358. Question Time: Political translators, Boris Johnson, and politicians to watch in 2025

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0:21Welcome to The Restless Politics Question Time with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Maurice Stewart. First of the New Year. So let's start off with something for the New Year. Politicians to watch us, Amy. Are there any politicians we should be watching out for in 2025, either in the UK or abroad? Well, some of them we've already mentioned. I can confidently predict. It says he's not always sure, but fairly sure in this. Friedrich Mertz will be the next chance of Germany and Pierre Prolyévre looks like he's pretty nailed on to be the Prime Minister of Canada. So that's two more G7 leaders on the right who will become pretty well -known around the world.

1:03Yes, I think in the UK people should keep their eyes on Kemi -Badenock because I think the jury's out. She's just in at the moment. Is she going to be able to do something which is very difficult, which is take a shattered defeated party that's gone to one of its worst defeats ever with the reform party in Nigel Farage with a lot of momentum and media coverage? Is she going to be able to craft the narrative, find the space for the Conservative Party and be able to position it? So that will be my question in the UK. Internshipally, the big question is who the Democrats are going to throw up? Who's going to have a decent chance of a run against the Republicans next time round?

1:41And I remain very, very interested in Shapiro, the government of Pennsylvania, Gretchen Whitner, the government of Michigan. I tend to be somebody who thinks that the decision to go with the Californian was part of the problem. So I like to see people who are able to speak particularly to white working class voters in the Rust Belt as part of winning back that election. And I think that if you look at the fall from Biden to Kamala Harris in turnout, it really does seem as though that was one of the big points of weakness that he was able to tickle the Rust Belt Yeah, I think at this stage of the rise of Barack Obama, although he would have been a very well -known figure in the political systems of the United States and different parts of the world, I don't think people would have been predicting him at this stage.

2:32So it may be somebody emerges that we don't know that well. I'll tell you somebody who I find very interesting and I think has a real sense of him is Hakeem Jeffries. Yes. And likewise, you know, that guy we spoke to in New York on the 90th election, Richard Torres. So I wonder if there are politicians that aren't that well known that will emerge. But listen, the Democrats right now are in a mess. The friends that I talked to are sort of working for the Democrats say it is really, really, really difficult, very, very depressing. You get the sense that Biden and Harris who are there for another three weeks, nearly three weeks, aren't getting on for the obvious reasons.

3:08And the whole thing is just going to have to be rebuilt and there's going to be a lot of regrouping going on. And I guess one thing they should maybe do is listen to the interview that we did with Bill Clinton because I think he's somebody who, you know, when we were doing our New Year's resolutions yesterday, afterwards I thought, do you know what maybe one of my New Year's resolutions should be to try better to understand what the appeal is of something like Trump, what the appeal was of something like Johnson, what the appeal is of something like Farage. Because I think sometimes I'm so divorced from their politics, but actually, I think we, people like me on the more progressive side of politics, have to do a better job of genuinely understanding what it is.

3:53Well, this is something we talked about, I think, on the Boxing Day episode, which is I'm very interested in this because I genuinely think there are many things that you can understand and can communicate to that. I think you've got instincts for different bits of country. You've got instincts for young men. You've got instincts for communication. So even if it kind of revolts you, I think you're actually quite well positioned to get yourself into the mindset of working out what's going on here and how you could craft a message, which pushed for the policies you believed in, but in a language and a tone and with an energy that could appeal to young men.

4:31That is my new years resolution. I'm going to start to think about that as a serious project. Now, why this one, Translators, Luke Walter, I was listening to your fabulous interview with former German Chancellor Angela Merkel on leading. Her translator was excellent. And it got me thinking about political translators in general, how does the vetting process work when choosing a translator? Are there multiple translators to verify correct syntax or tone? Do comical delays occur while translation verification takes place between nations? And do either of you have any tales to tell? I'm glad that people noticed how good the interpreter was because it's a woman that I've talked about in the podcast before.

5:09Dorite Kaltenbach, who was the interpreter for the German government for Helmut Kohl, Fagerhatschröder, then for Merkel, they run a sort of service and they work for, they're not political people at all. They work for all the translators that were. And she is brilliant. She is absolutely brilliant because she gets toned, she gets intonation. The thing about vetting is very interesting because of course, there was a guy I've talked about before called Tony Bishop, who was the British government interpreter for Russia, fluent Russian speaker. And he translated for prime ministers from Stalin to Putin.

5:45And he was reckoned to be absolutely brilliant. A bit like Dorothy would do the sort of the nuance, the detail. You also have to have amazing technical knowledge. If you think about when the whole nuclear disarmament talks were going on, you need interpreters absolutely on top of all of the detail. So they do have to be vetted because they are often listening to the very, very private conversations between leaders where there's literally nobody else there. So yes, they're vetted. They're vetted in the same way as seen in civil servants and possibly even spooks might be. I don't know about the multiple translation to verify syntax or tone, but I do have a Vivian memory of one of the great losses of 2024 John Prescott.

6:31I do have a Vivian memory of John once being a European sub -it. And it was in very John Prescott mode. And I just remember the look of sheer exasperation of the faces of the interpreters who just could not keep up. And a lot of them, I think, just did not understand what he was saying. I obviously spent a lot of my life as a diplomat, particularly when I was in Iraq, where I was spending probably seven, eight hours a day talking through translators. Because although I can understand fastly and speak a bit of fastly, my Arabic is basically non -existent. So I'm setting there for eight, nine hours a day.

7:09And it's a very odd experience because this was the world for me of real domination by the kind of jargon of the international community, which was then translated into formal Arabic. So you would hear again and again your Arab interlocutors using these very formal phrases for the international community, which comes out as al -Mudjtema Adali or security al -Aman or civil society al -Mudjtema al -Madani or al -Hukuk which is rights. And you just have this sort of sense of these endless phrases tumbling over your head as very distinguished Iranian -trained clerics, who of course are used to giving sermons, speak to you in this very, very elaborate formal rhetorical style about the future shape of a Iraqi society while you're nodding your head and trying to work out when you can pop in and say the translator.

8:04Yes, but can you please ask him, will he hand over his weapons? Did you see recently the photograph of Donald Trump who was having a conversation, I presume with Melonia, I don't know, but there was a picture of the English -Italian interpreter behind him as she was translating him saying that the United States have been allies with Italy back to the days of ancient Rome. How wonderful. Of course, she had to translate it, even though she knew it was a sort of complete idiocy. This wonderful picture of this woman looking, how about I really say this? And I'll tell you the other thing, I've got a huge respect for interpreters and translators, one because when you get to that sort of Tony Bishop, the Russian guy, Dorothy Calton, about when you get to that level, you are at the top of your game, you are an absolutely brilliant interpreter, but also it's incredibly tiring.

9:01You say you're involved in eight hours of discussions, speaking is tiring, because your voice is a muscle and they're having to both speak and interpret and understand and get the mood and get the tone. It's an exhausting job. And of course, most of us on the ground do not have translators of that level and quality. So I had a lovely translator who was an American who'd been deployed, but he was a Moroccan, and he spoke Moroccan Arabic. He didn't speak Iraqi Arabic, Moroccan Arabic and Iraqi Arabic. Unbelievable. So I frequently was having to interrupt him and say, I don't think you've quite quite got that right.

9:39I don't think you let's try this again. Then I try to set more simply, I'm going to give you my my favorite and for my father who used to be a diplomat. He was traveling during the Malayan emergency with General Templar in a Jeep and there had been an attack by communist insurgents on British troops in a village. So Templar draws up in the Jeep, jumps out with his translator and he says to the villagers, you are a bunch of bastards. But let me tell you, I can be a bastard too. And the translator says, the general says that none of you have fathers or mothers, but do not worry. He doesn't either.

10:18So what I wanted to say was Tony was doing a press conference with Leo L. Jospun, who was at the time of the French prime minister and Tony did one of his sort of throat clearing. I'll be nice about this guy because I'm always nice about everybody when I'm starting the conversation with them. And he said something's defective that he was a big admirer of Lionel in lots of different ways. And we then saw the French journalist who were getting this translation French sort of collapse because this was interpreted to them as he had a great desire for Lionel in many different positions. A good interpreter is worth his or her waiting gold.

10:57Right, one for you, very good. Well, that's a nice one for you, maybe less global, but I understand Alice that started his newspaper career in the historic Devin market terms from Jack M of Tava Stock, my hometown. What Jack M asks does Alice remember of his time at the Tava Stock Times? And it's been back since, so just to remind people of your biography, you grew up as the son of a vet in Keithley, right, in Yorkshire. And you then moved to Nottingham, is that right? Lester. And then you go to Cambridge University and then you somehow end up in Devin, talk us through what's going on here and what did you learn?

11:33Are you one of those old hacks who weeps with nostalgic memories of the all wonderful early days as a local reporter? I certainly do say to anybody who wants to be a journalist. And this is why it's such a tragedy that so many local papers are dying because of the sort of, you know, Facebook bear moth and the social media explosion, et cetera, is that local papers are an amazing training for any journalist. So Tava Stock, I was a trainee journalist on the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mirror owned these West Avenue newspapers. And that's where I met Fiona. What was she editing? Was she also a journalist for the Japanese training?

12:06We were on the same training scheme. No, we were very, you know, very different backgrounds. She's lived in London all her lives. She's got glamorous and she's definitely more glamorous than you. She's still definitely more glamorous than you. I think so, yeah. It was a bit of a coup de foudre. We moved in with each other like, you know, within days. Amazing. So we moved into this place in Wichurch Road in Tava Stock. I've got really fond memories of Tava Stock. It was a fantastic training. Very small team. My editor and deputy editor when we arrived were both women. Weren't at all interested in sport.

12:39I said, I'm interested in sport. Why do I do all the sports pages? I'll be sports editor. So day well about you, Spaper career. I was sports editor. And I said, the first thing I did, I'll make myself a sports columnist. So I wrote a column from the first day of my journey to career. I usually say, you know, a few years to get to that. And the other thing was just, I've always had this view. There is a story in any person you meet. Okay. So people can say sleepy market town, you know, I don't know what the population is today, but it's a pretty small place. And maybe this was just a sort of justification for my what was clearly becoming a drink problem.

13:16I used to justify going to the public lunchtime every day and having these new clients because I always find somebody who would have a story that you get at the Tava Stock times. Things like funerals, you know, getting getting a name wrong. And then somebody, they wouldn't just phone and complain. They'd come into the office and say, look, I just, and they wouldn't necessarily be angry, but they say, look, just in that funeral, actually, you spoke one of the children's names wrong. And so it's a great sort of level of the fact of being in the community, so close in the community. And then the other thing that was great was that all of the National newspapers then had guys who covered that area.

13:56So they all had somebody, the National NewsPaper, somebody who was the West Country reporter. And the Daily Mirror was a guy called Jeff Lakeman, who became quite a mentor to both me and Fiona. But it meant that we were also sort of stories that we were getting, we were selling them to the National newspapers and building connections and building contacts. So, you know, I've got nothing but fond memories of Tava Stock. Just a serious point to wrap that up. I mean, I think we've talked about it before, but the loss of local newspapers is a massive problem. And it's happened so fast. I had this amazing newspaper called The Cumberland and West Momed Harold, which was the absolute center of my constituency.

14:30Still edited today by a woman called Emily Atherton. And it's just wonderful because every week is doing the stories from the funerals, the photographs of primary schools in the 1950s, bringing the stories, the auction marks and the agricultural fairs. But it's also providing an opportunity to really hold the local member of Parliament accountable for the very, very local issues. And the councilors? And the councilors can give you a chance to communicate on what you're doing. Yeah. I'm still absolutely staggered by this fact that I've mentioned before, that I'm going to re -emphasize, which is that the evening standard when I was running as an independent mayor of London, only in 2019, had almost a million subscribers.

15:08And by the time it went online and basically shot a few months ago, it collapsed down to 200 ,000. That's happened in just five years. So there is this precipitate collapse, partly because they're just not getting the advertising revenue because basically Google and Facebook can target much more accurately the add to exactly the 27 year old woman that's interested in work out equipment in a way that you can't guarantee by just putting an ad in the newspaper. But this really means that our democracy suffers, right? Yeah, we've talked a fair bit about the whole sort of musk -fire -arge thing. That's even without financial donation, just getting his take and his advice on how technically that works and how you do that sort of stuff is of itself a huge help to anybody who's involved in this sort of new form of campaigning.

15:59Maybe this relates to this question from Sam Clark, would you agree that we're not so much in the age of post -truth as we are in an age simply where truth as an objective standard of correctness has no bearing on what people choose to believe? I think that's really important. And I think without sounding post -modern people are increasingly into the view of your truth, my truth. And that's very convenient for populists because it means that the best defense that Trump has if you call him a liar is where everybody's a liar. And if you say that's not true, he says they're all spouting nonsense anyway.

16:39Now that means that the stuff that you did, which was famously all about evidence -based policy, doesn't really work in a world where nobody actually believes there is any evidence. How you supposed to discuss whether climate change is or isn't happening? And that's partly because somehow we're not getting across the difference between uncertainty and no truth. What do I mean by that? I mean that in climate change in particular, the fact that climate scientists are being honest and saying there are a number of scenarios here. We're not exactly sure what's going to happen. Most of the scenarios are very, very bad.

17:16At some point there's going to be a catastrophic tipping point, but we can't tell you exactly where it's going to be because these feedback loops are too complex. And instead of people listening to that, they're saying, oh well, the guy just told me he doesn't know what's happening anyway. So he might as well continue to fry the planet. Oh worse, people say he's lying, net zero's costing you money. And you shouldn't listen to people like this, you should listen to me, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, whoever it might be, because I'm telling you that you will be better off if you ignore the climate hoax.

17:49So it's unbelievable, it's dangerous. Another question this will be Ben Robinson. I'm really fascinated by the rise of populism, anti -establishment politics. It's obviously been successful in the US and Europe. It feels like it's on the rise in Australia where I live. Can you please recommend some books to help better understand populism and its effect on democracies around the world? Before we do the books, Roy, did you get that feeling when you were on Australia? Because I got the feeling that you had a really kind of a very sort of rose tinted view, as I often do, but I have been conscious of the populist side of politics, getting a great attraction in Australia in the recent years.

18:23I think that Australia is very lucky. I mean, it's very unusual because of its compulsory voting system. It does force people not just to mobilize a small base. You can't really win an election, which is 33 % of the vote. They had an experiment famously with populism with this woman Pauline Hanson, who turned out to be a pretty catastrophic and incompetent party leader in politician. And so, look, obviously in Australia, there can be a pretty rough, direct form of political rhetoric. But no, I think it's the country that seems to be escaping it more than almost anybody. But what do you think about populism in Australia?

18:58Well, I just worry because I think that, um, Dutton, the leader of the Tory party, the Liberals, is a pretty populist politician. I think he's one of the reasons why Albanese as Prime Minister is finding it maybe harder than he thought he was going to. So just thinking of books, we've talked a lot about Moises Neym. His book, The Revenge of Power, definitely worth reading on this. If you speak German, there's a wonderful book called Populismus through Amfengar, Populism for Beginners, which I really enjoyed. I'm going to plug one of our fellow podcasters. I think if you read Tom Holland's Dominion, the making of the Western mind, I think you sort of bit of a classic.

19:47Jan Vennemurich is brilliant. People are interested in the sort of technical analysis of what populism is and he very much emphasizes that it's about people saying that we are speaking for the people. So even if they haven't got a majority of the vote, we are the real people and our opponents are not and all the dangers that come with that because if you were speaking for the real people and your opposition are not real people, that then justifies really dangerous constitutional changes, attacking the rule of law, embedding yourself in power. The other person is Cass Muder, who's written a really good book called Populismus, a very short introduction if people want to quick glimpse that.

20:29Somebody else that we talked to a leading last year, an Applebaum, her book Autocracy Inc, is essentially about how the populists have become as powerful as they have and her book is about dictatorship. Tim Snyder as well, he produced a wonderful, electric Yale on something called Sado Populismus, which you wrote about and then you European. No, I wrote about it in But What Can I Do, Rory? Another very good book about populism, which I wasn't going to mention, but you've now attempted to be into it. Anyway, listen, the reason why there are so many books about populism is because it is such a big thing.

21:00And I think the international best seller that we want is what are the best ways to defeat populism, which goes back to the challenge that you set me for 2025.

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22:32This is the business of all the intelligence and security apparatuses of all these countries around the world trying to guess what those things are. And what they learn, of course, is international politics, but like trying to predict the weather. We miss things again and again. Most of the big stories of the last three years were not predicted. This is so important to understand. Nobody would have predicted what Israel has done in Gaza and Lebanon. In fact, nobody would have predicted Hamas's assault. Nobody would have predicted the collapse of his run and run. People failed to predict Putin walking on Kiev.

23:06People failed to predict this victory in Syria. None of them came out of nowhere, though. No, you can always after the event trace back. But what's so striking is that if you'd asked those governments just to illustrate. So the ex head of the British intelligence service two weeks before Putin walks on Kiev said that wasn't going to happen. Yeah, true. Jake Sullivan, the US National Security advisor, said that the Middle East had never been more peaceful one week before October 7th. I mean, these are just illustrations of a very, very common phenomenon, right? And again, I don't think any Syria expert is claiming that they saw what happened in 10 days in Syria.

23:43And of course, I saw people get the Taliban taking over Afghanistan completely wrong. The assumption was that the US would leave and it would be months before the Taliban took over. Whereas in fact, they were in Kabul in the matter of days. So that's just a preface to saying what I'm about to say is likely to prove total nonsense. But let's think about things that people don't think about. And this is why it's quite fun sometimes in intelligence agencies to actually get a novelist to think about this because they're better able to be imaginative. So I talked about a dirty nuclear bomb. I didn't explain that very much, but it remains the case that after the fall of the Soviet Union, dozens of small hand -sized nuclear satchels were in the Soviet arsenals and they've gone missing.

24:27Nobody knows where they are. And you can make one actually pretty easily. And there's been some really good work talking about this. And it's actually pretty astonishing that in the last 30 years, we haven't seen somebody walk into the middle of one of our cities and set off a dirty nuclear bomb. This isn't a very happy start to the year. Not a happy year. Out of nowhere, you've brought up a subject that nobody has been talking about, which will be terrifying our listeners. Climate change. Again, we talked about this that we don't know when the tipping points could happen. The general assumption is they're going to happen more slowly than we think, but they could also happen more quickly because climate works in a very, very odd way.

25:09So you could see very strange things happening to the Arctic ice sheet much quicker than you think, because we're getting very, very close to these tipping point moments. So there's another thing to scare the wits out of you. I'm going to go the other way on climate. I think 2025. Is this a known unknown? It's not a known known, but it's something I cannot say with confidence at all. But I think 2025 will be the year when there is a backlash to the backlash against being serious about climate change. It will require leadership, but it will also require people to make clear. And also, can I please beg any journalist, any media people who are listening?