Reflections on Moral Leadership

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 therest ispolitics.com. That's the rest is politics.com . This was the Power Couple right at the heart of SNP politics, for years and years and years. Her husband spouting a new five thousand pound watch, and she thinks what exactly? Peter Morell, husband of Nicholas Sturgeon is currently in court, already been convicted of charges related to corruption. The police went in there, they put up those tents, it looked like a kind of murder scene, not a fraud investigation. I don't know what she thought. How do you explain to yourself how you've ended up with £4 50,000 of extra kit, right? After you've paid tax. How could you possibly think that's normal. There's something just wrong about having the leader who's married to the chief executive of a political party. That is just wrong . This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy. 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However, there's no minimum commitment and you can cancel after your free box. So that's beer52.com/slash football to claim your free case of beers. Welcome to the Resistponents Question Time with me Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. We're going to get into the incredible scandal around uh the Scottish National Party and corruption. We're gonna get into the revelation of emails from Peter Mandelson, our former ambassador at Washington. We're gonna get into the decision of the British government to ban two left-wing American YouTubers. We're going to talk about our travels and surveillance states emerging, and we're going to finish with a question of who is the most good person, the best person, the most moral person that we've ever shaken hands with. Looking forward to it very much. Where do you want to start, Alistair? So Rory, we are talking at a time that the political world is digesting a massive dump of documentation relating to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK Ambassador to Washington, and also at a time when Peter Morel, former CEO of the Scottish National Party and husband of Nicholas Sturgeon, is currently in court having already been convicted of charges related to corruption. So Clem wants to know, do the two Peter M's reveal that British politics is as scandal ridden as anywhere else. Are we becoming the next Italy? Bit of an insult to Italy there. It's a completely amazing story. Let me start with Peter Morrell. This is one of the absolute linchpins of the SNP. He was the chief executive of the Scottish National Party and was married to Nicholas Sturgeon, who was first minister of Scotland and the leader of the Scottish National Party. So this was the power couple right at the heart of SNP politic s for years and years and years. And it turns out that Peter Morel had been systematically taking party funds and using it to buy stuff for their own personal consumption. Now the claim is that Nicholas Sturgeon knew nothing about it, and she keeps giving interviews saying she's as disgusted as anyone and shocked as anyone. But no, let me just try to put it to you like this, right? The guy decides to buy a brand new top-of-the-range 85,000 pound Jaguar. He buys it partly with SMP money and he puts it through the accounts as buying Apple products, Apple business products. Then he sells the Jaguar a few years later and he doesn't give any of the money back to the SMP. He pockets all the money when he sells it. He's buying coffee machines , he's buying five thousand pound watches. He buys an enormous hundred and ten thousand pound motorhome and parks it in his parents' drive, right ? Through all of this , we are supposed to believe that Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Morel, who are on pretty modest salaries, I mean she says they're well paid, they're not that well paid, right? These are people on public sector salaries. She looks out of her window and, there's a brand new eighty five thousand pound jaguar sitting on the driveway. She goes to visit her in laws, there's a brand new motorhome. She comes downstairs there's three top of the range coffee machines. Her husband's spouting a new five thousand pound watch, and she thinks what exactly? Um I don't know. I don't know what she thinks. I I sir I was trying to think what I would think . If if you're only suddenly pitched up outside with a brand new motorhome. It was actually £124,000 , Rory. It was you're you're you're selling it short, this motorhome. I think I would think you see, let's be honest, Roy, you're with Shoshana, I'm with Fiona, Peter Morel was with Nicola. None of us know what really goes on inside the dynamics of another marriage. You know, we can see them or we can know people. So I don't know what she thought. What she's depending on at the moment is the fact that and she was humiliated, they were both humiliated by the fact that the police went in there, they put up those tents, it looked like a kind of murder scene, not a sort of, you know, fraud investigation. So what she's hanging on is the fact that she was cleared. She was cleared by the police. The police investigated her as well as him. They've obviously decided that he committed a crime and that she didn't. And so I guess what we're being asked to believe is that she either paid no attention to the things that he was buying . Or I wonder whether she realised that he had a sort of bit of a purchasing weird things issue. Now this is something that I don't understand because I'm I don't even have a watch. I would no more buy a motorhome than , you know, fly to the moon. My guess on this is that it's about the way and this is really powerful for understanding political malfeasance and how corruption happens and how embezzlement happens. This is embezzlement . He's basically taking funds which people have given for the SMP. He's buying a motorhome and he later tries to claim the motorhome was for the SMP, but the day after he buys it he's buying a tour guide for motoring around Britain . He parks in his in-laws' house. The SP's not paying the insurance. It doesn't appear on the SP account. So I guess the only way in which this works is firstly he is very, very, very important to her. So she's not going to look too closely because she has an incredibly powerful setup where she's the leader and the first minister and he's the chief executive of the party. That's not power you ever want to give away. That would be like a chief executive having their their own husband as the chairman of the board. You wouldn't want to bring someone else in because when you've got that control, why would you take a risk? Yeah. Can I jump in there? This is this is in your to your credit and in your favour, as it were. I th we've interviewed several leaders of the SNP, including Nicholas Thurgeon. And I think I'm right in that all of them you made the observation either to them directly, I think you definitely did with Humza Yousuf, making the point that there's something just wrong about having the leader who's married to the chief executive of a political party. That is just wrong. Now, it all in a way it does all flow from that. You're absolutely right. And you can see why she would want that, right? You can completely understand why that's convenient for her and why she's not going to look I mean apart from the fact she loves her husband, she's not going to look too closely at a situation that gives her absolute control over the S P. One of them runs the party completely, and the other one runs the government completely. So it's a fantastic combination of power. The second thing is, I think, possibly self-deception and maybe a little bit of entitlement. So maybe they think, because they're building this together, they're an incredibly successful couple. Well, you know, we deserve a good coffee machine, because we need some coffee to keep us awake in the morning. And, you know, we're doing a lot of work driving around the country all the time, so we deserve a nice car. So that the line begins to blur a little bit between what your public duties are and what your private duties are. But ultimately it gets a bit more crazy because by October twenty twenty two the auditors are resigning, saying they can't sign off on the accounts. And she's got to be saying to herself, Listen, really, on our incomes, she would have been paid just over a hundred thousand pounds. How do you explain to yourself how you've ended up with four hundred and fifty thousand pounds of extra kit, right? After you've paid tax. That's earning an extra nine hundred thousand pounds in order to have that stuff. How could you possibly think that's normal? Surely you'd say to your other house, darling, how do we afford that car? That's like a top of the range Jaguar. How do we get this brand new motorhome? That looks like a really nice watch. Where do we get this new coffee machine from? I mean, surely you'd ask that question, wouldn't you? I think so. People will be possibly staggered to hear that I let the owner take care of absolutely everything in relation to the running of our lives. This is not a very good commentary on myself, but most things I wouldn't even be able to guess the price of what something costs because it's just not of I don't find that that doesn't motivate me. You you're not the first minister, Alison. You're you're a private citizen. If you were the first minister of Scotland, you would be absolutely you know, when I was in politics, I think about my friends, I'm completely paranoid about these things. And you know, you don't have to be in politics very long to realise that these are the things that bring you down. So I think you would if she suddenly parked a Ferrari in the driveway and you were earning you, know a, hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year you'd be like, darling, what the hell is this thing? Where did this come from? Mm. No, th yeah, yeah, you would. You would. There's very little future for the marriage, it seems to me. He is going to go to jail, possibly for quite a long time, by the way. And she's probably thinking, Well, I've had my whole life torn apart, my marriage is wrecked. And she's also in that position where she's trying to set out her life story because she's wrote her written a book. So the first commentary she gave on this was in I I saw this when I was I was actually abroad and I was just channel hopping, and there she pops up, I think it was on Sky News, where she was being Dorsed, she was talking at an event in County Kerry because she's promoting her book. So I guess she's thinking I quotes I've been punished enough. And and he may be thinking that he's being the noble martyr, that he's gonna take one for the team. The other thing we don't know, we don't know whether in the interviews that he did with the police his line all along was I was acting alone, my wife had no idea about this. We just don't know. So I think it's quite hard to make a judgment, but the truth is it's not going to go away. It's not going to go away for him 'cause he's going to go to ja il. But the other thing that's happening is that some of the old enities within the SNP, so Joanna Cherry, who is no fan of Nicholas Sturgeon, was a big fan of Alex Salmond, and she's actually calling for John Swinney to resign as the first minister and the leader of the SNP because, you know, she's saying, well, he was part of the team while this was all going on. Jack McConnell, who is the um former First Minister, Labour First Minister, he's actually had quite an interesting proposal, which is the idea that this should be investigated both by Holyrood's Public Audit Committee and Westminster's Public Accounts Committee. Now I don't know what the I I don't know what the sort of constitutional niceties of that are, but the B MPs on the on the Scottish Affairs Committee have also said that if if Holyrood doesn't do a proper investigation into this, that maybe they should take it up. One more problem to this, which is that the police claimed that they presented the evidence to the prosecutors in Scotland a year before the election. And for some reason the decision was Now presumably this would have been devastating for the SP going into that election, and John Swinney's ability to get as many votes as he did was partly because this decision was made to hold back. Is somebody going to ask some questions on why they held back that investigation? And that, by the way, was part of the chatter that was going on at the time. So we had the whole dramatic thing of the police sort of raid on the house, all the stuff being taken away, the investigation going on, and I can remember in the run up to the election people saying, Well, of course, you know, they're sitting on this thing until etc etc, etc. So look I don't know, none of us know the full facts. Uh what we do know is that he has been convicted of pretty serious crimes, and politically she has taken a further hit on the back of it. And of course, it is quite extraordinary that a party that has been quite a scandal ridden that they just have won this pretty extraordinary remarkable win to keep themselves in power. They're becoming one of the longest-running governments in the world , at a time when most governments are sort of tipping left, right, and center. So that I think the point you've raised there is the most interesting question. Were the police put under political pressure to delay something which they actually felt they had a a strong enough case to take earlier than they did. Dunno. Well done on the police for at least for following through. Because I mean the it some people were saying when they were putting up the white things that this was political uh persecution, that he didn't do anything really wrong. And what they've proved is that he was absolutely conscious of what he was doing. He was literally putting in false um receipts. I mean you, know claim,inging that he was buy from Amazon when he was buying a Jaguar. He was putting his watches against codes against the party office. I mean, he really knew. I mean, i he this isn't naivety. This is a guy who had been the chief executive of this party for a very long time, understood inside out what the legal rules were, what the accountancy rules were, and set about very carefully and thoughtfully working out how to steal money. Yeah. And on on Clem's question, whether British politics is a scandal ridden and are we becoming the next Italy, as I told you I was in Italy last week and actually one of the questions I was asked is whether we Britain are becoming the we are becoming the new Italy, not because of this, but because of the way that we keep changing our Prime Minister. Giorgio Malone is now one of the longer serving Italian Prime Ministers, and there's a distinct possibility that we're going to be moving to our seventh within a decade before too long. What did you make of the Peter Mandelson stuff yesterday? I mean, the thing that I think is likely to be leapt on to do the most political damage is actually deeply unfair to Pat McFadden, but sometimes politics is not fair. It is Pat saying to Peter in one of their exchanges that every time he has a meeting with Labour MPs, they're basically saying who can we tax to spend more on welfare? Yeah. Just again to just do a little explainer for people who aren't following this. Mandelson resigned really about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, resigned as the ambassador Washington and now there's been a request to get hold of all his emails and WhatsApps. They don't seem to have got everything, but they've got a lot of it, and the trove has now been released. And what it's now beginning to reveal is Mandelson networking to try to get colleagues to vote for him to become Chancellor of Oxford, uh Mandelson networking around his dealings with Murdoch, and and him gossiping endlessly with his friends and former colleagues about what a rubbish job Keir Starmer seems to be doing, and of course entrapped in this net are his friends who are writing back saying, yeah, it's a bit rubbish in number ten. Um one of the problems though of the whole thing, just to begin with, is your bloody Freedom of Information Act. I mean a lot of this stuff is low level gossip. This is not um stuff that is central to the good ordering of government. It's not particularly really in the public interest to know that Pat McFadden thought that uh Keirstan was doing a good job. Would it have made any difference if he'd said it to him on the phone and it wasn't? Would it have made any difference if he had a disappearing WhatsApp message? All MPs now, when you get messaged on the messages, disappear in seven days. They don't want this stuff being dragged forward. In fact, it's extraordinary that Mandelson and Pat McFadden weren't on disappearing messages. Why on earth should the I mean, I guess it's fun for us as podcasters and journalists to get to see the internal gossip. But why on earth should we be entitled to see indiscreet private gossip between people? Or even worse, you know, we're being asked to look at um Peter Kyle's what he asked ChatGBT. I mean you imagine how embarrassing it would be if I had to release every conversation I had with a large language model, every WhatsApp I've sent to Why is none of this stuff private? And what on earth has it got to do with the question of the vetting? You say that we find it fun. I didn't find it fun at all. I found the whole thing made me feel a bit sick in the stomach. The minute I saw I mean Pat McFadden is one of the most discreet , sensible, intelligent political operators you will meet. Okay ? And yet that will be of all of the 1500 pages, whatever it is, of stuff that's been published, that is the one that the Tories and Reform and others will try to land as this is what the Labour government really thinks. They don't care about your taxes, they just want to. And what Pat was actually saying was whenever the Labour MP s are saying, you know, we need to do this, we need to do this, they're not saying, Well, where's the money coming from? So he's sitting there thinking, Well, we can't do that because we've got to put taxes. So it's actually something that in context of a private conversation , as you say, wouldn't stir the feathers, rustle the feathers at all, but in this context it does. What it says to me is actually that given how much was published, there wasn't that much to get the press terribly excited. And I think the other thing it shows, so if you think about this story , uh and the and it's going to get massive coverage again on Wednesday when there's the debate, Darren Jones is going to be um he announced yesterday there's going to be a full debate in the House of Commons, which means that stuff was going to happen on the health service isn't happening. So it just gives the sense of the government being a bit of a bit of a mess. But I do think it's interesting you take the observation. If I'd have made that point, I think people would have said, oh God, you just, you know, you just can't stand it when Labour's getting if this was the choice, you'd be kicking them all over the place. But I think there is a real danger that if people can't have private conversations in some shape or form. And what happened, you know, when we brought in freedom information, you know, I broadly think it was a good thing, Tony Blair thought it was an absolutely stupid thing. And he said in his memoirs that was one of his biggest mistakes, because it stopped the ability sometimes to have frank conversations. And it definitely led to a culture in some places where people were just writing stuff on post-its , which is nuts. You should be able to have those those discussions. But I think what this showed is that ultimately there are two reasons why this has caused such political damage. One is Keir Star mer made an appointment that now he knows he shouldn't have made. And the second is that the Geoffrey Epstein connection is so sort of toxic. The other thing that came through to me is how little Jeffrey Epstein appears at all, which says to me, nobody's really saying , hold on a minute. There's a very good letter from Ollie Robbins in there, by the way, where Ollie Robbins, who you know lost his job over this thing, Olly Robbins is actually saying to Peter Mandelson, he is saying, hold on a minute, what about these Epstein conne ctions? But there's not enough of that driving through the the narrative. And you're right, what it says about Peter Mandelson, this you know, this is not breaking news, is that Peter spent and spends a lot of time networking , looking after his own ambitions, as it were. And it it is crazy to think that he thought he could be both ambassador to Washington and Chancellor of um of Oxford and that he was still lobbying. Yeah, yeah. Incredible. I mean absolutely incredible. But I think both with this and the other big WhatsApp trove revelation was around uh Boris Johnson, COVID, Dominic Cummings, Matt Hancock, which which we went through on the podcast. These things will be interesting for historians, for anthropologists of government. It gives you a very unique glimpse into the private thoughts of people that we've never had before. So, you know, if you're a an analyst, it's it's a lovely thing to have. But none of it is really a surprise. I mean the revelation that Pat McFadden and Peter Mandelsons think that Keir Starmer isn't very good at communicating, doesn't have a very clear policy, and that the Labour Party 's been taken hostage by left wing backbenchers who don't care too much about where the money's coming from. It's not a big revelation. And the same is true with the Boris Johnson stuff. I mean, surprise, surprise, it turns out that everybody sitting round the cabinet table is Boris Johnson Well, and we kind of know this about these people. I mean a l a lot of journalists who were yesterday breathlessly reporting that you know it's extraordinary to think that Pat McFadden might say this in private and this in public. I suspect he said qu versions of those things to the journalists as well , because they sort of all bump into each other and they're chatting the whole time and and what have you. But the other the other thing it shows, it it shows that, you know, yes, Keir Starmer accepts he made a big mistake, but also it shows that he just does not get any lu ck. And let me tell you , you know, for the last three years, you and I have done this event in Leeds for UK Reef, the In Investment Infrastructure and Real Estate Conference. I did it on my own last week because you were away, or the week before. And I did one of my show of hands with them, and I I I want you to guess what the result was. I said, Do you think Kear Starmer should stay or go? What do you think the result was? You know the audience, because you've been there several days. Yeah, yeah, it's and it's the same audience that last year um was pretty un uninspired by the Labour government and pretty dismal about the whole thing. I bet what's happened now is they've reverted to thinking Keir Sama should stay. They've got to cling to nurse for fear of something worse. Well, you're right. The result was 85% stay, 15% go. I was talking to Harry Harm the other day. She was down at the the Hay Book Festival. So that'd be quite a sort of well inform ed, broadly middle class audience, I think, probably quite, you know, Lib Demi, quite Tory in some respects as well, maybe. She said there were 600 people, and she asked them the same question, and twelve said he should go. I mentioned in in the main episode that when I was in Budapest for the Champions League final, had quite a lot of political discussions. It was a similar thing there. People saying, why are they getting rid of him? He's not he's he's not great, he's not terrible, he's not like he's not evil. Is it because they think is it sympathy now, or is it what is it? Well I think it's going back to your central point, isn't it? Which is that of course it's a risk. Now, my view is that you know he's like a manager of a football club who's never gonna actually in the end win the championship, so you might as well spin the dice, get rid of him and try someone else . The other view is perfectly reasonable, which is well, listen, none of the other candidates seem very good and what happens if we end up being even worse off than we are now . So it's a questi it's a question of um how optimistic you're feeling. My my view is, listen, I don't think Keir Summer can lead them into the next election. I don't think he's the Prime Minister that's really going to be able to trans form the country. So however horrible the other options are, you know, my analogy is, you know, you're running into the Titanic into the icebergs, and we're arguing about whether the lifeboats are going to be any good. Well I don't know whether lifeboats are going to be good but we can't stay on the ship, right? But at the moment I think when they see the other candidates, people are far from confident that Andy Burnham or West Streeting is going to be an improvement. I I wonder though, I wonder because you know, look, I can see Tony Blair's anxieties, his anxieties are that West reating's talking about stuff that certainly for me as a pro business centre right guy I'm bit worried about. I don't like him suddenly saying he's gonna put capital gains tax up to the same level of income tax. And I think Blair's right to say people have looked at that in the past and rejected it for good reasons. And I think some of the wealth tax is a bit dubious and all that kind of thing. On the other hand, it's difficult for me not to believe that Burnham's got a certain vim charisma and he's really grown in this role of mayor of Greater Manchester and he will bring something to the job that that Star mer hasn't got. I was thinking yesterday, so buried in I can't even remember where I saw it, but it wasn't sort of big on the news anywhere. But two stories yesterday, which in a normal day, I think, would at least have got some coverage that suggested the Labour government's doing stuff. That was several train companies that are now in public ownership, as promised. And also the UK government winning this case against Rwanda, saving 100 million quid out of the madness of Johnson's crazy scheme that Rwandaed said it was ow. So this is what I meant when I said in the main episode that Keirstarmer's essay or his substack in response to Tony Blair, he actually listed a lot of things and even I, who follows it quite closely, yeah, when you put it together they've they've done more than they get credit for, but they don't get credit because there's no one, there's no real communication around it, and secondly they just seem to sort of, you know, limp from scandal to scandal, problem to problem, this case being a case in point. Peter Mandelson Big News yesterday and Peter Mandelson can be big news again on Wednesday when they have the the the Commons debate. And just while we've been talking about scandal, Rory . Reform, funding of reform. We got some great feedback on the first part of the series that we're doing. This is a series that we're doing in conjunction with the obser ver on where the money comes from. Uh that flows into Nigel Farage and the reforms coffers. And I think it's time that the country took it a bit more seriously than it currently does. And it's it's a great series, and I'm loving some of the stuff that people are finding out about reforms finances. Episode two on Friday, so just go to the restlesspolitics dot com in order to sign up and follow up on our reporting on reforms finances. Listen, th there's one thing I'm I'm gonna be very uh cheeky and do a plug here and I'm not going to try to connect it too closely, but we're not doing so many live shows this year. We there is a live show which people have kindly s signed up to and you've just done UK Reef, but I forgot to mention and I want to mention that if people would like to have a chance to engage live with me at least, thirteenth September, Dominion Theatre London, fifteenth September, Richmond Theatre London, I'm doing two live shows on politics which could be fun. So apologies for the pluck, but if you're interested, thirteenth, fifteenth of September I'm doing it with Fain. Sorry, and and and presumably you're doing that because you want to promote a book as opposed to promote the podcast. Is that is that what you're telling me? Because I want to promote my book on politics in Cumbria and talk about Yeah well I'm sure you'll be able to sell the tickets without any problem whatsoever, Roy, with that. But if you do need any help at any time then, I really appreciate it. Quick break and then we'll come back from the back from the break. And we've got some great stuff to get into. We've got your trips to Hungary , some of the Middle Eastern trips, and the best person we've ever shaken hands with. So see you after the break. See you soon. It's nearly that time everyone. The rest is football. Will be on Netflix every day for the world's biggest tournament. Join myself, Alan and Micah for daily debates, unfiltered takes, and the most special of guests, all from the heart of Changes in sexual performance are more common than most people realize, and support doesn't need to feel awkward. With MedExpress, ever ything happens privately online. Start by completing a short consultation reviewed by UK registered clinicians. If eligible, treatment is delivered discreetly to your home, with ongoing support whenever you need it. You're not alone in this. Visit medexpress.co.uk slash podcast to learn more. Welcome back to the Rustless Politics Question Time with me, Roy Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And a question here from Sanjeez. Why have American left wing YouTubers Hassan Pika and Schenk Uger been banned from the UK? And do you agree? My answer is I don't know. And no, I don't agree. It is a bit of a problem that we don't really know. I mean it's a really interesting for freedom of speech and all this kind of stuff. I mean I think what we're beginning to see is legislation which in the past was really targeted at terrorists. I mean, so you know, post nine eleven, the government did intervene to prevent uh hate preachers coming to the UK who they thought would actually genuinely increase the risks of terrorism. But American citizens who, yes, admittedly, are very critical of Israel and its actions in Gaza , but being banned from coming in? And you know, what would that mean for you and me? I mean, what happens if we go to the US and the Trump administration decides that we're left wing YouTubers and we should be banned from the US. I mean, what kind of countries are we creating and who gets to determine this? And what are the grounds for it? And is it explained transparently? Is the suggestion that these individuals are anti -Semitic and who's making that case? Is it a legal case? The ministers making it? Or is it just happening behind closed doors? Well there's this general phrase, um, you know, not conducive to the public good. And I am guessing, but I don't know, I am guessing that the judgment is that they are anti-Semites and that they might therefore be here to spread anti-Semitism Now, they deny that. They are what they are definitely is very anti-the Israeli government. But I'm very anti-tisraeli government, you're very the anti-Israeli government because they do terrible things, and they continue to do terrible things, not least in the last twenty four hours in Lebanon. The circumstances in Gaza continue to be absolutely terrible. We talked last week about Ben Gavir and the awfulness of the way that he was treating people who were trying to get that flotilla that was trying to get aid to Gaza. Now, I don't know. I don't know much about these guys at all. There's there's no doubt, sorry, l j just so that to to be fair, so that we can understand the problem that the government's facing. I mean I I think it was wrong to ban them, but to to explain why the government's banned them. It's these guys, some are on record saying Hamas is a thousand times better than Israel, and other ones had to apologize for saying the United States deser ve nine eleven, etc. So uh the question is though, are we treating people on the in these debates around the world in the same way, right? So how are we treating Israeli politicians who say that Palestinians don't deserve to get food. Exactly. And what is the principle here? I mean I think, you know, one can be think these people are unpleasant, regrettable saying horrible things. What's the line between that? Freedom of speech and banning someone from entering? Because certainly J.D. Vance is, you know, I'm not quite saying that kind of stuff, but he's said a lot of stuff that I find pretty disturbing. Donald Trump has definitely said stuff that I find deeply disturbing. So what are what are the categories? Where do-and I think this is quite important for democracy to decide where we draw the lines on these, because traditionally I think we tended to say we can put up, particularly with YouTubers, influence comedians saying pretty outrageous and disgusting things. We can condemn them, we can be horrified by them, but we don't actually ban them from entering the United Kingdom. Well, Elon Musk appeared, admittedly by video , appeared at last year's Tommy Robinson rally. Okay? Saying there was going to be civil war. Correct. And that we needed to fight, fight, fight. Nobody's going to ban him coming to the UK, are they? Well, they should think about it, because his influence on our politics and our debate is far greater than these guys. And and added to which, the the reason why I think it was look, unless there's something we don't know, in which case they should explain it, these guys have have now got a far bigger platform, including into the British political deb ate. I mean, I, you know, I was going through social media last night. They were popping up every two minutes. One of them was at the airport explaining, can't believe this. This is how oppression starts. Then Jeremy Corbyn weighed in, Zach Polan sky weighed in. This is actually for this South by Southwest conference, which I was at I was invited to speak at uh on a panel on mental health, but I I can't go because I'm not going to be here. But it's like they've they've ventilated the platform. And I just I think unless you explain this in your point about, you know, where you draw the line, I think the one of the worst things about this is it it does allow people to say that Israel gets treated differently. And so the guy that he was the the uncle, this is an uncle and a nephew, and the uncle was standing at the airport saying, What I find most extraordinary about this is that it's another government persuading your government, the British government, to stop somebody from another country coming in. Now, we don't know that that's the case, but it's you can see why he might say that, because it is the Israelaz-aG comments that they've made in the past that have prevented them coming in. I think the best and strongest articulation of the problem is actually made by a guy called Aaron Turr, who is the director of a big US nonprofit on public advocacy. He says it's one thing to exclude someone who poses a genuine security threat or intends to engage in unlawful activity. So did these guys pose a genuine terrorist threat, were they going to engage in unlawful captivity? But if the government's decision was based purely on these individuals' views , then that should concern anyone who values freedom of expression. This guy, one one of of them them said that you know America deserved 9-11, as you say, they made some very offensive comments about October the 7th, about equating Israel with Hamas, etc. Um, this I think is is is where we have a we have a problem, because I can't I can think I hate doing waterboutary, and I'm not going to do it, but I can think of quite a lot, well I guess I did it with Musk. I can think of quite a lot of waterboundary points that I could make from a different political perspective. So there has to be a proper explanation of the principles, and I don't think we had that in the communication yesterday. Added to which the government, in a sense, allowed them to control the means of communication. They were the ones who were explaining what was going on. So I think all in all, I think this is this is a bit of a bit of an own goal. Okay, next question. Nat from Swindon. This is for you, Alistair. What's going on in Hungary? You just been in Hungary. Just seen the Maya's going after the oligarchs, including with the Welsh text. Did you find out how to pronounce the leader's name instantly on your Hungarian trip? Well I I asked several people . Um and you know you've been with me when we're traveling around, I do tend to talk to anybody I I meet about, you know, what's going on in politics and what you think because it was a very interesting time to do that. In answer to your question, my c the closest I could get, I think is, Major. Major. Very good. Very good. And what did I find out? Well, I'll tell you the first thing that was I'd forgotten just how beautiful Budapest is. It really is a beautiful city. It was very nice to see the European flags. They they really have put out a lot of European flags. And the other thing that I saw were a lot of defaced posters. And I see that on this wealth tax proposal that Magy ar is coming out with. He's targeting people who have made a lot of money under Orban in his view, you know, in very dubious circumstances. But one of the people who's complaining is the guy who owns a lot of the billboards. Because he was getting loads of money from the government and from the Fidesch to plaster the place with billboards. And it is interesting just how many of them have been defaced. And they'd covered up loads of them just announcing that Arsenal and PSG were in town as if we didn't as if we didn't know that. I'll tell you the m the the general message I got from talking to people was skeptical hope. I think almost everybody said it's got to be better. It's got to be better. We're really glad he's gone. Really hope he goes after them. Um, but we've just been scarred by too much. And so and Manji's got a lot on his plate, he really has. I mean he's and he's making he's getting progress on the European front, he's made progress on the Ukrainian front. But I I didn't meet any sort of massive enthusiasts. I met a lot of people saying a lot of people saying I voted for him. I bumped into a a young couple at a cafe and was chatting to them and they said you know they they hadn't voted before but they they felt they had to get rid of Orban and it was it was like let's see let's see what he does and they quite like the thing about him saying he's gonna fly economy and he's gonna s he's gonna take a lower salary and all that they quite like that, but they know that ultimately it's about a totally different change of direction. But the place felt really good and and I have to say they organised the um they organized the final really, really well. And the other thing Rory something I know you're not a football f an, but I find it really strange that the Parisians rioted on the back of winning in Paris, sufficient to have seven hundred arrests. And we, not far from where I am now, had this incredible parade that really did show kind of North London at its best. It was it was so kind of multiracial, multicultural, the vibe was amazing. Hundreds of thousands, somebody even said over a million, I don't know. But even I, much as a football fan, I I even I don't fully understand why you riot when you win. They've now done it two they've now done it two years in a row. I don't quite get it. Um just just quickly before we we get on, I'd I'd love to tell you about where I' Ive been've been. just I just drove in fact from Amman in Jordan to Medina in Saudi Arabia and just got back yesterday. But tell us a little bit about Hong Kong, 'cause when were you last there and what was your sense of it? Well I've only ever been I've only been twice, I think, since the hand over. My sense of it was real change um and and real change. And I mean if you remember back in nineteen ninety seven when we were there for the hand over, and it was one country , two systems . I think you can safely say it's one country, one system. You'd have you'd have very little sense of being in a place that was once you know run by the Brits. So it it it it it it doesn't feel for a visitor very different to going to Shanghai or Beijing now. It doesn't feel like a a very different system. It it feels a bit different. It feels a little bit different. I mean for example, you know, in the hotel, you could pick up Western newspapers. Um I think that I I did speak to some journalists who said that the freedom of the press has been almost fundamentally eroded. There was a journalist who was jailed while we're there. He'd been stopped by the police who asked him for his identity. He said the last time you stopped with my identity you live streamed it and I was humiliated and I'm not doing it. He was jailed I think for five days or something. Um the and and the other And the thing they said was that they're as interested in politics as as ever, but they don't talk about it very much. Um, and I think that was that was uh interesting. The other thing that big news that was there when I big news in Hong Kong, Hong Kong has now overtaken Switzerland as the world's biggest wealth hub. My goodness. So uh and of course Hong Kong's economy very bound up with Chinese economy. I mean your point about not talking about politics and arrests is also connected to the thing we did yesterday on AI and the Pope, which is the nature of these surveillance authoritarian security states is now being shifted a lot by technology. Yeah. Um so if you walk down the streets in Shanghai, there are cameras absolutely everywhere. Everybody is conscious that their phones are picking up everything they say . Uh, that their digital identities there is no privacy at all about their data or identity, and it's all filtered through. I was talking to a Chinese friend recently who was explaining that they couldn't get a job in the in the Chinese government and what that felt like. I mean you can't get a job in the Chinese government if you've done an undergraduate degree outside the outside China, give you a sense. I mean you'd be totally Chinese, but if you go and do an undergraduate degree in Europe or the U S, you can't work for the Chinese government. So we're getting into a world where this very, very powerful country and which in many ways of course is is demonstrating more predictability, more certainty, more long-term planning capacity. But it still is very much an authoritarian security state. And as we're getting into a world of AI, autonomous drones, robots. Did you I I don't whether you saw in Hong Kong, but I mean if you go to Shanghai, Beijing at the moment, you you are beginning to see robots in the streets? Oh, well, uh the the I I saw right I saw quite a few robots. And of course part of the conference I was was at there a whole thing on on on robotics, some of which were absolutely extraordinary. You know, not just playing chess but also, you know, which you see everywhere. But but the there was a presentation on how robots were being used in the workplace and and what they could do. All that was going on. And the thing about the surveillance is like, you know, I mean coming through the the airport was as efficient as as I can recall. And it but you you realize that you know they've got the facial recognition thing as soon pretty much as soon as you're there and the gates are just opening when they you put your thing in and through you go. Um one fabulous story, Rory. I I went out for a run one day to find my tree of the day, and it's not a great place for trees because it's so so built up. But I found this wonderful banyan tree, and I got um and I posted it and I got a an email from a guy called William Atkinson who told me this story, complete with a message from his dad, who's a retired squadron leader called Richard Atkinson, and he told me the story that this these two trees used to stood up on the stand on the jetty at HMS Tamar. And and H HMS Tamar, just sorry to explain to listeners who want this, was the uh British military headquarters. So it's actually where my father worked. Um so we we lived at when I was born in Hong Kong, we lived in a little building just behind it. And that's where he went to work every day. So it's it's it's called a ship, but it wasn't a ship, it was the defense headquarters of the British government. Exactly. Squadron leader Richard Atkinson, who's now in his eighties and not very well, but he said that he could see the trees from his office office window in the UK headquarters, and he learnt that the Chinese had no plans to preserve the tree. So he fought a campaign as a result of which that one of the trees, the one that I pictured, without knowing this story, was dug up, it was put on a 200 tonne barge, it was towed across the harbour, and it was repl anted along with all the props that were needed. What new water supply brought in? And anyway, I spotted it and it's it we'll we'll put a picture in the newsletter. It's absolutely beautiful. Well, how how wonderful, because the joke when I was growing up in Hong Kong is um if it if it moves, eat it, if it doesn't redevelop it. But I'm glad to hear that this this energy was going into the trees. Yeah, that's lovely. Well this tree survived. This tree survived. So tell us listen, you went to you were you were allowed into something of a sacred Muslim site, weren't you? Yeah, yeah. I mean I so it f firstly an amazing trip. So we drove thousands of uh miles down through the desert from Amman through Aqaba down to Medina. People watching Lawrence Arabia will have a sense of that landscape. We went through Wadi Ram and people who can remember that nineteen sixty two movie, this is where Auda Abu Tai comes down the hills. And it is absolutely extraordinary historically because this is if Scotland is the very northern edge of the Roman Empire, this is the very southern edge of the Roman Empire. And this is basically where R ome ran out. Um we went from Petra, which you know people remember the rose red city half as old as time, these amazing rock cut cliffs, to the Saudi equivalent of that, which is hundreds of miles south in a place called Al Ullah, which was closed until pretty um almost impossible for foreigners to access, because it's a pagan site dedic dedicated to pagan idols, and the Saudi government. For many years , uh Saudis and Wahhabi Muslims saw this as a pretty horrendous infidel site. It's now been turned into a tourist location, which you can visit. Not many tourists around, either in Jordan or in Saudi at the moment. In fact, haven't been many since the first strikes on Iran last July. Heat, unbelievable. But then as you say, we got down to Medina. And Med ina is al,ong with Mecca, one of the two great sacred sites of Islam. One of the this is where the Prophet Muhammad is buried. It's where this great mosque was. It's where many of the early uh caliphs were buried. And first the Medina has become a completely modern town, so one of the things the Saudis did, the Wahhabis did is demolish all the historical buildings, all the historical tombs, because they thought it was idol worship to maintain these great beautiful early medieval tombs around the Caliphs and built this new concrete city in this oasis . But actually the centre of it is actually very beautiful. The modern architecture is quite sympathetic. There are lovely col onnades. The area around the mosque is there to accommodate million, two million pilgrims . And for the first time in I think 1, 400 years, it's possible for me as a non Muslim to get right up to the edge of that mosque, right into the centre of the of the Haram area. I I we didn't Shaitan and I didn't see anybody else who were non Muslims there. But everybody was very friendly towards us. Uh in the past we would have been approached by the police and pushed out. There would have been big signs saying no non-Muslims can enter. People would have shouted at us aggressively. So it's a real sign of how quickly Saudi Arabia is changing something. It hasn't changed fourteen hundred years. It's still, of course, quite conservative. I mean other parts, if you go to Riyadh, you can see women now beginning to uncover their heads and drive cars and drive Ubas. In Medina women are still very much in black abayas. But it was right at the end of the Hajj, so this is the moment where you know it was one of the great obligations of the two billion Muslims in the world to travel, so they traveled to Mecca and then to Medina and that was all hap pening as we were there. Um but don't forget, just connect back to China. It is also a surveillance security state. I mean, never underestimate that the this in democratic terms or in surveillance terms, in terms of cameras and your phones, Saudi UAE are closer to China than people understand. That in you know, you land at Dubai Airport, do not be very surprised if your telephone is beginning to report on every single one of your movements. Do not be very surprised. You know, for example there was a little seems to have been uh a whip around in one of the Shia mosques in Dubai to raise money for people affected by the US strikes on Iran. And almost immediately after, something like 8,000 Shia Pakistani Uber drivers were expelled from UAE. It's a country where the expatriates and I was I was um with some people who live in UAE. We w went onto a beach leaving our phones hundreds of yards behind , with the wind blowing and the waves crashing, and they still were very, very reluctant to say anything. Critical UAE government. People in Jordan reluctant to say anything critical of the Saudi government. And we also, final thing, we drove through the middle of Nyon. And Nyon was this amazing lineal city that he was going to build that was going to cost eighty billion dollars, which was going to run across the desert for one hundred and twenty five kilometers that was going to be taller than the uh Empire States building. The whole thing has been abandoned. Yeah. I mean it's completely abandoned. They've spent colossal amount of money on architects, planning, etc. Probably good that it's been abandoned, but again, it's something that nobody's talking too openly about. Unlike Age 2. Um , on the surve on the surveillance, Fiona and I have been watching Peter Cap aldi's news series Criminal Record, which is a sort of police drama. And it's fair to say the police in this one don't lack for surveillance and and and phone tracking technologies. So uh I think we've we've got a fair bit of it here. Rory, final question. This is from Ali . After your discussion last week on your most evil handshakes, slightly more positive one. Who is the most angelic person you've ever shaken hands with? And I've got to say we've got some fantastic, we asked people to send in, you know, their most evil, and there was lots of sort of interesting things. We also ran a poll of our listeners on Spotify asking them if they would share your use of the word evil to describe Boris Johnson. Who? thirty eight percent. thirty eight percent said they would, 44% of listeners said they wouldn't, and 16% were unsure . So there we are. I was hoping it'd be 52, 48, but never mind. Um so who's the most magical hand you've shaken . Um okay. Uh small footnote. My mother will kill me if I don't point out that my father shook Chairman Mao's hand. She wanted to get that on the record. Oh that's cool. That's cool. That's cool, yeah. I did Fidel Castro's. Fidel Castro, yeah. Chairman Mell though. Great leap forward, great famines. I mean that's quite quite mad. Would it would he have been your dad's most evil hand? Yes, I think so. Yeah. I think so. I think he'd probably most disturbed by shaking Chairman Mao's hand. Um so I think this is very cheesy, but I and I he won't like me saying this, but I have such um um admiration for Rowan Williams, our previous Archbishop of Canterbury. I think he is the most extraordinary man. I think personally , his ability to listen, his humility, his prose style, his writing, but also his sense of what matters, his sense of silence of work , of human suffering, of human dignity. I mean, I if I'm looking for a guy um who Wow. Wow. Let's get him on. Let's get him on. I'm sure he'd be happy to come on. Yeah. We've had we've had Justin Wilby, who's a very fine man, shaking both shaking his hand. Um I really enjoyed thinking about this question. I was tempted to say Maradona, but I just don't think people were going to do . Um Well it is the hand of God. It's the hand of God. And it would definitely if I'd shaken the hand of the Pope last week, I would have said the Pope. I have shaken Mother Teresa's hand, but I I was never I never fully bought into the Mother Teresa legend. I thought there was too much stuff going on in the margins that I probably wouldn't have liked. Um I have been thinking, because obviously we want David Attenborough to live forever. Um, but if and when he goes, then there has to be a replacement national treasure. And my short list of two, I have shaken both their hands. That's Paul McCartney and Michael Pal in. Ah. I think that I think Paul McCartney is just uh and he's got a new album out, age, whatever he is now, absolutely amazing. And Michael Pal in, just one of the most successful, nicest people on the planet. But I'm afraid the winner has to be a politician because this is the rest is politics, and it is Nelson Mandela. He is he is without doubt the most saintly hand I have ch chosen. Even though he had non-saintly Wh which which is also select selected by the Pope. And uh just final thing for me and then back to you. Um we we talked a lot about the Pope's eus and air, but the thing that we didn't register, which is maybe his most radical thing, is he says that the problem with the way that tech bros think about the world is they think that human beings can be endlessly perfected, that death is like a sort of bug in the system they can get rid of, that suffering and pain can be got rid of. And he says that he's all for alleviating suffering and pain, but that in the end suffering, pain is not just part of the human condition, it's actually what leads us to relationships, humility and love. That it that without suffering and pain and death, we wouldn't really have desires, we wouldn't really have love, we wouldn't really have empathy. And uh the the the the this magnificence of humanity is about our capacity for good, our capacity for evil, but also our capacity for suffering. Yeah. Well I I um I sort of wanged on so long about the Pope's brilliant encyclical that I didn't actually read out what was my favourite section. Oh yeah, come on, what was it? You've never I'll read you. It's this it's this um So called artificial intelligen ces do not undergo experiences, they do not possess a body, they do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship, or responsibility mean, nor do they have a moral conscience since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility. They may imitate language, behaviour and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding , but they do not understand what they produce for they lack the effective relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. And he said, even when machines excel in efficiency, a human face that asks to be gazed upon remains the centre of our history. Wish I'd written that. Well we'll I'm not gonna ruin it. Let's let's end on that. A human face to be gazed upon remains the center of our history. Excellent. See you next week. See you soon. Bye-bye.