Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 415. Iran, Israel, and Trump: War in the Middle East About this episode Are we heading for all-out war between the US, Netanyahu and the Iranian regime? Is the West betraying international law in its support of Israel's pre-emptive strikes on Iran? Why did Starmer u-turn on a national inquiry into child grooming gangs?
Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more.
The Rest Is Politics Plus: Become a member for exclusive bonus content, early access to Question Time episodes to 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. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics.
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 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 GetFuse.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]
Assistant Producers: India Dunkley, Evan Green
Video Editor: Josh Smith
Producers: Nicole Maslen, Fiona Douglas
Social Producer: Celine Charles
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
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Alastair Campbell? The Rest Is Politics is efficiently powered by Fuse Energy.
0:07 Rory Stewart? If you've got an electric vehicle, or if you're thinking about it, Fuse has a smart tariff with overnight charging for only £0.05 a kilowatt hour.
0:15 Alastair Campbell? And that's now available on both Apple and Android app stores and works with a wide range of chargers. No faff, no filibustering, no unexpected U-turns.
0:25 Rory Stewart? So quite unlike politics, and you don't even need a PhD in engineering. You just plug in your EV before bed and it'll be ready before the headlines hit your inbox.
0:32 Alastair Campbell? So if you need a charger installed, Fuse will sort the hardware, the fitting and the setup, often in under a week.
0:38 Rory Stewart? And when you sign up, you'll get the Trip+ Members Deal completely free. Ad-free listening, early access to Question Time, bonus episodes and pre-sale tickets to our live shows.
0:49 Alastair Campbell? So while your car recharges, your podcast feed gets a power boost too.
0:53 Rory Stewart? Just head to getfuse.com/politics, download the app and use the code POLITICS.
1:00 Alastair Campbell? Smart tariff, swift installation, no white papers, green papers or red tape required.
1:11 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
1:13 Alastair Campbell? And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.
1:26 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve and of course the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN and it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.
1:50 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?
1:56 Rory Stewart? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics.
2:10 Rory Stewart? And the link is in the episode description.
2:12 Speaker 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/restpolitics.
2:51 Rory Stewart? Welcome to the Rest is Politics with me Rory Stewart.
2:53 Alastair Campbell? And me Alastair Campbell.
2:55 Rory Stewart? So Alistair, I think today we're going to focus on two things. The first is the Iran-Israel conflict and what's going on there, how the West is responding, how Trump is responding, and what kind of danger this poses to the world. And the second is we're going to look at the recent report after the break on grooming gangs in the UK, what the story's about, the horror of these grooming gangs and what the government's doing about it.
3:18 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
3:19 Rory Stewart? So Alistair, over to you maybe first on maybe a little bit of an update on what happened since we did our emergency podcast on Friday. We're now recording on Tuesday morning. What's happened since in terms of the war between Israel and Iran?
3:33 Alastair Campbell? I think people understand that this is a really huge thing for the world. It's very hard to know where to start. Maybe we should start at the G7 because Donald Trump has dominated it. Day one, the news that came out of the G7 in Canada was Trump arriving and immediately saying it was terrible that Putin wasn't there, which I think took a lot of people by surprise. And then by the end of the day, he was announcing that he was leaving to go back, he indicated to get himself more properly, more fully engaged in what's going on between Iran and Israel. I think another place to start, just before we started recording Rory, I watched Benjamin Netanyahu's interview that he did last night with American TV, ABC News. And whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of what's
4:18 Alastair Campbell? going on, and we will without doubt come on to those. If you want to see an absolute masterclass in
4:27 Alastair Campbell? Communication in a time of of crisis and conflict, you have to hand it to him. The guy is appalling on so many levels, but I tell you, it was a brilliant, brilliant piece of communication. I don't know if you managed to see any of it, Roy.
4:40 Rory Stewart? I did, I did. You sent it to me and I I watched a bit of that.
4:43 Alastair Campbell? And what did you, what were your impressions?
4:45 Rory Stewart? So the first thing I think I picked up on that clip that you sent me, it's a 25 minute interview, is that the interviewer begins immediately by saying, I hear Iran is reaching out, trying to push for peace through intermediaries. Have they reached out to you? And Netanyahu says, no, but I'm not very surprised because of course they want to keep this fake negotiation going while they continue to develop their two existential threats of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons against Israel. And of course, we won't continue to tolerate because we're not at the, you know, whatever it is, we're not at the 12th hour. This is the, you know, this is the very last minute in this whole thing. So yes, as you say, frames the whole thing like that from the beginning. Let's just quick, quick update for listeners on what's happened.
5:28 Rory Stewart? So people who listen to our report immediately after the first strikes will remember that the strikes began with Israel launching attacks which hit the major enrichment facility. That's the enrichment facility at Nantaz, which is where, and we can get into a bit of the technicalities about this, but that's where a lot of these centrifuges for enrichment are located. And then attacks against the most senior figures, particularly in the Iranian military and security, so killing the head of the armed forces, killing the head of the revolutionary guard, also killing two senior scientists who do research into nuclear stuff. That was then followed by an Iranian response which hit buildings in Israel.
6:13 Rory Stewart? And as of last night, I think the figures were that 224 people had been killed in Iran, 1,400 injured, and 24 people had been killed in Israel with 600 injured. And the striking thing is despite threats from the Iranians, they have not attacked the US and its allies, they've not attacked other Gulf states. So they haven't broadened the conflicts. And I suspect that is because they want to make sure that this is very clearly them acting in self-defense against attacks from Israel, responding to what's been done to them rather than broadening the conflict.
6:52 Alastair Campbell? Maybe the way to think of this is that Iran is trying to keep the United States sitting on the fence, whereas Israel is trying to make sure that America is very onside. And the reason why I was so struck by that interview that Netanyahu gave, one was he did it with one of the channels that is not Fox News. It was ABC, the one that was recently in dispute with Trump. But he had several audiences. One of the audiences was Trump, and he was very flattering. He kept talking about Trump's amazing leadership in the first term and the importance of the Abraham Accords. America's with us, Trump is with us, we have no greater ally. Obviously, a major audience was the Israeli people, for whom he invoked the spirit.
7:36 Alastair Campbell? The only mention of Britain, actually, was when he invoked the spirit of the blitz in Britain. And that was what he was seeing amongst the Israeli people. He had an audience that was the Iranian leadership. And I think this business, this story that's doing the rounds, that Netanyahu told Trump that they could take out the Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader, and Trump said not to. I think that is a piece of absolutely amazing psychological warfare. And he continued with that. As you say, he also had these constant framing of this within a bigger battle, in which Israel is basically fighting for the whole world. Now, I know that there will be lots of people whose eyes will roll at that.
8:19 Alastair Campbell? But actually, I felt that for those various audiences, he was signalling determination, strength, constantly praising the operation, constantly praising his military and intelligence services, who have done a pretty amazing job. And the other thing that made it very, very powerful is a piece of communication. And this just shows you how the agenda moves on. He wasn't asked a single question about Gaza. He wasn't asked a single question about the role of the ICJ, the International Criminal Court, which has indicted him in relation to Gaza. Not a single question about the United Nations or other countries' views.
8:54 Rory Stewart? Do you think this was agreed in advance with ABC? Or do you think they would have been free to ask those questions if they'd wanted? I mean, because they got a pretty big scoop there. They got an interview with Netanyahu in a hidden, secret bunker.
9:06 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
9:06 Rory Stewart? So presumably, the Israelis could say, we're happy to do this, but you can't ask any questions about Gaza.
9:11 Alastair Campbell? They might be able to do that, but I'd be very surprised if ABC would go along with that. They might have done that. And added to which... Once you're into the interview, unless you've absolutely sold your soul, you can ask whatever questions you want. So when, for example, he framed it as this is a battle between good and evil, the interviewer would have been perfectly justified to come back and said, yes, but this is also a battle between international law and illegality. And he could have got into that way. So I'd be very surprised. I'd be very surprised.
9:42 Rory Stewart? Yeah, two things I'd like to get on to. One is the way in which this attack suddenly raises huge questions about what's going to happen in the Middle East. But the second one, which you've tempted me into, is this question about this very weird absence of focus on international law. What Israel has done would traditionally have been considered very, very dubious under international law. And in fact, from the point of view of many international lawyers, entirely illegal. And people who want to read the international legal argument, there's a good piece which we can share with subscribers, written in The Guardian by an international lawyer, explaining why what Israel has done is illegal under international law.
10:26 Rory Stewart? You can also see the statement from the International Energy Authority, so this is the UN's nuclear watchdog, saying they are completely opposed to what Israel's done. So in the spirit, Alastair, of disagreeing agreeably, I'm going to make the case for the mullahs. Now, let me, before I do this, just put on the record that I do not think there is a moral equivalence between Israel and Iran, any more than I think there's a moral equivalence between the US and China. Awful though, truly awful though, the behaviour of the US under Trump has been truly awful, though the behaviour of Israel under Netanyahu has been. That doesn't make them moral equivalents. There are fundamental differences. Netanyahu is democratically elected in free fair elections by the Israeli people.
11:11 Rory Stewart? There is a strong independent judiciary. There are changes in government. Iran is not like that. Iran is a proper autocratic, theocratic regime that funds hostile proxy terrorist groups around the world, oppresses its people, is deeply unpopular. So let me just put that on record. But the point is not moral equivalence. The point is the legal argument. And the question with the legal argument is, is Israel any more justified in attacking Iran in terms of international law than Iran would be in attacking Israel in terms of international law? And what do I mean by that? Well, the argument is about preemption, and the argument effectively is like a bar and brawl. If you think someone's going to punch you, you can punch them.
11:55 Rory Stewart? But the only legal grounds for doing that is if you're very confident that they can punch you and that they're going to punch you, right? They need capacity and they need intent. In other words, if you're going after Iran, you need to prove that they are absolutely either have a nuclear weapon or about to get it, and they're about to fire it at you. Whereas in fact, the conclusion is that Iran is almost certainly 12 months, very best case scenario from the Iranian point of view, six months off getting a nuclear weapon. And there's so far no sense that there's any plan for them to drop it on top of Israel. Now, let's put it the other way around. Preemption, if you allow preemption of this sort of what Israel's just done, what is to stop Hezbollah and Iran saying, we have pretty good reason to believe Israel's going to attack us?
12:40 Rory Stewart? And indeed, they would have been right to say that because Israel certainly has attacked them. And in the case of Hezbollah, basically wiped them out. And therefore, in order to stop them, back to the bar and brawl, to stop them punching us, we're going to punch them first. In other words, what would be to stop them immediately after October the 7th, launching every missile that Hezbollah had in Lebanon and every missile that Iran had against Israel, saying, we're doing it because if we don't do it now and if we sit tight, Israel's going to attack us? Oh, Lord, Rory, I think you've just slightly made the Israelis' case for them there. Well, what do you, what do you mean by that? Because let me, let me sort of get into a gribble disagreement here. Because what actually happened after October the 7th is that, for whatever reason, and partly because there was a lot of US pressure on them,
13:24 Rory Stewart? Hezbollah were convinced not to release what were estimated at about 100,000 missiles, which they had in Lebanon against Israel. And Israel went for them. They were convinced to hold back, and they were told, if you hold back, we'll restrain Israel. MIsels came over, but many, a tiny fraction of what they had.
13:41 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
13:41 Rory Stewart? Again, Iran was convinced to stay out of that war. They did not do what Hamas wanted, which was to follow up and attack Israel. And again, they were convinced not to do it because they were worried that if they did it, in both cases, Israel would respond.
13:54 Alastair Campbell? With American support.
13:55 Rory Stewart? The lesson they will have drawn is that by not using their missiles when they had the opportunity to do so, they just gave Israel time to organise themselves and attack them.
14:05 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
14:05 Rory Stewart? So the real preemptive strike to defend yourself, if it's completely justified in international law to attack an enemy before they attack you, logically, they should have attacked Israel before they were attacked.
14:17 Alastair Campbell? Okay, I get that. So I fear incoming, I fear incoming messages from those in Israel who tend to criticise us over our discussions and these things. So there's me explaining what an extraordinary piece of communication Benjamin Netanyahu's interview with ABC was. And there's you voluntarily basically saying you're putting the case for the mad Mullers, as Bibi calls them.
14:40 Rory Stewart? Exactly. And the one thing that is interesting in Israel is that even the most liberal Israelis, um, you know, even, I was talking to, to, um, Josh Hammer was just talking about this in relation to seeing somebody who's a Bernie Sanders supporter on the far left of Israeli politics being very strongly in favour of attacking Iran. I mean, the one big consensus in Israeli society is that Iran is an existential threat and should be hit. This is very popular within Israel.
15:08 Alastair Campbell? I'll tell you one thing I did see this week, which I, I, and I'd be interested in your take on whether you think that the Americans and the Israelis care about this. It was a huge survey by something called Arab Barometer, which tries to assess public opinion across the Arab world. And it, interestingly, obviously lots of hostility to Netanyahu over Gaza, lots of hostility to.
15:32 Alastair Campbell? To America, basically though, accepts the right of Israel, most respondents has recognized Israel's right to exist. But what has happened is that the favorability of United States, Britain, France is seeing a very, very, very substantial decline across the Arab world, I mean, really big numbers. So, I mean, I just don't know whether the the the politics of this in the region, we don't maybe understand the extent to which it does matter in this context. The the Arab barometer's headline was, you know, it was the sort of the unspoken piece of this jigsaw was, street Arab opinion about where this was going.
16:10 Rory Stewart? Yeah, I mean, it it's it is incredible, the change that's happened, I think. And and I think there's also a sense of, I was just watching Obama's 2008 speech to AIPAC, to the the Israeli lobbying organization US, in which he proclaims that the total unbreakable, unquestionable US support for Israel. Whether a democratic candidate like Obama 20 years later would talk in that language after what's happened, that's what I'm not quite sure. I mean, is what's happened in Gaza actually in the end going to be something that in the longer term will make it more and more difficult for people to stand up and say what Obama said in 2008, which is effectively, there is nothing that Israel could ever do.
16:54 Rory Stewart? They could do anything, almost by implication, they could drop a nuclear bomb on someone, we would still support Israel to the end.
16:59 Alastair Campbell? Just give you one point from this, one point from this survey. Eighty-four percent of Kuwaitis said they boycotted companies that support Israel. Sixty-two percent have made donations to support the people of Gaza. Forty percent say they've shared pro Palestinian messages on social media. Twenty-two percent have participated in public activities in solidarity with Gazans. And of course, in a lot of these countries, protest is kind of, you know, quite difficult to organize. So I do think that is one thing that doesn't get much play, which we should occasionally keep our eyes on, is what what real public opinion in the Arab world is saying. The other point, which I think it wouldn't be unreasonable. For people to make is if it is so abhorrent, the idea that another country, Iran in this
17:42 Alastair Campbell? case, should have a nuclear weapon, why does nobody ever question Israel's possession of nuclear weapons? That seems to be to have been not even a part of the thinking here.
17:53 Rory Stewart? And I know this is really getting into dangerous ground, but again, would it have been legitimate for Iran to attack Israel at the moment when Israel was developing its nuclear weapon? Would it have been legitimate if they had got information that Israel was about to create a nuclear weapon to attack those facilities before that nuclear weapon was created? Would it have been legitimate for Pakistan to launch attacks on India when India was building its nuclear weapon? Or for India to launch attacks on Pakistan when Pakistan was building its nuclear weapon? Would it have been legitimate for the West to attack China when China was developing its nuclear weapon? Would it have been legitimate for China and Russia to have attacked Britain and France when they were developing their
18:35 Rory Stewart? nuclear weapons? Are we in a world where we're saying that anybody developing a nuclear weapon is fair game and can be attacked? Or are we saying if our enemies develop a nuclear weapon, they're fair game, but if they're our allies, it's absolutely fine?
18:49 Alastair Campbell? The answer to the question ought to be resolved by international law. I think the problem that we're wrestling with here is that the international institutions have been deliberately fundamentally undermined. We've talked a lot about how the United Nations has become virtually dysfunctional because the major powers, the five permanent members, Russia and China veto anything that America and Britain want to do, and now America undermining the United Nations basically from day one, from Trump term two, he wasn't that fond of it in term one, but undermining it term two. And then the other two, of course, are the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. So the the post- War, the Second World War, the post-war order has been eroded.
19:34 Alastair Campbell? And by the way, I think Trump welcomes that. I thought he was fascinating yesterday. Let's just wind back a little bit to the G7. We'll come back to Iran, Israel. But just think about this. He goes to the G7. America is clearly the biggest power within the G7. And literally, the very first thing he does is to complain that Russia was expelled. And he doesn't set the context of the fact that Russia invaded Crimea and that led to the expulsion. He basically just said, it really pissed off Putin. Brackets, unspoken, so no wonder he's going for Ukraine. And then day two, let's be honest, why has he left early? He may argue because Iran, Israel, he has to get more involved, et cetera.
20:19 Alastair Campbell? The truth is, you can do that from anywhere. Yes, it's better if you've got the people in the room, but you've got the communications. You can do it from anywhere. I think he was deliberately saying, you lot don't matter as much as I do. I think he was saying that I'm here for a bit. I'm causing you a bit of grief. I'm now going to go. I'm going to say nice things about you all as I go. But frankly, for the rest of the day, you're going to sit around thinking, what should we talk about now? So I think it's a deliberate undermining of any international institution. So that the nation state can behave with impunity.
20:49 Rory Stewart? So I've talked a little bit about the legal question. There's an ethical question, obviously, it's a moral question about when it's legitimate to do things and when it isn't. But there's also a practical point. Many listeners will strongly support what Israel did and will be strongly opposed to Iran. And let me again reemphasize, the Iranian regime is a horrifying, illegitimate regime hated by the vast majority of its people, imposing extremely repressive, theocratic vision of the world through a horrifying police state. I know that. I walked across Iran. I was sometimes arrested or detained six or seven times in a day by different types of intelligence and security forces in Iran. It's a very sinister country.
21:32 Rory Stewart? But the practical problem is that if you say international law. Doesn't really matter. So we don't care what the International Criminal Court says. We don't care what the International Court of Justice says, which is effectively what Israel is saying about rulings on what they're doing in Gaza, right?
21:50 Alastair Campbell? And the West Bank.
21:51 Rory Stewart? And the West Bank. So the attempts to try to investigate what they're doing in terms of international law in the West Bank Gaza is completely rejected. And the US agrees with that. If you take that line, that makes for a much, much more dangerous world because of course, the obvious point is when your allies are doing it, when Israel's doing it, when the US is doing it, it all seems fine. But what happens when everybody else starts doing it? So remember, the last people to claim preemptive rights under, I think it's Article 50 of the UN, defending themselves to justify an attack were Russia against Ukraine. That's what Putin said to the UN. He was doing, what Lavrov said in his speech. He said, Ukraine poses an existential threat to Russia.
22:33 Rory Stewart? And therefore we are invading Ukraine. What will then follow on from that? Well, look, look at Africa. Ethiopia's got a longstanding claim to help itself to Eritrea. China obviously has a big claim to Taiwan, right? And that's just the beginning of things. If you completely give up on the idea that there's a rules-based international order, if everything just becomes might is right, and if you think that your neighbor is any form of threat to you, the only question is not should you do it, but can you do it, which is where this debate is. And look, this isn't just the US. This isn't just Israel. There was basically, as soon as Israel mounted this attack, the response from France and Germany was immediate condemnation of Iran. Immediate condemnation of Iran. And I think Australia,
23:18 Rory Stewart? our friend Albanese's government came out and said that everything that Israel had done was in accordance with international law. I don't know any international lawyer who believes that, but most states say it's ambiguous. The law of preempt, preemptions is getting dubious.
23:32 Alastair Campbell? The only leader of the G7 countries that came out critical at all of Israel was the Japanese. The other thing I think it's worth just reminding people, because of course, unsurprisingly, a lot of the arguments that we're now having. Were the arguments in a way that we took for granted at the time of the Iraq War. Now, I know that people who thought we did the wrong thing will roll their eyes at that because, and we'll hold on a minute, you didn't follow international law because lots of people believe that. But actually, if you go back to that time, both us and the Americans, admittedly under some duress, were absolutely determined to try to go down the United Nations route. And the argument, it is true, one of the arguments that we
24:16 Alastair Campbell? used at the time, that we believe that there was a genuine threat from Saddam Hussein, continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction, and we all know that what flowed from that, but that was the, that was one of the arguments. So ultimately, that went to the argument of regime change, okay? And what you have here is essentially, there has been no attempt to keep the international community on board. There's not even really, we still don't fully know whether Donald Trump gave the green light to this or not. We both think that he probably didn't, and that he had his, he's had his hand forced by Netanyahu. And I think, again, going back to this interview, if you want to see somebody who's absolutely putting drive and conviction at the heart of everything he says, it is there. Meanwhile,
25:01 Alastair Campbell? there's an issue, twenty-odd years on, where we still debate it, still get criticised for it and so forth. But just to go into Israel, so you mentioned what's happening in Gaza. The, I think it was last January 2024, that the ICJ, the International Court of Justice, found evidence of what they called that Palestinians in Gaza were at risk of genocide, and they set out a number of measures that they asked Israel to implement to prevent that from developing. They didn't do it. May last year, they issued another ruling, ordering Israel to halt the military operation in Rafa, and also a calling on them to, to allow unimpeded access for humanitarian organisations to get into the Gaza Strip.
25:46 Alastair Campbell? And then another advisory opinion, uh, I think that was in July, certainly sometime around the summer, and then eventually that led to the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and the then Defence Minister Gallant. Now- They all failed. So what you see now, and this is my point about why this interview was so kind of interesting, that's probably the first time that ABC had done a long interview with Netanyahu since any of this, but none of it got raised, none of it got raised. Whereas I guarantee you, if Tony Blair or I were doing an interview with most media organisations now about the Middle East, at some point, we would get asked to justify what we did 20 years ago.
26:25 Rory Stewart? So I think you've made a very interesting point, which is that whatever went wrong 22 years ago, the debate was still absolutely enmeshed in questions of international law. It was presentations to the Security Council, it was endless consultations with lawyers, endless attempts to try to make as strong a legal case as possible.
26:46 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
26:46 Rory Stewart? Now, people would say you pushed it too far, that legal case didn't quite add up, but my goodness, that was the focus. An enormous amount of energy went into it because people still believed in a rules-based order. What's interesting now is that the last group of people who should believe in this, which is the Europeans, seem to have abandoned it. I mean, that's the very sad thing. It's not that Europe has much influence, it's not that Europe has the power to affect what happens. Israel's not going to listen to Europe. But just as in the early 1940s, there were very few liberal democracies left in the world, and those liberal democracies kept making the case for democracy through the Atlantic Charter and other things, so
27:27 Rory Stewart? too, at a time when the US and many of the major players, the most powerful power in the Middle East and others, give up on international law, Europe should be trying to continue to keep alive the lonely case that there could be a rules-based international order, that international law matters. And that's why France and Germany's betrayal is so extraordinary and so kind of troubling and shocking. A meaning that actually it's only really, as you say, people like the Japanese, the UN itself, which continues to talk this language, and the Norwegians who continue to be very clear and consistent on this stuff. But what on earth has happened to France and Germany?
28:06 Alastair Campbell? Look, I think particularly for Germany, the, it will take an awful lot, I think, for the German political establishment to be critical of Israel. It's interesting that you put France in the same category because of course Macron is somewhat persona non grata with the Israelis at the moment because he is the one who's pushing the European calls for the recognition of a Palestinian state, not least applying the logic that we all keep saying where there should be a two-state solution. Well, that means you have to have two states. And I think the other thing that, that relates to this, which I don't know, I didn't see much coverage of this in the UK, but I'm, I'm in France at the moment and there was a fair bit of it. I think the other thing that will have really pissed off Trump is Macron going on his way to Canada, to Greenland,
28:48 Alastair Campbell? and doing a big visit with the Danish Prime Minister and talking about how Europe will always stand up for Greenland. Now, I would put that in the category tick, very good thing for Europe to remind America that Greenland is part of the European Union through Denmark. Where I agree with you is that I think that, given that Netanyahu doesn't listen that much to European leaders, given that Trump doesn't want to be even involved really in discussions other than the sort of transactional ones that he enjoys, I would like to see the European leaders and via the G7 stress the importance of international law. And what was interesting, there was, I don't know if you saw, there was a, there was a sort of six-minute doorstep that Donald Trump did with Keir Starmer, where they were talking about
29:31 Alastair Campbell? the deal, this trade deal, and it was another, it was extension of the one that we thought had already been done. And there was this rather embarrassing moment at the start because Donald Trump, who loves opening his folders with his big signature, he opened the folder and all the papers fell out.
29:43 Rory Stewart? Which was peculiar. And then poor Keir Starmer had to then bend over and pick it up, which looked a little bit sort of strangely deferential. Would you in that situation have leant over and picked it up? Or would you have allowed Trump to pick it up? Should the British Prime Minister be sort of kneeling down to pick up the bits of paper that Trump is dropping? Is that the right look? Would Mads have done that?
30:01 Alastair Campbell? I, I would.
30:02 Rory Stewart? I don't think Mads would have done that.
30:03 Alastair Campbell? Well, put it this way, there's Trump and there's Keir Starmer. Trump opens the folder, the papers fall out. It looks a bit embarrassing, especially when he says it's this very important document, there's nothing on it. I think what I would have expected. Is that one of the prime ministers or the president's team would immediately have shambled, run across, crouched down so that they couldn't be identified too readily, picked up the papers and allowed the two leaders to carry on. But I think the point I was going to make is that the questions that were being thrown, essentially were all about Iran, Israel, with the occasional one about Britain, where he did his old stuff about I love Britain, blah, blah, blah.
30:40 Rory Stewart? Which he called the European Union.
30:41 Alastair Campbell? Which he called the European Union. Yeah, that was a bit of a problem because I don't know if you know that, but we left the European Union during twenty, after twenty sixteen referendum. But I think that what I'd like to have seen was Keir Starmer interjecting himself into some of the questions about Iran and Israel. And simply, you know, all he had to do was to say, you know, we're committed to de-escalation. As you know, there are, there are concerns about the, the importance of the rule of law in this. I mean, he didn't need to do it in a way that sort of pissed off Trump too much. But I agree with you. I think that this is what has happened as a result of Trump very powerfully and successfully establishing this notion of a different form of diplomacy, where essentially it's all between nations. And I think that's the other reason why he left early.
31:26 Alastair Campbell? You could see the, the pictures at, and I know that place because I was at the G seven in two thousand and two in Caninasquez. And so that you have this table, just with the, the seven leaders plus the two from the European Union, von der Leyen and Costa. And Trump just looked really, really pissed off to be there. He hates it when other people are speaking. And fair play to Carney. I don't know if you saw Carney basically called a hawk to the, the sort of meandering ramble that was going on. He let him have a go about Putin. You could see his face going, oh, where's this going? And then once he started to get into American immigration, attacking the blue states and all this stuff. And Carney just stood up and said, right, I'm exercising my right as the chair of the G seven, recording this to a halt.
32:10 Alastair Campbell? Trump did look a bit pissed off, but I think he, I think over time, I think he respects that.
32:14 Rory Stewart? But he doesn't like it.
32:15 Alastair Campbell? He doesn't, you could tell he doesn't like it.
32:16 Rory Stewart? Let's just, before we go to the break, just, just come back to the, the fundamental framing. I mean, I've been talking to many, many people who are experts on this and in the region, including, I want to pay tribute both to my conversations with, but also what I've, what I've read from Rob Malley, who was Biden's negotiator, to my friend Gerald Russell, our friend Gerald Russell. But, but let me absolutely emphasise that what I'm saying here is my views, not theirs. They've been very kind in challenging me and informing me, but these are my views, not theirs. One of the things that they've reminded me of is that there have been four big questions for 20 years, 25 years, because we've been discussing whether or not Israel should attack the Iranian nuclear sites for 25 years. And
33:00 Rory Stewart? they're the same four questions. But now they're going to be resolved. And what are those four questions? Number one, will Iran abandon its nuclear programme, or will it push ahead of it?
33:09 Alastair Campbell? I think it will try to do the latter.
33:10 Rory Stewart? Very good. Number two, will it force them to the negotiating table, or will it make them back off the negotiations?
33:16 Alastair Campbell? This is where I was rather taken by the way that Netanyahu framed it. He said they don't want to sit at the negotiating table, they want to blow it up. And he said that they want to pretend that they're coming to talks whilst continuing to develop nuclear weapons. So I think that depends on whether America does fall off the fence or not.
33:32 Rory Stewart? Very good. Three, will it rally the Iranian people against the regime, or will it strengthen national support for the regime?
33:39 Alastair Campbell? Very hard for us to know, but our mutual friend Justin Forsyth, who supports the opposition against the regime in Iran, he sent me some very interesting videos of some of the protests that are going on, particularly when, when people are getting arrested. It's very, very hard to know. But I think you were right when you said earlier that fundamentally, this is a deeply unpopular regime. So I suspect any rallying to the flag will be staged.
34:04 Rory Stewart? Okay. Finally, can Israel do it alone? Can it take out the nuclear programme alone, or is it going to need US support to do it?
34:11 Alastair Campbell? Well, they say, the guy from the International Atomic Energy Agency says that the big place, Fordo, is kind of half a mile underground, and there's only one piece of weaponry that can take it out. And the only people who have it is the United States. So that would probably be no. I guess the, the other question that relates to that is whether Iran politically Loses its will, but I think the dangers of us thinking that they might is that that leads them straight into regime change and that is the thing which terrifies them even more than the bombing.
34:41 Rory Stewart? Yeah, just to replay that back to you. So the most optimistic scenario, which of course has always been the view of people in Israel and people in the US who support attacks is Israel will destroy the nuclear weapons programme, Iran will then abandon its nuclear weapons programme, it will then come to the negotiating table and the people will turn against the regime. The pessimistic view is they'll fail to take out the nuclear weapons programme or just make Iran accelerate its nuclear weapons programme or strengthen nationalism in Iran and make it more difficult to get a deal. Let me just, one final thing before the break. I've been listening, so that you don't have to, to Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk. So I'm trying to get my finger on the MAGA podcast crowd.
35:23 Alastair Campbell? They're not happy.
35:23 Rory Stewart? They're not happy at all.
35:24 Alastair Campbell? And nor is Tucker Carlson.
35:26 Rory Stewart? This is a really interesting problem for Donald Trump. So there are people like Lindsey Graham, the Iran hawks, Israel supporters on the traditional Republican right, who are very excited by this. But basically MAGA is isolationist. Charlie Kirk is saying 90% of his listeners are horrified by this. And the Steve Bannon thing I listened to, essentially what he says is, yeah, it's like Ukraine. If Israel wants to do this, they're welcome to do it, but they can do it on their own. We are not going to be sucked into this war. And Charlie Kirk says, you know, Persia's a great power, they've got huge weapons, this will be loss of faith. And essentially, they portray any pressure on Trump to support Israel
36:07 Rory Stewart? as being driven either, in Charlie Kirk's word, by war contractors and either defence industry trying to make money, or if you're Steve Bannon and his crowd, they say it's the UAE and the Gulf paymasters of Mike Pompeo bribing the Republican right to get involved. So from the MAGA crowd's point of view, they think, oh my goodness, here we are, this is another Middle Eastern war that we don't want to have anything to do with. Israel's playing us for fools, they're dragging us in, they're forcing us to get involved in something that's their business and not us.
36:36 Alastair Campbell? Well, Trump was asked, I think at his doorstep with Keir Starmer, he was asked about, and it just shows you the sort of ridiculousness of the American political ecosystem, that he wasn't asked about Lindsey Graham or anybody on the other side of the argument, he's asked about what Tucker Carlson said. And he was very, very dismissive of Tucker Carlson. He said, I don't know what Tucker Carlson has said, but he should maybe try and get himself a job and a decent network. And then people might hear it. So he was back to play the reality TV uh string puller. But I think it's true. I think he will be very, very wary because he's he's it's not as if he's got a united
37:13 Alastair Campbell? MAGA Republican Party picture on this. It's very, very divided. And the other thing that he'll be absolutely eating away at him all the time is this thing that he made such a big thing of no wars ever going to start on my watch. And, you know, he's the peace, he's going to be, he actually said at the, when he was, won the election the second time around. History will see me as a great peacemaker. Well, you know, as we said on the emergency podcast the other day, every single war that he's been involved in or that he's sort of related to at the moment. And this, by the way, this is why he should be very wary of trying to give the impression he can solve all this on his own. Far better if you can build international alliances.
37:52 Alastair Campbell? This is the point you made to Kevin McCarthy. People should really listen to the interview we've done on leading with Kevin McCarthy, the former speaker, because albeit he's absolutely sort of putting the Trump line in a way. You made that point to him that, you know, America spent decades building up alliances and it's destroying them. And ultimately, that is not good for good for America. We're going to be talking about this for quite a while. Netanyahu was asked on that interview how long he thought it'd go on for. And he obviously said it will go on as it needs to. But the feeling you get is that they have got a plan here. This is a very, very well thought out military plan. And back to your point about would the Iranians have been justified to attack? The other thing is clear this has been planned
38:35 Alastair Campbell? over probably years. This has been years in the planning. And certainly the detailed planning that's now been put into place is that that was not done overnight. This has been a pretty extraordinary operation. And the other thing that I think the Iranians would be terrified of is that so much of this has been down to Israel's extraordinary special forces, which of course reputationally took a massive hit on the back of October 7th. But, you know, as I say, Netanyahu, I wasn't even asked about all that.
39:03 Rory Stewart? Well, let's take a break and then we'll come back to talk about the UK.
39:08 Speaker 03 Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.
39:18 Speaker 04 Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.
39:25 Speaker 05 What would happen if I stopped grooming? You starve, you freeze to death, that's what.
39:29 Speaker 04 With great power comes great deniability.
39:32 Speaker 05 I'm not the first then.
39:34 Speaker 04 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle out parent.
39:43 Alastair Campbell? Welcome back to The Rest of Politics. With me, Asda Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And Rory, let's talk about grooming gangs. I was very surprised when I heard that while he was flying to Canada, Keir Starmer had told the traveling press that he was going to be going, the government was going to go for a full national inquiry into the grooming gang scandal. Because of course, the government line up to now has been best done locally, no need to do it nationally, et cetera. And what had happened was that he had read every word he said of the report that he'd commissioned a few months earlier from Louise Casey. Now, I know Louise Casey from some of the work that she did for us when we were in power. And she is a formidable woman.
40:24 Alastair Campbell? And she's not somebody who will kind of give you a glossed version if she finds something that's truly awful. And she actually said herself in an interview I saw that when she started out, she actually supported the idea that this was probably done best on locally. But the more she went into it, the more she realized this was way worse than she thought. That there'd been institutional failures at virtually every level. And that therefore, there has to be a national public inquiry into the whole thing. And this is something that lots of people have been arguing for for some time. I think we have seen some pretty horrific opportunism by your old party, the Conservatives, who sort of sat on this for year after year after year
41:07 Alastair Campbell? and are now sort of saying Keir Starmer should have done this when he came into office. But it's clear that this is going to, hopefully, at the end of this, a proper understanding of why all this stuff happened and what more needs to be done to stop it. But it's a terrible, terrible, terrible indictment, yet another one of the British of the British state.
41:26 Rory Stewart? Absolutely. I mean, if, if, I know we've got a lot of younger listeners. If you're listening with young children, you might want to turn off the section that's following, which is going to be graphic. But I think it's important for adults to understand the nature of what's going on because there's been so much jargon and obfuscation in this debate. So I think it is worth explaining in detail what actually we now know has been going on. And actually, many people have known for a very long time. Andrew Norfolk, great times journalist, 2012, now sadly died, was the first person to do really major reporting on this. Then there was the Jay Report, and then there have been other reports leading up to this Casey Report.
42:08 Rory Stewart? So I think what was explained very, very powerfully in the Jay Report on what happened in Rotherham is that we're talking here about children who've been raped with multiple attacks, trafficked, abducted, beaten, in some cases, set alight, threatened with guns. Louise Casey has emphasised that this is multiple men on separate occasions beating and gang raping children, often children in care, children with physical or learning disabilities, and that the cycle by which it happened often began with people approaching people in parks, pretending to be their boyfriends, giving them gifts, winning them over in what appeared
42:51 Rory Stewart? initially quite gently and quite quickly became drug and alcohol addiction, then violence, then coercion, then trafficking. And there are various other elements involved in it, such as the use of taxi ranks. But that's the reality behind what's called child sexual exploitation. And Louise Casey, again, is very, very confident that overwhelmingly the people involved in these group-based child sexual exploitation rings were predominantly Pakistani males.
43:19 Alastair Campbell? And just to go through some of the, the sort of big points that she makes, and it's about 200 pages, the, the whole report, and You know, as I would expect from Louis' case, it really doesn't hold back and it's and it's very, very clear and clearly written and persuasive. So she talks about huge data inefficiencies, so that actually the phenomenon of grooming gangs wasn't really captured in the police systems, recurring systemic failures, what she calls this repeated cycle of scandals and public outrage leading to bursts of government activity, but no real improvement. And this is the one, I think, where we get to a sort of cultural issue, persistent denial and obfuscation, refusal fully to acknowledge what's going on. And in particular, she emphasises
44:02 Alastair Campbell? this point about authorities being worried that they'll be accused of being racist if they identify the point you've just made about predominantly Pakistani backgrounds. Then there's this other issue, talks about the adultification of child victims. And this is where children under sixteen are being perceived as more mature and capable of consent than they are. One of the recommendations is that anyone who has sex with anybody under sixteen, it is rape. Lack of accountability, group thinking, the taxes that you mentioned. And then I guess what it also does is call into question the deeper problems with the with the functioning and the capacity of our policing and criminal justice systems more broadly.
44:43 Rory Stewart? Well, here's, I mean, you talked about capacity and I was reminding myself of some of the figures and they're absolutely staggering. There are in each year group about seven hundred thousand people in the UK. So there would be, for the sake of argument, something in the region of four million people aged between eleven and sixteen, rather than they say the youngest cases were eleven. The total figures for child sex abuse in the UK is estimated to be five hundred thousand cases a year, half a million cases a year. People think that ten percent of children are sexually abused. Of those, one hundred and fifty thousand cases are recorded by the police. Of those hundred and fifty thousand
45:24 Rory Stewart? cases recorded, about thirteen thousand go to prosecution. There are about ten thousand convictions every year. This particular subgroup, which is group-based child sexual exploitation, you get about seven hundred Convictions a year. So this is a subset of this much bigger thing. And this is one of the complaints that Louise Casey makes. Which is that one of the reasons everybody says the vast majority of offenders are white, or they point out that thirty nine percent of suspects aged between ten and fifteen. So they're young men aged under fifteen themselves, or aged under sixteen themselves, is confusing a whole series of different things. So nearly forty percent of these offences we're talking about are online offences and they're bundled in with not online offences. So
46:07 Rory Stewart? every possession of an illegal image online is specified by the police as an offence. And and that makes it very difficult to compare what's happening in Britain to any other jurisdiction, because nobody else counts it in this way, measures it in this way. So it's almost impossible to work out. This is about fifteen percent of court time at the moment, very, very large amount of court time, very complex cases because they require DNA and forensic evidence. But but let's step back to the bigger picture. While the police are dealing with that, they're also dealing with two hundred and fifty thousand burglaries, five hundred thousand shoplifting offences, four million fraud offences, a hundred and fifty thousand robbery offences.
46:48 Rory Stewart? And in this case, the prosecution rate on child sexual offences is much higher than it is with things like burglary. So burglary, about four percent go to charge and fifty six percent of those burglars who are convicted then reoffend within two years. So there's a massive systemic failure in the entire justice system. And I guess if you were to talk to a police person, they would say that you can only really understand, because from the surface, you're like, what what on earth was South Yorkshire doing? Why were they not catching all these cases? And they would say, because at the same time, they're under pressure from the government and indeed from Robert Jenrick and many others to say,
47:28 Rory Stewart? why are you not on top of shoplifting? Why are you not on top of fraud? Why are you not on top of cybercrime? Why are you not on burglary? Why are you not on top of robbery? Why are you not on top of knife crime? And the question is, where do you put those resources? Now, I think there's a total consensus now that a lot of those resources need to go into group-based child sexual exploitation and national task force going after this very particular type of crime. But this particular type of crime, there are about seven hundred convictions a year, compared to a prison population of about eighty seven thousand people and about two hundred thousand people on probation.
47:58 Alastair Campbell? But that shift that is clearly coming. Comes in part because of what she describes as this sort of years of denial and obfuscation. But I think she was right to call out the way that the Tories handled this in Parliament yesterday. If Ed Cooper stood up and essentially made an apology on behalf of the state and of the failures that had been made, then Kemi Badenoch immediately stood up and politicised it in a way that, given most of this happened on the watch of the Conservatives, I think, you know, she should basically take a look at herself on that one. Just very briefly for our closer, let's just go through some of the main recommendations in the report. So one of them we both mentioned, this is the thing about anyone who engages in penetrative sex with a child under sixteen, that is rape.
48:41 Alastair Campbell? Other stuff, make the collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in child sexual abuse. Research, and I suspect this is for the inquiry, into the drivers of group-based child sexual exploitation, including social media, cultural factors and group dynamics, and then also greater, more regular standards on the licensing and regulation of taxi drivers who were often involved. And I don't think we should, you know, taxi drivers get a bad enough press as it is. We should point out that these are relatively small numbers of taxi drivers, but in these communities where this has been, this has been rife.
49:17 Rory Stewart? And of course, the other obvious thing to point out is that this is horrifying evil men, but it's a very, very small number of the men in Britain and a very small number of the men in the Muslim and Pakistani communities. And that's important because, of course, as we'll get on to in tomorrow's Question Time when we talk about extremism, the image that Muslim men have come to our countries in order to rape white, working-class women is right at the heart of all the far-right language. And of course, is what's got Musk involved in this and US attacks on Keir Starmer and the rest, is the idea that somehow we've enabled a mass invasion of people who are raping women.
49:58 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
49:59 Rory Stewart? What we're talking about is very, very evil men. And yes, absolutely, predominantly from one ethnicity and clearly a very strong cultural element going on within that ethnicity. And that's why Louis Casey wants. Focus on the ethnicity because it would help you to track it by understanding that this is something that was happening amongst a group of Pakistani men. But you also have to point out that it would be the most incredible libel to suggest that this was somehow the normal behaviour of Pakistani men. And indeed, it's the attempt to do that by people like Tommy Robinson that's causing a lot of the hate and extremism in our society and many others.
50:35 Alastair Campbell? Well, as you say, question time tomorrow, we're going to talk about this, the violence in Palimina. As we didn't have time to talk about that last week, we're going to talk about this very interesting German intelligence service report about the rise of the far right. There's actually a lot happening with the Democrat, the murder of the Democrat politician Melissa Holtman in Minnesota. Lot of feedback last week about our discussion on immigration, not all of it very flattering, I was to say. And also, I don't know whether you knew no blaze Rory, but I know blaze Q has become C.
51:08 Rory Stewart? Amazing.
51:08 Alastair Campbell? So we'll talk about, we'll talk about the new head of MI6 as well.
51:11 Rory Stewart? Very good. Looking forward to it. See you soon. Bye bye.
51:13 Alastair Campbell? Bye.
51:18 Speaker 03 Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.
51:28 Speaker 04 Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.
51:34 Speaker 05 What would happen if I stopped doing it? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.
51:38 Speaker 04 With great power comes great deniability.
51:42 Speaker 05 I'm not the first daddy.
51:43 Speaker 04 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9.0 without parent.
Previous 414. Israel vs. Iran: What Happens Next Next 416. Question Time: What the Head of MI6 Really Does Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
