Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 458. Can Trump's Peace Deal Actually Work? About this episode Has Trump really brought a “new dawn” to the Middle East? How can one of the most broken places on earth begin to be rebuilt? And is Argentina mourning the death of a libertarian dream?
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Transcript 10,616 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Alastair Campbell? It was wall to wall Trump. Here's Trump arriving. Here's Trump at the Knesset. It really was the Trump show, parts of which were slightly mind blowing.
0:09 Rory Stewart? Everybody is a little bit scared of him. They're dealing with somebody who isn't carefully calculating within a rules based order what to do, but can be extraordinarily reckless.
0:17 Alastair Campbell? The bombing has stopped. Hostages are being reunited with their families. So that of itself is a huge achievement. But I think we're kidding ourselves. We think this is peace. What we've got now is the beginning of the framework. Seeing the Palestinians returning to their homes. Now 90% rubble.
0:34 Rory Stewart? There's no international structure. There's no UN structure here around this deal. There's no Palestinian Authority connected with this deal.
0:47 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:50 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.
1:02 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 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.
1:26 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think you're not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this. Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?
1:33 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. And the link is in the episode description.
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3:24 Alastair Campbell? Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Alistair Carmichael.
3:26 Rory Stewart? And with me, Rory Stewart.
3:27 Alastair Campbell? And we're going to devote the first half of this episode to peace in our time, Donald Trump in Gaza and Egypt. And then the second half, talk about Latin America. Lots going on in Latin America. So did you manage to watch much of yesterday's proceedings?
3:41 Rory Stewart? Nope, didn't get much out of it. I've been talking to a lot of people in the region, talking to Israelis, talking to people in the Gulf, talking to Palestinians. But what was your sense of the actual proceedings though?
3:51 Alastair Campbell? Well, I had a really strange day. I was all over the place. But every time I was kind of had five minutes, 10 minutes, I would just sort of get on my phone and get onto one of the news channels and just follow it. And it was just, it was wall to wall Trump. Here's Trump arriving, here's Trump at the Knesset, here's Trump doing this. It was just, it was literally every time it was Trump doing stuff. And then occasionally, you'd get to see hostages meeting their families, you'd get to see Palestinians being released, you'd get a sort of broader sense. But it really was the Trump show. And parts of which were just slightly mind blowing. I mean, fair play, when this plan, this 20-point plan first came out, you and I were both very, very sceptical that it would kind of
4:33 Alastair Campbell? lead anywhere. It has led somewhere. It's led somewhere very significant. And that is, it was a phase one. And that has been, the bombing has stopped. Gazans are going home and hostages are being reunited with their families. Palestinian prisoners are being released and aid is going in. So that of itself is a huge achievement, fair play.
4:54 Rory Stewart? Let's start maybe with that one. So this is of course, pretty much what the ceasefire agreement in January was supposed to be. So we're now going back 10 months, which was torpedoed in March largely by Netanyahu's government that didn't proceed to the next phases. So the the basic structure from the moment Trump came in, people will remember that Trump, as soon as he came in, announced within a few weeks, I've achieved what nobody else has ever managed to achieve, I've done what Biden can never do, I've got peace in the Middle East. And that peace was basically hostages released, ceasefire, Israel withdraws its troops. And since then, if you go back to July, for example, beginning of July, they were still in the middle of the negotiations that have been going on since January.
5:38 Rory Stewart? And a huge tribute to all these negotiators, right? The work that Trump has done, the work that Jared Kushner has done, the work that the Israeli delegation's done, the work that the Qataris did, putting pressure on Hamas.
5:51 Alastair Campbell? Egypt.
5:51 Rory Stewart? Egypt, et cetera. I mean, you must be familiar with this from a long time ago. I'm completely sick of this because for at least 10 months, but it basically an outline for a year and a half, they've seen what the beginning of a ceasefire could look like. And essentially, I think what's been happening is they've been going back and forth with the Gulf countries who are the people with the influence on Hamas, saying, why won't you agree to hand over the hostages and disarm? And the United States that has the influence on Israel, saying, why won't you stop bombing Gaza? And we sort of know the reasons why they didn't want to do that. But we can also see the reasons why in the end it would make sense for them to do that. And they got there in January, collapsed in March, they were trying to put it together
6:36 Rory Stewart? again in July, which is now, I suppose, three months ago. And now finally it's happened.
6:40 Alastair Campbell? When it was collapsing, I can remember we talked about it at the time, and our shared sense was that that was at the point at which we genuinely did feel, got a lot of flak for saying so, but we felt that Netanyahu's felt his own political interests of survival were to keep it going. And I think where you do have to give credit to Trump. Is that, and you could say belatedly, because it is essentially the same deal. If he always felt he had the power really to force Netanyahu to do something he was a bit uncomfortable about, and then do it in a way that gave Netanyahu the sense that he was very much part of it, then he could have done it earlier. That is true. But I still think when you see all of the things that happened at the same time yesterday,
7:23 Alastair Campbell? it was an extraordinary thing to pull off. And then I think it's interesting, I've talked a bit to Tony Blair, who's, as you know, pretty closely involved in this. And he is, you know, he's pretty clear, this has been the kind of framework the whole way through. Essentially what it is, what this is basically saying is you have Gaza without Israeli troops all over the place, and you have Gaza without Hamas. That's kind of the framing of it. But he did say that Jared Kushner and Steve Whitkoff have been pretty impressive in the way that they've done this. Really absolutely on it and pushing the right people and pushing the right buttons. And the one thing that I think is really interesting about Trump, I've been trying to think about Trump, because of course we've got such a negative view of him, and I know you have, I've got a very negative view of him.
8:09 Alastair Campbell? I think the one thing that you give him is this, for good and bad, this ability just to sort of, and boy, did you see it yesterday, just to command all the energy and all the attention. But I think what that's a reflection of more significantly is his instinctive understanding of the power of the United States still. And that ultimately is what pushed Netanyahu.
8:32 Rory Stewart? I'd love to come back to the Blair point, which I think is fascinating, but just to develop your sense of American power. When Biden was operating within the old world, in some ways, America was hiding its, I guess it's, its steel fist and a velvet glove. It was reluctant to do certain kinds of things. So something amazing has happened, as you say, to American power. And that's partly because of the way that Trump uses it. Obama, Biden to some extent often seemed powerless. They would say, here's a red line in Syria, the red line be crossed, they couldn't really act. Biden was putting pressure on Netanyahu for a ceasefire, he never got there. What's different about Trump? What's different about Trump is an incredible recklessness and a total disregard for global norms.
9:17 Rory Stewart? So we can see it. Here's a fifty percent tariff on Brazil to back my friend Bolsonaro. Here's twenty billion dollars going to Argentina. Here's airstrikes against Iran, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And what's happened there is all these players are now off balance because they're dealing with somebody who isn't carefully calculating within a rules-based order what to do, but can be extraordinarily reckless. And as you said, absolutely, this has worked with Israel. And it's also given Netanyahu, for some reason, coverage with his far right. I mean, what's the reason he stopped fighting or was reluctant to stop fighting? He was scared about Ben Gavir and Smotrich, that they would collapse the coalition.
10:00 Rory Stewart? Somehow, Trump's participation in this has created a situation where it looks as though his coalition will hold in a way that it didn't look like it was going to hold in January much. And it's true with the Gulf too. The Gulf are profoundly, I guess, worried about the way that Israel's behaving, incredibly resentful of that, the attacks on Qatar, totally thrown off balance and probably pretty resentful of the way that Trump is behaving. But somehow, I think everybody is a little bit scared of him. And unfortunately, this is one consequence of something that we hate, which is the collapse of the rules-based order. In this case, probably is getting results because if you are Mohammed bin Salman
10:41 Rory Stewart? or if you're the Qataris or if you're Israel, you do look at this guy and think he has power.
10:46 Alastair Campbell? And he uses that power in all sorts of different ways. And the other really bizarre sense you have in the last twenty-four hours, because I mean, even though I'm absolutely prepared to say this is in a very significant part down to him and the way he operates and the sheer brute force of the way that he applies that power. At the same time, I heard somebody saying that it's like watching a split-screen presidency. You have this guy who's talking about being the peacemaker and bringing peace to the world in the Middle East, and this is the 3,000 years of history. And then over in his own country, he's doing as much as he can to fuel division, to fuel hate. He talks and everybody in this side of the screen is, they're great friends of mine,
11:27 Alastair Campbell? and over here, they're all his enemies. You know, the slob governor in Chicago and all this sort of stuff. And that's, I think, part of, and again, I'm not sure it's that thought through. I think it's just the way he's always operated instinctively. It is a kind of form of strategic chaos.
11:42 Rory Stewart? Yeah, the split screen, Ezra Klein, who we interviewed on Leading, also has this idea that it's a little bit like those optical illusions where you can see a face or a vase, but you can't see both at the same time.
11:52 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
11:52 Rory Stewart? And I think this is the nature of this new form of power. So let's lean into Mohammed bin Salman, for example, in Saudi Arabia, right?
11:59 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
11:59 Rory Stewart? Where you can see your same split screen. On the one hand, he is the great reformer who's done extraordinary things for opening up the Saudi economy and Saudi society, and it's a great success story and people are going there. On the other hand, the early days of his rule were the most extraordinary examples of random power, you know, famously. If you were turning up to have your passport renewed in the Saudi consulate in Turkey, you were not expected, like Khashoggi, to then be chopped up with chainsaws. If you were Mohammed bin Nayaf, who was the previous crown prince of Saudi Arabia, one of the most powerful, wealthy men in the world, friends with US presidents, senators and everybody, you're not expecting when you turn up to the palace to suddenly find yourself
12:43 Rory Stewart? arrested, locked up in a hotel room, stripped of most of your possessions and find yourself under house arrest years later, along with many other close relatives of Mohammed bin Salman, some of whom still haven't been heard of to this day, most who've lost their money. So we are in a new world, and it's a world that, that actually I want to talk about a little later in relation to a new book by a man called Da'am Poli. We've got Saudi doing it. We've got Trump doing it in the US. We've got Israel doing a version of this. And what is Netanyahu doing with that strike on Qatar? And what may happen, I would not be at all surprised if there is soon an Israeli strike on Iran again, that he reopens in front of Iran. They're all people who sense, and same with Putin doing his drones,
13:25 Rory Stewart? they sense that power in the modern world involves being excessive, provoking, going beyond the limit, doing things that shock people and make them think, this is completely unnecessary. Why did you need to do that?
13:37 Alastair Campbell? Just adding to your theme. So if you watched Through the whole day yesterday. So for example, when Trump was addressing the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and he was doing his usual thing. If he had a, he was, he had an autocue, there was a script, but he kept sort of, you know, going off on tangents. And one of his tangents, because he had Herzog, the president, two down for him on his left, and he's got Netanyahu sitting in front of him, and he just turns to the president and says, and I don't even know if this is possible in the Israeli system, but because it's possible in the American system, he obviously thinks it's an appropriate thing to say. He says,
14:10 Speaker 03 Hey, I have an idea, Mr. President. Why don't you give him a pardon?
14:18 Speaker 03 Give him a pardon.
14:20 Alastair Campbell? Just give him a pardon of all these silly charges that he's facing, you know, corruption of the like. And of course, huge applause from all of Netanyahu's supporters, huge applause in the, in the galleries, from all the kind of people who've been put it there to, to, to Lord Trump. And then later, when he met Sisi in Egypt, and the thing in Sharm al-Sheikh was extraordinary, these leaders coming in from all over the world, who Fiona, my Fiona said this morning, it was like, they were like extras in his film. It was his film. He stood there and it was literally like a red carpet thing with peace, this massive peace 2025. And one by one, they had to come up and just stand there and shake his hand and pulling Macron and pulling Orban and doing his usual thing. But then when he sat down
15:02 Alastair Campbell? with Sisi for a sort of proper bilateral, brought the cameras in as usual, and he just started to, he went straight in, he didn't talk about the Middle East, he was talking about crime. And this guy, I'm with this guy all the way, because you commit a crime in this guy's country and you know you're going to pay the price. It's not like with our slob governor in, in, in Illinois.
15:22 Rory Stewart? Background for that, people who aren't concentrating, right? US ambassadors sitting there in Egypt for the last four years, complaining about human rights, complaining about European citizens tortured, Italian citizens disappeared in Egyptian prisons. Sisi is a military dictator, running a profoundly authoritarian regime, the standard American line for years, hypocritical though it would have been, would have been respect for human rights and all this kind of stuff.
15:45 Alastair Campbell? And Trump is basically saying, if only we had more leaders like him. I told you, I, I met Sisi at the time, just as he took over and I was. Part of this plan to try and get him to kind of democratize and, you know, be be a nice guy.
16:00 Rory Stewart? Absolutely, yeah. Which you which you've done a certain amount of, maybe not too much, but you've done a certain amount of this.
16:06 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, yeah, yeah, fair bit of that. With, you know, varying degrees of success. I think we have for Egypt, donors didn't exactly move the dial very far. But I remember we're talking to about, you know, the importance of values and the importance of, you know, taking the public with you on this journey and making them feel part of this journey. He did look at me like I was kind of from another planet. I thought this is this is not gonna work. But there's Trump basically saying this guy is my guy. And then when he had the later, when he had the leaders behind him, and he was just sort of wheeling them in, he there was only one electorate and he was in charge of it. So he says, where's Victor, where's Victor? I got Victor a twenty eight point lead and he's gonna do even better in the next election. Where's where's UK, where's UK?
16:48 Alastair Campbell? He goes, it was like, and it was a show, the whole day was a show. The really big worry I have out of it, this is where it's very different, I think, to the Good Friday Agreement or Bosnia and any of these other peace processes or post-conflict processes. Is that, let's say we're through, they keep saying we're through phase one. The number of points at which the detail is so difficult and where things can go wrong. And I just worry that yesterday was such, I get the whole, you know, day of joy for the hostages, day of joy for Palestinian families being reunited, all that, I get that hundred percent. But because of the way Trump communicates, I think you have you have a sense that it's all sorted.
17:30 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
17:31 Alastair Campbell? And it's not.
17:31 Rory Stewart? Yeah, so two things, quick, quick shout out to a book that was published two days ago called The Hour of the Predator by a man called Da'empoli about authoritarians and tech bros who who really would make these connections between C C Mohammed bin Salman and Trump. And and Bukeli in Latin America, who maybe we can talk about a little bit after the after the break when we get to Latin America. But your bigger point, right? Phase two, so phase one is basically a ceasefire. Phase two is supposed to be reconstruction of Gaza. And and this is something that. You know, you and I saw, because this was very much my time in the Foreign Office, your time in government, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the story then, the great cliches that you will remember, were there were meant to be three things you do when you reconstruct a country.
18:16 Rory Stewart? Governance, security, economic development. If you look at Gaza from that point of view, and what was the logic? Well, the logic basically is that governance is the heart of all of it. It's a pompous way of saying, if you haven't got a government which seems, and again, this sounds like jargon, credible, effective, legitimate, ideally elected, it's very difficult to do the economic development and security. And how do you illustrate that? Well, look, if, and I found this when I was in Iraq. So I was the deputy governor coordinator of this province in southern Iraq. And I'm sending back reports every week, talking about all the good stuff we're doing. You know, this week we've fixed all these schools, we sorted out the petrol,
19:00 Rory Stewart? we repaired a clinic, we've created these jobs, we set up the police. But actually, what's happening over my time there is an angrier and angrier local population who are demonstrating outside my door. And the fundamental problem, when I say to them, uh, look, why are you so angry? You know, we're doing all these things is our problem isn't what you're doing. The problem is you're doing them and who are you? And this is the problem, to cut to the chase, with this technocratic Palestinian administration, if it ever emerges, that's meant to be running Gaza. They will have to make every day the most difficult decisions in the world. Decision number one, Hamas is fighting with tribal groups which have been armed by Israel. These are tribal semi-criminal groups that Israel have turned into militia and have given weapons to.
19:45 Rory Stewart? They're fighting. Whose side do you intervene on? What do you do?
19:49 Alastair Campbell? And who intervenes? What are the security forces that intervene? And that's where you enter this other complicated thing about the international force and where that comes from.
19:57 Rory Stewart? Exactly. And, and at the moment, the story is maybe Pakistanis, Egyptians, Indonesians, but then there was a little bit from Shama Shekhar. Well, they'll stay on the borders and there'll be a local Palestinian police force in charge of doing this. How does that really work? There is a firefight taking place in the streets between these two groups. What do you do about it? Who do you shoot? Secondly, when you start doing your economic development and somebody comes and says, of the thirty two hospitals, why are you starting with that one, with that community rather than that community? Number two, why did you hire that contractor? What do you mean? You've spent two billion dollars on that. I know this guy, he's completely corrupt. He will have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars. It's too slow. You're not creating any jobs for this tribe, you're creating jobs for that tribe.
20:42 Rory Stewart? Hamas is influencing you and you're discriminating in that direction. Then the question isn't technical, right? It's not just saying, this is how you build a hospital. It's politics, right? It's the stuff that you live and breathe every day. It's exactly the same as, you know, why are you investing in Bolton instead of investing in Dorset?
21:00 Alastair Campbell? So you just dropped in there, two billion for this project, that project, and there's a prior question to all of this, which is where does the money come from? And I can remember being at one of those big donor conferences on Bosnia. And the sums of money, I don't remember off the top of my head, but I do remember we were talking astronomical for the time, sums of money, that countries around the world, with governments present, were basically, they're almost outbidding each other. No, I'll put in this and I'll put in this. What, where I think we are global economy wise, is where I think if you were to do something similar now, a global donor conference to help rebuild Gaza, where is the money going to come from? Who are going to be the big donors?
21:41 Rory Stewart? Okay. And traditionally, traditionally, two of the big donors, of course, were the US and the UK. So forget interventions, I mean, forget Afghanistan, Iraq, which were three trillion dollar interventions, three thousand billion dollars. If you even look at Pakistan, for example, in the twenty fifteen sixteen, the UK government was giving four hundred million pounds a year just to Pakistan. The US government's probably giving $2 billion a year. USAID is now gone. There is no more American money. The British money, and I don't think people have fully taken this on. When I was Secretary of State for DIFID, we were spending 0.7% of GDP. And it was almost entirely untouched, unconditional, unrestricted, anywhere in the world. $20 billion a year.
22:22 Rory Stewart? Today, the headline's gone from 0.7 to 0.3, but we're spending of that, two thirds, on asylum hotels in Britain. So there's 0.1 left. So effectively, the budget has gone down from, let's say, $20 billion to $3 billion. And of that, already, the money's given to the World Bank and the IMF, which we're committed to. Then you have humanitarian responses, which we used to give £100 million. There's no money, literally no money. So then the whole burden falls on Qatar and Saudi, right? To pay for this whole thing, because, again, this is not like, people draw analogies with the end of the Second World War. You know, America and Britain defeat the Nazis, occupation, reconstruction.
23:02 Rory Stewart? No, from the time of the Atlantic Charter onwards, America and Britain were already thinking about reconstruction of Germany. Israel has no interest in reconstruction of Gaza. I did a conference earlier this year, speak to a lot of Israelis about this. The one consistent theme is we want no responsibility for Gaza. Yes, there's been $50 billion worth of damage to Gaza, but if you expect us to contribute one cent, you can forget it.
23:26 Alastair Campbell? So the other big donors back then were Japan.
23:29 Rory Stewart? Yep.
23:29 Alastair Campbell? Their economy's not great, and they've got, providing she gets through, a new prime minister coming in who may or may not be as committed as predecessors. US, UK, as you say, Germany, facing similar pressures to the UK. So I think in the end, a lot of it will fall on the Gulf. But meanwhile, as you say, the needs will be now. And I think it was right yesterday, there was all this focus on the hostages. But I did keep thinking, because there was kind of wraparound television coverage of the whole thing. Far less seeing the Palestinians returning to their homes. Now 90% rubble, possibly finding bodies there and so forth. So they're going back to that.
24:13 Alastair Campbell? They're going to expect some sort of recovery fairly quickly. And they will look to the famed international community to do that. And I really do worry that... Parts of the international community, not least Trump, will think, well, we've done our bit.
24:30 Rory Stewart? Absolutely.
24:31 Alastair Campbell? And now it's over to the rest of you.
24:33 Rory Stewart? So firstly, what do we know about Trump? He's not going to put any boots on the ground and he's not going to be writing big American checks for sure. Secondly, the upside of Trump's autocratic, rule-breaking behaviour is that he can pull off a ceasefire. The downside is this pompous word legitimacy. There's no international structure. There's no UN structure here around this deal. There's no Palestinian Authority connected with this deal. And when he talks about what security forces-
25:02 Alastair Campbell? I was gonna say Mahmoud Abbas was eventually at that meeting yesterday.
25:05 Rory Stewart? Yes, that's good. But when you look at the security force going in on the ground, the sort of questions if you are Egypt or Indonesia or Pakistan or the Gulf that you'll be asking is what is the legal authority under which this group operates, right? Let's say you're a UAE Colonel or Pakistani Colonel on the ground and you're having to make this decision, what do I do? Do I shoot this person? What is your authority to shoot that person? Are you there legally under an Israeli occupation? Are you there under a UN peacekeeping mission? Or are you, as Trump seemed to be suggesting yesterday, reporting to the US CENTCOM commander, the admiral in charge of US forces, with the US somehow saying, we are in charge, we're coordinating, by the way, we're not providing any troops, we're not providing
25:50 Rory Stewart? any money, but you, the UAE Colonel or Pakistani Colonel on the ground, you're somehow following struggling? Are you going to get a Security Council resolution? Well, I mean, again, Trump goes back and forward on that. If you can't get an elected Palestinian Authority that people can look at and say, these horrible decisions, because within six months, 12 months, people will be so angry. I mean, people are hoping at the moment their houses will be rebuilt. You just pointed out it's no money. Rebuilding $50 billion worth of damage is like 10, 15-year project. So people will be so-
26:25 Rory Stewart? Impatient, there won't, where will be the jobs be? Will the borders will be open? Will you be able to have a port? Will there be an economic activity? Are the trucks actually going to be able to cross the border? Are you going to be able to cross as a migrant worker into Israel in order to get revenue? Probably not. So your family will be very, very poor. You won't have a job. Your house will be in rubble. So this government that you're going to have to be patient with is neither an international UN sanctioned body nor is it a Palestinian body. It's a body that very quickly you'll begin to say, if you're an angry Palestinian, is this a sort of proxy for Israel? And then Israel will say from the other side, where it's like, is this a proxy for Hamas?
27:05 Alastair Campbell? Hmm hmm. No, also, the other thing that will happen, because we've had no real international media access, I think the stories that are going to start to emerge about the scale of devastation, the scale of destruction. So let's take at face value 67,000 deaths. You're probably going to find there's more than that now. Those stories will start to get told. And so I just felt that there was something discordant about the tone yesterday. I think that if only Trump could find it within himself to say, look, this is a great breakthrough and we've made progress and now here are the steps that are going to have to be taken. Instead of which, it was all, the war is over. Peace in our time, the most momentous day in a century.
27:49 Alastair Campbell? You know, Rubio said it was the greatest day in 50 years and Trump said, is that all? He said, okay, 100. I mean, it's all this kind of boastfulness and this self-aggrandizing stuff. And I have to say, I think that is part of what, this is why we're back to the sort of split screen stuff. It's part of what has allowed him to make it happen. The over the topness, going over the top, that sense of making somebody like Netanyahu a bit scared of him. But the over the topness in this stage, I think, is setting us, laying the ground for a failure to understand the kind of thing that you've just said, the processes. And the organisations that now have to be put in place very, very quickly to avoid an escalation of the sort of violence that's already starting to creep in.
28:32 Rory Stewart? And you've put your finger on something that maybe we haven't concentrated on enough, which is the question of Trump's attention span and patience, because one risk with Trump, which we maybe have seen with Putin Ukraine, where he seems to have just lost interest now and given up, is, as you say, that he may have felt he's done his job now.
28:47 Alastair Campbell? He did Alaska, the Ukrainian government, his job was Alaska.
28:51 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
28:51 Alastair Campbell? Wall-to-wall attention, I'm doing something big, I'm doing something bold. You've got two weeks, Vladimir.
28:57 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
28:57 Alastair Campbell? Well, how many weeks ago was that? And actually, we should just give a shout out to our current leading interview with the former Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dmitry Kuleba. I mean, it's amazing how he somehow manages to stay positive and optimistic. But I don't think he's in any doubt, under any illusion, that the Ukrainians are not as reliant upon the Americans as they were.
29:18 Rory Stewart? If we follow your instinct on his patience, the only way of getting to a peace is continual pressure, day in, day out, on Hamas, who need to be made to disarm, withdraw, and on Israel, who need to be convinced to withdraw and to give the freedom and autonomy to Gaza to allow it to reconstruct, flourish, grow. And how's that going to happen? Well, that pressure on Israel can only come from one place. It can only come from Trump and the US. And what I think I fear, we don't know with Trump, because he's so unpredictable, but there's definitely a chance that he loses interest. And he feels he's done the heavy lifting and he's not going to continue to apply day
30:03 Rory Stewart? in, day out pressure if, for example, Israel refuses to withdraw from the lines it's currently at. Because the most optimistic scenario that I can see at the moment, I mean... I hope I'm wrong, but the most optimistic scenario I can see at the moment is go forward, six months, 12 months. Gaza is very poor, very high unemployment rates, still in rubble. Israel's still mounting strikes and military raids. Hamas still there on the ground, not fully disarmed, in a very ambiguous position with the government. No opening of ports, no opening of airports. The US largely disengaged. No two-state solution, no political sovereignty from Palestine.
30:46 Rory Stewart? Basically, simply Gaza in a more unstable, poorer situation than they were in before October 7th.
30:52 Alastair Campbell? You'll still have the settler movement focused on development in the West Bank. I thought the King of Jordan made a very interesting intervention yesterday. He basically said, "This is a great day, they're all saying that, but unless there remains a commitment to a Palestinian state, then the war effectively isn't over because that's what the war been fighting over for so long." So I think we're in a very, very unpredictable, vulnerable, quite dangerous place right now. And of course, so many people have bought into, and I don't want to be a killjoy, I really don't, I mean, I get the joy, I get all that, I understand why people were so excited and so happy and what have you, but I think we're kidding ourselves if we think this is the end of, or if this is peace.
31:37 Alastair Campbell? They're not going to be at peace with, and just think of all the, think of all the resolution that's going to have to be done. Think of all the people who are going to feel more radicalized, probably on both sides. And so I think unless there's that understanding of the processes that have to be put in place, and you know, going back to the Good Friday Agreement, or going back to Bosnia, the big day, Good Friday was not the, that was not the end of it. That was the, that was the framework, and what we've got now is the beginning of the framework.
32:09 Rory Stewart? And Netanyahu is selling a story to the Israeli people of unconditional surrender by Hamas. This is a great victory. But the truth is Hamas has not disappeared. There are still thousands of them around, clearly. And what we've learnt here is what we should have learnt in Vietnam, what we should have learnt in Afghanistan, which is that unless you have a political path, unless you have economic reconstruction...
32:34 Rory Stewart? You're not going to be able to destroy an ideology. The idea that you can just drop bombs, kill sixty seven thousand people and eliminate a movement like Hamas has never worked. Didn't work with the Taliban and Afghanistan.
32:47 Alastair Campbell? And from the Israelis' perspective, they hear you say something like that and they'll say, yeah, and don't forget, part of that ideology is to wipe us out. So we still feel at risk. You know, the fundamentals are still not on the side of a long term peace, I guess is what we're saying.
33:01 Rory Stewart? The other thing we always believe, and I think this wisdom in it, even if it's considered liberal wishy washy nonsense, right? Is that long term peace requires, in the end, both Palestinians and Israelis feeling safe, prosperous and having their own legitimate governments. And nobody is offering that to the Palestinians. So it's very difficult to believe that these problems are going to go anywhere so long as the only approach is one of violent military force.
33:28 Alastair Campbell? We should also say to our listeners that our fellow Goalhanger podcast Empire has done a series on the long history of Gaza, all the way back, eleven part series starting in fourteen fifty B C. I'm also going to give a shout out to a friend of mine, Don McIntyre. Remember Don McIntyre, Middle East correspondent? And he wrote a brilliant book about Gaza a few years ago. He's now updated it. I think it's only an ebook now, but it's, and it's called Gaza. But I think we need, we need, because a lot of people seem to still, seem to think this whole story started two years ago. It did not. It's been around for, and that's why I think it might be a little bit premature to say it's now all over.
34:06 Rory Stewart? Final shout outs from me, some great European and American commentary for people who want to go deeper. On the American side, you can see the spectrum covered by David Ross, Phil Gordon, more on the Democratic side, Elliot Abrahams, more on the pro Israeli Republican side, Yuss Hilterman from the International Crisis Group. And a lovely article actually on an exhibition that's been done in, in Paris on archaeological finds in Gaza, covered by Josephine Quinn and the Lund Review of Books.
34:37 Alastair Campbell? Excellent. Well, that's enough plugging, we'll go to a break.
34:42 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by Google. We won't fully realise the potential gains of AI unless we make it accessible and useful for everybody across the whole UK workforce. That's why Google, for example, are working closely with trade unions.
34:56 Alastair Campbell? AI and trade unions may not sound like the most natural of partners, but the union movement has got a proud history of supporting members from across the economy and preparing them for the ever-changing world of work.
35:08 Rory Stewart? That's why Google partnered, for example, with the Community Union in the UK on a People's First Skills Pilot called AI Works. And it's designed to see how AI could help workers and ultimately create productivity benefits across the whole wider economy.
35:24 Alastair Campbell? Just a few hours of training could save members almost a month a year on routine tasks, time-free for the work where their expertise really counts.
35:31 Rory Stewart? One community member, for example, working in a supported living home, said Gemini helped streamline paperwork so she could spend more time with residents.
35:39 Alastair Campbell? That's a very powerful story, and it shows the positive impact AI can have on people's lives, making a real difference in the day-to-day.
35:46 Rory Stewart? Find out how Google's AI is helping fuel the UK's growth and transformation at goo.gle/aiworks.
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36:12 Speaker 06 What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.
36:17 Speaker 05 With great power comes great deniability.
36:20 Speaker 06 I'm not the first then.
36:21 Speaker 05 Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.
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36:57 Rory Stewart? Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.
37:00 Alastair Campbell? And me, Alastair Campbell. And Rory, do you know what we were doing exactly a year ago this week?
37:06 Rory Stewart? Last year was probably, I mean, not for you, but for me, probably the biggest audience we've ever played. Do you remember us doing it '02? Difficult to forget? That was quite a thing.
37:16 Alastair Campbell? It was.
37:17 Rory Stewart? On stage, almost. And it was set up like a boxing ring.
37:19 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but we didn't fight.
37:21 Rory Stewart? So we had sort of 14,000 people in the round, peering down at us, following on from the Royal Albert Hall. That was a pretty bizarre moment in the world of podcasting.
37:30 Alastair Campbell? It was, it was. It was a good moment. I enjoyed it. And now we're going to do it all again.
37:34 Rory Stewart? We are. We're off on tour again. And this time, we're going to do London, Bournemouth, Manchester and Glasgow. You're going to bring along the bagpipes, as usual.
37:42 Alastair Campbell? So it's 9th to the 16th of November in all of those dates. So if you want to get tickets to any of those shows, just go to therestispolitics.com. Dead easy.
37:50 Rory Stewart? We'll be able to cover the whole world, delve into some of your lessons on leadership and much more.
37:55 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I also wondered, do you think it'd be, I'm now throwing this out as a live idea. Don't you think we should show some of these impersonators? Particularly of you. There's some great impersonators online of Rory Stewart.
38:07 Rory Stewart? Really? I think the ones of you are much better than the ones of me.
38:11 Alastair Campbell? Anyway, we're looking forward to it. Now, Latin America. We don't talk enough about Latin America because it's so interesting. There's so much interesting stuff going on there.
38:20 Alastair Campbell? But let's, let's do a bit of Argentina and a bit of Peru. And maybe a bit of, I've got a really interesting thing about Chile as well.
38:26 Rory Stewart? Okay. Well, a little bit of framing. When Trump came in, and I'm sorry it all keeps coming back to Trump, but a lot of what he was obsessed with relates to what's happening in Latin America at the moment. And probably, I guess, three things. One of them, immigration. So Venezuela, 8 million people have left Venezuela. Cuba lost, I think, 20% of its population in the last five years. And that goes to stuff we talked about, right? Colombia refusing to accept migrants back. Second thing, crime. Cocaine production consumption has doubled in the last 15 years. New markets have opened up in Latin America itself and in Asia,
39:07 Rory Stewart? which has then led to this incredible explosion of criminal gangs in countries which previously were considered pretty safe in Latin America. And then the third thing is this whole question of small government against big government.
39:20 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
39:20 Rory Stewart? Which brings us to Millet. Anyway, where do you want to go?
39:23 Alastair Campbell? Let's start with Millet because Millet is this extraordinary, it's quite a strange character. Uh, very, very, I know you're obsessed with politicians and their hair. He's got, he's unique, the hair is unique.
39:34 Rory Stewart? I think he's called the wig, that's one of his.
39:36 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
39:36 Rory Stewart? One of his.
39:36 Alastair Campbell? And he's, and of course, you mentioned chainsaws in relation to Khashoggi's murder.
39:42 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
39:42 Alastair Campbell? His chainsaw was a symbol to say, I'm going to cut the state down to size.
39:46 Rory Stewart? Then taken by Musk, which shows that the whole world isn't all about.
39:50 Alastair Campbell? All connected.
39:51 Rory Stewart? Yeah, isn't all about Trump influencing other people. It's sometimes about other people like Orban and Millet influencing Trump.
39:56 Alastair Campbell? Absolutely. And also both Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader here, and Nigel Farage, Reform leader, both said that Millet is something of a role model and example.
40:06 Rory Stewart? Well, so he's become a global brand. I mean, who would have thought an Argentinian president would become a global brand? Of course, but that's some time back. That's some time back.
40:14 Alastair Campbell? You heard of Maradona, I played with him, you know. And so what happened recently is that there were local elections in Buenos Aires. It's a, you know, big part of the country and Millet did very, very badly.
40:27 Rory Stewart? And having campaigned personally and hoped that he'd do well.
40:30 Alastair Campbell? Said that that would sort of turn it around. And that left the markets a little bit spooked. He has come out and said he's going to change his style a little bit. I think the, the, the chainsaw is going to be left in the locker. But he's now got really much bigger elections coming up on October the 26th. They have midterms like the Americans do. Half of the lower house and a third of the Senate. Are up for election. So these are big, big elections. And although his chainsaw approach and sort of absolutely disruption and all that, it has brought inflation down considerably.
41:04 Rory Stewart? Yeah, let's just remind people a little bit on the economy because we we we came back into this. And again, in terms of self criticism, I certainly was a little bit skeptical about whether he would be able to pull this off. The the conventional wisdom, of course, in all these cases is it's much more difficult than it seems and Argentinian politics was difficult and it was difficult handling uh the fact he didn't have a majority in the lower house of the upper house. So how was this guy who called himself an anarcho capitalist, who was basically a a TV pundit, going to be able to do all the stuff that he wanted to do? He would inevitably, the story was at least from my Argentinian friends, be blocked by the system. In fact,
41:45 Alastair Campbell? His word this isn't really well, after now.
41:47 Rory Stewart? Yeah, he came in and he did these extraordinary things. I mean, he cut government spending by something like thirty five percent, which was removing something like five percent of GDP. He got rid of all the subsidies on public transport, heating, groceries. He fired tens of thousands of civil servants. He cut, I think, pensions by thirty percent. And inflation went down from a hundred and forty four percent a year. So if you're running a small grocery shop in Buenos Aires, you were putting up your price maybe in the morning and the afternoon, and then again, two days later, to inflation now being only projected to be twenty five percent a year instead of a hundred and forty four percent a year. So all that seemed amazing.
42:31 Rory Stewart? And he remained remarkably popular, over fifty percent popularity even a year. And despite the fact the poverty rate was soaring, as we talked about, despite the fact many people were beginning to feel the strain until recently.
42:42 Alastair Campbell? Right.
42:43 Rory Stewart? When when things prices have got out of control, it's been difficult supporting the pay cell, etc.
42:48 Alastair Campbell? I think what's happened is that he's focused understandably on inflation and he's managed to get inflation down substantially, but the economy. Insofar as it is performing more generally is not doing terribly well. And then they had this problem with the peso. Um. And this is where he called in big, really big favour from Trump and from Scott Besant. Trump has said that he's his favourite other president, obviously. He's his own favourite, but Millet is number two. Besant has waxed lyrical about Millet and essentially said Argentina has to be saved. So they're offering them this twenty billion dollar currency swap.
43:24 Rory Stewart? Which, which again is absolutely unprecedented. I mean, the, the only closest president of the US ever doing this before was Clinton doing it with Mexico. But Clinton doing it with Mexico, which again was twenty billion dollars, was in a very different environment in the nineties. And Clinton would say, I guess, in his defence, well, Mexico was so integrated with the US economy. It has this enormous border that it shares. And at that stage, Mexico wasn't tapped out on its IMF lanes. Argentina, you would have thought in a normal world, if you were a MAGA base, would be the classic example of something which is not in the US national interest, doesn't really have much trade with the US, doesn't share a border with the US, is totally maxed out on its international credit lines.
44:07 Rory Stewart? Why on earth would the US taxpayer be putting twenty billion dollars behind Millet?
44:11 Alastair Campbell? Politics. Also, I don't know the answer to this, but did Clinton get Congress backing for what he did? Because, of course, that's the other thing that's happened on this is this, there's no even mention of, of whether Congress is involved in this. So, but, but when are these elections, what's happened is the markets have got a little bit scooped. His big thing was macro stability and they got a little bit scooped that maybe the public are not quite as supportive of this as they thought. And therefore, where is that going to go into the future? His ratings have started to drop. And then, of course, the other story that keeps coming up.
44:41 Rory Stewart? Although that twenty billion has massively strengthened him with markets, strengthens popularity. I mean, it's a real life. I mean, it doesn't, in a sense, the numbers don't completely matter. It's a bit like the, uh, the way that the US deterrent used to work with NATO. It's not really the numbers. It's psychologically, the sense that Besant's behind you.
44:58 Alastair Campbell? The other sort of story that has hit into his popularity and the sense of competence is our old friend corruption. There's a couple of big corruption things going on, in one of which, although she denies any wrongdoing, his sister, Karina, who is also his chief of staff, and his closest advisor by some stretch. I mean, this strange thing about Millet is he doesn't appear to have much of a life. Outside the public profile, I mean, he's very, very, very close to his sister. And she's got caught up in these leaked sort of conversations that she got caught up in. She was implicated in one of these big corruption scandals. So that has affected him as well.
45:38 Alastair Campbell? So if these elections, October the 26th, go badly, then given how the markets got spooked about a local election in Buenos Aires, then we shall see. We saw yesterday with Orban and, you know, Trump, Trump will now feel that he can get directly involved in these elections in a way that I don't think any previous president has ever done.
46:00 Rory Stewart? Which brings us, I guess, to Peru. So the big story is the story of Latin America, which has been, had a very, very strong influence of left-wing populists, and we can give many, many examples of this, ranging from people like Boric in Chile, who's turned out actually to be pretty respectful, respectful of human rights, respectful of the constitution, through to people who are slightly further out on the edge. So we will talk about Pedro Castillo, but we can also talk about the Colombian president. And then the far edge of left-wing populism in Latin America, which is of course Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, right?
46:41 Rory Stewart? And in this incredibly polarized world, all the people who are instinctively on the right in Latin America, who think that their states are too big, they're spending too much money, they're too much and hooked to unions, instinctively think that any left-wing movement, doesn't matter whether it's Lula or Steinbaum in Mexico, the basic right-wing critique would be, these people are taking their country towards Venezuela. And actually, the truth is that many of them are, in a British context, kind of versions of Jeremy Corbyn. They are people with strong left-wing identity, they often talk about Marxist Leninism, but they're not actually locking up, well, not in all cases, locking up political prisons.
47:26 Rory Stewart? It's like, Michael Reed would say, it's like, I guess, Jeremy Corbyn with much weaker institutions. And against that is the right-wing push. So the right-wing push is Millet, doing this sort of radical stuff and restructuring, and Bukele, who in El Salvador has come in, arrested eighty thousand people, detained them without trial, and dropped the homicide rate in El Salvador to the lowest homicide rate in Latin America. So a lot of people are looking at this and thinking, if we think about our problems, crime, immigration, security. Well, actually, you know, we're not going to exactly do what Bukele is doing, but they're beginning to be pretty tempted towards that authoritarian line.
48:01 Alastair Campbell? Trump is getting ever closer to it. There was a piece I read this week by the former chief of staff to ICE under Biden. I can't remember where I read it, but it was, it was, he was basically saying that what ICE is doing now is, you know, we're, we're, we're almost moving beyond any previous American definition of authoritarianism. But I think what's, and, and Bukele, and I mentioned Cece, Trump saying this, I'm with this guy in crime. He's also, he's, he's a big fan of Bukele.
48:31 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and wants to send, wants to send his people there.
48:33 Alastair Campbell? What's been going on in Peru, though? I mean, you regularly and rather gleefully, I fear, sometimes talk about Keir Starmer's terrible, terrible ratings. But Dina Boluarte, who until last week was the president of, of Peru, she was down at two percent.
48:50 Rory Stewart? Is that, and I never quite understand the nexus. Does that mean like negative ninety eight percent? Or am I getting confused?
48:54 Alastair Campbell? No, two percent means that she has two percent approval. That means that two percent out of, two out of a hundred think she's doing a good job. Right?
49:02 Rory Stewart? Brilliant.
49:03 Alastair Campbell? She didn't, she, well, it was hovering between two and four.
49:05 Rory Stewart? So just to remind people the story, because we covered it at the time, and if, if real geeks can go back to our original podcast when this happened, but this figure, Pedro Castillo, who was a primary school teacher from a pretty simple rural background, ran on the back of something called the Free Peru Party, which is, you know, proper Marxist-Leninist. I suppose more intellectual listeners from Latin America definitely familiar with Jose Carlos Mariategui, who was this great Marxist intellectual from the twenties and thirties. He won, but not long after he got into power, he decided to do a weird reverse coup against himself.
49:41 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
49:41 Rory Stewart? Which is, although he was actually the President, he tried to run a coup d'etat against Congress and judiciary, then they then impeached him. At which point, his deputy, who was this slightly sort of anonymous figure, became, to great applause, you know, the first female president in Peru. A few questions about just how able she was, whether she wasn't actually a little bit mediocre, but anyway, she got in. And she was sort of sustained by Congress, including being sustained by Fuji Moris daughter, who's traditionally from the right. There were then protests, the army was very, very violent, people were killed, so now there's a whole human rights story going on.
50:22 Rory Stewart? And the previous economy that did pretty well from the reforms of Fuji Moris through to 2016, beginning to falter, really losing its way, the parties giving up on ideology and becoming pretty much kind of corrupt party machines. And now this.
50:40 Alastair Campbell? Boluarte was the sixth leader of the country since 2018.
50:47 Alastair Campbell? And three of them are in jail.
50:48 Rory Stewart? A lot of this about lawfare, isn't it? We talk a lot about this complicated question. You know, on the one hand, we support the independent judiciary. On the other hand, in many Latin American countries, there's a sense that they're just used against your political opponents, which almost certainly is what Trump is doing and will probably happen to Trump when he steps down.
51:03 Alastair Campbell? And also, this is strange how you have high level corruption and what might be termed low level corruption. There's probably a bit of both going on here. But the media and the opposition became obsessed with her seeming fondness for Rolex watches. And her house actually at one point got raided so they could establish just how many Rolex watches she had. Then there was another story in that she went off to have a nose job while she was meant to be doing some sort of.
51:33 Rory Stewart? It's a little awkward because if you're coming from the Marxist Leninist left, I mean, originally sort of Vladimir Cheron, who again was put in jail so couldn't run, which is why Castillo came in and she was coming in on that ticket.
51:43 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
51:43 Rory Stewart? To be collecting Rolex watches and all, etc.
51:45 Alastair Campbell? But you mentioned crime earlier, crime and the murder rates and contract killings have just been going off the charts.
51:52 Rory Stewart? So what's next?
51:53 Alastair Campbell? I don't know what's next. What's happened now is that under their constitution, she didn't have a vice president. Normally, the vice president would take over, so it's gone to the president of the Congress, a guy called Perry. He's just survived rape and sexual assault investigations. So it's a mess. It's a total mess.
52:13 Rory Stewart? There, I guess the question is, what's next for countries like Peru? Are they going to, and I think this will be an opportunity for mini bukeles. So we're seeing sort of versions of this, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Panama. I mean, of course, the pro-Trump right wing candidate in Panama is feeling pretty uncomfortable because Trump's still talking about taking over the Panama Canal, confusing everybody. But is there going to be room when the election comes for somebody trying to run on a millet or bukele ticket? Because the situation in some of these countries, I mean, we talked in January of last year about this amazing moment where Ecuador, which had been one of the most peaceful countries in Latin America, suddenly found criminal gangs take over a TV station live on air.
52:58 Rory Stewart? Peru, we got a producer, produced this extraordinary figure that in 2024, 50% of the homicides in Peru were contract killings. The big story at the moment has been an attack on a local popular Latin American band that didn't pay extortion money.
53:14 Alastair Campbell? That turned out to be the final trigger. You know, sometimes it takes a tipping point that feels a bit odd, but there was this band, this popular band that got caught up in a, in a shooting. And I think it was just the point at which the politicians thought, you know, enough is enough. And the vote, I think that there, it was 124-0. She got literally zero votes. This was the eighth impeachment attempt, and she got zero votes.
53:37 Rory Stewart? And she was taken out for, under a clause for mental incapacity.
53:40 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, moral incapacity.
53:42 Rory Stewart? Moral incapacity.
53:44 Alastair Campbell? No, no, it was worse than that. Permanent moral incapacity. In other words, there is no coming back from this. Listen, before we go, just when I mentioned Chile, you know how I'm a big fan of compulsory voting? Well, they've got an election. Chile's got a presidential election on November the 16th. Also, Senate and 155 seats in the lower house. Now, I didn't know this, Roy. They've had compulsory voting. They had compulsory voting, but voluntary registration. Okay, so if you registered, you had to vote, but you didn't have to register. Then in 2012, they went for automatic registration. So everybody got registered.
54:22 Alastair Campbell? And voluntary voting.
54:23 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
54:24 Alastair Campbell? And they've now decided to put the two together. They've got automatic registration and compulsory voting. Round of applause for Chile, I say.
54:32 Rory Stewart? Round of applause for Chile. Um, and, and fingers crossed because, you know, obviously you and I are big believers in compulsory voting because I think a lot of people in Chile are pretty sceptical about Boric, this young student leader.
54:42 Alastair Campbell? He's only allowed this one term, though.
54:43 Rory Stewart? Right.
54:44 Alastair Campbell? He can't stand.
54:45 Rory Stewart? It doesn't, exactly. But I, I do want to do a little shout out from people who thought he was going to go for Venezuela and Nicaragua. It's not been like that. He has been actually more idealistic, more respectful towards human rights than many people anticipated and is a, I would argue, a sort of better version of the left-wing populist leader in Latin America.
55:04 Alastair Campbell? Well, in which case the Communist Party candidate won't come through. Well, listen, we've got a question time, Jerome. We're going to do something a bit different. We're going to be relentlessly positive, uh, on the back of a complaint that was delivered to me by hand by one of our listeners who said, we promised such an episode almost three years ago.
55:21 Rory Stewart? Let's, let's try it.
55:23 Alastair Campbell? Take care.
55:23 Rory Stewart? Bye bye.
55:27 Speaker 04 Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.
55:38 Speaker 05 Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.
55:44 Speaker 06 What would happen if I stopped going? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.
55:48 Speaker 05 With great power comes great deniability.
55:51 Speaker 06 I'm not the first then.
55:53 Speaker 05 Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under seventeen, not a minute without parent.
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56:21 Speaker 05 Espolón Tequila, forty percent alcohol by volume, eighty proof. Copyright twenty twenty six, Compaña America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.
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