497. Is Trump Plotting Regime Change in Iran? (Question Time)

Is Trump deliberately wielding chaos as a negotiating tactic with Iran? When did it become acceptable for world leaders to openly interfere in each other's elections, as seen with Orbán's international campaign support? How vulnerable is Starmer's position heading into the Gorton and Denton by-election? Join Rory and Alastair as they discuss all these questions and more. *If you are experiencing technical issues with this episode on Apple Podcasts, please delete and redownload the episode* __________ The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit fuseenergy.com/politics. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee ✅ __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: James Clayden Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Senior Producer: Callum Hill General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rory Stewart?

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• 1:02Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to the Rest is For Less Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Now Rory, Josh in Bradford would like to know, how can the US credibly negotiate with Iran from a position of military escalation?

• 1:20Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 1:22Alastair 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.

• 1:34Rory 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.

• 1:58Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:05Rory Stewart?

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

• 2:21Speaker 02

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• 2:51Alastair Campbell?

  Does the military buildup serve as a necessary deterrents to strengthen America's negotiating hand? Or does it risk triggering the very conflict it's meant to prevent?

• 3:01Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 3:02Alastair Campbell?

  There's a nice PhD in there somewhere.

• 3:03Rory Stewart?

  Incredible, incredible question. Well, let's just take it back one stage and remind us where we are. So Iranian regime been in since 1979, so hugely long time. Forty seven years. And people have been calling it out again and again and again. But it now seems to be very close to its death throes. Now, admittedly, people have been saying death throes.

• 3:30Alastair Campbell?

  Said that before, yeah.

• 3:30Rory Stewart?

  So much, but since the Massa Amini demonstrations, which were demonstrations after a young woman was killed for not wearing a headscarf, which is now a couple of years ago. And then the latest killings, I mean, and killings beyond imagining. This was an uprising which we discussed in a podcast a couple of weeks ago, in which in Iran, for the first time, the middle class bizarres, which are the sort of traders in Tehran and the working class, and the more liberal, progressive, wealthier groups have been out on the streets again and again. Called to come out by the son of the old Shah of Iran, the old ruler of Iran, implicitly supported by Donald Trump, who said if the regime killed them, he would intervene.

• 4:17Rory Stewart?

  And partly just motivated by their rage at this government, which has put Iran into the position of a bankrupt international pariah, engaged in foreign adventures, building nuclear bombs being hit. So they get in the streets and the regime has responded by killing and killing and killing. In Tehran, literally, I was talking to someone who was in Tehran, machine guns in the streets, snipers on the roofs.

• 4:45Rory Stewart?

  Thousands of people killed, hundreds of thousands of people injured. Estimates on how many, very difficult to get, minimum of three, four thousand from the regime, with estimates going all the way up, sixteen thousand, thirty thousand people killed. And somebody I was talking to yesterday said almost nobody in Iran now doesn't have a friend or a family member who's been killed or injured.

• 5:10Alastair Campbell?

  And meanwhile, Donald Trump sends a big, beautiful armada, including the Abraham Lincoln, which is one of the biggest aircraft carriers, got about seven thousand people on it, fighter jets and destroyers and a real proper armada like he did with Venezuela. And I think that's what has made people think, well, you don't send that much kit and that many men without intending to do something. And the question then is, will he, won't he?

• 5:38Rory Stewart?

  And why hasn't he yet?

• 5:40Alastair Campbell?

  And the reason he hasn't yet, I suspect, is there will be, even though we all know that Donald Trump tends to listen only to himself, I suspect there will be quite a lot of people trying to hold him back on this because whereas Venezuela was a straightforward decapitation, take the guy out on the top and then do some sort of deal with the people left behind, I don't think anybody, Marco Rubio said when he was giving evidence to an inquiry last week, that nobody can predict what would follow if they did inflict catastrophic attack on Iran, which led to regime change. Added to which, the Iranians seem very, very confident that it wouldn't lead to regime change, that they would be able to unite the country if the Americans did attack them. And they do have a pretty, they have the

• 6:23Alastair Campbell?

  biggest military in the Middle East. And it's very hard to get exact numbers, but you're talking about conventional armed forces, you're talking about the Revolutionary Guard, which is the kind of elite. And in both cases, you're talking about hundreds of thousands. And then you're talking about the ability to mobilize reserves that probably take their full complement, not far off a million. So this is not even Iraq, this is definitely not Venezuela. This is something that has the capacity to provoke all sorts of problems within the region. And even though America's allies in the region have said, we don't want our airspace used and we don't want this and we don't want that, that would not mean that if America did

• 7:06Alastair Campbell?

  attack, that the Iranians wouldn't think that those countries that have American bases become legitimate targets. Added to which, you've got Israel sitting there watching very, very carefully what happens. So it's pretty tense stuff. And his mate, Steve Witkoff, is off, I think, to Turkey to do some attempted negotiations with the Iranians, but it's hard to know where they go. So this may be a bit like Greenland, that it's sort of a lot of noise and goes nowhere for now. On the other hand, it may not.

• 7:32Rory Stewart?

  And we're back to the question of how you predict Trump and the framework of where in the strange reality TV show, which is Trump's narrative, doing something in Iran comes, and I'd like to get you on that. And if it's a reality TV show, what he's tempted to do in Iran of the different options he has. On the question of the risks of taking out Iran, I mean, one is this question of what Iran can actually now do to destabilize the region. Militarily, they've of course turned out to be much weaker than people would have thought they were a few years ago. Their nuclear program is basically on a very permanent hold, right?

• 8:16Rory Stewart?

  It may not have been eliminated to the last moment, but boy, if they got problems with their nuclear program, at least for the next two, three years. Their proxies, which were these militia groups that they were running, Hezbollah in Lebanon, well, that basically was blown apart by this Israeli action with these pages and the walkie-talkies that took out the 1,200 top leaders of Hezbollah. Their great base, which was Syria, has collapsed. Ahmad al-Shara has come in and is explicitly anti-Iranian, basically driven out all the Iranians, which leaves them really with some allied militia groups in Iraq and the Houthis.

• 8:53Alastair Campbell?

  In Yemen.

• 8:54Rory Stewart?

  And it's true that the Houthis have more capacity to strike than they did a couple of years ago, and they're manufacturing their own weapons now. So they get some components from Iran, but the Yemenis themselves are now manufacturing things that seem to be able to fly all the way to Israel. But I don't think the big problem, probably if you are Israel or Qatar or Saudi, is that you are particularly worried about the Iranian strike back in a way that you might have been three, four years ago. I think your bigger worry is about whether toppling this regime is going to create a better situation for you or a worse situation for you. So there will be some people, certainly in the Gulf, who think, okay, this regime is

• 9:39Rory Stewart?

  much weaker than it was. It's not a big threat to the region. Safer to leave it alone rather than start firing missiles around because if it's toppled, who knows what follows? A more nationalistic military revolutionary guard government that wants to really build up and take revenge, civil war, chaos, et cetera. And even in Israel, I think there is some concern, yes, about whether their dome is sufficient to defend against drones and missile strikes, but probably more than that.

• 10:10Rory Stewart?

  Again, this question of whether they wouldn't rather have a weak state than the different forms of alternative state that might follow.

• 10:18Alastair Campbell?

  I think there'll also be a generational battle. I think there's a, there's an older generation that'll, that'll lend itself more to supporting the, the, the supreme leader, and I think a younger generation that maybe will be more open. There does seem to be, you know, and it's very hard to know exactly what's going on, but I spoke to somebody who's recently been in, in Iran, who said that you really do get the sense that they want, that public opinion would like something to happen, would like some sort of change. What's really strange though about Trump, and you know, I've used this phrase before about strategic chaos. So on the one hand. If you go down the Whitcoff route, it's it looks like trying to get some sort of new agreement, maybe get a few sanctions lifted, and in exchange, you get them to agree to

• 11:03Alastair Campbell?

  limitations on their on their weapons programs. You could go through, you could go all out for regime change, or you could just try and keep them guessing. And what Trump seems to be doing is a kind of a mixture of all three. Now, what I don't know is whether that's deliberate, whether that genuinely is the approach of strategic chaos, whether he actually knows what he wants to do and how he wants to get there, and how the American system is even working when they are so dependent upon what he says and does at any moment in time.

• 11:37Rory Stewart?

  I was talking to some hawks in the US, and actually, we're about to interview on leading, Rob Malley, who's a deep Iran expert, who's part of Biden's administration. But the hawk line, in other words, the aggressive line against Iran, is essentially saying nothing could be worse than this regime. They're saying that we've known this regime for 49 years, they are implacably hostile towards the West and towards Israel, and that's never going to change. Now, there's some debate, there's a brilliant book by Vali Nassar on Iran's grand strategy, and he points out that it's not quite clear whether all the fault lies with the Iranians,

• 12:19Rory Stewart?

  because it is true that when Raffsanjani, who was the reformist president, tried to reach out to the West in the 80s and 90s, he was perpetually rebuffed by the Clinton administration and others. And so their conclusion that America has only ever wanted regime change in Iran is probably true. In other words, the paranoia of the Supreme Leader Khamenei is probably justified. But regardless of whether it's our fault or their fault, the fact is, they are implacably hostile to the shaitan, the great Satan, which is the United States. That means for the hawks, they think, okay, anything that follows has got to be better.

• 12:57Alastair Campbell?

  And they think now is the time, because he's weakened, his nuclear programs weaken, sanctions have weakened them economically, and there does appear to be genuine. Public opinion turning against them.

• 13:06Rory Stewart?

  Correct. However, of course, the problem is that when you say anything's going to be better, I of course get the heebie-jeebies because that's of course what we thought with Saddam Hussein. But you know, it can't be worse than Saddam Hussein. This guy's so implacably hostile to us. And actually, in many ways, it's turned out in places like Iraq and in Libya with Gaddafi, that civil war and chaos, I mean, let's take Libya, right? We thought getting rid of Gaddafi is a no-brainer. This guy's literally blowing up airliners over Lockerbie. So can't possibly be worse. But what actually happened is through the civil war that we created in Libya, or helped to ferment by Toplin Gaddafi. That is why the weapons have come flooding into the Sahel. These are all these Islamist groups

• 13:50Rory Stewart?

  that are growing. These are the military coups that are emerging from Chad through to Niger to Sudan. So there's a really strong story that a lot of the horror, instability, extremism and collapse of democracy all the way across North Africa came out of Toplin.

• 14:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, the other, the other thing I think is worth reflecting on in this is what is happening in Iran now says to other countries about the likelihood or the desire of them to acquire nuclear weapons. Because there is a, there is a chance that the conclusion others take out of this, if Iran does get really badly hit by America, is the only way you can actually look after yourself is genuinely to go for nuclear, your own nuclear weapons programme. So the Saudis look at this and think, and the Saudis are getting very close to Pakistan in relation to defence and Pakistan are well down the, the nuclear track. Turkey, what does Turkey think about watching Iran get its nukes wiped out? And, and don't forget, the so-called New START treaty runs out this week.

• 14:51Alastair Campbell?

  This was the treaty that, where the Americans and the Russians agreed to a limit on their nuclear warheads. We're recording on Tuesday, it runs out Wednesday. Um, and we just don't know what, if anything replaces it. So basically that's sort of at least something that had a sense of control on nuclear proliferation just goes. There is then no international agreement and no limit. And one of, I, one of the interesting dogs that didn't bark on Keir Starmer's visit to China, I think. China is developing nuclear warheads at a pretty alarming rate. So there are around something like twelve thousand two hundred nuclear warheads.

• 15:35Alastair Campbell?

  And about almost ten thousand are in stockpiles capable of being used militarily. And America and Russia between them are in charge of ninety percent of those. So China, although it's developing a hundred nuclear warheads a year, is still a long, long way behind. So they want to grow. And as they grow, what do these other, Mark Carney's famous middle powers, what do they do? Other than possibly think, is that the only way that we actually guarantee our own security in this very dangerous world? So I think the whole nuclear proliferation debate is going to become part of this as well, particularly with nothing, at the moment, nothing replacing this new Star Trek.

• 16:12Rory Stewart?

  And maybe in Europe too, because if you think about it, and people say, you know, the Russian economy is the size of Spanish economy. It's a third smaller than the British economy, so it can't be that strong. But of course, it's inconceivable that somebody would invade Russia, right? In the way that Russia invaded Ukraine, because they have nuclear weapons, which is why a lot of the British budget is now going to go into more and more nuclear weapons. And which is why the big discussion, if you're Germany or Sweden or whatever, is how does one set about having your own nuclear deterrent? And of course, that's proliferation. I mean, this is going from a world in which nuclear weapons were kept at a very, very small group with people like Israel or Pakistan bending the rules and getting secret programs going. To a world in which almost everybody can afford it, it's incentivized to do it.

• 16:56Alastair Campbell?

  And the other thing that happens, or could happen, you mentioned, so if you think of the countries that had nuclear weapons programs and that stopped them. Ukraine, okay, well, how did that end for them?

• 17:07Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. Libya?

• 17:09Alastair Campbell?

  Libya?

• 17:10Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 17:10Alastair Campbell?

  So at the moment, we've got, well, we've got nine nuclear powers, okay? And then the other thing that happened, particularly after those countries that were giving up their programs. You had, I can remember when we were in government, there was an obsession. Uh with this guy A Q Khan.

• 17:28Rory Stewart?

  Sure.

• 17:28Alastair Campbell?

  Who became a kind of, I guess you'd call him a kind of nuclear nuclear arms programme business.

• 17:35Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 17:35Alastair Campbell?

  Exporting expertise. And so there'll be more of that. If you have an Iranian nuclear programme that is suddenly brought to a halt through regime change, heaven knows where all this stuff goes, the expertise, the materials, et cetera. So I think that Trump is being very, very Trumpian in saying this armada is on its way. Hope we don't have to use it, but you know, they better watch out. And I suspect there will be others saying, okay, this is not Venezuela. This is not even Iraq. This is something much, much more.

• 18:02Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 18:02Alastair Campbell?

  Unpredictable.

• 18:03Rory Stewart?

  Well, one of the questions is what is it that they think they're doing? So again, I was talking to someone senior in the British government. Who said that their assessment was that the most likely scenario, if Trump struck, is that he would get rid of Hamani and there'd be an internal coup. And he would then be replaced by a strong man or a faction from within the existing regime, or by a sort of nationalist military group, maybe non IRGC, not not Revolutionary Guard. Um. And that is what we would probably describe.

• 18:32Alastair Campbell?

  A lot of big ifs in there.

• 18:33Rory Stewart?

  Lot of big ifs, but let's just flesh it out. That's called the Venezuela option.

• 18:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 18:37Rory Stewart?

  Because to to bring people up to date on what's happened in Venezuela over the last few weeks, Maduro was captured, taken to the US. His deputy, Delcy Rodriguez, has taken over. And everyone else that we mentioned in the podcast, all the senior figures, the interior minister, the defence minister, the speaker of the parliament, who's her brother, they're all still there. Totally in place. The only thing that they're doing, they're still making anti-American speeches, is that they're opening up the economy to American oil companies and now suggesting they may open up to mining. But most of the political prisoners are still locked up, the media is still suppressed. The entire administration of their militia groups, the military, the oppression, the supreme courts, the banks, all that are completely intact, right? So is that what these people think they're going to do in Iran? Is Trump's idea that somehow

• 19:21Rory Stewart?

  he gets rid of Ayatollah Khamenei and then you have the entire evil regime structure still in place. But somebody who's more willing to do deals with America on oil. And how does that play out? Because then your friend who's just come back from Iran would say, I think, F that.

• 19:37Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 19:37Rory Stewart?

  You know, thousands, potentially tens of thousands of people have been killed in the streets. This is the most murderous bloody regime on earth.

• 19:46Rory Stewart?

  The hundred and fifty thousand members of the Revolutionary Guard have blood on their hands. Hell no, are we putting up with the idea that we just get rid of how many and we continue to be ruled by this bunch of gangster thugs for the next forty years? There must be justice, there must be reprisal, we must get rid of these guys. Meanwhile, the former regime elements are going to be thinking, if we give an inch, and they keep talking about the Shah being too weak because the Shah only killed a few thousand people and was toppled, if we give an inch, we're going to be strung up from the lamppost because everybody knows we have blood on our hands.

• 20:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, Trump will also, don't forget, Trump's, we're going to talk after the break about this election in Texas, where Trump's party had a bit of a blow, but going up to the midterms, the last thing he's going to want is a sort of spike in the oil price. And I think the other thing to remember about the Revolutionary Guard, that we think of them as a kind of, you know, oversized special forces group, they're also a massive business. They run large chunks of the economy, they run the ports, they run construction, they run, they've got trade monopolies in all sorts of ways. So this, I don't, I don't think this is remotely like Venezuela, but there's a risk that he thinks that it is like Venezuela, because so far as he's concerned, Venezuela went perfectly by his perspective.

• 21:01Rory Stewart?

  And so then let me come to the final thing before we go to the break, which is trying to get into the head of this man. So we know because we sat through the Davos speech that he's very, very proud of what he calls his precision military operations, which he gets congratulated on and he does them perfectly. So in terms of trying to guess, I'm, we can't predict him, I'm asking for a forty percent probability, what are guesses of some of the things, if you are a president obsessed with ratings in a reality TV show, that you might want to do in Iran, which will capture the headlines of the world? Is it full revolution, liberal democracy? Is it chaos? Is it taking out a couple of top people and leaving the regime in place? Is it firing some of your beautiful missiles?

• 21:45Rory Stewart?

  Is it getting a piece of paper that you can wave around? What are the sort of things he might be tempted to do when he puts down his Big Mac and turns off Fox News?

• 21:52Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it, I mean, it is terrifying to think that that is possibly how he makes these, these judgments, but he might, I'm sort of tempted by, I mentioned those three possible strategies, I'm tempted by the third one, which is that he kind of leaves the armada there for quite a while. And he doesn't go all out for regime change.

• 22:13Rory Stewart?

  And the headlines that generates is that every week we're asking what's happening with the Armada and it keeps everybody guessing.

• 22:17Alastair Campbell?

  No, I think the headline moves on to something completely different. Uh, I think it just, he gets a new target, he goes to Nigeria again or.

• 22:25Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 22:25Alastair Campbell?

  Because I think the other thing about here, don't forget for his MAGA brand, and you said in the main episode that the Epstein files are kind of causing fishes within the kind of MAGA brace. The other big thing that he said was that he wouldn't take America into forever wars. Now, there's a Venezuela, he got away with it. Okay, up to now. There's a, I don't think, I think there is a real risk of something much, much worse than straight in and hit the guy uh in Iran. I think you're talking about, and I agree his military's been weakened, but you're talking about a country that has shown its capacity really to mobilize support and then to fight asymmetric warfare in all sorts of different ways.

• 23:09Alastair Campbell?

  So I, I don't know.

• 23:11Rory Stewart?

  Okay, here's another, here's another possibility for you. He keeps the Armada there, but what actually happens is that Netanyahu mobilizes against Iran and strikes Iran because he's been obsessed with Iran for thirty years. He will see this as his one big chance. There will never be an American administration that will be more willing to allow Israel to strike Iran. He's got an election coming up and he's got to recover his position in the polls. He needs to show, Netanyahu needs to show himself as a tough man and a hawk. And he can't do it in Gaza at the moment, or he doesn't want to do it in Gaza at the moment. So maybe it's an Israeli strike against Iran with the US providing coverage that we're more likely to see.

• 23:50Alastair Campbell?

  Possible, yeah, entirely possible. Um, but and then I think if you look at what the reaction to that would be, the reaction whenever the Americans have got involved in recent times has been pretty limited. And they've signaled it as well. They've said, we're going to take out this base, we're going to attack this base. So they've actually managed to avoid casualties. I think if the Israelis did it directly like that, I think the reaction would be far stronger.

• 24:11Rory Stewart?

  Well, and I think there's another final thing, and maybe we should get a break here, which is that when people are wondering why Gulf countries are. Seem to be encouraging Trump to hold off for the time being. I wonder whether it isn't that at some subconscious level, along with many, many other arguments, one small argument maybe that they're actually worried about Israel's rising power, that Israel is now becoming a military superpower and a regional hegemon. And that they may think that a weak anti-Israeli Iran is nevertheless the lesser of the two evils as the counterbalance in the region. Final thing is, is just to bring the focus back to the 90 million Iranians. This is their country, it's their destiny, it's they that are being killed.

• 24:55Rory Stewart?

  I was talking to Christopher Lake, great writer on Iran, married to an Iranian. And what horrifies him is the sense that Iranians, in so much of this conversation, are being treated as pawns in somebody else's game. That, that there are all these different countries around the world thinking they're playing chess with Iran, when they're probably playing blind man's buff. And the people who end up losing are the Iranians themselves, who are not getting the dignity, the autonomy, the justice that they're looking for. And instead, just absolutely vulnerable to whatever fantasies or ambitions all these other regional powers have.

• 25:29Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, let's take a break, then we'll come back and talk about another marvelous country led by a marvelous man in the form of Hungary.

• 25:35Rory Stewart?

  Very good, looking forward to it.

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• 27:40Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to the Rest of the World's Question Time, me, Alastair Campbell.

• 27:43Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart. Alistair, here is a question from Vivian, who's actually in Budapest. When did it become okay for prime ministers and presidents to interfere in each other's elections? I've been stunned by how many world leaders took part in Orban's campaign video, as well as seeing Zelensky and von der Leyen being attacked by Orban on giant posters. Right, this is not just a Hungarian election, this has become every other world leader weighing in.

• 28:09Alastair Campbell?

  Orban is a fascinating guy. Hungary's a country of about 10 million people. He's the longest-serving European leader. He's probably, he's been there 15 years. He's probably the closest to Trump. He's probably also the closest to Putin. And he's got an election coming up where he's been behind in the polls to a guy called Peter Magyar, who is also a conservative but not as hard-right as Orban, and who was in the same party but left to join this other party, T-SHAP.

• 28:41Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, the question is right. The the the original video to launch the campaign, you had Netanyahu saying what a great guy Orban was, you had Marine Le Pen, you had Alice Vidal, the leader of the AFD in Germany.

• 28:55Rory Stewart?

  Which is the far right party in Germany, a proper neo fascist party.

• 28:57Alastair Campbell?

  Your friend Herbert Kickel from Austria.

• 28:59Rory Stewart?

  Who's a proper neo fascist from Austria.

• 29:01Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely. You had Maloney in Italy and Millet from Argentina. And of course, I suspect they're holding back the big bazooka of Donald Trump, although they might be worried whether that will actually work in their favour, I don't know. But Orban is, he's been consistently behind in the polls, but it is narrowing. And it's narrowing in part because he's, he's got eighty percent control of the media. They're running some pretty effective negative campaigning against Magyar, and they've been giving some very, what we call pre-election sweetness in relation to public sector workers, mortgages, help with pensions.

• 29:40Rory Stewart?

  One there which I've always been very struck by is that because Hungary is facing a demographic crisis and is completely determined to have no immigration, this is a man who's been dominating Hungarian politics in many ways since the nineteen nineties, a real kind of survivor. Been at this time fifteen years, but he was actually Prime Minister when he was thirty five in the in the mid nineties too. So he he's all about the Hungarian nation and nationhood. And it's an interesting thing, the Hungarian nation, he defines it as a Christian nation, although he doesn't go to church, basically anti Muslim. But curiously, it's not, it's more complicated than being a white Christian nation, because he also celebrates the fact that the Magyar were originally a Turkic tribe who came over, but

• 30:24Rory Stewart?

  like the Mongols, from Central Asia. So he's often to be found travelling in Central Asia and Turkey, talking about the ethnic connections. So anyway, this this vision of a Turkic but non Muslim identity, and he is offering, as you say, sweetness. But one of those sweetness is that if you're a mother who had three children, you were exempt from income tax for your whole life. He's now said any mother who has two children are exempt from income tax for life. I would imagine that's pretty powerful.

• 30:57Alastair Campbell?

  A lot of people.

• 30:58Rory Stewart?

  I can think quite a lot of people would be quite tempted. Although actually he's got a flat rate of tax, or he used to have only 16%. So maybe that he he doesn't need to do it.

• 31:05Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, Hungary is a poor country by European standards. I think it's about 72% of the EU average in terms of of standard of living. But the other card he has played, I don't know if you saw this, it got next to no coverage in the UK, but he summoned the Ukraine ambassador and accused Ukraine of trying to interfere in the election, provided no evidence whatsoever. Now, we all know that Russia spends a lot of money interfering in others' elections. We saw that when we were in Moldova. The question about these posters of Zelensky and and von der Leyen with Magyar is basically saying Magyar is a puppet of Ukraine and Brussels. And if you put him in as prime minister, your children will get sent to the front line.

• 31:48Alastair Campbell?

  This is a deliberate, direct strategy. Again, no evidence of it. Magyar is actually trying to Magyar is doing a slight version of the Ming Vars thing. He's trying not to get caught on LGBTQ. He's trying not to be presented as a sort of Euro fanatic. He just says Hungary under him would become more sensible, more responsible European partner. But Orban is going full out, massive posters around Budapest, basically saying this guy is von der Leyen and Zelensky's puppet.

• 32:17Rory Stewart?

  And as you say, at the core of the Ming Vars strategy, so these elections happening in April, but for Peter Magyar, who may be able, after 15 years, to finally top Orban. And my goodness, that matters because Hungary in Europe now is absolutely central to getting unanimous votes on sanctioning Russia, dealing with the issues of Ukraine, interactions with Trump, questions around immigration, questions around the European Court of Justice, questions around the rule of law. So Hungary may be small, but it, boy, does it matter this election. Magyar is largely running on the economy and corruption because under the surface of all the far-right nationalist rhetoric, you know, and there's definitely there, you,

• 33:00Rory Stewart?

  I think, pointed out that when he saw him at the football, his supporters are waving flags of Greater Hungary. This is strange stuff. This is going back to just after the First World War, when the Kingdom of Hungary included parts of what's now Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, et cetera, right? Ukraine. But underneath is corruption, and it's a very odd form of corruption. It's not like Russian corruption where the oligarchs were essentially self-made gangsters, who, as people can find in the Bill Browder leading interview, created a massive parallel gangster state which was then co-opted by Putin. This is the other way around. These are people who are, have no independent power base. They're not actually big gangsters.

• 33:44Rory Stewart?

  They're not even successful business people. They've just been given government contracts. So the mayor, guy who's, I think, a plumber, the mayor of the small town where Orban grew up, is now one of the wealthiest people in Hungary, who's been given government contracts. And the problem in unraveling all this is that it's been done because they're all lawyers, Orban himself is a lawyer, in very tricky ways. So what they often do is that they nationalize private industries, buying them out, and then they re-privatize them back to their mates. They set up foundations which are protected. They then create links from the foundations, particularly universities or media organizations, that support Orban.

• 34:29Rory Stewart?

  And he's also, of course, appointed the chief justice of the court, that's head of the central bank, the head of the competition markets authority.

• 34:37Alastair Campbell?

  He very proudly calls it an illiberal democracy. He makes no bones about what he's done. He's done a kind of, and this is why Trump, the American people, MAGA people find him so fascinating, because he's, he's done it kind of openly. I guess the other thing, if Magyar does win, and I wouldn't put my life on it, and also I think if it's narrow, we'll see the Orban equivalent of January the 6th in terms, I don't know about the violence, but in terms of the protests and the calling for a recon and all that stuff. But if Magyar does win, his, his private life is going to become interesting, because he, in a sense, he became prominent by secretly recording phone calls that his wife was having, which led to the exposure.

• 35:22Alastair Campbell?

  Of a cover up of child sex abuse and his wife didn't know that she was being tamed. She's also a politician.

• 35:27Rory Stewart?

  No, no, ex-wife.

• 35:28Alastair Campbell?

  Now ex-wife and has since claimed that he indulged in domestic violence and and so forth. So, and of course, he says this is all part of a plot against him by Orban and blah, blah, blah. So it's a messy, nasty campaign and it's not, we're so used to kind of traditional left versus traditional right. This is, they're both conservatives, they're both on the right. And then there's a party, our homeland, which is even further to the right. So they might be Peter Maguire's best friend in taking votes off Orban. I think it's one of the most consequential elections happening, well, certainly in Europe, but happening anywhere in the world.

• 36:02Rory Stewart?

  And final thing, I guess, we we touched on this a bit on the J D Vance miniseries, which if people haven't listened to, please listen to. But is this whole world network, you mentioned it in yesterday's podcast when you were talking about Steve Bannon boasting to Epstein that he had contacts with Orban and then he listed all those other groups and a lot of those groups, the people endorsing him in the campaign video. But it's about these national conservative, in inverted commas, transnational networks that share ideas. And Orban's been right at the centre of this from the beginning. So Rod Dreher, who's an intellectual influence on J D Vance, lives in Hungary, he's an American living in Hungary. And they share ideas, one of them, the one you mentioned in the liberal, about the executive, right?

• 36:44Rory Stewart?

  Whoever is the boss gets to impose the majority will, screw minority rights, screw constitutional protections.

• 36:51Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 36:52Rory Stewart?

  A second idea, civilizational defence, Christianity, white people. And tying it all together beautifully for all of them, doesn't matter whether you're Miller or you're Orban, is immigration. Because immigration gives you an argument about security and culture and the economy and identity. And it justifies the exceptional powers and it gives you a kind of moral dimension. So they're all learning from each other.

• 37:17Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, yeah, absolutely. They are, they are a group in the left, the progressive left, it is not remotely as well organised globally. And frankly, need to be. Now. Hooray, a ray of good news for those of us who don't feel particular fondness for Donald Trump. Andrea is a Trip Plus member from Southampton. Given the volatility and unpredictably of politics on both sides of the Atlantic, with a Democrat just winning a solidly Republican Texas district, how worried do you think Keir Starmer is feeling about the upcoming by-election in Gordon and Denton?

• 37:50Rory Stewart?

  Well, go on, I'm going to flip that round to you. I, I, I, tell us, and what is going on in Gordon and Denton?

• 37:56Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's going to be very, very tough.

• 37:57Rory Stewart?

  And just explain for international listeners, this, this.

• 37:59Alastair Campbell?

  Well, this is a very safe Labour seat, traditionally.

• 38:02Rory Stewart?

  And a guy's resigned because the scandal, this was the seat that Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, was hoping to stand for as part of his bid to be Labour leader, but he's not been allowed to. I got, again, from one of my more right wing informants saying, there's a very good looking reform candidate with a doctorate.

• 38:20Alastair Campbell?

  Matt Goodwin, Matt Goodwin's vile, he's vile. He's a sort of self-styled academic who studied the far right and became far right. I think he's a very, very bad pick. I think it's a terrible mistake by Farage to put him in there.

• 38:32Rory Stewart?

  What, what, what would you, what sort of person might, I mean, do you?

• 38:35Alastair Campbell?

  Well, somebody from the north, for a start.

• 38:38Rory Stewart?

  So this is a parachute candidate, he's just.

• 38:39Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he's just, he's just another name who gets on question time a lot.

• 38:43Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 38:43Alastair Campbell?

  Which of course is how these people judge whether they're any good, is whether they can talk crap on the television.

• 38:47Rory Stewart?

  So you'd look for a strong local candidate, maybe a reform councillor from Manchester would be a better bet.

• 38:52Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, the Greens have gone, the, the Greens, they've gone for a plumber called Hadda. And who's a councillor and well established locally. Labour have gone for a decent local candidate. The more I think about it, the more I think they were right to keep Andy Burnham out of the race. I think that would have become a complete circus and wouldn't necessarily have, have helped Labour.

• 39:14Rory Stewart?

  If Labour lose, though.

• 39:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, for sure. They're going to get a lot of, a lot of flak. And the thing is, I think the Lib Dems and the Tories are just going to sit this one out effectively. They know that they've got absolutely no chance. And it's a very interesting seat. I mean, I said last week, there's sort of, there's, there's two parts to it. One that's vulnerable to Green, one that's vulnerable to Reform. The other factor is that the Workers' Party, George Galloway's lot, they did quite well at the last election. And I think they're sitting it out. Um. You've got a very large Muslim population and this guy Goodwin, I mean, he's absolutely right out on there. If unless you're kind of look like Rory Stewart, you're not really British.

• 39:53Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 39:53Alastair Campbell?

  So I I think he's very, very vulnerable. I think he'll make mistakes. I think he's arrogant. And I think arrogant candidates tend not to do well in by-elections. There'll be a lot of lot of interest, a lot of pressure. So I think it is going to be a three horse race and the the battle between, I guess, the battle between Labour and the Greens at some point becomes who can stop Reform. Um. And so you're seeing the market, the betting markets and the prediction markets, they're moving up and down between all three, sort of becoming a given that Labour won't win, which I think at this stage probably helps Labour a bit.

• 40:25Rory Stewart?

  And a victory for either Green or Reform will be used by those parties since an extraordinary sort of validation boost, wouldn't it?

• 40:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 40:32Rory Stewart?

  Because it was a very safe Labour seat.

• 40:34Alastair Campbell?

  It's a very safe Labour seat. And I mean, in the olden days, when I was a journalist, it was Gerald Goffman's seat, Manchester Gordon. Um. He was the Shadow from Secretary and I mean, he's the way his majority. It was like sort of. So it would be, it would be a big, a big blow to Labour if they lost either way. I think what the people in the inside the Labour Party will be looking at is if the Greens win, it will vindicate the view of people like me that Labour has been playing far too much to people on the right as opposed to losing support on the left. And if Reform win, then it will be.

• 41:09Rory Stewart?

  Vindicating Morgan McSweeney and everyone who thinks you need to sound like Farage.

• 41:12Alastair Campbell?

  That's one way of putting it, Rory.

• 41:15Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 41:15Alastair Campbell?

  Um. And and just briefly on the the American thing, it was a massive, massive swing. The other interesting factor that I dug out of this is that the Republicans in this is a state election, so a small election inside the state of Texas. And the the Republicans outspent the Democrats nine to one.

• 41:36Alastair Campbell?

  And the Democrats won with a, I don't know how you work out the maths, but a thirty one point swing. It was seventeen plus for the Republicans in the election and it was fourteen plus on the day. And the thing about Trump, Trump have, you know.

• 41:51Rory Stewart?

  Good. Trump said, well, of course I had nothing to do with this, nothing to do with me. I wasn't running yet.

• 41:54Alastair Campbell?

  He posted, he posted three times on the day before saying, she's a great candidate. Get out of there. I've endorsed her. And there is a, there is a suggestion that people think the Trump endorsement actually did a lot of damage because of all the ice stuff that was going on.

• 42:08Rory Stewart?

  Well, that's, that's the big thing to watch because that's the one hope is that Republican senators and congresspeople instead of feeling that the only way they can keep their seats is to have Trump endorsement, if they begin to feel that the only way they can keep their seats is a distance from Trump, Trump's finished.

• 42:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 42:22Rory Stewart?

  This is a question from Noam, which I assume is not the Homeland Secretary Christie Noem, but is a Trip Plus member in New York. So I don't know. Rory and Alistair, were either of you among the handful of people in the UK who managed to drag themselves out to catch the Melania documentary over the weekend? Now, I am going to be pious here and say I didn't see it and consequently have absolutely nothing to say amusing or otherwise about it.

• 42:47Alastair Campbell?

  You can't say nothing. I mean, you, you've heard about it.

• 42:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, go on, tell us about it. Go on, tell us about this documentary.

• 42:51Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I've not seen it and I, I, I have no intention of seeing it. Look, we're back to corruption. Jeff Bezos, forty million dollars, twenty eight million if it goes straight to Melania.

• 43:03Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 43:04Alastair Campbell?

  Twenty eight million she gets out of this.

• 43:06Rory Stewart?

  Just paid twenty eight million.

• 43:07Alastair Campbell?

  To be the executive producer.

• 43:09Rory Stewart?

  Of a documentary about herself.

• 43:10Alastair Campbell?

  About herself, which, I mean, there's, there's something really interesting going on because, look, Trump is interesting.

• 43:17Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 43:18Alastair Campbell?

  And he's powerful.

• 43:19Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 43:19Alastair Campbell?

  I find Melania unutterably boring.

• 43:22Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 43:23Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I cannot, has she ever said anything interesting, ever? I mean, she's got an interesting backstory. She's come from Slovenia, though my friends in Slovenia say they note that she never talks up Slovenia.

• 43:34Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 43:34Alastair Campbell?

  The reviews of the documentary, I I refer people to our Restless Entertainment colleague Marina Hyde, who has absolutely lacerated the whole film. I've yet to seen a professional reviewer who says it's anything other than utter garbage, propaganda, terrible. Led by Donkeys, wonderful organisation, they did a very funny video where they they sent a load of poor people with cameras to the British cinemas where it was showing. And it's just endless shots of empty cinemas. It's done quite well in America, particularly in republican states. Bezos has spent seventy five million on this, forty million for the film, thirty five million to promote it. Did you get the Financial Times today?

• 44:12Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 44:12Alastair Campbell?

  It's got a full page effing advert.

• 44:14Rory Stewart?

  I I did see, I was walking through Piccadilly Circus and those big screens behind.

• 44:20Alastair Campbell?

  Well, they're not cheap, I remember that from our day.

• 44:22Rory Stewart?

  Are just full of pictures for endlessly getting out of private jets.

• 44:25Alastair Campbell?

  That's pathetic. One of the reviewers said that the only way to enjoy this is to have to, is to have a foot fetish. Because there are thousands of shots of her shoes.

• 44:33Rory Stewart?

  Shoes. Um, well, let let me finish then with a little plug for a documentary coming out on Amazon on Friday that I think is worth watching, which is documentary about the king and his work on environment, biodiversity and his idea of harmony. And it's.

• 44:50Alastair Campbell?

  Is it in cinemas?

• 44:51Rory Stewart?

  It's not cinemas, it's going, it's but released by.

• 44:54Alastair Campbell?

  Because I think The King Against Melania, I would I would have got right behind that.

• 44:56Rory Stewart?

  No, it's released by Amazon, but I think people might quite be quite interested in it as a window into the king. Um, it's it's not sort of particularly trendy, fashionable, but what it is, is a really good account of what he has tried to do with climate, with the environment, with with your friend Irfan Ali. So there's quite a lot with Irfan Ali.

• 45:17Alastair Campbell?

  He was with him last week, wasn't he?

• 45:18Rory Stewart?

  Right, who's interviewed on Leading and and this incredible stuff that's being done on the rainforest in Ghana.

• 45:24Alastair Campbell?

  They're amazing.

• 45:25Rory Stewart?

  But also stuff about regeneration in India, a little bit about the work that um, Tekkwa's Mountain does in Afghanistan. Um, stuff on what's been done in Dumfries House in Scotland, et cetera. So anyway, I'd put that out. And the other final recommendation.

• 45:40Alastair Campbell?

  Does he talk about his brother too?

• 45:42Rory Stewart?

  No, it's not that type of documentary. No, and I think Marina Hyde might be disappointed. There's not, maybe not quite enough of that stuff for the salacious critic. But the final one is an amazing exhibition coming up at the British Museum on samurai. And it's got something for everybody. So it's both got the absolute classic medieval military armour, some of the most incredible swords, suits of armour, helmets and all. But it finishes with Darth Vader himself, the full original costume of Darth Vader. And there's video games and MAGA and samurai in the modern world. And in between, the Second World War period and the way that the samurai ethos was used to justify Japanese imperialism. So it's got the kind of trendy critique at the end.

• 46:28Rory Stewart?

  And the main part of the exhibition is the most beautiful examples of this incredible literate culture, not just samurai swords, but their poetry, their painting, their legends.

• 46:38Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'm going to give a couple of cultural recommendations then. Amazing book called The Big Music by a woman called Kirsty Gunn. You heard about it? It's about somebody writing a P-briff, which as you know is kind of top level bagpipes. But honestly, this is a, this is a really, really impressive novel. I'm only about a third of the way through, but it's absolutely brilliant. And then a film I would recommend, Rory, which I went to see with Fiona and Grace, who as you know is a stand-up comedian, is Is This Thing On? Which is, it's inspired by the story of a Liverpudlian comedian, John Bishop, who got into stand-up as a way of dealing with his divorce. And his wife turned up at one of his shows not knowing that he did stand-up.

• 47:23Alastair Campbell?

  And their love was rekindled.

• 47:26Rory Stewart?

  Oh, that's a good, that's, oh, that's good.

• 47:29Alastair Campbell?

  So it's a very nice film, directed by Bradley Cooper, who plays this amazing sort of very large cameo. And it's got a Canadian, we love Canada. Will Arnott is, this is the main character, played the John Bishop character. Yeah, so there we go.

• 47:42Rory Stewart?

  Great. Well, that was a good cheerful.

• 47:44Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. We've got to, we've got to stay cheerful, Rory.

• 47:47Rory Stewart?

  Got to stay cheerful.

• 47:48Alastair Campbell?

  Burnley are looking quite precarious towards the bottom of the table right now, as you probably noticed.

• 47:54Rory Stewart?

  Right. But there's the films, there's the exhibitions, there's the books. So we can keep that going.

• 47:58Alastair Campbell?

  And by the way, we should just encourage people to send in their questions. Also, I'd like to know what people think of our question time. I sometimes think we it's too much like the main episode.

• 48:07Rory Stewart?

  We get except well, let's try to get get. I don't know whether this is going to be scientific, but I will be interested because I'm slightly on the other side of this. I'm more comfortable when we do like a deep dive. Well, this question time is a really good example. First half was a deep dive on a rum. Second half was more jolly.

• 48:20Alastair Campbell?

  What about when we do the live shows and we do sometimes get totally unexpected questions that sort of provoke something unexpected?

• 48:28Rory Stewart?

  I think you maybe enjoy more the spontaneous, quick, funny stuff. I really like doing the research.

• 48:35Alastair Campbell?

  I love doing the research, Roy. I do more. I bet I do more research than you do. I bet I do.

• 48:39Rory Stewart?

  So I want to try to pitch the idea that first half of question time should be

• 48:45Alastair Campbell?

  A big dive.

• 48:46Rory Stewart?

  Big dive. Second half can be more jolly. How about that?

• 48:48Alastair Campbell?

  So I'm having jolly. It's about being a bit more, you know, zippy and spontaneous.

• 48:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, you're a zippier and more spontaneous figure than me.

• 48:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, okay, okay.

• 48:56Rory Stewart?

  Let's see what the listeners think.

• 48:58Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

• 48:58Rory Stewart?

  See you. Bye bye.

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