242. Scotland in crisis, how to get an opposition MP to defect, and can Britain defend itself?

23:41You had a guy called Quentin Davis, but then you had, I think, the first one was Alan Howard, is that right? Well, as you're Quentin Davis was after my time, that was when Gordon was Prime Minister. Right. The two that I was involved in were Alan Howard and Sean Woodward. Right. And Alan Howard, I've got to say, it was one of the most enjoyable it's one of those enjoyable operations in which I was ever involved. I got to talk to you through it. So this guy is like a classic looking Tory MP. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then and then somebody comes and tells you he's unhappy. It was Margaret Hodg.

24:12Margaret Hodg said, look, I really, she didn't say he's talking about defecting. She said, I think he's really, really unhappy. He's really uncomfortable. And then I said, well, just keep talking to him and, you know, let's see where it goes. And then eventually he met Tony, he met, I think, actually, I can remember telly job Prescott, because job Prescott, who's even more tribal than I have, or he, the idea of defection is just horrible to people like job Prescott. Possibly what did he say? So he looks a bit a bit at him as old stuffy generals used to look at traders coming over to give him inflation on the other side.

24:45Yeah. And there's always a bit of that. There's always a bit of that because of course, you defate one way. There's always this suspicion that you can defate. And how is, how is an amazing thing? Wasn't it? I just remember that he was a member of the Thantrite kind of wing of the party. Yeah. And he was the first conservative MP to defect directly from the conservatives to labor ever. And the first former conservative MP to sit as a labor MP since Oswald Mooseley. Forgetting the Mooseley connection, that was why it was so enjoyable. And listen, Roy, I'm up in the top of my house here. Right. And when we finally got him as it were over the lion, and a little bit as you suggested earlier, you obviously want to do this at the maximum point of impact.

25:23Right. So what I did was, we didn't have to wait that long, but I said, look, I would like to do this on the eve of the conservative party conference. How very helpful of you. Exactly. And what I'd like to do, as I'd like to do it as an exclusive in the observer with Tony Bevins and God, I wish Tony Bevins was still alive because he would absolutely be destroying this government week after week after week. And then David Frost, Frost on Sunday in the morning. So very, very similar to what happened this weekend. They did an article in the observer and then Dampal to was on a pre -record on Laura Koon's book.

25:57I think I'm right. Alan Howard did a live with David Frost. And I can remember I can remember, for the David Frost, I think on the Friday, I said, David, who have you got on the program? And he said, Oh, we've got this. We've got that. He said, well, look, David, can you dump your main interview? And we'll move it back. And because I've got a really good, made it to you for you. And he just thought I was going to offer up Tony Blair. And he said, what is it? I said, I said, well, how would you feel if you had an exclusive interview with the first MP ever to defect straight from the Tories to Labour?

26:28And he went, Oh, GASMIC.

26:33So he'd you, the observing you, and we kept you very quiet. But anyway, the reason I mentioned this house is that we then built around, because obviously the Tory party conference, we built around a whole kind of media strategy. So I got my team in here about eight o 'clock at night. And I've kept different them. I hadn't told even the team that worked for me. It was all done very, very, very quietly. And I got them here. I'll never forget when I told them Tim Allen, who was my number two at the time. And he said, God, he said, we're just sitting here bored for the next couple of hours, waiting for the observer to drop.

27:03And he said, this must be how terrorists feel when they know that bombs going to go off. Because conservatives had no idea. Absolutely. No, he hadn't. One of the things this is the views you, what are the things that they were absolutely important? He didn't even have the courtesy to tell his whip. It was amazingly shocking because I was sort of reminded of his, he had been, you know, he was the son of a sort of stuffy major. And he'd been in the centre of the Conservative Party central office for 15 years and have been given a CBE for Mrs. Thatcher in the early 80s for a service to the Conservative Party.

27:40And it had been a whip himself, I think. So it must have, he would have felt to them like a real sort of old school. Yeah. Yeah. But I felt, I felt with him. And we did look, I said that you don't make promises. What you do say. So for example, I remember one of the things I said was, look, we will do everything to make sure that you are welcomed into the Labour Party that you feel welcomed. And that's what I mean about why John Prescott's reaction was so important. If John had come out and basically said, you know, we don't want these torries, he's done all this damage, then you know, it would have been a disaster.

28:10So actually to get John on the record saying, you know, he's doing it for the right reasons, he's doing it because he believes in tacking child poverty. You remember he was a massive Brexit here. Look, that was after my time, or I'm just talking about that. Okay. So that went really, really well. And then of course, Sean Woodward, he was quite important within the Conservative Firmament because of course, he'd been a party strategist for a long time. Am I right in saying it was incredibly wealthy? He was married to St. Spree, eras. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, very, very wealthy.

28:42Obviously, anything that is not the first, it gets maybe less attention, but I was still seen as a very, very big blow. So Woodward was after you were in office, and Alan Howarth was when you were campaigning. Great. Great. The one in opposition, it really felt like a sort of massive hit on the Conservative Party morale. Now, I think partly because the media now moves on so quickly from things. I don't know if the downpour to thing has had that quite that impact upon the Conservatives. I mean, soon after his interview on Trevor Phillips -Bregan was pre -recorded, so it was before this happened.

29:13But I didn't sort of feel within the studio that day that, or they're all obsessing about this downpour to thing, whereas on the day of the Alan Howarth defection, I mean, I can remember getting a phone call from some of the journalists at their party conference. And and I cover who it was, but one of them phoned me up and he said, God, if you were here now, they literally would linch you because all that talking about is how you have utterly destroyed their conference. It's interesting how things have changed. And I was reading some of the comments they made about Sean Woodward, and maybe this is a bit unfair to read it now, because he may be a friend of yours, I don't really know.

29:46But William Hague wrote a letter saying, you've left a party whose members have given you their loyal support. You've done so for reasons not of integrity or of principle for your own careerist reasons. And Chris Mullin wrote with shock of the awful Sean Woodward defecting to Mullin's side, one of New Labour's vialist stitchups made my flesh creep. That was one of your own MPs. Was that in his diaries or at the time, did he? I did. That's in his diaries. He put the things down. Sure, Chris, Chris was a loyal foothold but that's what happens. It happened a bit with Dan Paul to, didn't it? Because you had some Labour people saying, why are we having this guy who voted for this vote for this?

30:24Why is it taken so long? And then he had Tories saying, this is absolute disloyalty and terrible for his constituents and there should be a bi -election or frankly, I don't get how big the majority is, I don't think they really want to bi -election. But no, defections, I really enjoyed defections, I really did. And I remember thinking, you know, I'd love to have been a spiced change operator during the Cold War. That would have, I really would have enjoyed that. And it did feel a little bit like that because you were doing something that you knew could go wrong, you knew they could get cold feet, you knew that you had to be very, very, very careful about the actual facts of what was happening.

31:02And I'll tell you the clincher with Alan Houth, I remember this, this just popped into my head now. I remember him saying the thing he was most worried about was his family and what they would think. And I can remember him when he phoned and said to me that he just told his daughter, and she said it was the best thing he'd ever done. And I could feel the relief that he, because he had been, you know, Margaret Hodg used the word agonizing, he had been absolutely agonizing. Well, it must be awful because, you know, even becoming an independent and leaving the Tory party, obviously, I've made a lot of my colleagues very angry and disappointed.

31:33And it's a very kind of tribal loyalist game. And it must feel very difficult for these people when they defect. And of course, everybody then has an incentive to portray you in the worst possible light. Do you think there'll be any more? Yeah, I think, I think there could be one or two more. Yeah, I think I'm watching this space, but they'll of course be watching how Dan Poulter's departure has seen. And I, you know, I just counsel colleagues leaving to be ready for the way that, I mean, you do it because you believe in it, but you have to be realistic about the fact that your former colleagues are going to put the worst possible spin on it.

32:09They'll never believe you did it for principle, they'll always believe, particularly when your party's about to be wiped out in an election at their 20 points ahead that you're just jumping off at synch and ship. Yeah. Well, as our listeners know, I'm not a member of the low party, but are there any conservative MPs there who want to defect before the next election and they want to trust it, experience defection handler, I'm here for you all. Shall we take a break? Yeah, okay, let's take a break.

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34:33Welcome back to the rest of politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Arst Campbell. So I'm still trying to get my head around you as the defectionation. I've got an idea that what one could do is run somebody pretending to labor that they were going to defect. Get them all really excited and then humiliate them at the last moment. What do you seriously think I would fall for that? Do you seriously think that if Steve Baker came along and said, I'm thinking of defecting to the Labour Party, Alistair. Could I come and have a chat to you about it? Fuck off.

35:08They ruined my ruse. There was just for podcast us as that voice that said, what's so funny around the corner was my son, Sasha, popping his head around to. Last year, Rory, according to the latest report, analyzing all defense spending in the world, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which I think is the latest, $2 .4 trillion spent on defense. That's 2 .3 % of global GDP, pretty much allied to the rate of inflation in terms of the rise. But I think what you are seeing is some pretty big changes happening in the defense spending world. So the US is the biggest spender by a long, long, long, long, long way, 916 billion.

35:51That's 37 % of all the money that spent on defense. China's second with almost 300 billion. Russia is third with just over 100. Then it's India, then it's Saudi, then it's the UK. But we're very low when it comes to both sizes and military. We're very, very low. And we're also low. We're about 50th when it comes to share of GDP. No surprises for guessing what's number one. That's Ukraine, 37. And it's interesting to see the ones that are spending the most, because it sort of reflects kind of where a lot of trouble spots are. Algeria is next. Then Saudi, then Russia, then Omar, then Israel, then Q8, then Poland.

36:28Interestingly, Poland has had the biggest increase in spending within Europe. Then the US, then Greece, then Kalamazka, sort of Turkey, partly, then Colombia, then South Korea, Pakistan, Singapore, Finland. In terms of the size of personnel, we now have the smallest army that we've had since the time of Napoleon. And compared with China, 2 .2 million military personnel, India, one and a half, USA, almost the same, North Korea, 1 .3, Russia, and million. And in Europe, Turkey's the biggest, followed by Ukraine, followed by France, followed by Germany, followed by us in 34th place in the world. So our military is shrinking.

37:05It's very interesting. And it's coming, of course, one of the reasons that we're talking about this is that Rishi Tunak has just announced that he's going to be increasing defense spending to 2 .5 % of GDP. And the figure that's come out of the MOD is that we're going to be spending another 75 billion pounds over the next five years on defense, which is actually dishonest, as I should explain. And is utterly dishonest. And actually the theme of dishonesty, it runs through an enormous number of defense budgets and defense conversations over many, many years. There's a guy called Francis Chousa, who is really, really good on this, and frequently points out, just a couple of points that resonate with what you were saying.

37:45He would say, listen, Britain is always boosturing itself and talking about how great it is, but actually Poland, at the moment, is able to deploy two armored divisions of nearly 18 ,000 soldiers. And Britain really struggles, really, really struggles to keep much more than a brigade on the ground at the moment. And there's a lot of obfuscating around this. And he also says that these numbers are a bit odd. I think you can develop this a bit more, but we're always sticking in things like pensions and Ukraine funding and intelligence accounts, which other people don't stick into their calculations to drive up our defense budget.

38:18Anyway, over to you on dishonest figures. Well, I tell you what it is. So they came out. And first of all, to remember, we've had several budgets, autumn statements, et cetera. If you're going to do something as big as this, right, say we're going to have this massive increase in defense, many, you just thought there might have been a hint of it in one of those. So it looks to me like yes, another thing that they're just coming along to say, now as it happens, I support it. And how did he do it? Was there a big press conference? Did he get a lot of mileage for it? Did it work for him? Was this the right way to if you're going to do it, if you're going to announce 75 billion pounds, presumably you want to get a lot of positive coverage for it.

38:49Did he manage? A lot of coverage. They briefed it. They got a lot of coverage overnight in the papers. I think he did a visit somewhere. I can't remember now. Laura Trot, the chief secretary of she did a visit. She was the one who trotted out this 75 billion lie, which I explained in a minute. It's interesting. I can't actually remember. But yes, he got a lot of coverage. Yes, it did. But the fact that he didn't do it in Parliament, or in a budget statement or an autumn statement says to me that it wasn't serious, the reason why this 75 billion is a complete lie. Oh, and by the way, Rory, the tourists have been have announced that they're going to get to 0 .5 % several times in recent years.

39:22And I'd also remind them that when we were in power, it was 2 .5%. I'm not saying that, you know, defense spending has fallen pretty steadily since the Cold War, but it was 2 .5 % when we were there. But the reason it's not credible is well, lots of reason. The first is that they say they're going to pay for it by sacking 70 ,000 civil service, civil service. That's utterly absurd. It wouldn't get you the savings added to which it's just back with a fact packet stuff. But the entire basis of 75 billion is that over the next six years, they're starting from a zero growth baseline. In other words, they're removing the spending that they've already announced is going to grow.

39:58And coming from zero is that every addition over those six years comes to 60 billion. So what I've noticed about Rishi Sunak is that virtually everything he'd says at the moment is being commented, check comment on social media. Full facts say this. This figure is misleading. It assumes spending would otherwise have been frozen in cash terms and fall on as a percentage of GDP over the next six years, which by the way would have been a breach of our NATO obligations. If you assume spending would otherwise have been maintained as a percentage of GDP, the increase is around 20 billion. Now, given this was such a big thing anyway, why do they feel the need to lie like that?

40:37I just don't understand it. Well, there's a long tradition of lying. So a lot of it is that when the government's not lying, and I agree the government this moment's lying, the military themselves are endlessly lying and misrepresenting the situation. I mean, there's an incredibly weird boosterism and misrepresentation in the way the British military fight. But Rory, just on that, the military eyes be to they certainly in private, they're doing the opposite. They're saying we're in deep shit, but you should see the testimonies that they give to committees. You should see the criticisms that the national audit office has made a year after year and ten years.

41:10That's true. I mean, it's astonishing. I mean, the NEO basically couldn't be more blatant. They say, basically, we can't trust the word we hear from the service chiefs of the military. I mean, I support, I support both Rishi Sunak and Kierstharmer have now said that they want to get defense spend to 2 .5 set of GDP. I support that. I think we are going to have to do a lot more to defend ourselves. But the first thing to say is they have been cutting defense. If they'd stuck to the sort of plans that we were on, the defense would have had an additional 80 billion in the time that they've been there.

41:40And also, don't forget he did cut it when he was when he was chancellor. But I just can't get why they feel they have to it's back to this Johnson sort of world beating. You call it boosterism. But when it's so when it's something as serious as this, I really, really hope that during the general election campaign, Kierstharmer David Lamy, John Healy, the shadow defense secretary, I hope that they make foreign policy and defense a big part of the campaign. Because we've lost what we've lost since the sort of THATCHER KINNER major Blair era, I think, has been an understanding that part of the role of politicians is actually to educate people about the realities of the world.

42:18Explain why the world is genuinely more dangerous. But if you're going to get caught on something like this and reading the reactions to soon outspeech, you mentioned Francis II, there is he's still with Roosie. He's not with Roosie, but he writes them in Keshe yet. The Royal United Service Institute, the Deputy Secretary General Malcolm Chambers, his reaction to this is very unclear how this is going to be delivered. There was a guy, Nick Carter, who used to be the head of the British Army, he wasn't a select committee this week. And he said he doubted very much that this new money could sort out the modernisation issues that the British Army is facing.

42:53And this is basically to go back to the fundamental problem. The military is an opponent, black hole. I mean, they're finances, they're an opponent, black hole. Partly because of procurement. And a lot of it to do with procurement. So they're spending, you know, off from 40, 45 % of their money on buying kit. And there's a procurement in the British military has been a huge problem. People who want to interest it, there's a very good recent House of Commons Defence Select Committee report on procurement. But it's basically repeating a story that we've heard for 20 years, which is we're really, really bad at procuring stuff.

43:27Francis Tussis got a good comparison with the French, where their procurement organisation is a very highly motivated organisation of engineers that civilians, but they have their own uniforms, they seem to do a much, much better job at buying kit than we do. And we've talked about procurement where it all goes wrong. But the result is that we end up with such a black hole through over optimism and miscalculating by billions of pounds every year. How much the stuff is really going to cost. That producing, even if they produce an extra 20, 25 billion over five years, which is an extra four billion pounds a year is not nothing.

44:03As Nick Carter says, it doesn't begin to address the problem. And the problems, you know, we just run through some of these problems. One problem is the army, the navy and the Air Force, instead of co -operating, operate as three warring tribes. And all they want to do is make sure all the money goes to them and doesn't go to the others. The navy and the Air Force particularly love big kit. So the navy got completely obsessed with getting these big aircraft carriers. Gordon Brown set off down that path of building these big aircraft carriers. And it turns out that we can't afford to actually keep planes on these aircraft carriers properly.

44:42Kind of fooled enough F -35s and those that we have, we were not maintaining or keeping the pilot hours up to actually be able to fly enough of them. We don't have the carrier battle fleet to surround them. So we can't really protect them. And it's pretty clear that technology is changing so much that these are just enormous floating targets. So we're investing billions in these things, which are just sort of show off prestige items, which are not a sensible investment. The British country. Yeah. What we saw in the Iran Israel stuff recently is that you're getting $100 million planes that are having to go up and take out $55 ,000 drones.

45:15And Russia, obviously a lot of this, the reason we're having this conversation, a lot of it to do with Russia, the reason why Poland has become the biggest, as I said, almost 4 % of GDP now. And their foreign minister said at the weekend that the world has is facing a choice. You've either got Russian troops pushed out of Ukraine or you've got Russian troops at the border of Poland. So that's why we're talking about this. And on the defense procurement, though, I mean, some of these numbers note on this that these armored vehicles, Ajax armored vehicles, they've spent 4 billion pounds so far. They haven't received a single deployed vehicle and they won't be in fully in service until the next decade.

45:47That's 4 billion. And that's before you look at the incredible gaps between how many tanks we claim to have, how many tanks we have available and how many tanks are actually operational. So we'll claim that we have, I don't know, 237 Challenger tanks. Then the MOD will admit that they have 157 operational Challenger tanks. And then it will turn out that actually 59 or 60 of them are actually able to operate a tool, a fit to go on exercise, let alone go to war. I just don't know, China have 6457. Right. Part of this is decisions. So we really ran down the number of tanks. Partly because David Richards was who was the head of the military was on record saying that he didn't think that we were going to have to go and do land wars in Europe anymore.

46:37Remember this when I was House Commons Defense Committee. I was the chair of the Defense Committee for a year. That's a great war leader Boris Johnson said the same. Right. The story at the time was it was all going to be stuff like Afghanistan, which is small unit operations, counterinsertions, sea against enemies like the Taliban. And we're not going to have to worry about things like fighting the Russians anymore. The plane story. So we bought over 30 of these incredibly expensive American planes, these F -35Bs of the 30 that we got 33 of them. How many do you think we actually managed to fly at the moment?

47:10Oh, God, I'm wearing six. Yeah, eight, eight. You're basically there. And why is it? It turns out we don't have the spare parts. We're not doing the maintenance properly. We don't have enough money for the pilots to fly. We don't have enough pilots. And those two things are related. Pilots are leaving the Air Force because they're just not getting enough hours flying the planes. And they're not getting enough hours flying planes because we don't have a budget to pay them to go up as much as they want to go up. I mean, the whole thing is really weird. And one of the problems with the extra 20 billion is they'll probably spend, you know, they'll spend 10 billion maybe on equipment for the Ukraine.

47:43The other 10 billion instead of sorting out these kind of underlying issues of recruitment and training and getting their existing kit operational, the service chiefs will be tempted to buy even more on a portable kit without thinking about the maintenance and the map. I've done some work in the past with on military housing, which is terrible. You know, we're forcing forces in their families to live in absolutely awful accommodation. So morale is very low. Last satisfaction, they obviously this stuff gets surveys get done. Satisfaction with service life in 2010 was 60%. It's now around 40%. They've missed every single recruitment target.

48:21So that there's going to have to be a fundamental review of all this. And just on the numbers, Rory, there's a fascinating debate going on in Germany at the moment because there are two. I'm going to teach a little bit of German Rory. Yes. Verpflicht. Yes. And kriegstucktik. Verpflicht. Kriegstucktik. You know what krieg is, don't you? Kriegstucktik. Yeah. Kriegstucktik means war ready. Verpflicht means compulsory and military service. So then having a debate, the Defence Minister Boris Pistorius has announced that in mid -May he's going to be setting out the terms of a debate about what Verpflicht might look like.

48:59So you talk about, in Germany is one of the, for all the talk of, you know, Zite and Vendor change in time and all that at the start of Ukraine. They're one of the, you know, they're not as hawkish on on Defence's for obvious reasons as maybe France and the UK and some of the US. But they are Pistorius. He said democracy cannot defend itself. And he basically is saying that they're falling backwards in terms of equipment and of numbers. And they may have to bring in military service. And there's a lot of talk about this Swedish model, which Sweden has a sort of partial conscription for both men and women has had since 2017.

49:31And the Swedish model, I believe you volunteer, no sorry, sorry, you're conscripted, but they select the people who they think are best. Yeah. And then, and I think there is also option that you could, you don't necessarily have to be in a potential fighting role. You can do all sorts of other things, but you can go in the civil defence organisations. But the point is that I'm just not sure that people in our countries are quite aware of how quickly this debate is developing because the truth is we're not as, when you go through the countries that are really investing in defence. You know, we have fallen behind.

50:02I mean, I don't often. And the reason to invest, obviously sorry, to to to state the obvious is not to go to war. The reason to invest is to to to make sure that people like Putin do not feel and get particularly given that he's making progress at the moment in Ukraine. He's broken through and have deep corners likely to make more progresses yet that he doesn't begin to think the rest of Europe is a kind of soft target. And of course, we're Donald Trump, the very rarely say we're Donald Trump has a point. But the truth is that Europe has basically assumed that America is going to be there forever.

50:34And it's not necessarily the case. And of course, within the European defence, I mean, you've got Macron made an extraordinary speech last week, by the way, at the Sorbonne. But he's also part of one of the things he's been saying, he's been sort of floating this idea that France's nuclear protection should maybe be cover other European countries as well. And of course, that's not going down terribly well with some places. The French nuclear umbrella. Exactly. Exactly. So look, I just I think with this is something that we should come back to fairly regularly, because I think there's so much happening in different parts of the world on not just on defence spending, but on defence thinking, on strategic thinking, which I just don't think the public really, even though they're watching what's happening in Ukraine, they're watching what's happening in Israel, Gaza, they know that China Taiwan is a kind of, you know, a big thing bubbling away in the background.

51:21But are we really ready as a country for the debate that some of our leaders are starting to say we're going to have to have? And I think also being realistic about our limits. I mean, being realistic about the fact that it feels like the British army and the Patrick Sanders who just stepped down as the head of the army said it feels like the military in 1937, or, you know, NACA equipment, exhausted troops, no proper training. I mean, it's really embarrassing. I mean, it took by the Air Force, you know, we could have a similar conversation about your Navy ships, you know, ships tied up, not really going to see totally NACA kind of forgotten about being unable to man them.

51:59I mean, there's something really badly wrong, and at the same time, we have this weird pretentiousness where we write defence reviews pretending that we're going to tilt towards Asia Pacific, and we're going to be kind of the sending one patrol ship to sort of thing that I've been most disappointed in soon -act about is the fact that actually far from reversing this sort of exaggerating, boostering, bullshitting, global British -ing, world -beating nonsense that Johnson became identified with. He's trying to do the same thing. People have seen it through it, and I think they're sick of it. It's so distressing, isn't it?

52:42Let's just finish, though. I mean, in politics how boring it was that they were endlessly re -announcing the same thing all the time. I mean, I secured a commitment to, I think, the dueling of the A66 and my constituency in a budget about 2011. The government that succeeded in re -announcing the dueling of the A66 every year, since including my successor managed to get a fantastic press release in 2024. And has it, has it, has it, has it, you can't tell us what to be jeweled, till about 2030 or 2035? How could be a fourth -term Labour Government job that we're worried? Exactly. Well, of course, actually, there'll be a fantastic announcement.

53:17Okay. Now, really exciting news, though. We have almost sold out all our shows, but we do still have tickets for our Summer Tours, not sadly for Brighton and Glasgow, which have completely sold out. But if you're a Manchester, almost all gone, very low ticket warning, but there's still a couple left for Manchester. And there are opportunities in Cardiff and Birmingham. So this is our October tour and over to you on London Alistair. Well, the O2, I mean, I actually couldn't quite believe that we're doing the O2 and we're on track to sell it out, because it's still going in the right direction, but you can.

53:52That's the biggest venue that we're going to do and there's still tickets there as well. Excellent. Well, looking forward to it very, very much. That's our October pre -election tour, everything that you need to know about politics and a bit of bagpipes on the side. All right, all right. See you soon. All right. See you soon. Thanks.