512. Trump’s Iran Disaster and the GB News Propaganda Machine

22:52Rory Stewart:And that means there'll be pressure on Israel and the US to just keep going, trying to chase this very, very difficult idea that they can somehow topple the regime. I think close to impossible idea. I guess also that one possible outcome in terms of this thing ending is if Iran basically says to the Americans, well, okay, we can call off what we're doing and we don't have to bomb the whole time. We just have to take out a few Americans every now and then. We just have to close down the Straits of Hormuz. We just have to cause you a lot of trouble, which we can do, and we've shown you we can do that.

23:25So you need to get a guarantee from Israel that they're going to stop. And they, the Iranians, if Trump were to do that, then can say, well, actually, we've won. And that's why I think it's been so catastrophic for Trump not to have had a very clear objective about what he was trying to achieve. He's a rambling, sort of changing goalpost, moving objectives. The other thing that this guy, Nate Swanson, said in the piece he's written post. He's written another piece in Foreign Affairs magazine. He made that point. He says, Iran doesn't need to score major military successes every day. The regime only needs to inflict enough periodic damage to keep regional partners, markets, and the American public jittery.

24:03Rory Stewart:They can do that easily. Yeah. Well, I was talking to someone in the US defense establishment, and the most optimistic line which is being sold by American admirals is if we just keep going for another four weeks, we can degrade Iranian capacity so much that at huge expense, we can safely escort some vessels through the straits, and then we will have won. Because we will have proved the straits are open and Iran can't shut it. My response is that doesn't make any sense to me at all. You mean they've got a grip? Yeah. Yes, maybe. The US may in four weeks' time be able to take a vessel through the straits at huge expense with aircraft carriers and destroyers, but they're not going to want to do that every day forever.

24:45Rory Stewart:And Iran doesn't need to demonstrate that it can hit 100 % of vessels going through. It doesn't even need to hit one out of 100. People just need to believe there's a possibility that it might be able to hit one out of 100 next time in the next six, 12 months, and the US have lost. So there isn't a clear point at which they will be able to say, the Straits are now completely open, completely safe, we're back to business as usual. Maybe that's a good point at which to turn to the whole kind of big political picture and Trump's attempts to persuade other countries to get involved in sending warships, sending destroyers, sending mine hunters to get the Straits of Hormuz operating again.

25:24And one by one, every single one of them was given in the bum's rush, which makes him angrier. So he's lashed out again at Keir Starmer. Mark Carney, who sort of was quite welcoming at the start, he's been absolutely clear we're having nothing to do with this.

25:39Rory Stewart:Pistorius was very clear. He said if the US Navy can't do it, what hope have we got? Merz said last night, this is not a job for NATO. Nick Carter, former senior military guy in the UK, he said yesterday, Trump's suggestion that NATO should take this on completely misunderstands why people are in NATO in the first place. It's a defensive alliance. If you think of the principle of what Trump's saying, any NATO country could say, right, we're going to war over there, and we then expect you all to come and help us when it fucks up. Because that's all that's happened. All that's happened is all these things that Nate Swanson said to Trump, one presumes, which is why he got the boot.

26:16This will happen. Trump wanted to ignore it, to have the war. And now that it's happening, he's basically saying, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Australia, you've got to come in and help me. I think, look, it's terrible what's going on. As you said last week, this is going to be terrible for the economy in Britain and Europe and around the world. But I think in terms of getting America under Trump, hopefully for some time back into maybe just getting a few grownups around him to say, listen, this has gone far enough. My really, really, really big worry about what's happening at the moment with the kind of, you know, Star McCartney, Macron melts all pushing back at Trump is he's just going to one day wake up in the middle of the night and do a true social post saying, we are pulling all support from Ukraine because the NATO countries have not been there to help us in our need.

27:05Yeah.

27:06Rory Stewart:I mean, I think that's a real risk. But equally, we couldn't be in a position where that blackmail threat meant that we should sign up for everything. And that was where I disagreed with Mandelson. Mandelson was continuing even after he'd been fired from Washington to write articles and give interviews saying things like, basically, we should let him have Greenland because the only thing that matters is US support for Ukraine. There were people in our own intelligence and security establishment who were very critical of Starmer's line saying, what happens if we go to war and we need the US to help us and we've got to go with them?

27:38Rory Stewart:People saying when we went to Spain, what happens when Spain gets attacks? And I think the problem with that idea is the idea that Trump does favors or feels loyalty or because you've helped him out here, he's going to help you out there is for the birth. So So the reality is that actually US support for Ukraine has been reduced to basically zero dollars. So we've had to step up, fill in a Europe 50 billion dollar hole. They're still doing a lot of the intelligence. They do a lot of the intelligence to security and they sell us stuff that we buy. Although a lot of the stuff we're trying to buy, they've now blowing in the Middle East, so it's not even available to buy.

28:12Rory Stewart:But the main thing for which Trump was always given credit was putting sanctions against Russian oil and driving down the price of oil. He's now lifted those sanctions and put up the oil price. So it's basically down to the intelligence and security enablers. Yeah. And that is very vulnerable. It's a big problem. But the bigger problem he's done, he's done much more damage to Ukraine than helped it, in particular around oil and the Russian economy. And that was before this. He was damaging Ukraine before this because he's always taking Putin's side of the argument. So is Wyckoff. Kirill Dmitriev, who's Putin's kind of Wyckoff in this equation.

28:46and he did a post on telegram he said the united states is effectively acknowledging the obvious without russian oil the global energy market cannot remain stable eu bureaucrats will soon be forced to recognize this acknowledge their strategic blunders under tone russia is i'm afraid i hate to say it but i think it's true russia is the only power there's one out of this whole thing So because of lifting the sanctions on oil, driving the price of oil up through what he's done in Iran, he is basically putting very, very large sums of money, 1.6 billion per month for every$10 increase in the price of crude.

29:29I mean, that is a lot of money. And this is why - And that's going to fund the next stage of the war.

29:35Rory Stewart:And this is why all the sort of, you know, I have friends who like to poke Europe and the UK and say, it's all our fault. And one of the great things they like to say is it was all Europe's fault for continuing to buy Russian oil and that at least Trump had called that out. Well, now it's quite clear that Trump is on the other side. My final thing before we maybe take a break is my biggest sphere is that this could continue for a very, very long time. I mean, the optimistic idea is that Trump somehow declares a victory. And we know that Trump is able to declare apparently a victory out of almost nothing.

30:13Rory Stewart:But his ability to do that feels less than it was before. Because if he was saying what he would have wanted to say before, which is, I've destroyed their nuclear the capacity. So, I've won. I've taken out their ballistic missiles. I've won. The problem is the whole world can now see that Iran has choked the Straits of Hormuz, driven up the oil price, and basically is now holding all the Gulf countries to ransom. If he says tomorrow, I've won and I'm stopping, the Gulf countries and a lot of the world will be like, you what? excuse me you you're leaving these guys in place they can now fire missiles at us whenever they want they can close the straits for moves whenever they want you you've declared victory right so one of the real risks is that actually places like saudi that might have been a little ambivalent about this may now be pushing him to keep going and you'll start seeing this i'm beginning to see this from some of our own british diplomats generals intelligence people who say to me well Rory, I didn't agree with the war in the first place, but now it's happened.

31:21Rory Stewart:We've got to finish the job. We can't leave these people here because actually they're too much of a danger to the world." To which I have to keep saying, what does it mean, finish the job? How do you finish this job? Because another problem is all the experts on Iran put so much emphasis on the fact the regime only had 15 % of the support of the population, was very weak, was very unpopular. And they thought that would mean it would collapse like a pack of cards. In fact, I think there were optimistic Israeli analysis. I had one of them saying to me yesterday, a Brit saying, I thought Israel understood Iran better than anyone else.

31:54Rory Stewart:And what he meant by that is Israel was always much more cynical about Iran, much more aggressive about Iran. But Israel was wrong. Israel thought this regime would collapse immediately and it absolutely did not. It's proved much more resilient. So the options are now, I don't know how you avoid two completely horrible outcomes. Horrible outcome number one, this war continues indefinitely because you never get anything that you can describe as a victory. Horrible outcome number two, you stop the war and you suddenly have Iran in a much more powerful geopolitical position, able to essentially blackmail all the Gulf countries.

32:28Well, before we go to break, we should say tomorrow for question time, as you described it, we're going to show a little humility. We put out an appeal to listeners and viewers for questions on Iran. We've got tons of them. And we've got a guest for Question Time, which is one of the world's leading experts, genuine leading expert on Iran. That's Kareem Sajipour. And hopefully people will enjoy that tomorrow. We'll take a break and we'll come back and talk about how useless our water and media regulators are. Very good. Looking forward to it, Alistair.

33:01Rory Stewart:Good break. This episode is brought to you by NordVPN. Spring is the season of movement. travel, shared networks, systems that aren't ours. When you operate inside infrastructure you don't control, your vulnerability increases. Mobility increases exposure. A cyber attack happens every 39 seconds. In the UK, hundreds of cyber-enabled crimes are reported daily, with around£4.5 million lost each day to cybercrime. Frictionless systems tend to hide to their weaknesses. Bank details, passwords, boarding passes, sensitive data moving across networks we don't control. So that's why we've been using our friends over at NordVPN, since it encrypts your connection, making your data far harder to intercept.

33:47It hides your IP address, reduces your digital footprint, and keeps your personal details secure.

33:53Rory Stewart:To get the best discount on your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com slash rest is politics. You'll get four extra months free on the two-year plan plus a 30-day money-back guarantee. The link's in the episode description.

34:31Rory Stewart:through March 29th, 2026. Exclusions and additional charges may apply. For licenses, see homedepot.com slash license numbers. Feeding the fam isn't easy, but we got you with Denny's Slam and Meal Deals starting at$5.99. Full meals for everyone, like a Grand Slam Burrito for Grandpa and a Super Slam for Super Mom. Get to Denny's now. Ballot at participating locations for dine-in or denny's.com. Limited time offer. Additional restrictions may apply at some locations.

34:58Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Now, Rory, you probably know I do occasionally weave in little plugs for my newspaper, The New World. But today I am doing so underlined 10 times because they've done a piece this week written by Alan Rusbridger, who you thought should have been Director General of the BBC, Senator of the Guardian. Yeah. Why would that happen? Maybe it didn't apply. Probably because I'll tell you why it wouldn't happen. It relates to what we're going to talk about because they would have thought, oh, we can't possibly put somebody in who's perceived as being left wing.

35:29Rory Stewart:I had a moment where I suddenly thought I should have applied for that job. I mean, somebody needs to do that job. Well, the guy who seems to be in the frame for the job that you wanted Alan Rusbridge to get is a guy called Matt Britton. And the job I've now decided I wanted to get. Yeah, yeah. Which is a great name for the BBC. His background is Google. Google Europe. Do you think it would be a great job or do you think it'd be a nightmare of a job? I think it'd be both. Most great jobs are nightmares. You know, if I was manager of Argentina when Maradona was playing, I mean, absolute bloody nightmare.

35:54What a great job. um but no so what they've done and it's it's really really interesting i do love the new world and it's so it's not many newspapers do 12 they call themselves a magazine now 12 pages on one story well okay and well with the front cover and led by alan ruspershire all written by alan rusper and it's an analysis of gb news and just quickly remind listeners gb news gb news a right-wing tv station founded a few years ago funded very very heavily by this guy Paul Marshall, Christian right-winger, used to be a Lib Dem. Andrew Neal, very well-known journalist, was the kind of founding driver of it.

36:33He's quoted in Russ Bridges' piece as saying, it has basically become reform TV, reform Nigel Farage's party. But what Alan does, he put together a team of, quite a large team of journalists and people who had experience of regulation. And not just kind of left-wing people, there were people who worked for The Spectator, for The Telegraph, as well as for The Atlantic, for The Washington Post, for Tortoise. So lots of different journalistic people. And they sat down, I think in pairs, and they watched a lot of GB News. And they were asked to score these programs that they watched, Farage's program, an interview that Beverly Turner did with Donald Trump, Matt Goodwin, his program, program, some of the chatty programs, and they asked them to score them against Ofcom's own guidelines.

37:28Rory Stewart:And the Ofcom guidelines, just to come in for a second if I'm right, a lot of them are about broadcasting, and this is different from how newspapers are regulated or podcasts regulated. Correct. It's about impartiality, is that right? It's about impartiality and fairness and accuracy. Okay. And the idea, if we go back to the beginnings of this, are that whereas newspapers were allowed to endorse political parties and create political opposition to be biased. Broadcast was supposed to be, this is going back to the days of the founding of BBC and ITV and Channel 4, was supposed to have balanced points of view, was supposed to be impartial, was supposed to be objective.

38:04Rory Stewart:And the idea of that was you didn't want streaming into people's living rooms completely biased propaganda. Yeah. And if you didn't abide by the Ofcom rules, you did not get a license. So GB News have a license to broadcast around the clock, which they do. The team that Russ Bridger put together, they include people who have the Sunday Telegraph, the Spectator, the Times, the Observer, BBC, ITV, the Daily Mail, the Mirror, Prospect, the Economist, the Guardian, BuzzFeed, the Washington Post, Tortoise Media, GQ Magazine. So they put a lot of people and sat them in front of television and said, you watch this for hours and hours and hours.

38:41And what they've got, both in Alan's report and in the New World's account of it, they've given their explanations as to why Ofcom rules were being broken.

38:51Rory Stewart:Okay. Give us some examples. So, for example, Donald Trump, interview with Donald Trump by Beverly Turner. He says in the interview, climate change is a complete hoax. An interviewer who's governed by Ofcom should at the very least say, well, that is disputed. Right. Okay. Or have somebody who comes on afterwards to say why that's completely wrong. Instead of which he said, it was so amazing to see you drop all those truth bombs at the United Nations. It's propaganda. Matt Goodwin. Matt Goodwin is an academic who did research on immigration, has become increasingly right-wing, and then managed to run as the Reform Party candidate in Gorton Denton by-election, which he felt when he came second.

39:32Your famous generosity there, Rory, in calling him academic. and what's more he had a program and has a program and guess what he was discussing four days before it was announced that he was going to be the candidate in gorton and denton he was discussing gorton and denton and he was discussing these were the subjects he chose is europe falling apart and becoming unrecognizable what is the risk of islamist fighters arriving on small boats why are cowborough residents up in arms over a local camp for asylum seekers and finally on this Fair and Balanced Programme, Sexual Assaults by Refugees in the Netherlands and the UK.

40:09So that Matt Goodwin Programme was scored by these guys at one, one out of five for being in keeping with the Ofcom guidelines.

40:17Rory Stewart:Okay, so just to put it in context, when I, in 2010, showed the then Prince of Wales around my non-profit in Afghanistan, and BBC News showed a couple of images of me pointing to things. Gordon Brown, then Prime Minister, made a formal complaint to the palace in Ofcom saying it would help me in my election in Penrith and the Border. Gordon Brown? Yeah, yeah. Because I appeared with the King and was shown on television showing him around the project. So to see how far we've come, in 2010 it was considered for me to be in the edge of a shot with the King as a parliamentary candidate about a stand for Penrith and the Border was, in Gordon Brown's views, breaching impartiality and critique.

41:00Rory Stewart:election compared to what would have happened if I'd actually presented my own program on the penalty boarder election. Every night. About all the issues that I was campaigning for as a main broadcaster, let alone on the margin of a program. Exactly. And so, for example, Andrew Neil, in the interview he does with the New World with Rusbridger, he says that when he was starting GB News, he said that, you know, there's no way that I would have allowed Nigel Farage to have his own program. Nigel Farage now has his own program. Jacob Rees-Mock has his own program. Lee Anderson has his program. Matt Goodwin And they all get financed too.

41:31That's the other thing.

41:32Rory Stewart:So one of the interesting things here is about conflict of interest and the funding of members of parliament. So as people will be aware, members of parliament often feel underpaid. A lot of the population disagree, other bits of population agree, but they are allowed to have second jobs, but they have to declare quite carefully what those incomes are. If you are a presenter on GB News, or if you are, as Boris Johnson was when he was an MP, a columnist for a newspaper, or indeed actually some of the Labour MPs who presented LBC radio programs, you can end up earning literally hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.

42:09Rory Stewart:But I think Boris Johnson was in the hundreds of thousands, certainly Farage seems to have been in hundreds of thousands of income. And those are in effect, or can be, indirect donations coming from the owners of these media corporations. So the Barclays brothers, I think, owned the Telegraph and he was getting this money. Marshall, as you say, has been a big funder of GB News. And so a lot of the thing that's maintaining the lifestyle of Nigel Farage is not being declared as a direct donation from an individual with a political cause to Farage, which he has to justify. Instead, it's just presented as, I have a second job.

42:51Rory Stewart:And I think all these questions around MPs' incomes, conflicts of interest, their future jobs are not being sorted. Personally, to return to my current obsession, pay them more and stop them from having these additional sources of income. And also for the backers, the poor marshals, this is the equivalent to funding a political Party, because Andrew Neal says this is now Reform TV. By the way, fair play to Gordon Brown, in my view, because if you have rules, they've got to be upheld. One of the things that's happening with this report is it's going to go to Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, is going to go to the Culture Committee.

43:27Two things should happen, in my view. First of all, the Labour government needs to get its head around why this is such a problem for our democracy, and as it happens for the Labour Party as well. But the other thing you said about how the things changed. Let me just read you this line from Russbridge's piece. To see how far Ofcom has journeyed in the way it operates, it's worth revisiting a meticulously argued 12-page adjudication it published eight years ago, which found the BBC had breached its duty of due accuracy in 2017 by failing to challenge Nigel Lawson's remark on the science of climate change on the Today programme.

44:04these guys on on gb news they don't just not allow voices on to rebut what they say they kind of almost cartoonize issues like climate change and so something like goodwin he has a program where he literally talks about immigration day and night and they would say so they got gloria del piero former labor impee on that's balance they have got so many really right-wing presenters This is why Liam Byrne's book is so interesting, because this is all of a piece with how Putin corrupted his own media, how Trump is corrupting his own media. You now have Brendan Carr, who runs the FCC, the federal commission that gives out licenses to broadcasters, and basically saying, if these guys don't cover the war properly, in Pete Heggs's view, they're going to lose their license.

44:53And that is already having an impact.

44:55Rory Stewart:One of the things that is also odd, which I guess is going on in Ofcom's head, and some listeners I think will already be shouting at our podcast pointing this out, is they will say, listen, how come we can put out podcasts algorithmically streamed on YouTube into people's living rooms and we're not governed by Ofcom regulations? You don't need to be Dominic Cummings to point out that you and I have particular political views. We are rampantly pro-European, for example, and we keep putting out those views, right? So, there's a really interesting thing that's happened since these regulations were set up.

45:29Rory Stewart:Now, I'm not defending Ofcom because I think your point is right. These guys get a broadcasting license. There is a law. They're not sticking to it. But just to explain why it's getting more complicated. It's getting more complicated because when these rules were set up, you didn't have podcasts and YouTube platforms. And actually, our reach is now bigger than these guys. So if you look at the figures, these figures suggest that they are getting at one time just under 100 ,000 viewers. Now, this is a rolling average over a particular period and it's quite difficult calculating, but it's worth pointing out that they will come back and say, hold a second, you are often getting 10 times the number of people listening to your podcast.

46:08Rory Stewart:And they would probably say, understandably, listen, we have our own political view, which is incredibly pro-European, centrist dad, et cetera. So they would say, how come you as a podcast get to have a pretty clear political view, but we as a broadcast network don't? We're just examples of us, there's news stations. And then there's stuff coming from the States like Joe Rogan, right, as a client or whatever coming in, which Ofcom can't even touch. I mean, if you wanted to regulate Joe Rogan, you would have to deal with the fact that people would start using VPNs to get around government Listen, it's a very, very fair point.

46:43And I went in to see Ofcom sometime last year, because I was already kind of spotting that I thought this was a real problem. And I went in, and it was before the election, and I was basically saying, look, how can you have Farage presenting this program virtually daily? It is total reform propaganda. That's all it is, minute after minute. And the one thing we know about Farage, he's very good at it. He's a good broadcaster. He's a good talker. He's a good propagandist. So I met these people at Ofcom, and we'll come on to the water in a minute, but one of the best things about the water program that we're going to talk about were the sort of bullshit merchants that they employed to give sort of empathetic lines to take.

47:23And one of the things the Ofcom people kept saying to me is, well, we can only take action under our remit if we get complaints. okay well matt goodwin did a poll on his own program on whether trump was right that europe was recognizable guess what 97 percent of the viewers agreed with him right now even trump's interview which was the biggest blow job you've ever seen on television i think they got 32 complaints and none of them were upheld on the basis that in other other times on the channel other points were made. If Donald Trump's on your TV station, you're going to get a lot of coverage.

48:03Rebuttal is not. The rebuttal has to be in the program. And I think Labour, the government, and the Conservatives, I think, should join in on this as well, and definitely the Lib Dems. I think they're underestimating how serious this is. I get your point about the podcast, and there may come a point, by the way, where Ofcom's remit has to be extended. But right now, in relation to what Ofcom's duty is to see that their own guidelines and laws are upheld. They are being broken minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day on a news station that claims and boasts that it now has more viewers than the BBC News and Sky News.

48:40So that is a real problem, I think, for our democracy. We've got to get a grip of it. Yeah.

48:44Rory Stewart:Also, what an amazing change in the media landscape we've seen. I mean, it's not just podcasts. Since 1989, something like 30 % of the British population every night watched the BBC News or the ITV News. It's now down to about 10%. The same is true in the US. We've gone from about 20-25 % of the US population watching the main news anchors in the evening down to about 5%. We've gone from, in 1989, 5 % of people getting no TV news to 32 % of people. From 2 % of people getting no TV or newspaper news. 1989 to about a quarter of the population getting new TV or newspaper news today. The number of people using a newspaper has dropped from 75 % in 1989 to 34 % today.

49:30Rory Stewart:And it's only the over 55s where almost half people are actually regularly watching TV. If you get under 35s, 58 % of their main news source is social media. Yeah, but a lot of the stuff they're consuming on social media is being produced by the newspapers. Yeah. Well, it's very complicated, isn't it? I mean, so So advertising revenue for newspapers has collapsed, which also I think gives the Paul Marshals of this world more control. Because when you were in Downing Street, they were making close to 10 billion pounds a year in real terms. They're now making about a quarter of that, which means that if you're a wealthy person, you can step up, fill the gap, which otherwise would have been made from advertising.

50:06Rory Stewart:So we're in this very, very, very weird world. And then the other thing we've talked about, you were teasing me, what am I doing appearing on Piers Morgan? What am I doing appearing on Today's program? Today's program is very interesting because that's remained incredibly high. It's falling though. Falling, but not as fast as you'd think. It's been a 75 % collapse in the TV news. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Today's program is pretty constant. And then Piers Morgan, you were saying, well, nobody watches Piers Morgan. Well, the weird thing - No, no, no. I was saying, what were you doing on it? The weird thing is that gets picked up on YouTube, which again makes it even more complicated.

50:38Rory Stewart:Yeah, for sure. Which is not regulated either. So Ofcom's in a really, really weird world. But I agree with you. So if you are going to say newspapers and podcasts are one thing, people expect them to have political views, broadcasting is supposed to be impartial, then of course you can't have Nigel Farage regularly presenting a program. No, but I think if you read this full report, you will see this is deliberate systemic. Well, they should shut it down. They should just shut down. They should take its license. They will be loving this conversation, of course, because they'll say, oh, they're lefty bedwaters, they don't like it when it's their feet on the other boot.

51:09because the other thing that they've done is they managed to persuade people like Ofcom that the rest of the media is really left wing. We've got the most right wing newspapers basically on the planet. The BBC is constantly scared of his own shadow and is neither one thing or the other, rightly in my view. I'll tell you what I would say, if the Today program don't have Alan Rusbridger on at 8.10 talking about his report, I will say they're all part of the same bloody club. Anyway, listen, I think it's a brilliant, The New World is a brilliant magazine and this is a particularly brilliant piece of reporting and i'm really really glad they've done it and because we're fair rory and balanced unlike others the new world actually offered ofcom an interview or an article or some sort of response and they said they didn't have time to do an interview they gave a statement which says our rules around due impartiality and due accuracy in news are cornerstones of the broadcasting code they ensure that audiences are not misled and that they're exposed to an appropriate range of alternative views and perspectives.

52:07Well, we'll see how that stands up against the excellent piece by Mr. Rusbridger. GB News didn't respond to the New World's request for response, but they, of course, have often said that they call themselves fearless defenders of free speech in the United Kingdom. And the link to water is this, the final line of Alan's 12 pages in the New World is this, clean information is in theory as precious as clean water. We know what happened to water in this country is our national news going the same way what a link that's good isn't it okay let's go to water and tell us about dirty business well dirty business actually got me even angrier than the post office stuff because as you know i like to swim in cold water and it made me think in fact funny i was talking to somebody at the swimming pool this morning who also seen me and said i don't think i'll ever swim in a river again because you just can't trust it you can't trust what they say about it.

53:04So that Dirty Business is the story of these two middle-aged retired guys who notice that where they live down in near where David Cameron's old seat, Whitney, that the river Windrush is changing color. And they get very troubled by this and they sort of dig and dig and dig and dig. And essentially what they're finding is these massive sewage spills. And then woven through the story as they then try to campaign, one to get the truth, which they struggle to get because these agencies just lie to them all the time. But secondly, to get things improved. Weaving through this story are two stories based on fact.

53:44One of a young girl who walked through some human sewage on a beach in Dawlish, which had a blue flag, and she ended up dying. She died? She died. From infections, contracted from surgery. And people couldn't work out what was going on, but she died. And then another guy who, in a different water incident, contracted Meniere's disease, which was utterly life-changing. What is this disease? You sort of lose your balance all the time, and you have these kind of never-ending sort of vomiting fits. It was really horrible to watch.

54:18Rory Stewart:But the basic point is that human sewage is a very serious threat to human health. Yeah. And that actually stepping into these rivers and swimming them is not something you should do if there's human sewage fletching around. Well, the point is you don't know. So the Dawlish Beach had a blue flag. Right. Saying it was clean. Saying it was clean. And you saw the family basically trying to get some sense of justice, at least to find out why she died, and constantly being fobbed off and saying, well, you know, you sure she didn't eat something and all this sort of stuff? And it's really what makes it so compelling as television.

54:49The first thing is it doesn't hide what sewage is about. And what you see is the, and I'm afraid this goes back to Margaret Thatcher and privatization, there's just been a complete undermining of the systems that keep our water clean, whilst these companies are making fortunes. And what's more, you see, one of the worst things about the program is the guy who is in charge of the Environment Agency, which is meant to be the regulator, which is just, in this program, just comes over as complete bullshit industry. He ends up, at the end of the program, working for one of the water companies. So it's the old revolving door from regulator to business.

55:28It honestly drives you mad. And I've got to tell you, you're in it. I'm in it because I was the water minister. Well, you're sitting, there's a clip in the... They mix real footage from politics. So for example, there's a speech, Keir Starmer's regulation speech, which I didn't particularly enjoy. But you're sitting behind Liz Truss as she's sort of doing what ministers do, saying, oh no, we're dealing with it, da-da-da. I mean, what was your experience with the environment agents because they come across so badly. They look like a total failed operation. It's awful, right?

55:55Rory Stewart:I mean, firstly, I feel very loyal towards my teams. So I naturally felt very, very loyal towards the environment agency. And I really was proud to work with them during the flooding. I used to go out and I walked the super sewer down the Thames with them. I mean, I really took a lot of interest. And every week, my Monday morning started with a call with the chief executive and the chairman of the Environment Agency getting an update on what they'd done, what was going on, etc. I'd go and visit them in Bristol, I'd go and visit them up in York, I'd go and see them up in Cumbria. And I always felt as individuals, they were hardworking, dedicated, thoughtful people.

56:33Rory Stewart:They were very happy to jump in a car with me, go out to see a farmer if there was a protest. And then on the other hand, you have the other side of the story, which is every farmer saying to me, this is a criminal organization. When I see the Environment agency turn up, I want to hang myself. All the businesses saying the environment agency's got no idea what they're doing, local residents saying they're dreadful, these stories around the water companies. And then I'd go back to the environment agency and see these very kind of educated, polite, helpful people in their special things going around.

57:06Rory Stewart:A lot of them became friends of mine. And I liked a British diplomat who'd been our ambassador in India, ended up as chair the Environment Agency. In fact, I was briefly put up to be Chair of the Environment Agency. Fortunately, Boris Johnson scotched it because he hated me. But the reason they were considering me is I really was very interested in subject as water minister. I loved it. But all these things were completely true. So you're a revolving door point. One of the first things you noticed when you were a minister in this is that the water industry was very, very good at entertaining ministers, very good at suggesting just how much money you could make as a chief executive of a water company or how much money you can make on the border water company.

57:45Indeed, some of my

57:46Rory Stewart:colleagues followed that route, right? So that's a conflict of interest, right? Number two, guessing to the information. So the story that we were told again and again while this train wreck was happening, right? It's clear now looking at Thames Water that it's a train wreck beyond imagining. Disgusting, sewage overflowing, water not being provided, bills going through the roof, bonuses being paid out, private debt companies coming in, KKR being offered 3 billion quid and then walking away because apparently they can't make enough money off this. I mean, unbelievable, right? But the story that I heard again and again as the water minister, now going back 10 years, is water privatization had been one of the great unsung successes of all time that costs had been kept down.

58:33Rory Stewart:So you spent one pound a day on getting your water in and out, $20 billion of investment had gone in from the water companies and none of this would have happened if it had been kept in public hands was the argument that the investment wouldn't have happened and the costs would have gone up. Anyway, that was my experience as a water minister. The final thing is that when I tried to challenge OffWad and say, look, are you sure these water companies are really doing a good job? because I keep hearing from different people, their beaches are full of poo, etc. You would get these presentations which would say, this is all the improvement that we've done, we're a 5 % improvement this year, and this is the EU regulation, and this is the number of blue flags.

59:15Rory Stewart:So you're given the blue flag, right? As a minister, you have to be really persistent and curious. Okay, you've told me this is a blue flag. I'm going to that beach. Here's a piece of human poo on the beach. Why is there a blue flag? Yeah, but you're busy, aren't you? They know that busy, they know you can't visit every beach. And you're dealing with these very, very charming people. Now, let me push it even further. What would have happened if I'd gone completely ballistic, made this my obsession in the way that I did violence in prisons and really started saying, I think these water companies are crooks.

59:45Rory Stewart:I think the whole system is screwed. I think our beaches are filthy, right? And I think we as the Treasury need to spend 20 billion pounds more on sorting out the sewage system. Pretty soon, I think people would have been saying to the Prime Minister, whoever the Prime Minister was, I'm afraid your minister's gone a bit tonto. He doesn't really understand what he's talking about. He doesn't really understand the Treasury implications. He's embarrassing the government. He's asking all questions. How are we going to get investment in from KKR if this guy keeps suggesting that he's Well, there was a very interesting exchange that I tweeted about this, and somebody sent me an exchange between Barry Gardner, the Labour MP, and he was grilling Emma Reynolds, the Environment Secretary.

1:00:20And Barry really had his facts on him. He used to grill me too. Yeah, he's quite a good griller. quite a good gorilla. And he really was going for her. And when you boil down what she was saying, without wanting maybe to say in these terms, she was kind of saying, yeah, but listen, Barry, the only way to do this is to take it back fully into public ownership. And there just isn't the money for that.

1:00:40Rory Stewart:So one of my heroes, as you know, is Dieter Helm. And I might try to see if we can persuade him to do a little bit for the newsletter on this, because he thinks about this a lot. But essentially, he says, in the end, you've got to bear in mind that someone's got to pay. Yep. Someone's got to bear the risk and someone's got to finance it. So who's going to pay? Is the government going to pay? Is the person with their bill going to pay? Or are you going to ask a private company to pay? And who's going to take the risk if it goes wrong? I mean, if the sewer turns up on the beach, is it the private company that's going to take the risk?

1:01:11Rory Stewart:Is it the government that's going to take the risk? England is the only country in the world with a fully privatized water system. Only one in the world. So if we renationalize, we've got to understand that in the end, the government's going to have to take the cost. And there's no desire from the government to do it. In fact, what the government's doing in John Kupfer's report, I'm afraid, may be the worst of all worlds, which is suggesting that Ofwatt's going to be beefed up and interfere even more in a pretty arbitrary way with these companies, which will just drive the cost of financing up.

1:01:43Rory Stewart:So let's say you're some, I don't know, massive American fund, and you're trying to persuade them to come in. And why is the government persuading massive American funds to The bottom line is the government doesn't want to pay and they don't want the householder to pay. So their idea is that somehow some complicated international private finance debt structure is going to come in, take over Thameswater, and the question is why? Why would they take it over? Well, presumably because they think they're going to make money. But in order to make money, that company needs to know there's a predictable revenue stream.

1:02:14Rory Stewart:If Cunliffe has set off an off wall, which every year or two politicians stand up in the House of Commons or Channel 4 produce the news program saying, these companies are horrible, we need to hit their bottom line, they can't be paying their bonuses, they've got to take the risk. Well, they'll say fine, but I'm going to charge you more. If you're going to have an unstable regulatory environment and you're going to say that I have to take all the risk, well then the cost to the government of me, KKR, whoever producing this 3 billion, is going to go through the roof. So we've got to keep coming back to this question because somebody's got to pay for it.

1:02:47Rory Stewart:Absolutely. I mean, it. Macquarie is the private sector villain of the piece in terms of this program on Channel 4. But honestly, I really do recommend people watch it because it's, I mean, it's a drama, but you've got these two guys who have actually, they've done an interview for our newsletter this week. They call Ash Smith and Peter Hammond. And you can sign up for the newsletter in the description below. They're beautifully played. You've got these wonderful shows where they go along to these meetings where they're being bullshitted and they sort of look at each other and they're like, this can't be right, can it?

1:03:19They're not sort of shouty kind of people, but you see through the series, you just see a system that's broken and everybody who has a vested interest in the system not being broken saying that it's not broken. But the figures are stunning. 585 ,000 times sewage was dumped into our waterways in 2024. And they have this line it's only when it's heavy rain, and that is bullshit too.

1:03:45Rory Stewart:So this experience though that you've described of going to a meeting, sitting there and just thinking quietly, this doesn't quite make sense, this can't quite be right, is I'm afraid the experience of British citizens in so many bits. If I'm trying to get to the bottom of why my constituents are angry, I don't know whether this is your Liam Burns book on populism touches on this. The biggest driver of anger I felt with my constituents was the sense that something was going clearly wrong. Something's wrong with their school, something's wrong with their hospital. I remember famously this old woman saying to me, I don't need to pay to go to Switzerland to get killed, I can just go into the Cumberland Infirmary.

1:04:23Rory Stewart:Or your fields have been flooded or people are rewilding. Let's imagine you're a farmer suddenly. Let's take what's happening actually at the moment today in Cumbria. The whole Lowther Valley all the way from Penrith down to Kendal has got into a government rewilding scheme which is basically driving sheep off the fells, leading to a lot of farms being closed and essentially trying to create a native wilderness, right? And it's really disruptive for traditional landscapes, farmers, communities, schools, etc. You turn up to a meeting as an ordinary person, let's say you're a Cumberland farmer, and what do you meet?

1:04:58Rory Stewart:You meet a bank of people in lovely fleeces saying environment agency, natural England, national park. You have people who've done master's degrees in environmental science in Manchester, you have government regulation, you have lawyers, and they're all telling you it's the only thing to do. And they make you feel stupid. You stick up your hand and say, well, this can't make sense because there's gorse and bracken all over the hillside. And how am I supposed to make a living when I'm going to sheep and I'm going to sell my farm? It's the same with inheritance tax. I mean, that was a really interesting one with farmers, right?

1:05:30Rory Stewart:The farmers are like, this inheritance tax is going to kill us. And the government says, no, no, no. If you look at the figures, it's not going to affect any of you." And they're like, well, that's just not true. It's going to affect me all of us. It's wiped out. And the government's saying, no, no, if you look at the figures. So this really weird world that we've created, and sometimes it's about lawyers, sometimes it's about quangos, sometimes about agencies, but it's also a lot about class. It's about people often from cities with advanced degrees telling people who have less resources, less education, less power to just put up with stuff that they know is no good.

1:06:05Well, I think what it is, it's the state through our political system, the way that people get elected, the way that governments are formed, basically saying, whatever problem you face in the world, we can fix it for you. But actually, once you've contracted out most of the fixing to people whose motivations are completely different. So I talk about 585 ,000 sewage bills in 2024, shareholders of the UK water companies were taking out a billion in dividends for what surely is reward for failure. And so I think it's that sense of the state failing. But the state partly fails because those at the top of it, across all the parties, basically say, we can fix everything for you.

1:06:50And you can't. And I think a little bit more honesty on that front would be no bad thing. But I think this is two cases of, I think, Thatcher is, you know, Thatcher's a lot of the stuff that's wrong with our country today, I think is down to Thatcher. Water privatization, to me, is absolutely a symbol of it. The Environment Agency funding was massively cut during the austerity period. And then Ofcom, I mean, you know, God knows what they do. God knows what they do, because here's something happening on their watch. Well, what are they doing? I don't know. I mean, if they're not shutting down GB News.

1:07:20I mean, we can - They've got loads of work to do. I'm sure they do lots, you know, telecoms and all that stuff.

1:07:25Rory Stewart:We can debate whether or not they should be regulating broadcasting in a completely different way to podcasting. But if that's their job, do it. But I think, honestly, I think what people will be amazed at, I kind of felt a little bit because the way that these people speak, okay, these bullshit merchants when they're dealing with staff, some of the environment agency staff in the drama are basically, you know, what are you doing? You're not doing your job. you're not letting us do our job. They do this thing called self-monitoring, where essentially the water companies decide when they're spilling out stuff that they shouldn't be, and they have the responsibility then to tell the environmental agency when they're doing terrible things.

1:08:04Well, hey, guess what? They say it's not going wrong. And so you've got people who are really complaining about it, wanting to do it, and you have these sort of suits and PR merchants who are basically just giving a line.

1:08:16Rory Stewart:There's been some amazing comic, I mean, maybe just finishing on this, we could share these amazing short YouTube comedy sketches on how the water companies do this. And actually, the trick seems to be that they start with empathy and then move to super specific detail, which you can't follow. It's to do with this exact widget on this particular control that you can't do this now. There's a great character in it, who's the guy who's looking after the sewage works. And he's this one little character, he just keeps saying oh i hate my life oh what a horrible job anyway it's really really really good so there you are people dirty business in the new world they're your two cultural references for the week thank you very much see you soon bye

1:09:06Rory Stewart:thought sweet green was just salads think again there's a new way to do sweet green Wrapped and ready, these handheld wraps pack bold flavor and 40-plus grams of protein into something hearty, satisfying, and built for life on the go. From craveable sauces to satisfying textures, they're designed to keep you going without slowing you down. So put that fork down. Try the new wraps today in app or at order.sweetgreen.com. Available at participating locations only.