517. Is Trump Plotting Regime Change in Cuba? (Question Time)

Welcome to the rest of this politics question time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alice Campbell. So hundreds of questions, I think even thousands of questions this week. But I guess I's going to start with Cuba, because that got a couple of questions. So, for example, Murray asks, with no obvious win for Trump that would allow him to save face in the war with Iran, do you think there's a real possibility he might resort to a distraction strategy? this time by targeting another country such as Cuba. So, Alistair, Cuba. So recent events in Cuba, you had this, it does relate to the capture of Maduro because 32 Cuban security personnel were killed during that raid, which didn't make Cuba very, very happy. Trump then quickly goes on to

declare that Cuba's estate ready to fail. Then the oil shipment start to dry up, threats on Mexico. He threatens more tariffs. So this really has been a deliberate attempt to, strangle Cuba when it comes to its own economy and particularly its oil supplies and this is what's led to several blackouts and increasing rising rhetoric from Trump and others in the administration that Cuba is not long for this world. Yeah and you've got people like a Senator Lindsey Graham out there saying Iran's done Cuba's next. We're mopping them up one by one. He is such a jerk that guy. It's a joke. Marco Rubio is of course from Cuban American family. I mean his parents moved from Cuba, weren't originally American citizens.

And so he knows a lot about Cuba. And of course, he represented the very, very deep Florida, Miami base of Cuban Americans. They're only 90 miles, of course, from Cuba at some bits the U.S. coast. And that constituency very, very strongly engaged in what they do to bring down the regime. And one of the things that I was thinking about this, we were talking about last podcast about what kind of threat Iran posts. and the question what kind of threat Cuba poses.

And I was listening to an interview with Trump's former deputy assistant secretary of state who dealt with Cuba, woman called Carrie Fulipetti. And I was really interested in the way in which Republican Americans think about Cuba. So she takes it as read that an intervention in Cuba, regime change in Cuba, is basically justified, partly because she wants to pose it as a threat to Americans. So along with arguments around the evident lack of democracy, I mean, this is a country which is a genuine autocratic state with over a thousand political prisoners. I mean, that's all true. It's a very poor, a pretty brutal state. But she wants to not just describe it as that. She wants to say, this is a country where if an American goes on holiday to Cuba, despite the fact they're not really allowed to go on holiday to Cuba by the Trump administration. They could have their possession spied on, was one of her arguments. Then she talked about Havana syndrome. which are these allegations which aren't really validated that the Cubans had a secret weapon that affected Americans who visited, then there have been a lot of arguments about how Cuba hosts Russian and Chinese signals intelligence,

which allows it to spy on the US. Now, these are very odd arguments for intervention, really, because of course the US has signals intelligence stations all over the world, including in Britain, spying on China and Russia. And the idea that because somewhere it's an autocratic, non-democratic state that spies on people who visit, that would apply to probably 50, 60 countries in the world. It would apply to Vietnam. And when asked what an intervention would do, and this is why I was getting worried, she said, well, things can't get worse, basically, for Cuba. And this is a little bit reminiscent of what people were saying with Iran and what people were saying with Iraq. It can't really go wrong because things can't be any worse than they are. But of course, they can be worse.

You could end up with half a million Cubans on boats trying to get to Florida. The only kind of risk she seemed to acknowledge was risk to American service personnel, not really risk to Cubans. So the only reason I'm talking about this is it reminds me a little bit of the structure of the Iran intervention, which is massive inflation of the risk posed by a country, assumption that there are no real downstream consequences for the US, certainly no thinking about the consequences for the actual local people, only in terms of consequences. for U.S. servicemen. And I guess the sort of general idea that it's just taken for granted that you don't really need to make international legal arguments at all. You just have to say this is a bad regime, which relates to maybe something that we can all relate to, which is

if like me you have Trump derangement syndrome, you find it quite difficult to believe that lots of people support Trump are going to vote for him. And if like most of the Republican administration, you have Iran derangement syndrome and Cuba derangement syndrome, you find it very difficult to believe that anybody could possibly support those regimes or that those regimes wouldn't collapse like a pack of cards as soon as you touch them. This episode is brought you by Fuse Energy. Energy policy rarely stays in Westminster for long, usually arise for the bill. And from the 1st of April, 75% of renewables obligation costs will come off electricity bills and move into general taxation. So if bills are meant to fall from

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was one of containment. It's hard to see what real threat Cuba posts is the United States, particularly now that they've lost that link to Venezuela and the support from Venezuela. they do still have some support from Russia. I was interested to read that one of the things that China is helping them to do is a massive expansion of solar panels to try to get them more energy self-sufficient. But surely the other thing that might be, I mean, they're not as military powerful as maybe they were when Castro had the whole country up, you know, backing him. But, you know, the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, in spring of 1961.

I mean, that was a bit of a disaster for the United States. that was another one that I don't you know so Dennis Brogan we talked about yesterday he wrote his piece eight years before that happened but that was another one

where they just thought we get a few exiles we put them together with some of our troops and they'll go in the whole thing will fall over it was a fiasco the most beautiful book on that

is if we're getting onto cultural recognition Norman Mailers Harlot's ghost oh yeah this incredibly detailed account of the CIA planning the Bay of Pigs and the way they're using

Cuban exiles and the different Cuban exile groups coming in and their attempts to try to disguise an American plane to look like a Cuban plane and pretend that a Cuban pilot has come across. And then the disaster unfolds on the beach where, of course, a bit like these attempts to use Kurds against Iran, the real victims turn out to be the Cubans who are gun to death on the beach. They also have these wonderful plots to try and take down Castro. So they knew that he liked diving and a bit like Vladimir Putin's people managed to put some poison inside Alexei Navalny's underp. pants. They poisoned Castro's wetsuit. But unfortunately on that day, he didn't wear that wetsuit. Somebody else didn't. They also tried, they put a bomb in one of his cigars at one point, which didn't go off. And then there was a bomb, I think, in a shell so that when he went scuba diving the bomb, and Andrews Fulasco, Andrews Fulasco is a former finance minister who's now

teaching in London, has written a very good substack on this, basically making the point with Cuba that we try to make a rum, which is, of course, in many ways, it's a loathsome regime. There's very little sympathy for it, and Cuba's been in real trouble since the Soviet Union pulled its support in 1990, and it's got even worse with COVID and Trump sanctions. But that doesn't mean that there are clear opposition groups or splits within the regime or any real reason to believe you can do what's now called Adelsea Rodriguez, that you can somehow replace the current president of Cuba with someone else which will suddenly improve things. And the thing, again, which is really going to cause a huge rift with the Cuban-American community,

is that if Trump thinks what he's going to do is bring in a new leader and just ask for more economic access for American companies without changing any of the human rights in Cuba, there will be horror because people are trusting Marco Rubio to try to improve the human rights and democracy situation. Yeah, but Marco Rubio's soul has flown away to over. very dark place. I mean, he's out today getting really angry with the media because they were saying to him that they've not been clear about their goals in Iran. So he said, that's absolutely nonsense.

The president's been clear and I've been clear. We've all been clear. And he then lists them several goals. I won't go through them all now, but they're completely different to what they said at the time. And they're also not really goals, are they? They're things like take out the Navy, but they're not strategic objectives. I mean, if you ask the question, and why, is it to open the straights for moves? Is it to topple the regime? Is it, I mean, there's no why. He's gone to a very, very, very dark place. But I think the other thing that's really interesting, although Cuba is not Iran. There's, there's no point. Lindsey Graham might want to put them into the same breath, but it's, it's just ridiculous. But I think the other thing to say is the threats that Trump routinely makes now

against other countries, the threats themselves are a violation of international law. When he says, I'm going to take Cuba, I'm going to do with Cuba, whatever I want. And by the way, Rory, when we were talking yesterday about Britain and the United States. And while we were recording, the palace announced that Charles III and Camilla are going on this state visit. Now, as you know and I know, these are the decisions that are made by the government, not by the royal family themselves. I'm very, very alarmed that they're going to do this. And let me just read you a post that Donald Trump put out on his ridiculous truth social. Shortly after this decision had been announced that Charles and Camilla are going there, all of those countries that can't get jet fuel because

of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran. I have a suggestion for you. Number one, buy from the US. We have plenty. Number two, build up some delayed courage, go to the strait and just take it in caps. You'd have to start learning how to fight for yourself. The USA won't be there to help me anymore,

just like you weren't there for us. Iran has been essentially decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil, President DJT. I mean, that's literally, we keep being told that the one bit of the United Kingdom that he absolutely has real respect for is the royal family and Charles III.

Charles III announces he's going on this state visit, which is a big deal for Trump because he loves Borgels, and then he puts that out as yet another whack at Gia Keir Starmer because he didn't go along with his Iran madness. Can I... Because obviously I'm getting some pushback around, and including from you, on my characterization of Americans not being properly engaged with the war in Iran.

I still hold to the view that people in the US have not understood what this means for allies. that what this message really means. I mean, if your economy is suffering as a British economy now is, and there's a big problem, which again, I don't hear enough about in the US, which is they're asking Europe to pick up the bill in Ukraine, asking Europe to spend 5% GDP on defense, while at the same time they are damaging the European economies through their war in Iran. You know, they drive up the oil price, drive up the interest rates, all our economies start suffering. But if you add to the fact that we're being asked to provide the bases, provide the overfly rights, and there's a

There's a contradiction there. The foreign policy guy was talking to yesterday, the Republican, was saying, yeah, we've got everything we want out of Europe. I don't even understand why, you know, we've got bases and overfly rights from every single country in Europe except for Spain. We've got everything we want. And then on the other side, they're like, you didn't give us what we wanted. And what we don't communicate properly is how humiliation works, that if you're made to feel, as Britain and Europe is being made, felt completely powerless, no choices, suck it up. We're not going to consult. We're not going to consult. We're going to damage your economies. We're going to do it without you. We're going to do illegal things and make you participate in our illegal things. And then we're going to take to truth, social, and insult you. I don't know how long an alliance can survive this. That's why I don't buy into this view from your friend Mike Pompeo, that somehow we just have to suck it up.

He's not my friend. He's really not my friend. But I think I don't think the king, queen should be going. I think they should be following the Alistair Campbell World Cup strategy. just don't go, but I know they're in a rather more difficult position than I am. And it's also incredibly unfair that all the ministers when interviewed and asked about it, say it's a decision for the king. It's not a decision for the king, as you just pointed out, he's doing it at the behest of

the British government. Yeah. And they've got to be careful saying this, because at some point, if they keep saying it's the decision for the king, do they really want the king to be like, okay, well, then fine, if it's a decision to me, I don't want to go. And is, Rory, speaking as a source close to the king, do you think that's his current thinking. No, I'm not saying anything. He says it's a constitutional monarch who follows the advice of the government. Exactly. Right. Let's move on to another very interesting thing that happened in the United States last week.

So, Rory, your friends, social media companies, Stuart, Triplus member from Scarborough, the tech bros have just lost two very significant court cases in the US. How can we better control these monopolies? Echoing your Mike Pompeer point, not my friends. So this was a judgment in LA and Los Angeles where Meta and YouTube were found to design products that harmed young people and they knew it. And in New Mexico, a case involving child exploitation and their shares have tumbled somewhat. I think we will look back on all this. You know a lot more about this well than I do, but I think we'll look back on this as a gigantic version of the tobacco industry in an earlier age. They knew that this was really damaging, but they just plowed on and obfuscated. One of the defenses they mounted in the case of the young girl who said she became addicted to Instagram in particular, was that they were trying to

be a very aggressive strategy to blame her parents. It was something to do with the parents and nothing to the mother and nothing to do with Instagram. And of course, they're now facing dozens and hundreds more cases like this. So where do you see this going? Well, I think it is a risk to these companies, because if the platforms are liable, which they've always tried to say they're not, and people accept the argument that they designed these platforms. to be addictive, which is absolutely true. I mean, the way in which they sell advertising is by getting as much attention as possible

and getting you addicted to it. And they play around with AB testing to make it as addictive as possible because the more attention they get, they more than monetize it. So if they become liable, they are then open to huge legal risk across the board.

And of course, since Trump came in, a lot of them got rid of that, you know, meta, Marx or Kovberg and others, got rid of a lot of their safety people. Yeah. X got rid of a lot of its safety conditions. control people because they thought they were entering a new world of free speech where they didn't need to worry about questions of truth or online safety or addiction. My goodness, this is

going to be the culture war of all culture wars because these are, of course, the very, very wealthiest people in the world. They're driving the whole AI revolution. And AI isn't just like tobacco. That's going to be potentially the backbone of everything that we do in our businesses and hospitals and armies. They're also people who, you know, people who, you know, they're also people who, who have a very, very strong self-conception of themselves as people who are improving the world. Again, unlike the tobacco barons, this incredible vanity. You know, people like Elon Musk believe they're going to save humanity,

take us to Mars. All the people in the tech business believe that people who grumble about their industry are Luddites, that technology has transformed the world, that the world before the iPhone was an unimaginable world. And so one of the reasons they all got behind, behind, or many of them got behind Trump, his Mark Zuckerberg was so offended to be dragged in front of the Congress and told that he was a bad person. And a lot of these people started flirting with Trump because they couldn't bear the Democrats telling them off. So there's a huge cultural issue, which embraces even people who are on the more liberal democratic side in this.

They are very defensive about their industry, very proud of their wealth, very proud of their IQs, and will put up the most ferocious fight. And of course, they control the biggest media and advertising platforms on Earth. So when that cultural war gets going, again, unlike the tobacco industry, it would be like taking on all the newspaper barons at once. Yeah, the tobacco industry, because it was mainly newspapers then, part of their battle was actually to fill the newspapers of advertising so that we didn't sort of, you know, go after them editorial, as it were. But just to give you two or three things that emerged in the court cases, so an internal document from YouTube in the California trial, there was this question post, how are we measuring well-being? and the response, we're not. There was another one. The young ones are the best ones for long-term retention. Targeting teens is a good gateway to entice other family members. They do sound like drug pushers. And there's actually one email from an employee, I think, who's warning them,

says targeting 11-year-olds feels like tobacco companies a couple of decades ago. And I guess the other issue maybe just to briefly touch on is what's happening in the UK. We've talked a lot about Australia. There are other countries that are now following in their footsteps. there is this debate going on the UK, essentially, I guess, around the question, why does the government just get on and do it? The House of Lords has now voted twice, basically, to say that. And, Alison, could just push you on that one? Because normally your story about the House of Lords is that they're these terrible

reactionaries that are blocking the will of the House of Commons. But in this case, I guess they're more on your side, aren't they? They're trying to push them to do more. Yeah, I can't quite understand. I think I got a feeling that part of it is a bit of shenanigan going on. They're just like defeating the government. But I don't, the government having committed to this in. principle, it now feels that they're now setting up all sorts of quite complicated process.

Isn't it characteristic generally? I'm afraid of this government. Instead of seeing the opportunity which Malinosa saw to take a big, bold stance, pretty primary colors, bold stance we could all get behind and make it into an incredible success. They managed to take what is now a proven vote winner and dilute it and complicates it and finesse it and make themselves seem as though they're resisting something that they're supposed to be embracing and pushing. Well, and if you look at the nature of this, so they're going to have a pilot, and a pilot always generally says, we're not quite sure about this, we're going to give it a bit of a go.

So they're going to trail these limits on access to social media in the homes of 300 teenagers, okay, for six weeks. So the 300 teenagers will have their social apps disabled entirely. they'll be blocked overnight or they'll be capped, okay? And they're then going to be put into, this just feels so processing. It'll be four groups. Group one, complete ban on most popular social media apps. Group two, apps capped at 60 minutes a day.

Group three, apps blocked between 9pm and 7. There are group four control group with no restrictions. Then they're going to measure impacts on family lives, sleep, schoolwork, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the long side, no, Rory, I've not finished with the process. Just be quiet. The government's pilot will be. run side of public consultation asking whether the UK should follow in Australia's footsteps.

Well, I think the public's pretty keen on this. And then Keir Starmer says he's very keen, very keen for the government to tackle addictive features. So what it does is it's like you're doing something that's big and bold, but through the process, you're making it feel very kind of step-by-step incremental, not very exciting. Yeah. I mean, the whole thing's complete nonsense because as somebody who did a few randomized control trials, when we were doing cash transfers to the extreme pool with give directly, a sample size of 300 isn't big enough anyway. I mean, no statistician is going to derive any information from 300 divided into groups

of 60. I mean, it's meaningless. So I don't even understand what the hell they think they're doing that. Almost certainly somebody said they wanted evidence, and then someone's civil service said they didn't have enough money to run a proper sample size. So now they're doing a nonsense. The other problem is that it makes it feel, I'm afraid, to somebody like me who's feeling a bit grumpy about this, as though they're under pressure from the social media companies,

because we know that was the case with Malinorskas. He said as soon as he started to do this, all the big American tech companies ratcheted up the pressure on him and tried to shut him down. I'm worried in this case that the government is very dependent on these big American tech companies for their next generation investment. You remember all the whole Trump visit was about these companies bringing in billions of dollars of investment to the UK. And the reason they're not taking the Malinorskis line is that they're desperate not talking. offend the tech companies. Well, do the right thing, I say.

Right, Rory, you're our sort of resident slag off the Green Party person. Sean asks this question. Hi, Rory and Alistair, I wanted to pick up on the idea that the Green Party is far left. I'm 27, says Sean, and in every election so far in my life, the centre or right has won. I consider myself left wing, but I don't think my views are fringe, invest in the economy, fairer tax, nationalised industries. Many of these ideas would have been fairly mainstream before Thatcher. Since then, the centre of gravity has shifted so far right that the principles of social

democracy and Keynesian economics are sometimes labelled extreme. Even if the Green Party goes a bit further, should principles like wealth-free distribution, ensuring greater economic firms really be considered far left? Oh, you like this bit. Many thanks. Sean Davis, brackets, running to be a local green councillor in the upcoming May election. So in the interest of balance, could we have the view of the Labour councillor at your seat and the Tory.

It's really interesting, isn't it? Because of course, you'll see if reform listeners wrote in, which they don't very much, but they're also very, very resistant to the label far right. They absolutely hate the idea they're far right. They would say their ideas are basically in line with a lot of the population. Common sense. It's interesting how the epithet far is doing a lot of work here. I guess, look, there's a trivial point, and there's a more important point.

Trivial point is we're trying to describe a British politics that's gone from a two-party politics into a five-party politics, and we're trying to describe the fact that reform is right, the conservatives, and green is left to labor. I think the more important point is this question around for both Green and reform about populism, which is they're not awfully good, either party, about explaining the costs and sacrifices that would be involved in their solutions, that they're very good at talking about the problems. And that's one of the reasons. I mean, we just interviewed Janus Verifakis.

And I was quite struck by the fact that he's somebody who's definitely on the left, but much more than the Green Party is very, very clear about the fact he doesn't think wealth taxes are going to make any real significant difference. He thinks, you know, there might be an argument for doing it morally, but it's not going to sort out the public finances. And that the kind of changes you would need to make to the British economy are going to be really, really painful and are going to hit people in the pocket. And that's exactly what populists on left and right never want to admit. Yeah, I mean, I don't view the Green Party, because the Green Party

is quite a complicated alliance now, because Zach Polansky has become the leader and the most high profile person within it. His politics, I'd say, are quite different to other reasonably well-known Green Party figures. I don't see them as far left. I just think they're not very credible. We saw that in our interview with Zach Plansky. I think they're very credible on the economy. I thought we got to question Joshua, what was the purpose of the protest against the far right when the far right are not in power? Or the protest against the far right, I suspect Josh, because a lot of people feel very, very worried that the far right is on the march. This refers to a very, very well attended march at the weekend in London, and it was specifically a march organized to protest against the threat of the rise of the far right. Zach Polanski spoke at that event, and I don't know, I just couldn't take him seriously because he was just looked like a guy having a really good

time bouncing around estranged to some music. Now maybe that's just me being a grumpy old man. But if the Green Party are to be taken seriously, I think they have to be serious. And I think that too often the policy perspectives that they put out there is not serious. And you're absolutely right. It is a form of populism. And the series I've done with Liam Byrne, we're talking mainly about the right. His book doesn't address the populism on the left. But it is a kind of mirror. You know, it is about saying, well, this is a problem and it's a terrible problem. We shouldn't have that problem. Therefore, we do this to deal with it. So yesterday, Nigel Farage and Genrick were out and about saying that, you know, we're going to make it easier to fly.

We're going to take the price down of flying. We're going to reduce your fuel costs. Well, how? And what tradeoffs are you doing? They never feel that they have to do that. Look, I think the Green Party, they are a real threat to labor. I was at a very good school the other day, Northampton Academy. And it's one of a chain.

And they had several hundred kids listening in the room. And then they had 7,000 online coming in from different schools. I could only see the ones in the room, but I did one of my votes, as you know, I love. So these are all students, school kids who are going to vote for the first time in the next election. I asked them, how many of you will vote? Virtually every hand went up. And then later in the tour said, you know, how many of you think Keir Starmer's doing a good job as Prime Minister? And it was very, very, very, very few, alarmingly few from a labor perspective.

Now, they liked Zach Polenski. I didn't do a vote on Polanski, but they came to say, you know, can't he be a bit more like Zach and a bit more radical, and a bit more this and a bit more that. Now, that shows that his strategy is working, okay, but I don't think it's the policies he's putting forward as strategy for government. I was so intrigued. I was so intrigued in our interview with him that, you know, him saying to me basically at the end, listen, you know, I could have known those economic statistics if you'd warn me in advance. But also that it didn't really damage him at all. I mean, I thought, you know, revealing that he didn't really know the difference in the debt and the deficit and he wasn't sure

about the top rate attacks, I think, could have been really damaging for a politician 20, 30 years ago, but it hasn't had any effects on at all. That's why, I mean, I said at the end of that interview, he needs to go away and get decent advice and get people around him and have good answers to that. Because in a general election, it is the sort of thing that can trip you up very, very quickly if you don't have those pretty clear answers. But maybe we are. We often say we're always a few years behind America in our political campaigning. maybe that is the awful road that we're going down where truth doesn't really matter. Some don't have to add up. You can get away with making mistakes.

But I don't see them as far left. I just see them as slightly lacking, well, severely lacking in credibility on the policy front. Should we take a break? Yep. Take a quick break and then back for more. Fourth of July savings are happening now at the Home Depot with select appliances starting at $398. Plus, get free delivery on appliance purchases of $398 or more, no membership required. upgrade your kitchen with a modern and sleek GE profile refrigerator featuring hands-free auto fill for the perfect pour every time

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Welcome back to the reciprocalities with me, Alastair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. Now, Bruno, Rory, wants to know, who do we think is more dangerous to the world right now, Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu? It's quite a question, isn't it? I mean, they're endangering the world in very different ways. So let's start with Vladimir Putin, who I do think is objectively the most dangerous directly for Europe. He controls 20% of a European country. It's a war where 1.2 million casualties have happened.

he's got this enormous nuclear arsenal and ballistic missiles. He's made it clear, as Tim Snyder said in our view with him for many, many years now, that he wants to increase Russian territory right into the Baltic. And we're in a very dangerous situation because that message you read out from Trump signals the US administration that for the first time really since 1945 is signaling that it's not really that interested in protecting Europe against Russia. I mean, there's something I keep picking up on here, which is sometimes these Republican foreign policy people I've been arguing with over the last three days are saying, when I say, what are you doing in Iran? They say, well, it doesn't matter because Ukraine's fine, Europe's fine, you can handle it yourselves.

And sometimes they're, of course, saying the reverse, which is Europe isn't fine. Europe needs to spend much more in a much more dangerous situation. The Israel point, though, is fascinating because Israel, of course, is justifying these attacks on the grounds that it's vulnerable, but it's probably doing these things because it feels almost in. vulnerable. In the short term, Benjamin Netanyahu, if you said, you know, what could go wrong for Israel and what's happening, the answer is ultimately he probably doesn't feel there is any existential threat to Israel. There's no way that the Gulf countries are going to repeat the Omkipur War of 74. He has a nuclear weapon. They are the strongest military power in the Middle East by a country mile. And therefore, a bit like Trump, what he's doing in Lebanon, what he's doing

in Gaza, what he's doing in Syria and, of course, what he's doing in Iran, he's partly doing because there isn't much direct consequence for him. He's insulated from very much blowback. And that's really being felt by the Gulf because they feel that Israel's offering the choice of either signing up to basically join all of Israel's campaigns or have their economies shattered, marginalized and pushed aside. Anyway, over to you. What do you think? Well, I think it's an impossible question to answer. I mean, Nenya at the moment seems to me to be pursuing in Lebanon the similar approach

that he pursued in Gaza. We said on the main podcast that I'm not sure that he and Trump are fully aligned in terms of objectives. I think Trump probably deep down does want the Iran war to end because it is causing so much trouble for the American economy. Whereas I think Nenya, who wants the time and the political support and the political cover to keep going. I guess the other two things you have to say about both of them

in very different systems in a way is just the survival instinct. I mean, Vladimir Putin has now been a dictator for so long that he probably has to survive until death. Dictators reach a point where if they lose power before death, it usually ends very, very badly for them. And I think he sees himself as being around for a long, long time. Benjamin Netanyahu was Prime Minister of Israel he was the first Prime Minister of Israel

that Tony Blair met when he became Prime Minister in 1997. Now, okay, lost power for some of that period but he's the longest serving Prime Minister of Israel by a long, long way. He's been written off many, many times. And I guess the danger, this is where Trump, I think, is in the same boat, is that the danger that they represent at times

is that when they are in a political bind, they are not scared to do things that we would deem to be very dangerous, very risky, and potentially catastrophic in order to keep going. I mean, I don't think it's impossible that Benjamin Netanyahu wins the next election, and I wouldn't have said that a year ago. What U.S. and Israel are doing together is they seem to be indifferent to the second, and third order consequences for other people, the Gulf, Europe, Asia, for what they're doing in Iran or elsewhere. All that matters to them is what matters to them. But that would be fine,

in a way, if it was all about their own selfish national interest, if they weren't also dragging us all along in their slipstream and demanding that we all endorse their wars, participate in their wars, fund their wars, provide flights for their wars, and attack us ferociously, when we don't join them in operations which are objectively harmful to us and beneficial to them. So how long can these relationships be sustained? Because support for Israel is no longer as bipartisan as it was in the US. It's certainly less than it was in Europe. The traditional focus on Israel's right to exist is now balanced with a strong focus on Palestine's right to exist,

at least insofar as European countries now recognize the state of Palestine in a way that wasn't true before. And we now have stories like Itamar Ben-Gvir, who's the Minister of Security in Benjamin Netanyahu's government, wearing a noose, signifying the death penalty as a lapel pin, and driving through legislation, which effectively would impose very rapid execution on Palestinians convicted of terrorist acts. out of the West Bank or Gaza, and going against a very, very strong tradition in Israeli democracy, which has been very reluctant to impose the death penalties since the foundation of the state. The celebrations of it were pretty revolting as well. Sorry to relate this back to Trump, because like you, I suffer from Trump derangement syndrome,

So this is an international network of the strong men. And one of the things they want to be strong about is never being punished for the things that they do wrong. So, I mean, Vladimir Putin is a fabulously wealthy man. He has presided over poisonings, murders, executions, assassinations. He has broken international law in all sorts of different ways, but never gets called out for it by Trump. And then, of course, the other thing he saw with Russia this week was that he's, extraordinary, and it seems to be real, tapped phone conversation between the foreign minister and Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. I saw a great comment this morning from somebody

who said that if you're an intelligence officer reading a transcript of this conversation, you're listening to a controller with an agent. So it's a network. That's the thing we have to understand. That's why the Rycroft report that we talked about was so important, because this is a network that is trying to undermine the... the sorts of democracies that we thought we could take for granted. There was something I've been thinking about a bit, which I haven't heard your views on, and we've had a couple of questions on, which is Restore Britain, which is the Rupert Low Party. So we've had a question from Stuart, is the rise of Restore a bigger threat to reform

or to the Overton window? The Overton window, I think, is the idea of shifting in what's acceptable, a general sense that things are moving to the right. Katie, Nigel Farage clearly doesn't fancy being questioned by you and Roryan leading. Would you ever consider putting Rupert Lowe under the spotlight? So my understanding is Rupert Lowe restores broken away from reform, has much more explicit support from Elon Musk, so you can see Rupert Lowe's tweets being boosted by Elon Musk and getting millions of views. What's your sense of what it will mean to have a sort of another party competing in the reform space?

I think it does pose a problem for, Nigel Farage on various levels. The first is, as you say, now, there's a part of him, I think, that didn't mind having Tommy Robinson right out there as a kind of violent exponent of the sort of politics that Nigel Farage believes in, because it could make Nigel Farage look a bit more reasonable. Rupert Lowe, it seems to me, is parking himself somewhere between the two. Rupert Lowe, I think, has genuinely what you and I would define as extreme views. You know, we talk about far right, far left.

I think he has pretty extreme views. I remember when he was chairman of Southampton Football Club. and because Clive Woodward worked there for a while and I knew him quite well. So Rupertolo asked me when Southampton were playing Burnley, he asked me to have lunch with him before the game and I went and had lunch with him. And I think I recorded in my diary. I don't think I've ever met anybody quite as right wing as this guy. He's very, very, very right wing on the economy on all sorts of things.

And clearly, the other reason why it's a problem for Nigel Farage is he does seem to have this historic inability to hold teams together, which I think ultimately in politics does matter. got to be able to hold a team together. And Nigel Farage is very much likes to be the main guy, doesn't really like to be threatened or challenged. And Rupert Lowe, and he fell out clearly very, very, very, very quickly. Just the second question,

though, Rory, because I think it's right. I mean, I've been trying to get Nigel Farage to come on the podcast, even though some of our listeners didn't want to hear him. Because I think he is an interesting consequential figure. You can't get away from that. And I get the feeling he doesn't want to come on. He keeps sort of fobbing me off and saying, well, maybe. And now he stopped even replying.

But what would you feel if we've got Rupert Lowe on? What would you think about that? Yeah, let's get him on. Why not? Why not? Why not try to get a sense of this guy? I mean, I think if we have the confidence to interview Zach Plansky, have the interview confidence to interview Rupert Lowe, I think we should go for it.

Listen, just final one on that. Do you think there's a chance, if given Nigel Farage's problem holding parties together, that he's going to lose Robert Jenrick, that Jenric will drift over to Lowe or drift back to the conservatives or head off in some other direction? I mean, God knows. He's clearly using Generic a lot. Generic was with him at this press conference. They did it. He threw airport. He had a big piece in one of the papers at the Sunday at the weekend. I mean, I find it hard to take Generic seriously because he just strike me as being a rank opportunist. But could he really go even further to the right? I don't know. I don't know. And by the way, when we said last time that Fras doesn't want to come on, they said, well, what about all these other characters like Zia Yusuf and Richard Tyson, blah, blah, blah, blah. blah, blah. I think Nigel Farage is the one that, you know, is probably we would want to interview. So Nigel, if you or your friends are listening, the offer is still there. But Rory, I'm surprised. Rory wants to interview Rupert as well. So Rupert, if you and your friends are listening, that's absolutely fine.

Now, Rory, great question here from Ben. Oh, yeah. Despite being perhaps the most famous living advocate of walking through his books. I think what you mean is despite through his books being the most famous living, because you don't walk-through books, Ben. But anyway, going on, Rory talks less and less about his benefits and seems increasingly to turn to meditation retreats to find consolation. What do these offer him that walking no longer can? Has Rory given up on walking? Huh. That's a lovely question. Lovely question. And I'm, I've applied for another one of my 11-day meditation retreat,

so I'm going to vanish on you at some point. I... Well, you're also vanishing this week. I am. I am. I am off on holiday. Should I tell you who have lined up in your stead? Yeah, go on. Who's it? Who's he got? Well, I've decided to bury the hatchet over his continual boasting that only I called at Trump as the winner of the election.

We're going to have Mr. Dominic Sambrook from the rest of his history. Oh, my goodness. Oh, well, I'm in trouble. I think I may not be back on again. It's Johnny good broadcaster that. That may be the end for me. I may have to be nice to Tom Holland and try to brush up on my history. You'll be Barry.

Don't worry? But it's one week only. So what about the walking? But you still walk a fair bit, don't you? I love walking. and I, you know, if I had the chance I'd be going on three, four week walks all the time. But it's true that if you're really looking for really deep introspection and meditation, if I'm walking for nine, ten hours, I maybe spend a couple of hours grumbling about my pack

or thinking, or am I getting a blister. And I get about an hour of sort of being in the zone and meditation. Meditating whereas if I'm sitting cross-legged in a dark room for 14 hours a day, I have more chance to kind of Contemplate my navel as they say. I can't do either I mean well I because I used to run a lot. I used to run hundreds of miles and you know every week and then But my knees really started to her if I was Sophie Rayworth Our next question is going to be about cultural recommendations Sophy Raywith as the BBC has written a book about running and she's got a section in it about how it's good for you

your knees to run. Well, it might be, but it bloody hurts my knees right now. I mean, my friend who's not a friend of yours, but a friend of mine, Matthew Paris, who was a conservative MP and an amazing marathon runner. He could run a marathon in sort of two hours, 20 minutes, I think. But his knees really got destroyed. My mother's 90 is a great believer in the fact that the reason she's able to walk so well as she's never done the exercise in her life. You also my friend David Mills, who says that the only time he, the only exercise he gets is walking up the stairs to visit his friends in hospital who've lots of injuries from running and skiing and things like that.

But yeah, so are you going to, what about another book, though? Would you do another book of walking across somewhere? I have sometimes wondered whether, you remember, I walked across, as well as walking across Afghanistan, I walked across Iran, for example, in Pakistan. And I wondered whether I could redo my walk across Iran or Afghanistan 25 years later and see what had changed and compare the diaries. But then sometimes I think, oh, fuck, I've already done it. Isn't it a bit lame to redo something you've already done?

You've got kids now. You can't just bugger off for weeks and walk across Afghanistan. Got to wait until they're teenagers. They don't want to see me. That's the key. There's going to be a moment where they'll be like, F off, Dad. We're going to go and do something else. I do still lie walking, but I find that I just, I think it gets it's aging.

I just, my legs get stiff very, very quickly. It depresses me. Well, you've got your swimming. You've got your mad swimming. I've got my swimming. I've got my boxing. I keep fit and what have you. But I used to, whenever I see people out running and really enjoy it, I get very, very jealous because I just can't do. And being overtaking a lot when you're out running, that's so depressing. Because I'm a bit competitive, Rory, a little bit.

Just, just tiny bit. No, look here. So you can be a little bit competitive to end our lovely question time. Judy, do you have any book recommendations or cultural recommendations, please, for the Easter weekend, Astor? If you're looking for a good telly thing, Gone, starring David Morrissey. Morrissey, I think he's a really brilliant actor. And it's a story about the wife of a head teacher who goes missing. And then it's just, it sort of just tells you, you know, you eventually find out what lies behind that story. But David Morrissey, he's such a brilliant action. It's so

sort of intense. Another thing to watch, Mr. I finally got around to watch him Mr. Nobody versus Vladimir Putin. Absolutely brilliant. This is about this teacher in a small town in Russia who post the war finds that they're having to teach. propaganda the whole time and he can't stand it and eventually gets out the country and it's a BBC film but it's really well done and then a book the book I read this week is one of those single sitting days you know I said last week published to stop sending me bloody books I'm getting too many books but this one this is the first book that arrived unsolicited post by play and it's absolutely brilliant it's called essays on madness a lunatic's guide

and it's written it's written under a pseudonym AA fellows and I wonder whether A.A. is one of the many, many mental health issues that this lady has to deal with through her life. She has anxiety, depression, alcohol, drug abuse, PTSD. She's got a whole lot beautifully written. And at the end, a little bit like my book on mental health, she tries to give you ideas as to how to deal with it. A lot of them quite similar to mine in relation to music and sleep

and all sorts of other stuff. But it's a really nice book. And I love the cover as well. says essay on madness is a brutally honest exploration of AA fellow's fucked up mind and her endless attempts to unfuck it. That's very good. So that's good. There's my cultural though.

Oh, one thing not to watch was, Roy, don't fall for hype. I finally thought everybody's talked about this Marty Supreme film. We ought to watch Marty Supreme about a table tennis guy of Timothy Chalame. I didn't buy at all. Oh, okay. I went to see Project Hail Mary, which I thought was really fun. I mean, it's not hugely serious, but really fun. And there's a wonderful book by Andy Weir, which lies behind it.

Have you followed the plot of that? That's somebody's going off to space to try to save the world from amoeba that are eating the sun. You see, we're very different in our days. Once you talk about space exploration, just this made me very limited. I'm just not going there. I don't go there. Well, I tell you what you would like, then here's another one for you that I think you'd like. Hitler's beneficiaries by Goertz Ali, a brilliant German historian.

And what he's done is he's written a book pointing out just how much economic benefit came to ordinary Germans. He begins with his own grandparents and talking about embarrassing conversations about where their furniture came from. And it turns out to have been looted from some house in the Netherlands probably belonged to the Jewish family. That's more my scene. Exactly. I think you'd like it because it's about how regimes of all sorts. create bargains with their public. And the way that people care about, obviously care about cost of living and economics

and how careful the Nazis were to make sure that all the costs fell on the countries they were occupying, but that ordinary Germans continued to, you know, get their rations, get their food, get their shoes. Just on the Nazi theme, Viena and I went to see Broken Glass at the Young Vic, and that's the old Arthur Miller play,

which was all right. But that's essentially about, a woman living in an American woman, a Jewish, living in America who just cannot get over what's happening to the Jews in Germany and can't understand why other Jews aren't feeling as passionate and then she has this kind of bodily reaction to it. That was okay. That was okay. So yeah, I would recommend that. On the madness book, a lunatic's guide to mental illness, here's an interesting one for you. She's written it under a pseudonym because, and she says in the introduction, she's got three children.

and she doesn't want attention for herself and she doesn't want to be a public figure, which is interested on two levels. One, because it probably makes it harder for her to promote the book, because we all have to get out there and promoting her book, which is maybe one of the reasons

subconsciously why I'm now doing it for her. But also it's sort of, because one of my big things, campaigning on mental health is, you know, the more open we all are, the better it will be. So she's incredibly open in that she tells us every last detail

of her life and her mind and her story, but with that resistance to actually wanting to be out there in public, which I completely respect, but it's just an interesting way of doing it. Last couple ones from me. Od Arnestad, who's a colleague here at Yale, who even beats Alistair on the multilingual. I mean, it's unbelievable the number of, he's a Norwegian bit he's got incredible Chinese, Russian,

and umpteen other languages, has produced a book called The Coming Storm, which is drawing parallels between the situation before the First World War and the situation today. And it's talking about how a Third World War might emerge in a particular America-China competition and a real attempt to be constructive. It's not just a kind of doom and gloom book talking about why we're doomed, but what the lessons might be on how we make war less likely, rather more likely. So maybe even a possibility for an interview or a miniseries.

And then finally, because we've asked about Easter, I'm going to go really left field here with something that will really make your toes curl. The Bible. I mean, it is basically that. So Amazon has produced a program called The Chosen, and it's about Jesus, and I've been watching it. But the interesting thing about it, I mean, I think you might question its kind of literary ability, but it's very, very much situated in the Jewish context. It's very much Jesus, the Jew. And of course, it's really good at bringing out the act of playing Simon Peter, playing Peter, for example, is a Yemeni Jew. Looks very, very Arab.

And it's both interestingly sympathetic towards Jewish heritage and Jewish culture, but really locates the fact that so often we're presented for 2,000 years with Jesus as a kind of white guy. was sort of chestnut colored hair and a very white Virgin Mary. And here is Jesus very much situated in not just a Jewish context, but almost an Arab Jewish context. It makes you think about Islam in a different way, Judaism in a different way. I can hear the Judeo-Christian movement of Maga and Reform getting very upset about this. Anyway, Arni Vista, incredible. I think not only would you love him because you'd have so much in common with him, with him speaking umpteen languages.

I don't speak umpteen. I speak three. I mean, for a European, that's below average. It's true, actually. I like, I like,

you know, it's true. If you were Dutch, maybe you wouldn't be surprised. That's true. Yeah, that's true.

Very good. Well, listen, that's enough cultural recommendations. That's enough blather for one week. Yep, very good. I won't see you next week. I'll be with Mr. Sandbrook. Look forward to seeing you when I'm back.

And I'm going to tell you all about the Galapagos. Excellent. See you then. See you then. Bye-bye.

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