324. Israel at War: One Year On

24:47Now it should be, I agree with you, it should be a combination of diplomacy and always trying to keep contacts open to your enemy and alongside kind of strategic build up and all that sort of stuff. But ultimately, the reason I think this is maybe worth focusing a little bit. Is that this, you talked about the way that the situation is being covered in the Israeli media. I've been surprised talking to some Jewish friends who I would, you know, I think a year ago, and we maybe, maybe we should get you along the Harari back on because he was very interesting about this. He's somebody who cannot stand Netanyahu, like a lot of the Jewish friends that I know.

25:22And yet I think they have, they feel more supportive of what the Israeli government is doing in part because they have a sense that that support is weakening elsewhere. And they think it's weakening because we, the weak West, etc., we don't fully understand that the existential threat is exactly what they feel. That this is really tough. I mean, so of course Israel feels an existential threat. And many of them felt an existential threat on the October 7th and they felt that what Hamas did on October 7th was a sign that unless they attacked Gaza, Hamas was going to wipe out every Israeli. In a way that's kind of a little reminiscent of how we interpreted 9 -11.

26:02You know, what did 9 -11 mean? I mean, there's no doubt that Osama bin Laden and Al -Qaeda was waging a global jihad and they envisioned a world in which everybody was going to become a Muslim and in which killing Christians and Jews was central to that project. So how do you respond to that? There's no doubt that the IRA totally denied the existence of the state of Britain in Ireland and wanted to eliminate the state Britain and Ireland and refused to recognize the state of Britain and Ireland, right? And no doubt they're killing people. So what sort of threat is this and how do you respond to it?

26:34And this is where I'm going to get a bit controversial, right? I think we made the wrong decision after 9 -11. We concluded that what we needed to do is topple the Taliban government and we also thought if we got rid of Salam Hussein, we say for it. And remember that many of the Neocons and some politicians in Israel were also trying to make us go after Iran in 2002, 2003 for the same reasons. Right, I remember when I was in Basra, people joking that I was put in as an acting governor of two provinces in Sunnaraq. The sick joke at the time was that I needed to get my farsie up and running again because I was going to be made to be the sort of acting governor of Isfahan.

27:13The idea was that the Neocons were going to roll into Iran and the reasons for doing it were all these reasons. Iran is an existential threat to global security, there's an axis of evil. Iran is connected to North Korea and all these kinds of things. And so what we need to do is topple the regime. And in those days, of course, we also understood that you can't just topple, because if you just topple, you leave Anarchy and Chaos by and we have topple a nation built. But there's a very big difference with the current American administration. Joe Biden does not want this thing to escalate. All of his diplomacy and anti -Blincon's diplomacy and Secretary of State has been about trying to de -escalate.

27:48That's the point I was making earlier that these people that I've been talking to were basically saying The strategy that we've been trying to pursue has been kind of undone by the fact that Netanyahu Has conducted his policy in a certain way that they think has made the likelihood of Iran Getting more involved greater rather than lesser and that is what Hamas wanted in the first place I guess what we're arguing about is whether in these circumstances you put your main focus on security or on diplomacy. And the truth is you have to do both, but it's how you get the balance right between that. But right now, one year on from October the 7th, it's very, very, very hard to see how and where this ends.

28:30One of the really interesting things is that Iran has been exposed as much, much weaker than people thought, and his well -a has been exposed as much weaker. So Israel has realized that they've got Iran over a barrel. There's nothing Iran can really do to deter Israel. So they've tried to find this very strange insecure narrow path to saying, well, we'll send a few missiles across, but we will warn people in advance before we fire them as missiles. We'll only fire them at military targets. So we end up in such a situation we don't kill many Israelis. and we hope that we can signal that we're doing something without doing so much that Israel can then get international support for attacking Iran.

29:12And the problem is that they're on a losing wicket because they're weaker, so much weaker militarily than Israel. I mean Israel on the end has a nuclear bomb and Iran doesn't, right? In the end Israel would just keep up in the anti, they'll hit them again and again and again. And if Iran doesn't respond, it's it's screwed and if it does responded screwed. But then the question is where does that end? And of course the hope in Israel is that they can hit Iran so hard that somehow the threat of terrorist movements and states that are unfriendly to Israel will just disappear. And that's what it doesn't seem likely because you can impose military damage on Iran.

29:51But in the end the Palestinian problem remains and the settlers remain and the anger of the Palestinians remain. Gaza remains a weeping saw. There's a lot of Palestinians living in southern Lebanon and there are many many Muslims around the world Not just Muslims, I mean a lot of young people around the world in all countries who are increasingly Pro -Palestinian and Israeli and Israel is sort of Benefitting in a way from an odd phenomenon, which is that the politicians around the world particularly in the West strongly supportive of Israel but most younger voters are increasingly not. But because the younger voters aren't organizing, and it was about social media, about a new democratic landscape, or they've lost faith in politics, there isn't a pressure from those younger voters, somehow translating to the politicians to drive for cease -fire or peace.

30:41Well, listen, we've known out both of us upset some people by, that's because it's such a difficult subject to talk about, but I think maybe close with this, back in the 90s, when I was on the mirror, I interviewed Yichak Rabin who was the Israeli Prime Minister who was assassinated in the mid -90s by an extremist who was unhappy at him engaging in peace efforts. And I remember, it wasn't my interview, but a famous quote from Rabin. He said, you don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies. And I think we at some stage, that has to come back into the frame. Great. Thank you. Take a break.

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32:32Welcome back to REST's Politics with me, Royce Chant. And me, Elisd Campbell. The big news in UK politics this week is that there has been a fundamental change at the heart of government Soodre who was Kierstarmers chief of staff has now basically been sacked or shoved sideways and replaced by a man called Morgan McSweeney And this comes at a moment where it does feel that the Labour government hasn't really managed to impress It hasn't really managed to get a sense of momentum narrative and part of that seems to be the story around the way in which number 10 is run What's your sense of what's going on there and maybe we can get into the right some wrongs this?

33:09Well first of all as we normally do on our public appearances we did a lot of show of hands at the Brighton for the first event of our tour. This is going on Wednesday, we're in Birmingham this evening and then we're going to Manchester, Glasgow, Cardiff and terrifyingly the 02. But if you remember I asked the audience that I gave them three choices, read the Labour government, have they been as you expected them? better than you expected them or worse than you expected them to be. And perhaps because it's more it made you smile rather than me, perhaps you could give the the result of that. Well, it's fascinating, isn't it?

33:46So basically people thought either as expected or worse than expected, but they also thought the label was likely to win the next election. So I think the government started pretty well and a combination of actually what we were talking about before, I wouldn't underestimate particular young people how much Gaza has really eaten into the sense of labor not being a government of change. Then the fuel, the winter fuel payment being taken and then that allied to the whole sort of route about freebies which we talked about on a recent podcast. We don't need to revisit that. But I think that has all come together with the Sue Grey story, which is, I feel a bit sorry for Sue because the press have just been a bit obsessed about her like there were one point of obsessed with me.

34:26She has got enemies, she has enemies inside the civil service, she may also have enemies inside labor and I think it's unfair to blame any official because ultimately my the big point that I think has to emerge from this is the strategy that the government is pursuing has to become clearer, stronger. I didn't realize that you may have read and heard Rory about this thing called the grid which is something that we invented back in the 90s. Yeah. Sue Gray had control of the grid. Yeah. Tell us what the grid was. Well the grid essentially if you look at the grid It's just a, you don't think it's just a diary, but it's not a diary.

34:57It's a strategic tool. And actually, I think you can find them online. The examples of Google Downey Street grid and go into images. You can usually see some of them. And essentially, so let's just take for example, we set on the podcast and we set in Brighton. I think one of the missteps has been to have this near four -month gap between the election and the budget. But let's take the budget. You know when the budget is going to be. So there in your grid, well in advance you say budget day, okay? And you know that out of the budget there are going to be a number of announcements, big debates, big arguments, and you plan around them following the budget.

35:33But you also seed the ground for the arguments ahead of the budget. So let's say you were thinking that what you were going to have to do is borrow some more money in order to spend some more money on the NHS and that was going to be revealed in the budget. How what would you set about sort of preparing those things that you just mentioned? That only might need longer. Okay. In fact, we did that. If you remember, answer that very specifically. There was a point where we did want to spend more money on the health service. Yep. And Gordon Brown laid the ground. Good was very, very good at commissioning reports and then getting those reports to say that this is what should be done and then he would do it.

36:10And that was really the notion of a high -pothecated tax. You float the idea of a high -pothecated tax. You write, you put one penny on the national insurance and that goes to the health service. I'll give you another example more recently. The Winter Fuel thing. You could have made a speech early in the government to say, yes, we've got this black hole, we're going to have to make some difficult choices. Today I'm going to focus on pensions and pensioners. And you set out a big argument about how pensioner wealth has increased, but so has pensioner poverty. And therefore, there may be a case to look at whether all of the benefits that all pensioners get, whether some of them the state pensionists secure and the stripper lock, etc.

36:48You float the argument, you get others to float the argument. But the other thing that the grid does, and it's basically the main thing that you want to communicate on a particular day is at the top, the second thing second and then everything else is below. So for example, November the 5th, the top of the grid at any government, most governments of the world is going to be the American election because that's where the world's eyes are going to be focused. But you might around that say, well, the foreign secretary two days before or we'll make a big speech, setting out the British interest and so far as the outcome is concerned.

37:16We have to make relations with both, et cetera, et cetera. So you plan it like that. But the thing I always used to say, when I looked at the grid, and I had a guy whose job, his total full time job, I saw him as my air traffic controller because he was bringing in, all the different things happening in government. He had people in every department department that he liaised with. He met with them once a week, and he then prepared notes on everything that they were doing. And then he would map it out, and then we would say, yeah, okay, good that we move that. And every time I look to the grid at the weekend, I accompanied it with a note to every cabinet minister, every minister, every private sector, every comms director, this is what we're doing next week, vis -a -vis strategy.

37:54Does everything that's at the top of that grid speak to one of our strategic priorities? Got you. So let's say maybe the theme for the week was early childhood education. And you'd want, basically, that week was gonna focus on that. and you wouldn't want ministers out talking about stuff that had absolutely nothing to do with that or launching huge initiatives that confuse that message. You'd want to try to reinforce a vision for the week. For something to take over a whole week, it would have to be like the budget. Okay, but you would certainly have, for example, let's take a smaller example.

38:26We're recording this on the day that there's been this report by the Commissioner Orracy. Yeah. Okay. So that's a report. this has been an outside body has done. So that might be a third order thing on the grid. But you plan for that. So you know that's coming and you say, okay, what's Bridget Phillips in doing on that day? Is it worth her doing a visit that accompanies this? Is it worth getting her on the media around? Is it worth targeting them? You know, the daytime media because that's maybe more of an issue for that. So you plan around them. Do you have someone ahead? You know, I want the front page of the paper I de -lead to focus on this story and then I want Oracee sort of back at page five so maybe you might have three or four stories.

39:05This may surprise you, I worry less about the media outcome than about the impact within and upon government. Part of what this is internal communications is that everybody knows what everybody else is doing and everybody knows why they're doing it. So we had, if you think about when we got elected, modernization, you see, we've had modernization going through everything. Many not the few, future not the past, leadership not drift, education the number one priority. So if you say education the number one priority, you better make sure there is something every single week that speaks to education.

39:36If you're saying future not the past, don't make lots of weird and wonderful speeches about nostalgia, make speeches about the future. That's why I say it's a strategic tool. And I think what's happened since the election is actually the grid has become more a diary. And that's why so, okay, well on Tuesday we're doing the Chegos Islands and then on Wednesday we're having a big reshuffle inside Downey Street or wherever it might be. Well, that doesn't, how does that hang together? And is this partly that by personality, maybe Kirstama, Sugree, is sort of civil servants, I mean, and Richard Reeps, I mean, they were all civil servants, weren't they?

40:10So maybe civil servants tend to have a more well, we're doing all this complicated stuff in government, we're just getting on with it day to day. And actually what you're lacking is the sort of experienced politicians who are doing something Civil 7s don't often have to do, which is kind of lay out big, simple primary color narratives. Because of course, presumably for a Civil 7, here you say modernization, education, and the initial response as well, yeah, but quite a lot of what we're doing is about the past, or a lot of things we're doing, yeah, sure. And there's no harm in having that. That's why ultimately I did it into our Andrew Marlin, it'll be C last night.

40:48And he said, how big a change to the government, you think it will be that Morgan McSweeney is now the chief of staff rather than than Sue Gray. And I said, well, actually the answer to that should not be about Morgan McSweeney or Sue Gray. It's about Keir Starmer. What does Keir Starmer want the government to be? What does Keir Starmer want the government to do? And strategy and message has to come from the top. Then you have to have these systems that I'm talking about to make sure that it's properly coordinated and properly communicated. And that's the bit that I hope this reset will do. And actually, I thought but another, it got far less attention, probably as reasons, because then the media is a bit obsessed with Subray.

41:22And added to which, by the way, I think there's an element of misogynist of that, but anyway, but I think the other interesting point was this guy, James Lyons, who was a journalist, then worked at the NHS, now at TikTok, who's coming in to do strategic communications. Now, that is, to my mind, all that strategic communications is, is the communication of a strategy at the same time as you were devising and implementing that strategy. That's all that it is. and the grid and the open nurse and explanation. I was doing an event this morning talking to these people who were business people, but they were kind of confused about what the government's about.

41:56And I said, well, I hope that this reset will actually fix some of that because what we've lost, I think, and this isn't just a labor thing, I think we've lost this from our politics generally, is that kind of educative explanatory stuff about why we're doing something, what is happening in the world that makes this relevant. and you can build blocks around that. You don't just think of one event. There's no such thing as one event. They're all, they've got to tie together in some way. And sometimes you have to force it. You have to say, okay, well, I can see why you don't think that's got much to do that.

42:25But I'm going to make a link, so that I can emphasize part of the strategic message that we're trying to deliver. Well, I had a long chat with George Osborne today. He spent an hour chatting to George Osborne about this. And he said that it was much clearer with Blair and Brown, what they were up to. And to some extent, Brown had a lot of ideas and had a very talented team. He had Ed Bulls, Neve Milliband, and Doug Salisam, as we talked about, generating ideas, even if that was sometimes but frustrating, and that the Tories, when they came in 2010, I remember this, in the lead up to the 2010 election, there were these big policy groups, sometimes connected with your dreaded, tough, and street think tanks, but really generating stuff.

43:08So, you know, some of it very controversial. That's the universal credit stuff came out of the Center for Social Justice, Goves Education Policy, which is mostly learning from Scandinavia and the United States, there was Andrew Lanzi's dreaded health reforms. Above all, there was this story that they told in the election, which is the fundamental problem with Labour. Again, it doesn't matter which is true or not, but it was a narrative that was very easily understood. Fundamental problem with Labour is they've spent too much. So if you vote for us, we're going to cut spending. So everyone knew what we were on about or what they were on about.

43:43And of course, I think what George is pointing to here is we don't really know what the analysis is. I mean, I've talked about one problem, which is that not very long ago, like a year ago, a year and a half ago, the normal story I would have got out of you or people who are broadly sympathetic to labor is that the problem with the Tories was austerity. Problem was they cut too much. And the solution was that they needed to spend more. And if you spent more, actually, the economy would grow. And this is kind of this Marianne massive car to and I did if you put investment in the right place and you grew it's right.

44:16But that narrative got a bit lost because we then suddenly had Rachel Reeves going into an election saying she was not going to spend more. She wasn't going to raise more. And actually when she got in, she changed the story from the problem is that the Tories have cut too much to the problem is that the Tories have made a whole series of unfunded spending comments. So as the Tories are spending too much. So I saw that as one big problem. I mean, what's your view on what the Starmer vision is or the Morgan McSweeney vision? And what are they going to try to tell us if your thing was education, education, education, what's their thing?

44:50What's their or Osborne was austerity? Yeah, I think it wasn't education, education, education. I think it was modernization. Right. And education was a key priority within that. So modern I think what they would say is that it's about building an economy where people have genuine equality of opportunity and I guess it's levelling up. It is actually levelling up. But again to do that, Liam Burn former Chief Secretary famously with his letter and still an MP. And I'll send on to you this thing that he's written. Maybe we should talk about it next week because he's basically an analysis of where reform did well against labor and people think it's all about immigration but actually there's a normal exact correlation between where people's living standards were falling further behind those who had rising living standards which is a lot of us.

45:42So our sentence is very very long and detailed it's really worth reading. So I think it's it is about leveling up, it is about extending opportunity and equality and the key to it is growth. There's no doubt about that. But so for example, if I was doing the Institute of Communications, I would build them all around the five missions. That's what they've been elected on. What are the five missions again? There's a growth mission, there's a green mission, there's a health mission, there's a crime mission, there's an aspiration mission. Okay. So it's not too many missions. I struggled through the before the three things.

46:12Well, it is, we can rely on those. And say that there's flow from it. Yeah. Yeah. But at least have clarity and priority. Or it's all about aspiration, everything for me. It's just trying to step back for a moment that there are basically five things that you could have said about Britain. You could have taken the Blairite view. So I think the Tony Blair Institute actually provided a very, very coherent vision of what Tony Blair would be doing if he was Prime Minister. And that's a lot of focus on technology and openness and globalization, which I think more than what he doesn't like. The second view was the kind of Corbin view, And which was to some extent early Starmer when Starmer ran for election It was tax the rich abolishing universal credit scrap tuition fees bring in free movement leader green revolution The third one was which we thought in the run up the election was that Stick which I think you were sort of selling me on which is that they're just more serious and competent We're fed up with these jokers and we're just gonna get in a more serious competent government There's a lot of like I guess you threw the door, but it's not enough not enough The fourth one I think is the really radical one which is the kind of labor equivalent of thatcher who really tries to rip stuff up and do things in a completely different way.

47:23And that, for example, in planning, we've had all this stuff on how our roads cost twice as much to build as they do in France and we've just spent 200 million pounds just on the planning process for the Thames tunnel. So maybe there would be a vision of labor just coming up and saying the number one problem in Britain is infrastructure housing planning. and we're going to go to war. We're going to go to war with Nimbis in Torey, housing estates, and we're going to rip up a lot of the regulations. We're going to challenge even the environmental lobby to get the stuff built. And then the final one I think is the one that you're sort of getting to, which is this sort of Morgan McSweeney vision, which is leveling up sometimes called security, sometimes kind of dealing with shabbyness and Britain, which feels sometimes a little bit like, we keep coming back to his time in barking, Tom McTagrax about this, the ice or gardens policy.

48:09and the sense of Morgan McSweeney hated Corbin, but also doesn't really like the Blairite fish. He's not really into globalization, technology, centurism, no more left and right. It's very much we're going to make things better for working class communities, isn't it? My point is that we shouldn't really be talking about what he thinks, because the big vision and the big drive and the big strategy has to be about the politicians, and it has to be about the Prime Minister in particular. So there's no doubt, obviously, you know, part of Tony Blair's strength, I think, was that he surrounded himself with a collection of people, different backgrounds, different views, different, different sort of assessments, different skills, but we all worked together to help him.

48:51What we didn't do was like say, okay, I mean, if we did have our, I would happily rory of sat in Downey Street and said, right, next up, we're going to get rid of private education. Next up, we're going to lower the voting age. Next up, we're going to bring in compulsory voting. I never did that. I argued things that I believed in, but ultimately he was the boss. And I think it would be dangerous, given what is Jonathan Powell, who is our chiefist, what are these great strengths? I helped him this by being such a lightning rod. Jonathan ever very rarely got written about. Jonathan just got on his job and got on his job and he was absolutely brilliant at it.

49:22Didn't want profile, didn't want publicity, he got very annoyed. What was just quickly, what was his job? I never come to the end, but just what is this chief of staff job, if it's done well? because you've got the cabinet secretary, you've got a principal grep secretary who doesn't exist at the moment, but in your case, it's just been appointed. Yeah. Right. So you had John Holmes, and you had Robin Butler, is there any? That really first came in? Yeah. Well, we had several private secretaries. Yeah. We had Alex Allen. We also had Robin Butler, and we had John was there. And essentially they had to work together, but all of them were facilitating John was with particular, but using the Prime Minister's perspective, facilitating what he wanted and what the government was trying to do.

49:59Simple as that. And that really does mean that the people who are doing those jobs really, really matters. And I think Morgan's canny enough to know this. He's going to get written about quite a lot and he'll get written about particularly in the coming days and weeks. He should try and keep his head down in terms of that. This should be about Kier's Starrmer having a project, not Morgan but Sweeney having a project. Now, Rory, we've gone on for a long, long, long, long time. And why don't we do? Let's do the Troy leadership in Q &A, but at the same time we can't leave people hanging about what we discovered in Brian and Calmy.

50:31So there we were at Brian between three and four thousand people and we asked them if they were Tories and some of them were there was a guy in the front row with a beard who admitted to me he was a member of the Tories party which is you know fair play alongside two people let me just tell our listeners there's two people who had been to the Brighton Tottenham game they were sitting in the front row wearing Tottenham shirts and Rory said to them at one point I We take those two arstle of fans there. Any idea? Any idea? Bad that, is Rory. Anyway, why don't you reveal what the answer was to the question about who they would vote for if there were Tories?

51:07And second question, who they would fear the most if they were Keir Starler? Well, the overwhelming vote was for James Clevverly. On both counts. Yeah, and I told James Clevverly this and he texted back saying, great, because I'm going to win this on the basis of the Brighton Book Club. Yeah, but you know, it's interesting because that does show I think maybe the difference between, it was a very general audience. I mean, I'm guessing most of them were left of center, but there were lots of people that it was a pretty middle class audience. I suspect that there would be more tourists there than we think.

51:43They didn't necessarily want to put their hands up in front of them. I mean, I think if you were cleverly, what you'd say is that this confirms what he would want to say, which is that he is more popular with the general population and is more likely to be able to take the fight to stun, but the problem is that even making it to the final two relies on MPs and then becoming lead, it relies on this tiny number of elderly, right wing conservative party members just over 100 ,000 of them. So the question is, I mean, I think that's what Clavis is slightly making a joke with when he's texting me back, that is he going to be able to let the conservative party in country sensed that he does have an appeal with the general public?

52:25Or are they just going to try to get back into their comfort zone by going for sort of right wing identity politics? And of course, the reason I think that would be so stupid at the conservative party is that it's the one thing that will give purpose back to Kierstama. Kierstown won the selection basically because people were fed up with the tourists and thought they were slightly crazy and didn't know what they were doing and then competent. So given that Kierstown so far hasn't managed to make it clear which of these kind of five visions the country's got, what he can do is if he ends up with Robert Generic or Camille Baidnog, say, I'm here to stop these guys.

53:04Look at these guys across the dispatch box. these are proper, proper, dangerous people. You're going to prefer me because I am more moderate, more thought for more normal than this life. And whereas James Clevverly is a kind of Giu -Git suit, because if Clevverly comes in and doesn't sound, particularly extreme, sounds rather sort of moderate and kind of reasonable and normal, then Kier Sam has got a bit of a problem because it's much less easy to define himself. I'm going to say, God he's got Bevichee with his response on the Chegos Islands. What's he done on the Chegos Islands? Well, he basically was in charge of the negotiations to get this thing sorted out in government.

53:40And the Labour government had been full of praise for the work that he did. And then as soon as the deal gets concluded, he comes out and says, it's terrible that we're giving these islands away. Just quickly, before we end, that's Brighton Show was really fun. As you say, almost 4 ,000 people, great questions, great interaction. We're now rolling on to Birmingham, 02, which I'm really looking forward to. We're doing Glasgow, we're doing Cardiff and Manchester twice. And I'm really loving these live shows. So thank you for everybody who came. And 02, the numbers are absolutely crazy. And we're doing it in the round like a boxing match.

54:16One of the questions indeed was who would win a fight. Yeah, and the other reason I can see it is that it would be you, unless I could tie you out somehow by running around the stage for long enough. Right. Okay, thank you all so see you soon. Bye. Bye.