301. Question Time: Iran’s retaliation, Labour "press bias" and an Olympic hangover

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0:20Welcome to The Restus Politics question time with me, Roy Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell. And I think in honor of keeping us honest, because I think we've generally pretty sympathetic to Labour government that came in, but we've got to keep questioning and here is a good question from Vincent Manacore. Alistair often complains about press bias against Labour. But following the case of Ian Corfield being given a top civil service job after donating £20 ,000 to Rachel Reeves, I can't help but think that if this had happened under a Tory government, the press would have been far less forgiving.

0:54What are your thoughts on this? So just to background, Ian Corfield is a banker who's donated more than £20 ,000 to Labour Party in the last nine years. And he after the election has been made a director in the UK Treasury, so working under Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, directors as you know, pretty senior, just under a director general. And it very unusual, because normally that's a role that would go to an internal appointment in the civil service run next time appointments. So I suppose if I had been playing the Alistair role from a few months, I'd be jumping up and down saying, if this had happened under a Tory government, there would have been a huge amount of press reporting, but because it's happened under a Labour government, people have barely reported it.

1:32What do you say about that? I think there has been a reasonable amount of reporting about it in the places where you'd expect it, Daily Mail at Owl. I generally want Labour to be a really clean, open, transparent government. Good. First thing to say, £20 ,000 in nine years for a Tory, that doesn't even get you a cup of tea with a Julia PPS, but we'll part that for now. But I think this is, I could be wrong, but I think what Ian Corfield, who comes from a financial services background, I think this is a short term job where he's going to be in charge of one of these investment summits that the Labour government is trying to put together.

2:12Now, I've not read that, but that is what I've been told by somebody who is as it were close to Ian Corfield. But in general, there are systems for hiring. You and I both agreed in the past that maybe these systems need to be shaken up a bit so as you can go outside, you can pay people more, you can get people in from the private sector for short term contracts that aren't necessarily on the same level of pay as civil servants. But I think on things like this, particularly in this early stage of the Labour government, anything which allows people to say you're just as bad as the Tories is to be avoided.

2:47Yeah, and it's unfortunate because he would feel it's unfair just because he donated the Labour government. He couldn't get a job that he was qualified to take. We should talk a little bit at some point or so about some of the early appointments. I mean, one of the interesting things that's happened, which makes me a bit jealous of my friends and your friend, Hamish Faulkner, is he's come straight in as a backbench MP and has got immediately before he's served, you know, a week on the back benches has been made the Minister for the Middle East, a job that I was just about and the running for eight years into my time.

3:17I was unheard of for David Cameron ever to put a new MP straight in as a Minister. He, you know, even his very favourites, the Matt Hancock's, and let's just have to serve at least two years on the back benches before they were ministers. Yeah, it's not exactly an easy job. And I mean, I think Hamish is a very clever guy. He's got a good track record in terms of his previous career, although I think we'd all accept that being an MP and being a Minister is a big step up from anything you may have done done before. George Gould is another one who's gone straight in as a Minister. I can't remember, I don't think Tony Blair ever did either.

3:50I think he's with Cameron on that. No, I didn't think you did because I remember chatting to Peter Mendelson about this, about him being frustrated. And I think the Millabans too, that they had to serve their times as back benches. And this was, you know, this was relevant because people like Matt Hancock who came in with me had been chief of staff to George Osborne and very much part of the inner circle of the Cameron Osborne set up really hoping that they would be able to become ministers. But the conventional wisdom was you had to serve a couple years on the back benches, learn your ropes before you became a minister.

4:18Now, of course, at the same time, I'm sort of quite well disposed towards it because I felt so frustrated that I was left on the back benches for five years. Nobody was tapping my experience. Nobody was using any of the energy I could have had. I would have loved to be a Minister early on. So it's largely jealousy that makes me grumble about it. You must be even more jealous of David Lamy who seems to be absolutely loving his new job at the time of Secretary, and he's certainly traveling a lot. Now here's Rory, we're talking foreign policy, Rory. We talked to a couple of times about about the recent elections in Thailand, his question from Jake.

4:50In Thailand, we recently witnessed the decision to dissolve the move forward party, MFP, over its controversial campaign to amend the law that protects the monarchy from criticism. Despite winning the election, his leader Peter was never able to forward government due to the legislative barriers subsequently barred from politics for the next decade, which is kind of what we said might happen. This isn't new, happened previously in 2020 when it predecessor's party, Future Forward was dissolved over a campaign funding violation. This undemocratic ruling seems to fly under the radar of so many in the global community.

5:21I wondered if you had an opinion on this and the future of Thai democracy. Yeah, well, this is something that we did discuss in some detail a year ago when the election was happening. So how was a year ago? Yeah, very distinctive in terms of basically the story of a lot of Southeast Asia. So Thailand moved towards democracy pretty much in lockstep with other countries, members of South Korea, became democratic, Taiwan became democratic, Indonesia eventually became democratic when I was a diplomat there in the late 90s. But Thailand held on to a very strong military and a very strong monarchy. We've talked a little bit about the monarchy and the to put it mildly eccentricities, the Thai king, who's largely to be found living in Germany, managed to release on social media pictures of his wife, Toplus, and made his poodle.

6:11I think it's a poodle into an air chief marshal called air chief marshal Fufu. Do you feel at all guilty or shamed that if you were a Thai citizen, you just committed an offense that would see you spend 15 years in jail? Well, I think that is a bit worrying, isn't it? It really is a bit worrying. One of the things that goes wrong in media is that you raise an issue and then you don't follow up. So the poor audience has left their own tentahooks and has been an election on South Africa. What actually happened with the colors from before? So in this case, it was an election in Thailand July last year.

6:42And it was very exciting because this guy called Peter Limon Joderat, who is a Harvard educated New Zealand educated, bright young thing in his early 40s, the kind of macro of Thailand swept through the election on a pretty progressive anti -militaries skeptical about the monarchy, modernizing favor of gay marriage against conscription, modernizing ticket. And it really felt as though my goodness, this is a massive rebuke to the old establishment. And Thailand is going to have to get with the times and modernizing. Here is this Harvard Kennedy school graduate who's now made it through. Fast forward a year.

7:21And of course, the forces of reaction have massively dug in. He wasn't allowed to form a government. Coalition instead was formed by the most conservative forces with the military and the monarchy back in. And his entire party has now been declared illegal. And he's been done for some offence. He committed two years ago and is no longer allowed to run. So, I mean, you know, we talk a lot about democratic backsliding and we're touched in question time on what's happening in Bangladesh. But this whole story of the way in which Asian democracies seemed in the 1990s to be on a steady path towards the modern democracies.

7:57Max, when you hear situations like this, Rory, and we kind of did predict this, although maybe not quite as dramatically or as speedy as it's happened, but it underlines how utterly ridiculous it is for people like Musk and Nigel Farage to say that Keir Starmer is the biggest threat to free speech in the history of the world, where this guy has won an election setting out a progressive program of change, not even criticizing the royal family, just saying maybe sometime in the future, that's worth looking at further down the track. And suddenly, he gets banned from public life. His party gets banned.

8:32And, you know, you're talking serious jail sentences in that country. You criticize the royal family or the military. The recent people turn of blind eye to it is that Thailand is, of course, an incredibly economic success story. And this was part of the story with Bangladesh. It's economy was growing so fast people turn to blind eye to the authoritarian government. Thailand is far far wealthy. I mean, it's a pretty poor country when I first went there in the early 80s. It's now a proper upper middle -income country and an economic miracle. And this is one of the problems that the link between being a liberal democracy and delivering growth, which was the sort of story for 200 years has been broken.

9:10And increasingly, from China to Thailand, people are looking at these more authoritarian models and saying, well, we don't really mind as long as we're getting wealthier. And maybe just just a sort of fast forward a bit. I mean, one of the things that goes wrong in media, and it's something that we can partially deal with in the podcast, but not completely, is that you raise an issue, and then you don't follow up. So on that basis, we should tell our listeners that the new prime minister of Bangladesh is Mohammed Yunus. He is there only ever Nobel laureate. He's been sworn in as the chief advisor of a caretaker government.

9:45Shaker Sina, who is currently in India, I think, has indicated that if and when they get around to future elections, she would consider throwing her hat in the room again. Well, so Mohammed Yunus, just for my people, he got his number prize because he was the guy that pioneered microcredit. So he made these very small loans to Bangladeshi women and had apparently, I mean, it's now become more controversial. People like me who believe in not making loans at all, but just doing direct cash transfer. Maybe would say that you didn't need to charge such high interest rates. But the basic idea was the same, which is that very small amounts of cash given to the extreme poor allowed people, particularly women, to really transform their economic conditions.

10:28But he was sentenced to six months in jail under the last government for a labor violation case. So it was one of the real sort of test cases of Bangladesh getting authoritarian that this great national hero had been thrown in jail through the general law fairness is now the interim president. Yeah. He's a few years older than Joe Biden, but inside the group of senior advisors are a couple of the leaders of the youth protest movement. Anyway, so I think we've covered up Bangladesh Roy, but we can come back to you again. What do we think? We can come back to again. I wonder whether there is enough proper international reports in the British press and whether people are able to connect the dots because, just for example, we should follow up on things like Uruguay.

11:05What's happening there? Where again, there was a very, very positive story that seemed to be turning dark. It's returning to some of the themes. I think it's really important. No, I totally agree with you. It's one of the reasons why both of us read widely abroad. It's why I do get the Le Mans diplomatic and why we do get the New York Times and these other papers that sort of do stick with. I think the decline of interest in foreign policy in our media. I still think the public is interested in it. Not all of them, but obviously, but a lot of people are interested in what goes on beyond our borders.

11:39Right. Let's stick with beyond our borders. Alex Bordman, does the Waltz pick, that's the new Vice -Presidential Vice -President Harris, signal that if the Democrats were in the US could have its most left wing administration in decades, how most using the progressive left will shape the approaches the campaign's take and the ultimate election result? I think it's very hard to put and bear in mind this is a guy. Waltz, this is a guy that Donald Trump pointed as the chair of his gubernatorial advisors and who said was a great governor. Did Trump push the liberal left thing in these interview with Musk?

12:15No, he didn't particularly know what his, his push in the interview with Musk is the obvious one, which I guess you would advise him to do if you were doing his campaign, which is to say it's all very well, these people complaining about immigration now, but they've been in office for four years and they didn't get on top of it. So his basic line is similar, I guess, the line that Labour took against the Conservatives is all very well during the election campaign, saying you're going to fix all these things, why didn't you fix them when you were in power? He was concentrating less on the Waltz, is he?

12:41Waltz has been the most astonishing find in terms of speaking. I mean, he's a great, great communicator, isn't he? Have you been impressed by his speeches and his stuff? I thought was his first big speech, when she was standing behind him, I thought it was brilliant, it was a masterclass in, in oratories, they're all word, it was kind of folksy communication, very funny at times, and he could flip between the funny and the very, very serious, and I'll just love that line about Vance when he said, you know, I can't wait to debate the guy, because he sort of, it wasn't bombast, it was, you know, when Trump does, you know, she's going to be great because she's even worse than Biden, nobody thinks he believes that.

13:22What he says with Waltz is he really does look forward to taking this guy apart. And it's difficult thinking of a British politician actually who's able to achieve that kind of communication style, because he genuinely seems so relaxed and cheerful. In terms of left -wing stuff, the controversy there is that in his own home state, he's introduced policies, which in the UK would be considered, you know, perfectly sort of center -right, you know, child tax credits, school meals, which is continually exactly free school meals stuff. So it's hardly the beginning of the communist revolution. One of the interviews I saw he was being pressed on it, and he said, yeah, hell yeah, I want kids to have food in their belly.

14:02That's so bad, so bad. He's just got his lovely way of kind of pushing back all this stuff. I was interested. I mean, we talked a little bit about this, but in the Trump mask interview, I was struck that Trump isn't going there. Trump clearly thinks that he should stick on. They've lost control of the border, and there are nasty people coming out of the border, and they're not dealing with immigration, and stick with cost of living. Yeah. You know, the prices are going up. His instinct at the moment, at least in that last interview, is not particularly to lean into that stuff. He thinks that he's more likely, I think, to win if he can make it about immigration and cost of living, and he's probably right, as me.

14:38Yeah. Now, Roy, you're in America at the moment. I'm in the last few days of my time, my post -Elympian hangover in France, but we will next be meeting in Chicago, because we're going to be doing the podcast from the Democratic Party convention. Looking forward to it, very, very much, very exciting. I think these things are going to, I mean, these things are pretty. I mean, we'll have to get some colorful clothing on and stuff. I think there's a real good party out there. No, I don't think we should do that. I think we should be very British and very sober. I could bring my backpipes if you felt that was necessary, but you must bring your backpipes.

15:12Now, quick break and then back for more questions.

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16:29Anushka, given the fact that Germany, UK and France are still sending weapons to Israel, how effective do you think the call between German Chancellor Olaf Schultz and the Iranian President, Masoud Pasezkian, will be at convincing Iran to prevent furthermentary escalation in the Middle East? So, remind people what's happened. So, ladies, figures from Gaza's Health Administration, last 48 hours, 142 Palestinians killed 150 injured, and we are very, very close now to crossing 40 ,000 Palestinians killed and 100 ,000 injured. And where is the escalation? Well, escalation is coming from the fact that Netanyahu just did a trip to the states where he was applauded by Congress.

17:13There has been an Israeli attack that took out the political leader of Hamas, who was there for the inauguration of the Iranian President, and Iran has vowed to retaliate. And there are certainly strong factions within the Israeli government that now feel that they need to take the war to the Hispala, which are the Iranian proxies, or allies in Lebanon, and some on the foreign extremes, who almost think now is the time to go to war with Iran. And I picked this up actually talking also to Americans who are very close to the Israeli government over the last few days. They keep returning to the story that Iran is the head of the Hydra and the only way to solve the situation in the Middle East is to go after Iran.

17:59This is something that the Biden administration profoundly disagrees with, and they are going all out to try to stop escalation into Lebanon and Iran. But as this question implies, how much leverage does the Biden administration really think it's got? If Netanyahu can turn up and get an applause from both houses of Congress, and apparently is able to act with complete impunity and logic, nor the U .S. on all this stuff. So I would have thought the risk of Ben Gavir and others being one of the right -wing politicians dragging Israel into a confrontation with Lebanon and Iran is relatively high at men.

18:37Well, watching the American media yesterday, it was as if it was a given, and there were some Israeli intelligence experts, I don't know whether they're experts or not, but they were builders such, essentially saying this is the week when it's all going to kick off, and that we should be sort of a question of when not if. No, I don't know if that's right or wrong, but I it does feel like it's in a perilous state. This thing you say about impunity there always, interesting, you know, in the main podcast we talked about China and Serbia, and we talked about the fact that a quarter of a century on, there's still these consequences from when NATO accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy, and at the time we had to apologize and explain and make reparations.

19:19And yet the other day you have a school that gets bombed, 90 people are so killed, and it's just stated as a fact we were taking out Hamas leadership, or Hamas can once enter that, and we've now become so sort of enured to this, that it's barely getting any international commentary anymore, and I just sort of worry that we're now to stage where, you know, you said when we talked about Ukraine, that we haven't talked about Ukraine for a while, and it's back to this point about things reach a sort of state of where it's just accepted this bad stuff's going to happen, and we only then take an interest when something really big and bad happens, but I found that really troubling this week.

20:02You're right. I mean, as the whole world gets more violent, and I mean, this is not just a sort of perception, this is statistics, right? Over the last 10 years, every single year we have had more civilians killed in conflict, more refugees, more internally displaced people, and we are now in a situation where about across 40 ,000 people killed in Gaza, which is a very, very high proportion of a pretty small population. The Ukraine war still absolutely, you know, meets Grindr's Soviet tactics as the way that it's characterized from both armies on the front lines. Sudan, the millions of people displaced and the drought now followed up with flooding, which is causing even more chaos and horror, and a general sense that this becomes the new normal, that thinks things which, you know, 10 years ago, we had the luxury to pretend or not pretend that genuinely the world has been becoming more peaceful.

20:58I read that Kier Starmer had his first phone call with the the new leader of Iran, making the same points that Shorts and Macron had done. Biden has been speaking to Kier, Starmer, Olaf Shorts and Macron and others, but it sort of feels at this stage, like they all feel this is heading in a very, a very dangerous direction. Just not being give air by the way, Rory, he said that instead of agreeing to a cease -fire deal, Israel should be blocking the entry of all humanitarian aid and fuel to Gaza until Hamas releases all of the astages. And as said, it would bring down the government of Netanyahu who goes too far, and Burrell, Joseph Burrell, who's the EU's top European diplomat, he's called for the EU to consider sanctions on Israel on the basis of that, saying that Ben Gavir's suggestion to cut away to Gaza is an incitement to war crime.

21:48So it's sort of, we all know, Netanyahu is a great survivor, but will he ever run out of road in trying to manage this cabinet and these different relationships between these very different people inside his cabinet? It's also a very interesting question about what exactly Israel's doing with some of these targeted assassinations.

22:14So yeah, we now have a new political leader who's taken over Hamas, who's a much more extreme is Yahya Sinwa, who's the man who masterminded, the horrifying attacks. This is a sort of strange thing which is both favoring the more extreme factions within Hamas, and look, some people listening to this will resent my saying, there are more extreme factions in Hamas, but the Sunniah, as with all these groups, it's true with the Taliban that we talked about, it's true with the Israeli government, there are more and less extreme factions going on. It suits the more extreme factions within Hamas, because on a spectrum, a slightly more moderate person has been killed, and a more extreme person has been brought in, but it also suits the more extreme narrative in Israel, because then they're able to say, look, you know, this is a more extreme organization.

23:04So it is this sort of sense that all these tactics are just increasing the tensions and increasing the risk of conflict, and a confrontation with Hisbalah and Iran is enormous. I mean, we keep talking about this, Hisbalah has over 20 ,000 people under arms, it is one of the most tested, tried military units in the Middle East, which developed huge capacity during the Syrian war, is much better armed than Hamas, and opening up another front in another country, because fighting Hisbalah will involve not going to Gaza in this time, it will involve invading a sovereign independent country, invading Lebanon itself, let alone taking on Iran.

23:49I mean, this is really, really dangerous stuff, and it's partly driven by people who think this makes strategic sense, so there are people in the Israeli government who think this is our chance to put this to bed once and for all, but it's also caused politics, it's about Netanyahu trying to keep his coalition together and avoid an election by flattering the more right -wing elements. Now, let's stay with a fairly heavy subject, State Knife, Paul O 'Connor, when you interviewed Eliza Manian Buller, former head of MI5 in April, she claimed that MI5 was unaware of State Knife until they were required to resettle in, this is the double agent that we talked about at the time.