541. Trump’s World Cup Mess and Kushner’s Albania Deal

As the Trump administration blocks a referee from entering the US, is this the most political world cup of all time, and just how messy will it get? Can the Democrats flip the Senate, and would it actually stop Trump? Is Jared Kushner turning the Balkans into his personal property portfolio? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in this week's edition of Question Time. __________ Enjoy Rory and Alastair’s interview with Odd Arne Westad by searching ‘Leading’ on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. 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: Adam Thorton, James Clayden 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.

• 0:01Alastair Campbell?

  There's a lot of worry about the Trumpification of this World Cup. A quarter of the 48 countries taking part are currently facing either travel bans, tight restrictions or high visa rejection rates. For the first time ever, Omar Artan, who's a referee from Somalia, he arrives at the airport and he's refused entry.

• 0:21Rory Stewart?

  And I noticed your great friend Gianni Anfantino, the head of FIFA, didn't use his amazing relationship with Donald Trump to get the Somali in.

• 0:29Alastair Campbell?

  There's Anfantino saying he doesn't get involved in day-to-day politics and stuff. This is the guy who gave Donald Trump the FIFA Peace Prize. The World Cup is the biggest sports event in the world, but I think this one is going to be horribly political.

• 0:50Alastair Campbell?

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• 0:52Rory Stewart?

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• 1:01Alastair Campbell?

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

• 1:12Rory Stewart?

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

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• 1:26Rory Stewart?

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• 1:33Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:41Rory Stewart?

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• 1:50Alastair Campbell?

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• 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.

• 2:14Rory 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 you're not already sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 2:44Rory 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/restorspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restorspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 3:03Speaker 02

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• 3:29Rory Stewart?

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

• 3:32Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. Rory, we're going to talk about the World Cup.

• 3:36Rory Stewart?

  Yay.

• 3:37Alastair Campbell?

  Starts Thursday. It's going to go for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. We're going to talk about the midterms in the US. We're going to talk about corruption in America. You want to talk about, know about Millay and there's a really interesting development in relation to AI. And we're going to talk about the election in Armenia. And I think my favorite question of the week, Rory, is I've been thinking a lot. Is what whether we would, if we had another life, whether we'd do politics.

• 4:04Rory Stewart?

  Ooh.

• 4:04Alastair Campbell?

  So, World Cup, World Cup, I know you're very, very, very excited about this. The question that we have on the World Cup is from Sunny in Lincolnshire. Is this the most political World Cup of all time? As a, as a World Cup historian, Rory, do you think it's the most political World Cup of all time?

• 4:22Rory Stewart?

  Um, I know what, uh, kind of historians do because I've been watching Dominic Sandbrook on our sister show very carefully. What happens is you stroke your chin and you say, no, actually, you know, there was a World Cup in nineteen seventy, whatever, which did this, that and the other.

• 4:37Alastair Campbell?

  Thirty four, go for thirty four if I were you.

• 4:39Rory Stewart?

  Go thirty four, brilliant, absolutely brilliant, okay. Um, now, Alison, tell us though about, a bit about the politics of the World Cup. What makes it political? I guess one big political thing is people like you are not going to the World Cup. How many people do you think are going to be boycotting the World Cup? Is the, is the sign of, signs of that beginning to happen?

• 4:55Alastair Campbell?

  Well, anecdotally, I know quite a lot of people. Um, look, the World Cup is the biggest sports event in the world, even bigger than the Olympics in terms of, you know, viewership around the world. Um, but I think this one is going to be horribly political for all sorts of, of different reasons. The reason I mentioned nineteen thirty four is that was, um, that was in Italy. And it was at the time that Mussolini was really kind of on the march, as it were. But I think this one is going to be pretty horrible, um, for all sorts of reasons.

• 5:31Rory Stewart?

  Help, help me understand. So all I understand about World Cups, I was at the Cathar World Cup.

• 5:35Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 5:35Rory Stewart?

  Which actually I really loved, there with the kids, because the stadiums were very, very close to each other. So it was amazing. I mean, you could watch two matches a day easily and you could just move between them. And it was a real, I, I think, very, very unusual to have these enormous stadiums all within about twenty minutes of each other.

• 5:51Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, it's not going to be like that in this one.

• 5:54Rory Stewart?

  No, so tell us, tell us about this one and how this is going to be very different from my experience.

• 5:58Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's going to be very different in lots of ways. First is it's the first time they've ever done a World Cup across three countries, USA, Mexico, Canada. The first game is going to be in Mexico. Um. Between Mexico and South Africa. Um. It's been expanded so as they can make even more money. And TV rights and the rest to forty eight countries. So it's going to be longer than previous World Cups as well. But it's really interesting. You remember Qatar. I bet you don't remember this, that on the day that the Qatar World Cup started. The BBC, I think, did not cover the opening ceremony. Instead, they did a documentary on human rights in Qatar. And then Russia, you had Russia, the World Cup, and a big part of that debate was sport washing.

• 6:43Alastair Campbell?

  Putin using sport to kind of brandish a different sort of image to the world. And also another big straw is the corruption in the bidding process. Now, I would argue.

• 6:54Alastair Campbell?

  You know, when when we were in um in Finland. And and I did the same at an event in uh Redford at the Redford Book Festival at the weekend. I did my question, which is the greatest threat to global stability right now? USA or China? USA is winning every single time, hands down. So I think there's a lot of worry about the the Trumpification of this World Cup. Just to give you some of the things that have allowed that have happened in recent days. For the first time ever, a referee from Somalia called Omar Artan, who's. You know, this is a guy who's done African Champions League finals. He's a proper professional referee.

• 7:33Rory Stewart?

  And he's and he was coming in to to do the refereeing for the World Cup. So he's been brought in for that.

• 7:38Alastair Campbell?

  So there are fifty two referees from different parts of the world. There's a couple of Brits all over the world. First time ever, a referee from Somalia, he arrives at the airport and he's refused entry. Despite having visa, despite having been okayed by FIFA, he's given no reason. He's just told, you're not welcome. Um. The Senegal team now. I think you can guess what colour most of the Senegal team are, Rory. They arrive in the United States. They arrive in the United States. Now, when England and Scotland arrived in the United States. They were warmly welcomed. They were brought through the security, onto the bus, off to the training camp, blah, blah, blah. The Senegal team were searched on the tarmac in front of the cameras, asked to take their shoes off.

• 8:22Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's now fourteen members of the Iran staff have been denied entry. On the referee, I heard an interview yesterday with Rudy Giuliani's son is the White House liaison man for the World Cup, and he was basically saying, why is this guy not being allowed in? We're not going to allow anybody in who threatens the security of the United States of America. No reason given whatsoever.

• 8:48Rory Stewart?

  And I noticed your great friend Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA, didn't use his amazing relationship with Donald Trump to get the Somali in. Instead, he's put out a solemn statement saying FIFA does not get involved in the internal immigration practices of another state.

• 9:04Alastair Campbell?

  No. So therefore, you're going to have a situation, and bear in mind, Rory, I think I'm right, that all of the American stadia are in blue areas, Democrat areas, okay? They've been open about the fact there's going to be an ICE surge in some of these stadium cities, so that they can be on the lookout for people who are in America, supporting their national team, and maybe not there, not shouldn't be there. A quarter of the 48 countries taking part are currently facing either travel bans, tight restrictions, or high visa rejection rates. Four competing countries, Iran, Haiti, Senegal, Ivory Coast,

• 9:43Alastair Campbell?

  they have faced full or very heavy partial bans. And there's Infantino saying he doesn't get involved in, you know, day-to-day politics and stuff. This is the guy who gave Donald Trump the FIFA Peace Prize since when we've had god knows how many more wars. And this is the guy who in a previous I don't get involved in politics said, quote, "Today I feel black. I feel disabled. I feel gay." In other words, there has been, there have been times when he's felt, I'll play into a different agenda. Okay, Rory, I've just had a brainwave. I'm texting Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada. He should make

• 10:25Alastair Campbell?

  a big, big political point. Give the Somali ref a visa. Get in touch with Infantino and say, change the refing schedules, he can ref the games here. And if there's any refs who are meant to be in Canada, they can go to America, find it obviously that they're white. And they can swap down. Great idea. The other thing that I think could be life threatening is the heat. Um, the world weather, the climate research group reckons that a quarter of the hundred and four matches are going to be played in conditions which are over the safety limits recommended by the Global Players Union. There are protocols for electrical storms.

• 11:08Alastair Campbell?

  They're predicting that several games will be interrupted by electrical storms, stadium evacuation. You've then got the whole thing about the pricing. So the bid to host the World Cup was won in 2018, okay? Now, okay, Trump was in power, but it was a very different to America to the one that we've got now. And the promise at the time was that the tickets for the final biggest sporting event, you know, of the four year period, the final, the maximum would be fifteen hundred and fifty dollars, okay? When they went on sale, the most expensive was listed at eight thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Then what you have is all this sort of trading of the tickets on the FIFA platform.

• 11:53Alastair Campbell?

  And every time you're trading your ticket, they're taking a thirty percent cut. Hotels are reporting, I don't know if this is a boycott, but hotels are reporting they're really struggling to fill their rooms. So I think it could be a bit of a mess. I mean, I don't want it to be a complete mess, but uh, I'm not feeling the joy that I normally feel in advance of a World Cup. And you know, the fact that I am, I will feel very, when Scotland kick off their first game, I will feel, well, maybe you should be there, but I don't know. I think it's going to be pretty horrible, I'll say.

• 12:25Rory Stewart?

  Right. Okay. Well, that brings us, I guess, on to the midterms, which is going to be the next big story coming out of the US, and which maybe we should have been covering more. There's been a lot of shenanigans. And a lot of critical stories. Let's just try to get to the first thing. So there's a question from Harriet. Please, could you give us an update on the US midterms? Will Trump manage to keep the Senate? How much does it actually matter if he loses it? Well, first thing is, there's been a lot of hope invested in the midterms. Trump is unpopular, more unpopular than he was last time round. A lot of focus has been put on the price of

• 13:07Rory Stewart?

  gas. In some states, you're seeing gas going up 25% above where it was before. And there's been a lot of hope that if he is roundly trounced in the midterms, this is going to make a real difference to Trump's administration and future chances. I got a lovely exchange with my nephew, Charlie Freeman, in the States, who's 18, has been following this all for me, and has sent me incredible amount of data on these races. He's operating for me almost as Rory operates for you. But the basic story seems to be that the prediction is that the Democrats will take the House of Representatives, the lower house, but that at the moment, the Senate looks too close to call. Over to you.

• 13:52Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. That's exactly what my Rory says. He says, Democrats currently three to one on to take the House. So that means very, very likely. Senate is on 50/50. I don't mean 50/50, that's going to what the makeup is, but it's 50/50 who takes it. I mean, look, I do think, it's interesting the point you made, maybe we don't talk about it enough. I sort of feel that even though Trump dominates a lot of our conversations, I feel that you and I have been, even subconsciously, maybe looking not to talk about him as much as we were at one point. And I think we have that in common with the public. I've been really interested how

• 14:34Alastair Campbell?

  Sometimes I mention things to people that Trump has said or done that I'm just assuming because he says and does them so loudly that they will know. And there's no one who didn't know about that, you know, because I think a lot of people are just turning off the news. Look, I think these elections are going to be bad for the Republicans. The one that my Rory says we should really keep an eye on, he thinks is the most interesting is Texas. Because, and what happened there in the run up, you had this situation where the two wings of the kind of traditional Republicans and the MAGA crowd have made it the most expensive, one of the most expensive primaries in Republican history. And what they've done is they've ended up, and this is where I think Trump becomes a problem,

• 15:17Alastair Campbell?

  because they've ended up picking as a candidate Trump's man, this guy Ken Paxton, who is just terrible. He's going to be a terrible, I think he's going to be a terrible candidate. He beat somebody who was a four time, John Cornyn, four time incumbent, traditional Republican, actually had voted with Trump mainly, but, you know, he said a few critical things. So Trump decided to go against him. Paxton, meanwhile, the guy who's now going to be representing the Republicans, he's been reported to the FBI for bribery by eight people who worked for him. He was impeached for bribery in Texas. His wife is a Republican senator who filed for divorce on what she called biblical grounds. He's been indicted for

• 16:00Alastair Campbell?

  securities fraud and he's got against this very interesting, we're looking, we're always looking for kind of interesting democratic talent. And there's this guy, James Talarico, pretty young, mid 30s, very, very, very Christian and seems to sort of allies Christian faith to everything he talks about. But if, if Trump lost Texas, which he won by 14 points in 2024, so it will be tough for Talarico. But the fact that they're even talking about this being too close to call is, you know, I think evidence of how much trouble Trump is potentially in.

• 16:33Rory Stewart?

  Quick, quick explainer again. And thank you to Charlie Freeman for, for reminding me of this all the time. It makes a difference whether the Democrats take both houses or not, just in terms of constitutionally, what can happen. So constitutionally, if they take just the House but not the Senate, they can block legislation. Trump won't be able to get any laws through. Question there, does he really govern by legislation? Increasingly, he governs by executive orders. If they take the Senate as well, it affects his ability to make appointments, affects his ability to appoint judges, ambassadors, officials, all of which have to go through a Senate confirmation process. Maine is the place to look. People will remember Susan Collins in Maine.

• 17:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 17:19Rory Stewart?

  Who is a very, very wily controversial figure. And up against her is a man called Graham Plathner. And Graham Plathner is a sort of Democrat larger than life, wearing a very strange, inappropriate tattoo, army veteran.

• 17:38Alastair Campbell?

  Is he not, is this the guy with the Nazi flavoured tattoo?

• 17:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, exactly, a Totenkopf tattoo. He's a really interesting character. I mean, we should try to get him on the show. And he seems in some of the polls to be narrowly leading Susan Collins in Maine. I think Maine, Michigan, Ohio are the main races to watch. We should start drilling in more into this though, because I think losing both houses will make a significant difference to Trump. And I think we should maybe get listeners engaging between now and November.

• 18:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 18:09Rory Stewart?

  In what's up and what's down and setting the stakes around that a little bit more.

• 18:14Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, can we not cover opinion polls too much because they do my head in?

• 18:18Rory Stewart?

  They do your head in. Maybe some of the characters. I liked your point about how Trump's own endorsement of Republicans against incumbent Republican senators is going wrong for him. But also extraordinary that he gets away with it. I mean, it shows the sort of residual power of Trump that he can do this.

• 18:36Alastair Campbell?

  He's still got the power in the party, yeah, yeah. And I think that's partly because a lot of them. Look, I wrote my column last week about this extraordinary encounter I had with a Trump supporter. I just bumped into them in the airport lounge in my recent travels. And I was on the phone to Fiona. And, you know, as you know, Rory, I always speak very quietly in public places if I'm on the phone.

• 19:00Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely.

• 19:01Alastair Campbell?

  But this guy heard me saying pretty disobliging things about Trump. And then literally the minute I came off the phone, we entered into a, an argument which, and I, I actually said, said in my column that four years of podcasting with you means I have sort of learned much better to kind of control my ire when it sort of rises, but I can still, I can still rise to it. This guy, he absolutely, there's nothing I could say, nothing I could say that he didn't come back with. Trump is the greatest president that we've ever had. I mean, he wouldn't accept that he lied. He wouldn't accept that he did things, he wouldn't accept that he was making money. Or if he did, he said, why shouldn't he? He's such a clever guy. He's got to do something when he stops being president. I hope he never stops

• 19:46Alastair Campbell?

  being president. It was just horrific. I ended up saying, oh, there's my flight being called and I walked out and, you know, went to a bookshop. But, so there are more people like that than I think we fully understand. It's a bit like some of the, the kind of Brexit people who in their hearts know that it's been a disaster, but they can't ever quite bring themselves to say that in any terms. And I think we've got a lot of that with Trump. But look, I think what we should do is, as you say, maybe focus on some of the interesting characters and some of these debates. And maybe also, I'll tell you the other thing I think is quite interesting, is what the Democrats' strategy is going to be in these winnable places. Are they going to try to come up with a positive

• 20:27Alastair Campbell?

  agenda of their own? Are they going to be anti-Trump? Or are they going to do, you know, very localized kind of campaigning that relates to their particular area? I'd find that interesting.

• 20:36Rory Stewart?

  Good. Well, let's get into the mechanics of it because the stakes are huge and, and it certainly is politics.

• 20:41Alastair Campbell?

  I also do, I do think that Trump wants whoever follows him to fail. I'm convinced of that. There's an absolute, it's a strand of narcissism that I think we underrate. I think he wants whoever comes after him to be a total failure.

• 20:54Rory Stewart?

  Well, Alison, I think maybe time to take a break. And just before we take a break there, maybe in Tombi, has Eddie Rahm has sold out Albania's natural beauty to the Kushner-Trump money grabber?

• 21:06Alastair Campbell?

  But what's really interesting, I was, you know, I know Albania quite well. I know Eddie Rahm, the prime minister, very well. And he's been sending me. His rebuttal of this with increasing sort of anger and frustration because he he said he actually says this is like Albania's wag the dog moment. Now, there is something clearly going on. I can't believe that Krishna and Ivanka would just say, I'm not really, we're buying this island. And the conspiracy theories are now saying it's going to be the new Epstein island, that they're going to get a new Epstein island. They're saying it's going to be a great tourism thing. So I I've seen different shades of coverage. I've seen some extraordinary stuff online. I can't remember a name, it was an Irish,

• 21:49Alastair Campbell?

  somebody online who was Irish, I think an Irish journalist, who was really deep into the detail of who is behind Kushner and Ivanka and their money. And it's a lot of very, very, very politically connected people. I've seen other stuff that says this isn't about building a kind of luxury tourism place. It's actually about them just creating their own escape from the world if it all goes tits up and the, you know, and the and the masses and the peasants come, you know, with their pitchforks to get the get the the super elite and the super rich like like Kushner. And I've seen Eddie Rama's messages to me when I keep saying, what the hell's going on here? When he basically says that this

• 22:33Alastair Campbell?

  is all being kind of blown out of all proportion, Iranians are behind all the social media stuff, the protests are nowhere near as big as the pictures that you're seeing on television. He's got a spat this morning online with Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders talks about 100,000 people out there. Eddie Rama says it's no more than 2,000. The maximum was 8,000. So I don't really know what's going on, to be absolutely honest. But I'm very suspicious of anything that has Kushner at the heart of it.

• 23:00Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, and you're right to be. So, listen, I I think it's obvious why Eddie Rama did it. And I think everyone knows, and he'll deny it till he goes blue in the face. But he's doing it to curry favour with Trump. That's basically what it is. It's part of a pattern. Look all the way through the Balkans. Eddie Rama hands over a pristine island to Jared Kushner. He's going to build 10,000-room luxury resort and destroy one of the last pristine islands off the coast of Albania. Dodik hands over mining concessions. The Bosnians give fuel. And in Serbia, they were trying to let the Trump family build hotels on the side of the Ministry of Defence. They're hoping by doing so is that they get invitations to Mar-a-Lago, that they get US support on sanctions.

• 23:45Rory Stewart?

  This is why they also want to join the Board of Peace and all this kind of stuff. In no way is this anything like a transparent procurement process. This is not... You know, let's say Kier Sama got out of bed in the morning and thought what he'd want to do is turn the Isles of Scilly into a luxury resort, and the British government owned the Isles of Scilly. There would be a huge process, presumably of environmental impact assessments, community consultations, and then you would go out to some sort of tender and procurement process. My guess is Jared Kushner wouldn't be getting it for a knockdown price and building 10,000 flats.

• 24:21Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. But I wondered, but you mentioned when we were in Serbia, right next to the place where Kushner and Witkoff's money-grabbing kids were trying to build a hotel. And it's not being built because of the protests. So I guess what's happening here is the protests are going on in the hope that this thing doesn't go ahead.

• 24:40Rory Stewart?

  And the hope is that they, I think people are hoping they can shame Eddie Rama to back out and not hand over prime Albanian pristine real estate to the Trump family in the hope that they can buy concessions.

• 24:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, just to give you his official line state, the planning process is ongoing, the environmental process is ongoing, the design process is ongoing. No project has been approved, no construction blueprint exists, no final development scheme has been presented. This is a process, not a project. Anyway, it does mean there have been these pretty large protests, but I think it's interesting how there's clearly something going on. And like I say, I wouldn't trust Kushner, even though my friend Tony Blair keeps telling me how clever he is and how much hard work he's doing on the border peace with him. I think this could be an example, both of a government trying to curry favour with Trump by doing something to his family, and

• 25:33Alastair Campbell?

  that the the kind of online world and the misinformation world is also kind of at play here. It's a it's messy and complicated when the what you get online is something that is very, very simple.

• 25:46Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Well, let's take a quick break. And when we come back from break, we've got an election in Armenia, which we don't talk about enough. Also, an amazing announcement from Milei in Argentina, who's announced that AI is going to be able to form its own corporations, which has the dangerous possibility that there's going to be no humans responsible that you can put in prison behind these corporations, and some very reckless activities can follow. And then there was a question you wanted to do on whether you'd choose politics again. So let's speak after the break.

• 26:15Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

• 26:21Alastair Campbell?

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• 26:31Rory Stewart?

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• 26:50Alastair Campbell?

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• 27:26Speaker 04

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• 28:17Alastair Campbell?

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

• 28:20Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart. So let me start you with a question which relates to something you've been looking at. Harry, are the elections in Armenia positive for Europe's future? Tom, what do the Armenian election results mean for the UK? We've had tons of questions on this. Take us through the Armenian election and maybe tell us why we've had tons of elections, questions on the Armenian elections.

• 28:45Alastair Campbell?

  I think we've probably had tons of questions on the Armenian elections because people are aware that it was very significant, even though it's a relatively small country, about 3 million people. But it was significant in this seemingly never-ending battle that Vladimir Putin is waging to keep any country that is in his sort of reasonably close orbit under his wing. And what you have with the guy who has won the election, this is the guy who was serving as Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, he has won and he's won pretty bigly, as Donald Trump might say. So Armenia was once probably Russia's closest ally in the South Caucasus.

• 29:30Alastair Campbell?

  They've had really deep ties historically and Putin has been getting more and more angry, more and more agitated. A week before the elections, he actually recalled his ambassador. In protest that Armenia is growing ties with the European Union, he warned them that unless they stop this sort of drive towards Europe and the EU in particular, that they face what he called the Ukrainian scenario. Well, you can make your own mind up about what that might mean. He's putting all sorts of economic pressure on, suspending a gas deal that they had. They were talking about kicking them out of the Eurasian Economic Union. And, you know, so all that pressure's coming on, plus all the stuff that they do. We saw how they did it in Moldova. You send in the spies, you do the disinformation,

• 30:15Alastair Campbell?

  you get all the online stuff going. And Pashinyan held his ground. He hosted a big defence cooperation agreement with France. This is the one that really would have got to Putin. He's recognised the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which has got a contract out. Anyway, he won a majority. The party that came second was Russian backed and it won 25% of the seats in the parliament. So I'd say, I'd say it answered the question. I think it's pretty significant and it is good news for Europe.

• 30:46Rory Stewart?

  One of the things that struck me quickly on this is we covered on the podcast, people with very long memories back in 2023, the final loss of Nagorno-Karabakh. And Nagorno-Karabakh was an Armenian enclave, surrounded by Azerbaijani territory. Armenia and Azerbaijan being in a conflict going back decades, one of the great kind of Caucasus conflicts, international conflicts, the 90s. And essentially what's happened is Azerbaijan has become much, much richer on its oil revenues than its neighbour Armenia. Its military's become very strong. The Turks have pumped in drones and weapons. And they captured Nagorno-Karabakh, displacing, I think, 100,000 or more Armenians.

• 31:31Rory Stewart?

  Under this guy's prime ministership, so you would have thought that he would be punished for that. And actually, interestingly, it seems as though the Armenian voter blames the Russians more for failing to help them against the Azeris, recognised there was not that much the Armenians could do, and this was a kind of unwinnable fight. And he's been rewarded for something quite difficult in a country where there'll be big strands of nationalism, which is sort of acknowledging reality. So instead of everything that I thought would happen on the back of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is this kind of great unresolved bleeding sore, leading to continual nationalist protest, and it may, maybe in five, 10 years' time,

• 32:16Rory Stewart?

  there'll be another war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. But at the moment, what's interesting is that the man who lost that territory, and basically said, there's nothing we can do about it, has won an election.

• 32:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. The other election that happened at the weekend, that you just said made me think of, was Kosovo. Albin Kurti won the election. On a terribly low turnout, though. The turnout was somewhere in the 30s. It was really, really bad. But he's won the election. That means, by the way, Albin, if you're listening, that our offer of a joint interview on the rest of his politics leading with the Serb leader Aleksandar Vucic remains, it stands. But I also think, I think we should, if we can, Rory, if we can track him down and persuade him, I think we should go and talk to Mr. Pashinian in Armenia, because I think it's really interesting what he's done. As you say, I imagine that what was

• 33:09Alastair Campbell?

  seen as his conceding defeat in relation to Nagorno-Karabakh, given how much blood and treasure was spent in trying to keep it, I thought that would really, really, really harm him. I also thought that he actually might be more harmed than he seems to have been by being so out there in terms of his projection of Armenia as a European Union-focused country, as opposed to, you know, classic Eastern European leaning towards Russia. But he seems to have been rewarded on both fronts. So it just shows you, stand up for big, bold things, and you can win.

• 33:44Rory Stewart?

  Great. Just before we go to the next question, quick plug. You've been talking a lot about this incredible new book called The Nord Stream Conspiracy. And in the newsletter, we've interviewed the author, Boyan Panchevsky, about how you uncover a story on the sky. This is amazing. As you've told people on the show, it's got everything. It's got submarine divers, CIA, SVR, conspiracies, gas, energy. So sign up the newsletter.

• 34:12Alastair Campbell?

  And an erotic model.

• 34:14Rory Stewart?

  And an erotic model. Sign up the newsletter to read that interview without the erotic model on Thursday.

• 34:19Alastair Campbell?

  If the book, which is truly brilliant, is ever turned into a film, I think the title could be Freya. I think Freya, the erotic model, is in some ways the most interesting character in the whole damn thing. She's the one, without giving too much away, she's the one who puts the bomb on the bloody pipeline. Amazing. It is a truly, truly brilliant non-fiction book that reads like a novel and it's absolutely brilliant. So I'm glad we've got old Bojan in the newsletter. Now Rory, you wanted to talk about Millet, Christina from Buenos Aires, capital of Argentina. Argentina is now allowing AI systems to incorporate its companies with no

• 35:01Alastair Campbell?

  humans behind them and no one to hold accountable. Is this the most reckless legal experiment in modern history? Or just the first of many countries to race to the bottom on AI accountability? My God, that is quite a story.

• 35:15Rory Stewart?

  It's an extraordinary story. So this comes out of the fact that Javier Millet wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times announcing this policy. And then Yuval Noah Harari, my friend who we've interviewed a couple of times on leading, then responded with his own op-ed in the Financial Times. Worth reading both pieces. I mean, the first thing that is absolutely staggering is Millet announces this policy. And at the core of this policy is some idea that you could set up a company run by AI.

• 35:46Rory Stewart?

  Where there was not unlimited human liability behind it. Some idea is of limited liability, or even that actually it's the AI that's going to end up being accountable for the company as opposed to the human. And he introduces it, you know, really to wind up most of our listeners, saying, the great model for this is the Dutch East India Company. If you listen to the wonderful Empire podcast, our sister podcast that William Daranpool does with Anita Anand, the Dutch and the British East India Companies are the most extraordinary examples of rapacious capitalism in a world, you know, like a world of hyperscalers running the universe, destroying states, hoovering up money, corruption, et cetera.

• 36:29Rory Stewart?

  So amazing that Millet says that his model for this is the Dutch East India Company. But the problem that Yuval points out is that in the end, you cannot send an AI to jail. And the ultimate backstop for a company misbehaving, there are so many incentives for a company to misbehave because an AI running a company is basically given the task of revenue and survival of the company. And if they feel the revenue and the survival of the company is under risk, the AI could begin to do more and more radical things. It could risk bankruptcy, it could lie to people who are making loans to it, it could begin to cut laws around pollution, and who knows what else.

• 37:14Rory Stewart?

  And when it's caught, what can you do to it? Absolutely nothing. You can't put an AI in jail, it would be like hanging a pig. So to finish with Christina's point, this is the big choice that we face. Millet has made a choice, right? His choice is AI is the future of the world. And that the solution therefore is Argentina has no choice other than to lean into it. That either you get with the American program or you're doomed. And so Argentina is going to open up, it's going to be the most liberal, most open country to AI in the world. And this amazing AI revolution is going to happen in Argentina. The downside is it might be a bit like saying, America's invented the nuclear weapons. So we're going to make our economic model, letting them test it all over our country. Back to you.

• 37:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. So is this why is Peter Thiel involved in this? Peter Thiel who's flitted to Argentina because apparently it doesn't feel terribly safe in America.

• 38:07Rory Stewart?

  Very, very much. I mean, Millet denies it, but all this references the Dutch East India Company are absolutely central Peter Thiel cod history and sovereign individual stuff.

• 38:19Alastair Campbell?

  Well, non cod history. You mentioned William Dalrymple and his East India Company book. It's called The Anarchy. Strongly recommended. And you get a flavour from that title of Willie's view of how things went. And I suspect, I've not heard him much on AI, but I suspect he sees rapaciousness being repeated by the capitalist class, which is why we also love the Pope.

• 38:42Rory Stewart?

  But Alice, just to sort of put you on the spot for a second before we move on. I mean, I think this will be the question we keep returning to again and again with AI, which is what do you do with a technology which looks like it could make America an incredible amount of money, give it incredible national security power, transform all its services?

• 39:04Alastair Campbell?

  And China.

• 39:05Rory Stewart?

  And China. And, you know, we could actually talk about the fact that the European Union's just brought in an AI act. And basically, not surprisingly, the European Union, being the European Union, is very much safety first, Europe first. And from the point of view of the AI companies, an enormous amount of regulations and stopping the kind of innovation they can do in the US. And probably what will happen.

• 39:29Rory Stewart?

  Is that Europe's being completely rational, they're completely right to be very worried about the risks. But the consequences of that is the US, which will not be regulating as much, which will be innovating much more, will be flying ahead. And we'll find ourselves technologically even more behind, even if we feel safer.

• 39:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, somebody sent me a very interesting note on the AI, the European one, and I think you're right, it says the five key requirements, AI literacy. Organizations have a duty to ensure staff using AI understand the risks, et cetera, to human oversight, well, that's something that clearly Peter Thiel and Millay don't want with their AI companies, transparency, people must be informed when they're interacting with it. Risk management and documentation and compliance. So I guess an American would look at that and say, that is why Europe's going to fall so far behind us. Or do you think there's something, is there a more positive judgment we can make of that?

• 40:25Rory Stewart?

  I think if you were going to be favorable towards regulators, you'd say sometimes regulation actually helps innovation. And the great example of that is that introducing the brake pad, which was Mrs. Benz, as in Mercedes Benz, developed the brake pad. Allowed cars to go much faster. It's kind of counterintuitive, you know, having a brake allows you to go faster. Having safety regulation allows you to innovate more because before that, people went around in front of cars with little little red flags saying beware of the car and actually the same to you of airbags, seatbelts, all that stuff. So that's the positive case. The other positive case for Europe is that it's putting, it's demanding European headquarters. Companies are right at the heart of our critical infrastructure. This is trying to get away from

• 41:08Rory Stewart?

  the threat after Greenland that Trump is going to try to weaponize American companies to extort concessions out of Europe. And they're also trying to build a European sovereign cloud. So that not all our data and cloud computing is owned by the US, but none of this is going to work. Unless we can start building a lot of data centers and it's going to be very difficult to build data centers if we don't have cheap energy. And then without cheap energy, we won't have the data centers, we won't have the weights and it's all a bit for the birds because actually it's only going to be the Americans and Chinese who can do any of this stuff anyway.

• 41:42Alastair Campbell?

  Just briefly, word to the last question. You mentioned, you mentioned the Pope, who I was hero worshiping last week and I therefore followed his procession through Spain. Over a million people turned out to hear him speak, but I, I don't think he did himself a lot of favors with some of the women in Spain when he, I think if he'd done it at a mass, but he went to the Congress of Deputies to do quite a big thing about abortion. I think he should have waited to the mass for that, probably. Certainly, one of my Spanish friends was very, very, very cross with him and she was, she was part of the hero worshiping

• 42:22Alastair Campbell?

  over the encyclical. The Pope's encyclical remains, if you haven't read it yet, I was at this book festival in Retford at the weekend and I was very upset. Only four people had read the full encyclical and two of them were, two of them were Irish. Right, last question.

• 42:38Rory Stewart?

  So it's from Oliver. If given another life, would you have chosen politics again? And I think we can finish on that.

• 42:44Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, depends when the life would be. I think I would, yeah. I think I would. I think if I was young now, if I was 25, 30 now, I think I would definitely choose politics, yeah. Because I think it matters now, possibly more than ever. In fact, I mentioned the Retford Book Festival, there was a very interesting and quite moving question from a woman who said that she was standing for Labour in a, in a local, a parish council election. Parish council. And she said she was getting abuse, she was getting online threats, she was beginning to wonder whether she should be doing it. And she said she was having to answer for

• 43:28Alastair Campbell?

  every single thing that the Labour government was being criticised for. You know, she's standing for the parish council and people are saying, you know, what about this in the Middle East and why aren't you doing more about this in Africa? I want to be your parish councillor. And she said to me, what advice do you have? And I said, well, don't look at the stuff online and just, you know, try to focus on the good that you can do. But it's bloody hard these days. And it's, by the way, we're coming up, Rory, to, I know you were a friend of Joe Cox, as was I, we're coming up to the 10th anniversary of her death. So a thought for Joe and for Kim, her sister, who's now doing the old job. But I was really quite moved by this one because, you know, you just think even

• 44:12Alastair Campbell?

  at parish council level, she's having to deal with all this bloody online abuse and threats and stuff. So I'd still do it. I'd still do it. Yeah, I'd do it. Would you do it?

• 44:21Rory Stewart?

  Glad, glad. Very good.

• 44:23Alastair Campbell?

  Would you?

• 44:24Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I'd give it a go. I think the interesting thing about politics is where's the space? I mean, you've got to work in an environment where there's the space. And I think what I've probably learned is there may not be much space for my type of centrist politics. Somebody very kindly tried to run an opinion poll for me and thought that a kind of Rory style party might get about 20% of the vote. But that it's very difficult to imagine in a modern kind of polarised world.

• 44:49Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not sure about that.

• 44:50Rory Stewart?

  Oh, okay. You think the centre's still got potential?

• 44:52Alastair Campbell?

  I think the centre has got potential. The centre in most parts of the world is just not being offered at the moment because people are tending towards extremes. So, and listen, by the way, 20% is a bloody good place to start. I wouldn't, I wouldn't rule them out, Rory. I can be your driver, drive you around the place.

• 45:15Rory Stewart?

  See you later. Thank you, Alice. I look forward to seeing you.

• 45:18Alastair Campbell?

  Take care.

• 45:18Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

• 45:19Alastair Campbell?

  Bye.

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