452. Question Time: America’s New Martyr and Westminster’s Hidden Spies

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0:50Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And first question, Rory, is from Tom, who's a member in Alice Springs. Alice Springs, Australia. Oh, I've been there. Fabulous place. Charlie Kurt's killing must be condemned, but the reaction is also concerning, says Tom. With the clampdown on anyone who now says anything negative about him, including even quoting him, is cancel culture worse from the right than the left? And is this a Reichstag moment? Well, let me begin by saying there's a big push from people who are on the soft right to think that we're all being hysterical.

1:29So I know I keep quoting my mother, but she has a general tendency to assume that when we're talking about what Donald Trump is doing, or when we're talking about what's happening in Gaza, we're exaggerating and we're undermining ourselves by exaggerating. And of course, comparisons to the Reichstag, to Hitler, Goebbels gives an engine to my mother's idea that we're exaggerating. But it is very, very, very scary. And the Mike Pompeo interview that we did on Leading Coming Up on Monday, one of the things that troubled me about it is how dismissive he is of any attempts to suggest that America has entered a new world, that threats against Greenland matter, that the contempt for the European Union is a problem.

2:18The speech that Stephen Miller, who is Trump's deputy chief of staff policy. And the big kind of, I guess, probably the big intellectual powerhouse in so far as there is one of the Trump campaign at the Charlie Kirk funeral is completely astonishing. If you play it, and there's many versions available, you can see him saying things which are basically some strange kind of extreme ethnic nationalism of a sort. I've never heard from a a mainstream American politician. He says Erica, who is Charlie Cook's widow, stands on the shoulders of thousands of years of warriors, people who built our industry, our civilization, who took us out of the caves into the light.

3:08And he keeps talking about legacy, inheritance. And the story seems to be our people, presumably white people, are the people who built Athens and built Rome and built Monticello, which is Thomas Jefferson's house where famously the slave quarters were kept right next to this great classical Palladian mansion. These are the good people. We created civilization and our opponents are people who live in caves, who are barbarians, who are anti-civilization, and we now need to stand up. It's like the Lord of the Rings. This is a speech taking on the orcs at Mordor. We, you know, the great inheritors of civilization need to fight these barbarians.

3:51And who are these barbarians? Well, presumably they're the people who do not come from Europe and presumably they represent most of the Democratic Party. I mean, what did you make of the speech? Well, I sort of watched bits of it and found it pretty horrifying. It wasn't a memorial. It was a rally. It was a political event. It did remind me, I'm afraid, a bit of the Reichstag moment where something bad happens and the MAGA, they just seized on it. And you almost felt like from the minute Charlie Kirk was assassinated that they were ready for this. It was to weaponize it. And somebody did a very interesting analysis of Stephen Miller's speech against a famous speech that Goebbels did called The Coming Storm, became known as The Coming Storm.

4:37And there were phrases almost directly lifted. Well, Charlie Kirk says, doesn't he? The warrior says, we are the storm. Yeah, exactly. And the other thing that Stephen Miller went on to say was that if you aren't of these people, him, Trump, MAGA, Charlie Kirk, you are nothing. You count for nothing. You are nothing people. And so that was pretty scary. I found it quite scary that Tucker Carlson stood up there and basically tried to make a parallel between Charlie Kirk and Jesus Christ. I found it pretty horrific that so many, there's now these people who bang on about there being a free speech problem in the UK.

5:17I had this with Curtis Yavin talking about, you know, all these people in Britain who get arrested for tweets and so forth. I mean, this is far bigger, a much bigger attack on free speech. Now, OK, Jimmy Kimmel has been reinstated, it seems, because of the backlash. But Trump celebrating the departure of a TV satirist, suing newspapers that came out against him during the campaign for massive sums of money. they do not believe in free speech free speeches you you have free speech so long as you agree with us if you don't agree with us you are as Stephen Miller said nothing and the other thing I found alarming about the um the whole event was just think of all the deaths that there have been think of all the deaths that have been in Gaza think of all the deaths that have been in Ukraine think of Melissa Hortman the the democrat politician who was murdered with her husband than a dog about who trump said he didn't know about that nobody raised that with him and and the gun deaths in the united states which are completely startling somebody somebody made the point that this this was the celebration of the life of a man who believed that in the right of everyone to carry guns where elon musk and donald trump were having a conversation behind a bulletproof glass inside and i think people forget the figures in the u.s directly connected to gun ownership, if you look from 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, the number of people killed each decade in the United States with civilian-on-civilian gun violence soars.

6:48In the UK, the homicide rate actually falls down. And in the US, literally over a million people have now been killed with guns since the Second World War within the United States. It's the most terrifying situation. And the Charlie Kirk shooter is a deeply, deeply disturbed man, many of whom's thoughts, attitudes, behaviors are very, very similar to the way that school shooters emerge and leave us with the same terrifying sense of being unable to explain them. I mean, one of the things that you notice when you read stories on school shooters that journalists go out. They interview the parents.

7:29They interview the friends. They read through their diaries. They read through their posts. And they hit bedrock pretty quickly. Pretty quickly, it becomes inexplicable. You never really manage to understand fully the psychology that leads people to do this. But right now, the Trump, Vance, etc. crowd, they don't want to understand. There were posters around this event. So it was held in a football stadium. and there were posters there say they killed charlie kirk they killed charlie kirk they will not kill his ideas and it's interesting what the ideas were because michael wolf who i've done this murdoch miniseries with that's coming out soon i saw him uh on his very beautifully filmed instagram account and he was saying that this is a really interesting example of where charlie kirk is ultimately a religious figure who has been co-opted by politics.

8:24And I do find that very, very interesting. And I sent you an article that somebody sent me from the Humanist Society about the rise of Christian nationalism. And a lot of what's happening in America, in a country actually where religion is not as prevalent or as popular as it used to be, but where actually there is this deliberate attempt to fuse right-wing politics with Christianity. And also partly that is to other anybody who is not a practicing Christian, and particularly, of course, Muslims. And particularly, of course, Muslims. Very striking. We talked about it with the Tommy Robinson March in London, that there were people carrying crosses and signs saying Christ is king.

9:06And Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, a number of other bishops have written a formal letter rejecting this vision of Christianity. And of course, what they don't say, because they wouldn't say, but I'm very happy to say, is I'm not sure that any of these people carrying these banners are actually serious practicing Christians at all. I think it's just a pure cover for anti-Muslim sentiment. And the journalists who indulge the idea that this is an expression of genuine religious feeling, what is Christianity fundamentally about? It is fundamentally about getting beyond ourselves.

9:41It's fundamentally about the other. It's about the empathy and imagination to see, like the Good Samaritan, a neighbor from another community and look after them. It's about driving ourselves in the words of St. Paul to think about slaves, to think about women, to think about the poor above all, and for it to be co-opted by people who are entirely about selfishness. Look after yourself. Strength to the power. The weak can go to the wall. hate the other is is so sinister and disturbing i mean i found uh charlie kirk's widow's speech probably the only one that you felt was even vaguely appropriate for a memorial event and and she talked about forgiveness she did and she and i thought it was profoundly moving that she said, you know, I forgive the killer because that is what Jesus would do.

10:41Next up was Donald Trump saying, he almost said it word for word, like when he was with Keir Starmer talking about Palestinian recognition. This is one area where I disagree. This is one area where I disagree. I hate my opponents. And not everybody, but quite a sizable chunk in that stadium burst into spontaneous applause. I hate my opponent. That is the notion right at the heart of authoritarianism. You hate your opponent. If you hate somebody, you want to destroy them. And I think that I was reading up on, just because I knew we were going to be talking about this, on McCarthyism. Joseph McCarthy, the Republican senator who headed up this sort of witch hunt against people who were engaged in un-American activities, said there were 250 people in the State Department who were communists.

11:33Turned out he couldn't find any. But incredible traction along the way. But if you think back to McCarthy, at least they had inquiries. Now, these people just call other people out. Jimmy Kimmel should get sacked. Jimmy Kimmel gets sacked. Okay, he's come back. People on boats in Venezuela, they're drug dealers. We should be allowed to kill them. and they do kill them and they do kill them and then it's three times no apologies nothing so i think the idea this is christian and the point about the way this debate is developing i i had a message from a brit who lives in states who said i don't know if you're watching charlie kirk but charlie kirk's funeral but you should because this is what's coming your way and what he meant by that was for let's take gb news gb news okay not much in the way of viewing but it's got quite a hold in the political world right now um paul marshall the guy who owns it former liberal democrat and i i said to nick clay why didn't you give this guy a seat and get him a safe seat and he might might have stayed on the sort of you know a decent path he is a sort of you know projects himself as a real sort of Christian thinker.

12:47And his media outlets are coming from this very right-wing perspective. And he now ends the spectator. He ends the spectator, unheard, GB News. He's become quite a player within the media world. And his view is that we have, I've got the quote here, traditional British idealism rests on the Judeo-Christian understanding that we are all, in moral terms, fallen creatures. Somewhere amid the arrogance of the Enlightenment, Curtis Yarvin hates the Enlightenment as well, we lost this sense of fallenness. Now, I don't think that's a majority view in this country. It's really interesting. It's really interesting.

13:30So firstly, they're so focused on the Judeo-Christian inheritance, and you can see that this is making common cause because after Charlie Kirk's death, Most of the senior figures in Israeli politics came out and made condolence messages about Judeo-Christian inheritance. So that's one thing. The second thing is this fallen stuff. The notion of our fallenness should be driving a sense of radical humility, a sense that we're broken and that we all need God, and that that should develop an incredible sense of our empathy with other people who are suffering, other people who are struggling. Instead of which what it's often used by, by other people, including my friend Danny Kruger, who's now defected to reform and who also has made speeches in parliament attacking paganism, attacking the Enlightenment, attacking effectively liberal values, is that they use the idea that we're fallen to forgive their rotten allies, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson.

14:36And it doesn't matter how much they lie, how much they misbehave, sex, they're like, you know, we forgive them. Everybody's fallen. We're all sinful. When it comes to their enemies, boy, there's not much forgiving at all. The enemies are immediately stereotyped as the evil that needs to be eradicated, the darkness, all this Charlie Kirk stuff. So this piece I read about Christian nationalism, he actually quoted quite at length from one of Kruger's speeches in Parliament last July. and it said that MPs had to back a revival of the faith, a recovery of Christian politics, a refounding of the nation.

15:08Christians should destroy, they love that word, banish from public life a woke modern creed which combines ancient paganism, Christian heresies, and the cult of modernism. And then went on to say, God knows what this means, Roy. Maybe you can help me because you went to school with them. To worship human rights is to worship fairies. What the hell does that mean? Well, so this is an idea. that human rights are a complete fantastical invention that has no foundation in reality. And again, human rights matters within the Christian tradition because it's founded on a sense that each one of us is uniquely created by God, is unique in our dignity, is unique in our equality, and our rights are founded on that.

15:55That's why there is a very profound Catholic tradition of rights going all the way back to Thomas Aquinas. And this attempt to try to suggest that human rights is simply a kind of liberal fantasy. You know, actually, people are really interested in geeking out on this. I have a huge argument with Jacob Rees-Mogg, where the two of us went at each other for an hour in the House of Commons, where I'm defending the European Court on Human Rights and Jacob's attacking it. But remember also that Danny Kruger is one of the people that J.D. Vance saw when he came to the Cotswolds. So this is the beginning of the development of this Christian stuff.

16:32And I think it behoves Christians to speak against this. And I'm very pleased that the leaders of the Church of England are standing up and saying, no, this is not Christianity, just as the last Pope and the current Pope has called out J.D. Vance. And they, look, don't listen to me, I don't know anything about this stuff, but the Pope certainly does. The Pope is something of an expert on these issues, okay state visit devinia who's a member from montreal on a lighter if diplomatic note when rory next speaks with his friend his majesty the king could he ask a why was the state banquet menu in french and b why there were no english wines on the menu rule britannia here i think so the lovely wines from kent none of that shard of they nonsense yeah well it's i i i'm i very interesting I'll try to get an answer for you.

17:25I'll report back if he's happy to. I'm going to say there was some wonderful stuff on social media of Charles's face during Trump's speech. He did. It struck me. He was stifling. He did do, though, what you asked, which is His Majesty did push firmly on the subject of Ukraine during a speech. He did. He did. It was really interesting that. Really interesting what it tells us about how a monarchy can operate in the modern world and the way in which it takes some of the... both gives the ceremony, gives the event for Trump, takes some of the political energy out of it. It reconfirms me, again, and I'm completely party-pre on this, that King Charles is doing an unbelievably good job and we're very, very lucky to have him.

18:12No, it wouldn't have. I don't think the Queen, I don't mean Queen Camilla, I mean Queen Elizabeth. I don't think the Queen would have made that speech in quite the same way. I thought there was something truly comical about Donald Trump being wheeled around in a carriage in the grounds of Windsor Park with lots of sort of military personnel hanging around. Quite good bagpipes this time, unlike Prince Philip's funeral. But yeah, anyway, as for the wine. I don't know, because of course, they wouldn't have worried too much about that, because famously, Donald Trump has never drunk alcohol. Well, maybe.

18:48I wonder whether they're slightly teasing Donald Trump also by showing their European connections. Yeah, like when the Queen wore that sort of Brexit flag hat. Anyway, there we are. Right, that's enough of Trump. Final question before the break. Tamira Yards, what does the collapse of the Chinese spying case mean for the credibility of the UK's ability to protect parliament from foreign interference. Well, again, to plug Mike Pompeo, God, did he give us a hard time about this new embassy, the new Chinese embassy. You've got this big building, you're going to have 200 Chinese spies in there. I don't care if they say they're diplomats, they're all members of the Communist Party and they work for intelligence.

19:30Yeah, and I promise you they're all so... Well, look, I've never quite got this because the truth of the matter is that we're all very open and very proud about spying on China and doing all we can to recruit agents all the way through the Chinese system. We're now doing all the dark web. Absolutely. And of course, we do an incredible, you know, the British signals intelligence, American signals intelligence, collecting extraordinary amounts of data worldwide. I totally think it's absurd if we start behaving like sort of prim Victorians pulling up our petticoats and saying, oh, it's absolutely shocking.

20:02The Chinese are spying on us. However, it's also worth bearing in mind that we need to be serious about the fact the Chinese are spying on us and we need to be careful and we need to protect ourselves against it. But that isn't a moral judgment on China when we have massive agencies dedicated to spying on the Chinese and Russians. Of course, they're spying back and we should protect ourselves. And the scale of the... I was talking to somebody recently who told me that there were now more than a million people in China who basically work for intelligence. Yeah. That's a lot of people in there. It's enormous.

20:33And they're cyber attack people into hundreds of thousands. And after the break, we'll come back on Moldova where we can talk about what the Russians have been doing and this kind of stuff. But just for people who haven't been following the case, Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry were face accusations of breaching the Official Secrets Act. And the case has now been dropped. We covered it in the podcast when it happened. I was always a bit skeptical, to be honest, about this case and whether they'd ever be able to get evidence to put it together and prosecute. These people were not people with developed vetting working for our government.

21:07They were people who were running parliamentary organizations for discussions on China, who may or may not have connections to China. But I couldn't quite see how they were going to put the case together. And sure enough, it's now collapsed. I also wondered from the point of view of the Chinese whether hiring people doing the equivalent of all-party parliamentary groups was the best way of spending your intelligence bucks. But maybe I'm being a bit rude about all parliamentary groups and the point is roy they they operate at every level that they can so it'd be very odd not to do parliament in some way anyway the speaker lindsey hoyle is very angry about this and thinks that parliament has to do more to protect itself and that this sends a very very bad signal and the point about the embassy is that i mean it is a big strategic decision but it's playing into this idea that the americans have that we're some sort of basket case I mean, I think it's a sign of that we're still a serious country that the Chinese want to build this massive new embassy and stack it full of their spies.

22:08It's just we have to hope that... But I didn't quite understand the issue here. I mean, what is it exactly that Pompeo is worried about? And Priti Patel is also very cross about this, but it's essentially planning permission for a new huge embassy. is the idea that somehow in the current position that the embassy is located they're not able to do all the signals intelligence they could do from the new embassy presumably not right i mean so in terms of actual technical ability they're expanding they're going to get more that's a question of visas that's not a question of buildings yeah yeah so and we can always expel so we welcome the speeding up of the planning process don't we're planning is absolutely except and we will cover this next week when it comes to the tearing up of the national parks legislation.

22:47Anyway. While we're on this subject, before we go to the break, Rory, podcast partner from one of our sister podcasts, the rest is classified, Gordon Carrera wants to have a word. Hi, Rory. Hi, Alistair. Thanks for the question. There is a lot of shock and concern about the dropping of this case related to China, because a lot of people have been watching it very closely. Now, does it damage the credibility of Parliament, of the security services ability to stop foreign interference. I think it raises some questions, but only some. Part of the issue with this case, it was under the Official Secrets Act, a very old piece of legislation, which required evidence that information had been passed to someone acting on behalf of an enemy.

23:30And so in court, that might have required a British official going into court and describing China as an enemy. Quite awkward at a time when the UK is seeking trade and investment from China. But since this case was started, we've had a new piece of legislation, the National Security Act, and that has a different bar in which material prejudicial to the British state or the UK national interest is a sufficient criteria for someone to be prosecuted for doing something damaging to UK national interest. So a slightly different bar. But it's also true, there is still quite a lot of concern about the ability of parliament to protect itself from what is seen as growing foreign interference.

24:15Sometimes it's even parliamentarians who've been warned in the past, well, the person you're meeting with is maybe close to Chinese or Russian intelligence. And sometimes parliamentarians themselves have kind of dismissed those concerns. There's also still the concern about foreign money and the ability of money to get into politics. There's supposed to be rules to stop it. But I think there's been concern that some of the loopholes which allow foreign money, and particularly foreign money, which perhaps is even linked to foreign intelligence service, to get in. That has not been closed by successive governments.

24:46So I think the threat remains, and a lot of people would say it's growing, not just from Russia, but also China. But I think the hope will be that some of the new tools, including the National Security Act, will make it easier to go after some of that activity without some of the difficulties posed by the Official Secrets Act in this case. And of course, we should say that in this case, the two individuals, the charges have been dropped and they've always maintained their innocence. If you want to hear more from Gordon, the rest is classified. Have a series coming out next week on the time when Chinese spies hacked Google.

25:20And for those who want to know more about the wild history of China's security agencies, let's go to the break.

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26:46Welcome back to the Rest is Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. So, Rory, Finn Walton, most weeks you both discuss the gradual breaking of the world order, and it tends to be supported by big headlines and geopolitics that would have shocked us 10 years ago. But are there also smaller signs that we're missing? Lots of them. There are many, many of them. I'm afraid, I mean, I was trying to talk to my kids about war and conflict. We'd just been watching a war movie. And they were really upset as eight and 10 year olds by the vision of an officer writing to the families of men who died, writing to their mummies and daddies.

27:27And of course, it made me think about the fact that while people are celebrating Trump or saying it's all a bit of fun, of course, what I believe they're doing is creating a world that's increasingly unstable and increasing the chance of conflict in our lifetime. And the canaries of the miners, the signs of this are rather interesting. So this week, for example, Saudi has announced a very, very big formal defense partnership with Pakistan. Now, Pakistan, of course, is the nation which has the nuclear bomb, which A.Q. Khan brought together. And that's Saudi signaling that they now have a formal alliance with nuclear weapons.

28:08And it comes just after the Israeli attack on Qatar. Now, the Saudis say, well, it's been a long time in coming together, But it's an interesting symbol of as people give up on the idea of the US as the global policeman, as the West shrinks, as NATO shrinks, as the US makes it more and more clear they have no interest in international law. Trump has no interest in preventing Israel from attacking his ally Qatar. Countries will begin to, in inverted commas, look after themselves. And that becomes more and more dangerous. Let's look at one more tiny example people may not have noticed. Australia was about to make a defense and security deal with Papua New Guinea.