Personal Reflections and Cultural Recommendations

Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts, and get early access to episodes and live show tickets. Go to therestispolitics.com. That's the rest ispolitics.com . Welcome to the rest of this politics question time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. So hundreds of questions, I think even thousands of questions this week, but I guess I'd gonna start with Cuba because that got a couple of questions. So for example, Murray asks, with no obvious win for Trump that would allow him to save face in the war with Iran, do you think there's a real possibility he might resort to a distraction strategy? This time by targeting another country such as Cuba. So Alistair Cuba. So recent events in Cuba you had this uh it does relate to the capture of Maduro because thirty two Cuban security personnel were killed during that raid, which didn't make Cuba very, very happy. Trump then quickly goes on to declare that Cuba's a state ready to fail, then the oil shipments start to dry up, threats on Mexico, he threatens more tariffs. So this really has been a deliberate attempt to strangle Cuba when it comes to its own economy and particularly its oil supplies, and this is what's led to several blackouts and uh increasing rising rhetoric from Trump and others in the administration that Cuba is not along for this world. Yeah, and you've got people like uh Senator Lindsey Graham out there saying Iran's done, Cuba's next, we're mopping them up one by one. He is such a jerk, that guy. Um Marco Rubio is of course uh Cuban from Cuban American family. I mean his parents moved from Cuba, weren't originally American citizens. Yep. And so he knows a lot about Cuba, and of course he represented the very, very deep Florida Miami base of Cuban Americans. They're only ninety miles of course from Cuba, uh some bits of the US coast. And that constituency very, very strongly engaged in what they do to bring down the regime. And one of the things that I I was thinking about this, we were talking about the last podcast about what kind of threat Iran poses, and the question what kind of threat Cuba poses. And I was listening to an interview with uh Trump's former Deputy Assistant Secretary um of State who dealt with Cuba, a woman called Carrie Filippetti. And I was really interested in the way in which Republican Americans think about Cuba. So she takes it as red that an intervention in Cuba, regime change in Cuba, is basically justified, partly because she wants to pose it as a threat to Americans. So along with arguments around the evident lack of democracy, I mean this is a country which is a genuine autocratic state with over a thousand political prisoners. I mean, that's all true. It's a very poor, uh pretty brutal state. But she wants to not just describe it as that. She wants to say this is a country where if an American goes on holiday to Cuba, despite the fact they're not really allowed to go on holiday to Cuba by the Trump administration . They could have their possessions spied on, was one of her arguments. Then she talked about Havana syndrome, which are these allegations which aren't really validated that the Cubans had a secret weapon that affected Americans who visited. Then there have been a lot of arguments about how Cuba hosts Russian and Chinese signals intelligence, which allows it to spy on the US. Now, these are very odd arguments for intervention, really , because of course the US has signals intelligence stations all over the world, including in Britain, spying on China and Russia. And the idea that because somewhere is an autocratic, non-democratic state that spies on people who visit, that would apply to probably fifty, sixty countries in the world. And when asked what an intervention would do, and this is why I was getting worried, she said um well, things can't get worse , basically, for Cuba. And this is a little bit reminiscent of what people were saying with Iran and what people were saying with Iraq. You know, it it can't really go wrong because things can't be any worse than they are. But of course they can be worse. You could end up with half a million Cubans on boats trying to get to Florida. The only kind of risk she seemed to acknowledge was risk to American service personnel, not really risk to Cubans. So the the only reason I'm talking about this is it reminds me a little bit of the structure of the Iran and local people, only in terms of consequences, for US servicemen. And I guess the sort of general idea that it's just taken for granted that you don't really need to make international legal arguments at all. You just have to say, this is a bad regime, which relates to maybe something that we can all relate to, which is if like me you have Trump derangement syndrome, you find it quite difficult to believe that lots of people support Trump or are going to vote for him. And if like most of the Republican administration you have This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy. Energy policy rarely stays in Westminster for long, usually arrives with a bill. And from the first of April, 75% of renewables obligation costs will come off electricity bills and move into general taxation. So if bills are meant to fall from April, why would anyone bother switching? Because policy sets the floor. The saving itself is automatic. What supp liers offer beyond that isn't, and that's where real competition operates. Fuse goes beyond the mandated saving. Customers who switch save around an additional £200 on average. In the Fuse Energy app you, can see exact ly what you're using and what it costs with 24-7 support if you need it. Listeners to the show will also receive a free Trip Plus subscription when they switch. Get more than just lower rates. Switch today at Fuse Energy.com slash politics using the code Politics and save around £200 on your bills. Visit FuseENergy.com for full details and terms and conditions. This episode is brought to you by Adobe Acrobat Studio. There's a lot of data in today's game, but chaps is it all waffle? A lot of it is, yes. No, it's not. Come on! XG, pre assists, pockets of space. Hold on, you started using that terminology. Hypocrisy. Come on. Well if your role involves working through reams of information and data, take a look at Acrobat Studio. You can create a PDF space, an AI-powered workspace that turns documents into summaries and insights, and even generates reports or presentations out of it. So you can cut through the waffle, work smarter, and save time. It's easy to create something amazing, all in record time. Plus, because we know working as a team is always better, you can work on projects together without having to worry about privacy or security. So whatever you want to do, do that with Acrob at. Learn more and try it out on Adobe.com We talked about Iran when we talked with Karim Sajapur that you know maybe the the best policy was one of containment. It's hard to see what real threat Cuba poses to the United States, particularly now that they've lost that link to Venezuela and the support from Venezuela. They do still have some support from Russia. I I was interested to read that one of the things that China is helping them to do is a massive expansion of solar panels to try to get them more energy self sufficient. But surely the other thing that might be I mean they're not as military powerful as maybe they were when Castro had the whole country up, you know, backing him. But you know, the Bay of Pigs invasion in nineteen sixty one I mean that was a bit of a disaster for the United States. That was another one that I I don't you know so Dennis Brogan we talked about yesterday, he wrote his piece eight years before that happened. But that was another one where they just thought we get a few exiles, we put them together with some of our troops and they'll go and the whole thing will fall over. It was a fiasco. The most beautiful book on that is is uh if we're getting on to cultural recommendations, Nor Norman Mailers Hal'etts Ghost This incredibly detailed account of the CIA planning the Bay of Pigs and the way they're using Cuban exiles and the different Cuban exile groups coming in and their attempts to try to disguise an American plane to look like a Cuban plane and pretend that a Cuban pilot has come across. And then the disaster unfolds on the beach, where of course, a bit like these attempts to use Kurds against Iran, the real victims turn out to be the Cubans who They also have these they also have these wonder these wonderful plots to try and take down Castro. So they knew that he liked diving, and a bit like Putin's people managed to put some poison inside Alexei Navalny's underpants. They poisoned Castro's wetsuit, but unfortunately on that day he didn't wear that wetsuit, somebody else didn't they also try they put a bomb in one of his cigars at one point which didn't go off.. That's right And then there was a bomb, I think, in a shell so that when he went scuba diving the bomb. And Andres Velasco Andres Velasco is a a a former finance minister who's now teaching at an in London, has written a very good substack on this. Basically making the point with Cuba that we try to make Iran, which is, of course, in many ways, it's a loathsome regime. There's very little sympathy for it, and Cuba's been in real trouble since the Soviet Union pulled its support uh in nineteen ninety and it's got even worse with COVID and Trump sanctions. But that doesn't mean that there are clear opposition groups or splits within the regime or any real reason to believe you can do what's now called a Delcy Rodriguez, that you can somehow replace uh the current president of Cuba with someone else, which will suddenly improve things. And and and the thing again which is really going to cause a huge rift with the Cuban American community is that if Trump thinks what he's gonna do is bring in a new leader and just ask for more economic access for American companies without changing any of the human rights in Cuba, there will be horror because people are trusting Marco Rubio to try to improve the human rights and democracy situation. He's out today getting really angry with the media because they were saying to him that i they've not been clear about their goals in in Iran. So he said that's absolute nonsense, and the President's been clear and I've been clear, we've all been clear. And he then lists them several goals. I w I won't go through them all now, but they're completely different to what they said at the at the time. And and and they're also not really goals, are they? They're things like take out the Navy, but they're not strategic objectives. Is it to topple the regime He's gone to a very, very very dark place. But I th I think the other thing that that's really interesting. Lindsay Graham might want to put them into the same breath, but it's it's just ridiculous. But I think the other thing to say is the threats that Trump routinely makes now against other countries, the threats themselves are a violation of international law when he says I'm gonna take Cuba, I'm gonna do with Cuba whatever I want And by the way, Rory, when we were talking yesterday about Britain and the United States, and while we were recording, the um the palace announced that King Charles and Camilla are going on this day visit. Now, as you know and I know, these are the decisions that are made by the government, not by the royal family themselves. I'm very, very alarmed that they're gonna do this. And let me just read you a post that Donald Trump put out on his ridiculous truth Social. Shortly after this decision had been announced, that Charles and Camilla are going there. All of those countries that can't get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refuse to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you. Number one, buy from the US. We have plenty. Number two, build up some delayed courage, go to the strait and just take it in caps. You'll have to start learning how to fight for yourself. The USA won't be there to help you anymore, just like you weren't there for us. Iran has been essentially decimated, the hard party's done. Go get your own oil, President DJT. I mean that's literally we we keep being told that the one bit of the Unit ed Kingdom that he absolutely has real respect for is the royal family and King Charles. King Charles announces he's going on this state visit, which is a big deal for Trump because he loves baubles, and then he puts that out as yet another wacky stama because he didn't go along with his his Iran madness. 'Cause I obviously I'm getting some pushback around and including from you on my characterization of um Americans not being f properly engaged with the war in Iran. I still hold to the view that people in the US have not understood what this means for allies, that what this message really means. I mean if your economy is suffering as the British economy now is, and there's there's a big problem which again I don't hear enough about in the US, which is they're asking Europe to pick up the bill in Ukraine, asking Europe to spend five percent GDP on defence, while at the same time they are damaging the European economies through their war in Iran. You know, they drive up the oil price, drive up the interest rates, all our economies start suffering. But if you add to the fact that we 're being asked to provide the bases, provide the overfly rights and and and and and there's a comp there's a contradiction there, the foreign policy guy I was talking to yesterday, the Republican, was saying, Yeah, we've got everything we want out of Europe. I don't even understand why uh you know we've we've got bases and overfly rights for every single country in Europe except for Spain. We've got everything we want. And then on the other side they're like you didn't give us what we wanted. And what we don't communicate properly is how humiliation works, that if you're made to feel as Britain and Europe is being made to feel completely powerless, no choices, suck it up, we're not gonna consult, we're gonna damage your economies, we're gonna do it without you, we're gonna do illegal things and make you participate in our illegal things and then we're gonna take to truth social and insult you. I I don't know how long an alliance can survive this. I that's why I don't buy into this view from your friend Mike Pompeo that some how we just have to suck it up. He's not my friend. He's really not my friend. Um but I I think I I'm I don't think the King Queen should be going. I think they should be following the Alice de Campbell World Cup strateg y. Just don't go. But I know they're in a rather more difficult position than I am. And and it's also incredibly unfair that all the ministers when interviewed and asked about it say it's a decision for the king. It's not a decision for the king, as you just pointed out. He's doing it at the behest of the British government. Yeah. And they've got to be careful saying this because at some point if they keep saying it's a decision for the king, do they really want the king to be like, Okay, well then fine if it's a decision me, I don't want to go. And is Rory speaking as a source close to the king, do you think that's his current thinking? No, I'm not not saying anything. Exactly. Right, let's move on to another very interesting thing that happened in the United States last week. So Rory, your friends, social media companies, Stuart, Trip Plus member at Scott from Scarborough, the tech bros have just lost two very significant court cases in the US. How can we better control these monopolies? Echoing your Mike Pompeii point, not my friends. So this was a judgment in uh LA and Los Angeles where Meta and YouTube were found to have designed products that harmed young people and they knew it, and in in New Mexico a case involving child exploitation and their shares have tumbled somewhat. I think we will look back on all this. You know a lot more about this world than I do, but I think we'll look back on this as a gigantic version of the tobacco industry in an earlier age. They knew that this was really damaging, but they just ploughed on and obfuscated. One of the defenses they mounted in the case of the young girl who said she became addicted to Instagram in particular, was that they were trying to very aggressive strategy to blame her parents. So the pet it was something to do with the parents and nothing the mother and nothing to do with Instagram. And of course, they're now facing dozens and hundreds more cases like this. So where do you see this going? Well I think it is a risk to these companies because if the platforms are liable, which they've always tried to say they're not, and people accept the argument that they designed these platforms to be addictive, which is absolutely true. I mean, the way in which they sell advertising is by getting as much attention as possible and getting you addicted to it. And they play around with A-B testing to make it as addictive as possible, because the more attention they get, they more they monetize it. So if they become liable, they are then open to huge legal risk across the board. And of course, since Trump came in, a lot of them got rid of their you know, Meta, Mark Zuckerberg and others got rid of a lot of their safety people. X got rid of a lot of its safety control people because they thought they were entering a new world of free speech where they didn't need to worry about questions of truth or online safety or addiction. My goodness, this is gonna be um the culture war of all culture wars, because these are, of course, the very, very wealthiest people in the world. They're driving the whole AI revolution. And AI isn't just like tobacco. That's gonna be potentially the backbone of everything that we do in our businesses and hospitals and armies. They're also people who have a very, very strong self-conception of themselves as people who are improving the world. Again, unlike the tobacco barons, this incredible vanity. You know, people like Musk believe they're gonna save humanity, take us to Mars. All the people in the tech business believe that people who grumble about their industry are Luddites, that technology has transformed the world, that the world before the iPhone was an unimaginable world. And so one of the reasons they all got behind, or many of them got behind Trump is Zuckerberg was so offended to be dragged in front of the Congress and uh told that he was a bad person. And a lot of these people started flirting with Trump 'cause they couldn't the Democrats telling them off. So there's a huge culturalist hue which which embraces even people who are on the more liberal democratic side in this. They are very defensive about their industry, very proud of their wealth, very proud of their IQs, and will put up the most ferocious fight. And of course, they control the biggest media and advertising platforms on earth. So when that culture war gets going, again, unlike the tobacco indust Yeah the tobacco industry, because it was mainly newspapers then, they part of their battle was actually to fill the newspapers with advertising so that we didn't sort of you know go, after them editorial as it were. But just to give you two or three things that emerged in in the court cases. So an internal document from YouTube in the California trial, there was this question post, how are we measur measuring well being? And the response, we're not. Uh there was another one. The young ones are the best ones for long term retention. Targeting teens is a good gateway to entice other family members. They do sound like drug pushers. And there's actually one email from an employee, I think, who's warning them says targeting eleven year olds feels like tobacco companies a couple of of decades ago. And I guess the other issue maybe just to briefly to touch on is is what's happening in the UK. We've talked a lot about Australia. There are other countries that is now following in the in their footsteps. There is this debate going on in the UK, essentially I guess, around the question why doesn't the government just get on and do it? The House of Lords has now voted twice basically to to say that. And Alistair, could just push you on that one because normally you're sorry about the House of Lords is that they're these terrible reactionaries that are blocking the will of the House of Commons. But in this case I guess they're more on your side, aren't they? They're trying to push them to do more. Yeah, I can't quite understand but I think I I got the feeling that part of it is a bit of shenanigan going on, they're just like defeating the government. But I don't the government having committed to this in principle, it now feels that they're now setting up all sorts of quite complicated processes Characteristic generally, I'm afraid, of this government. Instead of seeing the opportunity which Malinovsk saw to take a big, bold stance, pretty primary colours, bold stance, we could all get behind, and make it into an incredible success. They manage to take what is is now a proven vote winner and dilute it and complicate it and finesse it and make themselves seem as though they're resisting something that they're supposed to be embracing and pushing. Well if and if you look at the nature of this, so they're going to have a pilot, and a pilot always says, generally says, we're not quite sure about this, we're going to give it a bit of a go. So they're going to trail these limits on access to social media in the homes of 300 teenagers, okay, for six weeks. So the test they'll the 300 teenagers will have their social apps disabled entirely, they'll be blocked overnight, or they'll be capped, okay? And they're then going to be put into this just feels so processy. Could be four groups. Group one, complete ban on most popular social media apps. Group two, apps capped at sixty minutes a day. Group three, apps blocked between nine pm and seven a group four control group with no restrictions. Then they're going to measure impacts on family life, sleep, schoolwork, etc. etc. etc. It's a good thing . No, Rory, I'm not finished with the process. Just be quiet. The government's pilot will run side a public consultation asking whether the UK should follow in Australia's footsteps. Well, I think the public's pretty keen on this. And then Keirstammer says he's very keen , very keen for the government to tackle addictive features. So what it does is it's like you're you're doing something that's big and bold, but through the process you're making it feel very kind of step by step increment al, not very exciting. Yeah. I mean w I mean the whole thing's complete nonsense because as somebody who did a few randomized control trials when we were doing cash transfers to the extreme pool with GiveDirectly, a sample size of three hundred isn't anyway. I mean no statistician is going to derive any information from three hundred divided into groups of sixty. I mean it's it's meaningless. So I don't even understand what the hell they think they're doing there. Almost certainly somebody said they wanted evidence and then someone's civil service said they didn't have enough money to run a proper sample size. So now they're doing a a nonsense. The other problem is that it makes it feel, I'm afraid, to somebody like me who's feeling a bit grumpy about this, as though they're under pressure from the social media companies, because we know that was the case with Mal skus. He said as soon as he started to do this, all the big American tech companies ratcheted up the pressure on him and tried to shut him down. I'm worried in this case that the government is very dependent on these big American tech companies for their next generation investment. You remember the whole Trump visit was about these companies bringing in billions of dollars of investment to the UK. And the reason they're not taking the Malonovskis line is that they're desperate not to offend the tech companies. Right, Rory, you're our sort of resident um slug off the green per green party person. Sean asks this question. Hi, Rory and Alistair, I wanted to pick up on the idea that the Green Party's far left. I'm twenty seven, says Sean, and in every election so far in my life the centre or right has won. I consider myself left wing, but I don't think my views are fringe in. Invest the economy, fairer tax, nationalised industries. Many of these ideas would have been fairly mainstream before That cher. Since then the centre of gravity has shifted so far right that the principles of social democracy and Keynesian economics are sometimes labelled extreme. Even if the Green Party goes a bit further, should principles like wealth redistribution ensuring greater economic firmness really be considered far left? Oh, you like this bit. Many thanks. Sean Davis brackets running to be a local Green Councillor in the upcoming May election. So in the interest of balance, could we have the view of the Labour councillor in your seat and the Tory? It's really interesting, isn't it? Because um of course uh you'll see if if if reform listeners um wrote in, which they don't very much, but they're also very, very resistant to the label far right. They absolutely hate the idea they're far right. They would say their ideas are basically in line with a lot of the population. Common sense. I guess uh look this there's uh there's a trivial point and there's a more important point. Trivial point is we're trying to describe a British politics that's gone from a two-party politics into a five-party politics, and we're trying to describe the fact that reform is right the Conservatives and Green is left a Labour. I think the more important point is this question around for both green and reform about populism, which is they're not awfully good, either party, about explaining the costs and sacrifices that would be involved in their solutions. That they're very good at talking about the problems. And that's one of the reasons. I mean we just interviewed Janis Veroufakis. And I was quite struck by the fact that he's somebody who's definitely on the left, but much more than the Green Party is very, very clear about the fact he doesn't think wealth taxes are going to make any real significant difference. He thinks, you know, there might be an argument for doing morally, but it's not going to sort out the public finances. And that the kind of changes you would make need to to the British economy are going to be really, really painful and are going to hit people in the pocket. And that's exactly what populists on left and right never want to admit. The Green Party 'cause the Green Party is quite a complicated alliance now, because Zach Polanski has become the leader and the most high f profile person within it. His politics I'd say are quite different to other reasonably well known Green Party figures. I don't see them as far left. I just think they're not very credible. We we saw that in our interview with Zach Plansky. I think they're very credible on the economy. I thought the we got a question, Joshua, what was the purpose of the protest against the far right when the far right are not in power? Well the protest against the far right, I suspect Josh because a lot of people feel very, very worried that the far right is on the march. This refers to a very, very well attended march at the weekend in London, and it was specifically a march organised to protest against the threat of the rise of the far right. Zach Polansky spoke at that event, and I don't know, I just couldn't take him seriously because he was just looked like a guy having a really good time, bouncing around a strage to some music. Now maybe, that's just me being a grumpy old man. But if the Green Party are to be taken seriously, I think they have to be serious. And I think that too often the policy perspectives that they put out there is not serious. And you're absolutely right, is it is a form of popularism . And the series I've done with Liam Byrne, we're talking mainly about the right. He has his book doesn't address the populism on the left. But it is a kind of mirror. You know, it is about saying, well, this is a problem and it's a terrible problem, and we shouldn't have that problem, therefore we'd do this to deal with it. So yesterday Farage and Jen Rick were out and about saying that you know we're gonna make it easier to fly, we're gonna take the price down of flying, we're gonna reduce your fuel costs. Well, how? And what what trade-offs you are doing? They never feel that they have to do that. Look, I think the Green Party are uh they are a real threat to Labour. I was in a very good school the other day, Northampton Academy, and it's a cha one of a chain, and they had several hundred kids listening in the room and then there's seven thousand online coming in from different schools. I could only see the ones in the room. But I did one of my votes, as you know I love. So these are these are all students, school kids who are gonna vote for the first time in the next election. I asked them, how many of you will vote? Virtually every hand went up. And then later in the in the tour said, you know, how many of you think Keir Starm was doing a good job as Prime Minister? And it was very, very, very, very, very few. Alarmingly few from a Labour perspective. Now, they liked Zack Polensky. I didn't vote on Polansky, but they say, you know, can't he be a bit more like Zack and a bit more radical and a bit more this and a bit more that? Now that shows that his strategy is working, okay, but I don't think he's I was so intrigued. I was so intrigued um in our interview with him that you know him saying to me basically at the end, listen, you know, I I could have known those economic statistics if you'd warned me in advance. But but also that it didn't really damage him at all. I mean I I thought, you know, revealing that he didn't really know the difference between the debt and the deficit and he wasn't sure about the top rate attacks, I think could have been really damaging for a politician twenty, thirty years ago, but hasn't had any effects on it at all. He needs to go away and get decent advice and get people around him and and and have good answers to that because in a general election it is the sort of thing that can trip you up very, very quickly if you don't have those pretty clear answers. But maybe we are. Look we often say we're always a few years behind America in our political campaigning. Maybe that is the awful road that we're going down where truth doesn't really matter, sums don't have to add up, you can get away with making mistakes. But I I don't see them as far left. I just see them as slightly lacking well, severely lacking in credibility on the politic y front. Should we take a break? Yep. Take a quick break and then back for more . This episode is brought to you by Free Trade, the award-winning free investment platform. 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Value of your investments can, as I've often experienced, go down as well as up, and you may get back less than you invest. Other charges may apply. ICER and SIP rules and terms and conditions, of course, also apply. This episode is sponsored by Money Box. So Alistair, we're talking now about something that affects every single one of our listeners' lives, which is their money and their savings. And tax ye eararnings soon, there could not be a better time to do so. Exactly. So every adult in the UK has a tax free ICER allowance of twenty thousand pounds each year, but it doesn't roll over, so if you don't use it before the fifth of April, you'll lose it. Most of us work hard for our money and money box cash ICE helps make sure it's working just as hard for us with a market leading rate. Save up to twenty thousand pounds a year, tax-free, customers rate money box, excellent on trustpilot. And opening a cash Isa takes just a few minutes. So if your savings aren't earning their keep, it may be time to put them to work. Open a moneybox cash ICE in the app or a moneyboxapp.com. Subject conditions including bonus rate, ICER and tax rules apply. Market leading based on moneyfactscompare.co dot uk ologies with me Alistair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart . Now, Bruno Rory wants to know: who do we think is more dangerous to the world right now? Putin or Netanyahu? Po o. It's uh it's quite a question, isn't it? I mean they' endreangering the world is a very different ways. So let's let's start with Putin, who I do think is is objectively the most dangerous directly for Europe. He controls twenty percent of a European country, it's a war where one point two million casualties have happened . He's got this enormous nuclear arsenal and ballistic missiles. He's made it clear, as as um Tim Snyder said in our interview with him for many, many years now, that he wants to increase Russian territory right into the Baltic and we're in a very dangerous situation because that message you read out from Trump signals the US administration that for the first time really since nineteen forty five is signalling that it's not really that interested in protecting Europe against Russia. I mean there's something I keep picking up on here, which is sometimes these Republican foreign policy people I've been arguing with over the last three days are saying, when I say what, are you doing around? The sayy, well, it doesn't matter because Ukraine's fine, Europe's fine, you can handle it yourselves. And sometimes they're of course saying the reverse, which is Europe isn't fine, Europe needs to spend much more on defense, you're in a much more dangerous situation. The Israel point, though, is fascinating because Israel, of course, is justifying these attacks on the grounds that it's vulnerable, but it's probably doing these things because it feels almost invulnerable. In the short term, Netanyahu, if you said, you know, what could go wrong for Israel and what's happening? The answer is ultimately he probably doesn't feel there is any existential threat to Israel. That there's no way that the Gulf countries are going to repeat the Om Kippura War of seventy four. He has a nuclear weapon, they are the strongest military power in the Middle East by a country mile. And and therefore a bit like Trump, what he's doing in Lebanon, what he's doing in Gaza, what he's doing in Syria, and of course what he's doing in Iran, he's partly doing 'cause there isn't much direct consequence for him. He's he's insulated um from very much blowback. Now the and and and that's really being felt by the Gulf because they feel that Israel's offering the choice of either sig ning up to basically join all of Israel's campaigns, or have their economies shattered, marginalised and and pushed aside. Anyway, over to Well I think it's an impossible question to answer. I mean Nenya at the moment seems to me to be pursuing in Lebanon the similar approach that he pursued in Gaza. We said on the main podcast that I'm not sure that he and Trump are fully aligned in terms of objectives. I think Trump probably deep down does want the Iran war to end because it is causing so much trouble for the American economy. Whereas I think Netanyahu wants the time and the political support and the political cover to keep going. I guess the other two thing you have to say about both of them in very different systems in a way, is just the survival instinct. I mean, Putin has now been a dictator for so long that he probably has to survive until death. Dictators reach a point where if they if they lose power before death it usually ends very, very badly for them. And I think he sees himself as being around for a long, long time. Nany a, who was Prime Minister of Israel, he was the first Prime Minister of Israel that Tony Blair met when he became Prime Minister in 1997. Now, okay, he lost power for some of that period, but he's the longest serving Prime Minister of Israel by a long, long way. He's been written off many, many times. And I guess the danger, this is where Trump, I think, is in the same in the same boat, is that the danger that they represent at times is that when they are in a political bind , they are not scared to do things that we would deem to be very dangerous, very risky, and potentially catastrophic in order to keep going. I mean I don't think it's I don't wins the next election, and I wouldn't have said that a year ago. US and Israel are doing together is they seem to be indifferent to the second-third order consequences for other people, the Gulf, Europe, Asia, for what they're doing in Iran or elsewhere. All that matters to them is is is what matters to them. But that would be fine in a way if they if it was all about their own selfish national interest, if they weren't also dragging us all along in their slipstream and demanding that we all endorse their wars, participate in their wars, fund their wars, provide flights for their wars, and attack us ferociously when we don't join them in oper ations which are objectively harmful to us and beneficial to them. So how long can these relationships be sustained? Because support for Israel is no longer as bipartisan as it was in the US. It's certainly The traditional focus on Israel's right to exist is now uh balanced with a strong focus on Palestine's right to exist, at least in so far as European countries now recognize the state of Palestine in a way that wasn't true before. And we now have stories like Itmar Ben Gavir, who's the Minister of Security in Netanyahu's government, wearing a noose uh signifying the death penalty on a as a lapel pin and driving through legislation which effectively would impose very rapid uh execution on uh Palestinians um convicted of terrorist acts out of the West Bank um or Gaza, and going against a very, very strong tradition in Israeli democracy, which has been very reluctant to impose the death penalty since the foundation of the state. The celebrations of it were pretty revolting as well. Sorry to relate this back to Trump, because like you I suffer from Trump derangement syndrome. But I think it's important to understand that this idea of the strong man leader and the in and what we now have as an international network of it, when you see things like, for example, Trump as president saying to the president of Israel, for heaven's sake, Herzog, pardon the man. He's fighting a war for your country. Pardon him. Likewise the fact that they get it we talked just in about, you know, getting it them getting involved in our politics. You got the Hungarian election on April the twelfth. He sees Orban as a fellow strongman, Orban, another one for whom corruption is just a sort of name of the game. And so therefore he's backing Orban. Vance is due to make a visit there. Rubio has already made a visit there. So this is an international network of the strong men. And one of the things they want to be strong about is never being punished for the things that they do wrong. So I mean Putin is a fabulously wealthy man. He has presided over poisonings, murders, executions, assassinations. He has broken international law in all sorts of different ways, but never gets called out for it by Trump. And then of course the other thing he saw with Russia this week was the extraordinary and it seems to be real tapped phone conversation between the Foreign Minister of Hungary and Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister. I saw a great comment this morning from somebody who said that if you're an intelligence officer reading a transcript of this conversation, you're listening to a control ler with an agent. And so so it's a network. That's the thing we have to understand. That's why the you know the Rycroft report that we talked about was so important because this is a network that is trying to undermine the sorts of democracies that we thought we could take for granted. Which I haven't heard your views on and we've had a couple of questions on, um, which is Restore Britain, which is the Rupert Lowe Party. So we've had a question from Stuart, is the rise of Restore a bigger threat to reform or to the Overton window. The Overton window I think is the idea of shifting and what's acceptable, a general sense that things are moving to the right. Katie, Nigel Farage clearly doesn't fancy being questioned by you and Royal Leading. Would you ever consider putting Rupert Lowe under the spotlight? So So my understanding is Rupert Lowe restores broken away from reform, has much more explicit support from uh Elon Musk, so you can see Rupert Lowe's tweets being boosted by uh Musk and getting millions of views. What's your sense of what it will mean to have a sort of another party competing in the reform space? I think it does pose a problem for Nigel Farage on on various levels. The first is as you say, now there's a part of him, I think, that didn't mind having Tommy Robinson write out there as a kind of violent exponent of the sort of politics that Farage believes in, because it could make Farage look a bit more reasonable . Rupert Lowe, it seems to me, is parking himself somewhere between the two. Rupert Lowe, I think, has genuinely what you and I would define as extreme views. Well, you know, we talk about far right, far left. I think he has pretty extreme views. I remember when he was chairman of Southampton Football Club. And because Clive Woodward worked there for a while and I knew him quite well. So I cl Ruppolo asked me when Southampton were playing Burnley, he asked me to have lunch with him before the game and I went and had lunch with him. And I think I recorded in my diary, I don't think I've ever met anybody quite as right wing as this guy. He's very, very, very right wing on the economy on all sorts of things. And clearly the other way w reason why it's a problem for Farage is he does seem to have this histor ic inabil ity to hold teams together, which I think ultimately in politics does matter. You've got to be able to hold a team together. And Farage is very much likes to be the main guy, doesn't really like to be threatened or challenged. And Rupert Lowe, he fell out clearly very, very, very, very quickly. Just the second question though, though, Ruby, because I think I think is right. I mean I've been trying to get Nigel Farage to come on the podcast, even though some of our listeners didn't want to hear him. Because I think he is an interesting consequential figure. You can't get away from that. And I get the feeling he doesn't want to come on. He keeps sort of fobbing me off and saying, well, maybe. And now he stopped even replying. But what would you feel if we've got Rupert Lowe on? What what would you think about that? Yeah, let's let's get him on. Why not? Why not why not try to get a sense of this guy? I mean I think if we have the confidence to uh interview Zach Plansky, to have the interview uh confidence to interview Rupert Lowe. I I think we should go for it. Listen, j just final one on that. Do you think there's a chance if given Farage's problem of holding parties together that he's gonna lose Robert Jenrik, that Jenrick will drift over to Lowe or drift back to the Conservatives or head off in some other direction . I mean God knows. He he's clearly using Generic a lot. Generick was with him at this press conference they did at Heathrow Airport. Um he had a big piece in one of the papers at the Sun uh the weekend. I mean I c I find it hard to take Jenrik seriously 'cause he does strike me as being a a d a rank opportunist. So but could he really go even further to the right? I don't know. I don't know. And by the way, the word when we said last time that Farage doesn't want to come on. They said, well what about all these other characters like Zia Yusuf and Richard Tice and blah blah blah blah blah. I think Farage is the one that you know is probably we would want to interview. So Nigel, if you or your friends are listening, the offer is still there. But Rory, I'm surprised. Rory wants to interview Rupert as well. So, Rupert, if you and your friends are listening, that's um that's absolutely fine. Um now, Rory, great question here from Ben. Oh yeah. Despite being perhaps the most famous living advocate of walking through his books, I think what you mean is despite through his books being the most famous living because you don't walk through books, Ben, but anyway, going on, Rory talks less and less about his benefits and seems increasingly to turn to meditation retreats to find consolation. What do these offer him that walking no longer can? Has Rory given up on walking? Huh. ' Thats a lovely question. Lovely question. And I'm I'm I'm I've applied for another one of my eleven day meditation retreats, so I'm gonna vanish on you at some point. Um I Well you're also vanishing this week. I I am. I am I am off on holiday. Well, I've decided to bury the hatchet over his continual boasting that only I called at Trump as the winner of the election. We're gonna have Mr. Dominic Zambruck. Oh from the rest is history.. Oh my goodness Oh well I'm in trouble. I think I may not be back on again. He's he's Johnny Good Broadcaster that chap. That may be the infany. I may have to be nice to Tom Holland and try to brush up on my history. So but what about the walking? But you still walk a fair bit, don't you? I l I love walking. And um I you know I I if I had um the chance I'd be going on three, four week walks a uh all the time. Um but it's true that if you're really looking for really deep introspection meditation, if I'm walking for nine, ten hours, I maybe spend a couple of hours grumbling about my pack or or thinking, am I getting a blister? And I get about an hour of sort of um being in the zone and meditating. Whereas if I'm sitting cross legged in a dark room for fourteen hours a day, I have more chance to kind I can't do either. I mean I w I I because I used to run a lot. I used to run hundreds of miles and you know every week and then but my knees really started to hurt. Sophie Rayworth w our next question's gonna be about cultural recommendations. Sophie Rayworth of the BBC has has written a book about running and she's and she's got a section in it about how it's good for your knees to run. Well it might be Well it was it was I mean my friend who's not a friend of yours, but a friend of mine, Matthew Parris, who was then a server MP and an amazing marathon runner. He could run a marathon in sort of two hours, twenty minutes, I think. Um but his knees really got destroyed. My mother's ninety is a great believer in the fact that the reason she's able to walk so well is she's never done any exercise in her life. he gets his walking up the stairs to visit his friends in hospital who've had lots of injuries from running and skiing and things like that. Um but but yeah so are you gonna what about another book though? Would you do another book of walking across somewhere? I have sometimes wondered whether um you remember I I I walked across as well as walking across Afghanistan, I walked across Iran, for example, and Pakistan and I I wondered whether I could redo my walk across Iran or Afghanistan twenty five years later and see what had changed and compare the diaries and th but then sometimes I think oh fuck it I've already done it. Isn't it a bit lame to redo something you've already done. You've got kids now, you can't just bugger off for weeks and Gotta wait till they're teenagers, they don't wanna see me. That's the key. Well there's there's gonna be a moment where they'll be like, F off dad, we're gonna go and do something else. I do still lie walking, but I've I find that um I just I I think it guess is aging. I just my legs get stiff very, very quickly and it depresses me. Well you got your you got your swimming, you got your mad swimming. I got my swimming, I've got my boxing, I keep fit and what have you. But yeah, I used to I used to whenever I see people out running and really enjoy it, I get very, very jealous because I just can't do and and and being overtaken a lot when you're out running, that's so depressing. 'Cause I'm bit competitive, Rory, a little bit. Just just tiny bit. No, look here. So you can be a little bit competit If you're looking for a good telly thing, gone starring David Morrissey. David Morrissey, I think, is a really brilliant actor. And it's a story about the wife of a head teacher who goes missing, and then it's just, it's sort of just tells you, you know, you eventually find out what lies behind that story. But David Morrissey , he's such a brilliant actor and it's so sort of intense. Another thing to watch, mister I finally got around to watching Mr. Nobody vs. Putin, absolutely brilliant. About this is about this teacher in in a small town in Russia who f post the war finds that they're having to teach propaganda the whole time and he can't stand it and eventually gets out the country and he's it's a BBC film, but it's really well done. And then a book the book I read this week is one of those single sitting days. You know, I said last week, publisher, stop sending me bloody books, I'm getting too many books. But this one, this was the first book that arrived, unsolicited, post-by-play, and it's absolutely brilliant. It's called Essays on Madness: A Lunatic's Guide. And it's written is written under a pseudonym AA Fellows. And I wonder whether AA is because one of the many, many mental health issues that this lady has to ch has to deal with through her life. She has anxiety, depression, alcohol, drug abuse, PTSD, she's got a whole lot. Beautifully written. And she has she and at the end, a little bit like my book on on mental health, she tries to give you ideas as to how to deal with it. A lot of them quite similar to mine in relation to music and sleep and all sorts of other stuff. But it's a really nice book and I love the I love the the cover as well. So it's essay on mad ness is a brutally honest exploration of AA Fellow's fucked up mind and her endless attempts to unfuck it. So very good. So that's good. That's my cultural though. Oh one thing not to watch, Roy, don't fall for hype. I finally thought everybody's talked about this Marty Supreme film. We ought to watch Marty Supreme about the table tennis guy with Timothy Chalamet. I didn't I didn't buy at all. Oh, okay. Um I went to see Project Hail Mary, which I thought was really fun. I mean it's not hugely serious, but really fun and and there's a wonderful book by Andy Weir which lies behind it. It's uh have you followed the plot of that that's somebody's going off to space to try to save the wor ld from amoeba that are eating the sun. You see, we're very we're very different in our taste. Once you talk about space exploration, just this may be very limited. I'm just just not it's not I'm not going there. I'm don not going there. Well I tell you what you would like, then here's another one for you that I think you'd like. Hitler's Beneficiaries by Gertz Ali , um brilliant German historian. And what he's done is he's written a book pointing out just how much economic benefit came to ordinary Germans. He begins with his own grandparents and talking about embarrassing conversations about where their furniture came from and it turns out had been looted from some house in the Netherlands, probably belonged to a Jewish family. That's more my more mois scene. Exactly. I think you'd like it because it's about how regimes of all sorts create bargains with their public and the way that people care about obviously care about cost Just on the Nancy theme, we went with Fiona and I went to see Broken Glass at the young Vic, and that's the old Arthur Miller play, which was alright. It was but that's that's essentially about a woman living in America American woman, a Jewish living in America who just cannot get over what's happening to the Jews in Germany and can't understand why other Jews aren't feeling as as passionate and then she has this kind of bodily reaction to it. That was okay. That was okay. So yeah, I would recommend that. On the madness book, A Lunatic's Guide to Mental Illness, the the here's an interesting one for you. She's she's written it under a pseudonym because, and she says in the introduction she's got three children and she doesn't want attention for herself and she doesn't want to be a public figure, which is interesting on two levels. One because it probably makes it harder for her to promote the book, because we all have to get out there and promoting her book, even which is maybe one of the reasons subconsciously why I'm why I'm now doing it for her. But also it's sort of because one of my big things, campaigning on mental health, is you know, the the more open we all are, the better it will be. So she's incredibly open in that she tells this every last detail of her life and her mind and her story, but with that resistance to actually wanting to be out there in public Last couple of ones from me. Um odd Arnie Vestad, who's uh a colleague here at Yale, who uh e even beats Alistair on the multilingual. I mean, it's unbelievable the number of he's a Norwegian, but he's got incredible Chinese, uh, Russian, and umpteen other languages, has produced a book called The Coming Storm, which has drawing parallels between the situation before the first world war and the situation today. And it's talking about how a third world war might emerge in a particular America-China competition, and a real attempt to be constructive. It's not just a kind of doom and gloom book talking about why we're doomed, but what the lessons might be on how we make war less likely, rather more likely. So maybe even a possibility for an interview or a mini-series. And and then finally, because we've asked about Easter, I'm gonna go really left field here with a with something that will really make your toes curl. The Bible. I mean it's it is basically that. So there's uh Amazon has produced a a a programme called The Chosen , and it's about Jesus, and I've been watching it. But the interesting thing about it, I mean I think you might question its kind of um literary ability, but it's very, very much situated in the Jewish context. It's very much Jesus the Jew. And of course, uh it's really good at bringing out the acts of playing uh Simon Peter Peter, playing, for example, is a Yemeni Jew, looks very, very Arab. And it's both interestingly sympathetic towards Jewish heritage and Jewish culture, but really locates the fact that so often we're presented for two thousand years with Jesus as a kind of white guy, uh, with sort of chestnut coloured hair, uh, and a very white Virgin Mary, and here is Jesus very much situated in not just a Jewish context, but almost an Arab Jewish context. Christian