Russian interference: what really happened with Brexit

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0:37Tim Shipman: Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse. I'm James Heal. And I'm Tim Shipman. And today we're going to be talking about foreign policy and what Burnham's plans are for the rest of the world.

0:45James Heale: And what on earth is going on with Nigel Farage? How is he banging on the door of Westminster and trying to be heard again?

0:51Tim Shipman: Now, Tim, first of all, we have got the exciting news. We're expecting a foreign affairs statement by the Prime Minister this afternoon. Well, not just a foreign affairs statement, A statement on all the things that have been happening to me, or words to that effect. And there's been quite a lot happening, hasn't there, particularly in the foreign affairs sphere?

1:05James Heale: Yeah. I mean, look, Burnham has been travelling. He went to see the Germans last week to talk about Brexit. You've got Donald Trump doing deals with the Russians on diesel, telling Volodymyr Zelensky to go. Not quite the British position on that. And then we've got, you know, running sore in the Middle East. And frankly, Burnham has got a lot on his plate. but as we saw at the party conference what Andy Burnham wants to talk about is domestic affairs and got a budget upcoming there's a bit of pitch rolling going on for that now but as every prime minister discovers foreign affairs as a way of imposing itself and frankly what we heard from at party conference was very very little on that insofar as we did it was you know with a domestic bent really he's putting Brexit back on the agenda partly because he believes it but partly also because that's a way of trying to drum up votes from Green Party voters and the left.

1:56James Heale: And, you know, prior to that, Ed Miliband went and sanctioned Israel, hugely popular with most Labour MPs and Labour voters. But we've also seen that, you know, people inside the government are pretty queasy about it and think that it's not necessarily the most diplomatic way to behave. And we're potentially losing, you know, security assistance from the Israelis by doing so. So there's a lot of big serious stuff going on and it looks a little bit like Labour are making up foreign policy on the hoof to suit their domestic priorities rather than doing what, to his credit, Keir Starmer largely did, which was, for the most part, tried to sort of stake out a sensible position that advanced Britain's diplomatic interests.

2:36Tim Shipman: Yeah, it very much reminds me of another local politician who became prime minister, which is Neville Chamberlain, whom Lloyd George said about. He always looks at foreign policy through the wrong end of the municipal drainpipe. And there is an element of that. I think that the danger is, of course, Tim, in that if you are so exposed to world events, that can be a huge negative. I mean, there's a report by the IFS suggesting John Healy could have a 35 billion hole in his budget. The FT report over the weekend, I think there was 12 billion or so cost from the Iran war. Or the flip side of that, of course, is were the arrangements to get the oil going again and were there to be some kind of potentially ghastly, but nevertheless, potentially fruitful peace in terms of the British economy in Ukraine and Russia, you could start to see, as some of our colleagues like Matthews have suggested, potentially a bit of a Burnham economic upside to that, which could benefit him next year.

3:21James Heale: That's right. I mean, I spoke to Conservatives at their conference who were broadly happy that Burnham in domestic affairs had gone off to the left, sort of chasing the 1970s. They think that is, you know, giving them some clear blue water to talk about, you know, fiscal rectitude and getting the economy back on track, tax cuts, all the kind of stuff they love to talk about. But when you say, what's your overall picture here? And you say, what are you worried about? What Tories are worried about is that the oil starts flowing from the Middle East in more sizable numbers. I mean, actually, as it happens, the Americans have been pretty successful at setting up a sort of successful route for the boats that doesn't go near the Iranian coast and has got flows back to broadly what they were before.

4:04James Heale: But I also spoke to Tories at their conference who said, well, look, if Marine Le Pen wins in France and the AFD were to win in Germany, that would be a very hostile environment in Europe for the Ukrainians. There may be some kind of peace forced upon them. And we're seeing with the Americans now that Trump's barely even concealing his, you know, slightly strange Putin fetish. Clearly, he's got domestic problems as well. He wants to get the diesel price down before the midterm elections, which is why he's trotting off to Russia. but he's doing that, you know, frankly, in a way that's very unhelpful in terms of Ukraine.

4:36James Heale: And, you know, if Ukraine has a peace forced upon it, you know, then lots of money starts to be spent on rebuilding and all the rest of it. And you could see quite an economic boom from that. So in the sort of Tory nightmare world, Zelensky is sort of bashed into a corner, forced to make a peace. And then, you know, the political implications are that having done very little to assist in any of this, Burnham is the beneficiary of, you know, what someone said to me, you could easily see a£300 fall in energy prices off the back of a couple of those developments. So I think they're a bit sort of resentful of the fact that this guy doesn't seem remotely interested in foreign affairs, but yeah, he might actually end up being the beneficiary of it at some point.

5:12Tim Shipman: And of course, it means that there's a vacuum there for two people who've been talked about a lot, Edmund and Jonathan Powell, Foreign Secretary and the National Security Advisor. And there has been some reports from, I think it's in the Times over the weekend. And also, I mean, our old political editor, Peter O 'Born, has written a column about him from Middle East and I talking about some of this stuff. A bit of attention, do you think, developing there?

5:30James Heale: Yeah, no, I think there's very strong tension between Jonathan Powell and Ed Miliband, as the first person to write about this about three weeks ago. Powell said, don't sanction the Israelis, certainly not before the Israeli election. And that was a position shared by the British ambassador in Tel Aviv. And yeah, I mean, Peter Abel says Jonathan Powell has gone and sold out the British consulate in East Jerusalem. Well, I mean, it wasn't anything to do with Jonathan Powell. It was announced by the Israelis off the back of us of sanctioning Israel, essentially. So, but what had come out over the weekend, you know, sort of friends and allies of Powell effectively saying that, you know, he wasn't very impressed with what Miliband did.

6:09James Heale: And the sort of wider, you know, we're not just talking about one disgruntled bloke. We're talking about, you know, even the sort of camel core, as we used to call them, and still do call them in the Foreign Office. Those people deeply fascinated by the Arab world and who, you know, fundamentally don't much like Israel. Even they thought this was a duff plan and a duff idea. And, you know, Miliband and his justifications for it has been nothing more really than just, oh, well, this is outrageous and we've got to do something about it. And it'll make us all feel better. And that's sort of the approach.

6:43James Heale: And, you know, when even professional diplomats who are broadly sympathetic to the Arab world think this is a duff idea, it does sort of suggest that, did Burnham just go along with it? Was he deeply enthusiastic about it? I mean, the sort of Andy, I feel your pain man clearly found some sort of cathartic release in doing this as well as Ed Miliband. But, you know, you expect a prime minister really to take a slightly more strategic view of all this. And then we come to Brexit. So Burnham's been out over the weekend, you know, doing an interview with Alistair Campbell and Roy Stewart, both of whom, you know, I have great admiration for both men.

7:18James Heale: I rather like both of those men, but they are foaming Ramoners of the very highest order. And this was catnip to their audience. And he basically said, you know, since I came in, I've been told that there was interference by the Russians. Well, we've known there was attempted interference. You reported that in the book. Yeah, I mean, you know, I wrote books about this years and years ago. There was attempted interference, but it wasn't successful. And then everyone in 2019 got terribly hot under the collar about this Russia report that had been written by the Intelligence and Security Committee, then chaired by Dominic Grieve, another, you know, again, estimable character, but a foaming Ramona.

7:51James Heale: and it tried to hint that if you, in the secret parts of the report, which you're not allowed to see, there's some stuff that is quite worrying about all this. Well, I am told by people who have read the secret parts of the report because they've been senior positions in government at the time, there was nothing of the sort. And actually the conclusion was there was no meaningful kind of Russian interference that made any difference to anything. In fact, what it says in the Russia report is that what they did had much more of an impact in the Scottish referendum, where, of course, they were trying to support the SNP and independence.

8:24James Heale: Break up the union. Break up the union. So that is not the message that the progressive world wants to hear. And yet Andy Burnham has come out and said, oh, well, you know, I wanted to know about this, so I asked. And they said, oh, yes, Prime Minister. But then out goes the Europe minister and he's asked, well, what's the detail? And he says, uh, and then came out with a couple of examples of things that happened after the referendum. and they've now sort of clarifying that really, Downing Street is sort of saying, well, you know, it's what we always knew, which is that they tried and they didn't succeed.

8:56James Heale: And, you know, Russia interferes in pretty much every Western democracy, tries to pretty much all the time. And actually, you know, those who know this, and I've been in contact with quite a few of them this morning, people who've been in government, been around this, have had much more higher level security briefings about this stuff than even the MPs have had, who say, yes, they try, but broadly their approach is chaos. It's not most of the time a particular this or a particular that. They chuck money at it. They like to sow discord. They support people on the far right and the far left to sort of create a sort of unpleasant atmosphere and have a go at people on both sides of any kind of campaign.

9:37James Heale: But clearly, you know, if you can break up the United Kingdom, you're going to. And, you know, it was probably in Russia's interest to sow discord between, you know, Brexiteers and Remainers. Frankly, they didn't need the Russians to help them do that. It was one of the most toxic periods in British political history.

9:53Tim Shipman: Yeah, I remember when the Iranians cut off the internet earlier this year amid the protests about the regime there, and suddenly a huge number of, well, important reports, a sizable number of pro-independence bots online suddenly went all quiet and it's quite interesting, isn't it? It's not funny. But also, I think the point is about the UK and Europe. And this is obviously what the backstory is all about, is potentially foreign interference, etc. The flip side of that being we want to get close to the Europeans because it's good for our alliances and bad for enemies like Russia. I am fairly sceptical about the great EU pivot.

10:27Tim Shipman: We've had a similar thing for the last two years. Nick Thomas Simmons was a capable enough minister, didn't get as far as many would have wanted the Labour Party. And I'll make the point of two things. Number one, of course, is that we are currently doing this at a time when, in the short to medium term, the EU is gearing up for a confrontation with China over tariffs in terms of the dumping that's going on into the EVs. Now, that's something that Britain has done pretty well out of. So are we going to take on the Chinese over that, given that doesn't fit with the rest of the middle of the land's policy?

10:50Tim Shipman: I wonder about that. The second thing, more longer term, is to go back to your earlier point, Tim, all these potentially countries where they're going to have radical right parties could be in government soon. You know, we've got the Spanish elections coming up. We've got the Germans and the French next year. I very much wonder and don't know how we're going to have a Europe led by potentially radical right leaders is going to be very much enabling the return of Britain to the EU, particularly when they're all most of them are allied with Nigel Farage.

11:14James Heale: Well, I think that's right. And also, you know, even when those countries are run by people who are of Burnham's political persuasion, you know, to the left, generally more statist, you know, France is a, you know, believes in a big state and intervention and protectionism and all the kind of stuff that Andy Burnham seems to believe in as well. Labour have made this colossal sort of category error, it seems to me. It started with Keir Starmer. There was just this assumption that they'd turn up and say, well, we're not these dreadful Tories that you had to work with for 14 years. We're Labour and we're pro-European and you'll do us favours as a result of that.

11:51James Heale: And everybody turned around and went, Gaelic shrug. Just interest, not values. Yes, exactly. And, you know, this is where there's a sort of, you can exist in a European polity as we do and you can be part of a sort of a joint defence programme. You can be part of a system where clearly you want to be doing business and trade together. But the EU is a kind of cartel and it wants you on its terms if it wants you at all. And this seems to have been sort of misunderstood. I think a lot of people in Labour thought that it was going to be much easier than it was. I think Nick Thomas-Symons, to be fair to him, did not.

12:29James Heale: He'd read all the books by unnamed authors about what a blooming nightmare it was last time and went in with his eyes open. And I've said this before on the podcast, his policy was very straightforward, as close as possible without freedom of movement. And everything else that Burnham is suggesting is going to reopen that door. And I struggle to see how that is something that is going to work for him in the way that he quite thinks. So it seems to me that the Brexit stuff, a bit like making sort of noises about, oh, yeah, no, there was Russian interference. It's all terrible. All of that, we said before conference, this is a vibes politician.

13:06James Heale: And then at conference, it's like, we briefly went, oh, my God, look at all the detail. He wants to do this, this and this. All these huge ambitions might be a bit unrealistic, but at least, you know. But I think a lot of that is vibes too, you know. and if he wants to do his social care policy, he's probably going to have to chuck quite a lot of other stuff away, you know, electoral reform because the Labour Party don't like that and Brexit is surely just going to run up against reality at some point with a bunch of European countries who don't want to give us cherry-picking on a plate. You know, my old friend Michel Barnier was out only last week saying cherry-picking, cherry-picking, cherry-picking.

13:38James Heale: You know, there are bits of Europe, undeniably, some of them invite me to lunch, who now would quite happy if Britain rejoined the Customs Union and cherry-picked. You can find them quite easily. They're all in Northern Europe. The Scandinavian countries, you know, the Benelaks, bits of, you know, Germany, Holland, you know, up into the Baltics, Poland. These countries would love to have us back, partly because it would bind us in slightly even tighter on the security side. But also they're broadly coming from where we are on a lot of these issues. France don't want that. Spain doesn't want that.

14:10James Heale: Italy doesn't really want that either. And that's quite a lot of people. And the German government is going to survive. they may even be gone by the time we post this to YouTube.

14:19Tim Shipman: And also I think the issue around accessing safe talks has been a warning for some in the Foreign Office, which is that if we can't even get British hard military kit in there claiming for some of this 150 billion or so that the European countries have put up, the British army, I think, the British defence tech industry is probably the best in Europe. As a result, if they're going to be potentially willing to harm themselves in order to safeguard their own economic interests, what else are they going to do? And the other point that someone made to be in the Foreign Office is that we've got this upcoming UK-EU summit that's due before the end of the year.

14:48Tim Shipman: They still don't know yet what the priorities are going to be for that, which indicates a sort of psych confusion of mind. The fact that the Europeans, probably with von der Leyen about to bow out, want it as a last hurrah rather than a great rapprochement at the beginning of something.

14:59James Heale: Yeah, and I'm not sure Berlin really knows what he wants either. I mean, the announcement at conference was to say, well, let's have a think about it, and I'm going to outline three possibles for you. Well, that's not saying I have looked at this in detail and concluded that the best outcome for Britain is this, because we will gain this on the trade. And if we have to accept a bit of that, then it's worth it. It's like, I'll give you some more options and I hope we can reach consensus. I mean, pull the other one.

15:23Tim Shipman: He also quoted George Osborne as an expert, a Tory sage as sort of the great bastion of Labour. We could do what George Osborne says, we could do what the Liberal Democrat says. But we're not going to do that for all sorts of reasons.

15:33James Heale: But there wouldn't be a consensus for it. And the polling, undeniably, people say, was Brexit the right plan? Should we do it? there's a decent sort of six to four against on that at the moment but going back in again the numbers are similar at the moment but as soon as you run up against how many tens of billions will it cost us to rejoin and how many hundreds of thousands of Europeans would we happily have no control over admitting I think the public everything we know about the gravitational forces in British politics for the last 20 years suggests to me that that is not a winner So Burnham is throwing things out there, talking a bit loose-lipped again, and there's been...

16:17Tim Shipman: And you told me something interesting, which is that people in government don't want him meeting journalists because he can just basically blabber away.

16:22James Heale: Well, look, I think there's been tighter control over him than has been expected. This was a guy who's actually always got on with journalists. He quite likes joshing with journalists. He quite likes talking to journalists. During the Makerfield by-election, he was reasonably tightly controlled, but he did quite a lot of interviews. Off that Newsnight interview. Yeah, he did quite a lot of interviews. He went to Berlin last week. The German government wanted a press conference and Number 10 said, no, we're not having a press conference because he would have been asked endless questions about what he wants to achieve with this reset with the EU.

16:53James Heale: And presumably, the German Prime Minister would have been asked the same things. And I doubt either of them would have had particularly brilliant answers. And there is just this sense in Downing Street that they're constantly having to reissue sort of statements and clarifications because Burnham is, you know, I don't want to criticise the vibes. The vibes have worked for him. People respond to vibes. They get a sense of someone. And people have a strong sense of Andy Burnham, much stronger than they do of Keir Starmer. But you, as Prime Minister, you cannot riff and not expect to get into trouble unless you're Donald Trump and it's just you riff so much and you make so many gaffes and you just say what you think all the time.

17:33James Heale: And you're the most powerful man in the world. You're the most powerful man in the world and you're amusing. You know, you can just about get away with a lot of this stuff. The British Prime Minister cannot get away with saying things that are woolly, untrue or ill thought out and not get caught out. Questions will come in. And, you know, I don't think there's anything like, yeah, a bunch of people in the Labour Party going, oh gosh, we made a terrible mistake. Absolutely not. But you can see the kernel of where he might get himself into trouble going forwards. And it's interesting that people in Downey Street already seem to be sort of cognizant of that and trying to do something about it.

18:05Tim Shipman: And also, of course, you say this morning's media round with Stephen Doughty, the Foreign Office Minister. I mean, he'd be pretty annoyed having to go out and defend this stuff. They won't say it publicly, but this is what it did for Boris Johnson in some respects, was also having the indefensible. And we're not at that stage by any means, of course, but it is that sense of irritation, isn't there?

18:20James Heale: You have to go and defend your colleagues. Well, particularly when the line then changes. But again, why was no one briefing Stephen Doughty and saying, this is what the Prime Minister means by that? It's had huge publicity over the weekend. You're the Europe Minister. You might expect to be asked about it. And Stephen Doughty's been around. He was involved in a lot of those discussions over Brexit. He was in the slightly less fanatical bits of Labour Remain world, I'd say. He was involved in a lot of those cross-party discussions. He knows the detail. Much more than Burnham, he wasn't really engaged in any of that and had disappeared when a lot of it was kicking off.

18:56James Heale: So I'm a bit surprised they've got them. And all this has come about because he wanted to tell Alistair Campbell and Roy Stewart's audience, who are presumably a lot of voters he's targeting. Oh, yeah, no, I've looked at this and it's terrible.

19:14Tim Shipman: Ever notice how every new AI tool asks you to explain your business to it all over again? Google Workspace with Gemini skips that. You get Google's AI built right into the premium versions of Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and more. No new tools, no extra logins. Just one subscription that gives you personalized AI right inside your actual workflow. Make work less work. Try Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle slash workspace with Gemini.

19:47Tim Shipman: And talking of vibes finally we've got Nigel Farage trying to get back into the political picture he's doing this big announcement today at Dover he's talking about how you've got so many people coming across in these big boats there's a big boat behind him at the backdrop for the speech he's been doing on the new super small boats they've got and basically promising to abolish the asylum system if he became Prime Minister for one parliamentary term essentially I mean most of

20:13James Heale: party conference in terms of Labour and Tories was about the economy and about how you spend money. And it's in both their interests to have that conversation because Burnham thinks he can appeal to the left on it and Baden-Ock thinks she can hoover up some wealthy people in the South and swell her poll ratings as a consequence. Farage has always been very, very good at saying, I don't care what the uniparty or the political establishment is talking about. I'm going to tell you what's important and sort of, you know, punch through all that. And you think back to the summer before last, when he talked constantly about migration and crime, the two other parties were literally on holiday.

20:53James Heale: He dominated the airwaves. That was one of the sort of, you know, he had three months where his poll rating was soaring because he was never off the telly. So this is a challenge for Farage now. He's had a bad six months with internal problems and, you know, publicity about the donations. And now, you know, he needs to be able to show that he can still sort of push through all that and, you know, impinge himself on the public and remind the public that he's there and that this is still one of the most important issues to them. And I think for his audience, you know, they don't care what Labour and the Tories are doing.

21:25James Heale: So this is a sort of reminder for the base that he's there. But, you know, it will be a policy, you know, that will be quite popular in quite a lot of places in this country. There'll be a lot of Tories who look at that and think, OK, I mean, he's not threatening to shoot them at the border. You know, he's just saying, if you come in, we'll turn you straight back round and send you away. It's not a very humane policy, closing off all the safe routes. You know, you think of Ukraine, you think of Hong Kong, where I think, you know, most British politicians thought there was a moral duty to support those people.

21:57James Heale: But, you know, it's strident and it's tough and it shows that he's still chasing Rupert Lowe to the right on migration.

22:07Tim Shipman: And the striking thing for me was when we got the Conservative response to this announcement last night, Chris Philp's top line was that the proposals, quote, largely copy Conservative policy from a year ago. So, I mean, that's just, there is a sort of anything you can do, I can do better element of this on the right. Yeah, I mean, the Tories want to be able to say to voters who care about migration as one of their top issues, we've already said we're going to do this.

22:29James Heale: nothing Farage is saying is particularly extreme or you know but he won't be able to enact it look at the shambles of his party and by the way there's some quite unpleasant people there as well. That's kind of their approach whereas Farage really needs to you know he's knocking on the door and saying I'm still here and we've got to make it you know this is the most important thing. It's not all that guff the rest of you are talking about.

22:52Tim Shipman: I think they do need a win though because as you say it's been some difficult months and you look at things Tim you know a bit of a polling bounce for Labour the fact that they've won, I think, three council by-elections, which reform puts a huge amount of effort into in the past few weeks off reform. There are indications there that, you know, they need to kind of develop a new level.

23:10James Heale: And some of those, frankly, have been in seats where reform did pretty well in the spring and seats they really would have hoped to take. And part of that has been a bit of a split vote on the right, but it's also been a kind of solidifying of Labour's vote, I think, in some of those places.

23:24Tim Shipman: Yeah, absolutely. And that's Burnham's great achievement to date, in my view, which is that as Planski declines, you're uniting much of that progressive bloc. And as you say, it's really telling which podcast appearances you choose to do and the rest of politics is the obvious place to start.

23:36James Heale: Open invitation, Prime Minister, when you want to come and join us here on Coffeehouse, we will have a proper, detailed, interesting and respectful discussion. Absolutely.

23:45Tim Shipman: Thank you, Tim. And thank you for watching Coffeehouse at Home.

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