537. Indicting Trump, Israeli Prisons, and Rory vs. Ed Miliband

What connects Trump’s Cuba blockade and Ben Gvir’s abuse of flotilla activists? As Richard Tice denies climate change science, will reality catch up with Reform UK – and what is Rory’s issue with Ed Miliband’s approach to net zero? Who is the most evil person Rory and Alastair have ever shaken hands with? Join Alastair and Rory as they answer all these questions and more in this week's edition of Question Time. __________ 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 ✅ __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Vasco Andrade Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Emily Kent Smith 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.

• 0:01Rory Stewart?

  You would have a lot of grounds to prepare a case against Trump for war crimes or corruption. How would the US public react if we actually took seriously the fact that this man had broken multiple laws and that he would be under our jurisdiction?

• 0:14Alastair Campbell?

  Which government of the world would do it?

• 0:16Rory Stewart?

  How much can Netanyahu continue to distance himself from this man and say that he isn't speaking from Israel so long as he leaves him in his government as the security minister?

• 0:26Alastair Campbell?

  There is going to be an election. Netanyahu probably feels that politically he's not strong enough to do that.

• 0:30Rory Stewart?

  Well, what does that mean, Alistair? I mean, of course he can fire him.

• 0:34Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he could, but what he means in political management is he thinks his coalition falls apart.

• 0:39Rory Stewart?

  So in other words, he has to accept the risk of not being prime minister to get rid of a man who is utterly abhorrent from his government?

• 0:45Alastair Campbell?

  This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy.

• 0:48Rory Stewart?

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• 0:58Alastair Campbell?

  And it guarantees that your rates stay below the off-gem price gap, which saves you up to £200. And the tariff updates automatically every quarter.

• 1:09Rory Stewart?

  Energy prices don't move in straight lines. Global events and market pressures you can't predict and certainly can't control still find their way onto your bill.

• 1:17Alastair Campbell?

  And if you're on the wrong tariff, you can be stuck with higher rates after the pressure has ended.

• 1:23Rory Stewart?

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• 1:29Alastair Campbell?

  And it's automatic. No switching, no trying to second-guess the market. You're protected while prices are high and ready to benefit when they fall.

• 1:37Rory Stewart?

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• 1:46Alastair Campbell?

  Visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions.

• 1:55Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 1:57Alastair 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.

• 2:10Rory 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.

• 2:33Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:40Rory 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.

• 2:58Speaker 02

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• 3:23Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 3:27Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 3:28Alastair Campbell?

  First hour of Question Time, we're going to cover two big issues that relate to some of the things we're always talking about. Collapse of laws and collapse of norms. And we're talking about Cuba and we're also talking about Israel. And then we're going to talk a little bit about reform. And also, who, I hope you've thought about it Rory, who is the most evil handshake? We've ever had to endure.

• 3:51Rory Stewart?

  Disturbing question. Well, let me start you on Cuba.

• 3:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 3:54Rory Stewart?

  Anandi Mahadeo from Belfast. The US is doing to Cuba what Israel did to Gaza in the form of blockade. Why is the UK government silent? Am I allowed just a very quick explainer on Cuba? And then straight back over to you. Cuba is this Caribbean island, which is only about 90 miles off the coast of Florida. In other words, it's closer to the United States than Manchester is to London. Got about 11 million people and famously, having been very closely tied into the US economy in the 40s and 50s with sugar and casinos and tourism. In fact, my Scottish great grandfather worked as an engineer in a sugar plantation in Cuba from 1920 to 1940

• 4:36Rory Stewart?

  and would have been one of many, many foreigners as part of this slightly exploitative United Fruit presence in Cuba. But in 1959, there was, partly driven by the abuse of United Fruit and the US and everybody else, a communist revolution where Fidel Castro was elected and a very large number of Cubans fled to Florida, creating a very strong voter base in Florida of Cuban exiles who have pushed the United States very strongly to try to topple the communist government there. Fidel Castro handed over to his brother Raul, who became president, and Raul Castro now in his 90s remains very much the power behind the throne, very much the person that American administrations are dealing with, although there have been

• 5:20Rory Stewart?

  two other presidents recently. But the reason it's in the news is that President Trump and Marco Rubio, his Cuban-American secretaries state, who's been very focused on this this year because he's also from Florida, have really decided to apply maximum pressure and appear to see this is the moment to finally topple the regime in Cuba. Over to you.

• 5:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, where to start? I guess a lot of this is about oil. Cuba, since the revolution, has always had a big oil-producing international sponsor. So for a long time through the Cold War, it was the Soviet Union. Soviet Union collapses, they had an economic crisis then, Venezuela more recently. And since the Americans took out Maduro and installed Delcy Rodriguez as president, there has been a blockade.

• 6:10Alastair Campbell?

  And Andy's question is this doing to Cuba Israel did to Gaza. I can see the parallels, but I think the the difference here. I think this more relates to what we've already seen with Trump's administration, where they signal intent very, very strongly. They did it in Venezuela, did it in Iran. What I worry about what's going on with Cuba, which is basically running out of of fuel. There's no kind of people are living, you know, day to day, hand to mouth because it is. And it's just underlining how we all need energy and these energy flows in the modern age where norms are breaking down. It becomes so important, even more important. But there is effectively a bit of a humanitarian catastrophe going on in Cuba.

• 6:54Alastair Campbell?

  And interestingly, going back to some of the things we talk about with Trump and the changing world order, the question there, why is the UK government silent? I'm sure the UK government has been saying things, but I just I they haven't cut through to me. The things that have cut through to me have been China and Russia condemning this as a violation of sovereignty. So it is a it is underlining once more that we're in this very, very different world. And of course, Trump is, as ever, he's really sort of using every weapon at his disposal. There's economic warfare, there are the military threats. He sent the head of the CIA essentially to sit down with the government and say, you don't need to go or you don't need to change or go. And of course, the the threat of of military action at the back of this. So I think we're talking here about Trump.

• 7:39Alastair Campbell?

  We constantly talk about Trump wanting sort of, you know, right history. He keeps saying that he's going to be the president who sorts out Cuba once and for all. Now, he says that about a lot of things. We'll see whether he actually manages to deliver. But if I were Cuban right now, I'd be very, very worried.

• 7:55Rory Stewart?

  We covered this actually a few weeks back where we talked about Lindsey Graham saying Iran now Cuba's next. And you've got this a similar phenomenon that we have in all these interventions, which is this large expatriate community.

• 8:08Rory Stewart?

  Who somehow feel that regime change is going to work out. You know, the number of Iranians who said to me, I don't understand. I thought this was going to work out that they'd be able to topple the regime. And and we saw the same actually with Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya that often educated people from a country living elsewhere, particularly in the United States, develop very optimistic ideas about what will happen if they can just trigger regime change, that they can somehow put the world back to the world that they knew, which in the case of Cuba is a very long time ago. Yeah. You know, back to the 1950s. I think your point also about how anomalous Cuba is getting, how devastating the collapse of Soviet Union was to their economy, how they hoped under Obama that, because Obama was quite brave on Cuba in terms of opening up and really thinking about how to integrate

• 8:53Rory Stewart?

  Cuba into the American economy and what a more gentle way of reintegrating with Cuba would be, which of course was destroyed by Trump one. I think the the other final thing just before we move on that strikes me again and again when dealing with the US is the sense that America is reminding us day by day that it is willing to do things to other countries, that it would never countenance anyone doing to it. I was talking to one of my my sons yesterday and I was describing Trump's corruption. And he said, well, obviously, you know, what needs to happen is if the US won't arrest him for corruption is when he lands in some other country, you know, European country, we need to have a sealed indictment and arrest him, put him on trial.

• 9:38Rory Stewart?

  Which which child was this? Uh, that's actually the younger child. Brilliant, sealed indictment. A nine year old. It's good, it's good stuff, right? So I thought, actually, that's really interesting because of course you would have a lot of grounds to do it, a lot of grounds to prepare case against Trump for war crimes or corruption. But my goodness, the American reaction would be so hostile when they're very, very happy. You know, then the number of Latin American presidents, they seem to be able to indict, lock up people, their arrest when they step down in the United States, people they actually extradite when they're not even in the United States, they capture them in other airports. But it would be fascinating, even with everybody who hates Trump, how would the US public

• 10:20Rory Stewart?

  react if we actually took seriously the fact that this man had broken multiple laws and that he would be under our jurisdiction and the way the US tries to claim that almost everyone in the world is subject to US Department of Justice jurisdiction? Which government of the world would do it? Spain.

• 10:40Alastair Campbell?

  Sanchez. Maybe he won't. But this goes back to this point about how the the norms are breaking down. For example, when Netanyahu was travelling to different parts of the world, having to go navigate through complicated airspace because there were certain countries he feared getting arrested. Putin, the same thing when he's travelling around the world. It's a very interesting thought, but of course, what's happening is that Trump thinks he can get away with anything.

• 11:08Rory Stewart?

  The nine year old also pointed out that I shouldn't say this on the podcast because Trump might notice the threat. He really thought it was important. We concealed this and then sprung it on.

• 11:16Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 11:17Rory Stewart?

  His idea was that he'd turn up on holiday and we'd be able to get him on holiday.

• 11:20Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we could get him at a golf course near you any weekend, I suppose, including what he doesn't go to, his own son's wedding.

• 11:28Rory Stewart?

  Listen, Al, so just to be just to be serious for a second, I don't think I'd ever, until I really saw Trump do it, completely understood that the American government basically decides that American law is international law and that if the Department of Justice decides that somebody has broken American rules on corruption or money laundering or drugs or terrorism or anything, effectively, they can be captured pretty much anywhere in the world and put on trial in the United States.

• 11:56Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 11:56Rory Stewart?

  So what would they think if we did it to them?

• 11:59Alastair Campbell?

  They wouldn't be very happy.

• 12:02Alastair Campbell?

  But I'm trying to, I mean, you say Spain, I honestly can't think of a government that would do it. China, one day, maybe.

• 12:11Rory Stewart?

  It's fascinating, though, that one wouldn't, and it'd be interesting to see how a democratic president would respond. Would they somehow be so USA, I guess, they'd be so pro USA that they would launch a massive formal protest against the arrest of a US president, regardless the fact it's Donald Trump?

• 12:26Alastair Campbell?

  But just on, you know, if you look, you mentioned Raul Castro, Fidel's brother. So he's now ninety four.

• 12:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 12:32Alastair Campbell?

  And when we talk about he's using economic and military and legal, you know, the Department of Justice indicted Castro at ninety four. On murder charges, okay, so they've decided, so we've had several governments in the American, in the White House.

• 12:49Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 12:49Alastair Campbell?

  Since nineteen ninety six, but they've now decided that these two civilian aircraft that were downed, that Castro was responsible, okay? And Todd Blanch, the Attorney General, who clearly does whatever Trump tells him to, stresses this is not a symbolic indictment. I suspect it is. I don't think Raul Castro is going to be hauled off like Maduro was. But I, I think it's a very good point. It's a very, very good point. I'm going to spend, I'm going to spend the whole evening thinking, thinking about which country might actually, what about Denmark? Why Denmark?

• 13:25Rory Stewart?

  Demo, pretty good, demo, pretty good grounds for indictment. I mean, if you're allowed to do what the US does, which is apply its domestic law to other people's presidents, there's a lot of things he could be indicted on.

• 13:36Alastair Campbell?

  Well, maybe on the point about why is the UK government being so silent? Maybe your children should become the UK government and.

• 13:43Rory Stewart?

  Well, that's a possibility, except as we pointed out in the last episode, that wouldn't be as profitable as putting them in these amazing private sector positions.

• 13:51Alastair Campbell?

  Indeed, indeed. Now let's move on. Richard, what did you make of the treatment of Gaza flotilla activists by Itamar Ben-Gvir and the Israeli forces? And if people haven't seen this, it's this flotilla, I think about four hundred people from forty or different countries. I mean, largely symbolic, but you know, with stuff that they're going to trying to get to Gaza, they were essentially, you know, picked up by the Israeli authorities and they were put in this place and the pictures that were put out were of Ben-Gvir taunting them, abusing them. They were made to kneel, they had their foreheads on the ground and he was basically laughing at them for, frankly, for being activists.

• 14:32Rory Stewart?

  It's very interesting, isn't it? I mean, I think it's, we, we often talk about how norms have been erated, so it takes a little bit of time to remind ourselves of what any other country would have done. Or in fact, actually, what Israel might have done even quite recently compared to what Ben-Gvir did. I mean, let's imagine for whatever reason, I know it's a daft analogy, but let's imagine for whatever reason, there was a flotilla protesting the policy of some European state and it chugged along. I guess what would happen is the police would intercept them and they would politely take them away, right? In this case, what happens is the Israeli military board these vessels hundreds of miles off the Israeli coast in international waters.

• 15:16Rory Stewart?

  They board them with full face masks, full body armour, full weapons. Although, as far as one can tell, there is no military threat posed by the people on those. It's a peace flotilla, right? They're a bunch of peace activists. And despite the fact these people do not pose any form of plausible threat to the Israeli military, they are handcuffed and put in stress positions. So they're made to kneel down on the deck with their heads on deck. And Ben Gvir then walks amongst them, waving an Israeli flag, shouting, "This is what happens to you, this is what's going to happen to you." And I was trying to think, have I ever seen any government do this? I don't think the Chinese government would do it, I don't think the Russian government would do it. I mean, it's actually very non-governmental.

• 16:00Rory Stewart?

  It's much more reminiscent of what non-governmental armed groups do, which is to stage humiliations with people with flags, shouting at social media with people kneeling down in front of them.

• 16:12Alastair Campbell?

  You know, you've had hostages that have been used by states, but I think you're right, I think this is more synonymous of a kind of non-state.

• 16:20Rory Stewart?

  If you think about what the hostages normally do, they normally present them on state television, don't they? But what you don't see is the ministers sort of striding amongst them, waving flags and shouting abuse.

• 16:32Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 16:32Rory Stewart?

  I mean, there's another video that Ben Gvir put out a few months ago, which is him in prison. So, I mean, I was a prisons minister, so I was looking quite closely at the video that he put out. In the video, he has lined up a whole series of Israeli soldiers who are pointing their automatic weapons through the windows of the cells at the unarmed prisoners, all of them in a line. Now, firstly, none of the prisoners has a weapon, because they're searched before they enter the prison, right? Secondly, in our jurisdiction, our prison officers don't carry guns at all. The idea that you would have... An automatic weapon pointed through every window. And then they're all pulled out, they're all made to kneel again in the corridor.

• 17:17Rory Stewart?

  And Ben Gvir is walking amongst them. So it's been staged for him as the prison minister saying, this is how we treat people, I'm very pleased to say, except one thing I say to you, Mr Netanyahu, they should all be killed, they should all be executed. I don't care how. Electric chair, doesn't matter, they should all be executed. Now Netanyahu then says that he disapproves, but he doesn't fire him. So how much does he disapprove? How much can Netanyahu continue to distance himself from this man and say that he isn't speaking from Israel so long as he leaves him in his government as the security minister?

• 17:52Alastair Campbell?

  Ben Gvir has got a track record of, he says he's really, really proud that he's basically brought in a a regime of effectively brutality in the prisons. It was a horrible thing I read recently about, you know, rape inside prisons that's been used as a kind of weapon against some of these guys.

• 18:09Rory Stewart?

  Israeli prison officers raping Palestinians, which has been covered by Israeli nonprofits who've reported it, right?

• 18:17Alastair Campbell?

  Correct.

• 18:17Rory Stewart?

  This is Israeli human rights organizations have exposed the sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners.

• 18:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 18:23Rory Stewart?

  And why is that relevant? Because on the other side, Israel weaponized sexual abuse of Israelis who had been captured by Hamas. And yet the conversation is never integrated. It's spoken about in two completely different ways, as though it's happening in two totally different worlds.

• 18:40Alastair Campbell?

  And also, although Netanyahu, as you say, has rebuked publicly Ben Gvir on a couple of occasions on that specific thing, he basically said that the, he did not criticize what was the evidence, the people involved in the evidence that was produced.

• 18:54Rory Stewart?

  In fact, he called them heroes, didn't he, at one point?

• 18:56Alastair Campbell?

  He did, he did, he did. And this, this one, you've got to go some. As Ben Gvir to have both Netanyahu and the American ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who basically is one of those, let Israel do whatever the hell it wants, it seems to me. He called Ben Gvir's actions despicable.

• 19:13Rory Stewart?

  But can I just ask, but did he do anything about it? Did anyone stop the money going? Are there any sanctions? Is there any actions? It's all very well, Netanyahu doesn't fire him, the Americans aren't taking the action against him. So what does Ben Gvir conclude?

• 19:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I don't know. He concludes he can carry on. But I was looking at the law, and again, you know, back to one of our central themes, there's international humanitarian law meaning anything anymore. But it says, those involved in the transport and distribution of relief must be respected and protected during armed conflict. They are to be treated as civilians so long as they do not directly take part in hostilities. And they have the rights, if they are in circumstances where the civilians are detained, they have, under international law, they have to, they must be informed of the reasons, be able to challenge the decision, receive adequate food, hygiene and medical care, be given access to lawyers and counsel representatives, and be held in conditions that consistent with health and humanity.

• 20:09Alastair Campbell?

  And here's where we get on to Ben Gvir and how he treats them. They are to be protected from cruel, humiliating or degrading treatment, intimidation and insults, and public curiosity or degrading public exposure. And public curiosity is meant to be prohibiting any display of the detainees for propaganda or for public spectacle. Well, that is exactly what Ben Gvir was doing.

• 20:35Rory Stewart?

  Well, the thing that's so striking to me is I'm continuing to receive endless emails from my friends in Australia. And these are highly educated Australian Jewish friends of mine, with relatives in Israel, whose response to this is not in any way to criticize Ben Gvir, but instead to immediately send me something saying that the whole Nakba, the whole expulsion of Palestinians was a fraud, and that it was all a lie and that it never happened. So the narrative bubbles, and this is painful, right? I mean, the guy that's sending me this, I like very much. And I've known him for many, many years, but I have a sense of people in total silos

• 21:15Rory Stewart?

  and bubbles in which it's almost impossible to have a common conversation, in which the vast majority of the Israeli population still support what's happening in Iran, which the rest of the world thinks is damaging the global economy and achieving nothing. The vast majority of people in Israel support the actions in Gaza. And my friend in Australia is saying, well, if you're trying to describe this as war crimes or genocide, are you suggesting that the vast majority of the Israeli population support war crimes and genocide? Because if so, that's an antisemitic trope.

• 21:49Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that is, that is kind of where the part of the debate is. I still think there are enough Israelis who will be absolutely horrified by seeing what Ben Gvir did. That being said, there is going to be an election. Netanyahu probably feels, you know, that's your question, why doesn't Netanyahu fire him? He probably feels that politically he's not strong enough to do that.

• 22:07Rory Stewart?

  Well, what does, what does that mean, Alistair? I mean, of course, he can fire him.

• 22:10Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he could, but what he means, what he means in political management is he thinks his coalition falls apart.

• 22:15Rory Stewart?

  So in other words, he has to accept the risk of not being prime minister to get rid of a man who is utterly abhorrent from his government.

• 22:21Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, we're talking about somebody who's been prime minister for many, many years over a long, long period of time. He was prime minister when I first went into Downing Street with Tony Blair as prime minister. So the moral question is fairly obvious to you and to me. The political management question he's thinking through is because Netanyahu's desperate to stay in power for all sorts of reasons, including personal reasons to do with these corruption charges that he's facing. He's got to have an election at some point. And I don't know what outcome he would want from that election. He would probably like to have a majority where he didn't necessarily need to fill his government with people like Ben Gvir. I don't know. But Ben Gvir, when the video is being made of him waving his

• 23:03Alastair Campbell?

  flag and abusing the people from the flotilla, part of his mind will be thinking, this will be a good campaign video for me.

• 23:10Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and that tells you a lot about politics. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm doing this. I mean, you're in Hong Kong. I'm, I'm two miles from the Israeli border in Jordan at the moment, talking to you. I mean, I think one of the things that is so striking for me is how radicalized people are becoming on both sides. The local Starbucks, for example, no longer exists because people have boycotted it. I went into the local bookshop and where there used to be lots of children's books and travel books, the tables are now simply piled with books about Palestine and people's experience of Palestine and their memoirs of Palestine and what's happening in Palestine. And I also feel that there's a risk that he gets away with Ben Gvir and Smotrich by saying to people, of course, I don't want them in my government, but I leave them in

• 23:55Rory Stewart?

  as Finance Minister, Security Minister, because it's vital for my political survival and my coalition. And that he shouldn't be able to get away with that. One should be able to say, Ben Gvir and Smotrich are horrifying people. If you put them in your cabinet, you're endorsing them. You don't get to say, well, I don't really like them, but I'm keeping them anyway because they're important for me to be Prime Minister.

• 24:15Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think he even goes around the place saying he doesn't like them. I think he felt on this one, he had to condemn it because virtually, you know, most governments around the world were doing so. But I think all of that will have boosted Ben Gvir's own sense that from his perspective, politically, as a guy who's known to be such an extremist and who says some terrible things about Palestinians. And he probably felt the same about these people. I mean, he was abusive, he was insulting. But look, the point you're making about your Australian friends, though, is I've not got anybody quite like that. But I do think there is definitely, of all the issues around which there is this extreme polarization, I would

• 24:57Alastair Campbell?

  say it's probably top of the list right now. It's very hard to have conversations with people on either side who feel really, really, really passionate. But I think that's what we've all got to try to do, even when provoked by something as bad as this, has to be called out. But then we somehow have to get back to some of the basics. The worst thing for me in relation to Gaza. Is that we're not talking about it.

• 25:21Rory Stewart?

  And what's happening with the settlers? I mean, that again, I mean, many of the people I've seen recently are people who are Palestinians and who have relatives in Nablus and Hebron. And, and as we've described, the settlers now seem to be able to do almost whatever they want. They can drive in with FTVs into the middle of olive groves, wave guns around. One friend of mine was saying settlers can almost go into the main streets and shoot someone and the Israeli army will protect them. And the gamble, I think, is that they're just hoping that Palestinians will leave. The economy is collapsing in Ramallah and in other Palestinian towns. The Israeli controlled areas are expanding all the time and they're coterminous.

• 26:04Rory Stewart?

  And I think any idea of a two-state solution is completely, completely out the window. I mean, it, and Smotrich appears to have a kind of cruel and inevitable logic on his side in suggesting the whole thing is just going to become Israel.

• 26:19Alastair Campbell?

  Right. Well, on that very depressing note, let's take a break.

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• 28:13Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to the Restless Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 28:17Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. Now Rory, Vinod, gentleman by the name of Vinod, have you seen the car crash interview that Richard Tice did with Bloomberg where he refused to engage with simple factual questions about the science of climate change and its economic realities? Curiously, this is getting virtually zero coverage.

• 28:35Rory Stewart?

  Right, well, let's first try to sort of summarize what actually happened in this interview. So he was presented with graphs, he refused to look at them. He calls it net stupid zero. You can't present with a whole lot of graphs that I can't read, that may well be bullshit, puts out that this terminates now, it's the end of the podcast. I want to do two things. I want to agreeably disagree with you on your friend Ed Miliband's energy policy, which I think is actually becoming a real problem. And I'm hoping strongly, but I think it's unlikely, that whoever comes in gives them the heave ho.

• 29:08Alastair Campbell?

  Oh.

• 29:08Rory Stewart?

  But I'm not prepared to go as far as defending Richard Tice, who I think is clearly a climate change denying bizarro on this. And I mean, over to you on Tice first.

• 29:17Alastair Campbell?

  Um, no, I want to go straight into why do you want to get rid of Ed Miliband?

• 29:23Alastair Campbell?

  Well, are you buying the Richard Tice arguments that Ed Miliband is in trying to sort of, you know, play a leadership role on climate change, he's he's kind of destroying the world, is that where we are?

• 29:34Rory Stewart?

  No, I don't think Ed Miliband's destroying the world, but I think that in looking for the kind of things which are causing a big problem for the British economy and its competitiveness and its productivity, we've got to be honest about the fact that our industrial energy prices are very, very high. I mean, they're four times those the US and they're one and a half times those of key European competitors.

• 29:57Alastair Campbell?

  But how does that relate to what Ed Miliband's trying to do on the green agenda?

• 30:01Rory Stewart?

  Well, because the reason why the energy prices are high is because of the policies pursued by the government. I mean, we are gas dependent, but in theory, that should apply equally to France and Germany and to other countries that use a lot of gas, including the US. The reason our prices are so high cannot simply be about the wholesale gas price, or if it is, we're doing something weird in the way that it's calculated, which again falls at Ed Miliband's door. But it's about the way in which the whole energy market is run in the UK and in particular the hurry with which Ed Miliband is pushing ahead for his particular 2030 targets. And why does it matter? Well, it matters because if you're a steel producer, it's really difficult to compete

• 30:46Rory Stewart?

  with European steel production. But most importantly of all, you know, I'm, as you know, obsessed with AI and what we can do for our sovereignty and how we can stop ourselves being completely in hock to the US and China when it comes to AI, we need to build data centers. If we don't have in the UK the chips and the data centers and they consume an enormous amount of energy, we're going to be completely vulnerable to the US destroying our economy, taking away all our jobs, threatening our national security, and we can't get them built. And one of the major reasons we can't get them built, along with normal British problems with planning, is the energy costs are just too high. I mean, in many cases, we're paying 24 pence when people like the Norwegians, the Portuguese are paying 10 pence for the same unit of energy.

• 31:31Alastair Campbell?

  But you can't put that all at Ed Miliband's door. Listen, Rory, nor can we have a question about Richard Tice become a big discussion of Rory Stewart saying Ed Miliband should go. Can I just say something, you understand, AI Rory? I was in, I was at a lovely place called Brescia. Yesterday in Italy.

• 31:48Rory Stewart?

  You just jumped from Italy to Hong Kong in a day.

• 31:51Alastair Campbell?

  I know, my green credentials are not very good this week. Um, but anyway, this conference in Brescia is called the Future Future Proof Society, and it was sort of looking all sorts of, you know, different this and that. But you'd have loved this discussion I had with a couple of people. Actually, one of them was totally against AI and just wants to stop the whole damn thing. But one of the other people who's involved in this discussion we're having said that the UK is actually extraordinarily well placed. America and China are absolutely running away with everything, that is true. But if you were looking for a kind of, you know, best placed to get into the runner up slot, it is the UK. And this was an American guy who and basically said a lot of it was about our education, but also about some of the

• 32:35Alastair Campbell?

  the stuff that the government was doing. He mentioned that two billion pound thing that we're doing on Quantum last week. But essentially the infrastructure that's been that's been built. Uh, and I guess Rishi Sunak was part of this when he was Prime Minister as well. So I was quite, I was quite cheered up by that.

• 32:50Rory Stewart?

  You're completely right. We've got outside the US and China, we've probably got the strongest global talent pool. So we talk about Demis to Sabst and DeepMind. We've got language, we've got legal system, but time zone. Our real problem is energy and the data centers. Um, these new frontier models can involve hundreds of thousands of advanced chips, even a million advanced chips. So you can be looking for one gigawatt, two gigawatts. In the US currently, they've got about forty five gigawatts of built power around these uh, data centers, and that's probably going to double in the next three, four years.

• 33:31Rory Stewart?

  In the UK, we're hovering around, depending on which figures you look at, between one point six and three to give a sense in the difference. UAE is looking to build out five gigawatts. Now, why does that matter? It matters because at the moment, if all the large language models exist in the United States.

• 33:49Rory Stewart?

  President Trump can do effectively what's happening at the moment with Mythos, which is say this thing can't be exported from the US and all the latest technologies in the US, all the innovations in the US, all the growth is in the US, it's sort of extreme example of what's going on already with the magnificent seven with all these hyperscalers stuck in the world economy. And we will then find that all the native AI law firms are created in the US, not with us. All the tax revenue will go to the US, we'll lose jobs. So let's say, we talked about this in the last episode, we suddenly start massively laying off people in banks, people in call centres, people in software. Suddenly the government, the UK government's got to find the revenue to pay the unemployment benefit, but it's not getting any taxation revenue because it's not taxing any income and all the companies in America. So how do we deal with that?

• 34:32Rory Stewart?

  I think having the data centres allows you to do one of three things. In the best case scenario, you could actually build your own frontier model and actually be able to run it and have the chips and have all the parameters and the weights in the UK. Second potential is you could provide a safe haven for one of the American companies. So let's say Trump suddenly decided to go crazy on Anthropic or OpenAI. You could actually say, why don't you come to the UK to host your model here? Which you can't do at the moment because we simply don't have the infrastructure, they couldn't come here. And the third thing is even if you weren't able to do that, maybe that's unrealistic. If these companies were able to use data centres in the UK to run even 20, 30% of their models, we would have leverage. A future President Trump wouldn't be able to switch the stuff off and say,

• 35:17Rory Stewart?

  you know, I'm going to abuse the United Kingdom and get the handover, whatever. Because we would have leverage over the United States, but to get there, we've got to build these data centres. And one of the major reasons we can't build them to kind of link back is that our cost of energy is too high.

• 35:32Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'm going to issue an apology to Vinod because yes, he asked us a question, basically wanted us to put the boot into Richard Tice. Since when you took us down the Ed Miliband rabbit hole and I then led you into the AI rabbit hole. So Vinod, what I'm going to do on the, to hit back at you, I, because I feel I should defend Ed Miliband because he was my politician of the year last year. He's a regular listener. I'm going to ask whether he might do his own rebuttal for the newsletter. I think that'd be a very good thing to do because I want to get back to the point about why Reform don't like being scrutinised. It's very, very true. Look at Farage with his, I mean Farage will normally leap in front of any TV camera anywhere in

• 36:13Alastair Campbell?

  the world to give you his bonhomie and his shtick. This five million donation where he keeps changing his story, he's nowhere to be seen. The funding generally of Reform, nowhere to be seen.

• 36:26Rory Stewart?

  And they won't come on our show. I mean, you know, you started by trying to get Nigel Farage on and he wouldn't come on. I've now asked Reform MPs, I've asked Reform policy leads, all of them say, I'm afraid this isn't one for me. None of them will come on their show. Now, open invitation, we're very happy to have an open conversation. Look, look at our interview, even with people we have serious disagreements with, like President Vucic in Serbia. We'll give you a fair hearing, but why won't you come on a huge show where millions of people can hear your views? What's going on Reform?

• 37:03Alastair Campbell?

  And also, we discovered, we surveyed that we do have some Reform supporters who listen to the podcast, probably so they can shout at us, but even so, we do have some. No, I think, look, the answer to the question, Roy, is that Trump has created his own media ecosystem and that's what Farage is trying to do in the UK. Trump has Fox News and the MAGA people, that's their safe haven. Farage has GB News, Farage has several newspapers that absolutely give him the easiest ride in the world. As Vinod says, Tyce's interview where he just behaves like a child gets zero coverage. This is a guy who's going to, if Reform become the government, he's going to be a very, very serious figure. There's these amazing videos doing the rounds online of some of these Reform councillors.

• 37:46Alastair Campbell?

  Who basically, the one that's really sort of, I think, please stop selling it to me people, is the one where the woman who says, you know, I don't know what constitution is, I don't understand what a standing order is, I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. And she's leading a council. So you've got all these councillors are falling by the wayside, but do you see any of that in most of the media? No. So basically Farage thinks, if you just ignore this stuff, it'll go away. Now, if I were him, if I were Nigel Farage, and I would, I'd think, well, when he was presenting LBC, I used to go on his show quite regularly, we had perfectly civil conversations. We did once have a very aggressive shouting match on television, but that was right after Brexit. Nearly came to blows,

• 38:28Alastair Campbell?

  but not quite. But if he came on our podcast, we would do what we do with every other guest. We would go through their childhood, we'd go through their life, we'd ask them what they think. And yes, we would want to challenge him and press him over certain things. Yes, I would absolutely want to hold his feet to the fire about the damage that Brexit's done to the country. But we would not do it in a way to try and get cheap headlines, gotcha stuff and the rest of it. But I think, I think Vinod's got a point. I think they are scared of genuine scrutiny. They like nice short videos, they like newspaper headlines that they write with the right wing press, and they like GB News. Anyway, on the subject of reform, we had a wonderful discussion in the main episode with Vicky Spratt, who

• 39:10Alastair Campbell?

  did our mini series on Gen Z. Lo and behold, we've got another mini series. And the first episode arrives this Friday, the day after this Question Time episode, and it's all about reform and where the money comes from. And it's very, very interesting. The first episode will be available for everyone. Mr. Tice, by the way, features prominently. But to enjoy the whole series, you'll need to sign up to The Rest is Politics Plus at therestispolitics.com.

• 39:37Rory Stewart?

  Here's a question, which comes from Matthew, who's a TripPlus member from Biddingham, that he's been wanting to ask you for a couple of weeks. And I think you mentioned that you were going to answer it for us. So go on, give us, give us an answer. The question is this. I recently watched a documentary that Alistair featured in, and it was a clip of TB and Alistair, Tony Blair and Alistair, meeting Vladimir Putin. And I saw that Alistair shook Putin's hand. Question to both Rory the Tory and Alistair, well, Rory the Tory, Rory the Tory and Alistair, who's the most evil person you have shaken the hands with? Go on, then you first. I've thought about this a lot. Oh, blimey, I haven't thought about it a lot. Um, okay. So I think I would put people into

• 40:20Rory Stewart?

  three different categories. What I would call the brutal leader, the violent warlord,

• 40:33Rory Stewart?

  and the careless destroyer. Right. So first category, brutal leader. I mean, I have shaken hands with President Suharto, who we were talking about, President Kabila in the Congo, President Emerson Mnangagwa in Zimbabwe. And the second category down of the people who actually commit the violence on the ground, in Iraq, the heads of all the Shia militias that were putting shaped charges against us. And in one case, a guy called Assad, who I had lunch with in the morning and who attacked my compound the following evening. Afghan warlords,

• 41:15Rory Stewart?

  like Abdurashid Dostum or Sayaf. And we've, of course, both shaken hands with the former head of al-Qaeda, Syria, now the president of Syria. But the category of evil that I'm most interested in is, is one which we don't talk about much when we talk about evil. And I think it's something that C.S. Lewis is quite interesting on, which is that we tend to think about evil as though it's sort of Voldemort or Hitler, sort of very, very extreme cartoonish figures. My sense is that evil is often something closer to each of us. And partly it's about extreme carelessness and selfishness and not really caring about

• 41:55Rory Stewart?

  other people. And that's where I feel people like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson come closest. What I felt with Boris is, of course, he's not a genocidal guy, he's never killed anybody.

• 42:13Rory Stewart?

  He's sort of hail fellow well met, but in the extent of his carelessness, his recklessness in private relationships, his relationship to truth, what he did with Brexit, the way he ran the country, the sense that everybody else is a sort of joke or a game, that also is a form of sin and if I was going to push it higher, maybe even a form of evil and maybe one that I'm closer to myself before I lay into Boris Johnson. Then, over to you.

• 42:42Alastair Campbell?

  God, you sort of sounded like a vicar there. That was very, that was a very good sermon. I enjoyed that. This is, I think, you'll have a publisher on at the boarding. Roy, it's very just what you say about evil and the various categories of evil. Could be a great book. We got the question a couple of weeks ago, as you say, and I've been, I've been thinking about it. And I'm assuming that he imagines that it would be Putin. And certainly Putin, I think, in my defence, I didn't think he was totally evil at the time. But I also think, the truth is, you've gone through with some of the names you've mentioned, that in politics and in government, you have to shake hands with a lot of people that you wouldn't necessarily, you know, want to, want to go on holiday with them. During the Northern

• 43:23Alastair Campbell?

  Ireland peace process, I definitely shook hands with quite a lot of people who'd killed people. I remember once meeting a guy who had been on the IRA Army Council and somebody told me afterwards that, you know, he was the guy who really knew how to do the bombs and made them and all the rest of it. So Putin gets close because of course, the other definition, I think, of political evil, you know, at the moment, President Zelensky is responsible for a lot of deaths of Russians, just as the Russians are responsible for a lot of deaths of Ukrainians. Putin.

• 43:59Alastair Campbell?

  Also does kill some of his own people. We mentioned Navalny. Fiona and I were in the car last week, we were listening to this amazing book, London Falling by Patrick Radenkeef.

• 44:11Rory Stewart?

  I've been reading it on your recommendation. It is extraordinary.

• 44:14Alastair Campbell?

  Incredible, isn't it?

• 44:15Rory Stewart?

  Small subtext in that. Did you know that he, at the age of 50, got a J. Crew modeling contract?

• 44:19Alastair Campbell?

  No, I didn't. Is this because you just turned 50?

• 44:22Rory Stewart?

  There's hope for us all.

• 44:25Alastair Campbell?

  But it's, but one of the sections of the book where he's just going through, because Russia gets involved in it at a certain point, just going through all the people who kind of fell out of windows. And I'm reading at the moment, I'm now reading the book, Nord Stream Conspiracy.

• 44:40Alastair Campbell?

  And again, Putin and his ability to, I mean, honestly, Angela Merkel has not come well out of this book, because basically you get the sense that Russia is playing her and keeping her in the Nord Stream thing. And anyway, it's just, it's a bit like the, it's a bit like London Falling. It's a kind of, it's a, it's a non-fiction book written as an absolute thriller. So Putin sort of weaves in and out all these terrible stories. But I think the reason why he's only my runner up is because the winner of the most evil hand I ever shook was actually somebody who really killed a lot of his own people and just ruined, totally ruined his own country. And that was Mugabe. I really had a sense meeting, did you ever meet Mugabe?

• 45:24Rory Stewart?

  No, because that's why I went to Mnangagwa's inauguration.

• 45:28Alastair Campbell?

  Of course, you went to the inauguration after he's gone, yeah.

• 45:30Rory Stewart?

  After Mugabe was toppled, yeah.

• 45:31Alastair Campbell?

  And he was just, he just emanated, you just, you just didn't enjoy being in the same space. He had this horrible manner about him. He was surrounded, like a lot of authoritarian leaders are, by sycophants, sort of, you know, banging and scraping as he walked. He had the most ridiculously expensive suits. I think even Xi Jinping would struggle to match Mugabe on the suit front. And his little, his handmade shoes with his little, with his initials on the inside, but all this sort of horrible stuff. But I just think in terms of what he did to his own country, absolutely evil. And of course, you know, going back

• 46:09Alastair Campbell?

  To the the discussion of the main point about in the main episode about corruption, all that too. So I think it's probably him. I think that he takes he takes the gold medal from from Vlad.

• 46:20Rory Stewart?

  Good. Okay. A final thing, you were tempting with book recommendations, which we sometimes do at the end. And in in doing a bit of research on corruption, shout out for three books I really took to. And what actually one of them was London falling, of course, which links quite a lot to issues of money in London.

• 46:35Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, totally.

• 46:37Rory Stewart?

  Kleptopia by Tom Burgess, which is an extraordinary story about international money. Moneyland by Oliver Bule.

• 46:44Alastair Campbell?

  They are both apps. Those two guys have done. And I've got to be honest, reading their books, which I did a while back and listening to this, the corruption part of of this book. It does make me feel slightly sick that when we were in government, we didn't do more to stop this whole Russian laundromat situation in London. Because there's no doubt that we were. I think there's a line in in in London falling. We we didn't just sort of open the door. We kind of rolled out the red carpet to them. Um. So, yeah, both brilliant books.

• 47:18Rory Stewart?

  Well, my my final one is um is Sarah Chase. And Sarah Chase was in Afghanistan when I was there, running an amazing nonprofit in Kandahar. And she became very focused on corruption in Afghanistan and then became an advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and tried to make anti-corruption central to the project in Afghanistan. But she's now written a book on corruption in America. And it begins with this McDonald case that I was talking about in our main podcast yesterday. That this case of this governor basically getting away with taking this huge amounts of money and not being prosecuted. And I it it hasn't got the pick up it should have done.

• 47:57Rory Stewart?

  People seem to be much happier buying her book criticizing corruption in Afghanistan, which was, you know, really celebrated everywhere. When she starts trying to point out corruption in America, people sort of struggle a little bit more. I think the story is extraordinary, and I think it's partly to to return maybe to what we were talking about. What Sarah shows us is how the American legal system and the constitutional system is just not fit for purpose in an age of billion dollar campaign financing, crypto. And and the growth of the new tech sector.

• 48:27Alastair Campbell?

  And I think we should maybe maybe listeners, tell us who your most evil handshake ever is. And you can't say, nobody's allowed to say they're in laws. I was actually trying to write down a list and it became a very long list in the end.

• 48:38Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, of course you met Jeffrey, you met, you met Jeffrey Epstein, didn't you? You shook his hand.

• 48:42Alastair Campbell?

  I did shake his hand, yeah.

• 48:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So there's, there's very different forms of evil we could be talking about. There were, I mean, I was trying not to say that I had teachers at school who were subsequently prosecuted for child abuse, who I knew well. I mean, so there's lots of different types of evil from inflicting horrible pain on children, right the way through to, you know, conducting genocidal campaigns in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, through to the, the casual carelessness of some of our democratic politicians.

• 49:12Alastair Campbell?

  There's also the thug who stole my Burnley hat when I was eight on Main Road in Manchester City.

• 49:21Rory Stewart?

  What, what, a man stole it from an eight year old?

• 49:24Alastair Campbell?

  An adult.

• 49:25Rory Stewart?

  Stole it from an eight year old?

• 49:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 49:26Rory Stewart?

  Well, that's a bit mean. That is a bit mean. That's a kind of stealing candy from kids. Yeah, that is, that's pretty bad.

• 49:32Alastair Campbell?

  So.

• 49:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. If you're listening to this in your old people's home, I hope you're sorry.

• 49:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And I hope, you know, maybe serves you right that Arsenal won the Premier League and you didn't, eh? I've got a long memory, Rory. Anyway, lovely to talk to you as ever.

• 49:46Rory Stewart?

  Lovely to talk to you. Speak soon. Bye bye.

• 49:48Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon. Bye.

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