491. Trump at Davos: Rory and Alastair React

What does Trump's rambling speech to world leaders at Davos mean for Greenland? Are Europe and the UK ready to act together against Trump's threats? And what lessons does Mark Carney's approach to Trump offer on how middle powers should respond to Trump's brazen foreign policy? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. __________ Join The Rest Is Politics Plus: Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, an exclusive members’ newsletter, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit fuseenergy.com/politics. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee ✅ __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, James Clayden Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Senior Producer: Callum Hill General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair 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.

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creef. 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.

• 0:42Alastair 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?

• 0:49Rory 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/rustaspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustaspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:06Speaker 02

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• 1:33Rory Stewart?

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• 1:37Alastair Campbell?

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• 2:33Rory Stewart?

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• 2:49Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics Davos special with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:54Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. I'm not convinced it's that special Rory.

• 2:57Rory Stewart?

  You're pretty glam, aren't you?

• 2:58Alastair Campbell?

  That was one of the most horrific events I've attended in my entire life.

• 3:02Rory Stewart?

  So just to explain to listeners, what you're talking about here is the speech from President Trump that we just heard in the main congressroom. So put in context, I was queuing outside from I guess 12:30 to 2:30, like two hours. Alistair being Alistair let me queue for quite a long time and then came and claimed to be my husband or something.

• 3:19Alastair Campbell?

  I did not claim to be your husband.

• 3:20Rory Stewart?

  Join me in the line.

• 3:21Alastair Campbell?

  I said, you're up. I pretended. I had my phone. People were very grumpy. I've never seen such a big queue, apart from when we did the O2, obviously. Anyway, yeah. So we queued for a long time.

• 3:31Rory Stewart?

  You managed to get to the top of the queue by jumping up next to me. We got in, sat down. We did have prime seats. So I saw you, you know, we were sitting there behind Marco Rubio, Al Gore. I think the first thing that we need to convey though to the audience is that the very odd thing about it, which you're not expecting, right? If you're me, the language in many ways is, if you look at the words, it's very fascist, very populist, you know, reminds you of kind of brutal acquisitions, Mussolini threats. But the delivery is very flat, often very boring, very rambling, very mild mannered. I mean, the contrast, I think, that struck me most is that if you were a sort of 1930s leader making these statements about these countries have done nothing for them, all we want is

• 4:16Rory Stewart?

  this, that you would be much more aggressive. But he has this very odd demeanor, doesn't he?

• 4:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but I think that's part of his humiliation and cruelty of all those people there. Your friend Daddy Rutter, who you gave a little name check and his daddy here. And as you say, I saw you tweeted while we're there saying, does Marco Rubio really have to sit through this? I would probably use the S H I T word day after day after day. But I'll tell you what, no, the reason why I'm so kind of horrified by it, partly the content, which, you know, it was the stuff we've heard a million times. We'll come on to talk about Greenland because obviously news wise, that's the most important bit. But the rest was his greatest hits, Ramble of Lies, Misrepresentations, Sleepy Joe Biden, and all the stuff that he does all the time. And come by the end, people were looking at their phones, they were chatting, now Rory, at least for the sake of my friends in the Lido queue,

• 5:03Alastair Campbell?

  who were saying to Fiona this morning, please make sure he echoes.

• 5:06Rory Stewart?

  You did a bit of.

• 5:06Alastair Campbell?

  I've tried, but.

• 5:07Rory Stewart?

  You did a bit of.

• 5:08Alastair Campbell?

  I was surrounded by.

• 5:09Rory Stewart?

  So, so when, when.

• 5:10Alastair Campbell?

  I booed at Somali.

• 5:11Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, when, when he said Somali's, it's, you know, what did he say?

• 5:14Alastair Campbell?

  Something that it's even higher than their IQ, lower than their IQ.

• 5:17Rory Stewart?

  At which point you said boo.

• 5:19Alastair Campbell?

  I booed. And, and then people.

• 5:20Rory Stewart?

  And then occasionally you were like, no, it's not, that's wrong.

• 5:24Alastair Campbell?

  And you lost the election. You didn't win the election. You lost to Biden. But I sensed it, because we were just behind all these.

• 5:30Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And they kept, and they kept turning around and looking at us as though we were eating crisps in a theatre.

• 5:35Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. But also they kept chuckling at his little horrible jokes.

• 5:38Rory Stewart?

  Now, I found myself, actually I caught myself and you caught me laughing at one of them. And partly is that what he does is he says things which are so outrageous and self-satisfied. I mean, so the moment I caught was he said, um, people came up to me and they said, you know, Mr. President, uh, you know, every single military operation you've done has been perfectly executed.

• 5:59Alastair Campbell?

  And I said, I know.

• 5:59Rory Stewart?

  He said, I know. Right. And the whole thing is so, and he delivers it like that. So he, he uses his vanity as part of his shtick, as part of the joke, that he lets the audience in. And then he's always saying, you know, I, I don't think we do such amazing things in America in a year, perhaps a year and a month.

• 6:16Alastair Campbell?

  But the people you've been seeing day in, day out, they say he's telling this stuff, it's just rambling.

• 6:20Rory Stewart?

  And it's been true since 2016. I, I talked to someone who sat round the table with Theresa May and him on his big visit. And he set off on one of these things, which he, he talked for about an hour. He's with all his staff. And literally you can see all their heads kind of collapsing like this. And finally he turned to one of his senior staff and he said, so what do you think? And the guy was like, oh, think about what, Mr. President? You know, what do you think about? And then insert the thing. And the guy said, I think absolutely nothing about that, sir. And Trump was very pleased with that.

• 6:47Alastair Campbell?

  So, but I, I think also, so the stories you saw, for example, which probably you saw a hundred times about when he phoned Emmanuel Macron. And the thing about the glasses as well, he probably knows that Macron. Burst blood vessels, you know, what the hell's going on with that?

• 7:00Rory Stewart?

  Well, so I think to step back for a moment, one of the things that makes dealing with Trump so tricky is this sense that he begins to sort of, it's a sort of Stockholm to the drum. You become kind of accustomed or habituated to this stuff. So that when you're listening to it, you and I and many, many other people, 95% of the material is familiar. And you almost lose the energy to fact check. You know, I said to you, he's saying they spent 350 billion on Ukraine, which is weirdly that 350.

• 7:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:31Rory Stewart?

  So figure is off the side of the bus, right?

• 7:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 7:33Rory Stewart?

  Uh, during Brexit, right? In fact, you know, the real figure is probably 75. You could get it up to 200, but it's never 350 billion, right? Then he had this whole speech about how they don't have any wind farms in China. But it's all a sort of hoax and the Chinese just want to sell them to suckers around the world.

• 7:49Alastair Campbell?

  And he made it like a funny sketch.

• 7:50Rory Stewart?

  And the whole reason why we're so weak is because we have wind farms, right? Then he had a story about how Britain in the North Sea was sitting on 500 years worth. Well, we claim that the oil reserves are depleted, but we don't know because we haven't drilled down. But he knows, he knows that if you were to drill down, you would discover there's 500 years worth of reserves down there. So at some point, um, one just ceases to fact check.

• 8:14Alastair Campbell?

  You see, I.

• 8:15Rory Stewart?

  Because, and, and, and because I think I probably could have identified 75 statements, which were not true in that. And then, then the question is, what is the point of statement after statement? He claimed, I think at one point that he was spending 150 trillion on the US military. And presumably it's trillions and billions.

• 8:32Alastair Campbell?

  Well, let's just get through it. So let's just say on the big picture, because we know.

• 8:35Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 8:35Alastair Campbell?

  You and I have now in person, very close up, seen a total narcissist, okay? People are doing very well, they're very happy with me. Well, the polls actually are not good for him right now. His stuff on living standards was untrue. He said, quotes, virtually no inflation, extraordinarily high growth. No country has ever seen anything like this before, not true. Secured commitments for record breaking eighteen trillion investment, never done before, not even close. And even the White House own website does not have that figure. It hasn't nine point six, probably not true.

• 9:02Rory Stewart?

  I think the bigger question is amongst all of this stuff is to dig down to the fundamentals. And the fundamentals was astonishing contempt. America has done everything for the world. Nobody's done anything for us. One statement he kept repeating is, I don't think NATO would ever help us.

• 9:19Alastair Campbell?

  Well, at that point, I shouted nine eleven.

• 9:21Rory Stewart?

  Right, because of course, actually, when the United States, the only time Article Five has ever been triggered, it was triggered by the United States. And we all deployed to help the United States after nine eleven. And Denmark lost more soldiers per capita than any other country. So this whole framework, which is, we saved Denmark from the Germans. You kept saying you'd all be speaking German and Japanese, it wasn't for me.

• 9:41Alastair Campbell?

  And people, that was, do you know what? That was the turning point from the chuckling into the either total silence, or a very, very small number of people like me who couldn't sort of contain themselves. I was getting so many messages. The thing that stopped me was, you know, we bumped into Al Gore, good name drop, on the way in. He was sitting right up at the front. And I said, you know, you've got a great place to heckle Premier. And he said, I don't know. I don't think that's the way to go about it with this guy. So he put me off my stride.

• 10:06Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I'll go. Why did he think that was not the way to go?

• 10:09Alastair Campbell?

  I think he probably thought I was thinking about him doing it. But he was just saying, I don't know, that's the way to deal with this guy. But I honestly felt, because what, I'll tell you what will happen. Somebody, the guy sitting next to me, showed me the Wall Street breaking news headline from the speech. And it was something like markets rise as Trump rules out military force for Greenland. He didn't rule out anything. He just, as part of his rambling on Greenland, said, I don't need to use military, military force. Why? Because I'm going to do a mafia shakedown. You either do what I'm saying, and I'm happy, or you don't, and I remember.

• 10:38Rory Stewart?

  And of course, because this is Davos, everybody's obsessed with the markets, right? So the markets were down two and a half percent. And everyone thinks, okay, he's going to come in. And in fact, we got that from a very senior Democrat senator said, he's going to be worried about the markets, and he's going to turn the thing, change markets. So what he said is, I'm not going to take it by force, but we want Greenland.

• 10:56Alastair Campbell?

  I'm going to get it.

• 10:57Rory Stewart?

  Now, and the point is that repeatedly Denmark has said, you are not having Greenland. The European Union has said, you're not having Greenland, right? And instead of coming and in any way changing the posture, he just reinforces, he could not have said more frequently, we're having Greenland. Except he didn't just say we're having Greenland. He repeatedly said for much of the speech, we're having Iceland. We want Iceland. Now, I don't want to get too deep into the weird psyche of Donald Trump, but that concerns me too.

• 11:28Alastair Campbell?

  Because you don't think that was a slip of the tongue.

• 11:29Rory Stewart?

  Where is this Iceland thing bubbling up from? Maybe a slip of the tongue, but I'm slightly worried this guy's looking at a map and thinking, well, if we get Greenland, and give us Greenland, and we realise the truth, which is that we think Europe is completely pathetic, totally impotent, can't do anything at all, they've got no options, whatever we do to them, they'll lap it up. Well, why don't we have Iceland too?

• 11:49Alastair Campbell?

  I think, because I mean, there is, you know, there is the case to be made for a sort of quite a lot of similarity going on there. I think that's another observation I made, sort of just watching the whole thing. No real sense of what the, how the audience was feeling or reacting. I think that was a slip. You could be right. I think he meant Greenland.

• 12:04Rory Stewart?

  I, I, I would genuinely.

• 12:06Alastair Campbell?

  But that is terrifying.

• 12:07Rory Stewart?

  But remember, the US ambassador to Iceland made a joke saying he was going to be the governor of the 52nd state. So this Iceland thing is bubbling away.

• 12:14Alastair Campbell?

  So it could be real.

• 12:14Rory Stewart?

  Somewhere in the back of these people's minds. And I think this is the problem with the appeasement strategy. Because the appeasement strategy, if you're, if it's all about performance, if it's all unbounded, and he thinks this is my number one chance to expand the territory, United States.

• 12:28Alastair Campbell?

  Which he was clear about.

• 12:29Rory Stewart?

  There will never be a better chance in world history. America is more powerful than it's ever been. I'm the only president with the nerve to do it. Why not go for Buss, get as much land as you can?

• 12:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and, and just interesting on the appeasement, because as I was coming out, I was grabbed by a journalist, said, what do you think? And I just said, sort of not a lot. And, and he just sort of shrugged and went, it was kind of, it was kind of appeasement in the whole, wasn't it? Interesting. So there's one point where Trump actually, remember, he sort of insulted a group of leaders. There's those guys there, they're sitting there, they can't, they can't decide whether to look at me, you know, and he was suggesting they were scared of, which of course they probably are.

• 13:00Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 13:00Alastair Campbell?

  So there's that sort of public humiliation going on. And I thought if that had been a, a British audience, which were grecically about totally Blair big slow hand clap by the Women's Institute. I think if that had been a British audience, they wouldn't have taken it.

• 13:14Rory Stewart?

  No, and they would have walked out.

• 13:14Alastair Campbell?

  I could be wrong. But then, of course, the other thing which maybe the audience aren't aware of, and I wasn't aware of until we got here today, is, and of course, I've been with American presidents and I've seen how big the operation is around them. But this was of a different scale. And I think a lot of that's performative, making people queue for two hours, the whole sort of having all these dozens of overflow rooms, most of which probably don't have anybody in them. Walking back from the main Congress centre to here, it's amazing that we left before we finished. I mean, it was by the Q and A beginning, people were falling asleep. And so I I just feel, I feel terrified that that is the person to whom the rest of the world is pandering.

• 13:50Rory Stewart?

  And then finally, I think what what the speech is, is a reminder of his worldviews. So on tariffs, a strong reminder, that a lot of these tariffs are personal vindictiveness. So he said that the Swedish Prime Minister had not been polite to him and

• 14:04Alastair Campbell?

  Swiss.

• 14:04Rory Stewart?

  Swiss, sorry, Swiss Prime Minister had not been polite to him. And so he just knocked up tariffs. He said that he had this whole theory about any form of trade deficit was the United States being ripped off. He had these extraordinary stories about industrial investment and a very, very simple narrative. And the narrative effectively seemed to come down to because sleepy Joe Biden was fooled by the green scam and started started investing in wind turbines. Energy prices got too high, the American economy collapsed, uncontrolled migration. And he has defied every expert in the world to find the real secret source.

• 14:46Rory Stewart?

  Secret sources, high tariffs, forget about renewable energy, push all migrants out, secure the borders. Shake down and threaten all of America's allies in order to get as much money into the United States. And this will be record economic growth and the thing for which he will be remembered forever.

• 15:03Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the only other speech I've actually been in the hall for was Mark Carney's yesterday. And I thought it was very interesting that Trump today, his tone about Carney said to me that he takes Carney a lot more seriously than these guys who are pandering to him. Because he basically, he talked about his good, we're getting Greenland for the golden dome. Okay. And that's to protect America, Canada and the West. Okay. And he put them in like that. And then said, I watched your speech, Mark, and you need to remember the next time you speak that, you know, we've done a lot for Canada. But in in terms of the sort of scale of nastiness of the leaders and the countries that he was talking about.

• 15:43Alastair Campbell?

  I felt that felt that he'd taken a bit of a hit yesterday and something had sort of embedded. And that I think is what the other leaders have got to learn. You're not going to get on with this guy, I don't think, by pandering to.

• 15:54Rory Stewart?

  And the deference, the deference is unbelievable. So some of the Middle Eastern states falling over themselves, to be super polite. President Sisi of Egypt in his speech basically was not talking really about the interests of Palestinians at all. Massive praise of President Trump again and again and again, just laying it on. Got that from some of the Gulf. But what's so shocking is the extent to which so many of the American businesses, so many of the big tech companies. So many of the European leaders, these texts from Mark Rutte suggests that it isn't just authoritarian states. That believe that the way forward is just a flatter and grovel.

• 16:36Rory Stewart?

  But that all America's allies, these people who used to, I suppose, see themselves as part of a multilateral alliance.

• 16:44Alastair Campbell?

  But that surely is why Mark Carver's message is right. You've got these two massive powers, America and China. They're the sort of, you know, think they're the big threat to each other. And we thought we were part of this and Mark Carver was the best symbol this week of, you know, we may have to adapt quite a lot. But he's surely right that if you put what he called the middle powers together, there is a lot of power.

• 17:09Rory Stewart?

  Right. And then the question for Keir Starmer and the question for the European Union is, are they prepared to line up together? Right. Because

• 17:17Alastair Campbell?

  That's what I go do.

• 17:18Rory Stewart?

  Right. Together you stand, divided you fall. And exactly what Trump tries to do is divide people. That's why he's putting different tariffs on different European Union member states. It's to try to separate people off from each other. And what we need is joint statements. Not, well, you know, Macron may have said this, I'm going to say something else. And the European Union needs courage, right? The problem is that this is the moment where the European Union needs to think about, what do they do for Iceland?

• 17:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 17:44Rory Stewart?

  Is this the moment to accelerate membership for Iceland?

• 17:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 17:47Rory Stewart?

  Is this the moment to really think, let's, and maybe this is what Trump's changed in 12 months. Maybe instead of waiting for those countries in the Western Balkans to tick every box over 10 years, flip it round the other side. Do enlargement now, say you're members. And when you tick the boxes, you get different bits of the membership package, but you're into the EU.

• 18:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 18:07Rory Stewart?

  And that's what I'd love to see Starmer trying to do. See that imagination, that sense of a multilateral picture. Why does he seem so timid? Why does he seem so overly cautious? Why is he unable to think this is a new geostrategic moment?

• 18:21Alastair Campbell?

  Because I think he thinks that if he goes down the route that Macron has gone down, that we will get punished far more. And even though he won't sort of reverse the whole Brexit madness, we are much more isolated because of that. So I think he thinks he has to go the path he's going. Though while we were in the queue, I was just following it. I got the sense, just from reading what people were saying about it and reading the BBC sort of instant coverage of it, I got the sense that he'd been tougher in terms of the message about Greenland, but equally pushing back on the idea, I think against Ed Davey, that he needs to be more Macron, more Carney. So he's in that place now, I think is a very vulnerable place. I actually do think sometimes when you're in the room, you can feel the power of a speech and an argument.

• 19:04Alastair Campbell?

  The great thing about Carney's speech, it was an argument. It was a worldview.

• 19:08Rory Stewart?

  And written by Carney.

• 19:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 19:10Rory Stewart?

  Talking to his team, who I try to give them credit and say, well done. And they've absolutely pushed back and they said, no, he wrote 100% of it.

• 19:16Alastair Campbell?

  And one of them also told me, and somebody I know, who said that they have been, because they've been to Qatar and China.

• 19:21Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 19:21Alastair Campbell?

  They've been on planes for 26 hours and he worked at his desk for 22 of them. He didn't look exhausted, like you and I look and feel. I thought that was a real moment. I didn't think today that was a moment. I thought that was same old Trump. And the world has got to get its act together in understanding, as Carney said, this is not a transition, it's a rupture. And he's the guy who's doing the rupture.

• 19:43Rory Stewart?

  And this is a blithering, slightly senile, flaccid.

• 19:50Alastair Campbell?

  Lying.

• 19:50Rory Stewart?

  Loose, dishonest.

• 19:51Alastair Campbell?

  Narcissistic.

• 19:52Rory Stewart?

  But it's an account of basically what people like Vance believe, of what Stephen Miller believes, a lot of the MAGA base believe.

• 20:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 20:01Rory Stewart?

  And therefore, let's not just think, we just wait out Trump, get to the midterms, everything's going to be fine. Except that this monster is inarticulately rambling his way around things that is believed by, I don't know, thirty, forty percent of the US population. And an entrepreneurial Trump successor could win again.

• 20:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 20:21Rory Stewart?

  On this mad message.

• 20:22Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, and who will turn on their Fox News news tonight and it'll be the the clips where he's delivering the line that's been scripted for him about Greenland. It'll be a couple of the sort of the MAGA attacks and then there'll be shots of people clapping. And what.

• 20:38Rory Stewart?

  Not fortunately of you and me clapping.

• 20:40Alastair Campbell?

  No, there was, and also what I thought was very interesting, I mean, the applause when he came in was, I would describe, very tepid. Such that when it came to the end, I spotted some of the official American delegation. Starting to get a standing ovation going and they just sat down very, very quickly because people was leaving. People were just leaving and turning to each other and saying, God, that was, as George W. Bush would have said, that was some weird shit.

• 21:04Rory Stewart?

  So the question is, will Britain and Europe step up?

• 21:07Alastair Campbell?

  Got to.

• 21:08Rory Stewart?

  Or are we what America thinks, which is weak, divided, pathetic.

• 21:12Alastair Campbell?

  Which he couldn't have been clear about. He didn't say a single positive word really about the UK, apart from the fact that his mum came from Scotland. He made that hideous joke, despite his dad being, as he said, being German about, you know, if it wasn't for us, you'd all be German and Japanese by now. That was a moment where people should have said, you know, fuck off. So I don't know, if we don't, I think we're, I think we're living in a really dangerous mindset. And I, I just think Carney hit the note absolutely.

• 21:36Rory Stewart?

  And be very cautious of the Mark Rutters of this world who are beginning to say, well, let's not talk too much about Greenland. Let's talk about Ukraine, which was in.

• 21:43Alastair Campbell?

  Where he said, which by the way, he said was a long way away above a beautiful ocean. It's not our problem.

• 21:47Rory Stewart?

  And cautious of the Boris Johnsons, this world who are beginning to make what they call jokes, saying, well, why don't we give him Greenland in exchange for his support in Ukraine? What support in Ukraine? How can we trust Trump? What complete nonsense? You sell sovereignty, you appease this man, and then what do you get? What do you get? What, what guaranteed does Boris Johnson think he's going to get for Ukraine from Trump by trading our sovereignty?

• 22:08Alastair Campbell?

  I'll tell you the thing, just watching the whole circus today, somebody who follows the circus the whole time and is sort of semi-part of it. I won't name the characters because it's pretty libelous, but he was basically pointing to some of the characters and saying, they'd have been working the markets like crazy. They know what's coming. They know what he's going to say about Greenland. And this whole thing.

• 22:26Rory Stewart?

  Somebody who's been right at the heart of the American administration, saying also very clearly, these guys knew they were going to take the markets down. They knew the markets were going to go up. He pointed out that you can see money that was made with the Venezuelan intervention, that they're all trading it up, trading it down. They knew that if Trump said, I'm not going to use force on Greenland, the markets will go up again. And when it suits him and he wants to short it again, guess what?

• 22:50Alastair Campbell?

  I know you've got to get back, but let's just to conclude, remind us ourselves what we said in the main podcast about Moises' names, three Cs, crime, corruption, cruelty. We saw a lot of the cruelty today and I, I wish more people in that room had been as horrified as I was.

• 23:06Rory Stewart?

  And in a sense, the performance of cruelty, which is almost more cruel because it's so half-hearted, boring, dull, inept.

• 23:13Alastair Campbell?

  And will you at least tell my friends in the light IQ that I, I tried?

• 23:17Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. You did, you did. We heard your voice, even if, even if, even if President Trump may not have done. Okay.

• 23:23Alastair Campbell?

  I've heard one of them. I've heard the boo. Thank you.

• 23:26Rory Stewart?

  Thank you and bye bye.

• 23:27Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  There we are, getting a statement from Number Ten. On that flight, with 350 passengers onboard.

• 23:44Speaker 04

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 23:51Speaker 05

  We assess, Prime Minister... ...with high confidence it was Russian.

• 23:57Speaker 06

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 23:59Speaker 07

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 24:03Speaker 04

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself: You want to play, or not? You're the Prime Minister! You've done... ...nothing!

• 24:16Speaker 08

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 24:18Speaker 04

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today. Disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 24:27Speaker 09

  A FRAGO that says to... ...kill the President of Russia.

• 24:31Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 24:33Speaker 06

  New from Goalhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 24:38Speaker 10

  You're my soldier, are you? Sergeant Tom McDuff, Duffy!

• 24:42Speaker 06

  An audio-drama journey like no other.

• 24:44Speaker 10

  Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.

• 24:48Speaker 06

  Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller.

• 24:51Speaker 10

  We have two tight, friendly KIA's.

• 24:53Speaker 06

  Where Britain plays its strongest hand... He's the best. ...against its strongest foe. Don't do it, Duffy! Bear Hunt. Available now, wherever you get your podcasts.