434. Why the West is Finally Recognising Palestine

Why are the UK, France and Canada finally recognising a Palestinian state? Why is Trump punishing Brazil, India, and Switzerland with tariffs? Should Starmer’s Labour be less cautious and more populist in the way it communicates with the country? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. The Rest Is Politics Plus: Join with a FREE TRIAL at therestispolitics.com, for exclusive bonus content including Rory and Alastair’s first ever miniseries The Real JD Vance, early access to Question Time episodes and live show tickets, ad free listening for both TRIP and Leading, our exclusive newsletter, discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away FREE TRIP+ membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP+ gets you exclusive bonus episode, ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit fuseenergy.com/politics⁠ ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, Adam Thornton Assistant Producer: Evan Green, India Dunkley Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport 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?

  Gaza is an emergency, immediate humanitarian horror.

• 0:04Alastair Campbell?

  Israel and Netanyahu's government has made it clear they no longer even say they believe in the two-state solution.

• 0:12Rory Stewart?

  It is an extraordinary change. It would have been almost inconceivable 12 months ago that all these countries would have recognised Palestine. It's a sign of the focus on the starvation, which is becoming so brutal and so clear.

• 0:27Alastair Campbell?

  Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu is now talking about taking over the whole of Gaza.

• 0:33Rory Stewart?

  It's a brutal, almost existential divide between how Israel sees itself and how the rest of the world sees Palestine.

• 0:41Alastair Campbell?

  The rest is politics is powered by Fuse Energy and Fuse are now offering £20 credit and free trip plus membership if you switch to a fixed tariff before the end of August.

• 0:54Rory Stewart?

  They've listened carefully to their customers and the number one request was gas tariffs. So now at last you can switch both your gas and electricity to Fuse. One supplier, one bill, one less quokma to navigate.

• 1:07Alastair Campbell?

  It's also cheaper. Fuse gas and electricity customers typically save £150 versus the price cap.

• 1:14Rory Stewart?

  Today's political climate is full of talk about control and clarity. Well, Fuse have quietly exercised some, at least when it comes to your energy bill.

• 1:21Alastair Campbell?

  And they began with a mission, which was to make electricity cheaper, cleaner, simpler. And Fuse now supplies over 50,000 homes across the UK, all done quietly, efficiently and without a single campaign bus tour.

• 1:36Rory Stewart?

  Fuse's support is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with real people replying in under two minutes.

• 1:44Alastair Campbell?

  So go to fuseenergy.com/politics to switch your gas and electricity to Fuse and get your £20 credit and free trip plus membership.

• 1:59Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 2:01Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:13Rory Stewart?

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

• 2:37Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:44Rory Stewart?

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

• 3:00Speaker 02

  A BetterHelp ad. Imagine carrying a backpack every day. Every conversation, every mistake, every expectation. You probably wouldn't notice how heavy it was until someone asked if you wanted to put it down. Sometimes feeling better starts exactly like that. Better isn't one size fits all. Better is personal. It's therapy tailored to you to help lighten what you've been carrying. Match with a therapist who truly gets you. Visit betterhelp.com/rustpolitics.

• 3:37Alastair Campbell?

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

• 3:40Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 3:42Alastair Campbell?

  And Rory, welcome back from Colombia.

• 3:43Rory Stewart?

  Thank you, thank you, thank you. And something to discuss maybe in tomorrow's podcast.

• 3:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, we're going to do lots of Colombia in question time tomorrow. I think this week, a lot happening in Gaza, Israel. We should focus on that. Not least, I don't think we've done an episode since the whole recognition issue, France, Canada, UK, et cetera. And then also, I think we should revisit tariffs. I mean, God knows what you're thinking of. You're Brazilian, Swiss, Canadian, Indian, La Soutan. But first of all, I, when I was at school, I was very, very good at languages and very, very good at maths.

• 4:18Rory Stewart?

  Were you very good at maths?

• 4:19Alastair Campbell?

  I was quite good at maths, yeah. I was sort of ninety eight percent in my O level book. But then had to make a choice, do I go down the maths route or the languages route? I went down the languages route. But my maths knowledge is being severely, profoundly tested by Donald Trump. Keeps saying that he's cut drug prices by fifteen hundred percent. And I want to know if, could you explain that?

• 4:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, I, I guess if someone said they were cutting something by three hundred percent, they'd mean that it was down to a third. So I guess if it's, if it's down to fifteen hundred percent, I guess, yeah, off the top of my head, maybe he says they're now four or five percent what they were. If they were a pound, they're now four or five pence.

• 4:58Alastair Campbell?

  But surely it means that he's now paying us to take the drugs.

• 5:03Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I agree. I, I, it is, it's, it's testing me and it's presumably not true. His other great one, which we, I think, have touched on in the past, is this amazing two week thing. Everything's always going to happen in two weeks.

• 5:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 5:15Rory Stewart?

  And have a great deal in two weeks. In two weeks' time, we're going to have this, it's going to be sorted in two weeks.

• 5:20Alastair Campbell?

  I think he'd reduced it to ten to twelve days for the ultimatum to Putin, during which he and Medvedev have indulged in this sort of really childish tit for tat on social media, which then involved Trump claiming he was moving nuclear submarines. Anyway, let's put him to one side until part two and let's talk about Gaza. What have you made of the whole recognition?

• 5:42Rory Stewart?

  So I think the first thing is that it is an extraordinary change. It now looks as though by the UN General Assembly, the likelihood is that three of the countries out of the G seven, Canada, France and the UK, and two members of the, are permanent members of the Security Council. In addition to Russia and China, so it'll be four out of five members of the Security Council will have recognised Palestine as a state. There's a big thing we can get into about. Whether it's been done in the right way, whether it should have been made conditional on Gaza and Israel in this way, but there's no doubt, I think, that this is the product

• 6:22Rory Stewart?

  of Israel's actions in Gaza. It would have been almost inconceivable 12 months ago that all these countries, and it began obviously with Spain and Norway doing it in November, would have recognised. And in particular, it's a sign of the focus on the starvation, which is becoming so brutal and so clear.

• 6:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, just on that, I mean, just to give some facts on the starvation, we're recording this Tuesday morning, more people died of starvation in the last 11 days than in the previous 21 months. And when you're away, and I was talking to Katie Kay about this, we had an input from this guy who's who's used to run starvation, anti-starvation projects for USAID. And we saw explaining, once it starts, even if you get food in, it is very difficult to stop. Meanwhile, the Israeli military killed just short of 100 Palestinians, including 56 on the way to try to get aid in Gaza. Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu, according to the Jerusalem Post, is now talking about taking over the whole of Gaza. Meanwhile,

• 7:27Alastair Campbell?

  Ben Gavir, in breach of his own government's policy, went to pray with Jews at one of the sacred mosques.

• 7:35Rory Stewart?

  Taking, I think, 4,000 people.

• 7:37Alastair Campbell?

  With 4,000 settlers. I think this is all built up to a sense of of public opinion in the democracies that you talked about, UK, France and Canada, public opinion really demanding change in stance, change in attitude. You made a very interesting point about whether we could argue about whether it was done in the right way. So Macron, I think, clearly wanted to be out front because that's where Macron likes to be. I thought there was a very odd line in his approach, essentially saying that he talked about this would have to be a demilitarised Palestinian state. Well, that's quite a big thing to say. It's one thing to say Hamas should have no rule in the governments of Gaza, which they're all saying, but demilitarise basically means,

• 8:19Alastair Campbell?

  you know, you can't have armed forces. And then with Keir Starmer's recognition, there was a lot of debate about this because I think a lot of people think, yes, two-state solution, so let's recognise, as it were, both of the states. And we can get on to the Montevideo definition of what a state is. The issue with Keir Starmer's recognition was essentially, he was, he was applying conditions of recognition that applied to Israel. In other words, we won't recognise if Israel does A, B, C, D. Whereas I wonder whether it might have been sensible to say, you know, the context is the war, we condemn the way that Israel is conducting that war, we will recognise Palestine, provided that Palestine does A, B, C. I think that's

• 9:02Alastair Campbell?

  a different way of doing it. And then Canada, poor old Canada, I know we're going to talk about tariffs later, Macron comes out and does it, and immediately Trump makes it part of his trade war.

• 9:11Rory Stewart?

  Couple of questions on Starmer. One is, I think it would have been incredibly powerful if Macron and Starmer had made a joint statement with the same policy at the same time.

• 9:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 9:22Rory Stewart?

  Because Britain and France are the two authors of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which is right at the heart of the problems in the Middle East. They are the two permanent members of the Security Council. I think that was a really missed opportunity to, as a way of partly demonstrating what, you know, you and I care about a lot, which is thinking about how there's a joint European voice on defence and security. But just internationally, the, I think it would have been, to do some Trump maths, maybe three times as powerful to have the two together than, than having them separately. Any, any thoughts on that?

• 9:54Alastair Campbell?

  No, I, I, I agree with that. In fact, fun enough, I was pinging texts to sources close to the Prime Minister and the French President at various points, not least around the summit that we had, saying, look, this recognition issue is clearly kind of in the ether. Wouldn't it be really, really powerful to do it together? I think that there were probably issues around, would they, could they, would they say exactly the same things? I think they could have ironed those out. I know that Jonathan Powell, and, you know, Jonathan, as you know, I've got huge admiration for Jonathan, and he's, he's a real sort of expert in peace processes as well. I think he felt that... This should be part of a bigger thing. And maybe what they were doing was they thought, well, Macron's going to go out on front. Because that's what Macron does.

• 10:40Alastair Campbell?

  Let's see if we can sort of build in a sense of momentum, then Canada comes in, et cetera. But I agree with you, I think that would have been powerful. And of course, on the one hand, we said, again, talking to Katia, I made the point that Trump and Netanyahu have sort of engineered this situation. So it's like theirs are the only voices that count. Whereas I think if the European voices come together, I think there's an acceptance that Merz, Germany are not going to be in this position. They're in a different position and they're probably going to stay there. But I think the power of the international voice, I agree with you, I think it would have been more effective. And now, of course, we get to September, there's no way that Netanyahu is going to abide by these conditions. He's made that absolutely clear. Au contraire, Paché, the Jerusalem Post, and Ben Gavir as well.

• 11:24Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, Ben Gavir is an incredible thing, that's like impunity within impunity. We've talked about Israel, the government operating with impunity in Gaza, or seeming to. Now we have Ben Gavir within his own government, operating with impunity.

• 11:38Rory Stewart?

  That's an interesting one, isn't it? Just on Ben Gavir, because often when we are getting emails attacking what we're saying. One of the claims is, well, Ben Gavir doesn't really speak for the government. But I think that makes no sense at all. I mean, partly it is that Smotrich and Ben Gavir were given these key posts of Finance Minister and Security Minister. But also clearly, as you say, it's not just that they are part of the cabinet. It's that it appears that they can do whatever they want. Nothing they do gets any criticism, presumably because they could topple the government at any moment. Just a little overview again, because I was trying to get my head around this, about this question of recognition and why it didn't happen earlier. So there's a strange story.

• 12:21Rory Stewart?

  Up until 1967, there wasn't really a Palestinian state to recognise, in the sense that Egypt had taken Gaza and Jordan had taken the West Bank. They were part of other countries. After 67, when Israel occupied that territory, and particularly from about 1980 onwards.

• 12:41Rory Stewart?

  There was increasing moves pushed by Yasser Arafat to try to get people to focus. And I think by about nineteen eighty eight, you had this particularly not just Arab governments, but you had Eastern Bloc governments, former communist or then communist countries recognizing Palestine, which is why quite a lot of Eastern European countries in the European Union today recognize Palestine. They haven't had to do it recently. I think Poland, for example, recognized it back in eighty eight, and that's when Russia recognized it, etc. But the real story, I think, began to change most dramatically after Oslo, because of course with Oslo, this Norwegian agreement, the world signed up to a two-state solution. And once you get an idea of a two-state solution, the logic is, well, why are you not recognizing a Palestinian state if you believe in a two-state solution?

• 13:23Rory Stewart?

  And there was this mealy-mouthed excuse, which is, no, we need to hold it back for part of the negotiations. Somehow the idea was that conferring statehood would be the last stage of this complicated peace deal. But in reality, it was because Israel would have been very angry if people had recognized it. And so people held off. There was a big push again with Abu Marsan, I think, sort of nineteen ninety, two thousand. And we ended up with a situation where before October the seventh, nearly three quarters of the countries in the world recognized Palestine as a state. But the major Western European G seven, G twenty countries generally didn't.

• 14:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 14:04Rory Stewart?

  And then we had two little bits, didn't we? We had, we just interviewed the Norwegian Prime Minister, which I think people will love, because he was incredibly good, I thought, on Gaza, very strong, very clear. So we had Spain and Norway, and now we're going to the second phase.

• 14:18Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, why do you keep forgetting Ireland and Slovenia? They were part of the same move. The four who did it together, the four who did it together were Spain, Norway, Ireland and Slovenia.

• 14:29Rory Stewart?

  So on that story, I mean, do you have memories of this over? I mean, what is your sense of what's been going on since the nineties with this recognition of statehood? Was it a big issue when you were in government? Why, I mean, given that we acknowledged a two-state solution, why were we not recognizing a Palestinian state for the last thirty years?

• 14:45Alastair Campbell?

  I think you're right, because people assumed that what would emerge out of Oslo was the process, the progress towards a two-state solution. The state of Israel was already in existence. Palestine was recognized by some, but not by all. And in a sense, it would become part of that process. And what I think people are seeing is that Israel and Netanyahu's government has made it clear they no longer even say they believe in the two-state solution. So I think that's what's changed the dynamics around it. And also, there is this sort of never-ending debate about what represents a state. So I mentioned the Montevideo Convention, and this is from days back to 1933. And there

• 15:28Alastair Campbell?

  are four key criteria for a new state to be recognised. One is define boundaries. Well, you know, the whole settler thing has confused that. A permanent population, a government, and the capacity to enter into international relations. Now, you could argue that Palestine has got bits of all four. And although the level of Israeli intervention into the West Bank and the current situation in Gaza makes government very, very difficult. But just to say, for example, you know, sometimes you might get in a quiz, in a pub quiz, how many countries in the world are there? And there's actually no agreement on that. The United States says there are 197. Others say there are 200 and even more than 200.

• 16:11Alastair Campbell?

  The United Nations has it 193. And in the Second World War, when the United Nations was formed, there were 51, 99 by 1960 and 189 by 2000. So, and you know, we interviewed recently, just to take two of the interviews we did, Albin Kurti, the Prime Minister of Kosovo. Well, Kosovo is recognised by a lot of countries, but not by enough to get it accepted as a state. We interviewed the President of Cyprus. Now, right next to them, they have what the Turks call the Turkish Republic of northern Cyprus. They're the only people who recognise it. What was the last country that was recognised? Was it South Sudan? Was that the last?

• 16:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, South Sudan was definitely the last one that I remember. And that was extraordinary because, again, Sudan was a big contiguous territory. And this amazing combination of counter-terrorist people in the US, Christian churches, because South Sudan is predominantly Christian, and George Clooney. So sort of Hollywood churches and counter-terrorist people put pressure on the US government. We're now in sort of 2005. Recognize this whole new country and it was part of that moment that we often talk about of extraordinary optimism. And the international community moved there and Juba became full of foreigners and Lebanese restaurants and discos. And then collapsed into civil war. And again and again, as you, as you're aware, with a lot of these conflicts around the world, there are always people suggesting.

• 17:37Rory Stewart?

  Maybe the answer is partition. You remember in Iraq, people would say, well, maybe. Things will be easier if we partition Syria. Obviously, the Druze and the Kurds, to some extent, are still trying to push for. Creating semi-independent nations, splitting these countries up. And, and of course, we just interviewed Nicholas Sturgeon.

• 17:54Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, you're plugging all these interviews. So we should just sort of maybe let people know, we've got Jeremy Hunt, and we're going to talk about him. Later, we've got Jeremy Hunt, two episodes, we've got Nicholas Sturgeon, two episodes, then we've got the Norwegian Prime Minister. And I'm glad, I'm really glad you liked Jonas Skarsdóra, because I think he's a very, very impressive guy. And he was, you know, people will. Will hear, we put it out, he was, I thought he was brilliant on Palestine because he was coming at it the whole time. From the position of the Oslo Accords, and okay, Norway obviously has a sort of sense of attachment to that. But that was the closest we got to the sense of that process being there. And what he's refusing to do is to depart from the principles underpinning that.

• 18:36Alastair Campbell?

  And, you know, when we talk about Columbia tomorrow, I think, you know, Santos, who won a Nobel Peace Prize. For his role in bringing the civil war in Columbia to an end, was always talking about the framework, you have to get the framework right. Otherwise you get chaos. I also thought, by the way, on the way of recognition, Rory, the other, the other thing that. I don't think got nearly as much attention as I thought it deserved, was when the foreign ministers met recently. Mainly the foreign ministers, some heads of government as well, but David Lammy was there for the UK. And they met in New York and had this meeting about recognition. One of the most important things, I think, was the fact that the Arab League signed up. To something that was a very, very, very clear recognition of Israel,

• 19:20Alastair Campbell?

  which has been, you know, a complicated political diplomatic process too.

• 19:25Rory Stewart?

  Huge, big move, exactly, because people are very aware, because we often hear that Iran refuses to acknowledge the existence of the state of Israel. But that was absolutely true, as you say, of most Arab countries. Many of them still don't have full diplomatic relations with Israel. And I think it's countries like Indonesia traditionally didn't recognise Israel, many other Muslim countries. So I think that that's a huge thing.

• 19:49Alastair Campbell?

  Just underline that, Rory. So the the statement that they agreed condemned the activities of what they call militant group savage attacks. We know what that means, October 7. And also they linked the peace deal in the of the future with the disarming and disbandment of Hamas. And that included Turkey, it included Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia from the Asian side. There were African countries, Latin American countries, Europe, obviously. So I thought that was a pretty big deal.

• 20:23Rory Stewart?

  The challenge we now face, of course, is that the overwhelming majority of Israelis, I think this is right, now reject the two-state solution. It's not just Benjamin Netanyahu. I think there are two different views on this. There's the extremist Ben Gavir view, which is that the whole of Israel and Judea belongs to us because the Bible says so. And we're simply going to, effectively for the sum of the extremists, Smotrich talks openly in terms that sound like ethnic cleansing. Let's just push out all non-compliant Palestinians and just create a massive Israeli state over all the Palestinian territory.

• 21:07Rory Stewart?

  The more mainstream opinion, I think, is not that they're making a great claim on the Bible. Traditionally, these might have been people who'd be prepared to compromise on some of the history, but who simply believe that any time they leave territory, leave South Lebanon, leave Gaza, they end up with terrorists, a terrorist state on their borders. And therefore, they, particularly after October 7th, can't contemplate the idea of a Palestinian state because they believe a Palestinian state is simply a guarantee that you get Hamas or a proto Hamas. So we know, and that's just a long way of saying, we're now in a

• 21:48Rory Stewart?

  position where three quarters of the countries of the world, and now Britain, France and Canada, have signed up to something that is offensive to the overwhelming majority of the Israeli population. So there's now, this is not the 90s anymore. There's now, it's feeling more and more like a brutal, almost existential divide between how Israel sees itself and how the rest of the world sees, sees Palestine.

• 22:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. I guess the other thing we should recall is that over last weekend, Israel released another video that was filmed by Hamas of one of the hostages emaciated, digging his own grave. So that is, for obvious reasons, what drives a lot of the anger and the hatred within Israel. But I think where I'm not, where I'm not sure I completely agree with you, I think there is a fairly unmovable and pretty sizable chunk of Israeli public opinion that really does think Netanyahu's been exploiting this at various points for

• 22:56Alastair Campbell?

  his own survival, hasn't actually seized those opportunities when he maybe could have got more of the hostages back. And I think when the reckoning is told on this whole episode, then like who are we to say what history judges, but I think it's not impossible to imagine that Israel itself and the actions of this current government, and particularly the extremists that we've talked about, have inflicted as much damage upon the standing of the state of Israel as any outside forces.

• 23:26Rory Stewart?

  Well, we've had this shift, and we've got quite an important shift, which is to Israeli human rights groups, well-respected Israeli human rights groups, now saying that what's happening in Gaza is genocide.

• 23:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 23:37Rory Stewart?

  Ehud Olmert, who we interviewed, the former Prime Minister of Israel, being one more respected, was a brilliant interview done by the Guardian podcast with a surgeon called Nick Maynard, who'd just come back from Gaza. And for people who don't want to hear, and I think a lot of people don't want to hear about what's happening in Gaza, or who hear Netanyahu saying, Netanyahu said it's a bald-faced lie that the starvation in Gaza. Nick Maynard just, I think it's the, it's the small details that are so telling. He says that he was working with American doctors who'd heard that there was a shortage of infant formula. So they'd flown from the US with their suitcases packed full of infant formula.

• 24:20Rory Stewart?

  And every last packet of infant formula was confiscated from them by the Israeli military at the border, just weren't allowed to bring in baby formula. Or what it's like working as a surgeon with Palestinians whose all their children have been killed, their wives been killed, who have to leave the surgery because suddenly their sister's been killed in a, in a strike, and then return to scrub up again to do the thing. And, and your point, which you, you did very powerfully with Kadi K last week, which is the way in which malnutrition makes all the other medical problems far worse, this compounding issue.

• 25:01Rory Stewart?

  So Nick Maynard's a esophageal surgeon, and he was describing in great detail reconstructive surgery he'd done on an 11-year-old girl who'd been struck by a bomb, and how he was pretty confident she would have pulled through. But of course, the malnutrition means that it's much more difficult for people to recover from surgery, secretary infections.

• 25:21Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing maybe before we go to break, I'd like to plug is, because you know, in this modern age of TikTok and all the rest of it, and you know, the Israelis in their own way are very powerful communicators. I think their communications has been a bit of a disaster because they they're so kind of aggressive and denialist and so forth. But they're, you know, they're very effective historically as communicators, but you have to be kind of snappy. And one of the most impressive things I saw was a three minute thing on social media from Mehdi Hassan, who, you know, coming very much from a sort of anti-Israel perspective on one level. But he was just debunking some of the lies that they tell. And that's where I think they're doing themselves a lot of damage.

• 26:04Alastair Campbell?

  And because they know that Trump lies a lot, Trump, we're going to talk about this in the second half, he's, I think he's kind of sui generis in a way, there's nobody else like him. People may think they can operate like him, but I don't think it's nearly as he gets away with more than other countries do. He gets away with more than other leaders do. I wish he didn't, but he does. And so I think the Israeli, I've said this many, many times before, I know they don't listen. And I mean, David Menzies stopped even replying to, I thought we might try and get the president on on October the seventh, for example, to talk about, you know, to reflective look back on on the whole thing. But he's not

• 26:46Alastair Campbell?

  even replied to that. But I think their communications is a bit of a disaster for them.

• 26:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, I just to wrap it up, I suppose those two things connect, don't they? Because it's clear that this recognition of Palestinian statehood is driven by what Israel has been doing in Gaza. But I think.

• 27:07Rory Stewart?

  It's also worth returning to your first point, which is there's something that doesn't feel quite right in making recognition of statehood conditional on Israel's actions. I mean, either Palestine's a state or it's not.

• 27:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 27:21Rory Stewart?

  And actually, you could recognize Palestine as a state, separate from Gaza, because Gaza is an emergency, immediate humanitarian horror that should be pursued through international law, through international courts, normal approach to international law, and shouldn't be muddled up with the question of statehood. And I think there were some missed opportunities along the way. I think it would have been very, very nice to see this done as a big joint diplomatic statement. However, probably in the long run, it shows things strategically shifting against Israel and global opinion.

• 28:00Alastair Campbell?

  Let's take a break, come back and talk about tariffs, Trump, and some very interesting advice that Jeremy Hunt has for you this time.

• 28:08Rory Stewart?

  Very good. See you after the break.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  Payday bars have a bone to pick with the other candy bars. Enough with the toppings and layers and stuff, kay? Payday bars are just salty, crunchy peanuts and sweet caramel. Delicious! Payday Peanut Caramel Bar.

• 28:26Speaker 04

  The best part of waking up? A full cup of Folgers coffee and music on full blast.

• 28:52Speaker 04

  Shop Folgers K-Cup Pods and more at your nearest retailer.

• 28:56Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. For 125 years, Nordstrom has been part of your story. The stylist who found the perfect outfit for your big interview. The first pair of walking shoes for your one-year-old. The tomato soup you shared with your sister at the cafe. These are the moments that make Nordstrom, Nordstrom. Big or small, we're here for all of it. Celebrating 125 years with new moments still ahead. Discover it all in Nordstrom stores and at nordstrom.com.

• 29:32Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 29:35Alastair Campbell?

  And me Asda Campbell. And Rory, before we get on to the substance, you kept dropping, dropping information about different interviews that we've been doing while we've been in different places. Just to bring people absolutely up to date, leading is a separate podcast channel that we Rory and I do where we interview somebody every week. We've mentioned Jeremy Hunt in the current episode. Now is Jeremy Hunt, part two of that interview is out this coming Monday, but if you can't wait, you can become a member of The Rest is Politics Plus and you do that by going to therestispolitics.com. So we go Hunt, Hunt, Nicola Sturgeon, Nicola Sturgeon, then

• 30:16Alastair Campbell?

  the Prime Minister of Norway, my friend Jonas Garthorah, and then we might have a little bonus episode with the President of Guyana as well. So we get loads and loads of really great interviews and we hope that you enjoy them.

• 30:27Rory Stewart?

  I mean, I think Asda, a huge thank you actually for getting some of these big names. They're great A-listers and I think it's lovely to have current heads of state and current heads of state who are talking much more openly than I sometimes fear serving politicians do.

• 30:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think the King Harold might be upset that you just referred to Jonas Garthorah as the head of state, Rory, you as a sort of out and out monarchist, but there we are.

• 30:53Rory Stewart?

  Head of government.

• 30:54Alastair Campbell?

  I'm going to say as well, I enjoyed Jeremy Hunt a lot more than I thought I would. I thought he was, and it goes, he's still a politician, he's still an MP, but it does, I think, go to your theory, he's no longer in the cabinet. He was very loyal to Kemi Badenoch up to a point, but he was very much more reflective than most.

• 31:19Alastair Campbell?

  frontline politicians are. So I think he's got that balance right. Still in politics, but being interesting.

• 31:24Rory Stewart?

  And and of course, for me, I think it's a it's a real example of what the conservatives could be doing. And it's so sad they're not. I think there is a huge appetite still for the centre, for for the left wing of the Conservative Party, for a Conservative Party that doesn't get caught up in culture wars, that emphasizes pragmatism, thoughtful approach to stuff, is open about mistakes and failures. And I think there's huge opportunities actually for if the Conservatives wanted to for taking on Labour, because I think there are real communications problems. Keir Starmer's net popularity rating is catastrophic. And a

• 32:05Rory Stewart?

  good Conservative Party, speaking in the way that Jeremy Hunt was speaking, I think could have a real future. And I think it's very, very sad that where they're likely to go is with is to lurch towards Robert Jenrick and an attempt to chase Farage on the right.

• 32:19Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. The point I wanted to highlight from Jeremy Hunt's interview, because he said something really interesting. When he said it, I thought, this is nuts. But he basically said, Keir Starmer should take a leaf out of Donald Trump's book and communicate more, talk more to the public. Now, I said earlier, I don't think there's anybody in the world like Trump in the way he, you know, those 75 minute rambles he did at Turnbury and, you know, he communicates four or five times a day. And there's something about Keir's communication style anyway, which maybe doesn't lend itself to the same sort of communication. But the more I've thought about it, the more I think, you know what, he might have a point. We don't see enough of the Labour Government talking about what

• 33:03Alastair Campbell?

  the Labour Government is doing, other than when they're on the defensive.

• 33:07Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think that's right. And I think definitely this is part of the trick of Zora and Mamdani, the the New York mayoral candidate too. And it was actually something that even back in the day, David Cameron did a lot more of. If you remember, as Foreign Secretary, there were often videos of him going down the steps, or when he was running to be Prime Minister, he'd have people on the train with him chatting and doing.

• 33:29Alastair Campbell?

  Also, when when when David Cameron was Prime Minister. I would reckon David Cameron was on the main news bulletins pretty much every day of his premiership, not far off it.

• 33:40Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely, I remember that. I exactly remember that. I remember someone observing that. Somebody who really didn't like Cameron saying, okay, I mean, there's a lot of things wrong with this guy, but one thing you can say from him is that you basically turn on the main news every evening and there is David Cameron.

• 33:55Alastair Campbell?

  Whereas right now you turn on the main news and you've got Nigel Farage sort of trying to stir up hatred and violence.

• 34:00Rory Stewart?

  And obviously you'd have to find a way of doing it, wouldn't you, where to follow your friend, the Norwegian Prime Minister, who's very much about authenticity and being yourself. It would have to very much be Starmer being Starmer. But, yeah, it would be lovely to see. The question is, could he do it? Because what of course Mamdani and Trump are able to do is respond very, very fluently without too much nervousness to whatever's going on in the world. They're partly being commentators, something that, you know, traditionally, Linton Crosby, I remember saying to us, the Australian election adviser for Conservatives,

• 34:41Rory Stewart?

  used to always say, don't be a commentator. You know, your job isn't to be a commentator. Your job is to repeat the government line.

• 34:49Alastair Campbell?

  Well, do you remember when we interviewed Ed Miliband, he said, that's what I used to say to him, stop being a commentator, don't commentate, act.

• 34:55Rory Stewart?

  Well, maybe Crosby probably nixed it from you. Anyway, but Trump and Mamdani and these people have to slightly be commentators. They have to be a little bit more like that because if they're going to be talking two, three times a day, a lot of the time, they're just speculating, reacting, holding forth. I mean, Trump presumably does quite a lot of stuff, which isn't really much to do with global politics at all. It's just him.

• 35:19Alastair Campbell?

  Not at all. He was talking this week about some woman who makes jeans and he confused a country with a company in one of his sort of mad rambles. He talks about golf a lot. I think the, I, I, look, it's not Kier's style. And also, something I'd say about Kier is that I think sometimes his, the way he projects himself in public. Isn't the same as he speaks in private. And I think when people see the interview, for example, with Jonas Gaster, the Prime Minister of Norway, his speaking style is almost identical, regardless of what he's doing. And I do think that's the most effective form of communication. Yes, when you get up on a platform at a rally in front of 5,000 people,

• 36:02Alastair Campbell?

  you do a bit more of the kind of boom and boom and boom. But actually, it should be a recognisable form of communication to how you talk to your mates.

• 36:12Rory Stewart?

  It's one of the great tricks of modern politics, which isn't quite being met by most people. Because we see it, don't we? When we interviewed Sajid Javid, people were like, my goodness, if only you'd been like that when he was Cabinet Minister. And people, I think, will feel that when they watch the Nicola Sturgeon interview. My goodness, if only, you know, people like me, if only she'd been quite as open and reflective and thoughtful. So somehow it's just, and I feel that with Keir Starmer, when I meet him one on one, there's actually quite a lot of charisma and energy and humour to him, which isn't coming across in his. So it's about getting very, very controlled, cautious, slightly more introverted politicians to

• 36:57Rory Stewart?

  learn to speak in public a little bit more like the way they speak in private. And I don't know how you get them to do that.

• 37:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, I think a lot of it comes with practice and just doing it. I mean, the one thing I'll say about Keir Starmer, I think he's got a lot better at Prime Minister's Questions than when he started, which shows that he can improve and does improve. And I think on this communications point, I mean, again, you know, Nicola Sturgeon made the point that she said, you know, not just Keir, but she had a lot of the Labour Ministers when they come on, they speak and then when they finish speaking, you think, what did they say? Because there's just something a little bit robotic about it all.

• 37:32Rory Stewart?

  Well, also from your point of view, and I think the other thing that, of course, makes people nervous is that talking that way, you're going to take risk. If you're going to be talking two, three times a day about whatever, things will go wrong, headlines will be generated. And so you need politicians.

• 37:51Rory Stewart?

  Who are a little bit more like, I guess, Trump or Mamdani or Farage are, who when their comms team come in and say, what the F have you done? You've just generated another mad headline. Just shrug and say, don't worry, I know my people.

• 38:05Alastair Campbell?

  Win some, lose some, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I actually think Farage's communications is, I'm not sure he's as effective right now as he thinks he is. I know they're doing well because they're getting this whole sort of focus on migrant hotels and that's where he wants in, you know, crime or what have you, but I think the thin skin is getting to be a bit of a problem with them. The more I've thought about what Jeremy Hunt said, though, I hope the Labour people, I hope Labour people listen to it and listen to it not thinking, oh, he's a Tory, what does he know? I actually think there's something in this, there's, Labour's communications needs to change from what it currently is. Because, you know, even I, as a political obsessive, quite often if I'm sort of going scrolling through social media, looking for interesting things,

• 38:46Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not hanging around long when I see most of the Labour ministers pop up on my feed. Uh, and I am an obsessive, pro-Labour tribalist in politics. So there we are. Listen, let's get to a man who definitely can communicate it and interesting in a way. That's, that's Donald Trump. You talk about flood the zone. So just to go through the last few days, we've had this massive spat with Medvedev that quickly accelerated to moving nuclear weapons. We've had the tariff mayhem. We've had him sacking, and this is real Putin stuff now, North Korean stuff, sacking the head of the, the government statistical service, wonderful, wonderful name, Erica McIntafer.

• 39:30Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, she's got to get a job just for having that name. So I hope she won't be out of work for too long. Another Fox News host getting a big job, the new US attorney. We've also had, maybe we should have covered this in part one, the $60 million that he wanted thanks for from the starving in Gaza. Turns out it was only three million, but he has found 200, he is finding 200 million to buy, to, to build a new ballroom. Meanwhile, Ghislaine Maxwell is being moved to a low-security prison. Oh, just after the Deputy Attorney General went to have a chat about Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. Hmm, interesting.

• 40:08Rory Stewart?

  And and to add to it, Columbia University has signed a very, very controversial deal where they've, you remember that federal funds were suspended by Trump. He's now releasing money to Columbia University in return essentially for Columbia signing up to what Colombian, as an academic at Columbia University effectively means that when he teaches his Middle East course, he can criticize pretty much every country in the Middle East. But he cannot make points about Israel. He doesn't feel he'd be able to. And there's an extraordinary sort of academic policing outfit that has been agreed as part of this deal to monitor courses, provost, et cetera.

• 40:52Rory Stewart?

  Just on tariffs, though, I mean, the thing that caught my attention particularly because I'd been in Latin America was what's happening in Brazil. But as you've pointed out, there's much more than that. But just, just let's just start with Brazil as an, as an example of what's going on. Trump has imposed 50% tariffs on Brazil. Now, we're, we're so deep into this Trump world, it's only August, that 50% tariffs doesn't startle people anymore, but it's an incredible level. I mean, these are levels, this is essentially economic sanctions. This is the sort of thing that people used to do against Russia or South Africa, and he's doing it against Brazil. And why is he doing it against Brazil?

• 41:34Rory Stewart?

  He's doing it against Brazil not because Brazil has a, a trade surplus with the United States. He's doing it against Brazil because Brazil and its Supreme Court Justice are prosecuting Herr Bolsonaro, the previous president, who did his own mini January the 6th. So they're pursuing him for essentially insurrection and a coup. Bolsonaro's son has been hanging out in DC, presumably going to the new members-only club set up by Trump's kids and Whitkoff's kids, and has somehow convinced the Trump family that they need to get his dad out of jail. So 50% tariffs, and now sanctions

• 42:14Rory Stewart?

  against the Brazilian Supreme Court justices, and travel bans. And Lula, who's a leftist leader, now has his own cap, which looks like a sort of pseudo-MAGA cap asserting Brazilian independence. But he's in a very, very difficult situation. Same situation, Canada's in, Mexico's in, we'll get on to Colombia tomorrow. How on earth do you keep a sense of national sovereignty, national pride? You can't say, listen, it's fine, interfere in my judicial processes, we'll sack the head of the Supreme Court, we'll drop the entire legal processes of Brazil, please, dear America, drop the 50% tariffs. Anyway, over to you.

• 42:55Alastair Campbell?

  No, it's quite incredible. And it's a sort of form of strategic mayhem, the whole thing. I mean, the other two that really I found fascinating, one was, the first was India, because Trump has always talked about this great relationship with Modi, and Modi has always talked about this great relationship with Trump. And whenever they visit each other's countries, they have these 80,000 people rallies in massive cricket stadiums, tell each other, posters of each other all over the place. But India's been very badly here. But the one that really shocked me was Switzerland. So there's Switzerland. And we talked earlier about what is a country. Switzerland didn't become a member of the United Nations until very late on, because it's always precious, preciously guarded

• 43:36Alastair Campbell?

  its sense of neutrality. But the president, Karen Kallasutter, she did something very, very clever, I thought at the time, and she thought at the time. The talks between America and China, she organised for them to be held in Geneva. And at the time, she managed to get a meeting with Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary. She came out of that meeting and did interviews for the Swiss media, where she basically, and this must have been based upon something that Besant said to her, basically said that they were going to be hovering between the UK 10% and the standard 15, down from the 31% that Trump had announced on Liberation Day with his game show board.

• 44:18Alastair Campbell?

  He comes out a few days ago, thirty nine percent.

• 44:22Rory Stewart?

  So it's gone up, gone up from his game.

• 44:23Alastair Campbell?

  Gone beyond thirty one, they've gone to thirty nine. And this has led to an emergency cabinet meeting. It's led to furlough schemes for some sectors of the economy that are going to be particularly hard hit. And the other thing that's really got them scratching their heads, because Trump, of course, says it's all about the size of the the trade deficit. Switzerland says two thirds of their recent exports are gold bullion and bars that have been refined in Switzerland. And gold is supposed to be exempt from tariffs.

• 44:55Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 44:56Alastair Campbell?

  And this, so this is, they just don't know what to do.

• 44:59Rory Stewart?

  The the India thing is, is, as you say, a similar story because I I remember when this was all beginning in January. People I knew who were very close to the Modi government saying, India is very convinced that they're going to be front row. In fact, they were hoping they'd be the first to get a deal and were a bit disappointed that Britain got there ahead of them. And Modi was very much communicating, for all the reasons that you've said, that India is going to be in a very special position. And of course, part of the reason for that is not just their friendship, it was about China. So the story was basically that the US needed allies against China, geopolitical competition. And the biggest potential ally in Asia was India. You know, India is on track to become one of the very largest economies in the world.

• 45:43Rory Stewart?

  It's growing very fast, population of over a billion. And many companies were being encouraged to relocate their manufacturing away from China to India. So Apple, for example, you know, move its manufacturing from China to India. So India thought it was sitting very pretty, that it had very cleverly positioned itself as the alternative to China. The big, rapidly growing investment location and the US's greatest ally in the region with its own navy, which could help. So for all those reasons, both the personal connection and the geostrategic, they thought they'd be fine. And they have been hit unbelievably hard. Now, that means that if you are an international manufacturer trying to manufacture goods, you picked up that China wasn't going to work. You were thinking, maybe I moved to India.

• 46:28Rory Stewart?

  Maybe I move to Vietnam, but all of them have now been hit with tariffs. And this means that the basic goods that we're all dependent on, if you're an American consumer, everything from T-shirts to Apple, you're basically hit with a very, very high VAT. It's like a sales tax. So it would be like putting up VAT by twenty five percent, or in the case of China, forty percent on key products. And this is bringing revenue, and Trump's making a lot of money on this, he may well make hundreds of billions of dollars off this. But he's doing it by cutting taxes on the rich and then putting what's basically a VAT on the poor.

• 47:05Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, absolutely. And he's also squandering lots of goodwill. I mean, same with Modi, he spent so much time and effort building good relations with Modi, and now comes along and does this. And of course, the other thing that the Swiss are sort of really baffled about, because it's quite hard, you know, Switzerland, they they basically say they're already the world's sixth largest investor in the US. They're the biggest per capita, right? And there's even talk now, I mean, I can't see the Swiss doing this, but actually they've got a big order for F thirty five fighter jets from the States.

• 47:40Rory Stewart?

  Yep, that's right.

• 47:41Alastair Campbell?

  About saying, well, maybe we don't take their fighter jets.

• 47:45Alastair Campbell?

  But so the Swiss, what have they done? They've got the, they've now got the highest tariffs in Europe. And globally, there's only Brazil, Syria, Laos and Myanmar that are higher than them. Fiona and I are actually going to Switzerland in a couple of weeks, so we'll be able to check it out. But I was reading one of their newspapers, Blick, and it said that this is the country's biggest defeat since the French victory in the Battle of Marignano in fifteen fifteen. What do you do? Come on, Roy, let's imagine you are the president of Switzerland. What do you do?

• 48:20Rory Stewart?

  Oh, it's it's it's impossible, isn't it? Because we know that one thing that Trump really likes and has worked for some countries is announcing a massive package of investment in the US. So when Europe announced, I think it was six hundred billion dollars worth of investment, he cited that as a reason to bring the tariffs down to fifteen percent.

• 48:41Alastair Campbell?

  Even though it's meaningless.

• 48:42Rory Stewart?

  Even though it's meaningless, right? But as you say, the problem for the Swiss is they've already got a huge amount of investment. And of course, as we found with Norway, when we were talking to the Norwegian Prime Minister, indeed, when we talked to the Danish Prime Minister. Smaller countries in Europe like Switzerland, Denmark or Norway are very, very vulnerable to the US. They're very open economies, they're very much dependent on global trade, and they're frankly very weak. They don't have much leverage. It's the first time, I think, that Switzerland has really experienced the pain of not being in the European Union Customs Union. Because the trick that Trump didn't do, that people were afraid he might do, is to try to do divide and rule within Europe. And how on earth Europe would have

• 49:24Rory Stewart?

  responded. But there was a fear for a moment, you remember, that he might think, well, actually, you know, I don't really like what Spain's doing on recognition of Gaza, well, definitely. Suddenly now Switzerland, which seemed to have this very complicated but very fruitful relationship with the European Union, is in real trouble because it didn't manage to get in on that 15% tariff negotiation. I don't know what you do, and I, God forbid, you think that you can go down the Mark Rutte route, which is that if you just totally humiliate yourselves, say Trump should get the Nobel Peace Prize, call him daddy, call him Mr. Bigley, wonderful president, you get out of this hole. The other thing I think that's interesting is that we used to say in talking about Trump's tariff policies

• 50:08Rory Stewart?

  that there were four basic agendas which contradicted each other. Number one, he wants to move manufacturing back to the US, so leave China back to the US, or leave Switzerland back to the US. Number two, he's trying to make money, in which case the manufacturing stays outside the US and he makes money as it comes. And number three, he's trying to chase Fenton. And number four, he's trying to punish China. But it's clear, I think now, that it's quite different, that yes, he is going to continue to make revenue from it, and he likes his 10%, because it'll bring money in at the expense of poor Americans. But it's now become a general purpose tool. If you're doing stuff we don't like with Russia, which is the story with India, if you're prosecuting Bolsonaro, if in the case of Colombia, you're refusing to take people back on a plane, which is going to use as,

• 50:53Rory Stewart?

  and Syria, I guess. I mean, presumably Syria doesn't have a big trade surplus with the US, so those tariffs are just there, I don't know what, as leverage over the Syrian president. They're sanctions, aren't they? They're basically forceful economic sanctions, yeah.

• 51:05Alastair Campbell?

  Having just lifted other sanctions, and I mean, that's what I say, it's kind of strategic mayhem. Maybe just before we close, Rory, what did you think of the, I mean, I was sort of maybe a bit too lighthearted about it because of her wonderful name, Erica McIntafer. But what are we to think about the president of the United States, still the biggest economy in the world, firing the head of the statistical service because he said she was coming up with phony job figures, she inflated the good job figures for Kamala, bad job figures for him. Everybody in that world, including people who have worked under Trump before, has come out and said this is ridiculous. And then if you look through some of the history, the

• 51:50Alastair Campbell?

  New York Times had a very interesting piece about the history of countries where they've tried to fiddle basic statistics. I mean, there's the old joke about the Soviet Union, the tractor production, the potato production. But Greece, they got into a real mess by faking their deficit numbers, China constantly manipulating their growth figures. And, and, you know, Argentina, I'd forgotten about this until I read it, Argentina, in, you know, the early in this century, systematically understating inflation figures. So eventually, the international community is no longer bothered to read Argentinian government data. So this is, this is a bad, bad move, isn't it?

• 52:27Rory Stewart?

  It's a very bad move. And it's also, again, creating this strange sort of Bulgarian Communist Party thing, which is that all the Republicans loved citing her.

• 52:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 52:37Rory Stewart?

  That she was their go to person. And now they've had to flip to say, oh, this person I was, you know, quoting endlessly two weeks ago is now a villain. So there's a bit of the kind of sort of show trials going on. We don't know, I think to finish on a sort of bigger note, one of the things you're reminding me of is that there's no real historical precedent

• 52:59Rory Stewart?

  for an economy the size of the United States in a world this globalized, doing these kinds of things. Because the things that you're citing are, you know, Argentina, or even China, when it was a growing, closed communist country. But there's something we don't know what to deal with, which, and the Switzerland story is part of the story. The US is so powerful, so big, so impossible to ignore, so entwined in the global economy, so powerful, partly because actually they export much less than they import, partly because they're the world's reserve currency. We don't really know what happens with this experiment as it goes on.

• 53:41Rory Stewart?

  Normal economics tells you all those things that you've said. If you start screwing around with your tariff policy, you end up with expensive domestic goods, non-competitive domestic industries. You're shredding all your international alliances because you're alienating not just Switzerland and Western Europe, you're alienating Japan, India, South Korea, Canada, Mexico. And then you start destroying your statistics agency, you start going after your central banks. So we've got Jay Powell having to take a very firm line saying, I'm not going to be driven to bring down Israel. So at some point, you assume that investors are going to say, America is ceasing to be a reliable,

• 54:25Rory Stewart?

  predictable investment location. But the global economy is in such trouble, where else do they put their money? I mean, the US is now at 70% of the world's stock market. If you go into a tracker fund, and this is, and US treasuries are where you put your money. So Trump is, there's so much in the bank, there's so much economic power that he can do these things that nobody else has ever done. And we don't quite know how long he can get away with it from, and at what point the catastrophe happens. And the catastrophe is, of course, eventually people selling off US treasuries.

• 54:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 54:57Rory Stewart?

  Leaving the US stock market and, and giving up on this project.

• 55:00Alastair Campbell?

  Or that the, the American economy sort of declines and drags the world into some kind of, you know, some sort of recession. And of course, don't forget, he's got a lot of form on this, going back to his very, very first day as president, term one. If you remember, the big row, day one of his first term, was him claiming there were more people at his inauguration than there had been at Obama's, when clearly there weren't. So he's, you know, if, if the facts don't fit his narrative, he changes the facts. And I should say that, Roy, have you ever heard of a guy called Olimpi Kavikin?

• 55:34Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 55:35Alastair Campbell?

  Olimpi Kavikin was a Soviet Union census director who made the mistake of producing a population count that was lower than Stalin had already announced. And for his troubles, I'm afraid he was arrested and executed. Um, so we're not quite there yet, but we're, we're some of the way there.

• 55:58Rory Stewart?

  It's not great. It's not great. And of course, it's fascinating. It's just final thing that remember that what undid Liz Truss was her attempts to attack the Treasury, the Bank of England and the analysis of the ignore our own statistical predictions and our own agencies. But in a small economy like Britain, that that was kind of the end for her. But in America, as you say, this was exactly if Argentina had done it, the moment at which there's a massive,

• 56:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 56:24Rory Stewart?

  The currency collapses, the stock market collapses, the debt goes crazy. But in the US.

• 56:29Alastair Campbell?

  Please, change. Okay. Well, let's see you tomorrow. Going to talk about Columbia. We're going to talk about a couple of aspects of France and Germany not going too well. We're going to talk about changes at the Samaritans, which I know quite a lot of people are worried about. So we'll see you then.

• 56:42Rory Stewart?

  Very good. And if I could, Alice, this is very cheeky, but I just wanted to plug. Two days ago was the first episode of my BBC series, which is partly inspired by a conversation I had with you on The Idea of the Hero. So it's a programme called The Idea of the Hero from Achilles to Zelensky. It's at nine o'clock in the morning on BBC Radio Four on a Monday, if listeners want to listen, a jolly romp through different heroes from the classical world, through to some painful discussions about Musk, Trump and Zelensky at the end.

• 57:11Alastair Campbell?

  I think you should also probably mention BBC Sounds, you know.

• 57:14Rory Stewart?

  BBC Sounds, that's right.

• 57:15Alastair Campbell?

  They will go on there eventually.

• 57:17Rory Stewart?

  They will go on.

• 57:17Alastair Campbell?

  A little shout out, if I may, Roy. We've just had, I know you don't really follow sport, the most exciting test match series, probably in my lifetime, certainly since Ian Botham's ashes, I think. England, India has been absolutely amazing. And I want to give a shout out to Test Match Special. When you're riding around the French countryside on a bicycle, there is no better thing to listen to than Test Match Special. So Aggers and Co, thank you so much.

• 57:43Rory Stewart?

  Oh, beautiful. Great. All right. Well, a happy night.

• 57:46Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

• 57:46Rory Stewart?

  See you soon. Bye bye.