By-election Results and Political Strategy

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Trump seemed to have been on phone calls with half of the US press corps over the previous weekend and he gave a range of ideas. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, came out and said something which m might have been accidentally have been true and was therefore he was immediately had to backtrack on, which was the idea that uh Israel were going to do strikes on Iran, which they knew Iran would respond to, and so therefore America was preempting that. But that's obviously a very controversial thing to say, you know, that the world's greatest superpower is being dragged into a war by a a a nation of eight million people. So he then had to pretend that wasn't what he'd said. In one of those kind of great flat denials that they that the US administration really specialise in. Well they go, no we didn't and then they play the clip and then oh yeah you did. Okay. So no what the answer is that nobody nobody really knows. I mean they did last weekend they were talking about regime change, which they've got. So uh Ali Kamene is now dead. His son at the time of recording is wounded but alive. Yes. According to that. Not a big change then. Well I think I think it's a significant change because you now have a supreme leader who you murdered his father, his wife and his child. So he'll have more motivation for reform and reaching out to the West, I would have thought. Another success mission accomplished. Yeah, right, but also th so, you know, there's been all these things about how they want uh Iranian protest ers to rise up and capitalise on um on the protests. The trouble is that comes after several weeks of thousands upon thousands of them being slaughtered or imprisoned by by the regime. The other thing that they've done is um obviously the US defunded all of its um overseas broadcast operations, including I believe one in Farsi , um because that was sort of woke madness that just allowed people just to sit on very big sinecules. And the new supreme leader is called Moshtaba, which is the Far C four chosen . So when they were having the meeting, I wonder I wonder if they were gonna choose. But also in in his C V which obviously I've been reading recently to try and catch up, it said he had a very, very influential teacher um that um formed a lot of his views called his father. Right, okay. The signs have been there for a while that the immediate replacement, and as you say, we don't know how long this will last, is not going to be a leader of the um opposition party. No. So it's not we're not dealing with someone who we can trust because he's been through the British public school system and been deeply inculcated in our ways and values. Uh no. Right, okay. It's continuity ayatollah is what I mean. Yeah it hasn't been to Sandhurst. But does that bother Trump? Because I mean he did regime change in uh Venezuela, didn't he, which consisted of taking out one man and his wife, and then just letting the regime carry on as normal but uh making sure that some of the oil reserves came the US's way instead. Yeah, although I'm really not sure how even that's working out, given the reluctance of the US oil companies to invest in a mad Trump scheme, given that they think even if you think he's gonna stay around beyond his term, he's still heading into his eighties. Is it just Aaron Powell Andy Almada's in place. What are you gonna do? Send him home? Right. It would be embarrassing at that point to send them home. And I also think that , you know, Israel has been very clear about the fact that it feels that it wants to just use the opportunity of its current aggressive posture to take out as many regional enemies as possible. You know, they I mean but you know Israeli uh uh opposition to Iran's nuclear program is long running. I mean they've done a kind of incredible stuff. At one point they set up a couple of years ago a a remote controlled sniper rifle to take out on the top of a mountain to take out an Iranian nuclear scientist. You know, there was a do you remember that terrible mad time when Benjamin Nartanyahu posed with that wall of like rack of DVDs where they'd got all of the um uh the Iranian nuclear secrets? This has been a l you know, a long standing preoccupation of Israel. Previous US presidents have been more of the calm down, lad But this is also the nuclear capability which we were told by one Donald Trump had been totally obliterated last year. Yeah. When they did the strikes last year he said it was fake news to say that they were only s you know compromised and not totally obliterated. So they got going on that again quickly, didn't they? Given that they keep it for a few months. Right. Assassinat Iranian nuclear scientists. It's a real testament to their grit that they've got it back up again within six months. yeah And it is confusing for um uh sort of readers to say, Oh, how's the war on Iran going? Oh there's a lot happening in Lebanon. Most of the casualties, you know, three hundred in a couple of days, seem to be by Israel on a country that isn't the named aggressor. I think Benjamin Netanyahu has calculated he will never have an American president who is so keen to do w all the stuff that he's always wanted to do for for de you know, a decade or more now. And so there'sn't there's this is what I mean. This is a fundamentally a war about the fact that there is nothing to restrain Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. And why is there nothing? Well there's no international law for a start. So we have a you know, President Macron was sort of delicately t tiptoed up to the edge of saying it's not really in accordance with international law actually. There's no there was no vote in Congress um before this, no congressional authorisation for this. No one else in the alliance uh you know the NATO alliance is willing to kind of speak up to Donald Trump, you know. The most we're getting is Keir Starmer saying, Well you can't use our bases, oh no, actually you can now. And China and Russia, which are allied with Iran, haven't really stepped in in any I mean I'm sure they're supplying it with intelligence or arms, but they haven't stepped up in any massive way to make a big deal or out of this. So so who who what is the restraint here on on Trump and Netanyahu? And then some commentators say well that's good. There is no restraint. Indeed. The one thing that might be the restraint as ever is the US economy. So as we're talking now there's overnight been a huge oil price spike and that is the one thing that people in the White House who aren't called Donald Trump are very worried about. But this has been but this has been going on for a long time, right? The so the midterms are in November. Traditionally you'd expect a president's party to lose ground in the midterms, which will be the start of Trump's gentle fading out of public life if this were to follow classic US presidential second terms. So that his team are terribly worried that they can't get him to talk about affordability. You know, he mentions it in passing but then gets super bored very quickly and is not doing the kind of things you would do if you're worried about it, like rolling back tariffs, like not spending billions of dollars of ordinance in in the Middle East with no clear objective. After nine eleven there was a there was a strong impulse that something must be done. I don't get the sense that that's uh the same here. No, the polling on it is really um negative. And I'm not surprised about that because there was absolutely no preparation for it. So a couple of days before the strike, Trump did the State of the Union address, which was incredibly long and rambling, and he did I think three paragraphs on Iran. Now classically you might want to say we have this terrible enemy and, you know, to get back to two thousand three, oh we're really worried it'll unleash a chemical weapon on us, or we're really worried it's got weapons of mass destruction, or here's the threat that it poses to the world order or we can't allow this to go on because of this incredible threat. No, he just sort of said we can't let them have a nuclear weapon and that was really as far as it went. So the American public opinion hasn't been prepared for this. It was extraordinary. I'm always going back for reasons that will become apparent a bit later in the podcast to a lot of coverage from 2003, and quite how long the build-up to that one was. You know, it was all about are they going to get a UN second resolution and are the weapons inspectors going to be allowed to come back? I mean it was 18 months before they actually moved and and and kind of went in. Uh whereas this one just does seem to have done on a whim possibly d um do you think he knew it was gonna happen or did did did Benjamin Natanahu just phone him out and say it's tomorrow? I mean they had been moving as Andy said, they'd been moving all of the carrier groups into the um into the Mediterranean. So that for over a period of weeks. The day before the embassies were saying all the sen non essential staff please leave, which didn't trickle through to the influencers. At that point I would be like, Oh Brit okay, I see ya. Well they're essential though, that's the thing. Deeply essential posting activities that must be done. And and in a way they hadn't really stopped since last June when they bombed the nuclear facilities, right? That was a a ceasefire in the sense of and we'll come back any time we like, thank you. The international inspectors did say that they had found some um material. I mean so there was a a small chance to say actually it's not totally random, but that was just buried. Yeah. I really like people have been doing that meme of kind of like at least in two thousand three you took the time to lie to us. And you can't even be bothered to do that. I mean I think Trump's having a very b bad time at the moment. He's got this big rash on his neck. He's been wearing a b a baseball cap, which for a man who's very vain is an interesting one. So for the fake situation room that he's made in Mar a Lago, he was sitting there with his baseball cap on and, then he went to a dignified transfer, which is when they receive home the bodies of American servicemen, traditionally like the most solemn occasion, and he was wearing a baseball cap for it. But it's a white cap. I'm I'm pretty convinced that he's thought this shows I'm one of the good guys. I'm afraid we are Gary Cooper. I mean the Iranian guys, all their hats are black., Andy Right. He is wearing a white hat. Well I don't need I don't need any further convincing. That's the level of analysis you're gonna get from me. On when he orders a strike. Like or m or maybe it's a bit like the new pope. Maybe he he's sending out kind of signals through the colours of a hat. But yeah. I I mean I think I think it's about the fact that the ad that he's got some you know, he's had all these he's had this bruise on his hand that looks like a someone's but had an IV in it. He's had congested ankles. He's spoken a bit about the fact that that might be chronic venous insufficiency. I think he's struggling through a few health problems. Which is probably not surprising for a man of his age. Right. For a man of his age and prodigious diet coke and random food consumption, you know, he's not a you know and and he takes four aspirin a day. You know, there's this kind of 'cause he wants lovely thin blood. He doesn't want nasty thick blood going on. for his And own assists listening, I don't think he's got Venus insufficiency. I think it's Mars. So the so the war is not legal, it's not popular, it's hugely screwing up the global economy. There are hundreds and hundreds of civilian casualties happening. I mean w we haven't yet complet ely answered the question of uh who launched the strike on the primary school, which killed about a hundred and seventy uh girls. But it does I mean it could very well be. The Americans haven't denied it. They've just said Pete Heggs has said that Trump's denied it. press briefing, the BBC, one of the few legacy outlets that was still kind of allowed in there because of Pete Hages, the Secretary of War's turnover of kind of the press court to influences. They said, you know, what's happening with that? And he said there's an investigation going on. They said, that's what you said several days ago. Could you uh hurry this along? And no, they didn't get any further with it. I mean there was a piece in the aye last week suggesting that the the overuse of AI with targeting um might explain some of these errors, rather than it being a merely a malicious desire to blow up school children, which I don't think is what the Americans are doing. It is just a carelessness and an uh It's hard to see how the war is going to get any more popular as time goes by, if there are more casualties, you know, as as the certainly will be Iranian and whether there are any more American ones. We're used to the idea that Trump makes quick lightning raids, Venezuela the the the the bombing of the nuclear sites at last June, uh and then declares victory. It seems as though Iran hasn't received a copy of that script on this occasion. That's the real fear when you talk to people who uh cover that region is that w do it are is there a sense among the Iranian leadership that they don't have anything to lose by just continuing to send out drones. So I mean there's not really much coming back from that, even if it's amongst a s schmogger's board of other justifications. Yeah. They want you out. Yeah, but I think you're right about the the popularity aspect of it. I I suspect that will be what eventually prompts Trump to declare that he's definitely won. It's all over, everything's amazing. And then move on to something else. But it's it is really peculiar because I sat there at a Trump rally and listened to him saying I'm the only US President in eighty years who hasn't started any wars. I've ended some. Such a huge part of his appeal. He was in the twenty sixteen debates very when he had a go Jeb Bush, for those of you who are have long memories, about Iraq, saying, you know, you got us into this stupid war that cost American lives and American m billions. What was the point of that? There is a previous version of Trump that there was a blinking away, some neurons saying that this is a bad idea. It was an absolutely explicit part of his appeal to the American people, wasn't it? Was no more forever wars in the Middle East. And that's what I mean when we were talking about checks and balances on him. How much of a check and balance on him is the MAGA base and and and those voters? And I suppose he's if he's not standing for another election, then personally he's got nothing to lose from from annoying those people. But Well he has kind of stuffed J.D. Vance quite heavily with this. So the vice president is, you know, known to be America first, an isolationist, very much of that tendency. You know, he served in Ira in Iraq. And it's really made uh quite hard for fans to run as the vice presidential incumbent in 2028, having been so overwhelmingly kind of humiliated on his one of his signature kind of um policy positions. There we have it. The thinnest silver lining imaginable on an otherwise enormous I was about to say he's really nuked JD Vance's prospects and I thought that's not the happiest. Just to pick up on Adam's point, is only seven servicemen have died to date, only seven American servicemen. So obviously large numbers of other people have died, but aren't unpopular wars in America wars in which American servicemen die? I mean so far and I mean I'm not being callous and you couldn't be more callous than Trump, yeah well, people die, it happens in wars, there we go. I mean I thought quite a jaw dropping speech. But so far it's not losses that will make the war unpopular. The thing that is really toxic for him is the sense of the MAGA base going, why don't you care about the same things that we care about? I in you know, and and it is now a very popular conspiracy theory that he did this as he does everything to get away from the Epstein files, right? And and that is a you know, it's a fringe belief, but it's still uh quite a lively one among some sections of the base. And then for swing voters, there were people who voted for Trump because inflation was really high and they were having difficulty buying stuff and they didn't mind all the other mad stuff that he was doing. They just didn't like what Biden was was doing. Those people are not diehard committed MAGA heads. They're people who want a functional US economy. And at the moment he seems to be interested in everything but their gas prices, for example. And again he's telling them, he's saying this is a small price to pay um for um not having a nuclear Iran. This is in one of his latest speeches. And you're thinking, what so you're admitting today that this war is going to cost the US taxpayer money. Yeah, if you're if you are a recently minted crypto billionaire, probably lots of things look like a small price to pay, don't they? Yes. In terms of the MAGA base, what are their feelings about Israel? 'Cause traditionally the Republican Party's thing has been very much Israel, right or wrong, we are behind them all the way. There's a sort of feeling with this one that if Israel kind of took America into this with them. Well it's sort of continuation of it with the attacks on on Hezbollah and Beirut as well, it feels like a continuation of one of the eight wars that he's he's said he's already finished as well, doesn't it? I'm really interested in this because I think it's undercovered. So on the American right there has been a lot of discourse since October the 7th about the fact that the left is has been overtaken by basically sort of hammer supporting cafe a wearing students and that this is a driving force of anti-Semitism in the US. Actually, there's a mirror image of that happening on the right. So one of the big stars among Gen Z staffers in Washington, they will admit to watching Nick Fuentes , who is a self-described Christian nationalist, a Holocaust denier, openly anti-Semitic, and somebody who for that reason is very critical of the US military alliance with Israel. And saying that he would now vote Democrat. I mean he's troll, he's an internet troll. But he does represent something, which is that there is a big part of the institutional class, the younger institutional class, that doesn't see the US Israel alliance as being something that is completely unquestionable and sacrosanct. And that has huge implications in American politics, for example, because AIPAC, which is the pro Israeli funding organization, is really influential in lots of um congressional races, you know, lots of political races. It funds candidates. Um and it has a very, you know, specific set of demands about what it thin what thinks that you know those candidates should say if it's prepared to back them. And you were already beginning to see candidates backing away slightly on both sides of the money down. Well so Gavin Newsom is a really interesting example. He's obviously got his eyes on 2028 as a Democratic contender. He's currently Governor of California. He said last week that and he phrased it as someone else saying it, but he said other people have described Israel as an apartheid state. Now in American politics, this used to be the kind of thing that had people kind of reaching for the you know, the gin and the and they're clutching their pearls, that this was a completely unthinkable, unsayable thing to say. But it's not anymore. And then the mirror image of that is on the right. You will have people like very influential commentators like Tucker Carlson, who are incredibly critical of Israel, and actually have built up quite a fan base in places like Qatar and Saudi Arabia because of their willingness to say that. Already we knew that popular opinion in America had moved away from Israel and now that is finding its outlet in some of the elite commentators and some of the kind of niche and underground commentators. So I think you're right. I think that this sequence of events will drive those people even further into the arms of why does Israel dictate the US foreign policy? That's why Marco Rubio came out and kind of cleaned up his his statements. Because that is a toxic thing to have said to n to quite a number of people in American political life. And again it seems a bit of a U-turn from you know back in God it's only January, isn't it, when they they went into Venezuela. But then the justification of that was this this is all about the Don Roe Doctrine, which is saying that the Western Hemisphere is, you know, part of the the Americas are kind of what we're going to be focusing on now, which is make the Americas great again, I guess. But then suddenly, yeah, no, straight screeching reverse ferret into into more wars in the Middle East does seem quite a quite a turnaround. It makes no sense and I think people have tried to drive themselves mad in the last week trying to make this make no sense. And I think if you just go just imagine he's caligula and he's made his horse a senator. No Caligula. See the one thing we can't get wrong on this podcast is classics, isn't it? Yeah. Well it's like me saying you've been insufficiency. I shouldn't say um he does need more love, but he doesn't need more war. Um but I didn't make it clear. I'm gonna make I'm gonna do one deliberate error about either Roman history or the second world war and every podcast just to keep everyone on their toes. Thank you . We should come now to the most important question that the war on Iran has raised, which is why oh why is Kirstama not invading immediately. I think that's that that's the official British media stance, isn't it? Or most of us. So would you like to guess what percentage of people in Britain, according to a recent Ugov poll, describe themselves as being pro Trump? What percentage of Britons are pro Trump? Oh well it'll be triple figures. Um by which I mean three. Where was this poll conducted? Inside the telegraph office? Well rather different outcomes. Thirteen one three. And sixty-seven percent against, and then a lot of people going as ever in a poll going who? but you know and people really associate reform. Reform voters are more pro-Trump than everyone else, conservative, Labour, Green, whatever FSNP, whatever it might be. And they also people think of them as being more pro-Trump. Well it's not entirely surprising given that their leader rushed over to Mar a Lago last week, no sooner than the wall had broken out to try and have dinner with Trump, didn't he? And got stood up. Poor old Niger, taking his GB News film crew with him and everything. And yeah If he'd just booked it for a wedding he'd have had a handshake. He'd have been allowed a peek behind the curtain. He's got no political strategy at all. But this has been a really big thing in the last week as lots of the traditional British press, uh which I mean mostly print media , telegraph times, so on. Say running articles, I'm just gonna quote a few headlines here. Starmer has made Britain irrelevant, Starmer must not equivocate on Iran. What's the point of having aircraft carriers if we aren't prepared to use them? To do what is not made clear. But there is this drumbeat saying we must absolutely right or wrong support America in this, and saying, well, Keir Starmer can't sit on the fence. What actually emerges is that lots of people want Kirst Timmer to sit on the fence on this and think that's broadly the correct position. And lots of people are opposed. Forty-nine percent were opposed to the attack on Iran as opposed to twenty-eight in favour. It's reasonably clear public opinion in the UK, but that has not made it through to the papers. The Daily Mail in particular. I mean, did you see that headline last week that said, Starmer takes the great out of Britain? And I just thought, this is very old for a newspaper that presumably still thinks of itself as patriotic to be kind of piling in with another international leader who's been insulting our Prime Minister and kind of s taking his side on it. It just seemed seem seemed a very bizarre position to be in desperate and deluded, was their front page headline about Starmer. When as you say, I think he's pretty much taking a position that most of the British public, or majority of them, would would would kind of think was quite a sensible one. Trevor Burrus, And you said to me the Daily Mail was marvellous in invoking the spirit of the other great wartime leader, Sir Tony Blair, who the male used to not think of as particularly marvelous. That was the most extraordinary thing. Yeah, the mail on Sunday headline saying, you know, Blair Blair says we should have gone in at the first uh at the first moment. You just remember guys guys do you remember you don't like him? You really, really don't like him. And you've been saying for for for decades what a disaster leaving America and and and and and and going into Iraq was. It's extraordinary. I mean even more recently than that, do you remember when Obama uh was supposedly interfered in the Brexit vote and said we'd we'd be at the back of the queue. Do you remember all of the op-eds uh from people peop people saying, Oh, well how dare this American interfere in auditor ? You know, they managed to sort of find the find their backbones there and be a bit patriotic about it. But no, we seem to have gone over entirely into let's just be the 51st state now, according to certain newspapers. But you Adam, you have a very convincing theory as to why. The key thing about what's happening with a lot of particularly our right wing press at the moment is that internet advertising is a lot more lucrative in America than it is in Britain, which is why the strategy of most of our British newspapers over the last five years or so has been to set up outposts in a couple of them were ahead of it. The Mail Online was ahead of it, G the Guardian was was long ahead of it, setting up operations in America. But all of the others have kind of been piling resources into into uh New York offices and and and and America facing websites ever since then. And I think that's sort of because these days actual uh print papers are largely a sort of afterthought and it's all digital first . That whole mindset, I think, of facing an American audience is starting to filter back entirely into kind of the editorial line that they're taking even on the kind of British facing stuff. Yeah. So it's gone very it we've gone very MAGA, basically. You know, we are we are we are British newspapers are now kind of semi American products. It's it's as soon as you point it out, it's quite hard not to notice it anymore. It's fascinating. The telegraph itself is absolutely seeing itself as a as a well. We did a story in uh in in Street of Shame a couple weeks ago. The telegraph have earned themselves a place in the White House press room, which they never had before. But they are in there. And they were one of us. I mean the telegraph were amongst many uh people last week who appeared to be able to just to phone Donald Trump up on his personal mobile and just kind of have a chat to him and and say, Would you want to slag off our Prime Minister ? Yes, I'd be very glad to bring that? Yes, of course I will. It was even worse than that when the sun phoned him up. They seem to have fed him the line. So they said something like do you think he's just doing this because he's worried about losing the Muslim vote?, basically, right Is he afraid of offending Muslims? And Trump went, Yes, I do think that's probably is why it is and then sure enough that was the splash. And you can't ask leading questions in a British courtroom, can you? But you can if you're speaking to the leader of the free world. Well I did think it I thought that was a bit of a rum thing and I thought no, no no it's you shouldn't be able to trick the US President that easily. Harry Cole and it was part of his podcast which is titled Harry Cole Saves the West. So absolutely he's going into this objective. Andy's furious this podcast isn't called Andy Saves the West. We don't even try and save the West, Andy. Isn't what Liz Truss is Yeah well sh ten years to save the west. She didn't specify who would be doing it, I suppose. But I don't know if you remember Liz Truss didn't know. No, I was thinking how embarrassing to have taken the title of your product from his demand. But that's a very good example of the phenomenon you're talking about, right? Which is that Harry was political editor of The Sun for a really long time and he's now got an American facing online show. So his audience is is m is the MAGA base, right? Whereas even people on the British right and just not in that reflexively pro American place that the you know that the MAGA people are. Yeah, I mean the telegraph certainly used to be the paper of the kind of Bufton Tuftons and the retired colonels and things, who are mostly popping up now to say, well, it's not terri terribly wise to go into another war in the Middle East. We haven't really got the resources for this. But just sort of being ignored in this kind of la no, no. And the Buftons are and you know a lot of sympathy for them. Pointing out that uh the running down of the British Arms Forces can't entirely be laid at the feet of Keir Starmer, given we've had fourteen years of of the Conservative Party not funding them. Um the fact that there isn't a navy and that the army is as the eyes repeatedly point out, you know, has had its outsourcing volunteer and recruiting divisions um given to someone else means that it's almost entirely ineffective. But there does seem to be this willful thing of not learning from history anymore. I mean I wonder if this is part of the the you know the kind of the the the war on woke, because we've been we've been told for for sort of years and years by a lot of these right wing papers that uh this is this terrible thing that people want to want to focus on slavery and the bad things that Empire did. Naturally Empire was marvelous. But it now seems to have sort of will been extended to well about two thousand three, doesn't it? That we we've decided to just rewrite that one as a as a complete in fact, would you like to play a game of two thousand three or twenty twenty-six? Yes. Iraq or Iran? Okay. Okay. I'm gonna read you some quotes. Iraq or Iran. The sub editor's nightmare. You have to guess. Two thousand six or two thousand three. This is brilliant. That's the one . British spies are part of a deep cover operation to track down chemical weapons which could be used in attacks on neighbouring countries such as Israel and Dubai, the Mail on Sunday, can reveal. The intelligence officers are working with American counterparts inside the country to locate sites which have been identified as this potential hiding places for nerve agents. Twenty twenty six. Yep, twenty twenty six. It was last Sunday. Yep, Glenn Owen in the mail on Sunday. I was like, I love that it sounded so to the the chemical agents, I was like, intelligence sources talking about chemical weapons and nerve. I'm wearing skinny jeans, I'm listening to the strokes, it's all coming back Hans Blix is in the news again. Yes. Kim Kalali, he's back. Yep. Another one. This is uh this is an editorial. Uh Britain remains a bridge between America and Europe, even though its spans have been stretched to breaking point by the current crisis. It should be a matter of pride that we, who share so much in terms of democratic ideals with the great English speaking power across the Atlantic, should have stood shoulder to shoulder with it. That's the Daily Telegraph on why we need to be right in there, shoulder to shoulder with George W. Bush. Britain is left muttering about due process, nitpicking over niceties, proclaiming its loyalty to a legal legal order that others have abandoned. Far from making us look noble, it makes us look fat uous, shifty, and unreliable. Two thousand and three. Twenty twenty six. Dan Han an, the man who is reliably wrong about everything, in the Sunday Telegraph last weekend. Right, one more. An abject lesson in making a laughing stock of Britain. The Prime Minister's slow and inept response placed Brit Britons in harm's way. Other nations acted rapidly to evacuate their people. When it did act, its charter plane broke down and spent ten hours on the The Prime Minister was utterly misguided from the start. It raises the question who on earth is advising him? That's got to be d twenty twenty six. Surely the Dubai mentioned surely . No, that one's 2011. And it's the Daily Mail talking about Libya. Do you want just one bonus question? Who said last week when commenting on Donald Trump's justification, one of his justifications to the war. Trump said, if we didn't hit within two weeks, they would have had a nuclear weapon. Who said of that? He lies so often that he doesn't know the difference anymore. Is it is it Alistair Campbell? It's chemical Ali Campbell! It is indeed, yes, the man of 45-minute WMD's dodgy dossier fame. So yeah, wow. We're not learning from history. We can't be bothered anymore. Can I bring us on to another element of the British coverage? Because so much of the war has been about energy, what it's going to do to oil and gas prices. They've risen enormously uh over the last week, uh in particular oil, but gas is creeping up as well. So a large element of this discussion has been what Britain should do in response to this. Can anyone guess the prescription that's gone out far and wide about how we counteract this? Is it heat pumps? It's not no No, is it just drive less? It's drill baby drill. The the reaction has been well let's drill the North Sea, which no one has thought to do over the last fifty years. One example, Claire Cutinho, the Cvatonsiveer shadow energy secretary, has been out there saying, you know, North Sea, North Sea, Ed Miliband is a dangerous fantasist, we need to repeal the Climate Change Act and get cracking. To be fair, she was saying that before the war with Iran as well. Oh yeah. And she was wrong then. So don't you worry, she's wrong then, she's wrong now. She's remained consistent, which I do respect her for. So I've been speaking to a few people about the basic So would it interest you to have a a little bit of context about this whole discussion? Because it will happen a lot over the next few months. Your your heat pump time has come, hasn't it, really? The solar panels. How's your electric charging in your cross pavement charging solution working out for you to do? Yeah, half back. Yeah, yeah. The price of the sunshine hitting my roof has not rocketed uh tenfold, which is nice. So I'm not going to be smoking. No, I'm not the way it's been discussed, in particular in the papers, even today, is that we've got two days of gas supplies left in this country. This is a disaster. And it's absolutely not. This is how the industry works under normal circumstances. Most of our gas uh does not come from the Middle East. It's about ten percent at at most. Most of it comes from Norway, it comes from the North Sea, some comes from America. But we we are not reliant for the actual supply of it on the Middle East. The problem is of course it's globally traded it the price will rocket basically because of these shortages. If this goes on for several months, there will be a concern about how we get that last eight or ten percent replaced because Britain is really, really, really reliant on gas. We use it for heating a lot of our homes in a way that you know most other countries don't. That is potentially a problem there. But that's if this lasts several months, the actual supply of it. In terms of how the North Sea might change the prices, it's almost completely irrelevant. That's the thing. So people say anyone who says to you, we should dr ill the North Sea, i it it is equivalent to your heroin dealer has raised prices a great deal, should you start growing your own poppies? The answer is to get off heroin. Is that because it would now cost a huge amount to extract what's still there? It's g m it's gone. Or there just isn't any. It is a really, really what they call a mature basin. So you know Claire Kotinia has been saying, oh well Norway has been finding a lot. The the amounts they've been finding are sort of up practically in the Arctic Circle. What is left on the UK continental shelf, it it it's pretty well done. It does do we not own the Arctic Circle? Afraid not. No. Invade it . Seriously. I mean honest I mean, you know, if I was writing a a leader in a popular paper now, I would say in another blow to Starmer we failed to invade the Arctic. Quick, well Donald Trump's looking in another direction. Let's take Green land. So the weird thing is, Adam, you've been talking about short memories. We have been through something very, very similar four years ago. Russia invades Ukraine. Yep. Prices spiked enormously. Attempts were made then to increase the supply of gas and bring it down. Prices still went up fifteenfold. So you you cannot north see your way out of this. So what can we do? I mean the government has a lot of opportunities to say this is a crisis. You look at countries like Spain, which have hugely increased their renewable capacity, they haven't been affected by quite the same spike in prices. So the government can make a lot of sort of quick decisions to signal, you know, whether that's we need to electrify our home heating, we need to electrify our transport, these are things we can do with domestic supply. Countries mostly have this thing of have you heard of the energy trilemma? It's such a great phrase. re about to. I' Good. There are three things you've got to choose between when you're getting your energy supply. You want it to be cheap, you want it to be secure, and ideally you'd like it to be low carbon. But loads and loads of countries have said, look, we've got cheap and pretty secure fossil, so we're not so fussed about it being low carbon. In a world in which these things are no longer cheap or secure, and where China is waiting saying, would you like some batteries and solar panels? That really changes the discussion. And what's going to happen I think globally is that lots of countries will scramble for extra supplies and many will get them. Countries which have a bit less money to s to spend won't. This is places like Pakistan which don't have abundant natural resources. And when Russia invaded Ukraine and uh gas prices spiked enormously, Pakistan was absolutely left in the lurch. What that led to two years later is Pakistan importing an enormous number of solar pan els. And in fact this year they've cancelled lots of gas shipments because they said we just can't take on that much gas. We don't need it anymore because China was there waiting to provide supply. So this was all very different in the oil price shock, you know, nearly fifty years ago. It's there are now alternatives which awaiting superpower is is hoping to supply. That's so interesting to me because again I think there's a difference between some of the legacy media treatment of it which is that net zero is a ridiculous thing and super silly and whatever and and the reform belief it still be rolled back versus the view of lots of other people around the world that this is this is coming to an end. Like this i the era of fossil fuels is coming to an end. And not least among Saudi Arabia, the producer of an enormous amount of them, right? Where you will hear the Crown Prince talk about how he's got to find something else for the country to do in a post-fossil fuel future. Another example, Cuba, which might be next on the invasion list. It's certainly been blockedad for for you know, America's just turned off the oil taps. Cuba's now importing a lot of Chinese solar panels in an attempt, I mean, they're really struggling, you know, planes are struggling to refuel in Cuba. They want to keep the lights on. The one downside is that lots of big renewable projects take a lot of upfront investment and if inflation is is is very high then it an interest rate is very high, it's harder to fund them. But in the long run, oil suppliers don't want their stuff to be inaccessible to lots of people. They'd like the price kept at a reasonable level where they make a lot of money and and people can afford to actually buy it and they're not desperately casting around for alternatives. And I think old Sparky will be returning um to this theme in in the Ian, I presume that when this issue went to press you were thinking it would have something about the Gordon and Denton by election on the front. I did. I had a particularly fine joke about uh the plumber winning a by election and I could put the joke the cistern is broken um on there and I thought well that that that would do for the front. By Monday, yeah um it didn't feel like it was the biggest story in the world, which is a great shame, because it was really interesting. Not I think f um in ways that a lot of the press covered it. This is extraordinary, nothing like this has ever happened before. Which again it has quite frequently. Um that is what happens in by elections. And George Galloway must have been sitting there thinking, What what do you mean I I've I've done exactly this at least twice. How dare anyone say this is a new tactic by the Greens? Um you know, I've set up new parties, uh I've gone for this vote, I've won. So there was a sort of um feeling that the story had been somewhat missed, but we didn't really have time to go into it enough. So I think we could have a have a quick look now. Yeah. And um this is really the short memory episode, isn't it? We've got a lot of short memories all over the place. So black back to two thousand three, twenty twenty two, and now to George Galloway. So I suppose the question it raises is is Starbucks screwed? This is a seat with a re pretty big Labour majority that's just been completely overturned by the Greens, with a very charismatic local candidate who, you know, was a very winning sort of plumber who kept doing a plastering course throughout the campaign because, you know, what if she didn't the election? Just you know, th she was clearly very popular and liked and the message was quite convincing. It was costly. He was both a reform candidate and I think probably at the time of uh recording the UK's most popular political substacker. But that's only because Hannah Spencer MP doesn't have a substack, I presume. No, well she she was I mean she was brilliant on social media and I think that you know the the Green Party generally under Zach Polansky has incredibly upped its game. And I think you're right, Ian. The reason that I think people kind of panicked and freaked out about it, particularly on the right, was they sort of thought if there are angry voters who are rebelling against the system and the establishment, i.e. Labour, then the repository for those votes is reform . And then it turns out actually no there's a left wing version of that and then people if they are angry with Labour and still aren't willing to give the Conservatives a look, there's another party out there with just a very, very different set of political priorities that they might also go Mm. Because I remember sitting uh w with you guys recording a podcast about a year ago and saying my feeling was that there are as many people out there who are as repulsed by Nigel Farage and reform and will do anything to keep them out as there are people who are going And I think this election has kind of proved that in a way. Yes, the Greens are doing fantastically well, they're very appealing in terms of the social media stuff and all the stuff they're doing under Zach Volansky. But I think a lot of people would the the dilemma for them in in Gorton and Denton was finding which candidate was most likely to keep uh reform out. And I think that's gonna probably gonna be where the battleground is now in the next next few coming by elections and and in the next general election. It's going to be a case of reform versus whoever whoever is most likely to keep reform out. Would you agree with that? There was a very telling instance. So Rob Ford, who's a professor of politics at the University of Manchester, did a blog that r ran through all the different options and he said, you know, there's a path to victory for the Greens, but they need to be the alternative to reform. And sure enough, this got slapped all over their leaflets with like if you don't want reform, vote green, says pod . And he complained and said, Well that's actually not what I said. But it was a classic version of you know, mo most of us who are politics nerds will know the concept of the Lib Dem bar chart, right? Which is sort of mysteriously like Lib Dems can win here and you find out that the access has been massively manipulated. But that's exactly you're right, Adam, is that it became a reform versus not reform fight. And the interesting thing is that lesson is that could be a very effective way of doing politics. The 2025 election was a Tories versus not the Tories, and voters were very good at tactical voting and sorting themselves. Are you in a seat where actually the Lib Dems are the best challenges to the Tories, you know, one of those maybe West of England seats? Is it, you know, is it is it gonna be Labour the best place to get the Tories out or is it gonna be reform? And something similar happened here. And if you look at all the the polling on issues, reform voters are very distinct from everyone else. They don't have a lot of overlap on social uh issues with other people. They're in their own kind of blob. So there is a kind of left block that people can move through and people who were Labour voters in twenty twenty five are not going to find it particularly hard to end up as green voters, right? Whereas it's going to be harder for those reform to capture any extra people. They've you know, they can cannibalise the conservative vote, but some of the people who are now still voting conservative are unlikely they're they're more likely to be perhaps more likely to be socially liberal or don't believe in like the triple lock or whatever it might be, right? Which again makes it very hard for them to kind of be eaten by reform. So th the thing that political scientists say that they think about reform is that they probably have a, you know, they have a kind of high floor but a low ceiling. Um in the sense of like actually when it comes to it, the next election will be about whether or not Labour can kind of squee how hard can they kind of squeeze them. Any estate agent will tell you having a high floor and a low ceiling is very bad if you're six foot Yeah, yeah. No, the estate agent would say it's it's a really form of living and it'll cost you over a million. Perfect. Sorry, perfect for horizontal living. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think uh I think I should attribute this to um Ben Ansell, who's a professor at Oxford, and he's he talks about the fact there's basically a left block and a right block in British politics. And that's the way we've got to kind of see it. And Labour is doing this awkward straddling, which is why that so many of them were unhappy with Morgan McSweeney as Keir Stammer's chief of staff, because he felt they were spending too much time going after reform voters. So traditionally white working class baby boomers in those North of England constituencies in Wales at the expense of younger, more socially liberal pro-European voters that they were losing anywhere else. And the feeling is that Labour has been quite complacent about well there aren't enough of those people and they're quite geographically concentrated. Yeah, or Bristol or wherever it might be. But actually we'll be we'll really get a sense in the local elections in May about the fact that if there are lots of people who want somewhere to defect from Labour to, is l i are are they going to go to reform or are there some of these p people going to go to parties on Lib Dems , um the Greens in Scotland, the SNP? And the same thing with I think the Welsh elections will be a very interesting reform versus anti reform co urse. I was interested in her um victory speech in which she said working hard in this country used to mean something and I thought which party is that? I mean it could be more or less anyone. Um and traditionally you'd expect that to be a Tory um or uh a Labour person trying to attract a Tory. No, it's the Green candidate who has a job. That is that workers and shirkers argument from the from the uh twenty fifteen election. Absolutely, isn't actually when I say that, I can't remember whether that was uh Ed Milibrand or um David Cameron that was pushing that particular alarm. I was Osborne in particular. Oh was it, right, okay. Were the workers part of Alarm Clock Britain? Or was that the just about managing? No, Alarm Clock Britain is Nick Clagg. Sorry. And just about managing is Ed Milibrand. And quiet Quiet Bat People is the thick of it, which is the one you must not get confused with. I think just about managing is Theresa May. The squeezed middle squeezed is Ed Millerband, you're right. But they're all identifying the same thing, which is people who are economically insecure. And the interesting thing is that we've been used to thinking of that as people who are in you know deindustrialised parts of m perhaps northern England. Actually now it applies to thirty something graduates paying back their loans at nine percent of their salary, unable to get on the housing ladder, thinking, you know, what is the point? Like when do I get to settle down and have a family and all those things I've been told constitute a good life. Yeah. So you know and those are that's the pool that the Greens have been incredibly good at appealing to. They've got that novelty value as well, which is what Nigel Farage had, that's what stood him so far, was he was one of these people who didn't feel like a normal politician and felt like he was an outsider coming in. But then Zach Polansky's then got exactly the same problem that Nigel Farage had a couple of years ago, right? Which is how do you staff all the positions? How do you make it more than just you? But yeah, I think he's learned a lot from what has worked for Nigel Farage, which is both having a pop at the mainstream media and saying they're all a haters say against us, always works really well for populist politicians, but at the same time making yourself really available. Zach Palency has gone out and done a lot of stuff. Think about the number of interviews he's done versus say Kemi Badanock, right? He's just a lot more visible. He's out there. And yes, he might get into sticky situations when he goes on the the rest is politics or whatever, but fundamentally he's just there in people's faces in a very fractured media environment. Uh in a way that I think, you know, that and but neither Keir Salmer nor Kemi Baddenok nor even really Ed Davy for all his waterboarding. I don't mean that, do I? Battleboarding. He's waterboarding at the thought party. Waterboarding at the thought party. Worst day out ever . Well, it could be an American base by the time this podcast goes out . Okay, so we come back to his Kirstamascrewed. Yes. Right. I mean Helen, you've been telling me for ages Nigel Farage is going to be the next Prime Minister. I think that we should be very open to the possibility because there have been huge swings and this was a you know uh a massive swing to the Greens with the reform in second and Labour in third. Yeah, was that you know there were there was a large constituency of quite socially conservative Muslims. There was another bit of the seat that was you know white graduates essentially. Now those are two groups that have you know some things in common, but actually electorally you'd imagine want different things. And for one party to be able to get forty per cent of the vote out of that seat is quite impressive. And a big problem for Labour 'cause it doesn't say that there's one weird trick that they you know, why don't you just be meaner to immigrants? Might win you back some of those people but none of those people. Why don't we be more liberal on social issues? Well that's gonna turn off some of those people. Where do you go? You know, both of them united by the way, one of the few things they're united on is Gaza, to take us right back to the start, right? Both the kind of you know, white college graduates and socially conservative Muslim voters, both of them very worried about Br Britain's involvement in wars in the Middle East. So that you know, that was something that uh uh that Zach Polansky pumped quite hard during the But it can't all be about that, can it? Matt Badlose came out immediately and said, actually this is all down to the Muslim vote and down to family voting and and corruption and uh and everything. But I mean if you're going to get a load of socially conservative Muslims to vote for a woman candidate and an openly gay Jewish leader, that that's a hell of an achievement, isn't it? Yeah, it just proves that they ran a very good campaign that spoke to people on the issues that they cared about. That said, there are bits of that campaign I didn't like. Um and the same with it, I think that reform quite often play white grievance politics. I don't like the Green Party putting out adverts which is showing Keirstan with Modi to say look at him hanging out with a Hindus and then Netanyahu to say look at him hanging out with a Jew. That to me is pressing a button that I don't really want people carving up Britain into different ethnicities and tailoring their message differently or or on religious sectarian grounds. I mean that's the Zach Goldsmith going for London Mayor um tactic, isn't it? Yes. Right, exactly. I find it a continuation of the fact that there are people who are madly obsessed with Sadiq Khan that he's trying to impose Sharia law on Britain and just say just because he's a Muslim, I think you need you know, that's all you need to know about him. That kind of politics is really Show some respect, Helen. That's the president of the USA you're talking about, huh? Really, really ugly wherever it comes from, say. It is, yeah, yeah. But they've they've correctly identified that talking about boring old green stuff is not especially interesting. No one cares about the heat pump. Well the heat is pumped. For listeners to the podcast, there was a section in which Andy was talking about energy, but we've cut it. Kemi Badenok's Conservatives got 1.9% of the vote. And that I think shows that she's done the work of reducing the vote to its core and you can build from that. So I do think that's a reaction was to say the Keir Starmer is finished. Mirrored by a lot of the press. Yeah We haven't even done Dubai influencers. Imagine such a thing, Andy. I think with all the gloating that I've got pent up inside me. We get big, big views on YouTube in Du from Dubai. Okay, I'll say nothing. I I've always loved the UAE and I believe that everything that they do is great. Absolutely. I know who protects you. You have to say that when you move to Dubai, which you can do. You revealed where we're broadcasting from, where the bunker is. That is it for this episode of page ninety-four. Thank you so much for listening and for watching. If you would like to get a copy of Private Eye, it's available in your local news agent. And if you'd like to get a