119. Starmer's most controversial move yet, the truth behind Vladimir Putin, and the Good Friday Agreement

26:13And he said he went out and started talking to people, and he found actually there was an awful lot of opposition. And he said that's when his alarm bell started to ring. He believed that this was real, a real referendum. And he said, you went home and he started discussing it with his parents and said he was really worried because he felt that Putin was just lying about all this stuff. And he said, rather than them being supported parents, they were incredibly angry with them. And they accused them to his face of being a foreign agent, which of course is a crime. And he said that they've actually not exchanged a word since he fled.

26:47And he ends the interview with a big appeal to his former colleagues who are looking after Putin. And it's sex by the way that Putin in his closed circle has about 100 % support. These are people who are absolutely firm believers in the Putin, the whole Putin project, whatever that may be. But he appeals to them that the only way this is going to be stopped is if the people close to Putin stop being silent. Here's another little plug for a book. So book by Joshua Yaffa called Compromise in Putin's Russia. So that tries to focus in on particular individuals and look at how they manage these kind of trade -offs in their personal life.

27:23As you say, how the captain relates to his parents, how he relates to his workmates. One of the central characters in the book is a zookeeper in Crimea trying to talk through the way that he engages with Putin's Russia and thinks about it. I mean, it's interesting. I don't know. Maybe it's the deep investment in Soviet studies in the 70s and 80s. Just how much high quality work there is on Russia. I mean, there are dozens of books out there. Good book by Timothy Snyder called Road to Unfreedom. But dozens of really good books looking at this very, very odd phenomenon, which is how Russia, which in 1989, 1999, 1991, the plurality of the population, more people than not really wanted to move in a liberal democratic direction, how that's shifted towards the world in which they think Russia needs to be ruled by a strong man.

28:10And how all these individual stories have got there. The journalist guy, Martin Ophiiz, asked by the Speaker guy whether he thinks that Putin believes the propaganda that he puts out. And he says, I'm pretty sure he does believe in his own narrative because he doesn't understand the country he rules. He's surrounded by artificial views about what that country is. There's no real, he gets no real information. He only gets information from these advisors. Maybe your point there's an interesting one, isn't it? That when you don't have a phone and you don't connect to the internet, that protects you from people hacking into you.

28:43But it means that you simply can't be reading social media, googling, doing any of the things that most of it's doing to stay on top of what's happening out there. Nobody's also his worst in that. He's being told by everybody. He's an absolute genius and people think he's doing marvelous things for the country and for the world. Yeah. All right, let's take a quick break and we're back in a minute.

29:09This isn't ad from BetterHelp. At the moment, we're getting advice from everywhere. You just have to go on TikTok. Could be Alice's cold plunges. Could be my attempts to meditate or the digital detox that I'm doing in Colombia. But of course, one of the things that we know is that it can be incredibly valuable to talk to another human being, somebody who's actually been trained as a therapist to work through these ideas calmly, objectively and professionally. And as the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a very diverse variety of expertise.

29:45They've got over 5 ,000 therapists in the UK. They've helped more than 5 million people globally and you can join a session literally at the click of a button, change therapists anytime. It's obviously not about fixing you, but it's about hearing yourself clearly, maybe for the first time. So talk it out with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10 % off their first month at betterhelp .com slash rest politics. That's better help .com slash rest politics. Let's play Burlington's. Guess that price. Back to school means back to saving. We're bringing you kids genes starting at a hold on a minute, just 1199.

30:22Burlington's aching this test. What about character backpacks? We've got them starting at 1299. Burlington's done it again. How about sneakers for the kids? A plus brands and right on trend starting at 1199. Saving is now in session. Burlington deals brands wow. Stalls on Selection is very by location. It's the Smuckers Uncrustables Podcast with your host Uncrustables. Okay, today's guest is Ruffer on the edges. Please welcome crust. Thanks for having me. Today's topic. He's round with Soft Pillowy Bread. Hey, filled with delicious PB &J. Are you talking about yourself? And you can take him anywhere.

31:03Why do you invite? And we are out of time. Are you really cutting me off? Uncrustables are the best part of the sandwich. Sorry, crust.

31:47Welcome back to the RESTAS Politics with Mirorys Stewart. And me, Alex Campbell. And Alex, you've just been interviewing Brian Cox, not the astrophysicist, my friend, but your friend, the star of succession, the man who plays the kind of Rupert Murdoch figure in that great television series. Yeah, although he does say he's not based on Rupert Murdoch. What I love talking to actors about characters, they talk about them as though they're real people. I enjoyed the discussion of what he really thinks of his children. And he's always like he's telling you what you don't know from watching the show.

32:21In the end, I said, and Rory, and then I said, Brian, you do realize this is not a real person. Yes, of course, I know that. But I thought he's, I like, look, and I like Brian. I think he's a great actor, but I also do think one of two people said, why is this guy on leading? He's just an actor. One, I think he's a leading actor. He's a leading cultural figure. But also I do think he's got an interesting political story to tell. Bought up in a pretty poor family in Dundee, labor all his life and was honest enough to tell me that the Iraq war turned him against labor and he he discovered the S .N .P.

32:53and has since become an absolutely committed nationalist and still is. The interview was done just before the tents started to go up in Nicholas Sturgeon the Garden. So, but I think even that won't have changed his view that Nicholas Sturgeon's sort of, you know, he talks about her in very, very glowing terms and he says he's remained as committed to independence as ever. So, if people want to hear more of Brian Cox, wherever you get your podcasts, just get the rest of his politics leading. One of the things that I thought listening to it and I haven't reflected on in the past is the weird relationship between London and Scotland.

33:29You talked, you made a joke during the show about how you sometimes wonder whether London and Scotland don't have more in common partly because the way they voted on Brexit and you imagine a sort of joint country. But how different that is from the US debate. So, in the US, obviously people who live in what sometimes call the flyover states, states in the middle of the United States often have a very hostile relationship to the coast, the eastern west coast. And you can get a bit of that in Scotland and Northern England in relationship to London. But it's also very interesting that many people in Scotland feel a huge amount in common with people who live in London in terms of progressive attitudes towards immigration, votes on Brexit, embraces of Europe and the world more generally.

34:23And many scots, as you point out, like to move to London in a way that people in the flyover states, the US, with their suspicion of what people are now trying to call the liberal metropolitan elite, would not want to move to New York. There's more sympathy. It's a more complicated picture than the US picture of the liberal elites against the rest. Interesting. Talking of immigration, by the way, I think the story that most annoyed and good upset me this week wasn't the labour ads. It was the school children being turned away and rock bands being turned away from the UK because they didn't have the right papers.

35:02Or they did have the right papers, but the Board of Force decided that they didn't want them anyway. I mean, school trips, it seems to me that school trips are going to become a thing of the past if we're not careful. School trips from European kids coming here. And where were they from these children? They were in a school in France. They had identity cards from France, but their passports were because of their parents' nationality. I think one was Georgian. One might have been, I can't remember what they were, one was Africa, one of the African countries. They weren't EA nationals. Yeah, exactly.

35:34But up until now, they've been fine to come as school parties, but now that's all changed. And it seems to me it's massively in tourism now. There's a thing in one of the papers that last weekend about how the big museums in Paris are talking about a Brexit boom with Chinese and Japanese tourists because they're finally so difficult to get to the UK now to the good Paris and Paris themselves there instead. So that's Brian Cox. He was very critical of your friend, Prince Charles, King Charles, I thought feudalism, talked about feudalism. I did slightly listen to it wish I'd been on the show. I think you gave him a little bit too much of an easy time.

36:13I think he had some bonkers ideas there. One of the things I thought was maddest was his idea about dividing Northern England from Southern England. And that goes to heart of my basic problem with him. On the one hand, he really loved London and felt it had been the making of him and created him as an actor. On the other hand, it, that North and South England divide sounds like he's just got a massive problem with Southern England. And he wants nobody to have anything to do with it. Roy, I have to tell you, as I was leaving his very nice flat in Primrose Hill, his departing words were, do you give my regards to Roy Stewart?

36:48I'm actually going to talk to the title. I think he's a very, very good chap. Now here you are just slagging the go off. Now I think Roy, I think your big problem with him is actually that he talked about our obsession with the Royal family being a former feudalist. I definitely am a big support for the monarchy and unashamed support of the monarchy. Right. Let's come on to Peter Morale. So this is just again for listeners outside the United Kingdom. This is Nicholas Sturgeon's husband who spent most of his 20s and 30s as relatively junior staffer, parliamentary assistants to MPs working for the S &P, famously Alex Salmon, the leader, and then became the chief executive of the S &P.

37:32And ended up in this very odd position that he was the head of the whole political party and married to Nicholas Sturgeon who was the leader in Scotland. And remained a pretty obscure figure, people don't often concentrate much on the people behind the scenes. So he's not a elected politician, he's running the political party, but ran it for a very long time. And the problems began to emerge over a 600 ,000 pound donation that came from some lottery winners who gave 600 ,000 pounds the S &P and are now asking for their money back. In the course of which Peter Morale, Nicholas Sturgeon's husband, lent a hundred thousand pounds to the Scottish Nationalist Party for an unexplained reason.

38:17And since then, there have been a series of scandals. There's a scandal about him lying about how many members there were in the S &P which led to his resignation. The police have taken him in for questioning. His mother's motor home, which is worth over a hundred thousand pounds, was taken in on Wednesday morning. And Joanna Cherry, who was somebody I knew quite well, who was an S &P MP in the House of Commons at the same time as me, said this is absolutely par for the course that she's never in all her life seen such lack of transparency as she saw in the senior figures, the S &P that she served on many boards.

38:55But the total lack of transparency amongst the S &P went a long way beyond just the chief executive being married to the leader, that it was a very, very opaque system. And what are you picking up on it? Well, you've mentioned that several times before. The oddity, as you see it, of the leader of the party being married to the chief executive. And I think somebody told me, and this is right, that if the chief executive for whatever reason becomes unable to carry out their functions, those functions pass to the leader, it might be the treasurer. I know there's some sort of weird setup there. I mean, I think the images of a lot of policemen and women charging into the surgeon's home and then putting up that tent.

39:40I presume that the tent was put up because they would bring out evidence and they were putting the evidence there and they knew that there'd be media there. But it did, I mean, somebody said on Twitter, it's all going very Fred West up there. It did look like a sort of, like a murder scene rather than, and then there was all this sort of, I don't know, why would they need to inspect the barbeque? Is that about burning evidence or something? And what was the significance of his shovel at these hoe? But I think it's impossible not to feel a little bit of sympathy for Humzee Usef who has taken over as the new leader.

40:20And since when, I've not been aware of a single thing he said that has not actually been about trying to keep up with this, which I think does pose a huge problem for him going forward and a massive opportunity to lay apart. Because what it feels like to me is this is maybe what the kind of thing that happens when one party's been had a lot of power for too long. And they start to think that actually the normal process of political management don't really apply. And Humzee Usef in trying to differentiate himself has said that there has clearly been a lack of transparency. They clearly have been problems in the way that the party's been run.

40:58And whether that then plays into what we talked about last week, whether people start to focus more, well, if they can't manage their own finances properly without the police being called in, what does that say about their running of the things that we rely on, the public services and so forth. And it will also inevitably cast light back on Nicholas Surgeon's own resignation. People will begin to feel that she resigned suddenly in the way that she did because she would have been aware that some of these allegations might have been about to come out about her family. Even if that's not true, I don't know whether that is why she resigned, but it certainly will begin to look a bit odd that all these things are coming out a few weeks after she resigned.

41:37And Kate Forbes, who was the challenger who ran Humzee Usef closest to become the current leader, she and some of her supporters is saying that he was the Nicholas Surgeon continued to candidate. They clearly decided to have a very, very truncated election because they knew something was coming in there for the whole thing should be rerun. So I mean, the thing is a complete and total mess on so many levels. I think I need to apologize just to listen to you. Hear the call to prayer. Never apologize. Never apologize for his wonderful lunchtime call to prayer. Coming I think it's got to actually a very beautiful voice.

42:13So I was saying this to a Jordanian friend of mine who disagreed, but I think the mozin here has a really, really beautiful voice. Is it the same? Is it a live thing or a tape? Yeah, I've got a live guy here. When I left in Afghanistan for three years, I lived next to a mosque with a man with a slightly less beautiful voice who cleared his throat very, very noisily and loudly in the early hours of the morning. While we're on local and regional culture, I got a pretty stinging email from a friend of mine up in the Highlands Rory, Peter Newman, who's from Ardhamurken High School saying that I was talking quite a lot of bollocks and you were talking total bollocks.

42:52These are my words, not his, by the way, when we talked about Gallic last week. And we were we were we were fairly to differentiate when we were talking about the Welsh language between Gallic and Gallic learning and there are two separate subjects and in many, many local authorities subjects have been delivered through the medium of Gallic which aren't necessarily in those figures that I that I read out. So there we are. He says Gallic. So I think he wants us to say that actually Scottish Gallic speakers are not that far behind Welsh Gallic speakers. There's somewhere behind because the Welsh accounting Welsh accounting people who are learning.

43:28Yeah, well, he says nationally over 5 ,000 children were educated through Gallic in 2021 and then there are these children who are learning Gallic, much as they might learn French German, Italian, Spanish or whatever. So we stand created on that, Peter, thank you for that and give my very, very fondest regards to TJ. Now, should we talk a little bit about Ireland? Yeah, absolutely. We should move on to and just just quickly just to finish on on scond. I think you made a number of interesting points. One is that this may be an opportunity for Labour. One of the things that is difficult in one party, I said not quite of one party, obviously it's not a one party state, but it has had a bit of a feeling of that.

44:07The S &P have been so dominant in Scotland for so long that people do begin to make strange mistakes. And of course, Scotland can feel compared to the United Kingdom as though it's elite is quite small. You often feel in Edinburgh that everybody knows each other, the judges know each other, the senior police officers know each other, the politicians will know each other, even more than people would suggest the United Kingdom. And I think the final thing is this thing we haven't talked about much in the podcast, but I'd like to do more, which is this whole question of conflict of interest and us beginning to be more honest with ourselves and with others that you can't have your husband or your wife in an important position professionally related to you, that it's very, very difficult.

44:47However, hard you try to be certain there isn't a conflict of interest that you're not doing favors in our directions. Well, it's certainly a massive injury where the polls head in the near future. And I think I said a few weeks ago, I guess now I was being making a lot of visits to Scotland because part of the route to Downey Street for Labour has to come through a revival in Scotland. Very good. Now, good Friday, Grimit. This is something where I want to not talk, but ask you questions because you were very, very strongly involved. Just before I do it, just to set it up for readers, just to the listeners, sorry, my people, good Friday, Grimit was signed on Good Friday, 10th of April 1998.

45:26It was the products of an Northern Ireland peace process that began in some ways in the 1980s, got underway properly in 1994, but really reached its final stages and its critical final stages when Tony Blair and yourself were in. And of course, the Good Friday Grimit was signed with you very deeply involved, along, I guess, with the European Union, with Bill Clemson, with Centre Mitchell. And it was really remarkable. Just one figure before I start questioning you. In 1997, a Queen's University, Bellfast Poll, found that although 90 % of the population, both Catholic and Protestants, supported and negotiated settlement in Northern Ireland, only 25 % thought there would be a settlement.

46:10And that was only one year before, actually a few months before the Good Friday Grimit actually came through. So can I step back to the first question? What do you think the secrets were of this thing? What made it work? And how has it, with all the challenges and messes, what's made it probably one of the most successful peace agreements that we've seen? Oh, Lord. It's interesting you mentioned Queen's there because that's where they're hosting the event that we're going to be part of next week, which is going to be three days of commemoration, celebration, remembering the people who are no longer withers.

46:42And but also, I hope, trying to work out how we can keep the thing moving in the right direction. I mean, there's lots of things that come to mind when you ask that question. But I think if there's one, I think it, to be absolutely honest, there was a sense of fatigue on both sides. And I'd think without the without Sinn Fein, particularly Adams and McGinnis moving the direction that they'd did, and without the unionist moving the direction they did led by David Trimble. And then throw into the mix, you mentioned Clinton, you mentioned George Mitchell, I think throw into the mix to young popular prime ministers of the UK and Ireland elected roughly the same time coming together with this as a priority.

47:27And then having the understanding of the importance of these big strategic poles, principle of consent, absolutely no change to the status and all the other without the consent of the people, but an understanding that had to be a genuine commitment to equality for the nationalists. And then the ambiguity, I guess, I think the ambiguity, there's a lot of the phrase constructive ambiguity kind of runs through the Good Friday agreement and allowing people to identify as British or Irish, I think became very, very important. And then the rest of it was just frankly, it was just negotiation. And people talk about the Good Friday agreement or the Belfair's Good Friday agreement, there actually were two agreements, there was two agreements, there was an agreement agreed by the political parties, that was called the multi -party agreement.

48:12And then there was the British Irish agreement, which was the agreement between the British and Irish governments. And the whole time during the negotiations, this focus on strand one, strand three. Strand one was about the how the Northern Ireland was governed within the United Kingdom. Strand two was the so -called North South, which was the relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic. And then strand three was East -West, which was the relationship between the Republic of Ireland and the UK. And I think it was just the ability of this incredible collection of people. I actually think we talk a lot about how the characters in politics, I'm afraid they do matter, you might not want them to, but the personalities really, really matter.

48:57And there was something about those personalities that sort of made it work. And to this day, I can't really understand why it did, but it did. It's fascinating. I was part of a commission called the Principles for Inclusive Peace. And I spent two years, just as you said last two years, working with various people from around the world, trying to work out what the lessons were on building peace. And we looked at Northern Ireland and other places. The fashion at the moment, as you know, is not really to focus on leaders. A lot of the focus at the moment is on grassroots activists and on the involvement of civil society, the involvement of women, and people are a bit skeptical about the role of leaders and outsiders.

49:40I think they were very, very important. I'm really pleased, actually, that one of the big themes of the Queen's university event is actually the focus on women. And not just the women that we all know, MoMo and Hillary Clinton, who's going to be there, because she's now the Chancellor of the University. But some of the women's groups and the women's coalition in particular that really did provide that sort of sense of grassroots support. So now I agree with that. There's a lovely line that Tony Blair has written an article which has appeared in the Jordan Times, which I was reading this morning.

50:16And it's got a good line where he says, I just paid that's a syndication situation. I don't come on. You may have done it, you may have done it, you thought I must get a message to Rory. I felt very, very fast that Tony Blair is in the last kind of the Jordan Times that really is running on Northern peace process. But he says that you should use outsiders and that insiders often feel that outsiders don't understand the dispute. Tony Blair has this rather nice line. He says sometimes outsiders are key because not understanding the dispute is the key to resolving it. And I think his point there is that if you're an insider, you're just too caught up in too much knowledge about all the horrors that have happened over the previous decades.

51:00It's very, very difficult to step apart from that. And in a sense, it was a strength for the British government, the EU, the Americans that they weren't as close to involved. It was impossible to be there and not get very, very caught up in that sense of the history and where it came from. And I wrote a piece for the the I paper the other day and I recall this talking to Ken McGinnis, who was one of the leading unionists, also unionist politicians. And trying to persuade him that he needed to try to see things better from the perspective of in fame where they were coming from, try to understand where they were coming from.

51:41And he said, well, it's all very well for you to say that. But it's quite difficult wandering around this building and you keep bumping into people who've been trying to kill you for the last next number of years. And that's the fact of it. That's what we were very conscious of a lot of the time. And I think that the role that I think Tony in particular was able to play partly because of his use in the job, partly because of his commitment that both sides accepted was real. But also I think partly because he's just very good at that sense of taking somebody else's point and maybe it's the lawyer in him taking somebody else's point and then going to the other person.

52:16So I written this piece about I think I'm right in saying that David Trimble did not exchange a single word with Jerry Adams during the entire process that we were there in. And there was one point at which David Trimble was in the Gents having a P and who should walk in but Jerry Adams. And Jerry Adams who was prepared to speak said, somebody like, hey David, how you doing? At which point David Trimble managed to stop himself in mid -flow and disappear into a cubicle a lot of the door. And I think the history of this, and we talked about this I think almost a year ago on the podcast. The remembering, and we'll remember this one, it Queens University Belfast, that Ed Gugram who was a lecturer in a lawyer and a unionist and a friend and a colleague of David Trimble was chatting to a colleague in the middle of the Central Square in Queens University Belfast in 1983 and was then shot on the back of the head by people from the IRA.

53:16And as a salt on a university lecturer in a university hall, I did a murder in that way. It's something that's very, very difficult to remember in process. No, absolutely. And I can remember there were various points at which we were getting very angry and very frustrated with various parties as they were pressing for more or refusing to see somebody else's point or refusing at points even to discuss somebody else's point. And I think this was another of Tony's strengths, was his ability to always try to see it from their perspective. So for example, I remember once when Adams and McGinnis were being particularly difficult about something and of course they were leaving.

53:56There were various points at which they disappeared and left their phones and went off. And they were obviously talking to people in within the IRA about whether they could get them across the line. And Tony made the point that every time they go off there, they're running the not inconsistible risk, they're going to get a bullet in the back of the head. And all of them had that sense. So we sometimes just trying to be the people in the middle. And I think that's what Tony and Bertie did extremely well. They were the people in the middle. But Bertie Hurne, for example, I mean, you know, if you remember his mother died during those few days and he had to go down to Dublin to attend to that and come back in the back of the funeral and all that stuff going on.

54:39And yet at the same time sit there often and just take a level of a kind of abuse, frankly, from some of the unionists because he was, you know, he was the leader of the Republic of Ireland. And I think one of the things that's forgotten in a lot of this, by the way, is and of course there'll be a lot of focus on Ireland, North and South, but Joe Biden's trip to the Republic is going to get massive publicity for obvious reasons. And, you know, the Irish did change their constitution to get the good Friday agreement through. They essentially, you know, renounced that the notion that the point of their constitution should be to fight for United Ireland.

55:16So there was a lot of big change went on. And if you go through, you know, some of the issues, we talked recently about just some of the issues. So you've got, you know, the holies of sovereignty and who is sovereign discrimination, what you do with the paramilitary groups, policing, decommissioning, demilitarization, then all the civil and political rights that were being addressed, it was a massive, massive, massive agenda. And to get that signed and then to get the massive support for it, over 90 % in the Republic and over 70 % in the North. And then as you say, despite all the ups and downs and despite Brexit and despite the undercurrents of violence that have been there and that we saw again a little bit at the weekend, it's still on track, apart from the fact that the institutions are not up and running.

56:04And the DUP, I'd really do wish would would kind of make that final leap to say, look, we've just got to do what it takes to get these up and running. Well, it's such a lesson isn't it? And I think this is some of you said a lot in the past that it's not just a question of the signing of the document, it's a question of what happens in the years after and how long that took. I mean, Sinn Fein didn't accept the police service in all night until I think the early 2000s. And the final weapons were only handed in sort of between 2001, 2005. So it was a long old process requiring an a huge amount of patience when you and Tony there and others must often have felt huge frustration even after 98.

56:44You kind of felt this was done because for the next seven years, it was touch and go a lot, wasn't it? No, I'd say that Northern Ireland became a permanent part of Tony Blair's agenda. And you know, the fact that Jonathan Power, for example, who was Tony's chief of staff, but he was also his chief negotiator on Northern Ireland. So Jonathan who's never he's constantly backwards and forwards and before him, John Holmes, a civil servant who was absolutely brilliant and so important in those in those early stages. But no, it became a never ending process. And the good Friday agreement in a sense was the high point, but then there were plenty of low points there after and plenty of challenges that were met.

57:29And you know, Rishi Sunak's now the prime minister, he's got to get this thing back on the road. I mean, we'll do a lot more on this in the coming weeks. And obviously we'll do a lot more when we're in Belfast and hopefully interview some people involved as well. But it is a slightly worrying lesson for other peace processes around the world when we worry about the Yemen peace process or South Sudan or Somalia, that how difficult it was in Northern even with all the immense resources of Britain, Europe, the United States, which were able to put very serious economic packages in place. And I think GDP per capita has nearly doubled since the good Friday agreement was signed in in Northern Ireland, even with all of that, how tough it was and how much the odds are there against the processes in poorer countries, which are written by conflict.

58:19And I find it troubling that the kind of brexitiers and the DUP constantly want to try and play down the role of the European Union. But the fact is in these peace processes, you need that international support. The role of the Americans, the fact of Clinton being so committed to the process, the fact of George Mitchell being the chair who was kind of respected by all sides and able to kind of bring his wisdom and patience to the whole thing, it was that really mattered. And then likewise, some of the economic progress that was delivered with the help of the of the European Union, it's not to be sniffed at.

58:53And I think any of these processes that you were talking about, they require international support and international backing. And I don't, you could argue that without that, that the good Friday agreement might not have happened, and certainly wouldn't have been endured in the way that it has. Here's a question for you. What do you think of the 13 years of conservative rule? We will still be celebrating 25 years later. What do you think about the creation of the canal and river trust, Alistair? Okay, what about austerity? 25 years on, will we celebrate in that? Maybe gay marriage, but the foundations for that were well laid by the time.

59:36And I normally would have said 0 .7 % for international aid achieving that target, but unfortunately, they never destroyed that. Well, Alistair, I think let's move towards the close. And let's maybe pick the stuff again when we get to Belfast. Yeah, that's what I shall see you there. See you there. Bye -bye. Take care, bye.