588. Is Britain Prepared for Cyber Warfare and The ‘Plot’ to Undermine the UN

As supermarket fridges are hacked and bomb threats are called in, how is AI accelerating the rate of cyberattacks, and can Britain’s defences keep up? Who is in the running to become the next UN Secretary-General, and what will the appointment mean for the future of the organisation and the international order? Following the ANC’s worst-ever performance in South Africa’s local elections, has corruption finally caught up with the ruling party, and can it tackle the country's deepening unemployment crisis? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in this week's edition of Question Time. __________ Enjoy Rory and Alastair’s interview with Paul van Zyl by searching ‘Leading’ on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Give The Rest Is Politics Plus this Christmas. Treat yourself or a fellow fan to a membership: bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access, a members’ newsletter, and more. Annual gifts come with a special edition T-shirt. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. 🌏 Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! Get an exclusive NordVPN deal + 4 months extra here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee! __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Caroline Kaye, Adam Thornton Assistant Producer: Jake Preston, Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Bella Soames Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  One of the saddest sights of recent weeks was millions of pounds worth of food being destroyed in different parts of Europe because of a cyber attack on supermarket fridge systems. France has directly blamed Iran for hacking into fridge systems, changing the temperatures, rendering the food inedible and unsellable in no time at all. Then we've had the bomb scares, which have been causing mild chaos to European aviation. All signs that hybrid war is alive and well and doing real damage to our economic and social fabric, which is of course why the Iranians, the Russians and other bad actors do it in the first place. It partly explains why the British government has launched the Be Ready campaign to prepare for emergencies and disruptions. And the public do seem to be listening, which is why last Friday saw record withdrawals of cash, would you believe, from ATMs.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  So are we ready for what's apparently about to hit us?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  This episode is powered by Fuse Energy.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Most energy companies are counting on you doing absolutely nothing, not questioning what you're paying, not switching, just letting your tariff roll on, which is costing you hundreds of pounds every year.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  But the apathy goes deeper than our bills. We've almost given up on energy itself. We seem to all be accepting energy is expensive, the system's outdated, but that complacency is costing us.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  Fuse Energy does not accept that because the energy transition is not something that just happens somewhere else.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Fuse is building an energy company which is designed to bring down the cost of energy and right now its tariffs are up to £100 below the off-gem price cap.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  So switching isn't just about paying less, it's about expecting more from your energy company and it only takes you three minutes.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Switch to Fuse at fuseenergy.com/politics. Use the code POLITICS and you'll get a free Trip Plus subscription, allowing you to hear all the extraordinary members content that Alistair and I are now producing for you. Visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Hi, this is Gary Lineker from Goalhangers, The Rest Is Football. This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate and easy transfer and no surprises along the way. Wise keeps things simple. Wise is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies, most transfers arrive instantly. Wise uses the mid-market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee and get on with it. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the Wise app today. Be smart, get wise, Ts and Cs apply.

• 2:52Speaker 03

  Observe: The North American Dad. 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle, no one called him boss. He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Welcome to The Rest Is Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  And Alistair, let's start you with, and we've got a lot of things to cover, some fascinating questions this week. Thank you to listeners and to Trip Plus members who've come in. We've got a lot of questions around cyber threats, a lot of questions around the big new run for the new UN Secretary General. Huge momentous decision, which will determine the next 10 years of the United Nations and the international order that almost nobody's talking about. And then we've got questions about elections in South Africa and much more. But let's start with cyber threats. So Kate and Dan might be a good way to start. Kate, can you talk about the bizarre fridge hacks over the last few weeks and what that means about defence investment in the modern age? And Dan, what would someone have to gain from the European aviation bomb threats? So, Alistair?

• 4:19Speaker 00

  Well, the fridge threat, the fridge thing was, I mean, really, I found it really sad because he, the, I was, don't ask me why, I was watching Belgian television and there was these pictures of just tonnes of food just being thrown away. And what had happened, and the French Foreign Minister has come out definitively and said this was the work of Iran. One assumes that they discovered a way to know that. And so this was an attack, a deliberate cyber attack on supermarkets and supermarket refrigeration systems in several European countries, Belgium, Luxembourg, and then a smaller number of stores, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Estonia and Finland.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  But millions and millions of euros of food has just been literally thrown away.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  And these, just sort of quickly to explain to people, these are fridges which can be remotely, the temperature can be adjusted and monitored remotely. The idea of if you're a big supermarket, you get your engineer presumably in headquarters to check what's going on the fridge. And the problem is that in this particular case, as usual, people have left their passwords as 1234. So it was a very, very easy hack.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  Well, one of them, the default username was supervisor and the password was 12345. And they'd never been changed on some of them.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  And, and some of them are, and of course this suits maybe the fridge companies, but they're saying these are older models that didn't get their software updates and all this sort of thing. But as we have more and more smart devices, more and more devices that can be controlled through the internet, it's easier and easier to do what happened here, which was not a ransom demand, right? It's not someone making money. It's somebody thinking it would be disruptive or amusing or just wind people up to essentially turn a fridge into an oven. I mean, they were heating them up to 50 degrees centigrade, weren't they?

• 6:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then the other thing that was happening in France, which I think they managed to foil, was that they were changing the temperature where plasma was being kept for donation, blood donations. So, look, this is serious stuff and it relates to the, the concept of hybrid war. Now, this could be, the truth is, we don't, we don't yet know all of it, but it could be that this involves a state like the Russians, like North Korea, like Iran, and the intelligence agencies here will say that is happening and it's happening more and more. It could also be it's some clever kid in his bedroom at home just able to work it out.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  But the point is that this is, this is partly what has led to our government launching this Be Ready campaign. This really, I found this really interesting actually. So the government launched the Be Ready campaign, which is basically, it said, you know, make sure you've got some cash stored away, get some wind up, wind up lighting and all this sort of stuff.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  My, my mother has a wind up radio, which she keeps showing us. She's taken this very seriously.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  A lot of people, last Friday was the record for ATM withdrawals in Britain, which shows this idea that people don't listen to governments. It suggests they do.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Well, my, my mother though is, I'd be interested to hear from listeners what other people have got on their preparedness setup. So Mrs Stewart has, I noticed, bought a huge lot of bottles of water, some tuna fish. She's got her wind up radio. But she also bought five bottles of brass polish. She clearly thinks when the Armageddon comes, there's going to be a shortage of brass polish.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  So you've got quite a lot of things around the house. I've been in the house. You've got a lot of, you have got quite a lot of brassy type stuff.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. She clearly thinks when Mad Max is happening and all these guys are going around on their motorbikes, like stealing our cattle, she'll be able to polish the brass as well as eat tuna fish. What would you put in your emergency supplies?

• 8:00Speaker 00

  Oh God, I must admit Rory, this is, this is provoking a real angst in me because I had a technological disaster at the weekend.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Oh no.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  So as you know, Fiona is the best person in the world.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  I wrote a chapter about it and her perseverance to that effect.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  You do, yeah, yeah. And I interviewed you about that, yeah.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  And I, she gave me a cup of tea Saturday morning while I was sitting at my laptop, variously writing my column for The New World and researching for this episode.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Wait, and the cup of tea went over the laptop?

• 8:26Speaker 00

  Well, worse than that, I mean, do you think we could afford a new mug? We have hundreds of mugs already. Fiona had decided to glue a handle that had come off the mug.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Well, that's impressive.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Is it?

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I really like people mending things and fixing things.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  Well, that's fine, but it wasn't properly mended because I'm just holding it like that and the thing fell off and went all over the laptop.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  So you know, I hate tech anyway, I hate it so much more.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Did you manage to turn the laptop over and get the tea out quickly?

• 8:56Speaker 00

  No, not quickly enough because I was shouting and ranting and raving. My son Callum found a really nice guy in Archway who was able to get it back on, but I've lost a lot of stuff. Anyway, but, so what these guys are doing is, is, so if they can hack fridges in big supermarket chains, and then we've also had the, this thing about the, and nobody's got to the bottom of this surprise, I can work out, these persistent bomb scares on planes, which have been getting planes grounded, cancelled, diverted, one of them having to be escorted by the Hungarian military out of somewhere. So it just shows that where there's a, a will on behalf of state actors or just people who want to mess around, this stuff is quite easy to engage in.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  And what I want to know is whether we do it to them and whether we should.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Well, we have, oh, that's a really big question. Let me just pause that for a second because I think you already tempted me into an amazing ground there. The answer is we, we have something called the UK Defence Cyber and Electromagnetic Force.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Under Major General Mike Fairs. And we've got the Cyber and Specials Operations Command under Rob McGowan, General Rob McGowan. So we do have thousands of people that are supposed to be able to do defensive and offensive cyber. We also have the UK National Cyber Security Centre within GCHQ. So this, this, it's been increasing investment trying to do this stuff. And the government had a preparedness plan and 200 million and, but still it's a hell of a difficult thing to do. If you look at the details of that plan, I think they're going to be behind schedule, behind time. That's very common process. But I just wanted, before we got into that, just to take people back on the cyber story. So the real question around cybersecurity actually begins with the internet.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  I mean, until sort of 1988, 1989, there really wasn't much to do in cyber because we weren't all connected. We didn't have smart devices, we didn't even, computers weren't connected. It really gets going in the 90s when people realise, criminals, that your credit cards are being stored, your address is being stored. And you start getting really big attacks. It's not a new thing. 20 years ago, Estonia, 2007, the Russians mounted a massive attack.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  And they became perseverant and became the most digital country in Europe.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  On the back of it.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  They responded to that. 2015, the Chinese stole 22 million US government records.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  By 2014, there was something like 4 billion transactions taking place a year on PayPal. 200 million records were stolen from Target. I mean, this is like 12 years ago. So ever since then, we've been in a world in which there's been an endless race, obviously, between the poachers and the gamekeepers. But the thing that's changed it all is, of course, my favourite thing, which is AI.

• 11:42Speaker 00

  So it's going faster, there's more of it.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely, because what's something that you, as the sitting there, you know, in your bedroom, hacking something.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  I wouldn't know where to start, but anyway, yeah.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  But you're now replaced by thousands of agents. So I was just looking at a recent attack. Microsoft found that there were, thanks to AI agents, 2,900 login attempts against 2,250 organisations in under a minute. So the point is that AI is now able to explore, simultaneously with multiple agents, in a few seconds, every combination of supervisor 12345. And in particular, they are finding vulnerabilities that nobody expected. One of the reasons why Anthropics, Mythos and Fable were not released is that they discovered vulnerabilities on iPhones that no human had ever discovered very, very quickly.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  And although there is a huge debate around this, I am in the, what I would call the Azhim Azhar camp, right? Azhim Azhar is a British tech and analyst who I admire and follow.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  Does he know he has a camp?

• 12:52Speaker 01

  I think he should now. He now has a camp. Azhim, you have a camp. Because he described the, what's been happening during Black October, which is a number of these attacks, as the Wuhan moment. And this is the moment where I think we may see that the first real negative impact of AI on the world will be a massive proliferation of cyber attacks. I've been predicting this for three years. It's completely logical, right? If they can just mount millions of attacks and try and try and try and try every different thing, and every time you respond, they try another thing. You can imagine a swarm of AI agents doing incredible threat plan. Now, the response from the AI companies is that's why you need to put your foot down on AI, because the only way of stopping that is through ever smarter defensive AI.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, but so let's just say you're, because we've been talking about this hybrid war for years, okay? And we know that the Russians do it, we know the Iranians do it, we know that North Korea is very, very good at this side of stuff.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  And the answer is, we do do it.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  We do it, but we don't do it, we have a greater propensity not to want to break our own laws or other countries' laws. Is that not fair?

• 13:59Speaker 01

  That is true of Britain, but if you talk about British and American allies, the most famous example of an attack ever mounted was not by the Iranians or Russians. It was Stuxnet, which was an Israeli attack against the Iranian centrifuges in 2010.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Where they literally got all the centrifuges going.

• 14:16Speaker 00

  My point, though, is that we've been talking about it and it just felt, and I'm not criticizing the government for this, because, but it just felt when they came up and said, you know, get a few more candles, get your wind-up radio, put a bit of cash away under the mattress. It didn't feel to me like it was, are they, are they setting us up? Are they teasing the way, do you think, to actually warning us? Because West Streeting said, you know, we're probably 1,000 days away from possibly being under attack.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  So my sense is, and I'd love the government to correct this, as we're, we're acting now as government communications, is that the UK government, like the European government, want everybody to be able to survive for three days without internet, electricity and supermarkets. And the governments are gambling correctly, I think, that within three days, they'll be able to get stuff to you. We're not, we're not setting ourselves up for kind of Mad Max, you know, living for 10 years with no government support. Because it's amazing what governments can do, you know, I've seen it even in places like Somalia, how quickly they can get emergency supplies through to people if you properly organize yourself. But yeah, the governments want three days to be able to sort themselves out and they want you to be able to look after yourself for three days.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  That strikes me as being extraordinarily optimistic. You just imagine, right, you've just described something where you get these thousands of agents going in. So if they, if you're sitting there in North Korea, or you're sitting there in the Kremlin, or you're sitting there in one of these kind of units that exists to do this stuff, and they've got thousands of people doing it. And they decide, let's absolutely wipe out the effectiveness of the NHS appointment system, okay?

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  Not least with Palantir's involvement. I'm sure they can work out how to do that. Let's say that they then go and they work their way through all our traffic light system. Let's say they then work through and do the fridges thing here. It wouldn't take you long before you have absolute chaos and meltdown. And I think what the hybrid, the impact of this or the purpose of this is this goes back to a point I keep making about the difference between democracy and dictatorship, is that the dictatorships who are doing this know that the instinct of the population in the democracies is actually to point the finger at their own governments as opposed to point the finger at the people who are doing this. Because they just come out and deny it anyway.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  And the Kremlin says they're paranoid, this has got nothing to do with us, it's because they haven't invested over time. And they were doing that, the Iranians would do that as well. So I just wonder whether we don't have to be a little bit more upfront about what might happen in the future and how, and then try to explain what you might do to defend it. Because I didn't feel terribly confident in just being told.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Well, so do you think the government should say, listen, let's take North Korea as an example. They've got 8,400 specialised trained staff being put through three years of advanced training on cyber attacking. They've just stolen $6.4 billion in crypto from Binance. They've stolen $12.8 billion since 2017. And that the Chinese have invested, you've covered this before massively in this, you know, tens of thousands of people working on this.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  I went to this MOD place that does some of this stuff and a couple of years ago now. And, and they were saying that, you know, I think the reason they wanted me to go there was not necessarily to talk about it, but maybe then to emphasize to government.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  So I said, I said to them, how many of these have you got in the UK? And they said, well, this is it. And they said, how many the Russians got? I said, thousands. So I just think that that, if this, if this threat is real, if this hybrid war is the future of modern warfare, if it's about technology, if it's about infrastructure, if it's about destroying morale and creating division, which is why they invest so much in the social media bot space, are we, are we responding in kind? And I don't just mean responding in kind as in, do we do it to them? Which I think we should have a proper conversation about. But also, are we responding in kind in terms of preparing ourselves as people, as citizens, as a country,

• 18:28Speaker 00

  for what might come? Because what you're describing is a, is a Mad Max hellhole down the track.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Well, this is something that we're going to have to get into in our existential threats mini-series. And again, do sign up to follow all our mini-series. There's a lot of interesting ones coming down the line at the moment, but we've just done the latest and stuff on this. We'll move on to cyber later. But we've about to get an interview with Umar Mohammed, describing what Mosul was like. This is really looking at terrorism, terrorist groups, the rise of the Islamic State, the experience of living in Mosul during Islamic State occupation. But so much more to be done, because I think we shouldn't just be doing the way that AI is increasing cyber threats.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  We should also talk eventually about how AI will increase bioweapons threats, how it could create, in effect, a combination between, let's say Ebola, as lethal as Ebola, as spreading as COVID. There's a bit of a paradox there, which biologists will point out. But anyway, the way in which not just finding medicines that cure drugs, but actually creating viruses could be something that comes out of, out of AI.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Let's talk about United Nations Secretary General. Antonio Guterres is leaving at the end of the year and there is a race on to replace him. Toby, who do you think is most likely to replace Guterres as UN Sec Gen? Simone, the UN is in dire need of strong leadership, but with the race to replace Guterres as chaotic as it is, do you think it's going to get the leadership that it needs?

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Well, let me.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  Rory's got his head in his hands.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, I'm putting my head in my hands, because the first thing is, where the hell is the reporting coverage and focus on this in the British Parliament, for example? I mean, I've discovered sort of two references to this in Parliament. And we are a P5 member, we're a member of the Security Council, we can boasting about this. We have incredible power in this, right? If we assume a discouragement as a permanent member of the Security Council, we can steer this whole thing. Instead of which, the whole thing is being steered basically by Russia and the United States working together at the moment, right? It's really nasty. And this will determine the next five, 10 years of the United Nations at a critical moment

• 20:47Speaker 01

  for the rules-based international order. So where the hell is the discussion about this? I mean, it's unbelievable. And, and just to set it up, this was supposed, basically, and it's not a formal rule, but informally supposed to be Latin America's turn. And probably people were expecting a woman.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Because there's never, there's never been a woman head of the US.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and people were thinking Rebecca Greenspan from Costa Rica would probably come through or not, if not her Rafael Grossi, an Argentinian from the IEA. And people thought maybe Rafael Grossi, you know, because Trump likes Milei, the Argentinian candidate could come through. But it feels as though, and this is going to happen very soon on Thursday, there's going to be an indicative vote.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  Well, I've heard there might not be, which makes me even more worried.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  Because if there isn't, what that says to me is that America and Russia, this sort of trilateral that is pending with Xi Jinping.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Later this month, whether that is when they try to stitch it up.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Okay, well, let's, let's then get to the elephant in the room, right? The elephant in the room is the UAE candidate, Lana, Lana Nussebe. So Lana is a very, very bright, able woman who was the UAE ambassador to the UN. She's highly educated. She, her father was a minister in the UAE. Her grandfather was a Jordanian minister. Her great-grandfather was a senior Palestinian politician. Her family, the Nussebes, held the key to the Holy Sepulchre since the time of Saladin. I mean, this is, this is really going some in terms of, you know, the Arab, the grandest Arab aristocracy imaginable, and she's charmed a lot of people.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  So this is not a personal, particular attack on Lana. But there has never been a UN Secretary General who hasn't come from what was at least theoretically a democratic state in the whole history of the United Nations. And say what you like about the UAE, that is not a democratic state. More than that, if you look at what the UN Association has just said, you're looking for a UN Secretary General who's going to uphold the rules-based international order and international humanitarian law. The UAE is absolutely at the centre of the conflict in Sudan, where they are supporting a genocidal rebel faction

• 23:11Speaker 01

  against the government and the army of Sudan. And Lana, for all her merits-

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Has defended it.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Has refused to accept a UN independent neutral investigation into what's happening. She's actually challenged the UN inquiry into what's happening. She also, as the ambassador, refused to openly condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine. She led UAE's abstention on the Russian-Ukraine issue. So as Secretary General, if Lana wants this job, she's going to have to say, what is the independent investigation she's allowing into Sudan? What is her position on Russia's invasion of Ukraine? How can she be standing up for the rules-based international order and international law? And finally, and maybe most uncomfortable of all,

• 24:02Speaker 01

  is she actually really independent from the government of UAE? And particularly from Mohammed bin Zayed, right? Because if she is simply a proxy, for better or for worse, for MBZ, you are putting the autocratic leader of, to put it politely, quite a controversial Middle Eastern state, essentially in charge of the whole United Nations. And that may suit Russia. Why does it suit Russia? Russia-Ukraine, you know, the UAE position on that. Why does it suit the US?

• 24:31Speaker 00

  Impunity.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Right? And it might even turn out to suit China and France has huge equities and Britain. And this is the challenge to Britain, right? We have a foreign secretary who has said, you know, well, what's his great phrases? Enough is enough, or we're going to do something this time. Let's see him stand up. Let's see Britain take a position on this. Is Ed Miliband really saying he's happy for the United Nations to effectively be run by the United Arab Emirates, given what the UAE is doing in Sudan? And given what the UAE took as its position on Russia-Ukraine? Come on, Ed.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  Right. And the answer to that question, I am relatively confident, would be no.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Ultimately, this will become a very big decision for Andy Burnham as Prime Minister. My fear, and I could be wrong, because there've been several straw polls. And just, we talked about the electoral systems in Israel and New Zealand in the main episode. The system, somebody at the UN said to me, the system to get the Secretary General is more complicated and more opaque than getting the Pope. You have these straw polls where the Security Council vote, and you have white polls and coloured polls. And the white poll is where all 15 say, encourage or discourage. Now, Rebecca Greenspan has led every single one, apart from one, when there weren't many people there, because it was the middle of the summer. So it looked like, based on the fact it would be a woman,

• 25:58Speaker 00

  based on the fact it's meant to be Latin America's turn, that she was out there. For some reason, and it doesn't appear to do with her views, because Costa Rica is actually a pretty close ally of the United States, the United States just decided it's not going to be her, but don't necessarily want to veto. But then when we get to these coloured votes, the P5, they have a red ballot. So you know if somebody is going to potentially use the veto. So the question you're putting is if at this summit, Trump and Putin, and as you say, we can understand why Putin wants this, because it's a country that you can do business with, and it's a country that has not been gone from over Russia-Ukraine.

• 26:40Speaker 00

  Trump probably, it's fit it in, just fit it in with the fact that he did the diesel deal, he did the sanctions deal. Let's be truthful, he quite likes being on the same side of arguments as Putin, because they're the big, strong guys in their minds together. They get Xi on board. The Chinese have said, by the way, that they think it should be a woman, and they don't like the idea of going against the rotation idea. Africa, of course, hates the idea of going against the rotation idea, because they should be next. Okay? So all that's been in the mix. But if the three of them get together, and the French, by the way, so the P5, just to remind people, USA, China, Russia, France and UK. The French, I think, despite, my understanding is the French Foreign Minister is very against Lana Doucette.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Despite all the French equity in UAE and their very close relationship with MBZ, yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  But the president, because of what you've just mentioned, is your friend Emmanuel Macron, is actually very unlikely to want to veto this. So as you say, that then leaves the UK. So-

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Come on, Britain, your last chance. Rules-based international order. People question why you're on the P5 in the first place. Well, you're there.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  This is your last shout to stand up for it.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  And hold on, let me, let me, okay, let's just, so you're Andy Burnham. You're sitting there looking at all the papers. And then throw into the mix the Manchester City situation.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  And the role of the UAE in investment in Manchester and all that. So this is a big call.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Okay, so let's see, Andy Burnham. I think I'd say to you, firstly, do you care about the UN? Does it actually matter? Because you could take the position, I think, be horrible. It doesn't really matter. Let the UAE run it, the UN's irrelevant anyway. That is a terrible statement.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  I agree. And also, you don't have the UAE-controlled United Nations alongside the Board of Peace as the two sort of overarching things. No, not good.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  So let's assume he still thinks it matters. Then what kind of UN do you want? Do you want a Secretary General whose good offices allow you to intervene? Do you want a UN as a development entity? Do you want a UN as a guarantee of the rules-based international order? I mean, there's some strategic choices, because one of the things that seems to be going on with America is they claim that the reason they're against Rebecca Greenspan and others is they don't want anyone really, and grossy is, they don't want UN bureaucrats. They want, surprise, surprise, somebody more like a property developer coming in. In other words, they want some kind of outside-

• 29:11Speaker 00

  Kushner.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Guy to come, exactly, Kushner to come in and run it.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  One of the American papers said that Trump was trying to put Orban forward.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Ah, so you can see, you can see that.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  I think we'd veto that.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  And what worries me more, though, it's not that they're trying to send in someone disruptive to reorient the UN bureaucracy and make it, you know, suitable for the 22nd century. More likely, actually, Trump and Russia probably just want the UN to be completely irrelevant and marginalised, because they're not interested in a rules-based international order. They, everything the UN does annoys them. Get rid of it entirely by appointing somebody who will either make it do what they say or make it completely irrelevant.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  Look, Trump is, over the two terms, and particularly this term, Trump has had a strategy to, I don't know if this word exists, de-relevantise the United Nations, and it's been effective. Look at how little the United Nations, apart from the wonderful stuff they try to do on the humanitarian front, but where have they been on the politics of Israel-Gaza? So that has been a deliberate strategy. That's what the Board of Peace is all about. Or Russia-Ukraine. And so you see why, you can see why they want to be there. And it is, it is extraordinary. We are basically hanging our hat here on the hope that China will want to get involved. Just on the voting, by the way, I've just looked it up. So the last sort of, there was a straw poll on October 30th.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  Rebecca Greenspan got 11 encourage votes and four discourage, okay? Lana was in fourth place with seven encourage and six discourage and two no opinion. So that is not an overwhelming mandate at all. But if you've got America and Russia working together, leaning on the Chinese, with the French, they think, just wanting to park it, then I think this is going to become, and it's amazing, you talk about it's not being discussed in Parliament, etc. It's amazing it's getting so little media coverage of this, because this could become one of Andy Burnham's first really big foreign policy decisions. And ultimately, these decisions, you can talk about Ed Miliband all you want. And look, you know Ed Miliband well enough. I think you'll be, you know, I think you know where he might be on this.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  But I think this is going to be tough. And the other thing, by the way, this is the other thing that the de-relevantisation has done. I suspect it has put a lot of people off, thinking that they might want to go for this job. Because the truth is, one of the reasons they're struggling is there's no, there's been no stellar candidate.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  It's not an amazing range of candidates, is it? It's weird that, isn't it? And I think there's also a risk that we could end up with no Secretary General at all, that you'd end up with a sort of acting Secretary General. So the Deputy Secretary General or one of the other senior UN figures in office indefinitely, in which case you have no leadership, you have no voice. I think that's the other risk.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. Shall we take a break?

• 31:58Speaker 01

  After the break, we're going to talk about the South African election, which has been an extraordinary upset for the ANC that's dominated South African politics since the end of apartheid. We're going to talk about the King and Andy Burnham as different models of international British presence. We're going to talk a bit about reading, and I think Alice might get around to plugging a rival podcast.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Barclays Premier. Now, you might look at your pension as some sort of end goal, but there could be a lot of future left to plan for.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  A lot could change from personal circumstances to new rules around how you save or how you invest and pass on your wealth.

• 32:40Speaker 00

  So we're aware of things like policy changes well in advance, but you cannot predict everything.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  And that's where planning and advice exclusively for Barclays Premier customers comes in. A dedicated wealth planner builds you a personalised plan around your goals, while your wealth manager helps it evolve as life and the world change.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  They're here to help you navigate your next steps because it pays to be a step ahead.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Search Barclays Planning and Advice today to learn more.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  You need to be a UK resident with at least £150,000 available to invest. Other eligibility criteria apply. Money invested for over five years has historically delivered greater growth than cash savings, although investment values can rise and fall over time.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  It's me, the

• 33:27Speaker 04

  We don't need the jingle twice. Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights and rental cars.

• 33:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.

• 33:45Speaker 04

  Fine, no one deals more deals than Please stop. Touche. Priceline.

• 33:52Speaker 05

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Welcome back to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  And me, Alice Campbell.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Now, Alice, a question from Dylan. The ANC has eventually lost support in South Africa. How did we get here? What does it mean for South Africa? So South Africa is a country you've been very, very interested in, all the way back to apartheid, Nelson Mandela. Tell us what you make of what's happened with the ANC in South Africa.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  Well, they've just had a huge defeat in their local elections under a third of the vote. So if you go back 65% a couple of decades ago, 46% five years ago. And the Democratic Alliance is on the move. Now, this is a party that has generally been seen as very much a party of the whites for the whites, but they do appear to have picked up a fair share of the black vote as well.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  You're absolutely right. And perhaps the best illustration of the fact that the Democratic Alliance is no longer a simply white party is that they got nearly 25% of the vote and whites are only 7% of the population of South Africa. So the overwhelming majority voting for them would have been black South Africans. What's happened, the ANC is bucking a general trend in Africa where the big liberation parties, the sort of ANC equivalents in almost every other country, often get a commanding position and then just hold on to it. And it's actually quite encouraging for South African democracy that the ANC has seen its vote share go down and that there is pluralism and that there is a rule of law and that parties like Democratic Alliance are growing.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  And I think the ANC is going to be pretty pragmatic around the country with its So in some areas, they'll probably go into alliance with the DA and Zulu areas. They may go into alliance with what's effectively now Zuma's party. And they may go into alliance to the EFF led by Julius Malema, which is this more extreme party as well. Yeah.

• 36:19Speaker 00

  If you're interested in South Africa, do listen to this week's leading with Paul Van Zell, who is a guy who's in the age of 25, was Executive Secretary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And I loved the stories of how that commission came together, how it worked, some of the evidences sessions that he described the day that Mandela went there. It's a really beautiful conversation, I think, about how they went. You talk about Persevillians, going from something so bad as the apartheid regime to within across a period of four years to have and he kind of admitted there was reconciliation, but not necessarily full truth. And I thought that was a very interesting insight. But I asked him, I said, you know, what do you think?

• 37:01Speaker 00

  The two kind of giants of that process, Mandela and Desmond Tutu, what do you think they would be feeling about South Africa today? And he said they would have their head in their hands in total despair.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  And he was also, I thought brutally frank about the way that corruption, back to, I'm afraid, the old issue of corruption has really damaged the ANC. And he says, this is a guy who devoted his kind of youth and his young adulthood to delivering South Africa, helping to deliver South Africa from apartheid rule. And he said, maybe it's a good thing for the ANC to be out of power because when you're in power for too long, it does corrupt and it's been corrupted. Actually, Paul said that when Tutu died, he worried that this was the path that South Africa was on already. But Mandela must have thought South Africa was going to be better than this.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  I'm recommending here a book by Sigrid Ralston called Ghosts, which is a book about, partly about her husband, Eric Abraham, who was a big ANC figure and a director and very interested in developing theatre and speaking up for young journalists in South Africa. But it's an account of her spending time in South Africa and experiencing, I think it's done very beautifully and very sensitively, both the sense of hope, but also some very practical things. I mean, I was talking to someone this morning who's in Johannesburg, who says they basically lose water and electricity every single day at the moment. I mean, the inability to deliver the most basic municipal services.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  That is just a fact of everyday life. And so you'd have to think that the time that they've had since the end of apartheid, not to be able to deliver those basic, functional public services is got to be ultimately damaging the government.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  And again, I had this sort of cliche in the main episode where I said that the big theme across the world for the last seven years has been cost of living. Actually, interesting in South Africa, it's unemployment more than cost of living. Maybe that's a kind of small difference, but it really, it's 74% named unemployment, 21% cost of living and then quite a lot on corruption.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  Well, Paul was saying that he was talking about the Neet crisis in the UK. Alan Milburn's report's coming out on Tuesday. He was saying it's six times worse in South Africa. So these are economic challenges that simply haven't been met. And if you have corruption on top of that, it's no surprise that the government is taking a big hit.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Energy, infrastructure, electricity. And then the final thing that we've discussed previously with South Africa, which is the rise of populist anti-immigration sentiment, particularly directed against people from, for example, Malawi and Zimbabwe.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. So they're dealing with a lot of the same problems, but they've got, coming from a base of far bigger challenges, which just don't appear to be being met by a party that, I guess, did think, given they delivered what they delivered, probably did think they could be in forever.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Nobody should be in forever, not even New Labour. Nobody should be in forever.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  Well, do you think the country's in a better place for the fact that we had austerity and the Tories, et cetera?

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Question from Ben, which I'm going to direct at you. Who's more influential on the global stage, Alice, do you think, the king or the prime minister?

• 40:09Speaker 00

  I'm going to throw that right back at you. Who do you think, the king or the prime minister? I think they both have different levels of influence. But I think the king, because he's been around for so long, not as king, but because he's been such a part of the global furniture for so long. And because, as you know, I've written a chapter about him in Persevillians, because I think he has really cemented his authority.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Could you have like a strategic theory? If you were the prime minister, thinking about what things the king leads on, what things the prime minister leads on, are there certain kinds of issues which are kind of easier for the king to lead on? Would things like AI and climate be those kind of things? Or, I mean, other sort of global, I mean, how would you sort of, or, I don't know, dealing with Trump and state visits, how would you sort of divvy it up? Because they are a team, right? I mean, I think the nice thing about it is it's not like Poland, where the head of state and the head of government are on opposing sides. The king, I think, is very comfortable being part of the prime minister's team, whatever party there is.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, which is, yeah. I thought it was amazing watching the Senat House ceremony on Sunday. I mean, go on, they're going to have to send it down as far as the gates to Downing Street, aren't they? There were 10 prime ministers. And I actually thought of him as he sort of went to lay, the king's there, setting off to lay his wreath. He has to walk past this line of politicians. And of course, Farage got in there because he's finally crossed the threshold, the MPs you need. It would have been funny to have seen him and Polanski going alongside each other together. That would have been better. I think in a way, this all depends upon the character of the person. Because, you know, we talked a lot when Johnson was Prime Minister, that so much of our constitution depends on the good chaps theory. Well, the same goes for the monarchy.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  If you had a monarch who actually decided, no, I'm more important than the prime minister.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that would not work.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  I walk into the room before he does, they bow down to me, not to him. They sing my name, not his. If that was translated into policy, that would become very, very difficult.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  The British royal family kind of worked that out in about 1688.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it doesn't mean you don't get one person who comes along and actually thinks, you know, I'm different. The Queen, who's been there for all of my lifetime, and then the current king, they're not like that. So that means then, if you're the prime minister, you're probably sensible to think, right, well, they've got all the constitutional stuff that they do. So he does lay the wreaths on November the 11th. So he does do the state opening in Parliament. The Foreign Secretary does accompany them on state visits. We decide where he goes, but the government goes with. And I thought it was interesting to watch at Chogum. There were actually some really nice pictures, Commonwealth heads of government, which was in the Caribbean. So Andy Burnham wrote a piece in The Guardian in advance where he's Said he was open to the possibility of the country, the state eventually going, having a process of dialogue and perhaps issuing a formal apology.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  On slavery.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  On slavery. And immediately.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 42:52Speaker 00

  Most of our media went into a position of wanting to say, this is embarrassing to the king.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  Whereas in fact, the king had already gone considerably down that path himself in previous iterations of the, of the issue. I don't believe that, I could be wrong, but I don't believe that Andy Burnham would have committed that thing to print without the palace knowing that was coming. So therefore I think that was part of a kind of a tag team going to the Chogum Summit.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Then you need pretty good teams in number 10 and with the private securities in the palace, making sure this stuff is sourced through and coordinated quite carefully. But if you get that coordination right, you can be more than the sum of your parts, right? You can get a really interesting tag.

• 43:30Speaker 00

  And also I thought, you know, again, I've said to you, I thought his speech to Congress was extraordinary. And he was saying things which Keir Starmer, then Prime Minister, would have found very hard to say.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:41Speaker 00

  So I think that was another example of where the king would not have been saying things without, you know, we were involved when we're doing all the state visits. Okay, America's a bit different, but for example, when we had, it was a Chinese state visit, I remember here where the, where the king, when he was Prince of Wales, refused to have anything to do with it. Because of human rights and all that stuff now, I don't think at the king level, he'd be able to do that. So I think it's, you're working out, you know, famously the letters that he is spider writing and all that stuff. And I think ministers and prime ministers, they, they, they use those to work out what really matters to it. I think on the environment, I think on biodiversity, I think on some of his, the stuff that he's done over time. You're pretty clear about what he's really, really cares about.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  And as you know, from your, what's called the King Rory Stewart Jen, Jensen Huang Summit at Dunfermline House. Now he's got this particular interested in AI. It is interesting, you're right. I think, I think the way to think of it is as a, as a sort of tag team. And the other thing, the other difference of course, is that the king, the head of state sort of pops in and out of the debate. The politicians are in the debate all the time, day after day, after day, after day. So I don't know, I, I, I don't know the answer to that question. I'd say right now, possibly the king has greater international influence, but that, that could change. Did Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher have less or more international influence at the time than the Queen? I'd say Blair and Thatcher.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  I think the Queen also played it very differently, didn't she?

• 45:07Speaker 00

  Now Rory, I mentioned in the main episode, the really nice newsletter that Bella wrote and allowed you a few quotes along the way. And, and I just loved this image of you reading as you were driving along. You were, you had a collection of books, you were reading to the team as you drove along. I want to, I want to know about that, what was it?

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Well, it's an amazing vision. I mean, the first thing, huge shout out to Bella, who was actually driving us all the time. And it's a lot of driving, I mean.

• 45:34Speaker 00

  Do you have a driving licence?

• 45:35Speaker 01

  I do have a driving licence.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  Why did you, why did you not drive?

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Because I was reading.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  So reading and pontificating, I, so I, it was terrible. And Bella was taking, I mean, you know, she was driving on the wrong side of the road from our point of view and doing an amazing job. And she was just continuing, like, we went all the way down from Ohio into East Kentucky, East Kentucky, West Virginia.

• 45:53Speaker 00

  And did you read the whole time?

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Actually, Celine has a driving licence too, and Daisy, I think, doesn't have a driving licence. But anyway, there were four of us in the car, Bella was doing all the driving as well as producing, as well as being our bosses.

• 46:04Speaker 00

  Say love for a 10 hour car journey, how much of that time were you reading aloud?

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Quite a lot of the time and it's quite difficult. I mean, with Daisy sitting in the back to work out quite how much they're listening to of this. Occasionally I noticed that Daisy would sort of put her head on a pillow on the window. And she would very sweetly say, I find your voice relaxing, just, I'm just resting a little bit.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  Well, we both get people telling us that they fall asleep to us. So anyway, listen, Wendy wants to know this. I read your road trip report with interest. There's one thing I need to know, how did Rory manage to do all that in six days while reading seven books? It takes me at least a week to read just one. What are both of your top reading tips right now? But I've seen you read, you read books like most people read newspapers. You're dipping in and out all the time, you're on a Kindle. I, I, I have books, okay.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Well, this time I did, I had seven books, so the whole floor of whatever it's called.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  It's called a car.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  No, no, this, this, what's it called, the foot hollow, the, the, anyway, it's a technical word for it. Around my feet in the passenger seat, the front of the car, I had a massive pile of books.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  But they were, I mean, it's a very, most of them are not published in Britain and you can't actually get them on UK Kindle.

• 47:10Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Because they are Americans, generally without being rude, uh, progressive, left wing Americans heading off to East Kentucky, West Virginia. And writing about poverty in those places. And sometimes, I mean, it's a wonderful book that I was really enjoying called Stolen Pride by Ali Russell Hostchild. But Ali Hostchild is a lady of a certain age who is a professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley. And one wonders what happens when she turns up in East Kentucky and says, I'd just like to interview you about your support for the neo-Nazi party and what you think about this, right? So there's quite a lot of that going on. Wonderful book by Stephen Soul called Ramp Hollow. And, and some of the stuff you would have really loved.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  I mean, the, the, these, the devil is here in these hills is about the miners and the union movement.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  And what was the devil?

• 48:02Speaker 01

  The devil was everything. It was the companies, particularly corporations.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  Okay, wasn't the devil?

• 48:06Speaker 01

  No, but it's corporations blowing off the top of the mountains, polluting the water, driving children underground, the black lung.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Didn't it make you feel that maybe rampant American capitalism isn't all it's cracked out to be?

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely unbelievable. I mean, by the 1920s, they were deploying private security teams who were gunning down miners in the streets. They were sending in planes, dropping poison gas on demonstrating.

• 48:30Speaker 00

  I think Elon Musk would go for that.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  It's unbelievable.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, it's, no, this, this is, this is, this is the, the real stuff for the American labour movement, which I think was probably some bit, I don't know. Probably crushed in the anti-communist witch trials, the 50s, but this was the beginning of this stuff.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  But it was also a hotbed of corruption as well.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Also a hotbed of corruption.

• 48:49Speaker 00

  So there's something about American corruption as well. Although, right, seven books, okay.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  What percentage of the words in those books have you actually read?

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Ali Russell Hostchild, 25%. What are you getting wrong about Appalachia, 95%? Dispatches from Rural America by Wendell Berry, 20%. Factory Man and Dope Sick by Beth Macy, 50%.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  Okay, okay, not bad. I feel, I feel if I like a book though, I want to be a hundred percent.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Would you read, I mean, I think you might find if you've read seven books about earnest progressives going around talking about the story of mining and opioid crises in Appalachia.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  You'd be flicking by the end.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, they're beautifully written, but every story begins, you know. Jeff is sitting on the front deck of his trailer, you know, he's 45 years old. And then there's, you know, four paragraphs of description of the Appalachian Mountains. And then we get three pages on his family story and his grandpa with a black lung and the, I mean, I, I don't want to be mean, but you know, and, and I also read. I mean, there's a wonderful reporting, Larissa McFarquhar, George Packer, brilliant reporting in The New Yorker. Shout out to a wonderful guy who came to me to San Ohio called Alec McGillis, who's written a beautiful book again on Ohio.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  What proportion of that did you read?

• 50:07Speaker 01

  I read probably 40% of that because I was going to meet Alec.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  And did you say to him, I've read your book?

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I probably misrepresented the amount of the book that I'd read. Yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm afraid, yeah. But it's, remember people like George Packer are foreign correspondents. So they're people who I knew from Iraq and Afghanistan who are going into West Virginia. Sabrina Tavanesi, who does this stuff for The New York Times, and sort of, you know, well over a decade now of reporting of Trump America. Was somebody who I knew from Iraq, Libya, places like that. So there is something, if you wanted to be a bit cheeky, if you were from the Republican right, you might question, is there a slight sort of anthropology of the poor American? As though these people almost travel writers or going into war zones.

• 50:49Speaker 00

  J D Vance did a version of that himself. I mean, I know it's his area.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and of course hugely popular. I mean, it's, it's a real thing. But as I say, this isn't a genre which breaks through to the US anymore, to be fair, than my book, Middle Land. Really breaks through into the US market because deep descriptions of rural Cumbria maybe are not things that Americans tend to read.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  No, whereas I think perseverance is what America needs right now, don't you think?

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Final shout out to you because I, I very rarely praise you enough on this. There was a moment on the tour when we were sitting around the table in a diner. And I think Daisy said that somebody was perseverant. It was a woman that we just interviewed in, uh, Matewin in West Virginia. And I went, no, come on, surely we can come up with another word. And the four of us around the table were unable to come up with a better word than perseverance. So in the end, you filled the gap there. Now you've got to come up with a good word for blue green. Because, well, you know, orange describes red, yellow. We got a single popular word for red, yellow, which actually was a really revolutionary, you'd be interested in setymology.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  It was a revolutionary discovery in the Middle Ages. We didn't have a proper word for orange. Until that thing, the narange came over from Asia to Europe, we, we, the fruit arrived and then we found this colour called orange, right?

• 52:09Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  We never really developed a popular word for blue green.

• 52:13Speaker 00

  Is there not?

• 52:14Speaker 01

  No, and you've got to develop it and that could be, could be a new word, you could.

• 52:18Speaker 00

  Book number 23.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Next year's.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  It's not the word the world needs now though, it doesn't need that word now.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Perseverance is the word the world needs now. Think about the word orange, whoever introduced that. I mean, you, you imagine getting through your life without the word orange for the colour.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  I must give a shout out to a rival podcast.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  No, what? Why would you do that?

• 52:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I must, I must, I must do this.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  No, what are you talking about?

• 52:39Speaker 00

  I'll tell you why, because Harriet Harman.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  Who is one of the presenters of electoral dysfunction.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Ah, yes.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  They were discussing this new word mogging. And Harriet, in the discussion, said, I don't like that new word. My favourite new word is perseverance. And she explained why. So Harriet, I love you, I thank you.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  And if you praise Alistair, you get a shout out, your podcast gets a shout out.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  No, because I get praise from so many people. Shall I say the praise that most touched me this week, talking of books? I was in Westminster yesterday going to the launch of this wonderful Back Young People Now, Back Young People Now, six guarantees that we want all the parties to go for. And I'm coming out the tube with this young guy who's looking after me for the campaign and this young woman walks by me and nods and I say hello and she says hello and then she runs past me, then she turns and she shouts, Alistair. And I look back, she comes to me and says, look, I've seen you going to the Lido, go swimming. And I've never, I've always been too sort of embarrassed to talk to you, but do you mind if I say, tell you something? You changed my life. She said she picked up, but what can I do? My previous book, as a result of which she said, I've got to get involved. I've got to do something. She's now a spad in number 10.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Well, there we are. It's good. An encouragement for anyone listening to write books because you can genuinely change people's lives.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  And an encouragement for anybody to go into politics.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Just after your podcast plug, I'm, I should plug my friend Ben Goldsmith, who just had his birthday, Rewilding the World podcast, where he and I get into a massive row. As usual, I'm standing up for small farmers in Cumbria. He's standing up for reintroducing Wildcats and Lynx. But anyway, if people want a good rural Britain environment farming.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  I thought it was quite agreeable.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Oh, good.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  I mean, you weren't too bad.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Not too bad. Okay.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  No, you weren't nearly as bad tempered as you were with Kevin Rudd.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Very good. Okay.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  Or Jonathan Powell, or Sadiq Khan.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, yes, yes.

• 54:26Speaker 00

  Can I plug a couple of novels? I've been going through a bit of a novel phase.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Just describe, for those of you who are listening as opposed to watching, Alistair is holding up Back Young People Now, the Six Guarantees About Making Young People's Wellbeing a National Priority and Winning the Changes That Will Improve It.

• 54:40Speaker 00

  Which are, like, school being more than exams, teaching life skills, looking after mental health, tech, something to do, youth clubs, et cetera, and apprenticeships. And Rory, I want to give you a little lesson in, in presentation. There's the slogan.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:56Speaker 00

  My contribution to the slogan.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:59Speaker 00

  Was that full stop. So it's back young people now.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Good.

• 55:05Speaker 00

  As opposed to back young people now.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Well, let's think about it. People underestimate punctuation as power.

• 55:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Punctuation can be very powerful. Yeah.

• 55:12Speaker 00

  So I've been going through a novel phase. I don't know whether it's because I've been having all these kind of accidents to me and, you know, dropping tea on laptops and having a couple of diary malfunctions and doing too much in Australia, which is, by the way, PSA, for the first time since the launch of this podcast, I will not be appearing for the next two weeks because we've just not made it work. It's impossible.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  From Australia.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  Of course. It's just been impossible. The time difference and the commitments of both of us, not impossible.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Well, let's, let's have a little competition on who people think. We're not going to reveal. I'm going to bring in.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  Instead of.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  A status. Will it be Michael Gove? Let's find out.

• 55:49Speaker 00

  Well, it won't be Michael Gove.

• 55:50Speaker 01

  It won't be Michael Gove. No.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  I can tell you that now.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  No, but anyway, let's have a little competition.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  You've got to get Labour people, surely. I always go for Tories. No, no, Mehdi Al Mehdi Hassan, didn't I? I can't say that.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, let's, let's see.

• 56:00Speaker 00

  What's the prize?

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Let's see. Let's see.

• 56:02Speaker 00

  What's the prize for the first person? How many people are you going to have over two weeks? Well, here we are. Sign Perseverance and Sign Middleland to the first person who accurately guesses one of the four.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  No, no, two, two of the four. Two of the four we'll have. Guessing one's too easy. Two out of the four and you get a signed copy of both.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  I think it's quite hard.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Anyway, tell us, tell us about your novel.

• 56:25Speaker 00

  So the first one, a lot of people will have heard of, The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Sprout, which I think was up for the Booker but didn't get it. It's just absolutely brilliant. And even though it's not a book about politics, there's a lot of politics in it because included in the things we never say, it goes a little bit to what you discovered in America. It's basically a story about a relationship and relationships more generally. But the things we never say include in this book and in America, people not want to talk about politics. And there's this extraordinary bit where the guy, the husband, develops this friendship with somebody who helped save his life. And as the friendship develops, it's, they're sort of months into it before somebody says to him, you realise that guy's a massive Trumper. And they've just never, ever, ever talked about politics.

• 57:09Speaker 00

  And then there was called The Green Highlander, which is actually the name of a, of a fishing hook. And it starts as a story about, it's by a guy, Robin Copeland, who, who was an old friend of mine. And it starts as a story about family fishing holiday, but it becomes a kind of geopolitical murder mystery. So I read them both in a day.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  Oh, that's very good. Okay. My little shout out, which is a bit niche, Marilyn Robinson, who people will know for Gilead, has written a book called Reading Genesis, which is quite serious, but is a wonderful tribute, in a sense, to Judaism. And I think that there is a tendency with all the conflict in the Middle East to forget just how much the Old Testament and Jewish belief enshrines such extraordinary, inspiring, humane, loving vision of man, woman, and God. And what a universal message, the message of the Old

• 58:13Speaker 01

  Testament is. So Marilyn, Marilyn Robinson, Reading Genesis.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  Very good. All right, Rory. See you next week. No, I won't see you next week. I'll see you in two weeks.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  See you in two weeks' time, Alistair. Have a great trip to Australia and apologies to listeners in New Zealand that Alistair can't make it this time.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  What if I told you that there is a one in six chance of human beings being wiped out in the next 100 years? One in six. We're facing a crunch point in human history. A handful of threats could end life as we know it. It might be nuclear war. There is high risk in a confrontation between Europe and Russia or between United States and China. There will be no food, years without sunshine, but the catastrophe will be global. Or artificial intelligence. At the highest level, there are risks of AI takeover. Even Hitler had to sleep because he was an organic entity. AI doesn't sleep. This is the moment that we completely lose control. It could be engineered pandemics. If every five days, I infect 10 and then 10

• 59:17Speaker 01

  infect 10. It would take about 39 days to get to 70 million people, which is about the population of Britain. The jump from 70 million to 8 billion is just another 10 days. Or is the greatest threat we face actually less tangible? Could it be economic warfare or the collapse of our political systems?

• 59:35Speaker 03

  You know, the choke point of all choke points in the global economy is the US dollar. All it takes is Donald Trump taking out his Sharpie in the Oval Office and signing a document and that's it. You could send another country into a recession if you wanted to.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Or perhaps are we the real existential threat? The strange ways in which humans convince themselves to do very, very awful things.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  Question is very simple. How do we continue to live together?

• 59:59Speaker 01

  To hear my new series on Thinking the Unthinkable, sign up at the rest is politics.com.

• 1:00:08Speaker 05

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot stop your new clients from emailing you at 3am. We can help you sell, market and hire in one place. We cannot help you be in three places at once. And while we can't help you organise your calendar, LinkedIn can help you land more clients so you have a calendar to organise. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness. I don't know what I'm doing. Need a break. Forget it. I quit. Escape to Pluto TV. This is objectively fantastic. Relax into the movies and shows you already know and love, all for free. Swing. Even our news is uplifting. You stay classy, San Diego.

• 1:00:52Speaker 05

  Watch Tommy Boy, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Anchorman, The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  X-Files, Wayne's World and so much more. We're not worthy. The best things on TV really are free. You just have to know where to look. Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.