346. The Battle for Syria

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1:20Welcome to the rest of this politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Anna Stekamble, and lots to talk about today, Rory. We've got a big speech from Kier's starmer coming on Thursday, which must not be called a relaunch. We are going to talk a lot about Syria. Big, big, big events going on there. We've got some criticism over the last couple of weeks because we hadn't talked much about the Irish general election. So now that we've had it, we will talk about that. And it's actually really interesting what's happening there. They're sort of slightly bucking the trend on this incumbency theme. And then finally, government in real trouble in Paris.

1:53So a lot to get through. Let's kick off with the UK, where I don't even just seen the news where we're recording this Monday afternoon, where we, Sir Chris Wermold, the new cabinet secretary, who I think when we were in was a kind of fairly junior civil servant to education, and then went on to be a permanent secretary under Gove, I think it was, and I see Dominic coming. Just put out a pretty scorriating analysis. And then at health, during COVID and much else besides, did you have anything to do with Chris Wammalt? Yes, I mean, I didn't deal with him very closely because I wasn't in his departments, but for what it's worth, he had a very, very strong reputation.

2:31One of the things that his cabinet ministers said about him is he had very good political antennae, which doesn't mean he was political, but it means that unusually for a permanent secretary, he would anticipate some of the political issues. So he'd turn up, he'd produce the options, and he'd say, you may want to take into account this risk, might want to remember that. I think on the positive side, he was seen as somebody who worked morning, noon, and night, really, really hardworking, very, very serious. Obviously, as conservatives, given that he was sexual interdependence section goes there.

3:05People think that he helped to put through some pretty radical reforms there in education. Although I'd be interested to see what Dominic Cummings' objection is. Well, he basically says, I mean, to give it a, the coming of shorthand is that he's sort of part of the old blob who is not a reformer who will get in the way of any real radical change. Now, that usually means with Dominic Cummings is that I had a few rowers with him because they thought my mad ideas were pretty mad. But I don't know, I mean, I don't know enough about him to know whether he is a big reforming figure. I actually think Labour should have got rid of Simon Case on day one.

3:38I think that that should have been a very significant signal of intent. It is an important position, but the most important thing is the direction that he's given. Capital secretaries can be given directions, and that's why I think probably the more important event this week will be this speech that Keir Starmer's making on Thursday, which is, you know, he's getting a lot of coverage. They're calling it a plan for change, which I kind of always thought manifestos were a plan for change. So maybe it's a sort of tacit admission that the manifesto in the first few months haven't quite landed in the way they want.

4:07Yeah, I mean, maybe just final comments on Sir Chris Wormald. So just remind people, Cabinet Secretary obviously is the civil servant that runs everything. You know, he is the Sir Humpfrey of all the Sir Humpfrees. We've interviewed Cabinet Secretary, and I hope we can infuse a few more, but to remind people on leading, they can listen to the Infuidi with Gus O'Donnell talking about how central this role is. He was on the panel to choose the shortness that went to Kierstala. Great. And in some ways, you know, as you say, they take direction, but they are certainly more important than most cabinet ministers.

4:37So on the plus side, I think he was warmly liked by most of the ministers that worked with him that I knew. I guess if you were going to grumble a couple of things, he presided over education and health for the last 12 years. So a lot of the problems and education health, of course, were caused by the politicians. So it's difficult disentangling what was the politicians for, what's the systems for, but definitely you might say education health are not necessarily shining examples of success and that's what he's been doing for the last 12 years. Secondly, he's, I think, a great domestic implementer, but he's never been in any of the invertechomas great offices of state.

5:13So often these cabinet secretaries have been in the treasury where I think Sir Richard Wilson, who came to you, came from the home office, not me in the foreign office, so he doesn't have the sort of intelligence security, foreign affairs, Treasury background. He's an appointment, I think, for a government that I guess sees itself as being primarily about domestic implementation. Anyway, over to you with the speech, because you presumed you've seen which we, I certainly haven't some, some clues to what's coming. No, I have not seen the speech, Rory. That was a very unsuttle way of trying to suggest that I'm way closer in, and the new labour, the new new labour machine is actually the case.

5:52But I was aware of the briefing going all over the weekend. I think essentially trying to get back to this sense of what the government is for, the missions and the overall purpose of the government. I mean, I've been interested. You and I have done a few things together in recent weeks. And you know, there is a fairly negative mood out there at the moment. Also, at the football, I went to see Burnley at Stoke at the weekend. and in a normally when I go to the football I'm not getting much grief by the way of politics. People tend to leave me alone on that front. But there was a little bit of grumbling this week.

6:23What are they grumbling about? What sort of thing? Well, there was one guy who said I voted labor. I was really excited about it. I really thought this was going to be so different. And I actually said I can't get over the Winterfuel thing. I can't believe that was the first thing they did. I can't get over that. There was another guy who just sort of saying, he actually said it's just all a bit, you know, I'm not sure. Now, I still think, and we've seen this in the business audience who have been out, I still think there's good will. I still think there is a desire for them to do well. I guess this speech, I don't know whether it is, it will be impossible with the speeches doing on Thursday.

6:56Also to do what I would suggest to come out of the new year with the big growth plan. But it seems to me what they're saying this is about is setting milestones on each of the big missions by which the government can be judged as it's going to remind us what these missions are. Or you know full well what they are. Growth. Growth. Fastest Green economy in the G7, which I think is a way overly bolder number. So I think they should maybe trim the wings of that one just to be a little, grow the economy, be good. Get the weight in a list down, safer streets, green energy and the aspiration, smash the class ceiling.

7:34And I think that the reason why this relates to the appointment of a new Cabinet Secretary and Peter Heimann who you met in New York and we've got him on the podcast to talk about this project he's doing about populism. He had a piece in the new States when this week saying that the civil service has to fundamentally change mindset if it's going to deliver on these missions because so much of it is not about departmental silo. It's about how the government can deliver much more effectively across the piece. And so that is a new way of thinking. The thing about milestones, I was thinking about this the other day in relation to what's just happened in America with Trump winning and Biden losing.

8:10It is extraordinary when you look at the data in the American economy in the coal light of day. It's pretty damned impressive what the economic data is. Now, what that says is that in the modern age, even delivery is not enough. So even if labor do get the economy growing pretty well, even if they do get the weight in this town, there is such a added difficulty, I think, in the modern age in being the incumbent. Now we're going to talk about Ireland later, whereas I said in the introduction, most incumbent governments have really, really suffered. And I think we'll continue to do so for some time.

8:42I think it's becoming a new thing. So Labour's got to do more than just kind of deliver. They actually got to give a much clearer sense of what they're in power for, who they're in power for, and what the big things are that they want to change. So what they're in power for, who they're in power for, and what are the big things things change. So, second one I guess is the easiest. They're presumably on the side of people who want to break that ceiling. I'm going to give you a stab at that. Give me a stab at those three things what they might say. Well, I think in terms of who, therefore, the message in the election was working people.

9:17I think that's a little bit exclusive. I think one of the reasons the budget got into difficulty is because of the focus on national insurance as the biggest tax raising measure. and of course that was seen as a hit on employers and of course employers, aspirational employers, are also working people. I think they're better off in the divide that they've also used, which we use, which Jeremy Corbyn used, which they've also used, which is about the many not the few, because that then takes you into inequality. Very good. So who are they for? They're for the many not the few. What are they for? I think what therefore is, I mean the missions are fine, but the missions are the means by which they intend to make this a fairer, stronger, richer country.

10:02Got you. And greener. To be fair, the missions do, I mean the mission, you know, growing economy, you need to do that, sorting the health service, because it's not fair that so many people language or waiting list. class ceiling is about skills and education and apprenticeships and all that, and also about anybody being able to make a go of their life. But it's odd that they haven't produced the Farah Stronger, Greener slogan or whatever the slogan would be that trips off the tongue quite, have they? Well they had their mean, if you go back to the election, in Sephora there was a sort of single word that was on the lectern the whole time, it was it was change.

10:35Okay. But that doesn't quite work now, does it? It's not so easy. No, we're in government. No, and I think that, you know, like today, we've got Evet Cooper talking about immigration, you've got this think, I mean, we care later in the week. I think the fact that they're still having to kind of set the frame means that I think they probably acknowledge that the first few months didn't go really as well as they would have hoped. Not all their fault, you know, riots and just the sheer weight of international stuff that Kirsta, I'm had to do. I don't know why people hate the word relaunch so much, but they don't want this to be seen as a relaunch.

11:08because they wanted to see it as part of a sort of seamless thread. But I think they do need to be seen to be moving through the gears. And I also think to go back to my people at the football. By the way, there weren't all like that. There were one or two who were saying two young kids, by the way, really cheer me up, Roy. They were both from Burnley, both currently in higher education, both saying they loved the podcast, and they were still hanging on to the idea that this is a so much better government than the last one, and people should stop winging and get behind them. But I'd say the majority mood of those that raised it with me were quite negative.

11:38as have been the ones that we've been talking to in the business community. Let me just give you one small thing that I'm worried about. Morgan McSweeney, at least according to the Sunday Times, a big article by Tim Schitman, is trying to make sure that every one of these five missions becomes much more simple and straightforward. And the claim in the article is that he's going to make the NHS come down to the single indicator of reducing waiting lists. And I think that is trouble brewing between Morgan McSweeney waiting lists and the idea of actually genuine reform of the NHS. Because if you think about what we're speaking about, which is going from analogue to digital and from cure to prevention and from hospitals to the front line, that basically means shifting resources from hospitals forward to the front line.

12:25And what Wales found when Labour did this in Wales, and Wales as sort of we just were talking about this on leading with the first Minister of Wales, Wales is seven years into this journey, they would say that they have managed to go down that journey. They've changed things a lot, but the cost has been increasing waiting lists. If you make the target reducing waiting lists, what will happen is the resources will be dragged into the hospitals to try to drive those waiting lists down, and it's very much, I'm afraid, dealing with the symptoms, not the root cause. So I'm just putting a marker down as something that I think is going to be a big problem for words to be treating.

12:59The only thing I'd say about that is, I mean, I always get a bit hbgb when particularly Sunday newspaper articles are all about how decisions get made and it's all about the people behind the scenes and all that stuff. And there's no but, you listen, don't get me wrong, Walt, this weenie is a very important figure in the Kierstarma operation. But when you are talking about the core purpose of a government and the priorities of the government, they have got to be coming very, very clearly from the top. It's got to be clear to the machine. And I would imagine that when Kirsta Amar gathers the cabinet together with the new cabinet secretary, that to me is an opportunity for him to say to the cabinet, this is how we're going to change the way that we operate.

13:39Because it seems to me that partly because Simon Case has not really been functioning fully or not been fully trusted, I think that there's been a problem in that relationship, that's got to be fixed. We then have the whole Morgan with Sweeney Sue Gray thing, which has been fixed in that you know, Morgan is still there, Sue Gray's not and other people have been brought in. But ultimately, if you're driving something as difficult and complicated as a government machine, it's got to be coming from the top the whole time. That's why I think this speech is quite important, but it can't just be the same as the other ones.

14:08Last question for you. One of the big ideas out there on how to grow the economy, and it was an article by John Kingsman in a Sam Friedman substat recently, is that you really need to unleash planning in the Oxford Cambridge corridor, get a enormous number of buildings built there, really get behind those big fast -growing tech hubs. Crates are kind of trying to go Oxford Cambridge, London. Now that's an idea that's been around and was around when I was in government. And we didn't do it partly because people were worried about building on in my series of green Oxford and Cambridge, but more importantly, because people thought that was going to be difficult with the narrative of levelling up, because basically what you're doing there, as you're saying, London, Oxford, Cambridge, these are the fastest growing bits of our economy.

14:52We're going to reinforce success and get behind them. Given the Conservative government never quite mustered the political world to do that, do you think Labour is likely to or are they going to feel the same pressures from Red Wall voters not to be seen to be making Oxford and Cambridge central to their growth plan? Well, put it this way, if that was all that they did, it would be a problem. But that has to be, I read John King's piece, we talked about it a little bit last week. It has to be part of a much, much bigger plan for growth, where you're doing similar things in different parts of the country, north, south, east, west.

15:23And I think we do, I think that's what's been lacking a little bit. It's not that the government isn't doing lots of stuff. They are doing lots of stuff. But it's kind of the kind of energy that you get from big projects, big themes, big messages that sort of, you know, keep being dropped out into the public, into the public arena. I had a very interesting last meeting last week with a guy who's a business guy. He's involved in this project to essentially to feed big parts of our grid energy grid with power generated in different parts of Africa. Really, really interesting, very innovative. British people doing some pretty big dramatic things.

16:02And it's not necessarily something, by the way, it's going to cost government loads and loads of money, but government obviously would need to need to get engaged in it. And I think we just need a little bit more of that sense of big project, big purpose, big idea. At the moment it still feels that they're quite defensive, stuff keeps getting thrown at them, they bat it off, they move onto the next thing. So that's why I think this speech is important, but I still think that you year, that you year's message should be 2025 is the year of growth, this is the plan for growth, and it's like a big, big, big document that goes through all the different bits, in all the different sectors and all different parts of the country, saying this is where it's coming from.

16:41Now, should we talk about Syria, Rory? I guess for all sorts of reasons, Syria has sort of gone, there was a time when it was like the number one issue on the news around the world. And partly, I guess because Assad with Putin's help saw off the Civil War to a great extent, also because the media can't get in there. It's sort of has disappeared. And then suddenly, we wake up one day in Aleppo, which we used to talk about all the time, it's, we're talking about it again. So, Rory, given that Syria has sort of gone down the agenda is certainly in terms of sort of global media in recent months. Why do you just remind us of the history and the context of what we're dealing with?

17:15Okay, so Damascus, capitalist Syria, oldest, continuously inhabited city in the world. So Syria is right there at the heart of civilization. Literally you get a Damascus, you get an ancient pagan temple with a Roman temple on top of it, with a Christian church on top of that, a mosque on top of that. Comes into the modern world as part of this enormous thing called the Ottoman Empire, which originally people remember includes Greece, Serbia, Bosnia, Egypt, Iraq. First World War ends, the Ottoman Empire is broken apart and a Sykes -Pico agreement gets going, so Sykes, British, Pico, French, and they draw a line dividing some Ottoman provinces and the right -hand side they call Iraq and they give to the British largely because the oil around Mosul.

17:57This is the Sykes -Pico agreement that Anthony Scaramucci explained to Donald Trump through but having a conversation about the film starring Pietro Toul, Lawrence Varebia. Absolutely. Lawrence Varebia right in the heart of this whole story. So on the other side, you've got this thin -called Lebanon, which is chopped off on the Western bit of the Syrian coast because it has some more pro -French Catholic Christians in it. And then the middle bit is left a Syria. Fast forward, after the Second World War coming into the 60s Arab nationalism rising. This means the replacement of old monarchies and not the replacement of monarchies in the way that we might expect today by more radical Islamist groups.

18:36But by basically military autocrats and dictators, people like Saddam Hussein or in the case of Syria, a man called Haifa Salassat who takes over 1970 and he comes in and he rules the country for about 30 years and then hands over to his son. and his son is a British doctor married to a British citizen. Initially, people are quite optimistic. Arab Spring happens, 2010, 2011. Syria erupts in protest. It looks for three years as though Bashar and Assad is going to be toppled. And Obama's drawing red lines. He's using chemical weapons or a barrel bombs. And I don't want to, sorry, I'm sounding a bit.

19:16Maybe Gleb about this. 480 ,000 people are killed in Syria. 12 million people are displaced. I mean, this is on a level far above Sudan or what's happening in Gaza and Lebanon. One of the largest wars in the in the post -war period. And then in 2014, two states in Tafin Iran through their hispularmilisha prop up his infantry and Russia basically give him an air force. He recaptures Aleppo. And for the last four years, the front lines have been pretty stable, not easy to understand, but stable. and basically the story is he controls the most populated western bit of the country around Damascus and he held a lepo.

19:55Up in the northwest bit were what used to be the free Syrian army, but increasingly were al -Qaeda affiliate groups. Turkey occupied a sliver on the border. American -backed Kurdish resistance had taken everything east of the Euphrates, so this huge patches area, and then there are bits of Islamic state. It sits like that for four years, and then suddenly over the weekend, it becomes apparent that things are going wrong for the Syrian regime and two things are gone wrong. The Russians increasingly distracted by Ukraine, no longer concentrating, and Israel has just smashed up his bala, which were the absolute foundations of Vesha al -Assad's support.

20:34This is the page or attacks, the radio attacks, the killing of Nasser al -Ali attacks on Lebanon. That's the same his bala. So as his bala has fled back to Lebanon, the Syrian regime becomes much more fragile. Meanwhile, the Syrians had failed really to make friends with the region or with Turkey. And there's an explosion where suddenly within about 48 hours, these archider of originally a archider of Philip forces up in the northwest explode south recapture Aleppo and are now on the edge of Hammer, you know hundreds of miles south and have taken this huge sway the territory leaving us now on the verge of another Syrians of a war.

21:07Yeah, and I guess the only bit I would add to that in the middle of that and maybe it's because to this day I still get such a lot of grief over Iraq. Is the part of the story, you briefly mentioned about Obama. I think the point at which Putin decided to get involved to the extent that he did get involved and is still involved. It's, although as you say, they're distracted by Ukraine, they are still, they are currently bombing lots of Syrian rebels. But when you mention Obama's red lines, and the case of Obama said, if Assad uses chemical weapons against his own people, that's a red line, we will not let him cross it.

21:40And of course partly because the British parliament couldn't deliver on camera and promised to a barmer that we would help, the whole thing got dropped, put in sense real weakness, moved in, and has never really fully moved out. But as you say, what's happened now is looking at some of the stuff online. So this group called it, they called Hayat Tahir al -Sham and they're sort of, they're a kind of rebranded modernized version of al -Qaeda. They're trying to sort of, had this kind of elements and also some of their rhetoric. But I think they were genuinely surprised by how quickly they were able to carry out the operation that they put together added to which, I don't know whether this is symbolic or whether it was coincidental or whether it was deliberate, Assad was in Moscow as it happened.

22:29Gets on his private jet and flees back and as he's on the way, he's talking to Iran, he's talking to Iraq, he's talking to the Emirates, he's basically saying, you know, we've got these massive terrorist attacks, we need your help. Now the Russians are are helping, but I heard a very interesting thing to go. I was in Oslo last week, as you know, with Alex Younger, the former head of I -6, and he was on the, he was on the media this morning, and he was clearly struggling to decide which of these two he kind of load the most. The Assad regime or this kind of al -Qaeda shootoff. There's a good test of this, which Robert Ford, who was the great American expert on the region poses, which is which of these groups are the refugees fleeing from and which the people prepare to come back to.

23:12And on those terms, this new Islamist group wins hands down. Basha 'ala says, regime is collapsed because it is a gangster organisation which has we've discussed previously in the podcast has largely maintained itself by manufacturing and supplying amphetamine since the Middle East. It's one of the reasons why the Saudis are not being very sympathetic towards it. It's had an odd relationship with its neighbors. So Israel, traditionally the regime talks as though it's a great enemy of Israel, but in effect, C did the Golan Heights to Israel, which creates a very, very odd situation where, to some extent, Israel hasn't been that keen on Bashar al -Assad's regime falling, but on the other hand, Bashar al -Assad's regime is propped up by Iran and his Bilat.