192. What David Cameron’s return means for Israel-Gaza

23:06Right now, just to finish the first half, France. So there's been these extraordinary march in Paris, very, very moving march, over 100 ,000 people marching against anti -Semitism. And it was a rather wonderful march. I was talking to someone who was on it. The decision was, there were no banners, no slogans, no chanting. So people walks in a very respectful way, but was applause as people walked through. It is a complicated issue in France to put it mildly. Third biggest Jewish population in the world. Very large kind of half a million people. And even though there's been an increasing emigration from France to Israel over the last 10, 20 years, still a very significant population.

23:49France, of course, a very complicated, deeper history of anti -Semitism. So it's a slightly different context, the Britain, you know, Dreyfus affair, but also, of course, the Second World War. And I think, though now, anti -Semitism in France is largely at least perceived as being driven by Muslim communities. And one of the tensions in French society is between quite a large Jewish community and an increasingly large Muslim, most in North Africa community. The incidence of what the police and the security services define as anti -Semitic acts has tripled since, or over the seventh, to 1 ,250.

24:31And, you know, we said last week that some of the Jewish people that we've been speaking to, who have noticed that this is their, what Bravenman calls the hate marches, which was one of the most offensive things to say, but what they feel is that when they see these pro -Palestinian marches, you see people of all classes, all colors, all ages, etc. But when you have pro -Jewish marches, you tend to see Jews. And what was different about the one in France was that this did have much more of a feel of people coming out and saying, look, there is this rise of anti -Semitism, but we are not going to be part of it.

25:05And it was much more of a classless kind of exhibition. And of course, the big news story out of it was the fact that Marine Le Pen, leader of the far right, whose father, John Marine Le Pen, was an avowed anti -Semite that she was on the march, but Melanchion, John Luke Melanchion who leads the hard left. Just sort of Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn type thing, or in French parties, was not there. Presumably either because they're worried about offending his Muslim supporters, or because he's part of that hard left tradition that does have a little bit of a problem as well. Yeah, yeah, like Corbyn himself.

25:38One more thing that was very interesting is that there's David on walls in France. And it appears from the early reporting as though the people doing it were Moldovans who appeared to have been in contact with some kind of Russian handler. And this has raised the possibility that quite a lot of what is happening, or some element of what is happening, is the Russian intelligence services trying to stir up, in Europe. And they have real, I mean, this isn't just a conspiracy theory. There's now very good documentary evidence that they did exactly that in Germany in the late 1950s, early 1960s. And very, very successfully.

26:19So deliberately backed German fire right groups to do anti -Semitic things, really shook the German government, got the British parliament and others very angry with Germany, caused huge rifts in Europe. And certainly Russian bots have really been pushing hard this kind of device. God, the world without social media, you think it might be better? Just possibly. So we have a final word for the break on the future of the weekly marches in the UK. And we are talking about pretty big numbers now. The police normally give underestimates of this number. And even the police were saying 300 ,000 at the weekend plus out marches in different parts of the country.

26:57And I do think that some of the, I thought soon after statements on the week that the policing was an outrage actually because it was a little bit like Trump's, there were good people on both sides. They were essentially saying that these far right protesters, well, they called them counter protesters, but who were trying to get the senator, that the violence was sort of equivalent to what was happening on the pro -Palestin much, which just was not the case. I mean, if you just look at the numbers of the far right and the level of violence, it was horrible. And then you look at 300 ,000 with just a few arrests.

27:26It was quite a good balance article. I thought in the time that somebody who'd been with the pro -Palestinian march, which we can share in the in the notes, in which he got the sense that a lot of it was very moderate, very frondy. And I saw bits of it. I took my kids out to Hyde Park that afternoon. And I saw a lot of people coming back with flags. But there were also things that he had been doing. And definitely the, there's something visually very, very disturbing about people deliberately dressing in balaclavas with his headbands because that's kind of sort of ISIS -wind -ness. No, I don't think, again, to be fair to the police, the police get a lot of flag.

28:04They were put under horrible pressure by what Bravaman and the right wing pressed it. And I thought it was quite interesting how they, they police things as fairly calmly, apart from where it got really violent. But then on the, I think it was the Sunday or the Monday, I think it was after the arms to commemorations. They put out a series of pictures, quite a lot of them, essentially saying we'd like to interview these people. But both the far right and some people on the, on the pro -Palestinian march. And I suspect that very quietly now, it'll be going around interviewing these people and saying, you know, why did you carry that antisemitic placard?

28:37Why did you offend that person at Waterloo station? Whatever it might be. So I think they handled it pretty well under pretty intolerable pressure. Good. Take a break. Take a break.

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30:02Welcome back to the Rest Politics with me, Roris Yert. And me, Alistair Campbell. Now, Alistair, what I want to know is what legacy do you think you'll leave? God. Well, I was asked is a Brit -Port book festival. I think they wanted me... There were a lot of planks for Brit -Port book festivals. Yeah, I enjoyed it. I did enjoy it. And the thing I enjoyed most about it was my dog coming on the stage. That was very moving. It was very moving. But no, and somebody asked me about what my legacy would be. And I said, well, I don't think I'll really have one because I was part of working with a genuinely historic figure who Tony Blair will have and Gordon Brown will have big legacy.

30:35And I can talk about legacy for things like changing communications and mental health campaigns, etc, etc, etc. But then I did say, I found myself saying what I'd quite like my legacy to be is on the day I die. People say he was the one who never stopped banging on about what a disaster Brexit was. And that's part of the reason why we're back in Europe. Okay, that's good. Now that would be good. On that subject, there is a series which has just come forward by the rather wonderful Peter Frankapan, who's the author of Silk Road, great best -selling Silk Road millennials, and Afua Hirsch, the journalist of the Royal Custer.

31:11And they are looking at the subject of legacy, legacy of great historical figures, people like Mikhail Gorbachev, Nina Simone, Pavley Picasso, Napoleon. Is that sort of thing you might want to engage with Alistair? I think it's fascinating. If I on the tube this morning, second plug for the tube today, posters of the new film, Napoleon film, the Ridley Scott film, all over the place. So that is legacy, that is part of legacy when centuries later people are making films about it. I just can't like my great grandfather must have been completely obsessed with Napoleon at the end of the century, because we've got these sort of silver busts of Napoleon and the lawful things to put in.

31:49And he was a businessman, and maybe he thought, you know, I'm a Napoleon of my age. That's kind of... No, I think it's great. And the other one I think about a lot is when you say certain more posters, Hamilton. So Hamilton, one of the sort of family fathers in the states, had a legacy. But in a way, his legacy now gets redefined and redeveloped. So many, because everyone has probably forgotten about Hamilton. Yeah, and I had forgotten about Hamilton until somebody produced a massive musical about it. So I think that that could be our hope. They could produce a podcast musical. Rest his politics, the musical.

32:21150, 200 years time. He could be all over the tube. Do you want to have a legacy? Do you think they want... When you died, do you want people to say, oh, Rory Stewart, he left his, this, and he left his, that? I would really like that. I just need to work out what it is. Yeah. Well, you made me need to take up, if you're in a suggestion, go and work with the King. Yeah, or, or, or convince Kierstarma that he really needs a foreign secretary with sort of deep international experience. Kier, Kier, are you listening? I think David Bordes Point, David Labia, you listening? Could be a problem. Anyway, this podcast legacy, it's a collaboration between Goldhanger, which makes our podcast and Wondery, another leading podcast producer, search legacy wherever you get your podcast, and you can binge entire seasons of legacy, at free on Amazon Music.

33:03So Rory, the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal, let's start with Spain. It is amazing what's happening there, and yet, I know there's a lot going on, there's the Middle East, there's the Sunat reshuffle, etc. But you've really got to dig into the British media to find anything of what's happening there, and it's kind of cataclysmic what's going on. Yeah, it's amazing. So, little summary, a lot of the reader this is the movement for Catalan independence, which maybe we can talk about a little bit, because there's some interesting parallels with Scottish independence referendum and Brexit referendum.

33:35And what happened after that Catalan independence referendum, and now an amnesty that's been declared, but give us your sense on the current politics, and then maybe we can go back a little bit into the history of Catalonia. Well, so you had an election where essentially nobody really won, and to put a government together, Pedro Sanchez, Prime Minister has done a deal with a series of Republic Catalan independence movements, parties, part of the deal is that there will be an amnesty for people who, in the eyes of the courts, broke the law to set up an independence referendum, and broke the laws law sufficiently for the leader, Karls Purgman, that he had to sort of flee the country and go off in exile.

34:22So, you've got a lot of people who've now, basically, who were seen as lawbreakers, and are now going to be given an amnesty as part of this deal, and there's a massive protest. This is one of the classic questions, isn't it, in democratic politics trying to form a coalition, whether you're prepared to bring in parties who are outside the pale in order to shore up your coalition? Big question in Israel? Of course, big question again and again with far -right parties in Europe. Germans trying to work out whether you bring the AFD and things in the coalition, which they wouldn't want to do. But certainly from the point of view of traditional Spanish, I suppose, moderate nationalists who really believe in the root of law and the constitution and holding Spain together, they are completely horrified.

35:06And something like two -thirds of the Spanish public is totally horrified, that in order to push himself into power, Pedro Sanchez, who is this sort of really good -looking left -wing leader. Two weeks ago, Roy, you've talked about how good it is. Well, I think, you know, I was also praising the Argentinian. I mean, I think this is... Sorry, that's right. That's right. This is generally my theory that... Good -looking leaders. That Latin politics likes. Good -looking leaders. Although you then told me that actually this wasn't true, this is universal, and that basically good -looking people win elections, and that they did research in the US, and that was true.

35:38What's interesting about good -looking is about looking like their winners. You don't always have to be good -looking at that. But the thing is that, I think the other thing that's driving the anger is that they've had an election where actually the vote for the independence parties really fell. So we went down from 42 % in 2019 to 27 % in Catalonia. So you've got lack of political legitimacy as how the rest of Spain is looking at this. Or, you know, big -site junctions. That's actually also didn't win. The right -wing party got sighting more votes than him. So he's also it would be like Gordon Brown and Britain losing the 2010 election, getting fewer votes than Cameron and then pitching together a deal with the Lib Dems in order to stand up.

36:20Just quickly back on. I do the... Hold on, right. I mean, just pin you up on that one. You can't quite compare the liberal Democrats to the UK. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, you certainly can do that. Of course, those fine, proud, moderate nationalists in the Lib Dems cannot be compared. Of course, they have a lot of trouble if I do that. So Catalonia, really interesting. I mean, I think a huge difference between Britain and Spain on this issue. So to remind people, Catalonia, like Scotland, had a very interesting, distinct history from the rest of Spain, different institutional history. It was originally an independent territory, then became part of the Spanish monarchy, but even after it became part of the Spanish monarchy, had very different legal and parliamentary systems, and of course, had a different linguistic heritage, different language, much more so than in Scotland, a very, very distinct language.

37:10And it then became the industrial powerhouse of Spain. So obviously, the central Catalonia is Barcelona, amazing footballing, heritidionalist kind of stuff. And of course... That maradona played for the United States. Maradona, your friend Maradona, yeah, your teammate. They also had, you know, this was very important of course during this Spanish Civil War. And the question of whether parts of Spain break away and become independent is even rora because not just the catalan movement, but also Bask terrorism and the movements there, so that it maybe feels too, it's difficult to get an analogy, but maybe a moderate Spanish nationalist feels more about it in the way that people would have thought about Ireland in Britain in the 19th century, more than perhaps people think about Scotland today.

37:57Anyway, which one was elected into the regional government in Catalonia? And he decided in 2017 to hold a referendum. Now, unlike Scotland, where basically, Cameron said, fine, you want to hold a referendum, you can hold a referendum. And if you get more than 50 % of the vote, you can go independent. Spain has very strong constitutional structures to protect. Was that one of your friends 257? Yes, I would have say that was one of those mistakes. Yeah. And I actually think the whole idea, I think the Spanish are right and we're wrong. I don't think major constitutional changes should be able to happen just because one politician wants them every other country, Spain, the United States, etc.

38:36These big constitutional would require supermajority, not just a slim 50 plus one vote, and that's what got us in trouble, Brexit. And that's what would have got us in trouble in Scotland too. Anyway, in this case, he pushed ahead. It was boycotted by anti -independence voters. It was declared illegal by the Spanish government. The guard of this year was deployed and the courts. So you end up with the Spanish police, you know, 15 ,000 of them deployed into Catalonia to try to prevent these elections. happening. It was almost impossible. Imagine the British context is happening. People then turn out to vote 92 % of those who voted vote for independence on a 43 % turnout.

39:19Yeah. So to put it in context, if you do the maths in Scotland, it was 44 .7 % on 84 % turnout in Brexit. It was 51 .9 % on a 72 % turnout. And the maths works out like this. 37 .47 % of the British population voted yes of eligible voters. 37 .82 % of the Scottish population voted yes. And in case Catalonia, 39 .56. So more people as a percentage of the registered voters voted for Catalan. Even with the massive boycott voted for Catalan independence, then voted for Scottish independence or for Brexit. However, it was completely disallowed. And which month then fled? For Ed. One to exile. And a rest warrant was issued for him.

40:08He had to skip around different European countries was eventually picked up, I think, by the German police. And he's being chased for lots of things, including misuse of public funds because he had to pay for the ballot boxes, which are normally funded by the federal government. And for the majority, it seems two -thirds of Spanish people, this is not something they take casually at all. They see it as an existential threat to the existence of Spain. In fact, it appears as though there's a strong argument that what Petro Sancho is doing is actually illegal. He doesn't have the power to grant an amnesty.

40:40The king can pardon someone like the president in the United States, but Petro Sancho is can't. And in apparently, the European Union is now demanding an explanation on what's done. Yeah. Now, and of course, this is all to avoid him having to, he could just have said, well, election result was unclear. Let's have another go. And the coalition is now put in together. The number of parties involved in it is going to be in double figures. So it's a very, very, very unstable situation. But it does give some leverage, doesn't it, to the Catalan independence? Oh, because a big hold of balance of power.

41:11Absolutely. And they push for another referendum. Look, I think it's very hard to see how he holds it together. There is an argument that is taking what is such a clearly political issue out of the legal framework and back into the political framework. There is an argument. Yeah. And certainly in a British context, I think we would probably see it in that way. If Nicholas Sturgeon had decided to push ahead holding a referendum, which wasn't approved by Westminster, I think it's unlikely that she would have been pursued through the courts, prosecuted for legal use of money and how to flee the country.

41:44She has other legal difficulties too. But these protests are getting pretty, pretty violent. The former right -wing leader, Quadras, he was shot in the face on a street in Madrid whilst out on a protest protest. And while we're recording this, he's still in hospital. And of course, that's the sort of incident that gets all sorts of conspiracy theories going. The assumption at the start was that it was a sort of left -winger. Now there's the serious suggestion that actually it was an Iranian hit job. So this is yet another, feels like quite a local issue where there may be kind of quite international factors at play as well.

42:23That's extraordinary. What the Iranian government thinks they're doing, China. I mean, that seems unlikely to me that they would think. Not necessarily a government, but there could be all sorts of other tensions going on. Because don't forget a lot of tensions play out from that part of the world. And as we're seeing in the UK right now as well. So anything else you want to say about Spain? No, I think you're across the border. The portugal. The portugal. And so this is Antonio Costa, who again is a bit of a sort of hero for the moderate progressive left. He, the leader of Portugal, Socialist Party.

42:58And this is second term. He was seen as doing well with COVID. He had sort of relatively gentle measures to come out of austerity, seem to be getting economic growth off the ground. Very, very interesting backstory. As I think you pointed out to us when we were celebrating the fact that Rishi Sunak was the first British Asian Prime Minister. I think you pointed out that actually this in Europe he was actually the third because we have a Prime Minister of or a T -Shok of Asian descent in Ireland. And in the case of Antonio Costa, his father, Orlando de Costa, is part Goen, part Goen Indian, and partly from Mozambique.

43:38Anyway, over to you on this.

43:42When he was running for the last election, I did a big profile of him in the European. Did you go to interview him? No, I went out there and sort of met people around him. What did you learn? Well, I wrote a very, very positive piece essentially saying this guy is bucking the trend. He's a left to centre leader at a time. He seems to be shifting right. He's competent, he's popular, and who is taking Portugal in a interesting and different direction and doing it very, very well. And our old friend Corruption comes along. Now, he is pleading his innocence. But the fact is that a lot of cash was found in his offices and in his official residents.

44:28And his chief of staff, a guy called Vito Adesgario, has been arrested along with five others. And the reason they've been singled out is that the authorities say they were worried about them fleeing. Costa is also a subject of criminal investigation. And this relates to some pretty major projects building and hydrogen projects in different parts of Portugal. And he didn't take nearly in a way have to resign. But I suspect they have quite an interesting relationship between the president and the prime minister. The president was pretty clear that he was going to call a new election. And so Costa's stepped down.

45:08He's the caretaker prime minister until an election. And we're waiting to see who's going to represent which parties at that. And Portugal's a very positive story really within the European Union. In some sense, it's reminiscent of Ireland. It was a country that was very poor after the Second World War. In the case of, it's a Portugal part of a dictatorship until the 1970s, Salazar, joined the European Union in the 1980s and changed very, very quickly from a very poor place to a place that began to get into the middle of the league tables on life expectancy, GDP per capita, developed quite a good tourism industry.

45:47It's also had, as we've discussed, managed to avoid a lot of the problems of far -right populism. Although I was called up on that with somebody pointing out that there is the emergence of a far -right populist party in Portugal. Who will benefit from this, I suspect? Well, they didn't do nearly as well as people who's voted with the last election. They were the big fear and it just didn't happen in the way it had elsewhere. So I think, I think Costa has held that off. But, you know, corruption, when you think the populism part of it is about turning the people against an elite, there's nothing worse than corruption.

46:18Corruption for that. And on Furchi Portugal has had a bit of a bad repetitious corruption. I'm fascinated by corruption because we talk about it a lot in British politics, but the scale in Portugal has been much more dramatic. Socrates, who was the successor and Tony Guterres, who's now the UN Secretary -General, was the Prime Minister of Portugal and his successor from the same party, the same Socialist Party Socrates got caught up in a big corruption investigation in which he managed to get a dodgy university to award him a fake engineering degree in which he ended up with millions of euros being held by a mate for him.

46:54So he was in real trouble. Well, and even though Costa, this is the first time that he's been right at the heart of one of these corruption scandals, there have been 10 senior government officials who've lost their job since he won in 2022. So one of the ones I touched as I knew slightly the lady who was the chief executive of Portuguese Airlines. Oh tap, that was a big one. Yeah, and she had to step down as part of one of these scandals in which the Treasury Secretary of State received a 500 ,000 euro severance payment when she stepped down from the border tap. So quite a lot of these scandals are these companies which sort of partly nationalized and politicians and senior civil servants get on positions in these companies and end up getting payoffs.

47:37And then as you say, the Secret Intelligence Service to Portugal then recovered a laptop. Somebody called Galambo then came in as the new minister and then was also accused of conspiracy in this whole thing. So it is, it's a bit messy. It's a bit messy. And there those investigations, as you say about Hydro, about a data center, a lithium exploration. So unfortunately, just as final thing on Antonio Costa, his father, all -and -it -cost Drift people want to read about him was a go and write her. Go was of course historically part of the Portuguese empire as was Mozambique and strangely actually.

48:15Antonio Costa's cousin is a senior politician in Mozambique as well. And he was imprisoned. And then his mother is a really interesting figure. So she's called Maria Antonio Palo and she was a radical atheist communist republican radical feminist journalist who campaigned to make abortion not a crime in Portugal when it was a very official country. Married his dad because Antonio Costa's dad was in prison and because it was a conservative country, you couldn't have contricle visiting rights unless you were married. So when he was vaguely, briefly released from prison, she married him before he went back into prison so that she could continue her contricle visits.

48:53And so he comes from this very kind of interesting radical left wing. He's an opera actor. And there's an opera to be written about. That's a good, good. I'm one of my even though not really into opera, but one of my yet as yet unfulful ambitions is to write an opera. Well, I didn't think it sounds like a very good idea. If you're not into it, I think you should be doing things that you love. Yeah, because I could get into it by writing. Why not musical? Do you like not them like them? I love musicals. Oh, you should do musicals. No, but I think opera's just sort of sound a bit grand. The other thing, just to just to maybe close on this, the public prosecutor's office, this just shows how things could go horribly wrong.

49:32They confused the name of Costa with the economy minister who's called Antonio Costa Silver when they were transcribing all the wire taps. So there's lots of wire taps involved. This is going to be a great seat of the opera. There were all these wire taps that were transcribed. So according to the lawyer of one of the defendants, there was this terrible era where Prime Minister Costa was being confused at one stage with the economy minister in the wire tap. But if you think about it also, I mean, that could be a good defense. But also if you think about it in the context of British politics, if the security services started wiretapping the Prime Minister, you'd have to be pretty confident what you were doing before you got a secret.

50:17And also, well, I don't know what the system is important, but certainly here, I don't know what would happen because here, sort of really intrusive surveillance that has to sign off. So that'd be good. And if James Cleveley's first first silent office to say, we have reason to believe we need to wire tap the Prime Minister. So there, I'm loving the, what should we call the opera? Costa Costa. Costa Costa. Costa. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, here we go. So there we are. Next week, I think we should have a little discussion, it was we're in Europe, we should have a little discussion about the Netherlands because they got an election coming up.

50:55Very good. Well, look forward to that very much. Thank you. So we've done a lot Portugal, Spain, but on the Middle East. Oh, and Donald Tusk is now finally got his coalition together, which is great news and power. And just for my listeners, that is the election of a really impressive moderate force and the breaking of the back of the popular stranglehold, which has been in, in Polish politics since 2015. So really remarkable victory. Okay, Rory, been up for now. See you soon. Great. Bye -bye.