401. Trump’s Corruption Machine, Israeli Settlers, and the Rise of Reform UK

27:06And it is so disgusting. And corruption is obviously, I think, defined as using public office to private benefit. And it's absolutely, it's absolutely off. So there's got 500 million apparently into his political action committees. This is for somebody who under the Constitution isn't going to become bany again. So what's a political action committee if it's not trying to get you in front of the term? So where's that money going? So you can give him cash directly. You can pay. It appears now between one million and five million dollars. The dinner at Mar -a -Laga. Dinner at Mar -a -Laga or a meeting with him.

27:38Yeah. As you say, the Trump children have been traveling around just before the President visits coincidentally, all the countries the President's about to visit Saudi UAE Qatar. And as Eric Trump said, it's amazing how quickly they get to yes. And all these countries are literally announcing, billion dollar deals as he's turning up again and again. The other countries, of course, they've been visiting not surprisingly are the far -right populist countries in Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia, etc. Where they're doing deals there. And by the way, Donald Trump, junior panel is also doing it as part of what he calls a speaker, a paid, speaking door.

28:15So you go along, you make a speech that we can't criticize on that front row. But you make a speech you can then meet the heads of government and you meet the the big cheeses and then lo and behold, there's an agreement that yes, you can build a new waterfront properties all around Gaza. And the paid speaking thing is interesting too because there's no limit to how much you could pay in a vertical, for a speech, you're apparently paying for speech, but of course the amount of you could pay could be hundreds of thousands of dollars. And Trump, of course, is unlike other presidents not setting up proper blind trusts.

28:45He's not distinguishing himself from the family. So the income just rolls in. And we've seen other examples. He used the White House to strong arm the main Gulf Association into accepting him and his Saudi partners. And PGA has agreed very reluctantly that they'll do their towards the left. On Trump's Gulf courses, which massively drives up the value of Trump's Gulf courses. I've got to say, we're going to talk about labor in a bit. But if it's true that the Labor government is trying to get the British open to be played at Turnbury because Trump has a hotel there, then I might be joining the protests at La Wanri and I'm not a natural protestant myself.

29:22But then there's the whole thing about, you know, this guy that got pardoned after the 181 .8 million. He's sort of, it's just off the scale and I think these other things that we spend so much time talking about. So if you just take the last 48 hours where the thing with the Pope, no, I'm not a Catholic, I'm not anything, I'm an atheist. But given that the Pope, Pope Francis is dead just a few days for Trump to go out. And first to all do an interview saying, I think I'd be a great Pope. And then to on his truth social and on the White House social media channels have this picture of him as the Pope dressed as the Pope.

29:59And then last night, because there's been a bit of backlash from Catholics, say that he knew nothing about it is on your effing truth social. And then to say that it's why can't people take a joke. And this is how they do it. Forage does this as well where you sort of, you say something over the top, but then you say, well, it's just a bit, bit of fun. Why haven't people got a sense of human sense? It's interesting. I deeply offensively. I found it really offensive. Really. And of course, immediately the bad boys of Brexit come in and attack me and say, I don't have a sense of humor and what's your problem.

30:31And actually some of my more leftwing Tory friends said, Rory, you mustn't rise to this because if you react to their jokes. That's what they want. Yeah, agree. That's what they want. Well, of course, in the next day, you had Alcatraz, you had two things, tariffs on films and Alcatraz. Now, this somebody said, this is a video that apparently in Florida, there's a TV channel that in where Mar -a -Lago is, and they play the film that was showing that night on Saturday night was Escape from Alcatraz, right? So people think, you know, did Trump sit down and watch this film with thought, you know, we've got to reopen that place.

31:10You know, he suddenly throws out, we're going to put 100 % tariffs on film on foreign films and this Alcatraz thing. So yesterday, as I was driving back from the North, the lead story was tariffs on films. The second story was Alcatraz. I would put my life on it neither of those things will happen, just as he's not going to become the Pope. However, we've spent, we the world, we spent 48 hours talking about it during which we're actually not talking about Trump in Israel, not talking about Trump in corruption, not talking about things that really, really, really matter. So let's get back to corruption then, just to just finish.

31:43So we don't fall into the trap. So corruption is something that's been around in the US and did all our democracies long time. But the US is pretty dramatic in the 19th century, unbelievably corrupt, big move to clean it up, obviously through the 20th century. But still some pretty strange things that we've been talking about. We talk about Buddhistiancy in Rhode Island, taking cash, we talked about, you know, senators with gold bars, we've been listening to the fact that they can get inside of information and trade and work. To Nancy Pelosi, yeah, to talk about these amazing FBI stings in the 80s, which found Congress people and senators including one of them, the federal lawmakers saying, when the FBI agent tries to say, you know, you're going to take a bribe, he says, you don't need to talk to me, I'm as bent as they come.

32:32However, the real change is Chief Justice Roberts in Supreme Court and the follow -up from Citizens United, Citizens United allowed this horrible campaign financing situation where, under essentially an idea that this is a part of liberty and freedom, suddenly these incredible, you know, $100 million funds are able to often with dark money, finance bits of campaigns. And following on from this, there's been a massive retreat even before Trump in prosecuting American politicians from corruption. So Chris Christie's team was found, in order to punish somebody in New Jersey who wasn't with them, they were creating traffic jams in New Jersey by fiddling around with the traffic lights in order to undermine their opponents.

33:20That was clear. The governor of Virginia, who with his wife, was found taking tens of thousands of dollars in cash and gifts. Again, was clear. There's been an amazing investigation Ohio into the Speaker of the House who had a, you know, genuine kind of guy who modeled himself on the Sicilian Mafia and whose dad was a Mafia enforcer who killed himself by a pond and who the FBI was all over this. And then we come to Trump and the protections that the US set up to try to deal with this are of course laws, which Trump has suspended. So there are laws of foreign agents act, which was about trying to prevent, you know, Russian agents or Cuban agents paying American politicians.

34:04That's been paused by Trump. Foreign corrupt practices act. That's about companies going abroad paying bribes. Trump has frozen that too. Consumer protection acts phrased by Trump. Procurement, the State Department has coincidentally just issued a 400 million dollar contract by armored Teslas from Elon Musk. A no proper procurement processes followed. In $100 million contract after prison has now been annulled and it looks like Musk is now going to get that contract. Again, with no due process at all. This is the story. And to be fair to our friend and colleague, the Moot, she said this right in the word go while they're creating all these sort of, you know, distractions left right and center.

34:48The real big story here is about kind of, you know, personal enrichment and enrichment of his friends. People just look out for that guy, Chris Murphy, following on social media, if you don't, he really is onto this and Bloomberg, by the way, they've done it. I don't know how they know because the crypto world is so secretive, but he reckons that they're crypto, the Trump family crypto scheme is now worth about somewhere close to a billion dollars. Okay, right. It's been depressing so far. Let's have a break. Yes, it was depressing, but after the break, we'll be back and we'll be looking at some really, really interesting electoral results around what some of which Australia, for example, show a great deal of kind of optimism and hope and different directions.

35:24Trump isn't taking over the whole world and there are different currents moving in other directions, so a bit of optimism after the break. Yeah, well, I'm glad you can see the sunny side of life, whatever happens, or we'll also talk about the local elections in England.

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36:49Welcome back to the rest's politics with Miros Yut. And me, Alistair Campbell. So, Rory, what do you, you said you were going to start with an optimist, you know, what do you tell international listeners how the local elections went? Well, listen, just to frame it for everybody, British and international. There are two totally different stories happening in the world. There's the story of Canada and Australia, where being associated with Trump damages right -wing parties and allows center -left governments, who often were in pretty bad trouble and were seen as pretty useless and looked like they were going to lose elections.

37:24So if suddenly one of these elections largely thanks the fact that the right -wing has been discredited by Trump. And then there's the other story, which was seen in Romania, of which we're seeing in France, which was seen in Germany, which is actually right -wing we'll get on to that in a second, because in many ways you would expect actually Britain to follow Canada and Australia, not what's happening in Europe. Anyway, the British results were astonishing because it was totally unprecedented historic success for reform. And John Curtis and all these - It is the optimistic, but - So reform has managed to do something amazing.

38:10Reform just remind people, is this party set up by Nigel Farage? It was a relatively marginal party, a pretty new party in a country, dominated, of course, by a two -party system for over a hundred years, where if you go back to the 60s and 70s, Labour and Conservative is getting well over 90 % of the vote. And very difficult for a new party to break through in British politics, the Lib Dems keep complaining because we've got first passed the post system, but this time they managed to break through to 32 % potentially of the vote, up from a 2013 figure of 22%, and because of the way first passed the post works, there's a tipping point you can reach, which could mean with 32 % of the vote, you end up with 40 % of the seats, and Labour and Conservatives hit very hard.

38:56So quick figures, reform took 677 council seats, two maritalties, took a parliamentary seat by a tiny six -vote majority, it won the popular vote in 15 out of 23 local authorities. Labour lost two thirds of its counsellors, including Donkastor, which was the only council that it had up, which was controlled. It's got the lowest vote share for 40 years, so it's gone from 34 % of the vote in 24 to 19 % of the vote in 2025, but it did end up by very narrow margins holding a maritalties in Donkastor and Westening, and now the Conservatives lost all previously held councils. I mean, it went from 16 councils down to zero from having most votes and five additional ones to only having most votes and two additional ones, and this is for Labour and the Conservatives, the worst vote share for 40 years.

39:55So I guess the question is, what on earth do we make of this? In some ways, I mean, for once in our lives, we predicted it like half the world, we said we thought reform would do very well, we said that we've entered a world which is much more fractured, fragmented, because there are more parties in play, the Lib Dems did quite well, not not vote share, but in the way they allocated their votes as part of that trick, they don't necessarily get a huge amount of vote, they got maybe 16 % of the vote that the capital did. So we're going to enter a world more coalitions, more fragile, more anti -incumbency, reform doing very well, but what do you make of it all?

40:28Well, I certainly don't find it optimistic. If you go to the betting shop today, which I never do, but I'll tell you the odds, most seats at the next election today in the betting shops, you get six to four Labour and six to four reform. Now, the betting markets at the moment think that reform have a pretty good chance of basically getting majority in parliament being the next government. Not necessarily majority, but they're reading this as a significant change. And I think it is, and I think that the Labour government, if I had been them on Friday morning, I wouldn't have come out and said the sort of things they said, I would have come out and said, this is a real kick up the ass, and we've got to listen.

41:09I said to you last week, I've been talking to people, being campaigning, and the winter fuel allowance was coming up again and again and again and again. Now, that's not something that's been in the media much. You've got a situation coming up where the welfare changes, and I see Ellen Morgan, the First Minister in Wales, who we had to be done leading, where Labour are going to be coming up for election next year. And where reform is doing very well, and she is making clear that she is going to speak out against some of these changes. I was talking to an MP in Wales who reckons that something like two thirds of his constituents will be affected.

41:51Now, the point is, if you've been elected on a slogan of change, which Labour were, and I can point to, as I have on the podcast, lots of changes that they've made that I support, but if the changes that they've made that have connected with the public, not people like us who sit and talk about politics all day, what do the public know about what the government's done? They know about winter fuel, they know about farmers, they don't much like that, they know about national insurance on business, and they don't much like that, and they know about Pips. And the thing about Pips, the personal and immense payments, they haven't even happened yet.

42:24And the Pips, Pips, the payments for people with disabilities. Exactly. Yeah. I've had quite an interesting weekend because I went to Burnley, then I went to see my sister over in Wretford, and I was in Donkaster, I was in Manchester, yesterday I was in the Peak District, and there is still, but they've got to be really careful, because this will run out pretty quickly if they're not careful. There is still a desire that the Labour government does well. But what I heard again and again was, this is just not what Labour government should be doing. Taking money away from pensioners, taking money away from the disabled, whilst not fixing the, the kind of big stuff of inequality, and the, you know, we can maybe talk about Europe, because I still honestly do believe, one of the reasons why Farage is able to get away with morphing from one sort of character into another whilst constantly being described as authentic, is because the things that he's done in the past have never been pinned on him.

43:21Why was he allowed to get away from the Trump shadow? Answer because he decided, I'm not, I'm going to play down the Trump thing. And he never talks about Brexit. If he plays down these things. Is it also that the Labour government doesn't want to complain about Trump, because they are worried that they'll annoy him, so they don't want to pin Trump. Possibly. Possibly. But which is, I can't even understand, but let's just, you know, it didn't stop him coming out of the weekend and talking about film tariffs, which is like, you know, the UK is one of the hardest hit in that. Just to, just to sort of stop for a second on that, we really need to focus on that because we talk a lot about what could generate growth in the UK.

44:00Which is one of them. And creative industries and media and film has been the most incredible success. And actually, to give a little bit of credit to both Gordon Brown and George Osborne, they put a lot of stuff in place, which are proper industrial strategy. Yeah, big studios, and tech specialists. And it actually worked. And actually, if we're looking for industrial strategies and growth, for the other things that we often talk about, the Britain's good at, you know, life sciences, AI development, the film industries are really good model. But my goodness, it's a disaster if the big Hollywood studios.

44:35But my point is that can't make a new case. So you mentioned Kani. You mentioned Canada. So as you say, Albanese and Kani, both one, from left to centre perspectives at a time when people are saying that incumbents are dead and you can't win from the progressive left. Right, they've disproved that. I think it's less than the keyest animal government is worried about upsetting Trump. Too often, the arguments are taking place on kind of accepting forage's premise about the country. No, we can't touch Brexit. Yeah, the country is a bit broken. Yeah, the immigration system is a disaster. And why I said last week, attack him where he's weak and stop attacking him, go from where he's strong.

45:16What does that mean in practice? Not not attacking him where he's strong, attacking him where he's weak. Well, immigration has to be fixed. Immigration is a real problem. But if you come at immigration from the perspective that says we're going to do this because this is the way that we that we take on forage or this is the way that we shore up our vote in the red wall, which is how the breathers stuff out the whole time, fix the immigration system because the immigration system has to be fixed. The fact that he could go through forage could go the last few weeks where it already does his campaign.

45:45He's a campaigner, right? I mean, he wasn't said to me. He said, I'd be hopeless as prime minister. I'm a campaigner, I'm a communicator. I'm out there. And he's very, very good at it. So the fact that there was a poll last week, who do you blame for Brexit? Okay. Forage was, he was way down the list. He was one of the big drivers of it. But if the Labour government decides as the Tory party has done, let's not talk about Brexit, don't be surprised if he gets away with it. We should have had the Trump thing should have been pinned on him day one. Keers time I can't do it for the reasons you say.

46:20But let me tell you yesterday in Paris, Macron and Vondalayan were there. Macron stood in front in Paris in front of a slogan in English. And the slogan said, choose Europe for science. And he and Vondalayan announced 500 million euro scheme to attract American scientists to Europe. And she said it is the most disastrous miscalculation to turn against science. He said, did we ever in our lives imagine that one of the great democracies of the world would turn against fact and turn against science. You don't have to, now is that going to affect Trump's impression of Macron? I suspect he will get told about it.

47:03Oh, I've got to watch out for him. As he's done with Carnegie, Mark Carnegie is going to be seeing him today. We'll see. But I'd be very, very surprised if Trump does his 51st day thing. So I think it's about, look, I'm reluctant to sort of, you know, if I say to you, Rory, I don't want to become the Roy Keen of the podcast. Do you understand what that means? Yeah, I get that. He's grumpy and complain since it's the corner. Yeah, but also he basically says, Man United was a lot better in my day. And this law aren't quite out yet. And I don't want to be that person who says, but I heard one of them in the aftermath, part of the line of defense was, well, this stage of the government, governments have always struggled in.

47:44We didn't. And they actually compared it to 1997, you know, the Blair government had always problems with Bernie Eccleston and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, we did have lots of problems, but you won't punish like this. We were in the polls in the first year. We didn't lose a bi -election for I think the first six years. So if you start from this defensive mindset, and I just felt the response was too complacent, is take it as a kick up the arson, say, you know, because what you say, what they're saying is we're going to go faster further. But on some of these things, the change that's been offered is not changed that people felt they voted for.

48:16And if you if you've campaigned on change, don't be surprised if people then say, I don't like the change that they say, who else is offering change? And I don't know if you've ever looked at reform in the dictionary, it means change. Yeah, no, it's amazing. Danny Finkelstein, who I saw at the event that we did for prisons, the the twining project has this great line that Labour's slogan is Britain is broken, let's do nothing about it. And and I think there is there is you know, I said to you before the election that it was difficult to put a cigarette paper between Stama and Sunack on almost any issue.

48:54They sounded identical on immigration, identical on tax, identical on welfare. And it was impossible to see what policies Labour had up its back pocket, which was going to make it any different. They felt like they were an austerity light party that were going to come in. And it very difficult to see what they do that be any different. And you know, I even on housing policy, health policy, a lot of the stuff that Labour was talking about is exactly what C next talking now, the answer then. I could push back about. Yeah, you can push back.

49:24But the answer broadly, you know, I might be exaggerating that I'm probably I'm exaggerating, but the answer then was well, you know, they've got to win the selection. So they don't want to go too much on the policy difference. They'll just let the Tories lose because everyone hates the Tories. And then once they're in, you know, the mask will come off and then the policies will be revealed and then the radicalism will unfold. It doesn't feel like that. I'm a fridge. Well, what we both said during the campaign was that the scale of challenge that the country faced was not being met by the scale of policy response.

49:57Now, they would probably say, and I was talking to a minister last night who said, look, you know, we still got a bit of time. And I said, listen, you will be amazed at a little time you've got. And once people start to settle on a judgment, and this is why I heard, listen, I met loads of people who voted Labour and I met loads of people who didn't vote who said they might come back. Okay. But I also met this couple who said to me any conversation as you know, that starts with I've always voted something is always followed by a and the but that this guy gave me was this thing is that I didn't vote Labour for this.

50:34I didn't vote Labour to lose my winter fuel. I didn't vote Labour to see my, you know, my wife's benefits car. I didn't, you know, you've, so what is the, and I keep obsessively going on this thing about what is the national story? And so like Ferrage does have a national story and the trouble is it's the same as to some extent it's the same as what Labour Britain is broken. Ferrage went round the country say, Oxford is broken, Staffer's is broke, Lincoln's broke, Durham's broken. Right. Now I know and you know he does not have a clue about how to fix it. But what is the Labour national story?

51:09What is if you say to the Labour people, what give me the give tell me what Britain's going to be like in 10 years? What's the change? Now I, I honestly right now can't give an answer to that. So that's me. A lot of stress through this. So I had dinner with your friend Gordon Brown this week. And I did ask him that. He said he said, well, I don't really have much to say. I'll come on my, I have something to say. Now he does have a lot to say turns out. And of course, I don't want to, you know, put him on the spot because we were having a nice dinner conversation. But fundamentally, he would, I think say, a much more radical ambitious economic policy and a policy that addresses society and a whole new economic model.

51:57And he would describe what that was. And let's get him on the podcast to try to explain it. But yeah, when I heard on the morning after the election, Eddie Reeves party chair was was doing the rounds this year. I know he's difficult. You've just had a big hit. And you know, you've clearly lost and you go out and you've got to say something. But you keep saying about run corn and the bi election, which was cause because that guy dumped somebody and they lost the majority of 14 ,700. Okay, it was only by six votes. And if it had gone the other way on the recount, we wouldn't have talked about it so much.

52:28But it's a huge swing against them. And she mentions, she kept mentioning, you know, we've got to get our message out better about the things that we've done. For example, we've just delivered four new breakfast clubs in run corn. Right. Now I've got nothing against the four new breakfast clubs. And I think food poverty is a thing though because Gordon would wouldn't have talked about breakfast clubs. He would have talked about our ambition to end child poverty. Yeah. He would have taught, you know, what what they're not doing to my mind is setting this stuff in this, as I say, a national story.

53:03Where is the country going? So breakfast clubs are great. They are not a national story. Fight for an appointment. I mean, I've been very struck with our conversations with David Blanket, with our Comrade Sergeant Milburn. This dinner I just have a Gordon Brown that they must have been difficult figures to manage to put him out. They've got him around. Can't be an easy person to manage. But my goodness, the sense of intellectual confidence is, you know, it is a form of charisma. And it's just astonishing his certainty, his vision. And I'm struggling a bit within the Labour cabinet to see people with that kind of degree of kind of roar.

53:45And I guess, you know, I don't know. As you say, we don't want to make you sound like Roy Keen. Before we go on to Australia, let's have a little chat about the Tories. I was actually talking to Luke Trill from more in common. Well, he's been doing these focus groups that he says are the worst he's ever heard. Absolutely. Yeah. So the Tories, I think, are in unbelievable trouble. So this is me speaking. No, no, no, Jeremy. Yeah. So this is, this is me speaking as a former Conservative cabinet minister, somebody who may be pretty unpopular in my party, but I can assure you this is unimaginable.

54:17The mess they've got themselves in. We are now, I think, in a situation in which it's not inconceivable that reform could actually replace the Conservative Party as the major right wing party. We've seen it in France, they're a public out vanished. It can feel like what happened to the Liberal Party and Britain just remind people in them. Liberal Party is a very liberal. Yeah, 1905, they win this enormous majority figures like Lloyd George Asquith. After the First World War, the Liberal Party vanishes and is outflanked and replaced by this new thing called the Labour Party. And we go from one type of two party system, Liberal Against Tory, to a new type of two party system, Labour Against Tory.

54:57And I think reform is doing very well at hoovering up Tory votes. And they're reassuring people. You know, you can see now quite a lot of my former Conservative colleagues say, well, you know, for us not exactly Trump is he, a lot of what he says is sort of stuff that mainstream Conservatives agree with. And remember, of course, for us himself came out to the Conservative Party basically. He founded these parties, Brexit reform, because he wasn't really given an opportunity within the Conservative Party. So I think she is in real trouble. And above all, I think she's done. I cannot understand, honestly, why she's not out there speaking.

55:35She keeps saying, when nobody will listen to me, maybe a bit more truth in that, you know, I give her that. I need to develop policies. I don't want to come out and just talk monsters. But it seems to me it cannot be right. You have to dominate the airwaves. You have to get attention. You can do it through speeches as much as policy. And you've got to make the call. Now, my call, my advice to come to that, not you don't listen to me, apart from come on the podcast. You know, if you're not feeding your voices being heard, here we are. Millions of people will get you to remitate. We made the same offer to Pierre Puelly, and to Mr.

56:07Dutton in Australia, their opponents came on and won. Yeah. So it is, it's a chance to get your voice out. And I would say that if I were the Conservatives, you've got two strategies, you've got the trying to imitate reform, which I think is the disaster. Well, that's what they've done. And that's why they're in the mess. That is why I've said, and I'll say it again, I said, last week, if Labour honestly think that the way to deal with reform is to be a bit more for our Geon policy, absolute nonsense, absolute nonsense, the way they have got now to give a sense of a Labour government doing things that the people who voted for them expected them to do.

56:43And that is what they hear and know about. And forming a big picture that paints a proper story where we go. And the Tories, of course, what they should be doing is trying to present themselves as the serious mature party of government and change. They should exploit people's uncertainty about Trump. They should exploit the fact that the Labour government seems a bit inept, that the growth isn't really coming, the economy isn't really taking over. And they should be really leaning in, I suppose, to figures like Mel Stride, the Shadow Chancellor, and producing a sense that this is going to be the safe pair of hands, and they're going to rebuild that brand.

57:20That's not easy, because they had 14 years of discrediting that brand. I think it's out of leisure relation tomorrow, it would generate, and that would be a complete disaster, because you'd just try and sort of pee for hours. It's not serious. I think the other thing that was interesting about the Australian election, we talk about winners and losers in elections, and obviously, Dutton was the big loser, they even lost his seat. But I think the other loser is Mordok. The Mordok papers did what they do, they threw everything. I think that one of the reasons why Almanese won, and by the way, this was spectacular.

57:52We said when he did the podcast interview with us that we both thought it felt very confident, but I think even he did not think it was going to be quite as good as this. It was a swing towards Labour, and it's very much his victory, because if you're being written off, and maybe this is the thing that can give Kierstarm a bit of hope, if you're written off a bit and you then turn it around, then he has remade himself. He's done it. Rymora said to you what Fiona, my Fiona said about the interview, we would go in dance through France and listen, she said, he's a bit dull, but he really sounds like somebody's got a conviction in principle, I really like that.

58:29I think ultimately, in these volatile times, there was one of the Australian columnists that in the end, Australians decided which of these two, when I want to look at my tax returns and do it right, and it was albo. Is that sort of sense of decency actually came through? Well, let me, I've been trying to think this through, because I think it's so interesting. So if you were a political scientist, you would say that Britain, Australia and Canada have an enormous amount in common in the structures of their political systems, which should mitigate against populism. So constitution, Western style parliamentary democracy, strong party discipline, variations on first pass of the post, although obviously preferential in Australia.

59:12Two parties dominant in all these three countries, divided basically between conservatives and sort of third -way centrist and a similar kind of welfare state commitment, strong similar institutions, all three countries, common law, public broadcasters, which literally, comically are called ABC, BBC and CBC, Union, civil service, and also the sort of national character. These are countries which often have got incremental change, institutional stability, big consensus around NATO foreign policy. So you'd really provide quite a good explanation on why you'd expect those three countries to be similar, unlike the US or Europe, which have very, very different systems.

59:49So what went wrong, and this is my attempt to try to answer this. What went wrong for whom? What went wrong, I guess, for the right wing in Canada and Australia. You could, by the way, you could, I mean most people in Australia and Canada won't know that much about our local elections. So they actually might be looking at Australian Canada in the same prison in that Labour one -on -lan slide a year ago. You see, and what I thought, I remember, I said to you what Francois Aron said to me, he says, listen, you guys are lucky because you've had your populism with Brexit. So I think actually there's, but anyway, carry on, because I think you're right, they've done something different.

1:00:24They've done something different. And Britain, of course, these local elections, remind us that in, and the sun gone brown, pointed out to me, that populist parties, far -right populist parties are now leading in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Slovakia, Italy, Hungary. And we've got the election in Romania at the weekend where the election having been ordered for a rerun because of Russian interference and the former candidate not being allowed to stand. The guy that was closest and politically is now taking the lead and is going into the runoff with a very, very big lead. Exactly.

1:00:56And you would have thought, therefore, as you say, anti -incumency, you know, Covid screwed up economies. Growth was pretty in Nemia, can places, that it was pretty easy to beat centre -left parties in Australia and Canada. And the Australian, I just want to push into the Australian narrative a bit. So as you've pointed out, this is the biggest election victory on some numbers since the Second World War. In other measurements since the 60s or the 70s, unbelievable. Number of seats exploded, very, very unusual. Normally governments do slightly worse than the Second World War, it's a massive explosion.

1:01:31And in both countries, the leader of the opposition lost his seat, Poliarev lost his seat, Dapan lost his seat. Their story four months ago seemed pretty straightforward. And I produced this great slogan, we could go broke. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's a good how it is. Sound brilliant. We can't ask the security a little bit, we can't ask the referendum. Sending a spray, well, Australia is going from having had a great budget surplus, going to deficit, deficit stretches into the future. I just sound on the work bit there. So the, I thought that both of their speeches, Dapan made a very, very gracious, concession speech.

1:02:08He said, he says to me very nice, actually, he said to, to Albanese, your mum would be really, really proud of you. And then he spoke about the woman who'd beaten him in his own seat, who'd also, she'd lost her son. And he spoke very kind of warmly and movingly about her and highlight the helper. And I was watching him thinking, why were you not a bit like this before? But one of the things, the cultural issues that Dapan got involved in in the campaign, he suddenly said this thing about we're going to get, you know, when you go to Australia, as you know, and every time you do him, saying this thing, you know, we honor and pay tribute to those, the regional owners of the land, et cetera, et cetera.

1:02:44And he said he was going to cut all that down. And I think he did that because he was such a big player in the voice referendum. But what Albanese did, he lost the voice referendum, but he didn't then trim his views on it. So when he made his acceptance speech, one of the loudest cheers was when he said, and I want to pay tribute to the regional owners of the land and there, he was, he was a way of saying, I'm not moving off that because actually we've still got problems on that to fix. So I think that's the point I was making about principle and conviction. You stick to the big things that you believe in.

1:03:14I was, when I was in Canberra, I saw Simon Birmingham, who was the, on the conservative side, he was the sort of shadow foreign minister. And he just got in touch trying to reflect on how his party, Dapan's party was trash in selection. And he actually quoted Theresa May. Oh, the nasty party. Yeah. He said, our basis to narrow and so occasionally are our sympathies. You know what some people call us, the nasty party. And he said that actually Dapan came across as to grudging to intolerant of freedoms. And actually there was a narrative, you know, and it's the narrative that I would suggest the conservatives need to find a Britain that you could have had a narrative, which said, you know, we are in favor of enterprise, innovation, mutual respect, a comfortable and non -london world.

1:03:59But there's a place for a party that isn't too owned by the unions. It's surprising actually, in some ways, our one is this party's quite old fashion where it comes to unions. There were quite a lot of scandals that could have been used and somehow fizzled out scandals around the Quantus Club, around what was having Victoria with the Labour unions, scandals on, you know, cliff top houses. None of this really mattered in the end. They weren't able to land any of this, whether? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll believe he was lucky in having the pony in the yard. But unless anyway, you did say before the break that we were going to cheer ourselves up, Australia has cheered me up a lot, because I think it shows, you know, decency.

1:04:35He came, I think that's the thing that came through in our interview with him. He came over as a really kind of decency or bloke, who is in politics the right reason. He was almost crying when he won, because I think there must have been times when he thought he was in trouble. Well, you mean, it's amazing isn't it? And let's just finish on this narrative optimism. So, you know, we were setting up as we came out of a year of elections, where incumbents were losing all the time, a world in which it was likely that most of the big countries in the world were going to give up on sort of left -wing social democracy and embrace the right.

1:05:05An only star more would be allowed out there as the outlier. And actually, the Trump effects has pushed and due to X and some countries more populism. But in Australian Canada, really astonishing has given a new lease of life to these centralist parties turning people like Albanese and Kani into incredible heroes who've done things that sort of almost unprecedented in political history. I mean, Kani is even more dramatic and let's just finish by paying tribute to him and reminding people we've done a couple of leading interviews with him. And I just got a nice, nice message from him. We should get him on again.

1:05:37But he took what was 20 point lead against him? A liberal party that really would have been perceived in Canada as weak, woke, sending us broke, turned it all around at a moment where his economy is under huge pressure from Trump, standing up for values that we need to somehow rediscover in Britain. And if Labour and Conservative don't rediscover in the name of Britain, we're going to be in real trouble. Yeah, yeah, absolutely right. Finally, let's just close that sweet. Singapore, my friend Lawrence Wong, great win, great win. Why are you laughing? He's the most famous liberal democracy. Well, it's a strong democracy, that's for sure.

1:06:14But anyway, he did bloody well. But again, Trump was a bit approaching with the status quo decided, and as I said to you before, his speech about Trump and the tariffs was, well, where do we get him on? Yeah, we'll definitely get him on. Very good. Okay, take care. Bye bye.