Reflecting on Evil Handshakes

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 the rest ispolitics.com. That's the rest ispolitics.com. You would have a lot of grounds to prepare case against Trump for war crimes or corruption. How would the US public react if we actually took seriously the fact that this man had broken multiple laws and that he would be under our jurisdiction. Which government of the world would do it? How much can Netanyahu continue to distance himself from this man and say that he isn't speaking from Israel so long as he leaves him in his government as the security minister? There is going to be an election. Netanyahu probably feels that politically is not strong enough to do that. Well what what does what does that mean, Alistair? I mean of course he can fire him. Well he could, but what it means it what it means in political management is he thinks his coalition falls apart. 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The US is doing to Cuba what Israel did to Gaza in the form of blockade. Why is the UK government silent? Am I allowed just a very quick explainer on Cuba and then straight back over to you? Cuba is this Caribbean island which is only about ninety miles off the coast of Florida. In other words, it's closer to the United States than Manchester is to London. Got about eleven million people, and famously having been very closely tied into the US economy in the forties and fifties with In fact, my my Scottish great grandfather worked as an engineer in a sugar plantation in Cuba from nineteen twenty to nineteen forty and would have been m one of many, many foreigners, uh, as part of this slightly exploitative United Fruit presence in Cuba. But in 1959, there was, partly driven by the abuse of United Fruit and uh the US and everybody else, a communist revolution where Fidel Castro was elected and a very large number of Cubans fled to Florida, creating a very strong voter base in Florida, of Cuban exiles who have pushed the United States very strongly to try to topple the communist government there. Fidel Castro handed over to his brother Raul, who became president, and Rael Castro, now in his 90s, remains very much the power behind the throne, very much the person that American administration is dealing with, although there have been two other presidents recently. But the reason it's in the news is that President Trump and Marco Rubio, his Cuban American secretary of state, who's been very focused on this issue because he's also from Florida, have really decided to apply maximum pressure and appear to see this is the moment to finally topple the regime in Cuba. Over to you. Yeah, where to start? Um I guess a lot of this is a is about oil. Cuba since the revolution has always had a big oil producing international sponsor. So for a long time, through the Cold War, it was the Soviet Union. Soviet Union collapses. They had an economic crisis then. Venezuela, more recently, and since the Americans took out Maduro and installed Delcy Rodriguez as president. There has been uh a blockade . And Andy's question is this doing to Cuba or Israel did to Gaza? I can see the parallels, but I think the the difference here I think this more relates to what we've already seen with Trump's administ ration, where they signal intent very, very strongly. They did it in Venezuela, did it in Iran. What I worry about, what's going on with Cuba, with which is basically running out of um of fuel. There's no kind of people are living you know day to day hand to mouth because it is and it's just underlining how we all need energy and these energy flows in the modern age where norms are breaking down it becomes so important even more important. But there is effectively a bit of a human humanitarian catastrophe going on in in Cuba. And interestingly, going back to some of the things we talk about with Trump and the changing world order, the question there why is the U K government silent. I'm sure the UK government has been m saying things, but I just I they haven't cut through to me. The things that have cut through to me have been China and Russia condemning this as a violation of sovereignty. So it is a it is underlining once more that we're in this very, very different world. And of course, Trump is as ever, he's he's really sort of using every weapon at his disposal. There's economic warfare, there are the military threats he sent the head of the CIA essentially to sit down with the government and say, you don't need to go or you don't need to change or go. And of course the the the threat of of military action at the back of this. So I think we're talking here about Trump we constantly talk about Trump wanting sort of, you know, write history. He he con keeps saying that he's gonna be the president who saw South Cuba once and for all. Now, he says that about a lot of things. We'll see whether he actually manages to do We covered this actually a few weeks back where we talked about Lindsey Graham saying Iran now, Cuba's next. And you've got this a similar phenomenon that we have in all these interventions, which is this large expatriate community who somehow feel that regime change is gonna work out. You know, the number of Iranians who said to me, I don't understand, I thought this was going to work out that they'd be able to topple the regime. And and we saw the same actually with Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya, that often educated people from a country living elsewhere, particularly in the United States, develop very optimistic ideas about what will happen if they can just trigger regime change that they can somehow put the world back to the world that they knew, which in the case of Cuba's a very long time ago. Yeah. Back to the nineteen fifties. I think your point's also about how anomalous Cuba's getting, how devastating the collapse the Soviet Union was to their economy. How they hoped under Obama that because Obama was quite brave on Cuba in terms of opening up and really thinking about how to integrate Cuba into the American economy and what a more gentle way of re integrating with Cuba would be, which of course was destroyed by Trump one. I think the the the other final thing just before we move on that strikes me again and again when dealing with the US is the sense that America is remind ing us day by day that it is willing to do things to other countries that it would never countenance anyone doing to it. I was talking to one of my sons yesterday, and I was describ ing Trump's corruption. And he said, well, obviously, you know what needs to happen is if the US won't arrest him for corruption, is when he lands in some other country, European country, we need to have a sealed indictment and arrest him, put him on trial. Which which child was this? Uh the younger child. Brilliant. Sealed indictment. It's good. It's good stuff, right? So I thought actually that's really interesting, because of course you would have a lot of grounds to do it. A lot of grounds to prepare case against Trump for war crimes or corruption. But my goodness, the American reaction would be so hostile when they're very, very happy. You know, then the number of Latin American presidents they seem to be able to indict, lock up, people they're arrest when they step down in the United States, people they actually extradite when they're not even in the United States, they capture them at other airports with them. But it would be fascinating, even with everybody who hates Trump, how would the US public react if we actually took seriously the fact that this man had broken multiple laws and that he would be under our jurisdiction and the way the US tries to claim that almost everyone in the world is subject to US Department of Justice jurisdiction. Which government of the world would do it? Spain. Sanchez. Maybe he w ants But it's but that this goes back to this point about how the the the norms are breaking down. For example, when um Netanyahu was travelling to different parts of the world, having to go navigate through complicated airspace because there were certain countries he feared getting arrested. Putin the same thing when he's travelling around the world. It's a very interesting thought, but th of course, what's happening is that Trump thinks he can get away with anything. sprung it on. Okay. Okay. His his idea was that he'd turn up on holiday and we'd be able to get him on holiday. Well we could get him at a golf course near you any weekend, I suspect including when he doesn't go to his own son's wedding. Um listen Alistair just just to be just to be serious for a second, e I don't think I'd ever, until I really saw Trump do it, completely understood that the American government basically decides that American law is international law. And that if the Department of Justice decides that some Yeah. So what would they think if we did it to them? They wouldn't be very happy. Um but I'm trying to I mean you say Spain, I'm not I can't I honestly can't think of a government that would do it. China one day, maybe it's it's fascinating though that one wouldn't and it'd be interesting to see how a democratic president would respond. Would they somehow be so USA, I guess they'd be so pro USA that they would launch a massive formal protest against the arrest of a US president, regardless of the fact it's Donald Trump. But just on you know if you look you mentioned Raul Castro, Fidel's brother. So he's now ninety-four. And when we talk about his using economic and military and legal, you know, the d the Department of Justice indicted Castro at ninety four on murder charges. Okay? So they've decided so we've had several governments in the American in the White House since 1996, but they've now decided that these two civilian aircraft that were downed, that um Castro was was responsible, okay? And Todd Blanche, the Attorney General, who clearly does whatever Trump tells him to, stresses this is not a symbolic indictment. I suspect it is. I don't think Raul Castro is going to be hauled off like Maduro was. But I I think it's a very good point. It's a very, very good point. I'm gonna spend I'm gonna spend the whole evening thinking thinking about it which country might actually What about Denmark? Why Denmark? Denmark pretty good. Denmark. Pretty good grounds for indictment. I mean if you're allowed to do what the US does, which is applies domestic law to other people's precedents, there's a lot of things he could be indicted on. Well on maybe on the point about why is the UK government being so silent, maybe your children should become the UK government and possibility. Except as we pointed out in the last episode, that wouldn't be as profitable as putting them in these amazing private sector positions. Indeed, indeed. Now let's move on. Um Richard, what did you make of the treatment of Gaza flotilla activists by Itamar Ben Gaveer and the Israeli forces? And if people haven't seen this, it's this flotilla, I think about 400 people from 40 or different countries. I mean largely symbolic, but you know, with stuff that they're gonna trying to get to Gaza, they were essentially, you know, picked up by the Israeli authorities and they were put in this place and the pictures that were put out were of Ben Gavir taunting them, abusing them. They were made to kneel, they had their foreheads on the ground, and he was basically laughing at them for frankly for being activists. It's very interesting, isn't it? I mean I think it's we we often talk about how norms have been eroded so that it takes a little bit of time to remind ourselves of what any other country would have done? Um or in fact actually what Israel might have done even quite recently compared to what Ben Governor did. I mean let's imagine for whatever reason I know it's a daft analogy, but let's imagine for whatever reason there was a flotilla protesting the policy of some European state and it chugged along. I guess what would happen is the police would intercept them and they would politely take them away. In this case, what happens is the Israeli military board these vessels hundreds of miles off the Israeli coast in international waters. They board them with full face masks, full body armor, full weapons. Although, as far as one can tell, there is no military threat posed by the people on those it's a peace flotilla, right? They're they're a bunch of peace activists. And despite the fact these people do not pose any form of plausible threat to the Israeli military , they are handcuffed and put in stress positions. So they're made to kneel down on the deck with their heads on deck. And Ben Kavir then walks amongst them waving an Israeli flag, shouting, This is what happens to you, this is what's going to happen to you. And I was trying to think, have I ever seen any government do this? I don't think the Chinese government would do it. I don't think the Russian government would do it. I mean, it's it's actually very non-governmental. It's much more reminiscent of what nongovernmental armed groups do, which is to stage humiliations with people with flags shouting at social media with people kneeling down in front of them. You know, you you you've had hostages that that have have been been used by states. But I think you're right. I think this would be you this is more synonymous of a kind of non state. If you think about what the the hostages normally do, they normally present them on state television, don't they? But what you don't see is the ministers sort of striding amongst them, waving flags and shouting abuse. I mean there's another video that Bengeveir put out a few months ago which um is him in prison. So I mean I I I was a prisons minister, so I was looking quite closely at the video that he put out. In the video he has lined up a whole series of Israeli soldiers who are pointing their automatic weapons through the windows of the cells at the unarmed prisoners, all of them in a line. Now, firstly, none of the prisoners has a weapon because they're searched before they enter the prison, right? Secondly, in our jurisdiction, our prison officers don't care The idea that you would have an automatic weapon pointed through every window, and then they're all pulled out, they're all made to kneel again in the corridor, and Ben Gavir's walking amongst them is obviously been staged for him as the prisons minister saying This is how we treat people, I'm very pleased to say, except one thing I say to you, Mr Netanyahu, they should all be killed. They should all be executed, I don't care how. Electric chair doesn't matter. They should all be executed. Now Netanyahu then says that he disapproves, but he doesn't fire him. So how much does he disapprove? How much can Netanyahu continue to dislike Ben Gvier has got a track record of he he says he's really, really proud that he's basically brought in a uh a regime of uh effectively of brutality in the prisons. There was a horrible thing I read recently about, you know, rape inside prisons that's being used as a kind of weapon against some of these guys. Israeli prison officers raping Palestinians, which has been covered by Israeli non profits who've reported it, right? Correct. This is Israeli human rights organizations have exposed the sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners. And why is that relevant? Because on the other side, Israel weaponized sexual abuse of Israelis who had been captured by Hamas . And yet the conversation is never integrated. It's spoken about in two completely different ways, as though it's happening in two totally different worlds. And also uh although Netanyahu, as you say, has rebuked publicly Ben Gavir on a couple of occasions, on that specific thing, he basically said that the the he he he did not criticize what was the evidence that the people involved in the evidence that was produced. In fact, he called them heroes, didn't he, at one point? He did, he did, he did. Um this one, you've got to go some as Ben Gavir to have both Netanyahu and the American ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who basically is one of those let Israel do whatever the hell it wants, it seems to me, he called Ben Gave 's actions despicable. But but I saw can I just ask, but did he do anything about it? Did anyone stop the money going? Are there any sanctions? Is there any action? It's all very well . Nevnyel who doesn't fire him. The Americans aren't taking the action against him. So what does Ben Govir conclude? Yeah, I don't know. He concludes he can carry on. But the uh I I was looking at the law, and again, you know, back to one of our central themes, does international humanitarian law mean any anything anymore? But it says those involved in the transport and distribution of relief must be respected and protected during armed conflict. They are to be treated as civilians so long as they do not directly take part in hostilities. And they have the rights, if they are, in circumstances where the civilians are detained , they have under international law to they must be informed of the reasons, be able to challenge the decision, receive adequate food, hygiene, and medical care, be given access to lawyers and consular representatives and beholding conditions consistent with health and humanity. And here's where we get on to Ben Gavir and how he treats them. They are to be protected from cruel, humiliating or degrading treatment, intimidation and ins ults, and public curiosity or degrading public exposure. And public curiosity is meant to be prohibit prohibiting any display of the detainees for propaganda or for public spectacle. Well that is exactly what Bengevir was doing. Well the thing that's that's so striking to me is I'm continuing to receive endless emails from my friends in Australia. And these are highly educated Australian Jewish friends of mine with relatives in Israel, whose response to this is not in any way to criticize Benkvir, but instead to immediately send me something saying that the whole Nakba , the whole expulsion of Palestinians was a fraud, and that it was all a lie, and that it never happened. So the narrative bubbles and and this is painful, right? I mean the guy that's sending me this I like very much , right? I've known him for m many, many years, but I have a sense of people in total silos and bubbles, in which it's almost impossible to have a common conversation, in which the vast majority of the Israeli population still support what's happening in Iran, which the rest of the world thinks is is damaging the global economy and achieving nothing. The vast majority of people in Israel support the actions in Gaza? And my friend in Australia is saying, Well, if you're trying to describe this as war crimes or genocide, are you suggesting that the vast majority of the Israeli population support war crimes and genocide? Because if so, that's an anti Semitic tribe. Well that is that is kind of where the part of the debate is. I still think there are enough Israelis who will will be absolutely horrified by seeing what Ben did. That being said, there is going to be an election, Netanyahu probably feels in answer to your question, why doesn't Netanyahu Netanyahu fire him? He probably feels that politically he's not strong enough to do that. Well what what does what does that mean, Alistair? I mean of course he can fire him. Well he could, but what it means it what it means in political management is he thinks his coalition falls apart. So in other words, he has to accept the risk of not being Prime Minister to get rid of a man who is utterly abhorrent from his government. Rory, we're talking about somebody who's been Prime Minister for many, many years over a long, long period of time. He was Prime Minister when I first went into Downy Street with Tony Blair as Prime Minister. So the moral question is fairly obvious to you and to me. The political management question he's thinking through is Netanyahu, who's desperate to stay in power for all sorts of reasons, including personal reasons to do with these corruption charges that he's facing, he's got to have an election at some point. And I don't know what outcome he would want from that election. He would probably like to have a a majority where he didn't necessarily need to fill his government with people like Bengevir. I don't know. But Bengever, when the video was being made of him waving his flag and abusing the the people from the flotilla. Part of his mind w will be thinking, this'll be a good campaign video for me. Yeah, and and that tells you a lot about politics. I mean I'm I'm I'm doing this um you're in Hong Kong. I'm I'm two miles from the Israeli border in Jordan at the moment, uh talking to you. I mean I think one of the things that is so striking for me is how radicalized people are becoming on both sides. Um the local Starbucks, for example, no longer exists because people have boycotted it. I went into the local bookshop and where there used to be lots of children's books and travel books, the tables are now simply piled with books about Palestine and people's experience of Palestine and their memoirs of Palestine and what's happening in Palestine. And I also feel that there's a risk that he gets away with Ben Gavir and Smotrich by saying to people, Of course I don't want them in my government, but I leave them in as finance minister, Security minister, because it's vital for my political survival and my coalition. And that he he shouldn't be able to get away with that. One should be able to say Ben Gavir and Smotrich are horrifying people. If you put them in your cabinet, you're endorsing them. You don't get to say, Well, well I don't really like them, but I'm keeping them anyway because they're important for me to be Prime Minister. I don't think he even goes around the place saying he doesn't like them. I think he felt on this one he had to condemn it because virtually you know most governments around the world were doing so. But I think all of that would have will have boosted Ben Gavir's own sense that from his perspective, politically, as a guy who's known to be such an extremist and who says some terrible things about Palestinians . And he probably felt the same about these people. I mean he was he was abusive, he was insulting. But I look I I the point you're making about your Australian friends though is is um I'm I've not got anybody quite like that. I I I but I I do think there is is definitely of all the issues around which there is this extreme polarisation, I would say it's probably top of the list right now. It's very hard to have conversations with people on either side who feel really, really, really passionate. But I think that's what we've all got to try to do, even when provoked by something as b as bad as this has to be called out. But then we somehow have to get back to some of the basics. The worst thing for me in relation to Gaza is that w we we're not talking about it. And and what's happening with the settlers. I mean that that again, I mean, many of the people I've seen recently are people who are Palestinians and who have relatives in Nablus and Hebron and and as we've described, the settlers now seem to be able to do almost whatever they want. They can drive in with FTVs into the middle of olive groves , wave guns around. One friend of mine was saying settlers can almost go into the main streets and shoot someone and the Israeli army will protect them. And the gamble, I think, is that they're just hoping that Palestinians will leave. The economy's collapsing in R amallah and in other Palestinian uh towns. The Israeli controlled areas are expanding all the time and they're coterminous . And I think any idea of a two state solution is completely completely out the window. I mean it it uh and Smotrich appears to have a kind of cruel and inevitable logic on his side in suggesting the whole thing is just going to become Israel. Right. Well on that very depressing note, let's take a break. Welcome back to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. Now, Rory, Vinod, gentlemen by the name of Vinod, have you seen the car crash interview that Richard Tice did with Bloomberg, where he refused to engage with simple factual questions about the science of climate change and its economic realities. Curiously, this is getting virtually zero coverage. Right. Well, let's first try to sort of summarise what actually happened in this interview. So he was presented with graphs, he refused to look at them. He calls it net stupid zero. You can't present with a whole lot of graphs that I can't read that may well be bullshit, puts it out that this terminates now, it's the end of the podcast. I I want to do two things. I I want to agreeably disagree with you on your friend Ed Miliban's energy policy, which I think is actually becoming a real problem. And I'm hoping strongly, but I think it's unlikely that whoever comes in gives them the heave ho. But I'm not prepared to go as far as defending Richard Tice, who I think is clearly a climate change denying bizarro on this. And I mean over over to you on Tice first. Um no, I want to go straight into why do you want to go into the moment Well are you buying the Richard Tys arguments that Ed Miliband is in trying to sort of you know play a leadership role on climate change, he's uh he he's kind of destroying the world. Is that where we are? No, I d I don't think Ev Melban's destroying the world, but I think that um in looking for the kind of things which are causing a big problem for the British economy and its competitiveness and its productivity, we've got to be honest about the fact that our industrial energy prices are very, very high. I mean they're four times those of the US and they're one and a half times those of key European competitors. But well, how does that relate to what the Ed Millerman's trying to on the green ag Well because the reason why the energy prices are high is because of the policies pursued by the government. I mean we are gas dependent, but in theory that should apply equally to France and Germany , and to other countries use a lot of gas, including the US. The reason our prices are so high cannot simply be about the wholesale gas price, or if it is, we're doing something weird in the way that it's calculated , which again falls at Ed Miliband's door. But it's about the way in which the whole energy market is run in the UK, and in particular the hurry with which Ed Miliband is pushing ahead for his particular 20-30 targets. And why does it matter? Well, it matters because if you're a steel producer, it's really difficult to compete with European steel production. But most importantly of all, you know, I'm, as you know, obsessed with AI and what we can do for our sovereignty and how we can stop ourselves being completely in hoc to the US and China when it comes to AI. We need to build data centers. If we don't have in the UK, the chips and the data centers and they consume an enormous amount of energy, we're going to be completely vulnerable to the US destroying our economy, taking away all our jobs, threatening our national security, and we can't get them built. And one of the major reasons we can't get them built along with normal British problems with planning, is the energy costs are just too high. I mean, many cases we're paying twenty-four pence when people like the Norwegians, the Portuguese are paying ten pence for the same unit of energy. But you can't put that all at Ed Miliband's door. Well listen, Roy, nor can we have a question about Richard Tice become a big discussion of Rory Stewart saying Ed Miliban should go. Uh can can I just say something interesting on AI, Rory. I was in I was at a lovely place called Brescia yesterday in Italy. You just jumped from Italy to Hong Kong in a day. I know my green credentials are not very good this week. Um but anyway, this conference in in br Brescio is called the future future proof society and it was sort of looking all sorts of you know different this and that. But I you'd have loved this uh discussion I had with a couple of people. Actually one of them was totally against AI and just wants to stop the whole damn thing. But one of the other people who's involved in this discussion we're having said that the UK is actually extraordinarily well placed. America and China are absolutely running away with everything. That is true. But if you were looking for a kind of, you know, best placed to get into the runner up slot, it is the UK. And this was an American guy who and basically said a lot of it was about our education, but also about some of the the stuff that the government was doing. You mentioned that two billion dot the pound thing that we're doing on quantum last week. But essentially the infrastructure that been that that that's been built, uh and I guess Rishi Sunat was part of this when he was Prime Minister as well. So I was quite I was quite cheered up by that. You're completely right. We've got outside the US and China, we've probably got the strongest global talent pool. So we talk about Demasis, Sabas and Deep Mind. We've got language, we've got legal system, got time zone. Our real problem is energy and the data centers. Um these uh new frontier models can involve a hundreds of thousands of advanced chips , even a million advanced chips. So you can be looking for one gigawatt, two gigawatts. In the US currently they've got about forty five gigawatts of built power around these uh data centers . And that's probably gonna double in the next three, four years. In the UK, we're hovering around, depending on which figures you look at, between one point six and three to give a sense of the difference. UAE is looking to build out five gigawatts. Now, why does that matter? It matters because at the moment, if all the large language models exist in the United States , uh President Trump can do effectively what's happening at the moment with Mythos, which is saying this th can't be exported from the US and all the latest technologies in the US, all the innovations in the US, all the growth is in the US, it's sort of extreme example of what's going on already with a magnificent seven with all these hyperscalers stuck in the world economy. And we will then find that all the native AI law firms are created in the US, not with us, all the tax revenue will go to the US, we'll lose jobs. So let's say we talk about this in the last episode, we suddenly start massively laying off people in banks, people in call centres, people in software. Suddenly the government, the UK government's got to find the revenue to pay the unemployment benefit, but it's not getting any taxation revenue because it's not taxing any income. And all the companies are America. So how do we deal with that? Mm-hmm I think having the data centers allows you to do one of three things. In the best case scenario, you could actually build your own frontier model and actually be able to run it and have the chips and have all the parameters and the weights in the UK. Second potential is you could provide a safe haven for one of the American companies. So let's say Trump suddenly decided to go crazy on anthropic or open AI. You could actually say, why don't you come to the UK to host your model here? Which you can't do at the moment, because we simply don't have the infrastructure. They couldn't come here. And the third thing is even if you weren't able to do that, maybe that's unrealistic, if these companies were able to use data centers in the UK to run even 20, 30% of their models, we would have leverage. A future President Trump wouldn't be able to switch the stuff off and say, you know, I'm going to abuse the United Kingdom and get the handover, whatever. Because we would have leverage over the United States. But to get there, we've got to build these data centers. And one of the major reasons we can't build them to kind of link back is that our cost of energy is too high. Well , I'm going to issue an apology to Vidod because yes , he asked us a question, basically wanted us to put the boot to Richard Tice. Since when you took us down the Ed Millerban rabbit hole, and I then led you into the AI rabbit hole. So Vinod, what I'm going to do on the to hit back at you, I I because I feel I should defend Ed Millerman because he was my politician of the year last year. I he's a regular listener. I'm gonna ask whether he might do his own rebuttal for the newsletter. I think that'd be a very good thing to do. Because I want to get back to the point about why why reform don't like being scrutinized. It's very, very true. Look at Farage with his I mean Farage will normally leap in front of any TV camera anywhere in the world to give you his bonhomie and his shtick. This five million donation where he keeps changing his story, he's nowhere to be seen. And they won't come on our show. I mean i you know you started by trying to get Nigel Farage on and he wouldn't come on. I've now asked reform MPs, I've asked reform policy leads, all of them say I'm afraid this isn't one for me. None of them will come on their show. Now, open invitation. We're very happy to have an open conversation. Look, look at our interview, even with people we have serious disagreements with, like President Vucic in Serbia will give you a fair hearing, but why won't you come on a huge show where millions of people can hear your views? What what's going on reform? And also we discovered we served actually that we do have some reform supporters who listen to the podcast, probably so they can shout at us, but even so we do have some. No, I think look, the answer to the question, Roy, is that Trump has created his own media ecosystem and that's what Farage is trying to do in the UK. Trump has Fox News and the MAGA people, that's their safe haven. Farage has GB News. Farage has several newspapers that absolutely give him the easiest ride in the world. As Vinod says, Tice's interview, where he just behaves like a child, gets zero coverage. This is a guy who's going to, if reform become the government, he's going to be a very, very serious figure. There's these amazing videos doing the rounds online of some of these reform counsellors who basically the the one that's really sort of I think I've please stop selling to be people is the one where the woman who says, you know, I don't know what constitution is, I don't understand what a standing order is, I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. And she's still leading a council. So you've got all these counselors are falling by the wayside. But do you see any of that in most of the media? No. So basically Farage thinks if you just ignore this stuff, it'll go away. Now, if I were him, if I were Nigel Farage, and we I would I'd think, well, when he was presenting LBC, I used to go on his show quite regularly, and we had perfectly civil conversations. We did once have a very aggressive shouting match on television, but that was right after Brexit. Nearly came to blows, but not quite. But if you came on our podcast, we would do what we do with every other guest. We would go through their childhood, we'd go through their life. We'd ask them what they think. And yes, we would want to challenge him and press him over certain things. Yes, I would absolutely want to hold his feet to the fire about the damage that Brexit's done to the country. But we would not do it in a way to try and get cheap headlines, gotcha stuff and the rest of it. But I think I think Vinod's got a point. I think they are scared of genuine scrutiny. They like nice short videos, they like newspaper headlines that they write with the the right-ingw press and they like GB News. Anyway, on the subject of reform, we had a wonderful discussion in the main episode with Vicky Spratt, who did our miniseries on Gen Z. Lo and behold, we've got another mini-ser ies. And the first episode arrives this Friday, the day after this question time episode, and it's all about reform and where the money comes from. And it's very, very interesting. The first episode will be available for everyone. Mr. Tice, by the way, features prominently, but to enjoy the whole series, you'll need to sign up to the rest is politics plus at therestispolitics.com. Well, Alasta here is a question which comes from Matthew, who's a Trip Plus member from Biddingham, that he's been wanting to ask you for a couple of weeks. And I think you mentioned that you were going to answer it for us. So go on, give us give us an answer. The question is this. I recently watched a documentary that Alistair featured in, and it was a clip of T B and Alistair Tony Blair and Alistair meeting Vladimir Putin. I saw that Alistair shook Putin's hand. Question to both Rory the Tory and Alistair. Well it's Rory the Tory. Rory the Tory and Alistair . Who's the most evil person you have shaken hands with? Going you first. I've thought about this a lot. Oh, blummy. I haven't thought about it a lot. Um Okay, so I think I would put people into three different categories. What I would call the brutal leader , the violent warlord and the careless destroyer right so first category brutal leader I mean I have shaken hands with President Suhato who we were talking about, President Kabila in the Congo, uh President Emerson Manangagwa in Zimbabwe. In the second category down uh of the people who actually commit the violence on the ground. Uh, in Iraq, uh the heads of all the Shia militias that were putting shape charges against us, and in one case, a guy called Assad, who I had lunch with in the morning and who attacked my compound the following evening. Afghan warlords like Abdurashid Dostam or Saaf, and we've of course both shaken hands with the former head of Al Qaeda Syria, now the president of Syria. Um but the category of evil that I'm most interested in is is one which we don't talk about much when we talk about evil. And I I think it's something that C.S. Lewis is quite interesting on, which is that we tend to think about evil as though it's sort of Voldemort or um Hitler, sort of very, very extreme cartoonish figures. My sense is that evil is often something closer to each of us . And partly it's about extreme carelessness and selfishness and not really caring about other people. And that's where I feel um people like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson come closest. What I felt with uh Boris is of course he's not a genocidal guy, he's never killed anybody. Um he's sort of hail fellow Wilmet . But in the extent of his carelessness, his recklessness in private relationships, his relationship to truth, what he did with Brexit, the way he ran the country, the sense that everybody else is a sort of joke or a game, that also is a form of sin, and if I was going to push it higher, maybe even a form of evil, and maybe one that I'm closer to myself before I lay into Boris John son. Then over to you. That was very that was a that was a very good sermon. I enjoyed that. This is a by the you'll have a publisher on in the morning. Roy is very displayed about evil and the various categories of evil. It could be a great book. We got the question a couple of weeks ago, as you say, and I've been I've been thinking about it, and I'm assuming that he imagines that it would be Putin. And certainly Putin, I think, in my defence, I didn't think he was totally evil at the time. But I also think the truth is, in you've gone through with some of the names you mentioned that in politics and in government, you have to shake hands with a lot of people that you wouldn't necessarily, you know, want to want to want to go on holiday with them. I during the Northern Ireland peace process, I definitely shook hands with quite a lot of people who'd killed people. I remember once meeting a guy who um had had had been on the IRA Army Council and somebody told me afterwards that you know he was the guy who really knew how to do the bombs and made them and all the rest of it. So Putin gets close because of course the other definition I think of political evil, you know, at the moment, President Zelen sky is responsible for a lot of deaths of Russians, just as the Russians are responsible for the lot a lot of death of of Ukrainians. Putin also does kill some of his own people. We mentioned Navalny. We're Fiona and I were in the car last week, we were listening to this amazing book, London Falling, by uh Patrick Radankee. I've been reading it on your recommendation. It is extraordinary. It's incredible, isn't it small subtext on that. Did you know that he'd he at the age of fifty got a J. Crew modelling contract? No, I didn't think it's just the there's hope the hope for us all. But it's but one but one of the sections of the book where he's just going through because you know Russia gets involved in it at certain point, just going through all the people who kind of fell out of windows and and I I'm reading at the moment, I'm now reading the the book uh Nord Stream Conspiracy. Um and again, Putin and his ability to to I mean, honestly, Angela Merkel has not come well out of this book because you basically you get the sense that Russia is playing her and keeping her in the Nord Stream thing and anyway it's just it's a bit like the it's a bit like London Falling. It's a kind of it's a it's a non-fiction book written as an absolute thriller. Um, so Putin sort of weaves in and out all these terrible stor ies. But I think the reason why he's only my runner-up is because the winner of the most evil hand I ever shook was actually somebody who really killed a lot of his own people and and and just ruined his totally ruined his own country, and that was Mugabe . I really had a sense meeting did you ever meet Mugabe? No, because that's why I went to Manangagwa's inauguration of the co urse he went to the inauguration after he gone, yeah. And he was just he just emanated being in the same space. He had this horrible manner about him, he was surrounded like a lot of authoritarian leaders are by sycophants, sort of, you know, bowing and scraping as he walked. He had the most ridiculously expensive suits. I think even Xi Jinping would struggle to match uh Mugabe on the suit front and his little his handmade shoes with his little uh with his initials on the inside them and all this sort of horrible stuff. Um but I th I just think in terms of what he did to his own country, absolutely evil. And of course, you know, going back to the the discussion on the main point about in the main episode about corruption, all that too. So I think it's probably him. I think that he takes he takes the gold medal from from Vlad. Good. Okay. A final thing, you were good pretty tempting with book recommendations, which we sometimes do at the end. And in in doing a bit of research on corruption, shout out for three books I really took to. Um what actually one of them was London Falling, of course, which links quite a lot to issues and money in London. Yeah, totally. Klep topia by Tom Burgess, which is an extraordinary story about international money. Um Moneyland by Oliver Bullock. They're they are both absol those two guys have done and I've got to be honest, reading their books, which I did a while back and listening to this the corruption part of of this book, it does make me feel slightly sick that when we were in government we didn't do more to stop this whole Russian laundromat situation in London. Because there's no doubt that we were I think there's a line in in um in London falling we we we didn't just sort of open the door we kind of rolled out the red carpet to them um so yeah both brilliant books well and my my final one is um is Sarah Chase and Sarah Chase was um in Afghanistan when I was there, running an amazing nonprofit in Kandahar. And she became very focused on corruption in Afghanistan, and then became an advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and tried to make anti-corruption central to the project in Afghanistan. But she's now written a book on corruption in America. And it begins with this McDonnell case that I was talking about in our main podcast yesterday. This case of this governor, basically And I it it hasn't got the pickup it should have done. Uh people seem to be much happier buying her book uh criticizing corruption in Afghanistan, which was, you know, really celebrated everywhere, when she starts trying to point out corruption in America, people as sort of struggle a little bit more. I think the story is extraordinary. And I think it's partly to return maybe to what we were talking about, what Sarah shows us is how the American legal system and the constitutional system is just not fit for purpose in an age of billion dollar campaign financing, crypto and and the growth of the new tech sector. And I think we should maybe maybe l listeners, tell us who your most evil handshake ever is. And you can't say nobody's allowed to say they're in laws. I I was actually try trying to write down a list and it became a very long list in the end. Yeah. Well I mean of course you met Jeffrey you met you met Jeffrey Ep I did shake his hand, yeah. Yeah. So there's there's very different forms of evil we could be talking about. There were th I mean I was trying not to say that I had teachers at school who were subsequently prosecuted for child abuse, who I knew well. I mean so there's l ots of different types of evil from inflicting horrible pain on children right the way through to you know, conducting genocidal campaigns in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There's also the thug who stole my Burnley hat when I was eight at Main Road in Manchester City. What what a man stole it for an eight year old? Adult. Stole it for an eight year old. Yeah. Well that's a bit mean. That's a bit mean. That's a kind of stealing candy evil. Yeah, that is that's pretty bad. So yeah, if you're listening to this in your old people's home, I hope you're sorry. Yeah, and I and I hope you know it it maybe serves you right that Arsenal won the Premier League and you didn't, eh ? I've got a long memory, Rory. Anyway, lovely to talk to you as ever. Lovely to talk to you. Speak soon. Bye bye. See you soon. Bye .