176. Can the Tory Party be saved?

24:23These messages you're getting from people saying that Rishi Sunak reminds them of you, are they now saying to you that they think it's when not here for the Tories lose? Is that a mindset that you think is infecting the entire Conservative Party? I think there's a really interesting problem here, which is that a lot of people are very fond of Rishi Sunak, a lot of my friends who are from the centre left of the party and I think that's partly because they were so traumatised by Boris Johnson List Trust, it's partly because he's courteous, he does his work, he reads the details, he delegates, so if you're in the cabinet, you feel more respected than you did under Boris Johnson List Trust.

24:59He's very right -wing though, isn't he? Where is political compass lies? He's very right -wing, much more right -wing than Johnson in many ways. Yeah, but nobody quite recognises this, I think partly because he's much more courteous, much more softly spoken, he seems much more reasonable, but you're right, he's somebody who wasn't early committed Brexit here, he clearly sometimes seems to talk as though he believes the Singaporean -Tem staff about the British economy. So there's a gap and I think the explanation for it is that the party is unbelievably loyal, when I think loyalty is at the key of the way these parties work.

25:36I mean, I also found it difficult to understand why people stayed with the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn running it. I mean, you know, I and colleagues of mine left the Conservative Party because we could not bear Boris Johnson being our boss, we didn't want to stand for him, we didn't want to campaign for him, but of course many of my Labour colleagues stuck with Jeremy Corbyn and went into elections with his face on the manifesto's campaign forum, and that I think brings us to how these parties get rebuilt because probably the only way the Conservative Party will be rebuilt is not through people like me or Ken Clark who left and discussed, it will be by some of the moderates who held their nose, stayed loyal, put up with Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss, and eventually when the party's gone totally mad and decides it has to move back to the centre to win an election, you know, after Suela Bravman in four, five years time, might rebuild it again.

26:27What do you reckon? Well, the only thing about that is that you see, we didn't expel in the way that Boris Johnson did, so you mentioned yourself and Ken Clark and there were many others, they were expelled and it's very hard to get back in once that's happened to you. There's a couple of things I say though, the first is that I can remember in 1992, the day after Labour lost that election, doing an interview on the television, I was with Peter Jenkins, the then commentator on the independent, and he said if Labour can't win in these circumstances, this is in 1992, I don't think they'll ever win again.

27:01Five years later, we're on our landslide. 2019, Jeremy Corbyn leads Labour to a pretty devastating defeat against Boris Johnson's Conservative party, and here we are four years later, and the judgement is including in that room, we're in this morning and pretty much every audience who's peaked at the moment, Labour are going to win, so things can turn around, but you need the people in there to turn them around. So kick here, it's obvious to me that Tony is one of the lines they're going to run at Keir Starmer, is that how can you believe a word this guy says when he sat there alongside Jeremy Corbyn, telling every year to be the Prime Minister?

27:37Now, I actually do believe that that Keir Starmer, part of his thinking at that time, as he went into politics, relative and late in life, was he looking at Jeremy Corbyn, probably thinking this guy's not going to win, the Labour party is going to have to rebuild after he goes, and maybe I can be in the position to do that job, to have got himself into that position, he had to stay as a leading figure in the party. But it's interesting, but question wasn't because obviously other people made different decisions, I guess, Chuck Amuna left, trying to think of all the MPs who left their time. Oh, Luciana Berger, Chris Leslie, there were people who left, and you could say, you know, where are they now?

28:17Yeah, and that's the same with me in the Tory party, and I think this is why politics is so difficult because at some level, to get to the top, obviously you have to stay in the game, and that means compromising. If you are too uncompromising and say, I'm not going to put up with Jeremy Corbyn as my leader, I'm not going to fight for him in election, because I think he's awful, all the same with Boris Johnson, you don't get to stick around. Somebody pointed out that in a way, this was true in Labour, even back in the day, that part of the secret of Labour coming back from the madness of Michael foot, maybe madness is unfair, but the, the slightly unelectability of Michael foot, was people like Jack Straw, who not the Roy Jenkins is, right, not the, so we're not going back in the tension history.

29:01So for younger people, I'm probably speaking what happened to Labour Party in the early 80s, is that Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins, these were sort of monumental figures in the Labour Party, really couldn't bear the direction Labour was going in and left to set out the SDP, which was a sort of one point, this incredibly exciting centrist party that was dominating the pinnipoles. And they seemed to be the noble charismatic people and people at Jack Straw, who've been elected in 79 and stuck around, looked as though he was slightly sort of shilly shalying around and compromising. But in the end, of course, New Labour was built off the Jack Straws, it wasn't built off the Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams.

29:39Yeah, and it goes back to something we've talked about a lot, which is our electoral system and the difficulties of being creating a new political force that challenges the headgemony of the big two. But, you know, Neil, can it led the Labour Party through the period that he did and incredibly well in terms of laying the foundations for what followed, then John Smith, then Tony Blair. And the other point, I think it's important for people to remember, this thing about how change can happen quickly these days, maybe much faster than it used to. His case time was trying to do in one parliamentary term, what Neil John Tony did over, over several.

30:18Look, I don't know. I'm among those people who you mentioned to start, who it really wouldn't bother me if they could serve the party, it didn't rebuild. But I do agree with you that if you have an opposition in our system that is completely Trumpian, you know, dominated by people like Bravaman and Patel and Leanderson and the populist voices of the hard right, I think that is a real problem for the country, not least because of the message that it sends beyond these shores as well. And it's going to get much worse because at the moment, they are slightly, you wouldn't believe it, but they are slightly pulling their punches because they're in party as in government.

30:54As soon as Labour's in government, these guys are going to be appearing on GB news and going far more radical, you know, their statements on immigration and things are going to go out of the window because they won't be remotely held back by the sense that they have some responsibility for the situation. Another theme that you talk about in your book is the is the kind of death of shame. Look, I'll be absolutely honest, if I was Liz Truss and I did to the economy, what she did just over a year ago, I think I'd immigrate, I think I'd have plastic surgery, I'd change the way I look, I'd probably wear a wig, I'd go and live in the foreign country, I hope nobody would ever see me like one of the great train robbers.

31:34Well, I think, well, in face a very good parallel because of course, the great trade robbers either way saw themselves as these kind of epic folk heroes. And that phrase that Ben Elton said about Rishi Sunat that he's dripping with vanity, watching Liz Truss yesterday with her sort of these adoring young men or around her. It was horrific and she's posing for selfies, she's got no self -awareness, but no apology. It's horrific. Okay, let me, let me, let me then just to close this thing off. So there's a very interesting collection of essays brought together by David Gork, my political hero, called the case for the center right.

32:13I have contributed, I have contributed. I have contributed. And these should declare an interest? I declare an interest. Yeah, contributing, S .A. Mine is not the most distinguished S .A. in that group, but it's a, it's a great group of people trying to make the case for restoring the conservative. Okay, boil it down. Tell me in one sentence, if you have to sort of where's the center of gravity in their argument? Central gravity is that in the end, the smart electoral future for any party is in the center ground. And you've got to be able to win over younger, more educated voters around cities.

32:46And that the current path, the conservative party, which is appealing to older, less educated people in remote areas is not a sustainable electoral path. So that's this central argument. But I think they also make some very good arguments for what a better conservatism could be. It could be proud of the union, really put the union first. It could be fiscally conservative, responsible in the way that we think about borrowing and debt. It could be generous in international policy and international development. It could be steely eyed, but determined and idealistic on climate. But is all the things that this conservative party is deliberately and willfully rejecting?

33:27Yeah. And the path now to rebuild is difficult because of the people writing for it, people like me, David Gorkin, Abba Rudd, are no longer in. So you've got to get moderate conservatives back into the party. And that also means that we've rebuilt the conservative party in the country. So if people are serious about this, we need 30 ,000 people joining the conservative party who are from the moderate liberal center to actually change the way the party operates. And then I think probably the party needs to go through a period of defeat. It probably needs, unfortunately, to elect the Suela Bravenman figure, realize how unpopular and toxic that type of politics is.

34:03And then find its way back because in the end, the conservative party wants to win. That's how David Cameron did it. So after the end, Duncan Smith, Fiasco and Michael Howard essentially, in the end, the party members wanted to win. And that's what allowed them to bring back somebody who was more from the center ground. I think Nigel Farage thinks he can end up as leader of the conservative party. Oh, well, we heard that here first. Something to watch. My final observation of the conservative party conference is, didn't get much coverage, but Jeremy Hunt's speech, I found pretty disturbing as well.

34:35I think to put, when you think he's the chance for these checkered dealing with really difficult economic situation, and it seems to me that this government has completely given up on going after the big tax avoidance. And he made a big thing about going for this, this stuff about people on benefits, not being workshop. And I just felt that it felt straight out of the populist playbook. And I think we should put in the newsletter. There's a, I don't know who this guy is, but he's called at Red North UK. And he did a really kind of very, very long thread of real cases of people, including many who take in their own lives of people who've been put through absolute hell by this, but by the work of a capability assessment under this government.

35:17So I found that quite disturbing because he's meant to be one of the last sort of grown up standing, isn't he? Yeah, well, thank you, Alice, for all very, very depressing. But you are going to be going to the Labour Party conference next week and reporting from the front line and telling us what you find there. Well, we go for a bad day. He said with, with much experience of party conferences and not that much enthusiasm. Very good. Thank you. See you after the break.

35:49This 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 the 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.

36:25They've got over 5 ,000 therapists in the UK. They've helped more than five million people globally. And you can join a session literally at the click of a button. Change therapists anytime. So 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 % of their first month at BetterHelp .com slash rest politics. That's better H -E -L -P .com slash rest politics. I'm Chris Hadfield, astronaut and citizen of Planet Earth. Join me on a journey into the systems that power the world. No politics, just real conversations with real people shaping the future of energy.

37:05Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

37:12Welcome back to the rest of the politics with me, Alex Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. And we've just been doing a little bit on party conference, but it's a good segue into Theresa May because of course Theresa May will be famous both for her dancing queen performance at a party conference. And also for having a terrible moment where she essentially broke down on stage at one of these big party gatherings and lost her voice. I should have lost her. She didn't break down. Well, it was a very, very, I was, you know, it's a very, very strange moment in her life. But we've interviewed her on the podcast.

37:46And I think I'm really pleased with the way it's come out. I didn't encourage people to listen to it. I think Alex, are you brought out of sight of her that I haven't often seen in interviews? It's a, you know, she can come across obviously famous C, sometimes a little bit wooden. But I thought she, um, thought she really engaged and took it seriously and you were quite challenging. And it worked well. So I'd really encourage people to listen. What did you think of it? If you own a my partner, um, listen to both episodes in one go because she's a subscriber to the rest of the politics of obviously.

38:12Well done. Yes. But she, she said she thought she thought she came over really, really well. And I said I was a little bit worried. I was maybe a bit too soft. And she said no, she didn't think that at all that she thought actually it was quite challenging without being rude. No, I think, I think you landed everything you wanted to land. I think you made all the points you met tonight, but you did it relatively respectfully. And you had a bit of back and forth. I thought that was, that was an impressive stuff. So in Flyk Fiona, you want to hear part two before next Monday. You can do so by going to the rest of politics .com.

38:45Very good. So there we go. So shall we talk about Kosovo? A land, a very, very small land, which is a very large place in my heart. Because, of course, the Kosovo war back in the late 90s was a, was a huge part of our first, um, and it sort of feels like it's a little bit on the edge again. It's very, it's very, very, very sad. And we've been talking about Kosovo a little bit over the podcast. This is loyal listeners will remember that we've been raising this as a potential problem area for months now. It feels very, very dangerous. And there's a very high likelihood now of a proper conflict breaking out in Kosovo.

39:25But just to go back very, very quickly for younger listeners to the history of this, Kosovo is an area of, um, former Yugoslavia and that Serbia, which had as a predominantly Albanian Muslim population 92 % 90 % as so it's about 1 .8 million people, about 50 ,000 or so Orthodox Serbs. But it is a place that was historically incredibly important in the national imagination of the Serbian people because its society have very famous Orthodox monasteries, Serbian Orthodox monasteries. But it's also the site of a great battle at the Battle of Kosovo Polyia, which for the Serbs is like Waterloo was for the 19th century for the Victorian Brits.

40:11They're great fight against the Ottoman hordes and the defense of Serbian civilization. So when the Albanian Muslim community was really pushing for autonomy, there was a brutal reaction from Slobadan Lossovic, who was then the leader, which began to result in attacks that were leading to ethnic cleansing. And this is now in in 1999 and it is at that point, and I'm going to hand the story over to you because you were very closely involved in the UK US coalition intervention. No, I was, I was seconded to NATO, President Clinton asked Tony Blair if I could go and help NATO sort out their, their comms, because it did become kind of the propaganda side of things became very, very important.

40:55It was, I remember the guy in charge of the whole thing, Wes Clark, who later became a presidential candidate, remember, or a presidential nomination candidate. And he, I remember him saying that it was only when we sort of gripped the comms against the Milozovich, comms machine, that he felt that he was able to kind of get the military to focus on what it was that they were trying to do. And the reason why that's relevant to us happening today is that there I was as Tony Blair's comms guy, secondited NATO, and my opposite number doing the job for Milozovich was Alexander Vukic, who is now running the country.

41:35So there he ends up running his country and I end up doing a bloody podcast with Roy Stewart. With a boy, it is obviously affecting what went wrong. So I was also there then, I was, there's a look at that, I'd been posted to be the British representative in Montenegro, which is this country, obviously, between Cosfo Bosnia and Serbia. Yeah. And so I spent quite a lot of time in Cosfo. I had a K -4 pass, which was the Cosfo force pass. I remember going up to visit some of those Serbian Orthodox monasteries, which in those days was surrounded by Italian armoured vehicles with then 50 ,000 foreign soldiers on the ground.

42:10And the particular flashpoint was around these northern areas, around Mitrovica, where a Serbian population had been left behind in what was now an Albanian Cosfo dominated country. And a lot of the effort just just a fast forward over the last 24 years have been trying to resolve the status of those areas. And there have been repeated agreements, four agreements in fact put together by, often put together by the European Union or France and Germany, trying to resolve the tensions between Cosfo and Serbia, but to cut to the chase. They've never really worked. They never really worked. And what really became the cause of the real problems that we're now facing was license plates.

42:54So basically Serbs living in Cosfo want to continue to have old license plates, which don't really recognize the existence of a Republic of Cosfo and the Republic of Cosfo want them to drive around with Republic of Cosfo license plates. The thing you've jumped there is that in 2008, Cosfo declared it was independent and has essentially devoted its entire diplomatic policies of getting recognition. And it's almost at a hundred. It's almost half ways above half way now, 100 of the 193 United Nations countries recognize Cosfo, including us. And the United States and Europe, the people who don't, of course, are Russia, China, Serbia, most importantly.

43:31Yeah, and some, and I think there are still five European countries that don't, but they've done a pretty good job on that. But Vukic, President of Serbia has said that they never, ever will recognize it. And so you've had the plates thing, then we've talked before about the elections of of mayors in a in an election, which the Serbs in the North boycotted. So these Albanian mayors were elected on 4 % turnouts and that led to violence. And then this latest one is very, very hard to work out what's gone on. But essentially, three Serbs, there was a group of Serbs very heavily armed, engaged in a in a shootout with Cosvavar police officers, one Cosvavar police officer killed, three Serbs killed.

44:15And despite the Serb government saying this was some freelance guy, this kind of rather sinister mafia guy who was running the whole operation, nothing to do with us, Gav, they numbed the Lecester clad a national day of mourning for these three guys who'd been killed, which is what is make an added to which the, the arms that were discovered could only be state sponsored. States sponsored arms and the Serbs moved serious military units up to the border. So it feels to me as though Vukic was hoping to pull off sort of little green man Russian style paramilitary provocation inside northern Cosvow and then roll the army in to protect the population.

44:55So it feels like Northern Ireland's sort of 68, 69 feels like a moment at which you can see what's happening. There's an academic, I mean, Senator Link who said that people talk about black swans, these sort of unexpected occurrences. But what's happening here is more like a great big gray rhino that the violence that's coming is so predictable. It's like a two -ton rhino sort of snorting at you and charging towards you. It's been triggered basically and that here I'm going to take a sort of radical line here, which will be unpopular with some of the Europeans, the Americans. But basically there are two things going on.

45:29One of them is that it was held together by the European Union promising accession for Serbia. And so long as we catch thought that Serbia would get into the EU with all that that would mean in terms of freedom of movement and the economy, he held off the confrontation and Europe basically gave up on that. And Vukic concluded the whole thing was a sham. He was never going to get into the European Union. The second thing I think to be clear about is that it is Vukic not Alban Korti who's fault here. Alban Korti, you know, there's a real attempt by the Americans Europeans say, oh, blame on both sides and Korti is a bit radical and pushing to Alban Korti, who's the cost of her leader, is essentially just insisting on what has been agreed on these license plates four times in different agreements.

46:12Your point about Northern Ireland is relevant here because you now have a situation where both sides are refusing to believe that the other is actually in good faith. And I think that's why the Americans are Europeans. There are there are things that would agree that the Europeans appoint you to saying, Korti said he would do this, but then he hasn't. For example, a great autonomy for the Serb population living in the North and so forth. But I think you're right. And the other thing is that, you know, we can play in sometimes about the kind of inward looking nationalism of our media, but my god in Serbia is something else.

46:45And so at the moment, you know, Vukic is playing into a ramped up nationalist agenda, which is real within the population. It's not just being manufactured by the government. So one thing we often say on the podcast is that you need to look not at what people say in English, but what they say in their local language. So if you see Vukic being interviewed by Christian Ammanporn, CNN, we can share the link. He comes across as incredibly sort of reasonable holding up the rule of law. Nothing to see here. I'm all for peace. But when you read the the Serbian newspapers, you see something very different.

47:19So the pro -government tabloid, which is claims to be have the largest number of subscribers in Serbia, runs a headline on the front page, which is which means courteous is ethnically cleansing, Cosva of the Serbs. And then it says, Larshný premier tackles Varnog Kosova. So the fake premiere of the so -called Kosova was pomodz zapadni mentor with the help of his Western mentors, Sprovordný Tyho, Ethnicor, Chiszenje, Nasjag, Stanovista, Narkim. So is conspiring with Western mentors to ethnically cleanse our people from from Cosva. So when that's appearing in the local press, and you can see some outrageous comments by Vuchis's defense minister and by Vuchis himself, they're really whipping up to once going to be a brutal confrontation.

48:10So he's very good at charming when it suits him. He's charming the Americans, he's charming the Europeans as Vuchis. But when he's talking to his own people, it's all no surrender, no compromise, I will never accept Kosovo being independent. I met, I obviously had dealings with him of a non -speaking nature when we were running comms operations against each other, but I met him more recently when I was partly because of the work I was doing in Albania with Eddie Rama. And I had a quite a long one or one with Vukic. This was after, I don't know if you remember when the extraordinary incident with when Serbia were playing Albania at football and a drone flew in and dropped the Albanian flag and it was just all kicked off between the players and it became a massive sort of diplomatic incident.

48:59It was around that time and it was unfortunate away because he had a terrible cold, really bad cold. And as you know Rory, politices with colds, it's not a good look. But and he's got quite a sort of, he's a very tall guy and he's very imposing, but he's got quite, I think he's got quite a weak face and I think sometimes he has to exaggerate his strength in his rhetoric and with his actions and you're right, he does a very different stick for his domestic audience than what he does for the international audience. But I'll say to you, I think there was, I mentioned Eddie Rama there, Albania has been for the first time, I think, a little bit critical of the European Union.

49:39Yeah, well, your friend Eddie Rama strangely has been sort of charmed by Vukic and seems to be attacking the Cosfer Albanian. No, I don't think he's attacking them. I think he's not happy with the way that the European Union are doing this sort of, you know, there's equal blame on both sides because I think he's more with you that in terms of what happened, this attack by the Serbs, by this guy, Rudoic Chitch and his gang that has led to the current crisis, I think he feels that the European Union response has not taken sufficient regard of that. One of the things that we're seeing here is the sort of fantasy of all these populists, Vukic, Albania, etc.

50:21Which is the fantasy that Trump is going to come and save them. So Vukic got very close to Richard Grinnell who was the, who was Trump's special envoy for the region. And I think has very much since he's convinced Trump that Serbia is in the right and would want Trump to, he hopes Trump's going to come in a year, it's time to withdraw all the American troops. Well, Trump will probably say, well, Vukic is very, very tall and could he's quite small, therefore I'll probably back Vukic because he's, that's the kind of how his toddler mentality operates. No, it's really disturbing. So I guess there are two things.

50:51One is, is the European Union going to grow a backbone, recognize how dangerous this is. And secondly, is there any way of getting back to life again, the process to get Serbia back into the European Union because there is now a real national security argument. It's now like a whole, a terrible hold on the doughnut, which if we don't get some kind of reconciliation with Serbia will be a sort of Russian authoritarian populist proxy bang in the heart of Europe. Yeah. There's an interesting parallel to the work that you did in Ireland, which is the depth of the history of these people. So I was just looking at the individual biographies and there's been a great report again by my favorite people, the European stability institute on this, which we can share.

51:34But the president of Kosovo was driven from each of itsers a child. Albin Korti, the leader was imprisoned from 97 to 2001 by the Serbians. The foreign minister, Gervala had her father and brother murdered in Germany by Yugostav spies. And on the other side, the Serbian foreign minister, Datschic, was a spokesperson from Lasfetsch from 92 to 2000. And if you watch, there's an extraordinary moment in the security council where Datschic starts attacking this foreign minister, the Kosovo foreign minister, who's had her father and brother murdered and he starts screaming at the UN Security Council.

52:11Your hands are bloody, it's your fault and essentially starts blaming her father and brother for being sort of traitors and separatists. And then she turns around and screams back, you're a small, slobbered arm, a loss of itch. So there is a real kind of depth of history here, which is going to make it unbelievably difficult to reconcile unless the worst concentrates. And it will be tragic. I mean, nothing is more tragic than 20 years in Afghanistan where we go and get rid of the Taliban in 20 years later. We hand it back to the Taliban again, but it feels so we're about to do it again in Kosovo.

52:42Bosnian Kosovo were of course the successes. They were the things that made people proud of humanitarian intervention. They ended wars. They set up states. And despite all the grumbles, broadly speaking, the world is a better place for the interventions in Bosnian Kosovo, and it would have been without it. But it now looks like it's going to unravel through Western Vassalation and weakness. The only thing I would say to that is that the when there was this troop buildup pretty close to the board, again, way way too close for Kosovo's kind of security interests. And the Americans did step in and essentially have some pretty hard words with the Serbs.

53:20And Vukic came straight out and did a statement saying, it would be absurd for the how would that possibly help us that we were going to start a war there, etc. Now, on the one hand, we've heard all that before from other leaders, but this did feel to me like a quick word from the Americans led to a bit of a pullback. But in terms of the fundamentals, they are not in good shape. And I think it's something that we'll be coming back to again and again. Well, pretty depressing, but some very, very interesting stuff. It's an extraordinary story. And it's also an amazing place. I went there after the war because of course, once the once the Serbs had effectively had lost and were on their way home, I was then asked to go and help sort the sort of, you know, the comms going forward.

54:09And I spent a bit of time there, and it was, it was, it's a very beautiful part of the world. But what was incredible, I was there at the time when the Serbs were literally retreating. So they were coming back and we'd be driving along the road, and there'd be sort of truckloads coming the other way. And I mean, the hatreds, you felt it so powerful, every time one side passed the other, there were these almost sort of, you know, animalistic noises being sort of, you know, they'd stop fighting at this point, but there's still that you could feel the kind of absolute loathing and hatreds. And they're still there.

54:42And of course, this region up in the north is still very, very, it's more Serb and Albanian. And the Serbs in Belgrade want those people to feel, this is why the number plate thing is so kind of want them to feel that they're Serb not Kosovo because they don't and say they never will recognize Kosovo as an independent nation. It's very, very sad. And the, and as you say, it's a very, I mean, in some places, a very, very beautiful place with these amazing monuments. Other other bits are kind of sort of slightly bleak modern communist, but it's an extraordinary part of the world. And of course, it's on this, one of the reasons why it's so raw, of course, is that originally it was on the fort line between the Christians and the Ottoman Muslims, and the cause for this battling, cause for it was seen as a kind of existential fight.

55:28And it is still still remembered in that way. Anyway, thank you. And I, I don't think we're going to resolve it all now, but thank you for sticking with it and having a chance to talk about it. And see you tomorrow, question time. See you then. Bye bye.