189. The King's Speech, performative cruelty, and Argentina

24:50I just think he came over as a little bit too excited to be in the presence of people. So you don't think the format's wrong? You think something, you think the format's wrong? I don't think you wouldn't have advised Tony Blanot to do that or... No, I've thought it was fine, but I just think that the dynamic between them was odd. And I also think that we said this last week before it happened that the risk with somebody like Musk is you just have no idea where he's going. So you've literally had it this summit, Rishi Suneak saying, this will not destroy all jobs. Yeah. And there you have it. A lot of us covers a lot of basically says this is going to destroy all jobs and you know, unless you really want to work.

25:26And it was interesting to watch the kind of reaction from the Littorium piece was very negative to it. Yeah, but I thought in terms of the event as a whole, I thought it didn't harm it. Fiona's reading the Walter Isaacson book on Musk at the moment and we were driving back from this book festival in Dorset and so I was listening to it with her and I hadn't quite realised just how fascinating Musk's whole backstory is, his child and his life. I mean, getting into this whole rocket business age 30, he clearly has got something very, very special about him. But I think that in terms of you said last week and I hadn't quite realized the extent to which Joe Biden's executive order in terms of policy was probably a bigger thing than anything that came out of the AI summit.

26:14But I thought it was a good thing to do and I think the fact is going to be every six months now shows that political leaders around the world are on it. It's kind of prosa. I mean one of the nice things about the Mark Karni and few which people should listen to on leading is that he points out that we may have made more progress on climate in environment and people acknowledge that he says that when Paris was signed, it was aiming at about three and a half degrees. And now he thinks we may be getting down to two degrees. And that's interesting because generally speaking, you've all know Harari who we've also attempted to say and I think it's true that humans find it difficult to really make big policy decisions until the crisis is already there.

26:48In other words, we wouldn't really be able to tackle climate until the waves are literally lapping into our houses and we wouldn't deal with AI until the robots walk down the streets. and but actually Biden, Sunak and others are demonstrating that they have been able to move more nimbly on AI than you would have expected. Well, I spoke last week at this thing called the the Big Green Net Zero Festival and because it was a kind of set piece as it were, I did a lot of research and there's some amazing stuff happening and also in the figure so for example Norway which let's remember has made itself one of which is countries in the world by being an oil country, electric vehicle sales have reached 93 % of total new car sales on the back of tax rebates, which are making electric vehicles cheaper than petrol and diesel.

27:37And the total cost of car ownership is now 20 % cheaper than it was. One of Trump's capitals, Texas, Texas now has greater use of solar and wind than any other state in the United States. So there's also, he eating peat pumps and now out selling gas boilers in the United States. And I found this analysis of Biden's inflation reduction out by credit sweet of all people who said it was the biggest single act of climate change legislation anywhere in the world. So there's a lot of stuff happening. I was struck by how upbeat Karni seemed to be about the whole climate thing. And politically, by the way, back to the King's speech, I do think that Sue Nuckerman has made a political mistake with his switch on the environment.

28:24And I think business is just moving on without that signal. That's hopes so. Although there's been some slightly worrying signals that Shell has been reversing and has lost a lot of its green staff who've been resigning because the chief executive seems to be giving up on quite a lot of those stuff. So it remains quite fragile because there will still, unfortunately, be a lot of businesses out there who will see This stuff is extra cost and will be reluctant, which is why governments need to be very firm and need to have these clear dates Which is why I agree with you about about what Rishi Cine did right time for the break

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30:39Welcome back to the REST's Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Mr Campbell. And we wanted to do a couple of things. One of them was to obviously talk again about what's happening in the least and then move on to the Argentinian elections. One thing that you've been in touch with Holmes the use of the first theatre in Scotland his family was in Gaza. And what did he say again? Well, just, no, because we've been trying to get him on the podcast and there was a plan for us to do it when you were in up in Scotland recently, but he got stranded by the weather. So I just sent him a message sort of saying, I hope he was well and solid at her doing all that because of the thing that was going on with his wife's family and he was very, very, very obviously relieved that they were out.

31:25But I think it's been interesting to watch his public pronouncements in relation to the issue of the cease -fire, very, very strongly out there. And I think that I saw an interview with one of the United Nations people who I thought made a, this is going to sound harsh, but it's not meant to be. He said he thought this debate here about the cease -fire was something we were red -haired because it's not going to happen. There is not going to be a cease -fire because neither the side at the moment are going to allow it to happen. So I think politicians outside their role has to be what influence can they bring to bear to make the situation on the ground better.

32:02But I guess the question is what direction are you hoping that those politicians are going to be exercising their influence in so far as they can at all. I mean, some people in the region would say many Americans would say that the idea that Netany IU was going to listen even to the United States is perhaps overrated. I think you'll listen to the United States. Will he listen that much to European leaders? And how much will he listen? Because I think there is a very interesting thing going on there, which is the arguments that we're making to the Israeli government for a strait are generally based on military logic.

32:40You're not going to be able to eliminate Hamas. I mean, I was reminded when we were in Afghanistan that I remember having a blazing rail with someone in 2005 and I was saying don't go into southern Afghanistan and start fighting the Taliban and they said no, there are only 2 ,500 Taliban fighters and on how on earth they thought they could count the number. They're now saying there are 40 ,000 Hamas fighters. How do you count these numbers? Because these are secret organizations. Really, that's the claim. The coalition forces then went into southern Afghanistan and killed 20 ,000 people at least.

33:15And then the next thing we heard, there were 30 ,000 Taliban fighters. So I think the military logic doesn't hold, but of course that isn't the only reason that it's happening. It is also true that a bit like our debate about prison and criminal justice, there's an element of revenge and deterrence in the Israeli calculus. some people in the Israeli government will not say explicitly but they will be thinking we want to demonstrate that we will kill many more of them for every one of us that we kill and we will do this again and again and that this is our best defense. I mean the health ministry in Gaza says that the the death toll is now into five figures over 10 ,000 and that 40 % are children and And it was interesting to watch the Israeli communications peoples response to that was essentially, you can't believe anything they say.

34:12This is the other point that Holmes and Yusuf made when I was contact with him, is this deliberate conflation of every Palestinian, everybody in the Gaza Strip with Hamas. Anybody who was stayed in the North means that they somehow are supporting Hamas. And every, I watched an interview with Mark Reggeff, who both of you and I both know. Because he was the ambassador here. He was the ambassador here. And the very smart guy, very close to Netanyahu, by all accounts was a pretty effective ambassador. And he's now brought back essentially as to be one of the chief spokesman in this pretty amazing communications machine where they, I mean, I noticed the guy, when I was up in Scotland recently, there was somebody on for the IDF.

34:53He had a Scottish accent. The, I saw an IDF spokesman of the day speaking in utterly flawless German on a German TV channel. So, and Mark Reggeb is a very technically, a very, very, very good communicator. He's also a very intelligent guy, but what I noticed about him yesterday was literally not giving an inch on any question. And it's an interesting question. I mean, I was listening to the today program in viewing an IDF spokesman. And what was fascinating is just how aggressive the IDF aspects when was being and how much clearly their communications decision seems to be to go into full on frontal attack, never given inch, be as absolutely aggressive towards the interferes you can possibly be.

35:43And I found that unsettling, I would have thought particularly at the moment that there would be space for a communication style, even if it's just a communication style, which at least recognized nuance talked about the difficulty. You know, and if you think about the way in which Spokesman communicated in Afghanistan or Iraq or Kosovo about spilling casualties that the normal communication was quite subdued. The military Spokesman would say, of course, you know, it's very difficult to actually just can happen with fighting in a very difficult environment. No doubt people can be killed, you know, we're doing our very best.

36:18But that isn't the standard. No, no, no, no. And you know, there's a specific example on Channel 4 because they'd done an interview with a doctor in one of the hospitals who was talking about the impossibility of working because of like a fuel, like of this, like of that. And he was very, very moving. And then Krishna Guramurthy then interviews Mark Reggev who basically his line is, you can't believe anything that they say because they're all being directed by Hamas. And then it gets into this argument with Krishna Guramurthy saying, well, no, you don't know that. This is somebody that, you know, we go to great lengths, we speak to different voices.

36:57And my way of then deliberately takes it down this line of anybody who is on the television from Gaza is basically scared by Hamas and therefore must be seen as a voice. Why do you think the decisions have been made to communicate in that much more abrasive style? I think partly because that tends to be their their motives are brandy, but also I think they are feeling and this is why I think they're so wound up about these huge marches that are taking place in different parts of the world, including hugely in the United Kingdom. So I think they're feeling very, very pressured, very, very defensive, and they want to, for obvious kind of communications reasons, they want to take it back all the time to October the 7th.

37:44They started it. They don't particularly want, I think, to talk about the history. They don't particularly want to talk about some of the things that they've not been doing in the recent past, but your right is a very, very aggressive form of communication. And you mentioned Kosovo there. I can remember you in the Kosovo conflict and also in relation to Iraq, that pressure that you feel to explain how you are trying to avoid civilian casualties. They don't seem to feel that pressure. And I think what they are trying to do is basically essentially to say, if you're still there in the parts that we're bombing, then we gave the channels to leave and they are, say, hospital schools, etc.

38:24Amos users have died, their fighters, therefore all is fair. And of course, I think we've discussed the last and I think the interview which we did with you, Varno Harari, on the internal Israeli politics. It's very good by the way of illustrating this, but it is far from the case that all Israeli political parties remotely agree about even fundamental things like the two -state solution. So Ben Gavir's party, which is a very important part of this coalition, simply rejects the two -state solution, Tali, Okay. Smart Trich often also talks about having no interest in it at all. He simply wants everything that's currently called Palestine to be Israel.

38:58So we often in the British context imagine that there is absolutely, consider as there are many people in Israel who are strongly in support of the two states of the nation, but they're also people who simply don't want to use the word Palestine at all, don't want to recognize the tool, including the Minister of Heritage, the sort of Nadine Doris position who's from Ben Gavir's party who said that one of the options that they were considering was dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza. Or sending them to Ireland was the other proposal. I think he did get, has he been suspended by Nessie now? I think he has, yeah.

39:28I think the other thing that was on this channel for a news program, watch last night, was an interview of one of the, that organization, the Sisters and Brothers of Israel, who said they were not going to serve because of the judicial reforms that we've talked about before. Basically, the guy was saying he doesn't trust Netanyahu but he does trust the IDF. And I think that's where a lot of public opinion is now in Israel. Not necessarily trusting Netanyahu but they do trust the IDF. But listen, you mentioned the point about the military logic. Netanyahu yesterday was saying that the expectation is that Israel will keep security control of Gaza at the end of whatever this phase is going to be and however long it's going to last.

40:11But I don't have a clear sense of what the long -term military plan is and it's not been explained and these, you know, all I've been saying, I think you agree with this, is that when you are conducting this kind of bombardment, it is incumbent, I think, upon those doing it to explain the logic at all times. And the logic isn't, you can't simply just go back to October 7th and say, that is why we are doing all of this. You have to be able to, I think, give a deeper explanation, but they've decided in terms of their communication, it's going to be very black and white, it's going to be very hard, no shades of grey.

40:48And I think we're just going to have to, we're going to have to get used to that. Very interesting, also. We've talked a bit about UK domestic politics and the way that this is playing out. So two things, one of the support for Biden amongst Arab voters has dropped, and most of the votes in general has dropped dramatically. You see, I think people are focusing very much on, say, Muslims in the UK and Arab voters in the United States. I think the other thing that's happening is that young people, in general, perhaps not as well informed of the history, I saw a terrible thing and was observed that we can only 2 % of British school children learn about the Middle East in history, 2%.

41:29And one of the reasons is that it's deemed to be too controversial and sensitive and so forth. That's terrible. That's got to be changed. So I think there are some terrifying polls out this week, if you like me and like you think that Trump is a sort of real threat to the world. In five of the six most important swing states, Trump is now head of Biden. And Trump is now closing on Biden amongst the black population. When you think that Trump spent yesterday being holding hold up by a judge for behaving inappropriately in a massive fraud case, and yet every time these things happen, he seems to get more subordinate or less.

42:08Absolutely. And it's also tells you a lot about British politics that as we pointed out, there's very little difference between Kierstamer and Rishi Sunex public positions. But the latest Times poll found that only 27 % of labor voters think that Starmist handled Well, whereas 72 % of Tory voters think that Suner excited it well. And given their saying the same thing, it tells you a lot about different composition of the parties. Of that divide, yeah. And I think if you look, I haven't seen any demographic analysis of the people who have gone on marches. But I imagine that there won't be that many hardcore Tories who are going on those marches.

42:45There will be a lot of Labour supporters. You know, we've had the resignation of Burnley Council. Yeah. Yeah. The Council leader and 10 councillors. Do you have much to do with Burnley Council, or is it just football that draws you? I do know quite a lot of the Burnley Council, yes, and I know the excellent Labour candidate, Oliver Ryan. But there are some seats. There's another one, Leicester, it's very, very tricky to politics there. I think for these Labour candidates who've been fighting on the cost of living, fighting on health service and all this sort of stuff, where they feel very comfortable, now they're suddenly thrust into a very, very difficult political argument.

43:20And I do think that the outset, Labour should have perhaps had a bit more nuance and a bit more subtlety in the position, because it was pretty obvious to me where this was heading very, very quickly. And he got in trouble, didn't he, just to remind, again, internationalists, he got in trouble because he appeared to be asked whether he defended cutting off of water and electricity, and it sounded like he thought that was fine, and it took him nearly five days to clarify and say he didn't think that was fine. Yeah, because why? This is why in these situations, every word, so he was asked whether he backed that and his answer was, Israel has the right to defend itself, which was taken as yes.

43:57But I think that for Labour, he can't back off the basic position now, but I think Labour as a more critical friend of the Israelis is a better place to be. Well, there we are. Now, let's bring this to Argentina. So Argentina had first election and 22nd of October, run off 19th of November. And there were two previous presidents who could have run, Alberto Fernandez, who was the guy that was in from 19 till now. And Christina DeCurtschner, who will talk a little bit more about who was in from 2007 to 2015. So they didn't run. Instead of which, the final two are absolutely extraordinary. So do you want to tell us a little bit about the two final candidates?

44:40It is the most incredible roll -offs. So you've had their system is you have the presidential election, you have to get, I think it's 45 % and if you don't, then it goes up to a roll -off of the first two. Which is similar to the French presidential election. Similar, not identical to similar. And they also have interestingly compulsory voting from 18 to 17. And you can vote at 16 to 17, but it's not compulsory. Which is quite interesting sort of, we should maybe think about that. So the two that have made it through, one of them is the economy minister who has presided over 140 % inflation. So that is pretty amazing.

45:18That's Sergio Massa. Just on that, on your basis of a normal political analysis, an economy minister who's presided over 140 % inflation. 40 % living in poverty. Yeah, and has seen the dollar go from 80 pesos to dollar in April 2020 to 1200 pesos us the dollar today. So just three years, unbelievable loss in the value of currency. And nevertheless, did better in the first round of voting than his rival. Then Havier, Mille. So Havier Mille. So that's Sergio Masa, who's the leader of the union of the home man, which is the current. And he's connected, peronist and coach, he's from that tradition.

45:51Or they slightly disinfered himself from that. And he's also in the past said that Christina should go to jail, but he seems to be back in, back in down from that now. And then Havier Millay is this guy who's constantly compared to Trump and Bolsonaro. He's a kind of economist, radical right. He picked a massive fight with the Pope during the campaign. He goes around with a chainsaw to sort of show that the whole system needs to be chopped down. So, Massa ended up with over number one, over 36%, a Millay ended up on 30%, which is not much beyond what he got in the the primaries, the end of the primaries, which is like a kind of dummy run.

46:32And the big loser was the conservative bull rich and she only got, I think, 24. But now her voters know the key. So who are they going to go to? Well, she's backing Milay. Whether all of her voters will is another matter. So she's backing the Mr. Wick. The other thing to understand about Milay, which makes him really famous, is that he had And he had a massive dog, huge dog called Conan the Barbarian, obviously a testimony to our previous interview. Absolutely. And by the way, if you're listening, yes, we would have you all. You're very happy to have you all. And then he sent off some cells from Conan the Barbarian to Worcester, Massachusetts to have it cloned.

47:14So he ends up with four identical masters who are basically Conan the Barbarian reborn, who he's called after right -wing politicians, of which the one he refers to, who most is Milton, Milton Friedman. And frequently in his political speeches, he cites a conversation that he's had with Milton. So he will often say, I've been thinking hard every night, but Milton advised me to... Milton the dog. Milton the dog. Yeah, and he's quite happy to say this at the Senate and things, you know, I've been talking to Milton and Milton has said, really, this is where we should go. And his economic policies that he's pushing for include essentially getting rid of the Argentinean currency and replacing it with the dollar.

47:51And you can understand in a sense why I mean if you've gone from 80 pesos to dollar to 1 ,200 pesos, dollar in just three years. But of course the problems with that are many. And one of them people will remember from Greece's experience through the financial crisis is that if you lose control of your currency and pin yourself to another country's currency, which is what you do with the dollar, you lose a huge amount of flexibility in being able to drop your exchange rates to rebalance your exports. And Argentina went through this a little bit in the past. Anyway, let's just pause for a second.

48:28Maybe we could do a little bit of history of Argentina. Yeah, go on. Tell us about the main facts about Argentina. We know the thing for which you are most famous in Argentina is of course you're amazing appearance with Diego Maradona. Oh, Rory, please, honest there. We're going to have to talk about playing with Diego Rado again. Oh, you know, okay, we should probably do a whole special episode. I'm really sorry. He's not around for us to interview. No, no, no. Apparently his final words were once played by Alex to come with him. And what he learnt from you. Yeah, that's right. We should tell the state of our list is that the producers are now headed hands, seek to death of hearing it.

49:05I never time to talk about Diego Rado, but I won't do it now. So Peron, he's one of the, we talk about Isms, you know, So, thatcherism, Blairism, Sunachism, whatever. But Peronism is one of the kind of defining political philosophies, certainly in terms of Argentina. So Juan Peron, who was part of the coup back in the day, and then president, then lost, then his party was banned. So, present, present, late 1940s, early 1950s, and with a wife called Ava. Here's a question for you. How old was Eva Peron when she died? Gosh, I have no idea. 70? 33. No. Isn't that amazing? That is amazing. And she's probably now more famous than her husband.

49:51Thanks to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Are you going to sing Don't Cry for me, Argentina? No. But he was like this incredibly charismatic leader. When you read his definition of his own political philosophy, it sounds very like new labor. It's like, you know, economy, it's social programs, it's bit of patriotism without being kind of a nationalist. But it was incredible. It became very, very, and we have to forget yeah, exactly how brutal it was. And really, Peron invented or reinvented populism in a way that dominated Latin American politics. So he was all about the people against the elites.

50:30Yeah. And Argentina just to take it back a little bit. I mean, Argentina was this a astonishing success story in the late 19th century. Unlike Brazil, Mexico, it was a country which really was dominated by European immigration, predominantly Italian immigration, which rapidly overwhelmed the indigenous population so that it felt the late 19th century more like maybe Canada or Australia in terms of relationship between immigrants, European immigrants and the local population. I had this incredible economic boom late 19th century with the invention of refrigerated ships that allowed people to move Argentine B for cross the world.

51:07GDP per capita in Argentina was higher than in the United States. By the end of the 19th century, it was one of the seven largest economies in the world. It remained by the time Peron took over one of the 15 largest economies in the world. So enormous giant. And really did feel as though this was an Australia or Canada, this kind of country. And of course, your friend Diego Maradona's his name applies part of that Italian immigration movement. Since 1946, the Peronist candidate has won 10 out of 13 elections in those which they've been allowed to stand. There was a period when they couldn't stand, they were banned.

51:43The one that we got to know quite well was Carlos Manem, who was also a Peronist, but he moved it to the right. Mass is moving a little bit back to the centre left, so they fight under this umbrella of Peronism. And the thing that he's now emphasizing in the runoff against Milay, he's going very heavy on family, religion and lapatria, the nation. And I think the reason for that is he's probably working out that is why Milay seems to have got stuck at 30 percent, is because he did, let's say, peaked a fight with the Pope. The Pope ended up calling him a Nazi. The Pope called him a Nazi and he called the Pope a filthy leftist.

52:26And I think to call the Pope a filthy leftist, if you're going to list the countries where the Pope is very, very popular, Argentina is going to be very high up there. Is he not an Argentinian Pope? Well, he's the other reason. So I think that he's, it'll be fascinating to see what happens now because although Borgrich has sort of swung behind Millay, I don't think you can guarantee that all of her vote as well. Now again, for the listeners who aren't Latin American specialists, we've talked exactly like us, like like like like us. One of the ways to think about what's happening in Latin America is that many of the countries followed a pretty standard evolution.

53:06So Argentina like many of the countries Latin America went for military rule in the late 70s, early 80s. So people in Britain will remember General Gaultiari and the invasion of the focal lines. Then went through huge debt crises in the 1980s. Mexico had this enormous debt crisis in 1982, but it's true of Brazil, true of Argentina. And then in the 90s, they got these tetanocrats. So you were talking about men in Argentina, Cardo, Sohn, Brazil, Zedillo, and Mexico. So the 90s, they went much more sort of third -way, neo -liberal. And then in the early 2000s, they began to benefit from a massive commodity boom, which also brought in more left -wing populist governments who benefited from the commodity boom, spent money like water.

53:51But increasingly got themselves caught up in corruption scandals. So in Brazil, famously the car wash scandal, which ended up with Lula who's now back again going to jail. I mean, he literally took a beach front apartment from a businessman. But in Argentina, corruption is beyond everything. I mean, there's a, you know, famous cliche about British politics that in a British politics is about class, all else is embellishment and detail. To some extent you could say our Chintinian politics recently has been about corruption and all else's embellishment and detail. I mean, the corruption scandals are just beyond imagining.

54:27We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases, billions of dollars of others. So Ketzner herself is caught up in incredible allegations about building enormous roads to nowhere in her own base, a constituency base in remote areas where the contractors kickbacks the delays. I mean, if you think HS2 is bad, I mean, this stuff is beyond imagining. Presumably, this is why she did a run in the end, is that she feared what would be coming her way. She was found guilty and sentenced to six years into December 22, and she's now appealing. There's also this great notebook scandal that caught her up where one of the government car service drivers was keeping notebooks over a period of seven years, just recording a cash coming in and out, the deals doing it.

55:15Well, recording it for his own benefit. In the notebooks, yeah, and people were bit suspicious about what Northeat all he was doing, keeping these notebooks going for 10 years and then handing them over, but absolutely extraordinary. So recorded I think $160 million in bribes. And so hold on the driver's driving the car and Christine is in the back of the car doing these deals not Christina always it's it's it's often different sorts of Ministers connected to her but Jose lepas for example was found stashing $9 million in cash and luxury watches in a convent so he was the minister of I think development We thought God would be looking for it for him and and a lot of the businesses have testified now in Argentina I mean Polarocka, who's one of the most famous billionaires, just says we just had to pay bribes.

55:58Catchness had eight and a half million dollars for own cash for his, and the daughter's had six and a half million dollars for the daughter's cash for his, and again one asks, where exactly this money comes from? This is the other reason why it's pretty remarkable that Massa did as well as he did, because if you're the finance minister of the government that's presided over all this, then I have no evidence to say one way or the other about him, but it's hard to sort of think that doesn't get counted against you as well. And yet he's got 36 .6 % of the vote. And part of the point is that in Argentina, and this is true in Brazil too, that the leftist populist politicians will suggest that these corruption charges are completely politically motivated, and it's definitely true in Argentina.

56:44Well, that's the game Trump is playing. Absolutely. the judge exactly like that Trump, but particularly in Argentina, the judges tend not to act until there's been an election and then they turn against the government. So there's a real problem with judiciary because the judges can decide when to take a case, when not to take a case, when you proceed. So anyway, really worth watching. Oh no, it's going to be fascinating, absolutely fascinating. And the other thing, whoever wins, I mean we talk a lot about if KS time becomes prime minister, he's got a really difficult sort of, you know, circumstances to inherit, but Argentina, you're talking about, they're very close to hyperinflation.

57:20They've been in triple digit inflation now for quite some time. So I was talking to an Argentinian friend on Monday night for dinner who said the key thing to understand at this maybe he may be unfaithored was their encounterment, but he said the key thing to understand is that Sergio Massa is very, very good looking and that really matters in Argentinian politics. He's very good looking and he's very smart and he's a survivor. And the thing about being good looking, I don't know if I've told you this before, there was once a study in an American university, they had a hundred pairs of two sets of pictures.

57:51And the pictures were of two candidates in elections which had already happened. Okay, so the elections, and they were council elections, and senatorial elections. They weren't kind of household figures, we're not talking about Trump Biden. And they presented these pictures to a very large sample of people and said, who do you think won based on the pictures? and they got like nine out of ten right. And it's largely they just picked the better looking one. They picked the one that they thought was like one. Well I was always very struck by this when I went with the Foreign Affairs Committee in the sense of why you lost it for as long as it was.

58:23So that's absolutely such a good looking guy. That's what it was. Exactly. When I went with the Foreign Affairs Committee in Defense Committee to Washington, I was always very, very struck by the fact that we were all really small and weird looking. So me and my friend Frank Roy would go into the thing. And every American Senator we met was way over six for the charity. Yeah, it looked amazing. Yeah, really. And fat actually, I thought security guards in the capital found it very difficult to believe that we were members of Parliament. Well, there we are. We should keep a very, very close eye on Massa and Millay, but it's going to be whoever's the last man standing has got big, big challenges ahead.

59:02Great. See you next time. A question time. See you next time for Question Time.