478. Farage’s Crypto Megadonor and the Graduate Jobs Disaster (Question Time)

27:15What they're doing, and this is where you put your finger on it in the budget, where you said what she's done is she's done just enough not to alienate the labour-backed benches and not alienate the bond markets. And that's no route through when Britain's stagnant. Yeah. I read a thing over the weekend. How many applications were submitted for 17 ,000 UK graduate roles in 23, 24? 1.2 million. 1.2 million. So it's nearly 100 people, like 80 people applying for each job. Yeah. So that, I think, goes to the heart of why so many young people you meet say they're spending their time being rejected for jobs.

27:53And here's another one for you. The number of graduate roles advertised on one of the country's leading job sites, percentage rise or fall since last summer? Have a guess. Well, again, I mean, my whole AI series is about my instinct, which is we're going to find fewer and fewer jobs because of AI and technology, not because the government isn't borrowing and printing money. But I don't know how much it's falling. 33 % lower than last summer. So a third down already. 60 % fewer graduate vacancies in 2025 compared with 2016. And then, Alistair, I guess one of the questions is, what are we training people for?

28:30Because if what we've done is we've created a school system that says you've got to get into university in order to get a graduate level job, and a graduate level job is defined as, I don't know, working in a law firm or working in an accountancy firm, and those law and accountancy firms have AI systems now which are doing most of the work that used to be done by the graduate entrants. we then have to completely rethink the kind of way in which we think about educating people and the kind of jobs that are going to be available for them. But again, this is the problem with Chris Williamson, right?

29:03I mean, I'm being mean to Chris Williamson, but he's one of the guys that's been most active in the criticism service. What is he suggesting would happen with his monetary theory? Is it that somehow the government would be creating graduate level jobs in law firms and accountancy firms, even though AI could do those jobs much more cheaply and much more efficiently. And what would that mean for the fact that these businesses are global? They're trying to compete with American Chinese companies who are using AI or reducing their costs. We suddenly end up having generated all this work, which could be done by computers.

29:38And that is not the route, sadly, to productivity or competitive survival, unless you cut yourself off from the whole world yeah there was a very interesting explainer on this whole issue on the ft working it um site and it said they were talking about this thing about the diamond you have ceo at the top middle management and then historically you've had it it's gone down like that but what what was a triangle has become a diamond because all these lower level jobs are going and your point about what sort of people are we hiring there were there were people who were in the the hiring business who was saying that the problem when you get to the diamond is that you've got too few people coming into here who can then do the jobs in the middle.

30:19So you are still going to need to hire people. So there was an interview with a law firm who said that even though AI can do a lot of these jobs, they have decided they're going to keep hiring. Others were saying, no, we're just going to get rid of those jobs. And there were others then saying, well, that may lead to your company not existing in the future. so listen i think people will be fascinated by your series and this is the sort of thing that it's going to be uh looking into but i get i guess what the the main i read all the feedback because one of our team did a very good note on all of the emails and all the social media comments and i think that is where they were coming from as you know we've got a lot of young listeners and i think they look to us sometimes to give them a bit of hope that politics isn't as bad as it seems but also where they're really looking for hope at the moment is to think you know maybe there are people out there who do understand the level of pressure that we're under.

31:10I really like the apprenticeship stuff. I was glad that at the conference, Keir Starmer made a big thing of it. I've been critical that they've not rolled it out enough. But actually, I heard Jackie Smith, who's the skills minister, yesterday talking about this. And it sounded to me like on the apprenticeships thing, there was a bit of meat behind this now. And I think we need to see more of that. I think the final thing to say is our job is to call people out. I feel that we were very generous actually in the first half of that interview to Zach Polanski. We gave him a lot of chance to speak.

31:41I really liked him. I loved the stuff that he said about his identity, his journey, his political journey. I also remain proud and defiant about the fact that we were the first media organization to actually try to ask him basic questions about his economic understanding and data. And I was shocked. He has been the leader of the Green Party for many, many months. And nobody had asked him these questions. He actually said it after the interview. If I'd known you were going to ask me those questions, I would have learned my lines better. And I thought, rather than being something we should be ashamed of or apologizing to people, people saying it's gotcha journalism.

32:17No, it's holding people to account. And I think, just listen to the Michael Gove interview if people think we only do this to people on the left. or the Anna Wintour interview where you read some of the American Vogue and suggest it's not the finest Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism ever. Anyway, listen, I think that was a very good discussion and I think we should revisit it at some point. While we've been talking, and I don't think I'm breaking an embargo here because by the time this question time comes out, it will already be out. I'm very, very, very pleased. I've just received a text message saying the government's national youth strategy, which is being released today under embargo says it wants half a million more young people to have access to a trusted adult outside the family home over the next 10 years so i'm hopeful that is part driven by the work we've been doing on the lost boys task force um so there we are some good news i hope congratulations well done making a difference let's hope we can do the same for farmers, rural areas.

33:18Exactly, exactly, exactly. Thank you, Alistair. See you after the break.

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35:50Welcome back to The Rest of Politics. Question time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Anastair Campbell. And this question is in partnership with Tesco. Tesco, who are celebrating the real, slightly imperfect moments that make it feel like Christmas. So we thought we'd talk about what Christmas looks like in politics. Some of it, I think, will just anybody listening who's been to an office Christmas party can relate. I think this is when Liz Truss used to do her karaoke with her friends, where you get senior cabinet members beginning to get a little bit drunk. You certainly have a lot of staffers partying around.

36:27What's your memory of Christmas? Christmas and politics I think you yeah few parties but my this is going to sound really depressing but one of the things I really hated about being in Downing Street was this expectation that the prime minister had to do a new year's message and spent most of Christmas worrying about it even though I can't remember a single prime minister's new year message that anybody has ever remembered beyond January the 3rd you do a sort of chat GPT style you know bring together all the cliches of the past 12 years you're absolutely exhausted just want to get away with it so i remember that and then i think the other thing the other thing is is there's this i don't know whether it's still the same but there used to be a hell of a lot of focus on the christmas cards of the prime minister the leader of the opposition and you know all these we used to do all this work about the christmas guy i remember the thing it was shireen then let's just put a bloody picture of the family on it and send it out and they still do that i'm becoming over like a bit have a grinch, aren't I?

37:25I remember actually the number of times I and myself had to skip out to the Tesco Express, which is just on the edge of Westminster Tube Station, to try to pick up the food to keep us going, particularly the mince pies. I'm a massive mince pie eater. Another thing I've never really understood, but there's a weird sense that obviously the world keeps going day after day, but there's a convention in the British media that somehow at August, and am I right, it's sort of Christmas, New Year, sort of becomes a silly season where there really isn't any news, and the newspapers go into a completely different mode.

37:56No, I think that's gone. I mean, even when I was still a journalist, we used to have some journalists went into the office on Christmas Day because you had papers on Boxing Day. And it won't surprise you to know, Rory, that I was always... But you don't think people consume media in a different way? Oh, yeah, for sure. Even, God forbid, podcasts, they might listen to them less over the Christmas New Year period. Well, Rory, we've done a whole... We've got loads going out over Christmas. Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day. no we're going to change it because the quality our quality is so high that will change the general tendency but but presumably that there is a sense that you do hope that some of your staff can take a bit of a break i mean i i missed christmas in 2016 i've been really really looking forward to it's going to be the first time we were going to go away as a family we were going to go to costa rica and unfortunately just as i was about to get on a plane i began seeing signs from the met office that flooding was coming to Cumbria.

38:54And I remember thinking, oh, maybe I can get on the plane and maybe the flooding won't be too bad. And fortunately, I came to my senses and said, okay, I cannot be in Costa Rica as the flooding's minister when the flooding happened. So lost my ticket, lost all my bookings. The family went without me. And sure enough, right the way through, I think I had a... My mother very sweetly came over on Christmas Eve to my cottage in Cumbria and we put something in the microwave. And then Christmas Day, I was just in water up to, I guess, my thighs, sodding around with a high-vis vessel. Was it really, really bad?

39:28It was terrifying. Right the way across Cumbria, Yorkshire, Lancashire, communities going underwater. And right the way through Christmas, just thanking volunteers. We deployed the army. You probably did the right thing there, Rory. But I think that's a reminder to our listeners and viewers that they always go on. One of the things I loathe about a newspaper is to go MPs and their never-ending holidays. Good MPs are never on holiday because any MP worth their salt, if they thought they were going away for a little holiday with the family and suddenly they had something big in their constituency, nine out of 10 are going to make the decision that you made.

40:07So let's hear it for good MPs, Rory. Yeah. Let's hear it for good MPs. So I suppose to sum it up, in politics, Christmas isn't really a holiday. It's more something that kind of bends stuff out of shape in weird directions, which I guess is a bit of a theme with our Tesco imperfect Christmas. Yes, Rory, because Tesco are leading into these real moments with great quality Christmas food, not the picture perfect ones. Shop Tesco food this Christmas, either in store or online. So John H, Trip Plus member, who might be able to step up to progress the ceasefire in Gaza, which currently appears to be holding a name only?

40:50Without the lure of natural resources or any progress with the resort concept, Gaza is unlikely to retain any continuing interest for Trump. And the concept of Rio Amar seems dead for the Palestinians. Alistair? I'd be interested to hear what you picked up in Doha. But I think they're right to say the ceasefire is holding in name only. I mean, the truth is, it is better than it was. What is happening in Gaza is better than it was, but it is still really bad. and I do worry this goes back to we talked a lot about Trump on the main episode and this national security strategy in the very first page he talks about all these wars that he's ended and he says he's brought peace to Gaza just as he said he's brought peace to Thailand and Cambodia who are fighting again now and I don't think you can call this peace and I've been talking this week to some of the aid organizations who've been you know keeping us in touch with the way that their operations are going.

41:48Now, they do say that to some extent things are better than they were, but the fundamentals are really, really, really difficult. Let me just give you a couple. This is from Save the Children. The agreement that was reached agreed to 600 humanitarian aid trucks going in every day. That's 4 ,200 a week. Last week, average of 134 a day. So fewer than 1 ,000 got in. And one of the issues that they're dealing with the whole time is the Israeli authorities deeming stuff that the aid agency is trying to get in as dual use. And some of the, in other words, could be used for, you know, by the bad guys.

42:26And this includes meat, pesticides, vehicles, construction materials, tents if they have aluminium, and get this one, learning and recreational materials for children. Now, that was from Save the Children. The World Food Programme gave me some very interesting data on how they are managing to get more meals to people. They are doing that and they're finding it, you know, that part of this is working. But they still point to a level of suffering and a level of homelessness and a level of people literally scratching a living that we're just not talking about anymore. And I think that's the point of the question is that this is not peace and it is not settled.

43:10And, you know, the world does seem to be looking away again. And that's a relief in many ways for the Netanyahu government, may even be a relief for some people in Hamas, that it's not being properly covered. I think, and maybe I'm being unfair, but I think many, many listeners, if you ask them what's actually happening in Gaza at the moment, would struggle to say. So just to bring people up to date, what's happened since this so-called peace plan was announced in October, is it was meant to have a series of phases. The first phase was about hostage release, which has happened. The second phase is really the more important bit, which is about Israel actually withdrawing to the frontiers of Israel, so no longer occupying large swathes of Gaza and Hamas disarming, right?

44:00Those two things are meant to happen together. It just hasn't happened. I mean, Israel continues to have troops in this enormous zone, which they call the Green Zone, which is basically an enormous stretch of Gaza, including most of the agricultural territories stretching all the way around to the Egyptian border, with the vast majority of the Palestinian population pushed out of that zone into an ever smaller territory, about the size of Washington, D.C., around the major cities. And the yellow line, which is what divides Israeli directly occupied bits of Gaza from the other bits of Gaza, is where people are getting killed often.

44:44There are also strikes actually going directly in, Israeli strikes continuing, but at a lower level. The story that we're hearing leaked from American planners is that they were hoping to bring in this international security force. So there were stories about Britain and France and Norway and others coming in, and they were going to be in the green zone on the other side of the yellow line. There was also a story that reconstruction was only going to happen in the Israeli-occupied bit. And then presumably what happens there is those towns and villages in that bit of Gaza would be reconstructed.

45:16And maybe some Palestinians would come back or not. This is not clear. Certainly, Palestinians who've tried with families to cross that border have been killed. Children have been killed trying to cross that border. Meanwhile, the bigger story around the peace plan is that there's supposed to be this new council, right? Remember, there was a board of peace, which was going to have Trump and Tony Blair. Rumours now that Blair's been bumped off the board of peace, and then there was going to be an executive committee, and then it was going to be run somehow by Palestinians, but it wasn't going to include Hamas, which is very difficult because, in fact, even at the very junior level of people working in education, parks and recreation, these people are considered to be Hamas employees if they worked under the last government.

45:58And then you've got the question of the people who are going to be on the ground in the Hamas territories bringing security. And this is, is it going to be the Egyptians? Is it going to be the Jordanians? Is it going to be the Turks? Well, not the Turks now, it turns out. The Turks have been volunteering, but Israel doesn't want Turkey in because they see them as too pro-Hamas. Egypt very reluctant, and Jordan very reluctant because they border Israel and their people are so tied into this issue. And fundamentally, nobody's going to deploy troops, I think, because, or it's going to be very difficult to get them.

46:37I mean, they might do, but it's going to be very difficult because the fundamental problem is, what are you doing? Are you going in in order to keep a peace that's already been established? Are you there to create a peace? In other words, are you supposed to be fighting Hamas on the ground? And if you end up fighting Hamas on the ground, what's your position here? Hamas sees you as an instrument of Israel. Israel's blaming you for not doing enough for Hamas. Meanwhile, the local population are enraged because reconstruction isn't happening. This town has been favoured. The jobs aren't coming. They think you've stolen all the money, which is why all the funders are effectively saying that they're not getting involved either.

47:15So I was just in Doha, and one of the things the Qashri Prime Minister said is, until Israel withdraws back, until this phase two has happened, there's no way reconstruction money is going back in. Yeah. On the national security document, which we discussed on the main episode, there's so much in it. And I've just looked up the section on the Middle East, which we didn't even talk about really in the main episode. There was so much about Europe in it. But this goes back to the point that we make about Trump says something and therefore in his head, it's true. So the section of the Middle East begins like this.

47:49Conflict remains the Middle East's most troublesome dynamic, but there is today less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe. Iran, the region's chief destabilizing force, has been greatly weakened by Israeli actions and President Trump's June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains thorny, but thanks to the ceasefire and release of hostages President Trump negotiated, progress towards a more permanent peace has been made. Hamas's chief backers have been weakened or stepped away. I'm not sure the last bit is true. Syria remains a potential problem, but with American Arab, Israeli and Turkish support may stabilize and resume its rightful place as an integral positive player in the region.

48:33So the Middle East is sort of being parked by American strategy. And that, I'm afraid, is what these aid agencies are saying. They are still having to deal with the fallout of the fact that there may have been a lull, but there has not been a real ceasefire, and there has not been the workings of the peace process that's set out in phase two. And I watched a press conference that Netanyahu did with Chancellor Merz, who was in Israel the other day, and Netanyahu's line was, phase one is almost complete, we have the remains of one hostage to get back and we're ready for phase two. But then when you got that into detail, you felt that is him just saying that because he can say that, he gets a headline out of that.

49:20But as you said right at the start, phase two is not yet happening in any way. I think what Netanyahu and Hamas are doing is that this is a situation that actually suits both of them. Netanyahu, in a sense, and you can see he's doing more strikes into Lebanon, has just killed another hezbollah commander he's there's been over a hundred strikes into syria this is all to do with uh the israeli position in relation to the jews in southern syria i wouldn't be surprised if there weren't more strikes going into iran at some point because they'll argue the nuclear program hasn't so that's netanyahu signaling a very aggressive policy keeping a general sense of crisis probably in order to placate the far right in his government Smotrich Ben-Gavir, who like the sense of aggressive action, and maybe lead him through to an election, which of course is important because he's also being pursued for corruption allegations, which can't go forward so long as he's the prime minister.

50:14So Nedney Aarhus wants to keep this general sense of crisis going. And on Hamas's part, so long as this situation continues, Hamas have a breathing space, they rearm, they reconstitute, and increasingly in the red zone, Hamas will be de facto in control of the whole thing. In other words, So what actually Trump has done is put us back to a position which is a modified version of what existed before October the 7th. It's just that the Ghazan territory has been shrunk and Israel has now created a new what would have been called Area B, an Israeli occupied strip, which according to an Israeli army chief in a recent interview, they intend to stay in indefinitely.

50:55And the only problem that both of them have is this question is, is Trump going to get impatient with them? And how will Trump's impatience manifest itself? The other thing that happened in the region, which I thought would have got a lot of attention, but it seems to me didn't get that much attention at all, were these reports that Marwan Barghouti, who is in prison, Palestinian political leader, we interviewed his son, Arab Barghouti, on leading a while back. And these are the reports that he was he'd been assaulted in prison, up to and including having part of his ear removed. and I know this was raised by the Turkish foreign minister at Doha but generally this is not really I don't think it's had that much attention at all which again underlines the point that this is what Trump's a genius at he does his big moments whether it's Putin in Alaska or I've delivered peace in Gaza and then the world does kind of move on with it and why I think these aid agencies have been getting in touch with me is actually to say, listen, this is not how it's being described.

51:58Yes, it's a bit better, but it's still really, really difficult. And the lives that people are living there are an absolute misery. Suddenly, of course, having conversations surfaces all these problems that we're not talking about in the media. Yemen, for example, is in a horrible destabilized state with sudden new military moves that nobody's reporting on. Libya, as we've described, is now absolutely split into two sides with this shadowy warlord, effectively, in eastern Libya, who's now facilitating Russia and UAE moving arms from Libya through Chad into Sudan. We've talked a bit about Sudan.

52:39But there's other things. We talk about Syria. I mean, Syria is in real trouble because, of course, the president, who we interviewed, has got Trump's support. He's hoping the sanctions will be lifted, but the Syrian economy is not really taking off. And he doesn't control the Kurdish areas on the east of the Euphrates. He doesn't have any control over the Druze areas down on the southern border. So essentially, whole bits of his country are not under his control. And then the other things that nobody's talking about at all, Kuwait. The emir of Kuwait is now going around stripping citizenship from Kuwaiti citizens.

53:11He's gone after the man who was the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington, who was married to a Lebanese woman and stripped her citizenship that she's had for decades. And he's doing this to business families in Kuwait. People in Kuwait are terrified. They don't understand what's happening. They don't understand the logic behind it. You can't talk about it openly. And of course, this climate of fear extends to other Gulf monarchies too, particularly Saudi Arabia. So Trump is creating a world in which more and more disturbing things are just going below the radar. If you're Kuwaiti, you're saying, well, why is nobody talking about Kuwait?

53:45Why is nobody talking about Libya? Why is nobody talking about Yemen? Why is nobody talking about Chad? Mali, I sat down with one of the most senior diplomats in the Sahel, and he was explaining, he's a former foreign minister, that Mali is now in the most incredibly dangerous state where Islamists are on the verge of capturing Bamako. Niger is in real trouble. They're relying on troops from Chad. Burkina Faso is now divided in two. We're not even touching any of this because this is the violent, chaotic world that is beginning to accelerate. This is the acceleration of chaos. This is back to the national security strategy document.

54:22This is where Donald Trump says we have to abandon the failed experiment of hectoring these countries about the way they govern. um so that's one of the reasons why we're maybe not here as much as we did listen let's end on a let's end this discussion on a slightly more positive note um the slightly positive way to end this discussion is that the both the save the children and world food program said things are really bad but they are at least getting better and the point they made is if they were actually allowed to do and deliver what the ceasefire agreement says they should, they'd be able to alleviate a lot of the suffering fairly quickly.

55:03So all our support to them in doing that. As you say, I've been in Doha for four days, and it's been a fascinating thing. This is Qatar really stepping up and getting an extraordinary range of people there. There was a big attack by Laura Loomer, which named me and Tucker Carlson as being part of a kind of anti-Israel conspiracy who'd been invited. But I noticed didn't mention that Alex Brusevitz, the pro-Trump MAGA guy, was there, as was Donald J. Trump Jr. and Elon Musk's sister. So it was an extraordinary kind of collection of different voices from around the world. And to be fair, Qatar, they're really positioning themselves as mediators in a huge series of different events.

55:48But my goodness, You know, the Syrian president was there. I thought he did amazingly well. Yeah. He was interviewed by Christiane Amanpour. And she asked some pretty tough questions. But he was, I think, as you said, when you WhatsApp me after watching it, very fluent and confident. And so much of the Syrian government was there. I spent a lot of my time meeting with ministers, officials, various others within the whole Syrian setup. And then there was Donald J. Trump Jr. who made this incredible attack on Ukraine, calling Ukraine the most corrupt country in the world, claiming that when he hung out in Monaco, all the Bugattis had Ukrainian plates on them, etc.

56:27etc um and then i found myself on a stage i was supposed to be actually with bruce fitz and tucker carlson but tucker carlson dropped out so i was on with a tucker carlson's business partner um but uh i hope you would have been proud of me trying to stand up for some vision of of of a different way of doing journalism sorry after all this name dropping at the confidence that i just forgot to go to how many how many of these big names are beyond leading in the next six months well it's a really good question and the answer is i haven't managed i tried i tried i tried i tried but i cannot guarantee any of them for you yet alistair but there may be some good news coming okay i watched the donald j trump junior and i thought the thing about ukraine i mean you know that thing about you just know that is not true i mean i can't say monaco is my favorite place in the world but i have been there several times and you know he's probably seen one or two ukrainian plates and they're probably put there by russians by the way but he says half half of the luxury cars have got ukrainian plates on them and it was the whole thing was was basically and this i'm afraid this goes back to this is what they think of ukraine they're pro-russia they're pro-russia it's it's terrifying and and of course one of the interesting things that i'm not talking here about the categories but talking to people from other gulf states is how they feel that america is now operating like a royal court.

57:53And position doesn't matter. It's all about individuals. So Donald J. Trump Jr., the rumor at the moment is that he's less popular than he was because he didn't like Jared Kushner. So he was excluding Kushner. Now Kushner's up and Wyckoff maybe down. And everybody's endlessly trying to navigate through this list of names to influence American policy, but not through formal systems or processes at all. The American ambassadors, for the first time in my experience felt very, very marginalized. Nobody really wanted to focus on them and talk to them in the way that they were trying to talk to social media influencers, business partners, the Trump, et cetera.

58:30Well, this is great that they have Donald J. Trump Jr. to go out and talk about corruption and nepotism in different countries around the world. Interesting. Here's another small, small positive bit. So as you're aware, America cut basically all development international funding. And nobody has any idea, dealing with the American government, how you get funding and what logic there is, because there's a 29-year-old guy called Jeremy, and everybody just says, oh, Jeremy isn't interested in Sudan, so let's cut all the funding for Sudan. Or Jeremy's interested in this ally. Or, oh, no, actually, he isn't interested.

59:05And it's all MAGA. It's all about the fact that if you make the mistake of saying in a meeting that you've developed a good testing equipment which was used on COVID, their brains short circuit and they start saying COVID was a hoax, COVID was mad, right? So the whole American development funding mechanisms collapsed. But - Who is Jeremy? So Jeremy is a 29-year-old guy who was brought in by Elon Musk as part of the Doge Project, initially as a deputy administrator in USAID, who seems de facto to be the only person able to make decisions about what remains of American international funding, where it goes.

59:38Some of it's allowed to go into humanitarian, but suddenly it's not allowed to go into this country. We're supposed to be helping. One of the phrases he apparently produces, we would help our allies if they were buried under rubble, but nobody can get him to define who America's allies are anymore. So basically, if you're any of these organizations, you are just going mad, right? However, there's interesting things, which is that people are around it. So in Sudan, the UK and the EU have backfilled the US on humanitarian funding. And Bill Gates announced that Qatar, an incredible partnership. I think it's $250 million each of pushing ahead with Qatar working with the Gates Foundation.

1:00:21So there are these extraordinary examples of people working around the problem, but it's never going to be able to create a stable rules-based order these are these are people trying to improvise in a context of chaos now here's a final question for you and it's it's definitely a question for you because it's something that i know absolutely nothing about okay because of course it relates not to bagpipes but to football iver mcaddle trip plus member west barxshire what did you alistair make of the fifa draw for the 2026 world cup and what are your views on the inaugural overall FIFA Peace Prize.

1:00:58It seems like the prize for the kid who never wins one. Did you watch any of it, Rory? No. I think you should. I think you should, because it was utterly revolting. It was absolute revolting. And it was in the Kennedy Center, which, as you know, has been sort of taken over as part of the anti-woke cultural war within the United States. Donald Trump was there. So was Mark Carney. So was Claudia Schoenbaum, because this is a World Cup that's going to be in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. I was praying for Scotland to be drawn in Canada or Mexico's group because then they would have played in Canada or Mexico.

1:01:35However, they'll be playing in Miami and Boston. But the whole thing was turned into a bit of a show, not just for Trump, but also for Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA, who any, I mean, Trump won the FIFA Peace Prize, But if there is a prize for global sycophancy and the selling of a soul of a great global sport, then Infantino has got it. I mean, unfortunately, you couldn't see the audience when Trump was given this award. But the applause didn't feel very loud. And the audience was made up of football managers, heads of football associations around the world, who were all desperate to find out who they were going to be playing in the bloody World Cup.

1:02:22and they had to sit through Infantino describing how Trump had invited him to the Thailand-Cambodia signing and he delivered peace in Gaza. And so he gave him this award. And the thing is, it actually, the award itself is quite hideous. What is it? What does it look like? Well, it's a globe with these hands on it. So it's a sort of, it's a bit like the World Cup itself, but the hands look like they're dragging... Are they very small hands, Alastair? They're very small hands. You could certainly think they might belong to Donald Trump. There was a brilliant, we should put in the newsletter, the funniest thing I saw was a German AI advert for a new perfume called Or d 'Obedience, gold of obedience.

1:03:08And it was just this tribute to Infantino's sycophancy. And of course, because Trump is a narcissist, he can't see that the whole world are looking at this. I mean, I was watching on television. I was following on social media. I didn't see a single comment other than this is nauseating this is revolting as you say this is like the kid who never gets anything being given a prize for trying really really hard he then made a speech say it was one of the proudest moments of his life to be fair to Infantino he cut he kept Trump very sure it's about two minutes max what do you think of the draw the draw that was the second question final thing uh well it's really interesting two of the three teams that Scotland are drawn against the teams that were drawn against the last time they were there in 1998 Brazil and Morocco I think Haiti should be a nailed on win but you know Brazil you're doomed right I'm sorry I don't want to be rude but no not necessarily you're not going to Scotland's not going to beat Brazil is it well it'd be tough but Brazil are not what they used to be um so I think draw against Brazil draw against Morocco beat Haiti through we go beautiful for fingers crossed fingers crossed for scotland all right alistair see you soon see you soon bye bye