408. Broken Britain: Farage’s Plot to Outflank Labour

25:27Tears streaming down her face as she described how she escaped from this fire, which has killed siblings and one of her parents, certainly one or maybe two of her parents. And then the other thing is she's decided, and this may be more interesting, she's decided to come up very, very strongly in favor of keeping the two child benefit cap. But I don't think she's going to last. I could be wrong, but I don't think she's going to last. I think that will happen. The question then is who takes over and where they position themselves against Vrache? I think that both the main parties have made a mistake by devising so much of their strategy around reform.

26:06The thing that I don't know what James Johnson said about this, it seems to me that where Farage is very, very vulnerable. You mentioned there the NHS. He's very vulnerable on the NHS because most of the people who voted for him, this comes through in the polling, aren't aware that actually he does favor a much more private insurance model of healthcare. I think he's vulnerable on Putin and Trump, and I think he's vulnerable on this point that my hairdresser, Josh, made about the one manbandism that once you take for Azure Way, there isn't much there. And what is good at, we'll see this today.

26:38I mean, to come out and say, this is classic populism. We're going to reinstate the Winterfuel allowance and we're going to get rid of the two -child benefit cap. And we're going to pay for it by shutting down these stock paying these hotels to keep asylum seekers. Well, that begs the question, where are they gonna go? What problems is that going to care beyond? So it's classy populism, it's total truncism. You just say you're going to do something. You say it was such confidence. It's also interesting that to give him some credit, he's got a feeling for what voters want. And I think oddly in this, he's got a better feeling for red wall voters than what we're hearing from the rumors from number 10 and Morgan McSweeney, the chief of staff, as Thomas chief staff, who the story was a week ago was that we mustn't get rid of the two -char benefit because he thought from opinion polls that a key working class voters didn't like the idea of people on welfare with big families getting more money when they had more kids.

27:41What's happened now is that Farage has outflanked Labour on the left and he's sensed that his reform voters do want to generate a welfare state like the idea of looking after people and having money for pensioners and having money for children. And what we'll then see is I think Morgan McSweeney and will then come in behind for us on this. So for us is actually making the political weather. There's no doubt about that. But to me, this was an obvious one. This is why, look, the thing about, I've said to you before, I think at the moment within the number 10 operation, there is too much politics and not enough political strategy.

28:16Political strategy, when we interviewed Ed Miliband this week on leading, and he was talking about one of Gordon Brown's skills being able to see sort of 50 moves ahead. A year ago Nigel Farage and the politics that he was pursuing at that time, which were very much he's going for the Tories, you would have said that he would have been absolutely sought out the welfare scroungers. That would be where he would be positioning himself. But I think what anybody who's been to any of these places and who's talked to people, and this is coming from Labour MPs all the time, where you have real levels of child poverty that seem to be developing, that requires a big strategy.

28:56Now what he's done, as the conversation has started with Labour clearly starting to think, maybe we need to look at this, maybe we need to unpick this, for our just certain, so that's what they're going to do. Therefore I'm going to say it first and I'm going to get out there and do a big thing. And when they do it, I'll be able to say, look, they wouldn't have done it without me. He played the same game in relation to the steelworks at Skunthorpe. Labour clearly had a problem. Clearly was sort of going through the complicated policy processes to get to the decision. He smells the wind, he works out where it's going.

29:28That is part of being in politics in opposition. But I think it's a consequence of Labour having the role approach when it comes to dealing with him. They've got to have a strategy that is about not dealing with reform but addressing child poverty. One of the issues is of course that there are people in number 10 who like the rise of reform and their calculation would be in any one of those three scenarios that I laid out, labor benefits, regardless of whether reform is ahead of the Tories behind the Tories or neck and neck with the Tories. Yeah, I went off on one rather than answering your question.

30:01I think that is the most likely as things stand, but I don't think we're in such volatile times. None of us can really accurately predict. Exactly. I don't think any of us can accurately predict because a lot of it depends will, as you say, Farage discredits himself. Will he sort himself out? So what's the best case scenario for Farage? Well, best case scenario for Farage presumably is that he begins to build a shadow cabinet and he gets a really credible person in as his shadow chancellor. Not an MP, somebody from the outside world, because nobody thinks the Farage is being a good economic manager.

30:34It's not like Trump. Trump, of course, a lot of people in America think because of very successful businessmen, party because he ran the apprentice. Frash hasn't got that. Nobody thinks Frash is a kind of guy who's gonna be able to run the economy. The Tories have got a difficult choice, haven't they? Basically, if they replace the Kamibeid knock, and I think just to analyze where she got wrong, you're right, she's doing primary colors now, but the basic problem since she came in is that she disappeared. She had this idea, which never made sense to me, that she was gonna slow roll and slowly develop her policies since she had a long time to the next election and she wasn't in a rush.

31:08But what she forgot is that she's in a world of social media with reform rising fast and she needed to fight every day for the British right. And I don't understand, I mean, I think the strategy should have been, get out, pound the streets, do town halls all the time, be humiliated, get the video cameras in watching you. Craith and narrative of, can we be not traveling around the country, meeting people, being shouted at, arguing, apologizing, and create a story? I think this was madness what she did. Anyway, I think she's going. So then the question is, do the Tories go with Robert Genreck? And here, a Tory MP said to me, look, he's pretty all -form.

31:54We don't think he's got much census strategy, but at least he's got some energy. At least we think he's going to be able to get some headlines, or do they bring back Boris, which I think would be a catastrophe because it would be very easy to pin on Boris so many of the problems. That's Boris Johnson, I'm a talker, is it? That's Boris Johnson, I'm so sorry, I reverted to forgetting what he's supposed to be called. He's another child. He clearly sees himself as being in competition with Elon Musk's, who can have the greatest number of offspring on the planet. I agree with you, but I think bringing back Johnson would be a disaster for them.

32:26Yeah, and then I suppose the third thing is whether they could get back to somebody like James cleverly, but James Clevverly's strategy has slightly disappeared. It hasn't come on our podcast, hasn't been in the shadow cabinet, haven't seen much of him. It's called biding your time, Rory. What is the strategy for the centre -right? The only strategy for the centre -right has to be to exploit for Ash's weakness on the economy, and to try to hope that with a couple of changes of leaders, the Tories can distance themselves from the catastrophe of the last 14 years, all the way in which at least the last five was portrayed, and get themselves into position of mounting an economic attack and coming us as credible on the economy.

33:02I mean, impossible though, that is that's the only hope against Farage, right? I think playing Farage at his own game, which I suspect is what Generate would do, is I think is doomed to fail. I suspect that the membership of the Tory party, such as it is, because I think it's dwindling, but I suspect that's the sort of person that they would elect, but I think they need to really think and fresh. I do it. It's a little bit like the Democrats in the States. I don't feel that they've had any sort of real analysis as to why they lost. And because they've got a lot to attack labor on, there's a going for labor.

33:39So in a way they're doing an inverse of what you described was happening at our first year at the conference. The Tories of Terror was a labor of be better. The Tories, as you'd be saying, labor terrible and we'd be better without actually understanding that until they have that proper public analysis and why they lost so badly. Nobody's listening. I mean her problem at the moment is I don't think people are even listening. Whereas they are listening to Farage because and I always felt Farage getting into Parliament would be a really significant thing because he's not stupid and he uses it well.

34:14Now people do say by the way that when he's in Parliament, if he's a terrible parliamentary performer because he's not used to being challenged directly as he speaks and so he's So he's what he's going to do. And I think you're right, he'll pick a cabinet of all the talents from outside Parliament. He's only got four MPs to pick for. And he can't imagine Leanderson as your chancellor, I don't think. I think he'll do that. And the Tories, I think, they need to think absolutely afresh and come up with some new. And Labor meanwhile, need to have a strategy that is about governing and a strategy that is about addressing these big challenges, some of which we've talked about today.

34:50and doing it in a way that paints this picture of what they're trying to achieve for the country. Final point from my head, Dresser, he basically said, at one point, he said, I don't really know what the government's trying to do and I haven't got a clue what the Tories are trying to do. You know, cue, open a door to a populist opportunist outsider. And on the subject of populist opportunists outside, is when we take a break and come back to Donald Trump?

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36:29So Rory, I think that even by your standards you've been on the move a lot more than this time last year. So here's a question, how do you stay connected when you're on the move? So in the past you remember you used to turn up the app or get a new SIM card or you're roaming on your UK SIM and driving up unbelievable bills. There's actually now a terrific thing called Saley which is an e -SIM app from the people behind our old friend NordVPN. So you download it once, you choose a data plan for wherever you're going, covering over 190 countries and that's done. So no dodgy kiosk sims, no roaming horror stories.

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37:50Welcome back to the rest of politics with me, Rory Stewart and me, Alice Campbell. And I briefly mentioned Ed Miliband in part one, but just to remind people we've done this two part interview with Ed Miliband. First part was out on Monday, second part was out on Friday. If you can't wait till Friday and you're not a member of Trip Plus, just join and you'll find it will just Woff seamlessly into your members feed. But I thought what did you think of Ed Miliband Rory over the two hours? We spent one. Well to remind people he of course he almost became Prime Minister He was leader of Labour party.

38:22This is an amazing story about his fratricide or fight with his brother David who many people Including probably you and me thought should have been the Labour leader He's also been the big champion of Net Zero climate policy. He's one of the people in the cabinet that really has a clear idea of what he's tried to do controversial though it is. So I think he's he's a big beast. I mean, if you're looking for big beasts and modern politics and also looking for someone who's done something which is increasingly unusual, which is to stay in politics despite all the ups and downs. I think he's anyone interested in politics should listen to that.

38:57Yeah, and also engine we talked a lot about reform and Nigel Farage because one of Farage's big things now He's sort of given up talking about Brexit net zero is his thing and I think in part two when people listen to that I thought he was Ed was at his most compelling and animated when he was talking about how to win the argument on net zero And I think that will become a very big part of the of the rest of this this Parliament Now let's talk about where do you want to start in in foreign affairs Do you want to start with something positive, the king? Yeah, let's maybe finish with the positive so people can leave on a cherry note.

39:33Okay, yeah, fine, fine, yeah. Let's just do a very, very quick summary of the different things that have been front and central in the world. So number one, Ukraine, a lot of talk of calls between Trump and Putin, exchange of prisoners and then some very, very brutal attacks by Russia against Ukrainian cities. Then we've had big new announcements on tariffs, so everybody will remember the tariffs came down, but Trump has then been threatening to ramp them up again, particularly against the European Union. We've had a next layer in the attack on American universities with a big attack on Harvard, saying that no visas will be issued for foreign students who want to study hard, it's very big chunk of Harvard's base.

40:18And then we've had Trump pass his tax policy bill, which is his big spending bill, which is going to have huge ramifications in terms of the US deficit and the direction in which those things go. I think that's the main things from me, but there are other things that caught your attention in terms of what's happening in the world. There most certainly were. The two things that really struck out to me this week, were three things actually. The meme coin dinner, you know, Mar -a -Lago, and this is straightforward corruption. He has a meme coin. Apparently he's growing his own wealth at the rate of a billion a month while he sort of keeps saying, I'm not taking a salary for being president, I'm giving my salary away.

40:57So on the one hand he gives his salary away, which is a couple hundred thousand dollars. And on the other hand, he's sort of taking in billions. And this was a place where apparently some of the guests were so unkeying to be seen that they arrived with bags over their heads. Others who were tweeting and posting merrily say, look at me, I'm right up close with Donald Trump. And the line from the was he was doing this in his free time. The other thing that I noticed was he made the speech to West Point, West Point Military Academy, one of the most prestigious military academies in the world, and he made a speech that was so off the scale bizarre.

41:33He started talking about some guy who was chasing trophy wives and it didn't help him in the end. He was criticizing Joe Biden of course. He then said, and by the way, Joe Biden and Obama, when they did the speech West Point. They stayed and shook hands with every new graduate, thousand people. They stood there and shook hands with them. Trump announced that he can't stay to shake their hands because he's got to go and deal with China and Russia. Not long afterwards, he was photographed in a golf buggy playing golf. So that one. And then the other one also relates, also relates to corruption. Was Vietnam, you mentioned tariffs, Vietnam were getting sort of, you know, whack the tariffs.

42:12and suddenly there's this big deal to do a real real estate golf course project in Vietnam for the Trump family and lo and behold this helps the tariff situation. I mean you define corruption recently as the use of public office for private gain, okay? Well we're seeing it played out in plain sight day after day after day. And indeed Johnson might Johnson the speaker. He was interviewed about the weekend of the weekend. Well, I don't know about this dinner, but the difference has been Trump and Biden, is it's all being done in public, it's all being played out in public, as if that kind of makes straightforward corruption.

42:49Okay. I'm a final point, Rory. Sorry, the rant is coming to an end, I promise you, was that he sent a free speech team to come to the UK to look at the free speech issues of some of the people who generated the riots at the time of the Southport killings through social media. I mean, you know, stay in your lane. You may be president of America. I would argue our free speech right now is a lot healthier than yours, not least because we don't have a government that's going after media, academia and judiciary, which is what you and Mr. J .D. events are doing right now. I'm now calm. Well, one other thing we haven't mentioned was this amazing meeting with Cyril Ramaphosa, the South African president, which happened in the White House, which for again people haven't watched it I I sat through about 17 minutes of it and then I I watched some of the questions at the end.

43:42So this is the thing that I'll say you keep reminding listeners has become a staple of the Trump presidency which wasn't normal before. So it's this thing before the meeting where traditionally I in I think in your account find us down right what used to happen is used to say very happy to be in Washington looking forward to meeting the president and deepening the ties between our countries and few photographs and then you go in. This time Rumpos have turns up and the backstory is a lot of anger against South Africa from different bits of the Maca Coalition. So people are angry that South Africa was taking the genocide case against Israel.

44:22People are angry about South Africa because Marco Rubius says the G20 is going to be ruined because South Africa is talking too much about DEI. But particularly in this case, Trump very very focused on the issue of attacks on white farms and what he calls a white genocide. And the fact that they've announced that they're going to give asylum, strangely having an anti -immigration policy against almost the entire world. So Afghans who served with the United States are left to loiter and Afghans. In fact, some of them at risk of being expelled from the United States now whose families were all brought over two years ago, now at Risker Binks thrown out again, meanwhile he's bringing over white farmers.

44:59And so there was this amazing moment where Trump is sitting down with Ron Posa and he suddenly says, look, here's a video you've got to watch. And you can't see the video in most of the angles from which the cameras are shooting. You can hear the video and you can see Ron Posa turning over a shoulder and it goes on for a long time, it'll have five, six minutes of video. But what you're hearing from the video is Julius Malema, who we've talked about, who's this radical, called Barry Wearing, Fringe politician, leading a big rally, apparently, where there is dancing and chanting not in English, which I guess sort of feeds the sort of sense of something strange going on in South Africa and chanting kill the Boer, which was an old chant.

45:40And Rammel Posey is trying to work out what to do. Does he look at the video? Does he look at Trump? Does he frown? Does he smile? And then Trump brings out all these bits of paper and I'm going to hand back to you on this. But the bits of paper are Trump saying, and I've got all these articles from people and look at this, you know, they hear all the white crosses of all these farmers buried in this field and hear a mass graves and there is this concerted effort to steal their land without compensation and kill them. And every time Ramaphosa tries to answer, Trump either repeats himself sort of rambles through the whole thing, almost word for word again, or he starts attacking the NBC correspondent who he's decided as a bad journalist and asked bad questions because he's asked about the counter plane.

46:24Anyway, over to you on this. Well, the other person in the room was Elon Musk and of course a lot of this is driven by Elon Musk and I think the thing to understand about I did I was at the hay festival of the weekend. I did five events one of which was with I did one with Julian Navon -Naya who said hello. Oh, yes, very good. Yep. She was amazing. She got standing on both ends. I did one with Eddie Rama another leading guest and an Applebaum and Misha Glenny, where there was a very interesting spat between Eddie Rammer and an Applebaum, which actually relates to how you deal with Trump and how you deal with Putin.

46:59Eddie was trying to almost put the case that Trump had done some good by getting people to focus on the ceasefire in Ukraine. Anyway, Ann Applebaum was having none of it, Putin's terrible and we should never ever say anything but that he's absolutely terrible. But the The point about these, the meeting with Ramaposa, and this is how Trump goes on about fake news. He was the author of the fake news because the first of all just to give you some facts. South Africa, it is true, has one of the highest murder rates in the world, an average of 72 a day. Most of them are black. In 2024, there were 26 ,232 murders.

47:3844 of them were linked to the farming community. 8 were white farmers. So, you know, when he talks about genocide, it is absurd. Even the African as farmers union says that under 1 % of total murders have been of farmers. Now, I'm not saying that's a good thing about me. I'm just saying that even they are saying when he talks about under 1%, this is not genocide. And also, Trump taught us though the government, the South African government is just sort of going around expropriating land. They have passed the law saying at the giving them the right to do so, but they haven't actually used it. And if you look at the stats, 76 % of farmland is owned by whites who make up less than 8 % of the population, 4 % is owned by black South Africans who make up around 80 % of the population.

48:27So it's not unreasonable to say let's try and sort of get a bit more equality, but they have actually not expropriated any land even though they have the law that allows them to do so. and this is apparently the law that muskers wound Trump up to say this is part of a white genocide. It's absolutely nonsense. But then the other thing was that so you mentioned that these crosses, okay, and he said this is where white farmers are buried. No, it wasn't. It was a protest about the death of two white farmers, but all the crosses were put down there to represent the deaths that there had been as it were in history.

49:03And then the other thing with the cuttings, He's going through the cuttings, going, look, death, death, death. Somebody from Reuters, or one of the news agencies, spotted that it was their story. But it turned out it was from the Democratic Republic of Congo. It had nothing to do with South Africa. This was the mass graves. Yeah, yeah. You take that one factor note. Here we are, 23 years after the weapons of mass destruction, dossier, okay? where most days some do on social media will challenge me about that because it's still a kind of live issue, right? Donald Trump, that story of him using fake, and by the way we didn't use fake information, we just used intelligence that turned out to be to be wrong, which I would argue is different.

49:52But he's there using a story about one country pretending it's a story about another, and it doesn't even last a tenth of a new cycle. because he's then on to the next day. We lose, don't we, so quickly, a sense of what's normal? So if you think about any British Prime Minister or former American President in a formal meeting with the South African President, deciding to pull out a piece of paper and say, in your country, there are these mass graves and kind of thousands of bodies being buried. And it turns out that not only is he humiliating, embarrassing, and attacking his foreign guest, but that actually it's complete nonsense and that the bit of paper he's showing shows graves in Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

50:45Thousands of miles from the border of South Africa. It's sort of unimaginable. I mean, any presidential premise, it will be the end of their career, wouldn't it? but that would be the two -temic moment. This person has gone completely mad. They've attacked a foreign visitor. They're not briefed properly and they're lying. Let's look at it another way. Let's imagine that, and somebody said that what he did in showing that video and presenting South Africa as he did was like Ramaphosa being in Cape Town, welcoming Donald Trump and showing him a film of the Clue Clux clan, or it's like him coming to Britain and showing Kirstama pictures of Tommy Robinson leading a kind of, you know, violent protest somewhere and Trump saying, there's, that's your country.

51:36And I think any other leader who did that, if Ramaphosa did do that to Trump and then it turned out it wasn't the Clue Clotscan, it was some sort of, you know, weird far -right group from, you know, somewhere in Europe, then he wouldn't survive. He'd be done finished and the Americans would make sure he'd be finished. So I think it's the you talk about the norm, we've talked before about the normalization of the abnormal. It is utterly abnormal behavior. It shows that there is no kind of checking going on around because remember by the way, he actually leaned over to Vance to say give me those papers.

52:13So somebody has presumably gone through them and now if that was a British government of French government, a German government, and you decided that was the right thing to do. Heaven knows why you would, but let's say you did. The fact that nobody's gone through them and said, hold on a minute, this isn't South Africa. Or maybe they've gone through and said, it isn't, it isn't South Africa, but it doesn't matter. And one of the events I did at Hay was with Anthony Scaramucci. He said, you have to understand what was going on here, had nothing to do with South Africa. This was him absolutely playing to his base.

52:46He's got a black guy alongside him. He wants to humiliate him. He wants to say that his country is FUCKED and he wants to say that there is a genocide against white people because it plays into this is the Mochis speaking now. It plays into the white replacement theory that, you know, black people are trying to replace you and therefore we have to make you angry about that. So it was all about the domestic consumption. And it plays into a second narrative too, doesn't it? Which is that there are double standards. He kept coming back to the fact that I bet you're not going to report this because you only reported when black people are killed.

53:20You don't report it when white people are killed. So there's also this whole story about the mainstream media being biased. Which brings us to Harvard. So I talked to a couple of Harvard professors yesterday. And I think to probably to save them. I don't want to put their names on the record, but it's very striking what he's doing. So just a sort of quick reminder, there was a letter issued by the Trump administration to Harvard, which began by saying we want control over key decisions on how you hire people, what professors get in, we want diversity of views, which is another way of saying, you know, we want people teaching our right wing opinions as much as the liberal opinions that are normally to order Harvard.

54:02And this was then followed up by another letter from Christina Noem saying, we want to know all the identities of students who cause demonstrations, disrupt the university, disrupt classes, aren't studying correctly. And the implication was that foreign students at Harvard represent people who are causing antisemitic demonstrations, who are un -American,

54:31who are reporting on your students and we want the full report and we want the systems in place to keep reporting on your students will stop all student visits. Now Harvard's fighting back in the law courts. It's fighting back first see about the fact that billions of dollars of federal funding has been taken away from Harvard. It's fighting against the stop of student visas, probably win on those, but what we'll lose on is the endowment tax. So he's now putting in a tax of nearly 27 % I think going through the current bill up from 3%, which effectively takes about a quarter of Harvard's income out and they will also massively be cutting all the federal funding.

55:07Two quick things on that. First, the American Research University of which Harvard is probably the most dramatic example has been one of the most incredible successes of the United States since the Second World War. It was a decision by the federal government to think, how do we get ahead in research innovation science, we will give billions of dollars of federal funding to our very best universities and the results have been unbelievable in terms of number of no -bar prizes they've got in terms of the kind of scientific advances being done in these places. The second thing is just this question around Trump's personality.

55:41I suspect because Harvard pushed back so hard, legally he may not go after as many other universities as he might have done, so maybe Harvard's done a favor to other the universities, but on the other hand, he is absolutely determined to humiliate Harvard because they set up to him. No, but it's all part of this thing. We've talked about it before in my previous advance and his obsession and interest in all ban, going after the academics and projecting all academics as being sort of basically radical left lunatics as Trump calls them is part of the plan. And I think that allied to this new media ecosystem, we're talking about the deliberate at dumbing down of one of the most, as you say, one of the most intelligent nations in the world.

56:24In terms of that top level of research, of academic study, of innovation. So I actually really genuinely think this is going to do them fundamental damage. Ursula von der Leyen was straight out saying, you know, we'd welcome lots of these Harvard people coming to European universities if they feel that they can no longer go to Harvard. That goes to Americans as well. But it's sort of, you know, we're back, we've made this point, week after week after week, the damage that this does to their soft power around the world is immense. I think it's good that Harvard are continuing to stand up to it, but my God, they're repaying a heavy price.

56:58Just one more thing on Trump and your reflections from your weekend talking to the mooch and others, and Ann Alperbaum and Rama, and EU tariffs. So this is really worrying stuff. People remember Trump put tariffs in place when he came in January, February, Canada, Mexico, and then there was Liberation Day, so 2nd of April, and this was the moment at which we got tariff some penguins and we got 45 % against Vietnam and eventually 140 % against China. The stock market reacted badly, the bond market reacted badly and he dropped it all down basically to 10 % except for China and then he blinked on China too.

57:35So everybody breathed the great sigh of relief and said okay, maybe he hasn't gone full crazy and the one thing they've got back to is one thing that Trump cares about as the bond markets and the stock markets. But the small Prince had been ignored, which is actually what he said. This is a temporary respite for 90 days. We know that he has history on Scrooing Runlight. That's because he brought the tariffs down on Canada when Trudeau made those concessions on Fentanyl and then he ramped them up again. That's what he's just signaled he's going to do with Europe. That's signaled 50 % tariffs against Europe again.

58:08The S &P dropped 3%, the stock market dropped 3 % on this news because this is really, really big news. I mean, this could be US growth down by 1 .5 % and for countries like Ireland in the European Union, which are massively dependent on the US. That could not 4 % off that GDP. I mean, trick them into proper recession territory. And all of this stuff is going to come to a head in July because that's when the EU stuff he now says will be returned to and that's when the 90 days come up and that's where you might well expect more strange stuff going on with China and new announcements against Apple where he's made it clear, it's not just that he doesn't want Apple being made in China, he doesn't want to make an India either.

58:46So the Indians who thought, well, this is a great opportunity, geo -strategically, to balance India against China and all those companies that were moving their investment from China to India, now being told, no, no, it's got to move to the US itself, but why would you put your investment in the US under Trump when you don't know when your supply chain costs are going to go up and you don't know when he's going to do something that will drive reciprocal tariffs against you, preventing you from exporting back to you. Well, you know, we're back to the unpredictability of the whole thing. So he suddenly turned on Tim Cook, Apple, who was one of the oligarchs, the media oligarchs, who was at the inauguration.

59:23Musk does seem, even though he was in that meeting with Ramaphosa, seems to have been sort of pushed out. Must have detweet yesterday, saying he's going back to sort of full -time working on his business stuff, which does that mean Doge is now dead? I don't know. And then, so the other guys, the sort of Zuckerbergs and those guys, they presume Blue Moon next to the line. This goes back to Skyrimicchis Point. Eventually, he falls out with anybody who absorbs any of the kind of glory or any kind of space that should be all about him. And Roy, it is incredible. If you think we've talked for, I don't know, 15 minutes about Trump, we've hit about, you know, 10 or dozen things that he's been involved in, but actually possibly the two most consequential relates to what I think are emerging as catastrophic failures for him.

1:00:07that is Ukraine and Gaza. Ukraine, he was going to sort the deal in 24 hours. And he's now basically saying Putin's gone crazy. Well, as Anapalbaam said, you know, if you think this is Putin being crazy, you haven't been watching him for the last 25 years. This is kind of how he operates. So Putin has played him. And the Russian media, Steve Rosenberg of the BBC, did a wonderful analysis the other day of the Russian media coverage of the phone calls there have been between Trump and Putin. And it was basically like, you know, this guy's been successfully played and this guy's gonna walk away. I mean, while Gaza, whereas the, as things get worse, it seems to me, and certainly watch the news every night, it's getting worse in there.

1:00:53And the humanitarian situation is just now a complete disaster. Where all of these world leaders, in terms of sort of talking about where they take this thing now. So I think it's very hard, unless you're an absolute mega true believer, it's very hard to say that he's delivering on the things on foreign policy that he said he would. So on Ukraine, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, and we said that the strategy from Macron and Stama and Mertz and Zelensky was that they would do absolutely everything that Trump asked them to do, be as flexible as possible, say we're totally open to a peace deal, we're very happy to meet Putin and Istanbul, we'll do the prison exchanges to force as much as they could Trump to recognize that the problem was not coming from Europe and Ukraine, the problem was coming from Russia.

1:01:43And that was the very best case scenario. And they got quite a long way and you remember the train visit to Kiev, which was a really interesting visit, unfortunately derailed by the stupid lie that they were taking again on the train. And there was a moment where Trump said, you know, Entry's social well if Putin doesn't cooperate, you know, we're looking at sanctions. But the biggest story which we've known about for five months is that in the end when push comes to shove, I'm afraid Matt Kron and Stama, you know, they have to keep trying, but they're being too optimistic. There's never been any real indication from the very beginning that Trump has had any interest in sanctioning Russia, putting pressure on Putin, or continuing to provide supplies to Ukraine.

1:02:26He's made it very clear from the very own level in providing security guarantees. So one of the sad things from the point of view of people like Macron who really lent into this is that they've just gambled everything that they can change Trump's mind that if they do all the right things, visit enough, get the right context together, he will eventually agree. First, Macron wanted security guarantees, then at least to keep selling this kit, and at least to put some sanctions on Putin and recognize that Putin's not doing what he's promised. The truth of the matter is, Trump, yes, okay, he recognizes that Putin isn't doing what he's promised.

1:02:56He says, I don't understand what's happened to this guy. I've known him for 25 years. He's gone crazy. Why is he getting on his phone? But absolute red line, he is not putting sanctions on Russia. What he wants to do is lift sanctions on Russia, and he does not want to continue providing support for Ukraine. That just doesn't change, does it? Merced it into yesterday where he said that Britain, France, Germany, and I think he said America as well, that now there is nothing to stop Ukraine using our missiles for long range, which was taken as a really big change. But whether he was speaking out of turn vis -à -vis the Americans, I don't know.

1:03:29But this coalition of the willing has got to start to mean something now. Otherwise, Putin just thinks he's kind of, he's on the march. So, Rory, we've gone for a long, long time. Shall we talk about Canada and the King in question time and call it a whole there? Absolutely. Look forward to it very much. Look forward to speaking to you tomorrow. Thanks again. See you soon. Bye -bye.