support. And then, of course, if you're Joe Biden and you're having all these massive, incredibly expensive demands on your own military, it does, I think, put him in a very, very difficult place politically with this guy who's still in court. But when he comes out of court, he's going to be saying, I'm the only guy who can stop us going into World War III.
20:47 Rory Stewart? Yes, and Ukraine is now in a real difficult problem. In the optimistic days of last year, people thought that what was happening was that there was an attrition of the Russian army. In other words, so many Russian soldiers being killed, so much equipment was being killed, that basically Russians' capacity was being fatally degraded. And there were people here in the US, and you know, I saw some of them last week, who were saying, this is a great thing, we just keep giving weapons to Ukrainians and Russia just gets destroyed. It's now become clear that actually that hasn't happened as often in wars. After an initial stage where the Russian army suffered a lot, it's actually in a much better position than it was in a year ago, it seems.
21:31 Rory Stewart? It's learnt a lot through the conflict. It's now got a massive superiority in ammunition. It seems to have five times the number of shells that the Ukrainians have. And of course, Russia is a huge country. I mean, Putin hasn't begun to mobilize the kinds of numbers that he could mobilize. And people forget, I mean, to sort of be really extreme about this. I mean, it's not actually true that just killing lots of the enemy. Degrades their capacity. I mean, Russia lost eight, 12 million soldiers during the Second World War and was probably stronger at the end of the Second World War than at the beginning. So it's a real issue. And when people talk about victory in Ukraine,
22:13 Rory Stewart? that looks much less plausible than it might have done with the offensive last year. Very difficult to see how one breaks through these Russian frontlines. Ukraine's very short of people, very short of missiles, very short of air defenses. And even this question that people are now moving to, you know, you saw the Italian Prime Minister talking openly about this, about some sort of land deal with Russia. Russia has momentum at the moment, and Putin is, of course, gambling a lot that Donald Trump will be re-elected, and he's going to be trying to retake land. I think we can expect big Russian assaults on the southern front through the summer, which may change the whole position dramatically.
22:50 Alastair Campbell? If you're Zelensky, you're sitting there being urged, as you say, by people like Maloney and also quite a few American politicians now saying as well, "Look, you know, do a deal on the land that's already been taken." But Zelensky is perfectly entitled to say, "Well, hold on a minute. This is the land that we've been defending that was taken against our will, and that you've been putting all this capital into supporting." So in a sense, they're trying to redefine how this war ends. And so I think the other, maybe this is a good time to turn to this other potential big flashpoint, which I think is, I don't think, getting nearly enough attention, and which, again, is right at the heart of Biden's intrigue at the moment.
23:31 Alastair Campbell? And that's the South China Sea, because we've talked lots about Taiwan. The reason I thought we should talk about this is because not long ago, Biden got together the Prime Minister of Japan and the President of South Korea, not traditionally great friends, and he got them together, and some pretty interesting things came out of that. And then last week, he got the Prime Minister of Japan and Marcos, the former dictator's son, who's now President of the Philippines, and brought them together. And really, specifically to address this worry that while we're all focused on Taiwan, there's this other flashpoint going on. So if you look at, you take a map and you've got Huge Great China there and you go down to the southeast China and you're coming
24:16 Alastair Campbell? out from the Manchurian Plains and you've got, you've got North Korea and you've got South Korea. And then across the Sea of Japan, there's Japan. And as we said earlier, Japan and South Korea have not been great allies, but Biden's trying to broker a better relationship between them. You go south, you go down the map through the East China Sea and you have Taiwan. And of course, we've talked endlessly about Taiwan and the world is rightly worried about the possibility of China reclaiming Taiwan as their own. Go down further and you're into the South China Sea. So this is all happening in, in, okay, it's a large expanse of sea, but it's essentially in the same region, not that far from China. And
24:58 Alastair Campbell? the hotspot at the moment, it seems to me, relates to this dispute over submerged coral. The Philippines claim it, China basically say that it's theirs and they've been involved in some very aggressive ramming of ships, lasering of ships, water cannoning, those Filipino troops who've been going to look after this little outpost. So it all sounds a bit kind of, a bit weird, but I think this is in its own way as, as big a flashpoint. And we, you know, and that's why Biden had the Prime Minister of Japan and the President of the Philippines over to the White House last week and was very, very clear that he
25:41 Alastair Campbell? used exactly the same phrase for the Philippines as he uses for Israel, ironclad support in the face of Chinese aggression.
25:49 Rory Stewart? Alison, I mean, I think you've provided a really good account of the geography there. And we can give people more detail on it. It's called the nine dash line showing this visually in a map. If people sign up for our newsletter. So go to therestispolitics.com, sign up the newsletter. And in addition to our book recommendations and things, we'll also send you clear map and an explanation of how this is all playing out across Southeast Asia, where China tries to make this huge claim. People maybe will have heard of the Spratly Islands, but basically, as you say, these are all these disputed territories, which at the moment, the flashpoint is Philippines, but also potentially bring in Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam and others. And for China is about claiming sovereignty and it does this stuff
26:33 Rory Stewart? it has in the past, you know, built artificial islands. And as you say, got involved in this. Can I just so develop a little bit though, what you're saying about? President Biden. So the first thing that's dramatic about it, which makes the US very different to anyone else, is just how much energy they are putting into doing things simultaneously all the way around the world. You're not getting a sense that Biden is just transfixed on Ukraine or transfixed on Israel Gaza. The next thing is just how big America is around the world. You know, America still has 55,000 soldiers in Japan, in Okinawa. It's got about 30,000 soldiers in South Korea. It's got bases in the Philippines.
27:17 Rory Stewart? It's got this big base in Guam. And if you include Hawaii, there are nearly 300,000 American troops gathered around Indo-Pacific. And then in Europe, as you know, there's like 34,000 American troops in Germany, 12,000 in Italy, we've got about 9,000, 10,000 in the UK. And now another 20,000 US troops pushed forward into Poland and other East European states because of Ukraine. So, I mean, these numbers, I mean, I'm just kind of spilling out these numbers, but to put it in context, the British Army would struggle to deploy and sustain in the field about 5,000 people. The US has got something like 228,000 soldiers currently outside the United States, deployed in these bases around the
28:01 Rory Stewart? world, which Biden is having to sort of juggle with and use as part of this question of deterrence.
28:06 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. And yet, there was a time, you know, we talk about Britannia rule the waves. The truth is that there was a time when the American Navy was pretty much part of a sort of global shipping insurance system, that, you know, the American Navy was all around the world. Now, the Chinese Navy has grown hugely. Japanese Navy has always been very, very, very big. But one of the factors that's involved in this initiative that he's taken with the Philippines and Japan last week, is the fact that China's been intercepting ships and aircraft belonging to the US in the South China Sea, just to sort of, you know, see how far they can, as part of this kind of provocative action, see how far they can push it. So you're right that the American military remains this giant, but in comparative
28:51 Alastair Campbell? terms, it's not as big as it was. And it doesn't have the kind of bipartisan and popular
28:59 Alastair Campbell? Political support that it had, that's the point I was making earlier. You meet so many Americans who really have bought into this idea that, you know, we're just sort of fueling these forever wars. And okay, and you know, the idea of the global policeman used to be kind of part of the the strength of the American political identity, but that's being eroded. A lot of them don't want to be the world's policeman.
29:20 Rory Stewart? And that's from both left and right. I mean, the US is spending over eighty, probably eighty five billion dollars a year on on its its international deployments. And as you say, from the left, there will be a sense that it's all our fault and we don't want to make the world worse. And, you know, obviously, there's a strong drive towards peace. And from the right, there will be a strong sense of, well, it's none of our business. Why do we care about these other people? So that both sides are driving American politics towards a more isolationist position. And the final thing, though, which, you know, maybe just before we go into the break, that you've pointed to is the way that what Biden is doing forms a pattern of making
30:05 Rory Stewart? small temporary coalitions of support as opposed to leaning into the big international global system of the UN. So the old approach, if you were Obama, is, you know, if you're going into Libya, you're relying on the UN. If you're doing climate stuff, you're relying on the UN. Biden seems to have got frustrated with the sort of big things, sort of UN, WTO, and instead is making things. I mean, you talked when you were in in Australia about AUKUS, which is an example of one of those things where, you know, Australia, US, UK has come together. Then he's got something called the Quad, where he's working with India. Now, as you say, he's got this agreement going with the Philippines.
30:45 Alastair Campbell? And one of the one of the things apparently that he talked to the Japanese about last week was the the possibility of Japan being added to AUKUS at some point. So I don't know what they're going to call it, but no, so they're building these different alliances. But is that also a reflection of the weakening, not least by Trump, of some of these other military institutions that we've depended on?
31:04 Rory Stewart? Exactly. So the positive spin made by the Biden administration is they call it creating a latticework and improvising and getting around these cumbersome. Setups, but of course it's driven by the fact that they're struggling to get the support in the bigger international agreement. So you've just come back from Singapore and I think one of the things you probably would have picked up there is that Singapore is an example of a place which in, you know, 99% of ways is pro-West and pro-American, but is very, very reluctant to sign up to a US confrontation with China.
31:37 Alastair Campbell? Oh yeah, absolutely.
31:38 Rory Stewart? So these things give the impression of a massive coalition of the willing, but the reality is that in lining up against China, they've got South Korea, they've got Japan, they've got the Philippines. That's about it. They're really struggling to get full-throated support from the other major players in Asia and Southeast Asia. Even India is pretty ambivalent.
32:01 Alastair Campbell? Oh yeah, I thought it was interesting though about the Philippines because the Philippines, when Marcos Junior came to power, he was seen very much as being, you know, looking favorably upon China. But all this stuff within the South China Sea has, it seems to have pushed him far closer to the American side of things. I was reading a report that from the American Defense Department. So in the last two years, Chinese ships and planes, these incidents of sort of provoking American ships or aircraft, there have been almost 300 in the last two years. And that is more than the total of the entire previous decade.
32:43 Alastair Campbell? And if you throw in the similar things against Philippine vessels, against Vietnamese vessels, there's something going on there that I think we need to keep our eyes on.
32:52 Rory Stewart? Right. Let's take a break.
32:54 Alastair Campbell? Let's take a break.
33:32 Rory Stewart? Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.
33:35 Alastair Campbell? And me Alastair Campbell. And in this election year Rory, well I don't know whether it was a surprise, but I think the scale of the defeat for the president's party, the PPP, in South Korea was a surprise. The Democratic Party, which alongside this little satellite party it works with, has got 175 seats in the 300-seat parliament. And the PPP has just got 109. Now, the only sort of shaft of light for President Yoon is that they didn't get a two-thirds majority, which would have meant they could have sort of overridden his veto, changed the constitution, they could even have impeached him. So he's stopped short of that, but it's a pretty devastating result for him. His party leader has had to resign.
34:20 Alastair Campbell? The prime minister and others have offered to. And it means he will be the first, I think the first South Korean president ever, who will go through his entire term without ever having control of the parliament.
34:32 Rory Stewart? And this is important because South Korea is facing a lot of simultaneous crises. I mean, one of them is having been the great economic miracle. I mean, as people remember, South Korea and North Korea, of course, were occupied by Japan before the Second World War, went through the Korean War in the early 50s, in which 3 million Koreans were killed, country then divided. And South Korea then went through a series of dictatorships, particularly under a couple of generals from the early 60s to the late 80s, where it became this incredible economic miracle. And again, in the newsletter, we can direct people towards a wonderful book by a Korean-British economist called Ha-Jung Chung,
35:13 Rory Stewart? arguing that actually Korea is a really exciting model because it wasn't a model of sort of Thatcherite deregulated free-market development. It was a model of quite directed government investment development that created these enormous things like Samsung and Hyundai. Become incredibly impressive country. I mean, you've just come back from Singapore and you can feel the weight of South Korea throughout Asia now culturally with kind of K-pop.
35:37 Alastair Campbell? Okay, K-pop is unbelievable. Unbelievable. I read it was their third biggest export. I don't know if that's right, but I'd read that when I was in Singapore. It's their third biggest export. And even in the UK now, Rory, I mean, I'm sure you follow K-pop very, very closely.
35:52 Rory Stewart? Definitely not as closely as you.
35:54 Alastair Campbell? These big bands now, when they come over here, I mean, here we are trying to sell out the O2 and hopefully we'll get there by October. They can do it 20 times over in five minutes just by doing a couple of tweets.
36:06 Rory Stewart? It's amazing. And, and you know, lots of things to admire about South Korea. I mean, it's got, people live to be kind of 83. It's got a very impressive stats around its health service, but it's also facing real problems. And one of them is it's had a big doctors. I mean, some of it's familiar from Britain, right? It's dealing with longstanding doctor's strike. Huge challenge in trying to produce affordable housing, young people feeling completely locked out of the market and feeling their lives.
36:33 Alastair Campbell? Very aging population.
36:34 Rory Stewart? Very aging. So fertility rate down at 0.85 per couple.
36:40 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
36:40 Rory Stewart? So its population dropped. It's one of these countries now like China and Japan, which is facing unfortunately pretty bleak economic future in a sense. Because its population is beginning to contract. And like those countries too, not a big one on taking in immigrants. I mean, it's 93% ethnic Korean. So he's struggling with that. And of course he's struggling with what we've been talking about a month ago, which is North Korea.
37:03 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
37:03 Rory Stewart? And as you've pointed out, and I think you struck the alarm on this, and I think people have slightly taken their eyes off it. North Korea is in a very, very dangerous state. It's getting a little support because it's supplying arms to Russia. And Russia in return vetoed the UN inspectors going into respect to nuclear weapons. I'm picking up from people who are in touch with the Chinese government, that the Chinese government is now very worried about North Korea. And it's beginning to signal that it's not in control and what North Korea does isn't really its responsibility. So that's the background.
37:39 Rory Stewart? And then, as you've said, this election, which is part of a pattern again in Korea, which we've seen across so many countries, particularly in Latin America, which is the use of. Lawfare kind of attacking the previous president, trying to put them in jail. This kind of Korean politics since the eighties, it just sort of flips back and forth. And every time somebody steps down as president, the other party tries to go after them for corruption or abuse of power. And we can see this now, you know, the current president's wife is under investigation for taking a D O handbag, so that's corruption. The leader of the opposition is under investigation for corruption, for allocating a corrupt contract on a land deal when he was mayor.
38:19 Alastair Campbell? The handbag incident was was unfortunate, to say the least, because it was one of those grainy, secretly filmed things. But it's quite interesting. She has literally vanished from the scene. She didn't even go, you know, normally you will have the the the party leaders are filmed going to vote and the the wives or husbands will be there alongside them. And she she wasn't there. I don't think she's been seen since December in terms of sort of out and about publicly. But the point you made about North Korea is interesting because, of course, his predecessor was quite, molly-ance the wrong word, but he was trying to calm things, whereas Yoon has been much more outspoken, much more aggressive. And that seems to have backfired. And I think, you know, we talk a lot about the personalities of these of these political leaders.
39:03 Alastair Campbell? And here's a guy who's actually, I'm not going to compare him to Keir Starber, but his background is is a prosecutor.
39:10 Rory Stewart? Right.
39:10 Alastair Campbell? And it it seems that he he's not really adapted his style to politics. I think Keir has adapted his style quite well to politics.
39:18 Rory Stewart? But both of them, I mean, somebody said in the last presidential race, which was incredibly close, I think he won by, you know, point zero something percent.
39:24 Alastair Campbell? Or point seven, I think it was, yeah.
39:26 Rory Stewart? It was an unlikeability contest that both these people are lawyers. You know, one of them, as you say, a prosecutor, the other one, a bit like Keir Starber, is a human rights lawyer.
39:34 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
39:34 Rory Stewart? And that's like, kind of, in one sense, people talk about the kind of gladiatorial contest, where they're always trying to put each other in jail. But in another sense, these are not figures who are really big on big on charisma.
39:47 Alastair Campbell? He also, he he said that he did this terrible, it's it's. It's just amazing how seemingly little things can catch on. So one of the turning points of the election, it seems, was that there was a big fancy department store where a single apple suddenly cost seven dollars. Okay, about five pounds. So five pounds for an apple. So that became like a quite a big story. And President Yoon thought, I need to do something about this. So he went out to a market and he basically said that the spring onions there were very, very cheap. Now, several points about this. The first is it was one of those subsidised markets. So actually, yes, they were quite cheap. Well,
40:29 Alastair Campbell? that's because they were subsidised. But also, what do you say that rather than eat apples, we should eat spring onions? And so during the campaign, the opposition just went around the place waving spring onions everywhere.
40:42 Rory Stewart? It's a fundamental problem that British politicians do sometimes, isn't it? The stupidity of a politician going out and saying, oh, actually, things are quite affordable. Tory politicians get in trouble for this. They sort of go around the supermarkets saying, if you buy own brand products, you don't have to pay very much. I think-
40:56 Alastair Campbell? Well, Lee Anderson became thirty p Lee by talking about, you know, you can, was it, he said he can sort of get a decent meal for thirty p. McMillan, you know, you've never had it so good. Yeah, it's always a dangerous thing. But this is quite sad in a way, because he's, well, sad, maybe the wrong word to use, but he got attacked over a lot of the things that as president, he doesn't have much control over. And it means now that he probably will be able to do next to nothing on the domestic front. Parliament's going to be gridlocked. He's lost control of Parliament. And that means he will focus much more on foreign policy. Now, he actually, I don't think, got enough credit for what he did in relation to the thing with Japan and Biden. I think that was quite a brave thing to do.
41:36 Rory Stewart? And that's a big, big deal and very brave and very unpopular, because Japan was a very brutal colonial occupier of Korea. You know, enslaved Korean women as sex slaves, killed an enormous amount of Koreans, destroyed Korean culture. So quite brutal and recent. And so although reproach on which Japan makes a lot of strategic sense, it's very unpopular of a lot of people in Korea.
41:59 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. And he also, he is a little bit gaffe prone, I think. He had a bit of a Gordon Brown bigot moment when he was- After a meeting with Joe Biden, didn't realise the microphone was on and he was swearing. He did then sort of endear himself to the Americans. Remember, I think we talked about this at the time when he sang, Don McLean sang American Pie. He sang American Pie to Biden. But he's very, very, very confrontational. And who does this make you think, Obrori? He was described as a leader who is stubborn, doesn't listen to anyone, doesn't believe in compromise. Now, which recent British Prime Minister does that bring to mind?
42:38 Rory Stewart? Oh goodness, because I don't, I don't want, it's almost certainly one of my heroes, isn't it? Or is it one of my villains?
42:43 Alastair Campbell? Well, Liz Truss.
42:45 Rory Stewart? Well, I think, I think the same, you know, I'm a admirer of Gordon Brown and Theresa May, both of whom have been accused of being pretty stubborn. But let's bring in Liz Truss, though. I mean, she's produced this book, which was called, it's 42 Days to Destroy Britain or something.
42:59 Alastair Campbell? No, it's 10 years to save the West.
43:04 Alastair Campbell? And it was 49 days, wasn't it? But I'll tell you what, I am, I just, I find the whole thing mesmerisingly mind blowing. She's done a deal with Elon Musk because every time I look at Twitter, the first thing that comes up is Liz Truss talking to somebody about her book and blaming everybody apart from herself for the absolute chaos and mayhem that she, that she presided over. And so, I mean, she's got, thick skin doesn't even come into it. This is, this is on a level that I've never witnessed before.
43:37 Rory Stewart? It is extraordinary. Well, I, I of course worked for Liz Truss because she was the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs when I was the Minister for the Environment. And we had offices down the corridor from each other. I used to sit in her office for hours every day. I'm not going to repeat on the podcast because I've done it already and put a lot in my book, some of the horrifying encounters that we had about funding for national parks or press releases or 25 years' environment plans. But she is a very, very strange person to work with. I mean, as you say, she, she comes from a left wing background. I remember going to her house and meeting her mother, who was on CND marches, very much part in the nuclear disarmament. Drive in the nineteen eighties, a left wing math professor, father and getting increasingly
44:22 Rory Stewart? right wing. But the thing I took most from it is her style of not caring about management. I mean, she just wasn't interested in the normal business of leading a team, managing civil servants. What she thought she was the business of was throwing out radical ideas. She wanted to be radical all the time. And the quality of those ideas, I felt, didn't really matter. I mean, it was all her saying to me, we're going to be the, you know, the most amazing data department in the government. Hashtag open DEFRA and, and or suddenly announcing some, you know, she also had this idea when she was
45:02 Rory Stewart? in Ministry of Justice, that the way to stop drones coming into prisons was to fly eagles at them. The eagles were somehow going to deter the drones.
45:13 Alastair Campbell? Was this an attempt for DEFRA to take over prisons?
45:16 Rory Stewart? Oh, this, no, this is when she was
45:17 Alastair Campbell? This is a power grab.
45:18 Rory Stewart? This is when she was the Ministry of Justice, but it was, and it was also a little bit like a sort of slightly reminiscent, I think of, do you remember Queen Elizabeth the first in Blackadder? She had that sort of sense of sort of energy and a people moving behind her, but also a slight sort of petulance and occasionally quite sort of childlike quality of, you can imagine her sort of saying, off with her head, you know.
45:39 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's something very childlike about the way she speaks and she's got this thing with her hand that she does on sort of like every point she makes, it's almost like she's talking to a child. It's exacerbated over time. She used to speak like quite a normal human being and she's now developed this very weird style of speaking.
45:59 Rory Stewart? There's a lot about her that's likeable, but the one thing she should not be is a minister, a secretary of state or a prime minister. And actually, in some ways, you know, David Cameron should take responsibility for her. He fast-tracked her through to make her a cabinet minister when she'd been in Parliament only four years and adored her. You know, oddly, she was traditionally very good at pleasing her bosses because they thought that she was sort of feisty and quirky. And they even produced this weird phrase that they thought she was a good media performer. In my experience, she's actually not good at all on, on television or in speeches, but somehow David Cameron, you know, she already caught David Cameron's eye, George Osborne's eye. And I'd be interested in knowing how they now reflect on that, that they made the career of somebody who wasn't ultimately any good at the job.
46:44 Alastair Campbell? When you go through her, her sort of, you know, progression as a politician. So the first time I think she was ever on television was at the Liberal Democrat Conference, calling for the abolition of the monarchy. And then she's gone through, even as a conservative, even since becoming Prime Minister, she seems to me to have been more and more radicalised. I do think she's been captured intellectually by these very, very right wing ultra libertarians. I mean, I watched a clip from an interview that she did yesterday where she was sort of, she was almost talking like she was still the Prime Minister. You know, we must abolish the Supreme Court. We must withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. We must do this. We must do that.
47:24 Alastair Campbell? And now I don't know whether she's still considers herself to be a player. I don't know whether she's trying to influence the direction of current political thinking or the current Conservative Party or what happens after the election. I noticed that her, her latest poll ratings, we didn't, I don't think we polled her in our poll last week. We should have done.
47:44 Rory Stewart? We should do, yeah.
47:45 Alastair Campbell? The poll that I saw for this morning, she had eight percent of people viewed her favourably. She was actually lower than every other politician that was polled. And yet she swans around as though she's
47:57 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
47:57 Alastair Campbell? the Queen of Sheba.
47:58 Rory Stewart? And, and I think is trying to present herself as, as a potential sort of king or queen maker for the next Tory election. I've been quite struck with the fact there's now a campaign against her where a pretty traditional conservative is running as an independent in her seat.
48:14 Alastair Campbell? A self-described Rory Stewart Conservative, I'll have you know.
48:17 Rory Stewart? That's right. A man called James Bag running in her seat in Norfolk. And I think it's worth watching quite closely because this is a, really a battle about what is the identity of the Conservative Party. And it's interesting that a lot of Conservatives are really horrified by her. I mean, I'm finding this in Parliament, you know, she's very, in a strange way, very likeable on a one-on-one basis. And I always feel a bit guilty raging against her because she's always been very polite to me and she's very courteous when I meet her. And that's true for a lot of my colleagues. They think she's, she's friendly and nice, but people are just so horrified by what she did as Prime Minister. Because if you're, I mean, you're obviously not a Tory, so you don't really care about this.
49:02 Rory Stewart? But for the point of view of the Tories, the one thing they thought they had was some credibility around the economy. The story was supposed to be that, you know, Labour were compassionate and progressive, but the Tories were meant to be the people who were careful with your money.
49:17 Alastair Campbell? Always a bit of a myth, but anyway, yeah, I accept the premise.
49:19 Rory Stewart? Boy, did she, boy, did she blow it. I mean, she managed in 49 days to do as much damage to the Conservative Party's economic credibility as Boris Johnson did to their moral credibility.
49:32 Alastair Campbell? But she's done it and now has come out all guns blazing, essentially saying it was everybody's fault apart from mine and it was, it was an establishment stitch up. I have just been listening to, to plug another sister podcast, I listened to The Rest Is Money, who've done this three part mini series on Liz Truss and on the mini budget. And whilst Robert Peston and Steph McGovern are rightly very, very critical of Truss as a politician and Kwong Tseng as Chancellor, they also do talk a lot about the, a lot of mistakes that Robert thinks were made at the Bank of England. It was a financial regulatory issue which Truss and Kwong Tseng had no knowledge of whatsoever and weren't alerted to until I think the Monday after the mini budget, by which time the whole thing had gone tits up anyway.
50:15 Rory Stewart? But I went to a meeting with you, in fact, with people in this industry about three weeks ago. And in the sort of drinks afterwards, I was talking to someone and they said they could not believe that Kwasi Kwarteng, who'd been a banker, didn't understand what he was doing. I mean, from their point of view, these are people in this particular bit, the industry. But for them, it was incredibly obvious what would happen if Kwong Tseng and Liz Truss panicked the markets in this way and what the consequences were, would be for these financial instruments of the Bank of England, of the financial health of the system. And they just couldn't believe that Kwasi Kwarteng, who was supposed to get this stuff, did something that they thought was quite as reckless. And of course, the, the other thing is that they did it with so little, I mean, it's just
51:00 Rory Stewart? all part of the new populist mindset. They basically couldn't be bothered to consult with anyone. They signaled they were going to fire the permanent section in the Treasury, they didn't bother to talk to the OBR, they didn't bother to talk to the Bank of England. So part of the thing that made the markets even more panicked was not just what they were doing, but the way in which they were doing it.
51:18 Alastair Campbell? I also worry that the I mean, here we are, we're talking about Liz Truss. I don't know if I'll bother reading this book or not. I've sort of probably have heard enough of it. But I also, you as a monarchist, right? I mean, I'm not the world's greatest monarchist, as you know. But I mean, if you had been Prime Minister and you get the message that the Queen has died, would your reaction have been, why me? Why now? I mean, that was that was of a narcissistic self obsession, again, on a level that I don't think I've ever contemplated.
51:52 Rory Stewart? Well, this is why it's become quite existential for the Conservative Party, because she represents really incompetent economic management. But the thing I think that's really means that people like me are likely to support independents like James Bag in Norfolk against her, and other Conservatives will too, is this flirting with Trump and MAGA and the appearance on these stages now in the US where she's essentially leaning in to these very dangerous fringe American conspiracy theorists and populists. It's totally, it's completely undignified for a former UK Prime Minister to do it. But it's also dangerous because she's she's giving space to people that should never be given space.
52:35 Alastair Campbell? But she's also, she's getting, she's being given that space because she, okay, she's a former Prime Minister, but we all know she was the worst Prime, one of the two worst Prime Ministers of all time. And yet, because she's sort of a bit weird and a bit wacky, we're back to this sort of politics as performative, politics as being about, you know, who's a bit weird, who's a bit wacky. She's actually starting to begin to remind me of that American woman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who gets all that coverage in America because the media know that she'll say really crazy, wacky things. And therefore, she's interesting. Well, Liz Truss has become interesting in the same way. But it's it's just desperate for our politics.
53:16 Rory Stewart? It's a sort of reality TV take care of politics.
53:19 Alastair Campbell? Totally.
53:19 Rory Stewart? I got a bit of criticism, I'm sure you didn't, but I did, from last week for not being more critical of Angela Rayner. So I had some quite thoughtful, moderate Conservatives saying, listen, the question around Angela Rayner and the mortgages is the question around whether she lied or not. That it's fine my doing and explaining that these are complicated tax things and that. The question of whether it was her main home or not, whether she should have paid tax on it. But the big question is, has she lied about this? Did she really receive legal advice? Was she really confident? And of course, the reason this matters, well, it goes to your Nolan principles point, and it goes back to the expenses scandal, that
54:04 Rory Stewart? of course, what she did is something that I guess is very, would be tempting for many members of the public to do, to think, oh, gosh, I can save some capital gains tax if this is my prime residence, now that my second residence, can I make it look like my prime residence? But I guess the question is firstly, holding politicians to high standards. And secondly, this question of lying.
54:21 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but I think that I was actually with Keir Starmer last night at this event that I did. And remember when he was questioned by the police over the beer nonsense in Durham? And he said, if I'm found to, you know, broken the law, I would resign as Labour leader. She said the same about this. I don't think he would have said that without total confidence. And I don't think he would have allowed her to say the same thing without confidence that actually this will in the end be fine for her. But I don't know if you've seen the Times today, Rory. Nick Bowles, your former colleague in the Conservative Parliamentary Party, he's got, I'll just read his very short letter in the Times today. Having served nine years as an MP, I know how low politicians can stoop when their backs are against the wall. But the Conservative tackle on Angela Rayner is one of the most grotesque spectacles
55:06 Alastair Campbell? of hypocrisy I've witnessed. On one side is a billionaire Tory peer, Lord Ashcroft, and a multimillionaire Tory Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, whose families of all avoided pay millions of pounds in UK taxes beneficiaries of non-dom status and who live in luxury. On the other is a woman who grew up in poverty, caring for her illiterate mother, who is now a mother to a child who is registered blind and who, through her own guts and character, has risen to be Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. Even Rayner's accusers accept that the most she might have benefited from the error that they allege, and which she denies, is less than £3,000. I suppose that her attackers cannot bear the idea that they're about to lose to a woman who pulled herself up by her bootstraps and who is going to wipe the floor with them. Nick Bowles.
55:49 Rory Stewart? There we are.
55:50 Alastair Campbell? So to people who want more of the same with the Jonathan Harmsworth of Viscount Rothermere and his property portfolio and Paul Dacre's property portfolio, I recommend you get this week's The New European.
56:03 Rory Stewart? Well, Alison, thank you. We covered a lot of ground. Just to sort of wrap it up, I think, setting UK politics aside, I think the question that we kept coming back to is whether you're talking about China and the US, you know, how do you deal with Chinese attacks on shipping, or whether you're talking about Israel and Iran, is how in a world you respond firmly enough to keep the world peaceful without responding so firmly that you create a spiral of increasing conflict. And I guess it's the same with Ukraine, Russia. And that is the thing to look at over the next few months. It'll be the same with North Korea, actually. We touched on four things like this.
56:41 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
56:42 Rory Stewart? Are we smart enough? And I guess that comes down to the military force being surrounded by the diplomatic connections, the economic sanctions, and the sense that people are being proportional and realistic and reliable. Are these different players, China, US, Iran, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, able to restrain themselves and not overreact in a way that spills into a much bigger global conflict?
57:07 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, absolutely. And on that subject, I recommend, if you haven't listened to it, listen, go back a couple of weeks to our interview with John Soares and Eliza Manningham-Buller, who were very, very interesting on that sort of balance between having to do something and sometimes kind of not doing very much, being the right response.
57:24 Rory Stewart? And that's on leading for our separate feed for people who want to feed up. Thank you, Alison.
57:28 Alastair Campbell? See you soon. Bye bye.
58:15 Speaker 03 We would need to understand the policy context.
58:17 Speaker 04 All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, and disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.
58:26 Speaker 05 A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?
58:30 Speaker 04 Yes.
58:32 Speaker 05 New from Goalhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?
58:37 Speaker 06 You're my soldier, are you? Sergeant Tom MacDuff, Duffy!
58:41 Speaker 05 An audio drama journey like no other.
58:43 Speaker 06 Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.
58:47 Speaker 05 Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller.
58:50 Speaker 03 We have two types of deadly key.
58:52 Speaker 05 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.
Previous 236. Question Time: The fight to be Donald Trump’s VP nominee Next 238. Question Time: Liz Truss, climate change deniers, and why print media is so polarised Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
