207. Question Time: Fighting British corruption, Japan's economic conundrum, and a Premier League team in Belfast

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0:50Welcome to the Restus Politics question time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alex Campbell. So, where do you want to start? Well, I think we should start on new year resolution, given that this is our new year recording. Robbie Meeks, what should each main UK party leader have as a new year's resolution? Okay, Rishi Suneak, start doing the job. Keir Starmer, more courage. Very good. I like this too. Another way of framing it is given that we both think that Keir Starmer's going to be the next Prime Minister. Rishi Suneak do all the things that you actually care about and believe in because you're not going to win the next election.

1:26So, this is an opportunity to not worry about the politics and just get on with doing the right stuff. And Keir Starmer, given that you're going to be the next Prime Minister, come up with some pretty clear bold ideas. Well, my big problem with that is I think to fight a campaign, you have to have two mindsets running alongside each other. One is I could still lose this if you're Keir Starmer. And Rishi Suneak to fight a good campaign has to get out of bed thinking he could win. So, I wouldn't say to Rishi Suneak, it's all over, get stuff done. What I would say is you're in a difficult position and the best way to get out of it is to stop playing these silly political games.

1:59So, you saw the debate over tax over the Christmas and New Year period. This whole debate about tax, inheritance tax, threshold levels and so forth was all about and borrowing. How do we make this a trap for labor as opposed to kind of what's the right thing to do for the economy right now? And I think if Rishi Suneak tried to do the job seriously and properly, I think people are going to get really turned off by the whole thing being seen through this prison. That was the other reason why the Cummings thing was probably bad for him. And likewise, where I agree with you about Keir is have the mindset that says I could be Prime Minister and I could get elected facing a multiple massive challenges.

2:37I have to have the outlines of the answers to those challenges now and campaign on those. And I think just a bit more boldness and a bit more courage. Very good. Okay. Now, Conor Murray, to what extent was Alice's part of the discussions to relocate Wimbledon football club to Belfast after the Good Friday agreement? Surely it kind of mean it's serious proposal. So just give us a bit of background on what this idea was when it was and what on earth the concept was. Well, I'm assuming given that these are papers from, was it 20 years ago or 25 years ago? I guess 25 years ago. Yeah. I've got to say that this will sound ridiculous.

3:13If you're a passionate supporter of Wimbledon, it will sound ridiculous that I can't remember the detail very, very much. So what I do remember having a very discussion about it with Sam Hamann, who was the owner of Wimbledon. And this was a time when Wimbledon was having to move for all sorts of historical reasons. Again, vague on the detail. It was ground sharing with Crystal Palace, apparently at the time. Yeah, there were ground sharing with Crystal Palace. That for some reason had to stop. They ended up moving to Milton Keynes, but somebody had the idea what about moving Wimbledon to Northern Ireland so that the Northern Ireland felt it was part of the Premier League.

3:52That's right. Belfast would host a team in the Premier League. Correct. Correct. Now, whether they would stay there that long would be another matter, but it was definitely discussed. I don't think it got off the ground. It got further off the ground than the other ludicrous idea that I had of Rangers' Blake Celtic. It fell fast, swapping their shirts before they gave nothing that after that was definitely one of my crazier ideas. So this first of all, this was not my idea specifically where it came from. I can't remember, but it was discussed. And I remember I went to a, I think it was Wimbledon against Manchester United.

4:26The reason I remember it is because Grace, my daughter talks about it a lot because David Beckham touched her hair. That is a true story. David Beckham touched her hair since she was very very excited about that. But I remember having a discussion with Sam about it. I can't remember what he said, but I will have reported it back and that may have been the papers. And what would have happened? I believe Wimbledon moving to Milton Keynes annoyed a lot of Wimbledon supporters and they went off to AFC Wimbledon. Presumably Wimbledon moving to Belfast would have annoyed a lot of Wimbledon supporters.

4:54They would have had to find a whole new support base. Yeah, it would. It would. No, the Milton Keynes stories, and interesting, there was still some people who won't go to Milton Keynes because they saw it as part of this modern, franchised football. Historical factory, I think the first game that they played at Milton Keynes was against Burnley. Look, I'm sorry if I'm vague on the detail, but this is what's quite interesting about where these papers come out year after year after year. There was a lot this year about my dispute with the BBC over Iraq. That was under the 20 -year rule. There was also one in which Jeremy Haywood, who was a very senior civil servant, great guy, went on to be cabinet secretary, but he wrote a private memo to Tony Blair, which when you read it, the headlines all said he was being critical of me.

5:39In fact, he said that he was reporting criticisms which he found to be monstrous, but he was pointing out that my media machine was in a bit of difficulty. So I guess you look at these things. I don't go and look at the whole lot. There are thousands of people who would have put out there. It's also fascinating for historians, isn't it? Because it's a reminder that actually talking to one of the key players 25 years later doesn't all help you as much as you'd think, because people's memories aren't quite what they were. I feel this now that if someone infuse me about what I was doing in Iraq 20 years ago, I'm not sure I'm the most reliable witness anymore because a lot of things get muddled and confuse my mind.

6:19No, also, I'm really bad at years. I'm really bad at remembering exactly when something was and where it fitted into a pattern. Also, because I'm away at the moment, so I don't have access to my diaries, I probably could have looked up Sam Aman, Wimbledon, and see whether I put anything in my diary. That might have triggered a memory. Would it be a wholly accurate memory? Not necessarily. So I think you're right about historians. I think the reason why this whole sort of WhatsApp culture is a bit of a problem for historians is that one, you have situations where the records are not being kept properly.

6:52There is no proper archive of discussions and meetings. And even like, so I said for example, you know, I bumped into Sam Aman at the football match. So I might have got home or waited till the Monday morning. That was a Saturday. I might have waited till the Monday morning, fire off a very short note recording the meeting. That would be broadly accurate given it was so soon in your memory. But if you then 10 years later, it becomes controversial for some reason, or it gets involved in a public inquiry, do you really remember, or are you remembering fragments based upon the record that already exists?

7:26It's a very, it's a very interesting thing and that's why people, you know, we should keep proper records of discussions. But I've never read a, if you look at the minutes of cabinet meetings from that time when they get published, they don't really refrate the discussion. They sort of, they give you a line of what somebody said and then a line of what somebody else said. I mean, that's the great trick of the civil servants, isn't it? I mean, my father was the secretary of the Joint Intelligence Committee when he was the civil servant. And he was brutally honest about the fact that he was determined that the committee minutes would always reflect his conclusions and he would arrange the entire committee around that.

8:02And then he would draft it and send it off and nobody would bother to read it and they'd sign off and he'd get authorization to do almost whatever he wanted. Is that why did you get the top job? Exactly, put it away and get the top job. Question from Jenny, why do the inspectors insist upon disturbing a school, its staff and pupils, rather than just getting an honest assessment of what normally happens? When I was principal of a sixth form college and an inspection loomed, I decided not to tell the teachers so as not to disturb their teaching. I told the inspectors when they arrived, they would see all the teaching as it always was, not especially reorganized for them.

8:31They were not pleased. The result was 9 out of 10 for teaching quality but 2 out of 10 for admin. I was delighted. Oh, interesting. We talked about this just before Christmas when we had that awful story of the suicide of a head teacher whilst a pretty difficult inspection was going on. I think we do have to look at this inspection business. I mean, I know a lot less about this than the fear in the course she's been chair of governors of several schools but every time you get the word, there's going to be an off -stead. It sort of sends the school into a kind of not chaos, but you all attention goes on that because it's so important.

9:05The outcome is so important. And there is more to a school that I think than I think getting a sense of the school is as important as some of the box ticking that gets done. So I think I actually think it'd be good if Labour do come in that they back the principal of school inspection and a school grading, but I think that it should be less blunt than we have now. And I think that we do need to rethink the way that these inspections are done because it's very rare that you hear head teachers and teachers describing it as anything other than a pretty unhealthy process. Now here's one for you, Rory.

9:39This is a question from Fion Kelly. What did you make of Michael Higgins Christmas speech where he thanked migrants for enriching Ireland's culture? I don't know if you saw it, Rory, but it was a very interesting New Year's message. And I was the president, so he's not the kind of the T -shirt, but it was a peer of praise to the people who've made Ireland what it is, who've come from a broad, and very relevant because there have been that outbreak of Ireland, which my people have. Well, that was when there was a violent attack in the centre of Dublin and all sorts of false rumors spread about what was involved and so forth.

10:11And before you knew it, there were rights from the streets. So he was basically talking both about the fact that so many Irish people have known what it's like to be migrants to other parts of the world and the contribution they've made there, but also very specific about the contribution that current migrants are making to Irish culture, Irish economy, Irish society. We'll put it in the newsletter, but it was a very different sort of New Year's message to many that you see. Well, here's a nasty one which has come in Jamie Prior following what happened on Christmas Day. What can the international community do about the murder of Christians in Nigeria?

10:44It doesn't seem to be getting any media coverage at all. That's right. Over Christmas, I think Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, about 140 Nigerian Christians in villages in the North Nigeria were killed in attacks by Islamist militants. In what seems to have been reprise of attacks from another series of attacks on December 3rd against Islamic festival celebrants in Kaduna. And this allegations that the government of Nigeria has been backing these different militant groups. It's very, very deserving. I mean, the previous killing on December 3rd was Nigerian air strikes by the government. And this seems to be these Fulani militia, which is part of a general story, Northern Nigeria, and across the Sahel that we've talked about about conflict between nomadic communities and settler communities.

11:35Nigeria now leading the world in attacks on religious minority groups. Yeah, I saw the question when I was looking through some of the questions that they came in and I didn't know anything about. I didn't when I looked up the news coverage of it, almost all of it was from Christian organizations. So there was a big piece in the Catholic herald. There was a huge piece about the background to it in one of the American Christian newsletter magazine type things. And one of the points they were making, which is the point that comes through in in Jamie's question, is that this appears to be happening without anybody outside the Christian communities and particularly in the countries where it's happening actually seeming to give a damn.

12:24And one of the stories, I mean, that you do sometimes have to feel for Joe Biden or whoever happens to be president of America because one of the the stories that was it was leading on the fact, you know, why is Biden saying nothing? Why is Biden doing nothing? And when you look at the trend of this, there just seemed to be an awful lot of killing going on. And when I dug a little bit deeper, where there was some coverage of it in, you know, newspapers in Australia or America or South Africa, wherever it might be. And in the UK, I think the Guardian did a piece. The tendency tended to be to make it a story about climate change.

13:00In other words, they're these were disputes over land and water. Whereas what the Christian community seems to be saying is this is the deliberate wiping out of a Christian community. So I'm a little bit ashamed to say I didn't have a clone. Absolutely. One of the people, James, targeting this question out, why is there so little coverage? I'm glad that you read his question out and that we've been able to debate it. But it does seem to be something that has not been taken as seriously as it should be. Then we have a question about Simon McDonald's. The Simon McDonald was the head of the foreign office when I was the foreign office minister.

13:31And he's just written an essay. It's Louis Sutter. What do you think of Simon McDonald's SNL literary reviews suggesting Russia and UK rotate seats on the UN Security Council and that the UK gives it seat to the EU? This was a much broader essay by Simon McDonald. Now Lord McDonald, given that we've been talking yesterday about peerages. So he was the permanent head of the foreign office. I think he was married to the daughter of a previous permanent head of the foreign office. He a very sort of old fashioned central casting diplomat. And it reveals an enormous amount about the way that professional diplomats view Britain's role because in this essay, he basically says Britain is not coming to terms with the fact that it's a declining power.

14:11He says that our inference in the world needs to be more soft power, which is this phrase from Harvard professor Joe Nye all about using cultural linguistic other informal power rather than hard power. Cultural superpower already. That's what we need to be. Well, I thought it was fascinating because I had real run -ins with Simon McDonald, particularly around Zimbabwe, where I was trying to suggest that we combine with other countries to try to encourage fair elections in Zimbabwe. And he basically was saying to friends, Rory is too much an idealist. So there's a very thin line within the what Simon's saying in the culture he created in the foreign office between realism and cynicism taken too far.

14:49Simon's view often seemed to me, well, there's not much we can do about the world anyway. There's all about soft power and soft power almost by definition has very little to do with the foreign office because it's to do with what other bits of cultural life do. I mean, I think you need to have a foreign office that wants to influence the world, even if it acknowledges its capacity to do so as less than it was. Yeah, we have talked though before about the construction of the United Nations Security Council. And I think we are both of the view that if you were devising it today, you wouldn't have the setup that you have now with the five major post -war powers.

15:23But how would you even begin to let us take one part of his proposal? Russia and the UK kind of rotate their place on the security council. Well, it is completely ridiculous. It's an entirely insane. You couldn't even begin that discussion probably. No, no, it'd be completely mad because you'd go from Russia's default position, which is generally against the US to the UK's default position, which is very pro -US. You'd have an absurd rotation where, you know, every, however, I don't know how often they were going to rotate, you'd go from veto to non -vito to non -vito and that's absolutely no way that Russia would ever accept it.

15:55Whatever the UK felt. He was also, Simon Dolor was one of the people who played a pretty big part in the end of Johnson, didn't he? He did because he pointed out that he'd warned Johnson about Chris Pincher and said he shouldn't point him. He's also been very brutal about Listerus. I mean, I'm a little bit divided on this question because, of course, I agree with Simon Donald strongly on his criticisms of Boris Johnson Listerus. On the other hand, he is a career civil servant. The civil service is really meant to be politically impartial. He was the permanent secretary, so he was right at the top of the foreign office.

16:29And I don't like the emerging culture, which I'm seeing more and more of permanent secretaries, gossiping, going out and public, talking about what's happening inside government. We saw this with all the WhatsApp during COVID. We've seen this with Simon Case, who I think's been a very worrying permanent secretary, but I've seen a number of permanent secretaries recently and the culture of kind of gossiping and slagging off your buses is developing a lot. And I would like to see somebody come in and say, wait a sec, that's not how we do things. We are going to be discreet. We're going to be understated.

17:00We may share these thoughts in private, but the point of being a permanent secretary is not to be a sort of outspoken political commentator. You'd presumably agree. That is why the leadership that's given from the top is so important and so fundamental. I can remember speaking to somebody pretty high up in the foreign office during Johnson's tenure, who said, it's so difficult to do this job when you are essentially watching the person at the head of the organisation, the politician who's meant to be leading it, who's out there saying things which aren't true, or doing things which are not in line with agreed foreign policy.

17:35So you then put yourself in the position. I mean, I broadly agree with you, but where I think these guys have been in a very difficult position for the last few years, particularly since Johnson, is that they're watching, they're being told to do things which go against what they think their job is. So for example, being told to say things that aren't true or to defend things which they know to be indefensible. So I think that's where why you wanted to criticise over pinching. I guess the culture of senior civil services is changing too, because they're also being encouraged to be more outspoken, more human, more relatable, funnier with their staff.

18:07So there's a change also in the type of way they're supposed to behave. Ministers like them to be warmer, more gossipy, more informal. And I think there's a cost to that. I mean, but if you think back to it, Richard Wilson, who was your permanent secretary, Jonathan Powell, your friend, and Richard Wilson, didn't always see eye to eye. But as far as I know, Richard Wilson would never have gone out afterwards and then made a series of public statements trying to expose things he disagreed with or put up no. No, but we had then a Prime Minister who expected us, the special advisors, the political side of the operation.

18:43He saw it as part of our job to make sure we got on pretty well with the senior civil service, even if we disagreed at times. Whereas I think what you have, the other thing that you hear from the civil service at the moment is of these pretty young inexperienced special advisors who wander around white hole like they own the place, which is again, not a very sensible way to conduct yourself. Well, Alice says, should we take a quick break? Okay.

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20:22Now here's one from Rod. Are you feeling positive for 2024 or do you have a sense of impending doom? I feel pretty doom laden to be honest. You've prepared to do me. I think that I can put an optimistic spin on things. So my optimistic spin is going to be this. I think there's still a good chance that Biden will win the election and that will be against Trump and that will be a huge boost. I think we could see positive change in South Africa. I think we could see positive change in Europe and I think it could be the great election year which determines a less populist, more liberal future. So that's the best case scenario I can push.

21:06Where would you put AI into all that? That's where I get a bit gloomy because I do think this will also be the year where AI will dominate elections in a way that we can't even begin to imagine. You found rather an interesting self -venue from Singapore of AI being used. I did. It was the Prime Minister in, we've talked a lot about, I think it was these New Year's address. He warned the public about AI because what had happened is that an organization, I presume criminal I don't know, but somebody had put together a completely fake video of the Prime Minister who's very popular through a long -serving Prime Minister who's pretty popular and it was him essentially promoting a financial venture.

21:47That's sort of an actual scam. Yeah. He was out there sort of urging people to invest in something and when you watch it, I mean, yes, I've met him and I know what he speaks like and nobody sounds like. You'd have to be very, you'd have to basically be his wife, I think, to know this is not him. Well, this is what we've talked about, haven't we? With AI, what's so clever about it is that what people have worked out is the way they blackened politicians' names now is not to sort of invent something completely off the scale, like show them having, I don't know, naked and bed with someone. Instead, it's all these things that are almost plausible.

22:22You know, a politician endorses a site -each -ubious financial company or Kierstammer and one of the AI fakes shouting at an aid for dropping an iPad or sometimes it's just cutting film, poor Rishi Sunak, there's been this viral thing of him banging a nail with the side of a hammer. When it turns out if you look at the full clip, the woman for some reason has told him to bang the nail with the side of the hammer. Yeah, that's the way I do it. That's just cruel editing. No, no, that's not AI. That's just way to cutting things up, but it's the general sort of fake news thing that you undermine people not necessarily with the most kind of blatant thing, but something that's sort of faintly funny, faintly plausible just on the edge.

23:00Yeah, look, I'm always very doomy and gloomy at this time of year. I don't know why it's sort of, I always have a bit of a plunge around Christmas New Year, and this has been no exception. And it's interesting. So you said to put a positive spirit, Trump could be beaten by Biden. When I'm in the sort of mood I'm in now, I see Trump winning, and that makes me very, very gloomy. And I do think of all the elections that we're facing. That is the one that's going to have the most profound significance. And we've got to start thinking about how the world handles that. If you think of the issues that we've been discussing in the last couple of days, Taiwan, you talked about American interest in relation to Africa and China.