524. Starmer’s Mandelson Mess and the Iranian Nuclear Threat

Did Starmer show a fatal lack of judgement and curiosity about Peter Mandelson’s suitability for public office? How and why did Trump destroy years of successful Iranian nuclear ‘containment’ policy? Four years into the Sudan war, what does the failure of peace efforts reveal about the unravelling of the world order? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. __________ Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, Bruno Di Castri Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Chris Sawyer General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Rory Stewart?

  Appointing Peter Madison in the first place was a massive lapse of judgment.

• 0:04Alastair Campbell?

  Look, it's a mess. There's no getting out of this. This is a mess.

• 0:07Rory Stewart?

  The reason why Starmer's finished is that this demonstrates above all that he lacks the two things that he claimed to possess, which is judgment and seriousness.

• 0:17Alastair Campbell?

  He's in this mess at this particular time because he made a bad decision.

• 0:20Rory Stewart?

  At what point did Starmer try to find out the truth? Did he actually care at all? This was one of the biggest scandals at the heart of his government, something that almost brought him down. The minimal expectation would have been a bit of curiosity.

• 0:38Alastair Campbell?

  This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy.

• 0:40Rory Stewart?

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• 0:55Alastair Campbell?

  So if bills are meant to fall from April, why would anyone bother switching?

• 0:59Rory Stewart?

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• 1:09Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:23Rory Stewart?

  Listeners to the show will also receive a free Trip+ subscription when they switch.

• 1:28Alastair Campbell?

  Get more than just lower rates. Switch today at fuseenergy.com/politics using the code POLITICS and save around £200 on your bills.

• 1:36Rory Stewart?

  Visit fuseenergy.com for full details and terms and conditions.

• 1:46Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 1:48Alastair 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... Managed to watch it. There you go.

• 2:01Rory 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 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.

• 2:24Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:31Rory 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/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 2:47Speaker 02

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• 3:25Alastair Campbell?

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

• 3:28Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 3:30Alastair Campbell?

  So Rory, we're going to talk about Keir Starmer's continuing political difficulties over his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson to the ambassadorship in Washington. We're going to update people as best we can on what's going on in Iran and what's going on inside Donald Trump's mind in relation to Iran. And we're also going to talk about the wretched war in Sudan. Where do you want to start on the? Starmer vetting row.

• 3:55Rory Stewart?

  Let's take it back to the first question, which is, why on earth did Starmer find it necessary to try to put a political appointee into Washington? So he had in Karen Pearce, an ambassador in Washington who had a good relationship with Trump, who was very experienced, pretty straightforward, actually quite colourful, charismatic British ambassador. He's now got in Christian Turner, again, a career diplomat doing the job, instead of which he decided to make the ambassador in Washington a political appointee. So that's the first question. And, you know, you, I think, were interested in David Miliband, who I would have been supportive of. George Osborne's been briefing ferociously to the newspapers that he was the other candidate

• 4:40Rory Stewart?

  that was being considered. It's really interesting how absolutely solemnly so many of the British newspapers keep saying George Osborne was the other candidate that was being considered. Can I just pause for that for a second? I mean, that seems incredible, isn't it? Or am I misreading the relationship between Keir Starmer and someone like George Osborne? Was he really thinking of making the former Conservative Chancellor, the architect of austerity, the ambassador to Washington?

• 5:08Alastair Campbell?

  Well, if he was, I think he would have created probably not as many political difficulties for himself as this has created because of the various directions it's gone in through Jeffrey Epstein and the current row about developed vetting that we'll get on to. I would hope not. I would hope not. But the point about why he wanted a non-career diplomat, I wonder if we shouldn't go even a step further back. Because what I don't think we've ever quite got to the bottom of, including through Keir Starmer's statement in the House of Commons yesterday, and Ollie Robbins, the now sacked Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office, and his evidence to a parliamentary committee, I don't think we've quite got. To the actual reason for the appointment. So the the line is, the argument is that with

• 5:53Alastair Campbell?

  a very unconventional presidency, Trump two, maybe it was time to have an unconventional ambassador. I think that's overstated. I can remember Tony Blair often saying, look, frankly, leaders don't really care much who ambassadors are, as long as they know they're speaking to somebody who's giving the government line, okay?

• 6:12Rory Stewart?

  Put pause on that, because I think that's really important. I mean, I I think that's critical, isn't it? Knowing that they're giving the government line. I mean, in a sense, the reason why a career diplomat is a more reliable appointment is that the Trump administration, like them or loathe them, at least has a sense that this is a mouthpiece for the official government line. If you start appointing very, very colourful Wheeler Dealer, George Osborne, Peter Mandelson types, there is a risk that Tony Blair might say, well, you know, is this guy actually giving me the government line? Is this the Foreign Office line, or is this some weird improvisation?

• 6:46Alastair Campbell?

  That I think, though, is is part of the thinking. But I think the thing we keep coming back to, because I don't, look, Keir Starmer had no sort of real relationship with Peter Mandelson. You didn't really know him. And I do think this was much more Morgan McSweeney, who was quite close to Peter, and who maybe felt that with the support that Peter had given him, that, you know, Peter would hopefully do the job well, two, perhaps, you know, would be a kind of political signal, getting one of the new Labour people into this sort of Keir Starmer tent. But look, as, you know, and I I don't want to jump all over people, but I I think it was a bad judgment from the word go.

• 7:23Rory Stewart?

  Support he'd given him. I mean, the support is that Mandelson seems to have developed a close relationship with Morgan McSweeney, advising him on tactics and strategy. The suggestions also that he may have been quite helpful in introducing him to potential funders. So there was a sense in which McSweeney owed Mandelson, and I suppose Mandelson presumably was lobbying hard for the job, just as he was lobbying hard to be Chancellor of Oxford and various other things.

• 7:51Alastair Campbell?

  And at one point, if you remember, was felt that he might be able to do two at the same time, which I think would have been really stretching it. The sense that you're getting. From what Ollie Robbins has been saying to the Foreign Affairs Committee is that it was kind of a done deal, you know, and Keir Starmer yesterday set out his version of the process. Ollie Robbins today is setting out his version of the process. And there is without doubt a conflict. I mean, it's we're almost in Her Majesty's Recollections Can Vary territory. But if I can sort of try and unpick it all, my sense is that the Foreign Office thought

• 8:32Alastair Campbell?

  that, well, Peter Manlos is not a ridiculous incredible thought because he's been a senior politician, he's been a, he's worked in the European Commission, he's been a cabinet minister. Now, what we also know, he's been fired twice, which should have rung a few alarm bells. We also know and knew at the time that he'd been building up, and nothing wrong with building up a business, but even building up a business, which was in part reliant upon contracts with quite controversial Russian and Chinese and other firms. So there was, the reason why there would have been the requirement for pretty heavy vetting would have been to be assured that there was nothing there that was going to cause the government difficulty or embarrassment or whatever.

• 9:14Alastair Campbell?

  And what appears to have happened, as we said the other day, that the Cabinet Office process led to a suggestion being made to the Foreign Office, that there were, there were warning signs that there needed to be worried about, and that Ollie Robbins took the judgment that with mitigation, which was put in place, it was manageable and he could go ahead. What he has also been saying to the Foreign Affairs Committee is that he, yeah, he did feel under, under pressure. I think the one big new thing that came out of the committee hearing was this idea, he told the committee that Number Ten had also asked him to find an ambassadorial position for Matthew Doyle. And not tell the Foreign Secretary about it.

• 9:52Rory Stewart?

  Remind us who Matthew Doyle was and why there's been scandals around Matthew Doyle.

• 9:55Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Matthew Doyle, long term Labour Party employee and official, in and out of government, working for the party, working for government, worked for me for quite a long time, and then worked for Keir Starmer as one of the communications directors who has since left. And he then was, there was this story about him in relation to a candidate that he was supporting who had sexual allegations against him. So he's now been put in the House of Lords. But what Ollie Robbins seems to be saying is there was an attempt to get him an ambassadorship. Now, Matthew has got a lot of qualities, but I think the diplomatic service would have gone a bit nuts if, now, it's not, it's not unique. I mean, for example, Ed Chloellin, he was an advisor to David Cameron.

• 10:39Rory Stewart?

  More than advisor, he was, he was the chief of staff, right, at the central thing. He's now actually back in the Foreign Office in London. I mean, he's become a proper professional diplomat. It's quite interesting.

• 10:47Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 10:47Rory Stewart?

  But he's slightly different. I mean, so Ed was a sort of, acted as a civil servant, both in Brussels and for Chris Patton in Bosnia. He was then a very non-political chief of staff.

• 10:56Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, no, I'm not saying they're equivalent. I'm saying, I'm saying sometimes.

• 10:59Rory Stewart?

  No, you're, you're right, sometimes, but just to develop, it's a very interesting case. I mean, he was made ambassador in Paris, then ambassador in Rome. He's now back as the director general of the Foreign Office. So he's basically devoted the last sort of 10 years of his career and probably the rest of his career to becoming a, a professional civil servant. Listen, can I just sort of push on this strange question of what's going on in Starmer's head when he is thinking, oh, well, I'll appoint Peter Madison, even though I don't really know him, or potentially even if the newspapers had believed, I will consider appointing George Osborne, even though he doesn't really know him either. Is there a sort of naivety going on? Does he, is he sort of intimidated by these sort of worldly figures? I mean, what do we know about these figures?

• 11:41Rory Stewart?

  We know that both of them are, to put it mildly, on the very colourful end of politics and very much on the kind of business commercial end of politics. I mean, famously, they had this big standoff because they were both on a yacht with a Russian oligarch called Deripaska back in the day. It's very interesting. That rather than these figures being treated with a little bit of sort of distance. And it's it's odd in terms of Starmer's kind of brand. I mean, I thought the brand was meant to be this sort of careful, loyally. This isn't going to be the Boris Johnson world anymore. If that was your brand, why would you flirt with these very larger than life, colourful, super wealthy, business connected politicians?

• 12:25Alastair Campbell?

  I think it goes back to the point I made when we recorded the episode was last Friday, that he doesn't take a close enough interest in personnel. Now, actually, as it happens, I have a lot of sympathy with what you said, that actually, would it have been that crazy to have kept Karen Pearce? Would it have been that crazy to have gone out and said, get me the best person inside the Foreign Office? That would, I think, have been a sensible way to go. I think it would have been, if he was determined to say, I want somebody a bit different, then I think David Miliband might have been a better better option. Though then again, I think David Miliband would have found it very, very difficult to be UK ambassador with the Trump administration, because David is somebody who's got very, very strong views and very strong values and maybe wouldn't feel that comfortable.

• 13:10Rory Stewart?

  That's such an interesting point, though, because you've put your finger right. Part of the reason presumably that he's flirting with George Osborne and Peter Mandelson is because he believes they lack exactly those qualities that you've just described to David Miliband.

• 13:22Alastair Campbell?

  Um, I don't want to make David out to be a saint or them to be sort of great sinners, although sins they may have done. But no, I I just think that David, having, especially having been a Foreign Secretary, I think he'd, I think he, in a funny sort of way, I think he'd find it harder than, say, a Peter Mandelson or a George Osborne to finesse his own views about things. And as, back to my Tony Blair point, ultimately, an ambassador, whatever their views, they're there to represent the government, and that means the government policy and the government line and the leadership of that of that government. And I think the, what what I think this maybe goes down to, because one of the things you hear about Keir Starmer from a lot of his colleagues is that, although I think he's trying to do, improve at this,

• 14:06Alastair Campbell?

  is that he doesn't invest that much time in relationships. And you have to do that because you have to know. What is going to work best for you? Now, I don't think anybody would be able to say that this has been the most functional Downing Street in the history of Downing Streets, because it's just been too many people leaving, too much about the rouse between the people if you go back to the Sue Gray, Morgan McSweeney seeming battle that went on. And I think ultimately, here you are, Rory, this is where I'm going to try and get to what I think is the big point here. I want to test your memory of previous discussions that we've had when Keir Starmer's been under the cosh,

• 14:47Alastair Campbell?

  when I've, I've said what I think are the two most important currencies in politics. I've always felt that the two most important currencies in political life are reputation and goodwill. And you have to think of them the same as you think of bank accounts. Money goes in, money goes out, reputational currency goes up, sometimes it goes down. Goodwill currency reserves grow or they shrink, okay? Now, in politics and political campaigning, there are not many bigger single boosts to your reputation and goodwill currency, particularly with your own colleagues, than winning a general election, okay? And winning it big. And Keir Starmer did that in 2024, less than two years on.

• 15:28Alastair Campbell?

  And there's lots they can point to that says, well, that helps with the, with the reputation. People say he's done pretty well dealing with the Iran war. We've just regained our place as the fifth biggest economy in the world. Unemployment figures today seem to be quite good. There's lots of things you could point to, but there has been a lot of draining of the reserves. And the biggest one, I think, even though they're part fixed, it wasn't, I'm afraid, one of the early ones, the removal of the winter fuel payments for pensioners. Then you get certain lobby groups offside, farmers over inheritance tax, business over national insurance rises, people like you and me over, for example, overseas aid cuts. These are survivable in the account if the account is constantly being topped up on other issues. And maybe more than anything.

• 16:13Alastair Campbell?

  By the steady, clear, compelling story about where the country is going. And that's the bit that I think has been missing.

• 16:21Rory Stewart?

  I mean, I think the reason why Starmer's finished and why personally I think he should go is that this demonstrates above all that he lacks the two things that he claimed to possess, which is judgment and seriousness. So appointing Peter Mandelson in the first place was a massive lapse of judgment. We now know that even the Trump transition team was warning him against appointing Mandelson, which is very, very odd, given that they thought Mandelson was their Trump card with Trump. He knew about Epstein, he knew about the financial links and he pushed ahead. What's the story about Ollie Robbins? The story is essentially, but because Starmer had already announced that Mandelson was going to be the ambassador before the security vetting was done, he was putting his civil service

• 17:03Rory Stewart?

  in a position where if they had refused a security clearance, two months in, it would have been a massive humiliation for the prime minister. They basically would have been saying the prime minister's appointed as this ambassador to Washington, somebody who's a security risk and he can't get the job, which is almost certainly why Robbins didn't push harder. But on top of that is the seriousness. At what point did Starmer try to find out the truth? Did he actually care at all?

• 17:32Rory Stewart?

  Did he try to look into this? You know, he was up there in September defending him, saying in January that all the vetting had been done properly. This was one of the biggest scandals at the heart of his government, right? Something that almost brought him down six months ago. The minimal expectation would have been a bit of curiosity, a bit of getting people into the room and trying to get to the bottom of this. It turns out his permanent secretary, Antonio Romero, knew about this a month ago. Starmer doesn't know. So he's standing up in the House of Commons and he's blaming everybody except himself, saying how disappointed he is, how angry he is, et cetera, this kind of thing. Total lack of judgment appointing the man in the first place and total lack of seriousness into not digging into the process after the scandal had been exposed.

• 18:17Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, it's possible that it is true, both that he has been let down by some of his officials and that he has lacked his own curiosity about what's going on inside his own government. Now. And the thing about being government, this goes back to the importance of the team, is that if you're the Prime Minister, particularly at a time with so many challenges, Iran, Ukraine, the economy, public services, there's so, I've sometimes defined sort of being Prime Minister, it's like, you know, you're like a batsman at a cricket match and you're being, you're facing the twenty best fast bowlers in the world at the same time, okay, you're having so many things coming at you. That is why you have to be

• 18:57Alastair Campbell?

  able to focus in a way that all the ones that maybe you're just gonna let go outside and you're not even gonna play a shot because somebody else is dealing with them. You can't deal with everything all the time, so you've therefore got to have a network of people who you trust absolutely to think like you, to share your vision of what you're trying to do, and thereby be able frankly to make a lot of the decisions that don't then have to come to you, so you can focus on the big stuff. He's in this mess at this particular time, one, as he admitted himself in the Commons yesterday, because he made a bad decision about the appointment in the first place, and that nobody, it seems to me, at

• 19:37Alastair Campbell?

  any stage of the process, before or thereafter, was across all the detail in a way that they could make a judgment about when this had to go to him. Now, that's a systemic failure, but the system has to be set by the people and the best people have to be appointed by the guy at the top. You know, I thought in terms of what a terrible wicket he was on yesterday, you know, he probably survived, he probably survived. I thought Kemi Badenoch, and it's interesting, I keep hearing that David Cameron's kind of back, it used to be Michael Gove that she was relying on, I think we've seen a slight improvement in her game, and I did take the hand of David Cameron in that. I thought on what was a very good wicket for her, she did pretty well. So if you're thinking about the reserves,

• 20:21Alastair Campbell?

  his have taken a big withdrawal and hers have increased a little bit. And I was talking to, you know, because what happens in these big dramas is that people just phoning each other the whole time and WhatsApp and whatever, I was talking to an MP the other day who came in at the last election, who said, said the whole thing has been traumatic.

• 20:43Alastair Campbell?

  And he didn't just mean this, he meant from the word go. And he actually mentioned the winter fuel thing as like, you know, oh, I came in, felt really great. We've got in, we've got a government, we can start to change the world. And it's just been trauma after trauma.

• 20:58Rory Stewart?

  Your friend Tom Baldwin, who wrote the biography of Starmer, used to have a line that Starmer has been consistently underestimated all through his life. I'm beginning to think this is a guy who's been consistently overestimated right through his life. This is somebody who is demonstrating at the moment that he didn't really have the loyalty of the civil servants, let alone of his members of parliament. It makes me question actually how good was he as the Director of Public Prosecutions? He certainly, I didn't feel, was very good as the Brexit Minister under Corbyn. You know, people kept saying, you know, what an amazing forensic man he was in the House of Commons. I found he was dull, uninspiring, and he actually missed the big imaginative opportunities for the customs union, the single market and the different deals that were being offered by Theresa May.

• 21:40Rory Stewart?

  I think he's been a very, very disappointing Prime Minister and it makes one wonder actually, what was this Morgan McSweeney mandelson machine that managed to drive this guy into a position of office where he's demonstrated an inability to generate real loyalty? So Helen McNamara, who was the Deputy Permanent Secretary in the Cabinet Office, has pointed out that what's really weird about this, and I'm sure I feel this as a former minister, you must feel this as somebody who was right at the heart of number 10, is why were the civil servants not checking and rechecking this question on his behalf? I hope as a minister or a prime minister, I would have seen, okay, this mandelson is one of the biggest single scandals that could topple my government.

• 22:25Rory Stewart?

  I'm going to dig right down into the depths of this and understand what the hell's going on. But even if I wasn't doing it, I would hope that I had Permanent Secretaries, Direct Generals, who had my back and who were thinking, bugger, bugger, bugger. Prime Minister's in trouble, we really need to get to the bottom of this and work out what the hell's going on.

• 22:44Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 22:44Rory Stewart?

  It feels as though Ollie Robbins didn't get to the bottom of this, his bosses didn't get to the bottom of this. Nobody went through the process of double and triple checking. What was the security? This is after the event, after Maddison's fired. What was the nature of his development? What was the process that was followed? And the fact that nobody did that for Starmer reflects a guy who's running a number ten, where he's humiliating the civil service, telling them that they're in the tepid baths of managed decline, firing permanent secretaries, firing cabinet secretaries, showing no loyalty towards his own people.

• 23:19Alastair Campbell?

  So Ollie Robbins, I mean, because you and you and I are about to travel to Belgrade to interview President Vucic, which is why we're we're trying to record and follow the latter part of Ollie Robbins' evidence to the Select Committee as we record this. What I'm picking up from what he's saying is his defence in a way is there are processes and I followed them. And he's adding that he's he's thrown in this revelation about number ten wanted an ambassadorship of Matthew Doyle, which I think won't help Keir Starmer's case. And also he's gone through some of the cases where he has actually had to let people go because of vetting

• 24:00Alastair Campbell?

  or, you know, may take people's security status away from them because of issues that have arisen. And how he's basically said that was part of his job. So I think he's defending himself on the process. And of course, what happens when we go back to my point about, you know, the reputational bank, part of Keir Starmer's reputation was being, as you said earlier, much more serious than Boris Johnson, which he is, but absolutely the guy who's going to be focused on on process. And where I thought Kemi Badenoch has been quite strong in recent days, I think she went way over the top on day one. But I think actually in the Commons, she was she was quite effective. But one of the points she's making is that this is the guy who also said, you know,

• 24:41Alastair Campbell?

  Any organisation I lead, the buck stops with me. That is exactly how it has to be. I think Ollie Robbins, I don't think anybody who's ever worked with Ollie Robbins thinks he's anything other than, you know, what you cannot want in a civil servant. He's a very, very effective civil servant. And there will be some repair work now to be done between the government, ministers of the government and the civil service. And this also sends out a message to people who might think about becoming civil servants. I still think it's a very good thing to do, but you've got to feel that your work is going to be valued and you're not going to get chucked under the bus when stuff gets tough.

• 25:15Rory Stewart?

  And I think if you feel as Starmer clearly does, that there's something that needs to be improved in the way the civil service functions, where's the reform package? I mean, you know, he insults the civil service, says they're on the warm bath of tepid decline. He keeps firing senior civil servants. But where is the systematic thought about training, recruitment, promotion, culture, which would actually end up with a much better civil service in 20 years' time?

• 25:40Alastair Campbell?

  If you do talk, as I do, to him and to ministers and to others, there are quite a lot, there is quite a lot of complaining goes on about the civil service in terms of, you know, we want to change this. And then they come back with 25 reasons why they can't change it, whatever. But I think this goes back to my point. This is why I think sometimes people, when I go about narrative and storytelling, they think it's all this sort of spin stuff. The civil service need to know what the story is too. They need to know what your big picture is. They need to know what your priorities are. They need to know what your character is. They need to know where you are trying to take the country. That is where they take their direction. So I would, I suspect, and I don't know whether Ollie Robbins might, would say anything like this, but I suspect in part he will have been driven in the managing

• 26:23Alastair Campbell?

  of this process by thinking, well, Keir Starmer's character, as I know it, I've got to be absolutely rigorous about following the process, which is what he seems to have done. And so, look, it's a mess. There's no, there's no getting out of this. This is a mess.

• 26:38Rory Stewart?

  This is also, I think, where Starmer's got himself in the middle. My final point is Starmer's sometimes suggesting that the law. Meant, it seems bizarre, but he's claiming the law meant that the civil servants were not allowed to tell politicians about the developed fatting process. If that's true, then he has no reason to fire Ollie Robbins.

• 26:57Alastair Campbell?

  Which is one of the points that Kemmy Baid not made yesterday. Anyway, listen, I think that Kierstan was getting to a place around the new year where the economy did look like it was picking up a bit. The rumblings had sort of, you know, died down a little bit. But there was, I think it's fair to say, there was a lot of rumbling going on over the weekend. And I think yesterday he got through it. I think Ollie Robbins has been very Ollie Robbins-ish in being very kind of, you know, calm and thorough and methodical. But I think he's said two or three things today that make life even more difficult for Kierstan.

• 27:30Rory Stewart?

  Okay, well, Alistair, thank you. And let's take a quick break. And when we come back from the break, let's get on to the subject of Iran and Sudan. This episode is sponsored by Starling, the bank that helps you organise your money, build great habits and stay in control of your spending. Plenty of us have strong opinions on how to run the country, but knowing how to manage your own day to day can be more of a challenge, especially when it comes to being good with money. That kind of self-assured self-governance could start with just checking your balance daily. And yes, it can feel like opening the books at the treasury, but eventually you'll feel like the Chancellor of your own ideal exchequer.

• 28:11Alastair Campbell?

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• 28:31Rory Stewart?

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• 28:35Alastair Campbell?

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• 29:47Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to The Rest of Politics. Me, Alastair Campbell.

• 29:50Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 29:52Alastair Campbell?

  So let's move from the UK to the rest of the world. Let's talk about Iran. I am confused. Is JD Vance going to be in Islamabad? Are there going to be more talks? What do we know?

• 30:03Rory Stewart?

  Well, what we know at the moment, we're recording, is that JD Vance is intending to go and the Iranians are making noises, but it's not clear whether they will attend. And Trump, of course, is going back and forth between saying he's on the cusp of a deal to then boarding vessels. One thing I've got from listeners, which I think is probably worth doing a little bit on, is a lot of people saying we often refer to the JCPOA without explaining what it was.

• 30:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 30:29Rory Stewart?

  So this is the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and it's the deal which Obama, but not just Obama, actually France, Britain, Germany, China, Russia, all brought together with Iran in order to deal with the Iranian nuclear program. And the reason why it's maybe worth doing a short explainer on it is that In the end, the nuclear thing is the big existential question with Iran. There's the horrifying behaviour of this loathsome regime and the way that it treats its own people. But I don't think anyone believes that's the reason why the United States or Israel attacked. There's the question of proxies and missiles, but the real existential threat that has been pushed by Netanyahu and others since the early 1990s is Iran's nuclear programme.

• 31:13Rory Stewart?

  And the JCPOA is an amazing example of a world in which we actually seem to really solve it. And maybe three things to get across. Number one, it worked. Right, this was an amazing deal, which until Trump came along and wrecked it, managed to get a massive reduction in the amount of stockpiles that Iran had, uranium stockpiles, a reduction in the enrichment, down to a very low degree, I can explain that a little bit later, and an inspection regime, which allowed inspectors in very, very regularly to make sure that Iran was not enriching, and a limit on the number of centrifuges, and in return, sanctions relief.

• 31:55Rory Stewart?

  And it's a really great example of the way we used to do business in the world before Trump. It was very complicated. It took two and a half years to negotiate. There was a hundred and eighty page document, it was very, very technical. There was ambiguity, which is why the Republican right and Israel could attack it. Because of course, what it really did is meant that Iran was always kept about 12 months away from being able to have enough of a uranium stockpile to have the fissile material for a warhead. But it worked. Trump comes along, throws it out of the window in 2018, and we end up in a much, much worse situation. So instead of uranium enrichment, kept at about 3%,

• 32:37Rory Stewart?

  and the really difficult stuff with uranium enrichment, nuclear bombs, is getting from 3% to 20%. The Iranians got up to 60%, and getting from 60% to 90%, which is what you need for your nuclear weapon, is much quicker. So by the time Trump was launching with Netanyahu this 12-day war last year, Iran was in a situation. When it was potentially only about twenty eight days away from being able to create enough enriched uranium. Now, that isn't everything, because they were still a very, very long way away from being able to fit it into a well functioning warhead.

• 33:16Rory Stewart?

  Let alone getting anywhere near the kind of missiles that the US or the Soviet Union has or had or Russia has today.

• 33:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 33:23Rory Stewart?

  But just to keep coming back, JCPOA, well negotiated, very, very detailed. And the final point, of course, is what's mad about what Trump and Vance is doing. Well, what's mad is that they're basically trying to do some new version of the JCPOA. But as you pointed out in our last podcast, instead of spending two and a half years negotiating it, they think they can get it done in a single night in Islamabad.

• 33:46Alastair Campbell?

  And yeah, so the JCPOA took about roughly about a decade. The piece I quoted from Foreign Affairs Magazine, co-authored by Federica Mogherini, who was the Italian negotiator who worked on the whole thing and who made the point that the lesson that is being taken out of this by the Iranians is thought, oh, yeah, we better listen to the Americans now and give it all up. Is they're going to think, no, God, my, my God, if they can attack us like this, then we're going to need a, we're going to be the ultimate deterrent, as it were. Now, they've discovered, and they're now using another deterrent in the form of the straights or moves. But I was, I was talking this week to somebody who has been, who works in the region, who has been in the region quite a lot,

• 34:28Alastair Campbell?

  who was British, tearing his hair out, saying, the Americans have got no idea what they're dealing with. The idea that the Iranians are going to, on the back of this campaign, in the way that it's been done, with the damage that's been done and the people they've killed, the Americans keep saying how great it is that they've taken out all the top levels. Okay. He was saying, that is what is making them even more determined on the nuclear front. The new, you know, when we talk about red lines in these situations and there's Vance going to Islamabad if he is going and with Kushner and Whitkoff, these hapless negotiators that Trump still seems to believe in, even though, you know, for the the ten wars that he claims is solved, I can't really point to any that you could actually say they've they've they've done a good job.

• 35:12Alastair Campbell?

  But they this this guy was saying that the the red line has got a lot redder in the Iranian mindset. The Americans still think that they're that they're winning.

• 35:20Rory Stewart?

  And partly, I think what your friend is picking up on is that since the senior leadership was killed, you've removed the only people who really remember the normal world of Iran or the more normal world of Iran before the revolution.

• 35:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 35:33Rory Stewart?

  So all the new generation are people who've grown up in the Islamic Republic in this paranoid, theocratic, the world is trying to destroy a state.

• 35:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 35:43Rory Stewart?

  And you've got a big split between people like the Foreign Minister, Arachi, who put out this tweet saying they were going to open the Straits of Hormuz and the Revolutionary Guard Corps, this kind of heavily militarized, theocratic organization, which is very suspicious of him and has always been much, much more hardline and never liked the JCPOA in the first place.

• 36:03Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 36:04Rory Stewart?

  So a real question of who are you negotiating with, who can really deliver? And then stepping out to the next stage, how do you get a negotiation together where one side is a bunch of paranoid, theocratic, militarized Iranians who are fighting for their existential survival and they're trying to sweat every sentence around exactly how uranium enrichment works and where the monitoring is on the one hand and on the other hand.

• 36:30Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 36:31Rory Stewart?

  An American regime which seems completely careless, feckless, incapable of defining what its real objectives are, hardly paying any attention, largely interested in generating social media stories, making strange comments about Jesus, showing films of Marines rappelling onto boats. What is that negotiator? How do you have a negotiation between this kind of grimly, serious, paranoid regime on the one hand and Trump who can't quite decide whether he cares about what's happening in the stock markets, oil markets or not?

• 37:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, and on that, by the way, why is there such little coverage? Every time I mention Kushner there, even I've fallen into this, where we describe him as a negotiator. I mean, the level of corruption related to just his existence there. This is a guy who became a billionaire during the first term on the back of his dealings, partly on the back of his dealings with the Saudis. And he's now, it's just sort of given within the American system that this guy is the negotiator. And you said earlier, Rory, about Trump sort of moving one way or the other. Somebody said, no, right. So on Friday, Trump said, the situation with the Strait is over. Okay. Well, it's not. On the same day, he said Iran had agreed never to close the Strait again.

• 37:47Alastair Campbell?

  The next day, they closed the Strait. On Sunday, he said Vance isn't going to Pakistan for talks, and the White House press release at the same time said that he was. Yesterday, he said Vance had left to go to Islamabad, and the White House said he was going the next day, i.e. today, yesterday. He says Iran have got no military anymore, but then complained about these gunboats that were attacking tankers in the Strait. He said the Pope had said Iran can have a nuclear weapon. He never said any such thing. He said the Gulf being attacked was a surprise. Years of evidence that that's what Iran said they would do if this happened. And then he said that the US only lost planes to friendly fire in Iran,

• 38:29Alastair Campbell?

  which he said at an event where he'd just been speaking about Iran shooting down an American plane. This is not clear.

• 38:37Rory Stewart?

  It's not clear. And it means that if you're negotiating with Kushner and Whitkoff, you have one set of problems, which is that they're not on top of the technical details. So as you can imagine, the Iranians are obsessed with how you do verification, what the difference between 3.7% enrichment is, 20% enrichment, exactly what type of devices you use to do your enrichment, whether you can move from gas to solid state, all these technical questions, right? And they can't do that. Second problem you've raised. Jared Kushner is a massive example of what we're going, we covered in the first half, which is this question of security clearance, right? Jared Kushner doesn't have a formal job in the government. He's President Trump's son-in-law.

• 39:19Rory Stewart?

  He was denied security clearance in 2018 and was then overruled by Trump, who granted him permanent security clearance and Trump won. As far as we can see in Trump two, none of this is happening at all. Guy doesn't even have a job in government, right? And yet he's doing negotiations. But the third problem is, even if you get a deal with Vance or Kushner or Whitkoff, and of them, and it sticks in my gullet to say Vance seems to be the most serious, and Vance's aide seems to have some idea about how to deal with Iran and some knowledge of how to deal with Iran. As soon as they get on a plane back to Washington, you have no guarantee that Trump isn't going to say while they're on the plane, by the way, I reject everything my negotiators have negotiated.

• 39:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It's an utterly dysfunctional system. Shall we talk about Sudan? I mean, I don't think there's much that we can say that we haven't said before, but I think it's worth recognizing that it's probably the worst war in the world right now. I'm not saying, you know, I don't want to have a league table of wars, but Sudan is is kind of almost uniquely horrific, both the scale and the horror. And we're now into the fourth year, and there is so little attention to it. There was a meeting in Berlin last week and quite a lot of the big powers were there, but I kind of felt, I'm not denigrating them at all, and it's right that they should sit and talk and try to work out how to resolve

• 40:41Alastair Campbell?

  this thing, but it sort of felt like the world's saying, oh, God, maybe this is what we're doing, the podcast, we'd better do something about Sudan because we're coming up to the third anniversary. But you don't have a sense of the international community really with its eye on this in a way that you can see any way forward.

• 40:57Rory Stewart?

  In a way Sudan is the is the canary in the mine. Sudan is really what shows what goes wrong in the new Trump world. I mean, this is a conflict where, as you've pointed out, hundreds of thousands have been killed. Millions have been displaced, tens of millions are now facing food insecurity, where there is credible reports of genocide, rape, and it's being driven as a proxy war. Right, this is a war basically driven by the United Arab Emirates funding, and there's so many credible reports on their bases in Chad and their relation with Hameti, the RSF, and on the other hand, support coming in for the Sudanese Armed Forces, which are retaking Khartoum,

• 41:40Rory Stewart?

  from Egypt, Turkey, and the use of Iranian drones. Now, this is exactly the kind of situation that the international, much lamented, hypocritical global world order was set up to try to deal with, right? If you cannot deal with a situation in Sudan, of course you can't deal with Iran, of course you can't deal with Ukraine. Go back 10 years, 15 years, the response would have been pretty straightforward. The United States would have deployed a really big, serious super envoy. The European Union, Britain, Britain of course has historical connections to Sudan would have got involved, the African Union would have got involved, pressure would have been put on UAE, Egypt, Turkey, and there would be a real attempt,

• 42:26Rory Stewart?

  you know, in Jeddah with Saudi or in Geneva to try to work out a peace deal to stop something which is now obliterating tens of millions of lives.

• 42:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 42:36Rory Stewart?

  Instead of which, all the instruments, I mean, almost everything I've mentioned, people just groan. If I mention the African Union, the United Nations, UN Special Envoy, US Special Envoy, pressure on UAE, everyone's like, forget it. Right, even a relatively, in global terms, relative, a medium-sized power like the United Arab Emirates, appears now to be able to operate, or Israel, with complete impunity. There don't seem to be any leverage or control at all over what these people can do, and in the case of UAE, what they might be doing in the Horn of Africa. But you could extend it, you know, you can talk about what's happening in Libya, you can talk about what's happening in Sahel. And I just think we need to keep coming back to Sudan for the sake of the horror of Sudan, but also because it...

• 43:21Rory Stewart?

  Tells us so much about a world which is unravelling. I mean, this is the really clearest example of that unravelling.

• 43:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and but it and it's unravelling at a pace and amid a geopolitical and media climate of alongside the impunity of those who are carrying out this these atrocities, a kind of indifference, you know, there's been such little media coverage of the war in Sudan. If Trump, and this is the this is the Trump genius and it's the Trump, it's what gives us Trump derangement syndrome. If Trump were suddenly to say on Truth Social, we mustn't forget about Sudan and to start to have an opinion and voice view, we'd sort of think, oh, well, something would happen, something's happening. But then, you know, it would just be for the sake of the the Truth Social post, not because he wanted actually to do something about Sudan.

• 44:11Alastair Campbell?

  So it is be it is, I was reading a Der Spiegel at the weekend, they call it the, you know, they've done quite a lot in Sudan, but they call it the forgotten war. And it has, I think, become that. Along the point about sexual violence, Rory, I was at an event yesterday with Carey Mulligan, the actress who's a ambassador for War Child, and she's been to Sudan in the near past. And some of the stories she was telling about the scale of, and of course, we can, we can have the the stats, you know, Médecine Sans Frontières, they said there'd been 4,000 cases of sexual violences at facilities that it was working in. Ninety seven percent of the victims were women or girls, in South Darfur, 20% under 18, including 41 children under five.

• 44:56Alastair Campbell?

  And and and their report says sexual violence is now part of everyday life for these people in most parts of Sudan. And Carey was sort of talking about, she was making the point that, you know, you hear the statistics, but then you hear the stories of these children just saying what happened to them and the trauma they're then living with, without any kind of support to to deal with that trauma. In fact, the trauma then increased by the fact that they've been displaced, there's food, there's food insecurity and what have you. And I just think we've lost, there's something gone badly wrong with the world's moral compass that we know that's going on, we can read the stats, but actually, there's not much that we feel we can do about it because we think the people in power.

• 45:40Alastair Campbell?

  On up for taking it on. It's horrible.

• 45:43Rory Stewart?

  Question, just to finish maybe this this episode and maybe brings us back to Iran. And I was trying to get my head around this in terms of Trump and what you think about Trump and his motivations. So I I'm keep being stuck in this slightly lame position of saying it's impossible really to predict what Trump's going to do. Next. And I can't quite work out whether that's a piece of immense wisdom or just a total cop out. But but let's let's just take take the Iran thing. So there are there are three broad possibilities. Number one, he ends the war, you know, ends the blockade, announces victory done. Number two, he just keeps the blockade running indefinitely while these talks go on.

• 46:25Rory Stewart?

  Number three, he actually starts deploying Marines and ups the ante and goes back to violent conflict again. And if he did number one, we might say, okay, he's ending the war because. He's bored of it, or maybe he's actually worried about the midterms and Republicans and others are putting pressure on him about gas prices in the US. And he he's worried about the stock market and the oil price. Number two, he keeps going. Well, he keeps going with the blockade. Because it turns out he doesn't actually care that much about the gas price. And most of the consequences are being felt by Europe, by the Middle East, by Asia, whose economies are being wrecked by this. But the consequences for Europe, the Middle East and Asia are much more profound than they are for Trump, and he doesn't care.

• 47:08Rory Stewart?

  Number three, he puts in the Marines and ups the ante because somehow his pride is offended. And he wants to do something sort of spectacular in order to demonstrate that he's the tough guy. How how do you think about this? How can one work out which of those three is most likely?

• 47:23Alastair Campbell?

  I honestly don't think we can, because it goes back to a point we've made right from the start of this war. Is that it's never been clear what his big strategic purpose is.

• 47:36Alastair Campbell?

  And unless you have that, if you're dealing with somebody who's volatile, unpredictable, driven by spasm, tweeting through the night, making policies, you say, regardless of what the facts are with the people who are actually on the ground, then it's impossible to work it out. There's no doubt he wants the war to end. There's no doubt that whatever the circumstances in which the war end, he will claim with the backing of the sort of MAGA machine. Although I think the MAGA machine is getting a bit afraid by this. I don't know if you saw the interview with Tucker Carlson recently where he's basically saying, you know, he's kind of ashamed to have backed Trump to the extent that he did. And he feels he's misled people by, you know, we always knew there was a character issue, but maybe

• 48:18Alastair Campbell?

  it's a lot worse than we thought. And I mean, you know, you've got to be pretty blind not to see that one. But so I don't think you can predict. And I think that's what does actually give us the Trump derangement syndrome, because we, with most leaders, with Putin, you can kind of, you work out where he's coming from. With Xi Jinping, you work out where he's coming from. By the way, on China, Roy, did you see that graph that I sent you about China's export of solar and EV and batteries? It's gone. The graph goes like that. And then suddenly, Trump goes to war in Iran, and people start to think, oh shit, another oil price shock coming. And bang, it goes like that. So look, I don't know. I think we could all go mad predicting what Donald Trump might do next. One sort of thing

• 49:00Alastair Campbell?

  that I have noticed talking to a few Americans is how much they're saying, we've kind of stopped listening as much as we did. Now, you and I are finding that impossible, partly because we have to talk about it, but also because he's so kind of high volume. But no, of those three, I think, I think this is going to be, I said this right at the start, I think this is going to be a longer war than people imagine, because I think the Iranians are prepared to endure more than the Americans think. And the Iranians, I think, have a couple of pretty big cards that they're not going to play anytime soon.

• 49:33Rory Stewart?

  Okay, well, on that slightly depressing note, and the big theme that we'll keep returning to, I fear, for many months to come, which is how on earth one makes sense of what the US is doing. And his incredible carelessness, fecklessness, lack of focus. Thank you very much.

• 49:50Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

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