327. Question Time: What does peace look like in the Middle East?

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1:35Welcome to the rest of the process. Question time with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Rory, where do you want to start? Let me start. Got the Tim Northance. Elon Musk is using his money and influence to help Trump hold the line. But why? As Musk realized that Trump is 78, won't be a viable candidate for anything much longer. Or is this about creating him as an heir apparent or president of 48? Well, he can't be president. Musk is even more inside Africa. Good answer. Very good answer. Listen, just very quickly on Musk, I think his personality is central here. One of the things is that he's got a sort of strange fixation with an idea of Trump's mokismo connected to the moment that he was shot at.

2:12And Musk has convinced himself this is the kind of leader to American needs. Secondly, there's a lot of this stuff that he keeps talking about on Twitter about challenging the woke mindset, which is partly to do, I think, with his transgender child. And his unhappiness about that. But also to do with a whole series of theories he has about the dropping US population and immigration, all this kind of stuff that ties in. But finally, there's a more fundamental problem with some of the people around him in Silicon Valley, which is they basically think that they're smart and everybody else that they are great sort of contrarians, that they made their money by challenging the conventional wisdom.

2:51And the more that people say positive things about Trump, the more inclined he is to back him, can I just pick up though, just as we were coming in here today, you said something to me about how you felt that actually there is a sort of quite cozy liberal establishment. And that is part of the story behind Trump. Tell me about what you were saying. Well, it's actually something Katty Kay was saying when we were having dinner, where she was saying that, you know, there is this sort of sense of an elite in America. And it is slightly condescending to people in the what they call the middle of the country.

3:20But I don't see muskers being part of that. I see muskers being something much more dangerous, which is that we know that Trump is jealous of Putin, jealous of his power, jealous of his authoritarianism, jealous of his ability to stifle all criticism, jealous of his ability to plunder the reserves of his nation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And Anthony Scaramucci was also at this dinner. He was making the point that in a sense what you've got with Trump, if Trump gets back is sort of their Trump at the center in power. And bear in mind, this is a guy who's son -in -law, something like Jared Kushner, who's probably made about $800 million while he's in the White House.

3:59It's beyond imagining that that one that it can be done, too, that you can get away with it. So what I think, and what Scaramucci was saying, people like musk, people like Peter Teal and others in that sort of elite billionaire class, what they see is the possibilities of a kind of Russian style oligarchical situation developing in America. I'm not such a robot, because I know Peter Teal a little bit, I don't know Elon Musk at all, but I do think there is a strong element of intellectual vanity, a strong element of liking to be contrarian, a strong element of them increasingly believing that the world's become too censored, that it's becoming too hard to try to talk about censorship.

4:40Nobody is censored more than musk at the moment. You're constantly pointing out to me that certain people on social media who used to get massive traction for the stuff that they were posting, that sort of being reduced to nothing, whereas musk tweets are kind of going to all of us and getting ventilated again and again and again. I mean, we, I also taught Joyce Media that it's extraordinary thing recently about the extent to which he goes after people who criticize. Well, maybe this is, we don't have the thought space to do this as serious as we should, but sometime I should ask you about how musk might or might not compare to the kind of great press barons the past to sort of a repert mirrored arc or a Lord Rothermere, because in some sense, obviously controlling X gives him the most astonishing ability to sway things and of course, Trump will be hoping to give Trump a significant leg up in the election.

5:31But also, there's clearly, I'm not saying musk is directly involved in this, but there's a lot of people who want Trump to win, clearly involved, I think, in the manipulation of the betting markets, which then has its own effect. I remember when social media first came along, one of the reasons why I welcomed it was because I thought it would break down the sort of mirrored arc, rather mere type oligarchies of the media. But musk is, I think, worse in many ways. Partly, because he's global, but Twitter, as a business or X, is absolutely dying on its feet, closely that he probably doesn't care because he's made so much money elsewhere.

6:03I also think that has extraordinary picture of him going to the Trump rally and jumping like a boy, like a child. There's something very weird about his desire to be noticed, his desire to be liked. As somebody who knows him way better than I do, I don't know him at all, as you don't. But somebody who does know him quite well says that he can't understand by when he says something that he thinks is funny. People don't laugh and it really upsets him that people don't find him kind of amusing and witty. And I've seen the thing with Trump. Trump will destroy him. If Trump becomes president, he may give him this job as department of government, officials, whatever.

6:38He'll kill him. We should put in the, I've said just for some rocks, I think one of the funniest things that I've seen on social media recently, which is somebody pretending to do a chat show with someone defending Elon Musk. And one of the great lines in it, which should hurt the two of us is, it's fine if he wants to spend, $40 billion, $9 billion in today's money buying Twitter. It's just like a middle -aged guy getting a motorbike and starting a podcast. Very good. Well, we don't have a motor. I said it. Now listen more about this one for you. I think we might be able to disagree agreeably on this one.

7:12Alan Stock praising the Labour Party for taking on the hereditary peers and kicking them out of Parliament, but actually saying, why don't we go further and get rid of the place altogether? You know, weirdly, I think there's, we'll be now, this is going to sound very strange, more conservative support for abolishing the House of Lords now that the hereditary peers have gone. And it's going to sound completely mad, but for me, certainly, I partly like tradition, just as I like the Royal Family. It's not that I think it remotely is rationally justifiable, obviously, that a bunch of jukes are doddering around talking about, you know, British Sheet, whatever they're focusing on in the House of Lords.

7:50But it had a wonderful historical connection to the past. This thing had been around for a thousand years. Some of these people, you know, the Duke Montreux, who I'm talking about sheep, is, you know, descended from the great hero of our country in the 17th century. And I think that once they were removed, Labour's done something inadvertently rather brilliant, because in fact, nobody is remotely interested in a bunch of washed up old politicians and corrupt party donors, calling themselves Lords and strutting around in, I mean, who's really interested in Michel Moon or Lord Alley or any number of my former colleagues strutting around, calling themselves Lords?

8:28The whole thing looks absolutely preposterous, right? But they are legislators, they are part of our legal process. And once you've removed the hereditary peers, you've actually struck a body blow to the whole thing. The reason why, presumably, all these people want to be in the House of Lords is they're hoping that somebody, I don't know, a matriety in a restaurant might mistake them for being a hereditary peer. As soon as the hereditary peers, the rest of us don't care whether they're ready to law, honestly, as soon as the whole snobbish value, which is the whole thing, right? And why does somebody want to be called a Lord?

9:00For one reason or one reason only, people think it's like J. Noston or the War of the Rose is you're a Lord, right? You might have a country house, you might have a country house. I can think of nothing worse. Of course you can't leave anything, you want to be in there in the first place. I think there are more people like me than there are people who want to be a Lord. You've got to agree with me that the only reason that all your former colleagues want to be Lords is snobbery. And why do you want to put Lord in front of your name? No, because people might think that you were a Lord, right? No, I think I know, the one time I've visited Lord so and so, ladies so and so, it doesn't work if there are no Lords.

9:33If they're all fake Lords. I think most of the people that I know who are in the House of Lords, they'd certainly say, and I think most of them believe that this is the only way to stay in politics. I don't agree. I bet they put it on their business cards. I bet they go around Lord and ladies so and so. I'm sure they love it. I must say that. Yeah, well maybe I don't know. Can you see my sort of argument that this is the end of it? Well, I hope so. They're actually by removing the reddit trees, you've removed the last bit of aristocratic glamour. Alan stock, feel free to ask you another question, but definitely tell us what you think of all his answers.

10:06Now listen, your turn, trust me a question. Okay, teacher John, how bad would it have to get for care before Alistair offers to go back to Downing Street to sort out comms? Do you think it's bad? Without overly flattering my podcast partner, it would seem to me that they need exactly your skill set of them. They need some way of framing ideas, getting policy and then packaging it in a way that gives the sense forward direction. Let's just say for the sake of argument, care for me up and said, nice to comms aren't going great. Would you come in and sort out? I mean, would I advise that that was a good short term plan for him?

10:44What would the story be? Ah, but that's true. That's true. That would be, yeah. So I think the only way, everybody then would remember the Iraq war. And I think the only way to do it. And the Labour Left would go completely mental, wouldn't they? No, I think they'd have the alignment more than they did. But I think that people thinking, oh, he's really sort of getting serious about it. And that's good. But I think also it would be playing into the notion, we got loads of questions which relates to this about whether we think that the media really is very, very biased against Labour. And look, they are.

11:17They always have been. But I think there has been quite a substantial loss of perspective on a lot of this stuff. It's become a given one that Kierstheim was unbelievably unpopular and two that they've had a terrible start. You can certainly say that his ratings have gone down, but I think in part that's because the coverage has been so negative. And yes, you can say they've made mistakes. No doubt about that. Or hiccups, as I call them on the main podcast. But I think the loss of perspective has been quite substantial. George, that's fun. You always talk to George. Yeah, it was going on. So it's a word, George.

11:44Ah, I've got, I've worked it out. So Ed Balls, because he's married to Evette Cooper. He's probably finding it difficult on the podcast, which I must have met I've owned it some two couple times, but he's finding it difficult to be say what he thinks. So therefore, George is getting a bit bored with it and is looking for a new partner where they make it more about the Tory party. You can actually have a real hit, wouldn't it? I think George is a rory, yeah, yeah, yeah. Specialist Tory party. The rest is Tories. The rest is Tories. The rest are Tories. The rest is Tories. The rest is the rest is the rest is the Tories.

12:16Yeah. I see, who will I get when you go on? Who will I get? You have to get a ball. That's where this whole thing works. No, because he's not a criticised Labour government, whereas of course I'm not at all try. Oh, exactly. Anyway, George said what he would say is adulterous relation is that when he came into politics, most of the right wing newspapers were supporting you guys that you've developed the sort of uptraught point that your point that the sun were behind you, the male, well, the sun were behind Labour at the election, but they still put the boot in. And don't forget Rory, we had Bernie Eccleston fairly soon after we got elected.

12:51We had a big argument, a big rebellion on child benefit, but you still had net popularity rating for Tony Blair at this stage of about 80%. Yeah, true, true. Whereas Kirsten was on minus what? I can't remember, but I'm in British, I'm in British, I'm pretty British. This morning before coming down to Wales, I had breakfast with Jacendrard Anne for the Prime Minister New Zealand, and she was unbelievably popular at a certain point. And then it just it just went not within a hundred days. No, no, it's true. This is what I do. I mean, nobody has succeeded in right. And they have rotters. That's fast.

13:24They have to one of the lessons they have to learn is from all these questions about the media, you know, they've got to work out how you deal with it because that's the reality. They are biased. They are unpleasant. They really want to destroy you. Yeah. So one, don't give them ammunition. Two, have a more strategic approach, not to the communications, but to the governing and the communications follows from that. Talking about wash up all politicians, I talk about me and George Osborne, but another former big beast of the camera government was saying that one of the interesting things in Britain is that there's no sort of second act for politicians.

13:59The media is so brutal that once you've left politics, that is it. I mean, you could be 30 years old leaving politics and that's it. Where is black? And I think, you know, even at Clegg, maybe would love to do stuff in public service in Britain and probably feels it's quite difficult for him to imagine what his route back might be. And it's partly because unlike in America, where often there are so many opportunities, it seems. Many, many other people leave politics going to government for a bit or going to business for a bit and are able to come back. There's more of a real problem. You can come back in different ways.

14:30Douglas Alisandro has come back as an MP. Alan Milburn has gone back advising the government on health. But I think for me, Rory, I think the only way I could do it is to do it in a very coded way and do it very publicly, possibly through a podcast. That kind of thing. You could sort of take over a podcast. I could tell a podcast and I could say, let's talk about the grid this week. Why should the grid be doing this week? How should the grid be working? Please, please, don't do that. That's such terrible. Let me just point at say this though. I think it's interesting that we've had loads of questions in recent weeks, essentially on the theme of why have Labour messed this up while on the issue?

15:05Why has it been so disappointing? I have noticed a real surge in questions saying, why is the media so biased against this Labour government? Why do they only pick on the bad stuff, not doing any good stuff, etc. So I think Labour just have to be aware of that. These people are not your friends. Question from Barbara Voles, age 93, do we now have the right caliber of people in government? That's what we're going to find out over the next few weeks months because that is what we'll decide whether this is just a comms problem or whether my instinct is right that some of the cabinet are good. I think West Streeting sounds plausible, sounds clear, but without naming names, I think quite a lot of the rest of the cabinet are pretty hopeless.

15:48I don't feel this as a big average. Average? Uninspired at a time when the country really needs radicalism and imagination. It doesn't strike me as a team that you'd put in a crisis. The real illustration of that is I really don't feel they had a plan. It's very odd a hundred days in that we haven't seen the plan produced. I think that's sort of suggested a lack of intellectual curiosity. On the train down, I met this woman from Scotland who was coming to our show with her sister as a surprise birthday present. She said, I've been thinking all week about what question I'm going to ask you at the show.

16:24And I've decided what she's going to ask us was, why is Angela Rainer actually quite low profile within the government? I think Keir looks and sounds the part and I think has done some good things to about the riots. I think actually he's got resilience. He keeps going when the SHIT is flying around him. And I think that this investment conference shows seriousness of intent around the main mission, etc. Where's, as you say, Peter Kyle, I think is very, very effective. I think Pat McFadden is very, very good at what he does. I think you can go through and it all comes back to the central point I keep making.

16:55It's every time that Keir or any of the government come on the television, the public should have an immediate sense of the kind of thing they're going to be saying because they've got a sense of the overall strategy. And also of the figures, I mean, I think you would have got that with David Blanket. You would have got that with Ken Clark. You would have got that with Michael Heseltine. Actually, you probably would have got that in a different way with even with figures like John Reed. Oh, 100 % with John Reed. So what I'm lacking here is people who are going to move into these studios and give a sense that they've really, they're imaginative, they're funny, they're alive, they've dominated their brief, they've got ideas.

17:34Yeah. I think the other thing we need is a bit more of kind of you call it intellectual curiosity. I wonder if you think about Gove and I know he completely shafted you and he's pretty duplicitous or what have you, but when he was, particularly in opposition, actually, but you always had a sense of him coming up with ideas. There may have been bad ideas, to my mind, a lot of them were, but you had a sense that they were coming from a position of relentless intellectual exploration. And I think the thing about politics today is you can have a lot of impact on the debate as a politician by floating ideas yourself and say, I don't quite know what I think about this, but here's some interesting thoughts, here's something interesting happening on straight it, here's something interesting happening in Latin America, and I'm going to go look at them.

18:14Your sense of Gordon Brown came in with quite a lot of ideas. I mean, he gave the impression of somebody who had his nose stuck, but he was relentlessly in deep, electric theories. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, right, quick break. There are more questions.

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19:41Right. Now, a couple of questions here on Israel, both coming from a very similar place. The first one is from At -Earm. What would Israel have to do no longer to be supported by the UK in the US? I'll go Celtic. Do our government have any red lines when it comes to Israel? So they're both asking the same thing. And we had quite a lot of questions on that theme this week. I think one very interesting thing is that by shifting the focus to hisbalah and Iran, Israel has pulled off a public relations success in the US because the US has often framed the sort of axis of evil with Iran at the centre of it.

20:20And if Israel is going after Iran, it feels the US as though they're going after a common enemy in the name of democracy. And it takes their eyes off the question of what Israel is doing in Gaza. And it's also allowed Israel to portray sending troops into Lebanon as being an attack on Iran, basically. But I think that narrative isn't getting through totally. I don't think Netanyahu has managed to convince the world of that in Lebanon by any means. And very interesting things around the R -H -P -S keepers, who many less than will be aware, Israeli tanks rolled up to the UN bases where the R -H -P -S keepers in southern Lebanon were and told them to leave the bases.

20:59And the R -H -S -S know we are here on a UN mandate, provide security in southern Lebanon. We're not evacuating these bases. And that I think Shadun quite a sort of stark light on the question of what's happening. And if America is genuinely talking about a rules -based international order, Israel's actions are causing a real challenge to what the narrative is here. It's an easy narrative on Russia, Ukraine. Russia has invaded somebody else's sovereign nation and Ukraine is defending its territory. You can see what the narrative might be on China, Taiwan. See what narrative be on North Korea, South Korea, which in some is getting more and more dangerous.

21:34But if America is ready to build a rules -based international order, there need to be rules. Clear international rules. And the UN's got to be part of that. And I'm afraid the international courts got to be part of that. And sovereign borders got to be part of that. And if Israel is really pushing troops in to what at the moment feels like prolonged military operations in somebody else's country. And America is responding now by sending troops into Israel to support Israel. I think it's going to be very difficult. Over the weekend, sort of hopping around some of the channels, that I spotted several American politicians and former military people actually criticizing Biden for not being supportive enough of Israel, which is just to my mind ridiculous.

22:13Biden and you know, who don't get on at a personal level. But I think it's very hard to say Biden hasn't been supportive of Israel. And I think that, you know, the question here about whether there's any red lines for labor. You know, labor is already reversed its position relation to the charges from the international court against Netanyahu, stop the cells of some parts of the arms that we sell to Israel and has been trying to, I think, slightly calibrate the position and the message around that. But essentially, it's still pretty much an echo of the American position. But to answer the question directly, what would a red line be?

22:47So for example, let's say they did take out part of the nuclear program. Is that a red line for America? Is that a red line for America? No, I'm afraid what we've learned is that it is impossible to imagine anything at the moment that Israel could do it seems that would change American support. And that's probably being true for a very, very long time. I think US support for Israel is so deep and so bipartisan that it doesn't feel to me as though, you know, because famously, you know, Bill Clemson was annoyed for Netanyahu, Biden's an overnight Netanyahu. But since the 1990s, really that hasn't had any effect.