481. Polanski, Macron & al-Sharaa: The Best & Worst Politicians of 2025

23:45I think they are terrible people doing terrible things. I agree. I think they have done more damage than almost anybody conceivable, really, to the reputation of Israel. But I also think that Netanyahu needs to take full responsibility for including them in its cabinet and making them his security ministers and finance ministers. So is he your worst politician? He doesn't get away with that. No, my worst politician here, of course, is predictably Emmanuel Macron, who I think is the most catastrophic bluffing. That's the first time you've ever said those words without your friend in advance. Mon ami.

24:22That would have been a bit aggressive before Christmas to say your friend was my worst politician of the year. Now, I think Macron has absolutely demonstrated the most catastrophic failure of what could have been the incredible potential of a highly intelligent centrist politician has, through sheer vanity and ineptitude, blown his position in parliament, blown the power of his presidency, failed to achieve any of the things he should have done in the big picture on Europe. Emmanuel, tu sais qu 'on a discuté la possibilité de venir sur le podcast? Je crois qu 'on pourrait le faire seul, toi et moi, sans mon collègue.

25:08Yes, I think you're completely blind. I mean, I think he was in for February, but... Well, you know, I think he should come on and prove me wrong. I think he should come on and prove me wrong. Because I'm sure I'm underestimating him. And I know how much you admire him. And I know how much the economist correspondent in France admire him. Now you are kidding, my friends. So Macron should come on and prove us wrong. Because I think he's somebody who, again and again and again, I've thought, you know, EM, the great Emmanuel, oh come, oh come Emmanuel. And he says the right things about Russia. And he says the right things about AI.

25:44And he says the right things about Europe. But when it comes to the real stuff, making the alliance with Starmer and with Merz, really working together. How do you stop Farage getting into British politics? You work ambitiously and bravely to fix the boat issue, which only Macron can really fix and which he's half-heartedly failed to address again and again. When you look at the big issues on defence and European security, industrial policy for Europe, reforms on the European budget. He talks a good game. It just doesn't happen. And all of us are beginning to get a bit frustrated with the gap between rhetoric and reality.

26:26God, you sound like Boris Johnson then. The gap between rhetoric and reality. By the way, Johnson has to be mentioned in the worst politician of any year ever. And given we had the COVID inquiry this year, the latest stage of that, I think we should give him an honourable mention. Look, I'm not going to pretend that Emmanuel Macron has worked out as I had hoped. But I think you're being very, very harsh. There is the point about arrogance, and I think that that is something that he's never properly dealt with in relation to people's sense of him. I don't see him as being arrogant, and I've seen him with quotes, ordinary people, where I think he's got far better relationship with people that he meets than he gets credit for.

27:04But I think where you're right is, I think this is a sign of just how bloody hard politics is without making big own goal mistakes. The truth is, you were right about this on the day, I remember you said it, on the day that he called that snap election. I could see the logic for it, but I think actually it was one of those moments where he really damaged his own authority and he's never fully recovered for it. I still think he's one of the brightest and we've got one of the best brains in politics, but that one took me aback. Speech for the year. Well, I might take you back here. I'm going for three in different categories, most consequential, which I'm going for J.D.

27:43Vance in Munich. Wow. Okay, just to remind people what happened there, tell us about the J.D. Vance. So J.D. Vance turned up at the Munich Security Conference where all the great sort of brains and policymakers and diplomats and military figures turn up to talk about defense and security at a time of kind of peak opportunity as well as threat in relation to the Ukraine war. and he made the most awful speech. But the reason why I think it was consequential because I think this was at the point at which America's real foreign policy intentions were laid bare. He basically said, you lot think that Putin's your biggest threat.

28:19Your biggest threat says you don't believe in free speech. Most of the people sat there thinking, what the F are you talking about? He then went off to have a meeting with Alice Feidel, the leader of the Alternative for Deutschland, a neo-Nazi party that he basically said should be running Germany and therefore in their minds of the Americans Europe so I think that was the most consequential speech I think the best parliamentary speech this is where I think I'm going to shock you was in fact Kemi Baden-Ock's response to Rachel Reeves in the budget now a lot of people hated it and we got pushback on the day that we we did our special episode on the budget we got a lot of people saying when we both said we thought it was a very effective brutal speech a lot of people saying it was it was horrible it was personal it was nasty they're still the nasty party etc etc etc but she did three things actually the first is important especially just before christmas she settled i think any doubts within her party that she's tough and so therefore she might have what it takes doesn't mean she has but she settled that in their minds the second thing she did was she and a lot easier when you've been given the budget in advance but she really i think went to the heart of a dividing line that they're now going to drive which is labor is putting up tax and putting up welfare and we believe in bringing both down and so she's making an argument to relate to your brown put she she had a clear argument she's creating a very clear what that argument was yeah now whether she can then bring forward the policy to deal with it That being said, my speech of the year, do you know who Pep Guardiola is, Rory?

29:57Yes, yes. He's a football manager. That's the one. He's the manager of? Manchester City. Well done. Round of applause, Rory. Manchester City. He got an honorary graduate thing at Manchester University, and he made a really quite beautiful speech about Gaza. The thing I remember about it most was he had this line. He basically said, this whole thing hurts me. It makes me scared. I hate the lack of humanity that's attached to it. I'm not speaking here about taking sides or ideology. I'm speaking about our basic humanity. And he told this story of this parable of a bird that can fly and fill its at a fire, fill its mouth, fill its beak with water, fly back, drop a bit of water, fly back, drop a bit of water.

30:40Bang on message for What Can I Do? A great book, as you'll agree, Rory. So, you know, the point is we can all do something. So I thought it was, you know, for a football manager... We can all do something small. And that all those little beaks of water ultimately can put out the forest fire. Oh, beautiful. He's my speech of the year. Beautiful. Well, look, I don't want to be too gloomy at Christmas time. But following on from your point about J.D. Vance, I thought the most revealing speech, if you want to understand what's most dark and terrifying about the direction which Trump is leading not just America, but Europe, is for people to watch Stephen Miller's speech at Charlie Kirk's funeral.

31:20This is a speech in which he says that Charlie Kirk and his family, to quote, stand on the shoulders of thousands of years of warriors, of women who raised up families, raised up cities, raised up industry, raised up civilization, who pulled us out of the caves, out of the darkness, into the light. We are the light. They are the darkness. And the implication here goes right back to the rise in America after the Civil War. This is all this language, civilization, warriors. He then goes on, we are Athens, we are Rome. It's about white European civilization. And originally, this whole language was simply developed to attack African Americans, to say these are people who live in primitive societies.

32:07I can't remember who did it, but somebody did an analysis of that speech related to a speech that Goebbels had made in the 30s. I mean, when I see speech of the year, I'm trying to find the good speeches, but you're basically, you're going with my consequential. Yeah, I thought it just sort of tore the mask off, because you're absolutely right. Yeah, even the language about the warrior stands up to the storm. We are the storm. This stuff, as you say, is taken very much from that tradition. Did you have a good speech, a nice speech? Well, I thought Mamdani, in his short snippets on social media, I mean, it's a very different way of doing speeches to the kind of honorary degree at Manchester University.

32:50But I guess, yeah, my speech of the year is a sort of memory speech from a university acceptance speech, which I talked about at the time, which was the extraordinary Jane Goodall watching her deliver an acceptance speech for her honorary degree at the American University in Paris, where not only was she modest, funny and charming, but she did a full, I don't know, it felt like minute, two minutes, maybe it was only 45 seconds, full chimpanzee mating call to an audience of two and a half thousand people. I mean, it says something about the state of our politics that we both really quite struggled to go for politician of the year.

33:27And for our speeches of the year, I've gone for football manager, you've gone for somebody imitating a chimpanzee. A primatologist. That's true. That's not very inspiring. I think both of us have been impressed by some of the people speaking in the Senate and the House exposing Trump. We talked about Senator Murphy getting into some of Trump's corruption. James Comey did a very, very short speech in response to some of the different stages of the persecution of Trump by Trump of him. Ben Smith, who's one of the prosecutors that Trump is going after, did an incredible thing at LSE where he talked about the basic elements, the rule of law, which I thought was very moving.

34:05That's an American standing up for the rule of law. But yes, we're struggling a little bit, and we keep coming back to the chimpanzee mating call. I can do a good impression of a white-handed gibbon, but I can't do a chimp. A white-handed gibbon? Yeah. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. Like that. Sort of owl. Sort of owl to me. Well, I just heard it at the Cotswold Zoo. If people can do better than that, they can. Okay. Well, we've done the Christmas card competition. Let's now have a gibbon imitation. They're very noisy and their whole chest vibrates. It's one on your environmental stuff.

34:42If you ever have an opportunity to go to the rainforest and to see the gibbons flying through the top canopy with this noise erupting across the jungle, it is just the most exciting thing in the world. Excellent. Okay, Rory. Well, on Gibbons, let's have a quick break and then we'll come back. Biggest political moment. And we're going to talk about issues, people that are under discussed, undercovered, under debated, even on the rest. Even on the rest of politics. Yeah. Okay. See you then. As the year draws to a close, it's time for our annual reminder that even in an age of political noise and division, one national consensus still stands firm.

35:20Roast potatoes. Oh, God, all this British stuff. If you're wondering, however, what to buy, the politically obsessed person in your life this Christmas, might I gently suggest a year's membership to The Rest is Politics Plus? It's the thoughtful kind of present. Ad-free listening, bonus episodes, early access to Q &As, book discounts, and perhaps I think most interesting, it's our mini-series available only to members focusing on the world's most complex characters and topics. We've already explored Rupert Murdoch and JD Vance, and we're doing many more subjects to come. So think of this as a civilised gift to allow families to disagree agreeably over Christmas.

36:05What could be nicer? And if you've left it until Christmas Eve, as I fear I often do, the great thing is it's digital. No queues, wrapping or panic. The membership lands neatly in their inbox on Christmas Day. So spread a little political peace and goodwill. Head to therestispolitics.com and click Gifts.

36:28This episode is brought to you by NordVPN. December should be the season of peace and joy, but there are some people, some bad actors, who don't take a Christmas break. So we have to hope that the cybercriminals are visited by the three ghosts on Christmas Eve. But in case they miss out on redemption this year, we can safely protect ourselves from their online crimes thanks to NordVPN. NordVPN's powerful software encrypts your data, a threat protection pro, blocks malicious links and scans downloads for viruses. And it's not just online safety. NordVPN knows that some online retailers like to change their prices depending on your location.

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37:52Dein Drive, dein T-Rock. Rockt, der neue T-Rock.

38:01Welcome back to the Rest is Politics Christmas Eve special. With me, Alistair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. Yeah. Are you feeling now more Christmassy, now we've made it through the break? Did you spend the break reflecting on, you're becoming a bit like Scrooge. This is kind of terrible. No, I'm not Scrooge. The Grinch, maybe. I'm not Scrooge, no. Do you know what? It's really strange. It is strange. There's definitely something in my psychology. I don't like things where everybody is meant to feel the same. Are you sure it's not some sort of grim Scottish Presbyterian anti-Christmas thing back in your DNA?

38:36Could be. You know, the Scots, you know, basically banned Christmas for some time. Yeah. As you know, I'm not really a party person. I'm not a wedding person. If you ever found God, would you become a slightly grim Presbyterian minister? Well, Tony Blair always used to say he was really worried I'd get God because he thought I'd become an Islamic fundamentalist. An Islamic fundamentalist. That's another possibility. I think the one thing you wouldn't do, the one thing the ministers used to do, which he might not do, which is ban the playing of sport on Sunday. No, 100 of them wouldn't do that.

39:06You wouldn't do that, no. No. You'd allow us to play sport. Anyway, happy Christmas, everybody. I hope you're having a lovely, lovely, lovely time as we all are because we're all meant to. Go on. Tell us about your biggest political moment of last year. Zelensky in the Oval Office. Oh, wow. Okay. So this brings us not just to Trump, but to J.D. Vance. So everybody remembers Zelensky. It's the big moment. Trump says he's going to fix the Ukraine war in 24 hours, comes into office for a few weeks and everybody's a bit off balance. Zelensky's first big meeting, question mark. Is he going to get US financial support?

39:42Is America going to support his borders. He comes in, he's wearing his trademark fatigues, walks into the Oval Office, and very unusually, the whole format changes for the first time, doesn't it? Because traditionally, you point out, it would have been a short little thing before a private meeting. I think Trump had already sort of set that precedent, that he was going to use these as big press rolling, rambling press conferences. And it wasn't just Trump and the president speaking, because the vice president was sitting there like a peanut gallery weighing in. Talk us through this moment. I thought it was truly horrible.

40:16I watched the whole thing on my sofa and I felt sick because I think we had kidded ourselves that Trump was going to try to bring this war to an end. Now, in his head, that's what he was doing, bringing this war to an end. Vance lit the fuse, but once Vance lit the fuse, Trump went along with it and he was basically they were doing it by saying to zelensky you're little we're big putin's big you're still little you've lost give up that was the basic message i don't think zelensky had any sense that was coming in the way that it did i did an interview that night on channel four news where i i almost said the f and even worse because i was so angry and that i think it was just i used the word consequential for vance's speech i think this was part of that pattern it was it was hugely consequential because it was basically saying you lot in Europe are sitting there thinking we're on your side we're going to say that from time to time but this is this is us this is really us and I thought Zelensky behaved as he does so often with amazing kind of courage and dignity but you know to be the leader of a nation at war and this and essentially get asked to leave the White House because he's not buying this idea that you have none of the cards And then pushing this line that Zelensky shouldn't have started this war if he couldn't win.

41:35As if Zelensky had started the war, playing into the kind of Putin narrative that NATO provoked this and all this stuff. So I thought it was horrible. And the thing is about Trump, we'll talk about this a bit more in the next episode where we're talking about what surprises about this year. So much stuff happens with Trump that we don't kind of hang on long enough to reflect on these massive moments. It just moves on to the next one. The moments are unbelievable, aren't they? I mean, as you're thinking through, I mean, we're talking after this astonishing revelations that basically Whitkoff took the entire Russian talking points on Ukraine and tried to drive them through this peace deal.

42:14So we're talking in a year in which Trump pushed through the ceasefire in Gaza in the most extraordinary, strange, last minute, brutal fashion. We're talking about a year in which Iran has been attacked by American missiles, in which Qatar has been attacked by Israeli missiles, in which Syria has begun to bring itself together, in which Sudan continues to disintegrate, in which military governments backed by Russia all over the Sahel, etc., etc., etc. But my big choice is that moment at the very beginning of April, just after April Fool's Day, the Liberation Day tariffs. And again, I think if historians looked back in 30 years' time, this was the big change because it changed so many things in a single moment.

43:06The first thing is it showed suddenly that the American president had a type of power that people weren't really aware of before. he found an obscure law an emergency power ready for war which allows him personally to move up and down tariffs without congressional approval hadn't really been done for decades right and it suddenly showed trump can do stuff and it's perfect for trump because as you point out it means that every country in the world has to come and just watch him do the signature yeah and give him weird presents and you know the swiss will turn up with gold bars and the japanese have to give him 300 billion sovereign wealth funds to spend at his discretion.

43:45So sort of tribute bearers, but not just countries, American companies having to come and Apple has to give him special gifts to get changes on whether or not they can do stuff with iPhones in China, etc. Power. Second thing is unpredictability. What we discovered is what you call the hokey-cokey. The tariffs go up, the tariffs go down, the tariffs go up, the tariffs go down. And the whole thing is completely bewildering. I mean, so that most people in America and in the world would still have absolutely no idea whether the tariffs are really up or down. But the reality is, the big picture is at the end of last year, the average tariff rate in the US was 3%.

44:26Today, the average tariff rate in the US is 18%. Last year, global trade growth was projected at 3%. This year, it's projected 0.3%. So massive consequences for the global economy. And then I think the final thing that comes out of that is tearing up the whole world order. He's broken this whole American idea since the Second World War that American power was behind certain kinds of multilateral institutions and rules like the World Trade Organization, which tried to balance the interests of small countries and big countries with relatively transparent rules that you could apply to courts, etc.

45:03Blown that all out of the water. And he's gone after his allies. I mean, what's so astonishing about it is that everybody assumed that if he was going to go after China, he would correspondingly try to keep allies on side. India, Vietnam, Switzerland, Japan, Europe, because he'd need them. Instead of which, it's turned out that he actually inflicts more damage on his allies than he does on his enemies. Partly because China and Xi Jinping has stood up to it in a way that he didn't expect. Well, I think that's partly because China knew that the United States was its enemy, and therefore spent the last 10 years making sure they couldn't be taken for right.

45:38We thought the United States was our allies. So we opened up our entire economy to the US. We allowed them to do open heart surgery on us. Consequently, we had no defenses. I mean, it's like letting a virus into your body with absolutely no defenses. We've allowed the United States over 70 years to become totally central to every element of our defense, security, economic life. And so that's what allows the long con. That's the real long con. It's that America spending 70, 80 years being so well behaved that Europeans, Japanese, Canadians, could allow themselves to be that vulnerable. Right. But the reason for that is not the United States of America, it's Trump.

46:23I think every previous president would have not a... I can't think of a president living or dead that would be sitting there approving what Trump is doing in relation to their relations with Europe. No, but of course, the problem is once Trump has revealed it, once he's really brought out into the open the fact that we are this vulnerable, that America has actually done more damage to Europeans, Japanese, Canadians in the last 11 months, the last year, than the Chinese or the Russians. Actually, more damage to our economy, more damage to our security, more damage to our democracies. And the problem is that we've always in the past asked the question, when we're looking at our enemies and adversaries, is this country a liberal democracy?

47:08Are they part of the Western alliance? And if they're not, we think they're an enemy. what we fail to understand is this question of vulnerability if you integrate too much i mean we saw this in microcosm with russia where we integrated too much with their energy but our dependency on the u.s is 90 times greater than our dependency ever was in russia and this is what trump's exploiting and now suddenly i mean honestly if he decided to invade greenland we could do absolutely nothing about it. Most under-discussed, under-appreciated domestic moment or issue. Last year I went for Brexit, and you went for unemployment in the UK.

47:49So I think unemployment's looking not too bad at the moment, Rory. Brexit's still a disaster. Unfortunately, unemployment is a little bit up in the UK. And what I'm really talking about here, which hasn't been fixed, is the million people who just aren't working. And this is people living on different forms of disability benefits and payments, which hasn't been fixed. I mean, it's the one big difference between the UK economy and all our peers that everybody came out of COVID with a lot of people out of the workforce, but only in the UK out of the major economies have all these people remained out of the workforce.

48:22And if you don't get those million people into the workforce, the benefits budget is skyrocketing. I mean, this is part of the problem that Rachel Rees is struggling with in trying to generate growth, get the public finances going. I don't think in the last 12 months they've really come up with anything to do about it. I'm going to go for SEND, special educational needs. And I think this relates to the change in media landscape as well, because the whole kind of internet revolution and the way the media has developed has sort of destroyed so much of our local media. Local authorities are trying to do more and more with less.

48:57and I think send has grown and grown and grown and grown as a problem and it was briefly mentioned in the budget in the context of what is now a 14 billion pound black hole call it what you want and this is where there's been this thing called the override where debts that the local authorities are building up and building up they've not been going on the books they're now going to be taken over by central government and it sparked this debate finally about whether if it's not coming from local authority budgets is it going to come out of education budgets or are we now going to look at another massive spending cost that the government's just going to have to fix and the issue behind it i guess is that we've become increasingly thoughtful about understanding how different children are and how many needs there are so i suppose there are probably two things happening.

49:52One of them is a genuine increase in certain kinds of conditions. And the second is more awareness of them and more sensitivity to them and schools realizing that there's a lot more that they can do to help children at different parts of the spectrum from relatively mild, who also benefit from a huge amount of support, through to more serious cases. And also the ways in which COVID feeds into that, social media feeds into that in loneliness, loneliness, people facing serious challenges with their mental health, all the stuff with young people, and how on earth do you finance this? Because it's clearly vital if you can get that intervention right in early childhood.

50:30It's incredible what you can do with results. I mean, again, I don't want to make this too much personal, but our kids' school has, with my eight-year-old, been so thoughtful about thinking about how to occasionally give them a few more minutes in an exam or just helping him write down what the homework is for the night. And the results have been unbelievable. I was very, very worried in September that he would find it incredibly academically tough. He's come out of the end of his first term so confident, cheerful. He was saying yesterday, it was kind of an extraordinary parental moment, you know, I'm so grateful for the fact I'm learning something every day.

51:09So they've turned somebody who could have been incredibly anxious, insecure, and was saying six months ago, I just can't do this, I can't do school. It's into somebody who feels really confident. And these are small tweaks. And we're very, very lucky. But of course, this takes funding and backing. I mean, I think the other thing is you've got all these graphs showing massive rise in diagnosis, a lot of controversy, debate about reasons for it. Then you have lunatics like RF Kennedy coming in saying it's related to taking, was it paracetamol or whatever it was. And so you've got experts divided, you've got medics divided, you've got families divided, but it's an issue that government is going to have to grip.

51:50Is it a bigger issue though, just listening to you, can we put this in a bigger issue about how we think about the future of looking after citizens, the welfare state? In other words, presumably there would be an analogy in healthcare too, which is as the state tries to provide more and more thoughtful, tailored care in education health. As people's expectations go up, things become more and more expensive. I mean, I noticed because I teach in America that in American healthcare, they will do a lot of things the NHS wouldn't do on more minor lifestyle things, dermatology, diet, whereas the NHS is really, really good at the kind of extreme kind of surgery for the acute case.

52:36And this is partly about the fact that to provide the really tailored care for people at every stage on an autism spectrum is a little bit like thinking about the full challenges in somebody's health. This is the problem. Can we afford to do this? Have we got the tax balance right? You know, one thing we talked about during the budget is that in the UK, we're actually very oddly skewed. The top 0.1 % is paying as much tax as the bottom 50 % now in the UK. So it may be that we need to also talk about increasing the basic rate of tax. Well, we're now revisiting the arguments that preceded the budget.

53:17But I think what this speaks to, you mentioned social care. Social care, we have still not got a grip of. we've talked a lot about there is going to be whether we like it or not increasing demand on defense and security because of what's happening in in russia and ukraine have we really got a grip of that have we really got a grip of of this issue what this said to me is that they're starting to try to get a grip but the sums of money involved are absolutely astronomical and i'll tell you who if he if he manages to crack it our politician of the year next year might be Pat McFadden because I think he's got one of the toughest jobs in government now.

53:56Labour tried to do welfare reform. MPs rebelled against it, weren't able to do it. One of the factors behind the tax rises in the budget. I think there are some really, really big issues here. And I do think the Labour MPs have got to understand it's the easiest thing in the world to stand up and say, no, you can't do that because that's going to affect some of my constituents. Sometimes, I'm afraid, you have to look and you have to really sit back and say, why is this happening? Why is the scale of this problem now so big? There we go. Most under-discussed, under-appreciated international moment.

54:32I'm going to go with NVIDIA stock reaching$5 trillion in October. NVIDIA is, of course, the chip manufacturer that's at the core of the AI revolution. And this, of course, brings us to the mini series that I've been doing with Matt Clifford on AI, which if you sign up, become a TripPlus member. And I hope some people are considering doing this as a little gift for each other at Christmas. You'll be able to listen to it because what we're trying to say is that here is something which in technology terms potentially could change the world more than the industrial revolution and far more quickly.

55:08Far more important basically than politics, transform all of employment, all of defense and security, all of the way that our lives work and potentially pose a massive existential threat to our politics, our security, our lives. And yet almost nobody's discussing it. I sat down with a friend of mine in the US Congress just two days ago, who said to me, frankly, none of us are discussing it because none of us understand. We feel very, very insecure dealing with technology issues, and therefore we don't want to go there and which is why the politics of today often can feel as though it's stuck 20 30 years in the past that those nothing's really changed that in some sense the kinds of things that people are discussing in parliament not very different from what they were discussing in 97 right and in the same way and in the same way yeah so order so you can't say this you can't say that um so anyone who's interested in the bigger argument around this please sign up uh and listen to our mini series where we really get into everything we get into what ai is we get into what it could mean for the economy, what it can mean for defense and security, what it can mean for existential risk.

56:11But that, for me, is the most undiscussed international moment. I think this year, the UK economy is going to work out as being worth about 3.9 trillion. So smaller than a single American company. This feeds into one of my, I don't know if we're going to do a book of the century at any point, but it might be my sovereign individual by Jacob Rees-Mogdad, because this is kind of playing out pretty much as he said. These tech guys are going to become way more powerful than any country and far wealthier than any person on earth. And maybe there could be the other moment. This is the year in which it was announced.

56:45If Elon Musk meets his targets, he will get$1 trillion. And so to repeat, because Elon Musk is obsessed with this, he's obviously obsessed with how rich he is. To put it in context, a million seconds ago is 12 days ago. A billion seconds ago is 1994. A trillion seconds ago is 30 ,000 BC to get a sense of how different a trillion is to a billion. Right. My most under-discussed, under-appreciated international moment, you might be surprised by this because it relates to Gaza. Now, Gaza has had a lot of discussion, but my most under-discussed episode is what's happened in Gaza since the so-called bringing of peace by Donald Trump.

57:29It's almost that Trump is such a brilliant salesman, conman, communicator, you would think, to all intents and purposes, that he's brought peace to Gaza and the Middle East. Life, for most people in Gaza, remains utterly horrible. People are still being killed. We're recording not long after the Pope visited Lebanon at a time when Israelis were dropping bombs on Lebanon. So I just think it's one of those things where Trump manages to shape a moment and go, bang, that's the end of that chapter. So Alistair, I think that's a moment maybe to finish. I thought you were going to maybe weave effortlessly from that into telling me a story about Bethlehem or something.

58:12Something biblical. Give me something Christmassy. Well, that's a great thing. Let's imagine you're a priest. Let's imagine these meetings you're having with clergy who are leading somewhere. What would they say? I'll tell you one of the things that I've got for that. I mean, you're right. You could make a little pivot to the fact that Bethlehem is a Palestinian city in the West Bank with Palestinian Christians. We often forget Palestinian Christians in the story. And a place that's very, very difficult at the moment to access. My wife's charity, Telkos Mountain, is working with craftspeople in Bethlehem.

58:44And a lot of the proposals that are coming now from Smotrich are about cutting Bethlehem off from Nablus and the other parts of the West Bank. But I think the move I wanted to end on is this. A lot of the people I've been having lunch with recently, these priests, are getting older. So you want to replace them? No, I'm saying they're going through extraordinary personal challenges. Sometimes they're in health, sometimes aging, sometimes tragedies within their own family, and they're having to try to apply consolation to themselves that they've spent 50 years providing to other people. And that is an extraordinarily difficult moment.

59:26I mean, what's the moment in which one of them said to me, he's somebody who's a man who meditates a lot and had a family tragedy beyond imagining and was saying to me, honestly, he couldn't meditate anymore. And he was literally flattened back on his bed. But then he turned to listening to other people he admired, giving little talks on meditation, 10, 15 minutes listening to it just pulled him back enough to keep going. But I'm just so moved by how at the center of the Christian message is the sense of human frailty and weakness and that nothing's ever perfect. It's not like some of the Buddhist traditions where you pretend there's a moment where you're suddenly enlightened and you become a saint and everything's over, that right the way through to the end, people are learning, struggling, and sometimes finding that they can't cope.

1:00:28We can't end a Christmas Eve episode on the words, can't cope. Well, they can't cope, and they would say, without God, without other people, and that they're not alone, and that actually it's an unbearable burden to think that you've somehow become a superhero saint who can do it all on your own. That for them, it is other people, other voices, and whatever, in different ways, people are trying to get at when they talk about God, which in the end provides that final consolation at Christmas. Well done. You got it back. You wrestled it back. Happy Christmas to you and your family, me, Rory. And because we're just sort of, we never stop.

1:01:10Let's do another episode on Christmas Day. Should we do that? We will. We'll be back on Christmas Day with our message and I'll try to make it a little less happy. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

1:01:28As the year draws to a close, it's time for our annual reminder that even in an age of political noise and division, one national consensus still stands for roast potatoes. Oh, God, all this British stuff. If you're wondering, however, what to buy the politically obsessed person in your life this Christmas, might I gently suggest a year's membership to The Rest is Politics Plus? It's the thoughtful kind of present. Ad-free listening, bonus episodes, early access to Q &As, book discounts and perhaps I think most interesting it's our mini-series available only to members focusing on the world's most complex characters and topics we've already explored Rupert Murdoch and JD Vance and we're doing many more subjects to come so think of this as a civilized gift to allow families to disagree agreeably over Christmas what could be nicer and if you've left it until Christmas Eve as I fear I often do the great thing is it's digital no queues rapping or panic the membership lands neatly in their inbox on christmas day so spread a little political peace and goodwill head to the rest is politics.com and click gifts