282. Starmer’s first week, Le Pen’s loss in France, and Iran’s new president

24:47There are very few of the very old right when guards are left. So Ian Duncan Smith still left, David Davis, John Hayes. But they're not really part of the new leadership of the party. So I would have thought Victoria Atkins has good a chance. I'd like to see James Clevally try. I've always liked James Clevally. I think he's got a good straightforward communication style. So Anastya, listen, I don't want to ask you to endorse Victoria, obviously. But what do you think about James Clevally's kind of communication style? Yeah, better than most of them. I mean, they've all had a very, very difficult wicket to play on in recent months and years, but I always find him pretty straightforward.

25:22I could see him being a quite attractive candidate. I hear on the Great Vine that, well not even on the Great Vine, I hear pretty clearly that Rishi Soon Actors not respect or rate, Kemi Badnock as a minister. I think she wasn't a very good minister. I find her both her politics and her manner really kind of off -putting. I can't, I just cannot see her being a challenged her labour. On the one hand, it's incredible that three of the survivors and three of you might all fancy themselves to go for it, Pretty Patel, Suella Bravaman and Kemi Badnock, all very right wing. I thought Bravaman went straight off to America.

26:00She went to another of these ridiculous popular conservators and whatever it's called conferences. I saw Ian Dale on the rampage and call brand on the rampage on social media because she was basically talking about, out cried as some kind of, you know, always using the language that you use for terrorist organisations, you know, they're taking it. It was just awful. So I think, I mean, I really wish we'd seen the end of that. It's a very interesting communication style, isn't it? Those three, because they say provocative things or certain things that wind up you and me, but they always deliver it in this very sort of polite reasonable sounding language.

26:36Absolutely. You sort of convince yourself that Suella Bravaman is a sort of terrifying kind of populist figure, but it's largely the content not the delivery. Whenever you see her deliver, she's sort of incredibly sort of courteous. Whereas sometimes, Nigel Farage, it's sort of the other way around that actually his manner makes what he says, even feel of the sound, even more extreme, but actually she is, I think, genuinely, genuinely extreme. Anyway, all in all I say, Rory, very good result for the country. Very good for you. Very good first few days for Labour and the Tories are just orchards take a big deep breath and sort themselves out of the time.

27:14Very good. And we will reassure our listeners that this podcast is going to involve us continuing to hold the government to account. So we're not going to become overly cheerleading to it. And the things we're going to be looking at is are they really going to be able to get the NHS reform going? And one of the things we're judged and by NHS reform, we're judged and by will they be able to drive through the planning reform they're talking about because planning and house building is going to be central to the economy? Are they going to really take advantage of AI? So we should get Peter Kylon to talk much more about science and technology?

27:44Are they going to be able to get a really sensible relationship going with Europe? What are they going to be doing about defence and international relations? Because Kylon has been pretty domestic in his focus. This is good early stage stuff from David Lamy traveling around. But are we going to see Britain playing a bigger role internationally? So I think we need to keep measuring them against those yardsticks. Then a couple of other things I think we need to watch out for prisons. Will they genuinely sort out prisons and make them, you know, have a proper rehabilitation prison system? And then the other thing is that is how are they going to deal with some of these really big issues coming up?

28:20Tems water looks to me like a total disaster waiting to happen, infected blood scandal and how they're going to deal with that. So there's lots of kind of practical stuff. And then the other thing I'd like to see that I think we should hold them to account on is the whole leveling up thing. I mean I always felt about leveling up that it was a great slogan and it would have been a great approach to government. It's just that Johnson only did the slogan rising. He didn't do the policy bit. So actually Labour now has to take that off. Exactly. And let me develop that a little bit because in fact the Conservatives did more than they got credit for.

28:51I mean I think it's now that they've lost. I think it's worth acknowledging that Michael Gove for example was very very interested in the mechanics of this and how to think about this. They did some quite interesting things on trying to change the way in which money was managed. So they tried to devolve more control of planning and money to down to local government. They created more mayors. There were some quite generous investment schemes. And if you look at the figures, the productivity gap between London and the southeast and the north has actually narrowed over the last two, three years. Now not necessarily in a positive way because part of that is actually the productivity in London and the south east is collapsed rather than that it's improved.

29:30Yes. So there is, they can labour control on four years of quite a lot of thought from ministers and seen ourselves about how this could be done. And rather than I think reinventing the wheel harnessing that and really putting those ideas to work is going to be the key. Okay, well just to echo you I think I will not become a cheerleader. I will be a critical friend that you will allow me a few days of feeling so happy that Labour are in and the Tories are out. I've allowed that, Rory, I've allowed that. Fantastic. Right, let's take a break. Let's take a quick break.

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32:05Welcome back to rest politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alice Campbell. Few plugs to start off with, hella, toning, Schmidt, former Prime Minister Denmark, wife of the new health minister, Stephen Kinnack, amazing force for life. And she is our latest interviewee on the rest's policies leading. I recommend that to everybody. Sort of the model for Balkan. I mean, I think she points out it's a bit more complicated than that because Balkan is everything. But she is the Balkan character. She is just a Prime Minister of Denmark. And really worth listening to. And just so positive about everything.

32:40Which is absolutely wonderful. I love that. Second plug is for the rest's policies, US. Because of our election, they normally pop up on your normal rest's politics feed. But because we were so busy podcasting in the middle of the night last week, they were on their own feed. So if you want to listen to Anthony Scaramucci and Cady Kay's chat on the future of Biden and Trump's immunity, on which both of which, some of which there are a lot of interesting things to say, go to the rest's politics, US feed. I am going to plug the new European by telling you that if you subscribe to the new European, but it's the pound a week, you will get both of my children's books on politics for free.

33:22So all you need to do is visit the new European website. And I know that in right behind Rory right now is a very avid reader of one of those books. And a final plug for Rory, I was pleased to say your paper about politics on the edge is still a top the paper about charts, which is excellent news for you. It's very odd. Yeah, I'm still the number one best seller in paper. So thank you very much to listeners who have been buying the paper back of politics on the edge. Now, left horse. Right. So I am in Lafos. I know. And actually, I was here for the first round of the elections and came back to see you for the UK elections.

34:02Now I'm being here for the second round of the elections. And I mean, just to give you a sense of the sort of feeling of it on Sunday, we were driving past the Assembly National and saw very, very large number of vans, John, Dan, or even pull up people rolling out the John, Dan, onto the streets, driver who was from Senegal said that he was very worried on Sunday night that there were going to be riots and demonstrations. I said, what do you think about what's happening? And he said, well, I mean, all you need to understand about the far right is their racists. That's all you need to understand these people are racist.

34:37And we need to do everything we can to defeat them. But he was very concerned. Then the results obviously began to come through and very, very surprising results given, as you say, France is the world's center of polling. Poding really seemed to misleaders for many, many days. All over the place. Absolutely. All over the place. I mean, if you get, so this is as listeners to a previous podcast will know, this is a two -stage system where anyone can stand in the 577 constituencies first time round and then two go through the top two go through or any candidates which get 12 .5 percent or over. What happened in this case because the Hassan -Bremon National, the far right party led by Marine Le Pen, they did so well that it provoked this absolute convulsion in French politics and French society, actually.

35:26So what happened is that lots and lots of candidates pulled out to allow one candidate to go forward. More to take on. More to 200 candidates in more than 200 constituencies where there were three ways pulled out. And pulling out meant that the left and far left and Macron's more centrist party basically decided that they were going to do tactical voting. It would be as though in an attempt to beat the conservatives in Britain, I guess, Lib Dem or Labour would simply pull out. Well, every candidate would pull out. Not just tactical voting, but actually saying no, you will only vote for the party that can go so.

36:00And we'll give the voters, and this is what, obviously, the far right complaining about, give the voters only a choice between two people. So it would be like saying we're going to remove all candidates except, well, we could have done it actually in Claxon. That's where Faradish got elected in, and it would have been every party pulling out and running just one candidate against. That's where they did an over 200 seats. And then over to you, Alex, on what the result was and why that was surprising. Well, so the one of my I arrived in Istanbul and I turned on my on to French telly on the phone.

36:34And the first thing I saw, it was the pictures, the last on Ramon National headquarters as they were counting down to the exit poll coming up with the something close to the result. So this was the wall champagne on the red and it was five, four, three, two, one. And then the thing came up and they just looked absolutely, they looked like they'd been shot because they honestly had convinced themselves that we're going to win. Well, because that the polls, the polls suggested. Sorry. If we go back a week ago, that the far right was going to come first and that second would be the left and then third would be Macron.

37:12And what actually happened, evidently, was that the left, the new popular front got 182 seats, Macron's alliance got 163. And the last one, Ramon National got 143 and later he probably got 46. So nobody got anywhere near a majority of two, two, eight and nine. Now, Mariel Fandrentigan, who writes for the new European on France, she has written a superb analysis of the whole thing where she talks about these twin emotions that sort of flooded through her as the results came through. One was relief at the national front not winning, but the other was anxiety because the clarity, which Macron said was going to come from this, this paris, this great bet at his gamble actually now leads to kind of ungovernability and a sense of chaos.

38:03And I mean, I'll tell you, people want to study really powerful rhetoric. I mean, Macron is quite a speaker, but atta, his young 34 -year -old prime minister, his resignation speech was quite powerful. He made absolutely clear. Without dumping on Macron, but you didn't have to read too far between the lines to realize he thought this dissolution of parliament was a really stupid idea. He felt he couldn't stay on because he hadn't got his party and not got a majority. But then, and this is classic sort of French vachronism, Macron allowed that kind of to run. And then he asked if atta, I could stay poor limo more.

38:44Could he stay poor limo more? Just for a few moments to help us through the Olympics and then we'll see what happens. And what will happen probably now is he will appoint somebody. I think the Macron is going to be making a speech to the French nation today sometime Tuesday. But I think he will probably appoint somebody to lead the negotiations to try to get some sort of working arrangement. He won't be able to keep atta, as prime minister for long. The left will go crazy at that. Jean -Luc Mélencheau, if we talked about before, he went straight out. He was virtually the first speech. He did not have a majority.

39:20He was the leading party within this four party alliance on the left. But he went to out. This is the guy who said that when Macron had only 250 seats in parliament, he didn't have any legitimacy. He went straight out and said, we have one. We now have the right to bring it our program. So 90 % wealth tax and scrapping the pension reforms and massive ramping up at the minimum wage. So it's kind of how you get that into an alliance with people that are basically supporters of Macron. Let alone the soft right who would also have to be part of any governing majority. I don't see how you do it. For people who want a little bit on the history of this, it's kind of eye -bortering.

40:01If you go back to 2012 and 2012 is when Francois Hollande was elected, who we've interviewed on leading, people can listen to. And 2012 was a kind of big year because it was the year that Hollande was elected, but it was also the year in which Xi Jinping became Premier of China and where Putin came back as president of Russia. So 2012, the world was still a world in which the Socialist Party had 280 seats out of 577. And the traditional rights, the sort of equipment to the Conservative Party, had 194. So this was a world in which basically the French Quimta Labour had 280 seats and the French Quimta Conservatives had 194.

40:40That's only just over 10 years ago. And in those days, Macron's party didn't exist. The far right, Le Pen's party had only two seats and Melanchol, who's on the far left, had only ten seats. Even in 2017, Le Pen only had six seats. Exactly. So flip to 2017. The first thing that happened is this explosion of Macron becomes president. He then runs a parliamentary election. And his group gets 350 seats. The numbers on this, so at the end, I will disagree slightly on the micro numbers because some of these things are coalitions. So it gets a bit complicated on how you define exactly how many seats people got.

41:18But broadly speaking, what happened is in 2017, Macron explodes. The Socialist completely collapse, you know, down to about 45 seats. And they Republican just about sort of staggering along. And as you say, Melanchol and the far right still don't really have very much. Fast forward to 2022. Well, that's the first time that Macron's project begins to get a little bit into trouble because for many, many, or over 20 years, the presidents have tended to have a majority in the assembly. And then suddenly, 2022, Macron loses his majority still has by far the most seats. But people will remember he got into trouble on pension reform.

42:00And then there was a no confidence vote against him. And he just survives the no confidence vote because they're a public hand, which is the equivalent of the British Tory party vote for him, not all of them, but enough of them vote for him. And he just survives by nine votes. So it's a sort of fragile coalition where he has a lot of lot of seats, but he's pretty much dependent on the sort of moderate right to keep himself alive. Yeah. Yeah. And he doesn't have to have an election then really for another five years. And then this is the big story. He suddenly decides to trigger one. And by triggering one, he goes from collapses down to, however many we measure them out.

42:38What do you see, Macron at the moment? 163. 163. Okay. Okay. Down. We should, by the way, three times better than they were predicting in the first round. But what Jordan Bardela, the National Front guy, what he describes is this unnatural alliance between the left and the center. It did have the effect of the desired effect of stopping the last one from on as you know, but that's the only reason why they're so you screw. Yeah. But very, very difficult to work out how he governs. So definitely what he can't do is what he used to do, which is rely on his party to rely with the sort of moderate right.

43:14There's just not enough numbers. So the only way he can get the numbers is teaming up with the left. And as we've pointed out, the left includes 70, I mean, it's difficult again, breaking down because it's a coalition, but it looks like it's about 75 seats for France, unbound, which is Melanchion, about 63 for the traditional kind of labor socialists, 35 for the Greens and 10 for the communists. And Melanchion, very much saying, I'm not going to compromise with Macron. I'm not going to work with him. So one way of characterised is we now have three blocks in parliament with completely different visions of the country.

43:47And totally different databases. And who frankly, loathe each other. I know absolutely. I mean, Melanchion is, I mean, at all, what he speaks about Melanchion, the idea of those two even being the same rooms strikes me a bit odd. And of course, what happens often in these coalitions on the left is that the bitterness and the loathings are even greater within that coalition of the family of the left than they are against the right. So I guess the only way forward, you'll have to appoint a sort of prime minister designeur, I guess, to try to lead the negotiations somewhere. And then it's about sort of issue by issue, trying to get those.

44:27But this is at a time when you know, he was playing quite a leadership role in Ukraine. That's now going to be very much weakened. You have big grand vision and visionary ideas for the future of Europe. That's very, very, very difficult. In Marion's, Marion Van Rentegum's piece, she says that, you know, the relief that the French initially felt is a delusion. Yes, because although Melanchion on the far left and the panel on the far right agree on almost nothing, they're both much more skeptical about the Ukraine policy. They're both skeptical about bits of Europe, different bits of Europe they don't like.

45:01But they're certainly not signing up as you say for the macro vision. And of course, the French president is so important in Europe, along with the German Chancellor, but the German Chancellor is very weak. And the net popularity ratings now of macro are terrible. It's like 26 % approval. 26 % of people actually approve of the job that he's doing. Short, I think probably even worse now. So the big European leadership really challenged by this. And of course, I'm in Paris, where half the city is now getting closed for the Olympics. There are now seats all the way along the sand. You go to the Eiffel Tower, you can see a sort of things that out.

45:39You go to Versailles, I think they're getting ready for horse in the question of events. And it's a real sadness because this was something that Macron was very proud of getting the Olympics. He was going to preside over it for France. And we're just a couple of weeks to go. He's managed to blow the whole thing and create this sort of ungovernable chaos. Yeah, well, let's see, let's I shall be going to the Olympics for part of the time, but it's a bit of a mess. There's no other way of describing it. And Bardel, we call it Rory. And Bardel. Bardel. C 'est le Bardel. Le Francie, oh, I love, oh, they have the bow full of it.

46:16Okay, right, briefly and finally, should we talk about Iran? I can't help reflecting, Roy, as you were talking there about Macron Shultz, wouldn't Europe be a little bit different if perhaps a newly elected Labour Prime Minister in the UK with a strong mandate might have been able to adopt an immediate position inside a European, a former European Union. That's absolutely true. Absolutely true. I was breaking from Germany with a with a major players who would have been able to play a very, very major role. Well, let's let's move on to Iran. And as you know, I have my little son in the room with me, so I'm going to encourage him to get on with his Lego session.

46:51You can get on with your Lego. Well done. Thank you. You did really well. Well done. So moving on. You take him to Paris for a holiday. He spends all his time listening to you bluttering on about absolutely. Yeah, and then it's exactly. And of course, I fantasize that he's paying attention to every word, but nothing else. Okay. So really interesting in Iran. So generally, everybody's very gloomy about Iran. And you remember that the Iranian President, of course, we all remember the Iranian President was killed in a helicopter crash at a very difficult time. And the assumption was that the only people who would be allowed to run were the hardliners.

47:31And Masoud Pseche -Kiann, who has just managed to win, was actually not allowed to run by the Supreme Leader in the last presidential election because he's considered too much of an inverted commas reformist. Yeah. This time he was allowed to run. And he clinched a very considerable victory, 16 .3 million votes against 13 .5 million votes against his hardline opponent. And this has happened at a time when Iran is in a pretty close to a shadow war with Israel. You know, we remember killing Iranians in their embassy and then missiles firing across and boarding of each other's ships and the pressure building for a potential Israeli attack on his in Lebanon.

48:14So all of that taking place. And also really interesting questions around nuclear enrichment because we're now in a situation where this is a reformist faction that wants to, and was very much his foreign affairs advisor, was the cornerstone of putting together the Iran nuclear deal. And again, people want to hear more about that. Kathy Ashton interview on leading. Tells us quite a lot about her views. She worked very closely with this man who's called Mohammed Zareef, who's now going to be a very important voice in Iranian foreign policy. Anyway, it's thoughts from you from it. I wonder whether he was allowed to run this time.

48:49As you say, he was he was vetted out of the race in 2021. I think he ran in 2013 and got nowhere. I wonder whether they thought he just wouldn't win. And what happened was very, very low turn out in the first round, 39 .9 percent. And even in the second round, under 50 percent, 49 .8. So 61 million people, eligible to vote, did not vote. And I wonder whether the machine thought they'd be able to get enough of those out to vote for Jalili, who's the sort of hardline opponent, who was who sort of made his name as part of the kind of very, very hardline approach to nuclear negotiations. And I think we should just say because we use the word reformer, we shouldn't imagine that this is some kind of, you know, lily lilywood liberal reformist is still part of the Islamic Republic ruling a elite loyal to the by a toller won't have as much power as we might imagine for a newly elected president.

49:45But also, I know how much you love the back story, very interesting back story, personally. Because he I think he's got four children and his wife and youngest son were killed in a car crash. He's never remarried or got together with anybody else. So he's basically raised his three children on his own, a heart surgeon, a cardiologist who had also been a doctor on the front line in the Iran or at war. Somebody who during the campaign was actually slapped down by the a toller once a choice because he felt he was being too pro -western. He actually used this phrase, it reminded me of Macron's on Memta, he said he was neither anti -West nor anti -east.

50:26He talked about how much damage sanctions were doing to the Iranian economy, the Iranian people, and he wanted a strategy in the plan to get those sanctions lifted, which meant having better relations with the US. So, you know, it's very interesting and different approach culturally, particularly under the influence. And he's important because, you know, Iran has been supplying drones to Russia. It's evading sanctions through its connections with Russia. Amazing amount of trade back and forth, you know. And including weird things like iPhones flowing back and forth across the borders as well as drones.

50:57Just one more thing on the new president. He comes from the Northwest of Iran, which is an area that I spent 90 days walking through and spending time with villages, and he's some half a zary, half Kurdish. So, these are minority groups, not mainstream, Persian groups, and these are groups which are very strong, sunny, not sheer communities. And he's very much from that culture out right up on the edge of the Turkish border. So, he was a member of parliament for Taboriz. He was the head of the medical university, Taboriz University. So, Taboriz is the big city up in the Northwest of Iran. He is much older than most recent Iranian leading politicians.

51:37So, he grew up under the Shah. He served in the Shah's army in the 1970s, then went to medical school. But you're absolutely right. It is important to understand that he very much didn't leave the country. He stayed during the revolution. He became a doctor on the front line as you pointed out. You can see photographs of him in military uniform. He's made supportive comments about the revolutionary guard. But on the other hand, on Mem T 'on, as you like to say, he was very critical of the way that protesters have been treated. So, he came out and made very strong comments in, I think, 2002, 2018, 2022, these big protests that happened, 2007 as well.

52:19On each occasion, he came out and said that actually the government was being too aggressive in their attacks. His wife, who was killed in the car crash was a gynecologist, so very, very educated woman. And he has also warned against Iran becoming too close to China or Russia, because he thinks that China Russia could begin to abuse them. That was the specific issue that led to the Iatola issuing a mild rebuke. When we have, we've talked so much this year about all these elections happening in different powers of the world. And when you talk about a new president being elected or a new prime minister in the UK, you assume rightly in most cases that they have enormous power, you know, President in France or America does have enormous power.

53:04A prime minister in the UK has enormous power. A president in Iran is, you know, that they sit within a pecking order that has the supreme leader at the top, the office and the team of the supreme leader, very, very powerful. You then have a guardian council, you have the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and you have the Supreme National Security Council. So this is a sort of, you fit within kind of a tablo, a very powerful, sometimes conflicting organizations, you are not first among and you've inherited a structure. So you've inherited an economy that is under sanctions. You've inherited a uranium enrichment program, which is controversial.

53:48The Americans say that the Iranians are not currently trying to create weapons, great uranium. The Israelis, on the other hand, say they're researching in the university, so you can take different views on how serious they're about that. But the biggest thing he's inherited is this structure of these proxies. So these are armed groups, terrorist groups, militia groups, which are spread now very influential in Iraq, very influential in Syria, very influential in Lebanon, where his Polaris, the big example, very influential in Yemen, whether who's the other big example. These are groups which the Iranian Revolutionary Guards fund, provide missiles to provide training to and have used in wars up and down these borders.

54:32And it's likely that he will not dismantle those that apparatus, because in some ways that's worked quite well for Iran. Iran has managed to extend its influence over the last 20 years through these groups, while keeping just below the threshold of open conflicts with the major anti -Iranian powers. So really interesting. We're going to make a bid though immediately to get him on leading. He speaks very good English, as well as good as Erie Turkish, good Farsi. I think one other European language. Well listen, we need to have a little think about who was to get on leading. We've already said on this podcast we'd like to get Peter Carlon fairly soon.

55:14Did you think David Cameron might, he doesn't really like you very much does he? He doesn't, he's pretty, pretty cross with me, I'm afraid. And give me your book on the edge, does not indicate great relationship to me and David Cameron. He's probably looking at the Sunday Times best cellarist every week. When is that, when is that bastard going to get off the top of the best cellarist? The terribly disabliging things he said about me. Anyway, we've got a lot of people to choose from and we've got a few good ones lined up. And finally, the rest is politics, US feed, which is separate feed, not on our main feed, which is Katy Kay and Anthony Scaramucci talking about Trump's immunity now available.

55:50And we'll come back to the US again next week, because obviously the spiden story is not going away. It's completely fascinating. And a lot of this is the inverted commas, the democratic party, which turns out to be even more complicated than if you talk about the labor of the conservative parties. Nobody has any idea what you're talking about. You're talking about the senators and congresspeople. You're talking about ordinary citizens. You're talking about mysterious billionaire funders. You're talking about party officials. But whatever they are, my goodness, they're frozen around the system of whether or not they get rid of Biden and how they do it if they want to.

56:20And we talked a lot before Keir Starmer was elected about, you know, how would he handle his first meeting with Donald Trump if he came president? His first meeting with Joe Biden is in the next 24 hours. And that's going to be quite tricky as well, because everybody will be on tentahooks. I'd be to loads of those. Both as a journalist and working with Tony Blair, those sort of, when you go in the White House and they have the meeting in the Oval Office and then they sort of bring a press, they call it a press spray. They bring a press spray through it through at the top of the meeting. Somebody throws out a question and it's all about the body language and it's all about the kind of, you know, and you can imagine, I know, the people are going to be about that.

57:00And then whether they'll do a press conference as well, I don't know. But every time Joe Biden goes out these days, it's a little bit tentahooks. It is tentahooks, isn't it? Because the problem is that there's always, even when things are going reasonably well, he did a, you know, an interview with George Stephanoplas that his supporters said, really showed he had his stuff together. But he then appears to have described himself as the first black vice president and another serious ventifuses week, which has not helped. It feels as though, you're right about tentahooks, it feels as though, and this is what one seems to be getting from Bob Woodwoods reporting from the White House, that there are, you know, a dozen occasions where it just goes horribly wrong.

57:37And other times he seems to be okay. Okay, we'll see you soon back tomorrow with a question time. All right, thank you, Alistair. Bye. Bye.