524. Starmer’s Mandelson Mess and the Iranian Nuclear Threat

23:05And where I thought Kemi Baden-Ock has been quite strong in recent days, I think she went way over the top on day one, but I think actually in the Commons, she was quite effective. But one of the points she's making is that this is the guy who also said, you know, any organization I lead, the buck stops with me. That is exactly as it has to be. I think Ollie Robbins, I don't think anybody who's ever worked with Ollie Robbins thinks he's anything other than, you know, what you kind of want in a civil servant. He's a very, very effective civil servant. And there will be some repair work now to be done between the government, ministers of the government and the civil service.

23:40And this also sends out a message to people who might think about becoming civil servants. I still think it's a very good thing to do. But you've got to feel that your work is going to be valued and you're not going to get chucked under the bus when stuff gets tough.

23:52Rory Stewart:And I think if you feel, as Starmer clearly does, that there's something that needs to be improved in the way the civil service functions, where's the reform package? I mean, you know, he insults the civil service, says they're on the warm bath of tepid decline. He keeps firing senior civil servants. But where is the systematic thought about training, recruitment, promotion, culture, which would actually end up with a much better civil service in 20 years' time? If you do talk, as I do, to him and to ministers and to others, there is quite a lot of complaining goes on about the civil service in terms of, you know, we want to change this.

24:27And then they come back with 25 reasons why they can't change it or whatever. But I think this goes back to my point. This is why I think sometimes people, when I go about narrative and storytelling, they think it's all this sort of spin stuff. The civil service need to know what the story is, too. They need to know what your big picture is. They need to know what your priorities are. They need to know what your character is. They need to know where you are trying to take the country. That is where they take that direction. So I suspect, and I don't know whether Ollie Robbins would say anything like this, but I suspect in part he will have been driven in the managing of this process by thinking, well, Keir Starmer's character, as I know it, I've got to be absolutely rigorous about following the process, which is what he seems to have done.

25:10And so, look, it's a mess. There's no getting out of it. This is a mess.

25:15Rory Stewart:This is also, I think, where Starmer's got himself in the mud. My final point is, Starmer's sometimes suggesting that the law meant, it seems bizarre, but he's claiming the law meant that the civil servants were not allowed to tell politicians about the developed vetting process. If that's true, then he has no reason to fire Ollie Robbins. Which is one of the points that Kimi Badeknot made yesterday. Anyway, listen, I think that Kirsten was getting to a place around the new year where the economy did look like it was picking up a bit. The rumblings had sort of, you know, died down a little bit.

25:48But there was, I think it's fair to say there was a lot of rumbling going on over the weekend. And I think yesterday he got through it. I think Ollie Robbins has been very Ollie Robbins-ish in being very kind of, you know, calm and thorough and methodical. all. But I think he's said two or three things today that make life even more difficult for Keir Starler.

26:07Rory Stewart:Okay. Well, Alistair, thank you. And let's take a quick break. And when we come back from the break, let's get on to the subject of Iran and Sudan. This episode is sponsored by Starling, the bank that helps you organize your money, build great habits and stay in control of your spending. Plenty of us have strong opinions on how to run the country, but knowing how to manage your own day to day can be more of a challenge, especially when it comes to being good with money. That kind of self-assured self-governance could start with just checking your balance daily. And yes, it can feel like opening the books at the Treasury, but eventually you'll feel like the chancellor of your own ideal exchequer.

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27:18Rory Stewart:Pepsi Prebiotic Cola, an original and cherry vanilla. That Pepsi taste you love with no artificial sweeteners and three grams of prebiotic fibre. Pepsi Prebiotic Cola. Unbelievably Pepsi. Hi, everybody. It's Dominic Samarick here from The Rest Is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest Is Politics, when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Rest Is History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now, we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise, people are arguing about Europe, the government has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say, governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues and people are asking if Britain is governable at all.

28:28So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on The Rest is History, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson.

29:00And we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts.

29:37Welcome back to The Rest is Politics. I'm me, Alistair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. So let's move from the UK to the rest of the world. Let's talk about Iran. I am confused. Is J.D. Vance going to be in Islamabad? Are there going to be more talks? What do we know?

29:53Rory Stewart:Well, what we know at the moment we're recording is that J.D. Vance is intending to go, and the Iranians are making noises, but it's not clear whether they will attend. And Trump, of course, is going back and forth between saying he's on the cusp of a deal to then boarding vessels. One thing I've got from listeners, which I think is probably worth doing a little bit on, is a lot of people saying we often refer to the JCPOA without explaining what it was. So this is the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. And it's the deal which Obama, but not just Obama, actually France, Britain, Germany, China, Russia, all brought together with Iran in order to deal with the Iranian nuclear program.

30:34Rory Stewart:And the reason why it's maybe worth doing a short explainer on it is that in the end, the nuclear thing is the big existential question with Iran. There's the horrifying behavior of this loathsome regime and the way that it treats its own people. But I don't think anyone believes that's the reason why the United States or Israel attacked. There's the question of proxies and missiles. But the real existential threat that has been pushed by Netanyahu and others since the early 1990s is Iran's nuclear program. And the JCPOA is an amazing example of a world in which we actually seem to really solve it.

31:11Rory Stewart:And maybe three things to get across. Number one, it worked. This was an amazing deal, which until Trump came along and wrecked it, managed to get a massive reduction in the amount of stockpiles that Iran had, uranium stockpiles, a reduction in the enrichment down to a very low later, and an inspection regime, which allowed inspectors in very, very regularly to make sure that Iran was not enriching and a limit on the number of centrifuges, and in return, sanctions relief. And it's a really great example of the way we used to do business in the world before Trump. It was very complicated. It took two and a half years to negotiate.

31:53Rory Stewart:There was a 180-page document. It was very, very technical. There was ambiguity, which is why the Republican and right and Israel could attack it. Because of course, what it really did is meant that Iran was always kept about 12 months away from being able to have enough of the uranium stockpile to have the fissile material for a warhead. But it worked. Trump comes along, throws it out of the window in 2018, and we end up in a much, much worse situation. So instead of uranium enrichment, kept at about 3%. And the really difficult stuff with uranium enrichment, nuclear bombs, getting from 3 % to 20%, the Iranians got up to 60%.

32:34Rory Stewart:And getting from 60 % to 90%, which is what you need for your nuclear weapon, is much quicker. So by the time Trump was launching with Netanyahu this 12-day war last year, Iran was in a situation when it was potentially only about 28 days away from being able to create enough enriched uranium. Now, that isn't everything, because they were still a very, very long way away from being able to fit it into a well-functioning warhead, let alone getting anywhere near the kind of missiles that the US or the Soviet Union has or Russia has today. But just to keep coming back, JCPOA, well negotiated, very, very detailed.

33:18Rory Stewart:And the final point, of course, is what's mad about what Trump and Vance is doing? Well, what's mad is that they're basically trying to do some new version of the JCPOA. But as you pointed out in our last podcast, instead of spending two and a half years negotiating it, they think they can get it down in a single night in Islamabad. And yeah, so the JCPO took about roughly about a decade. The piece I quoted from Foreign Affairs magazine, co-authored by Federica Mogherini, who was the Italian negotiator who worked on the whole thing, and who made the point that the lesson that is being taken out of this by the Iranians is thought, oh yeah, we better listen to the Americans now and give it all up, is they're going to think, no, my God, if they can attack us like this, then we're going to need the ultimate deterrent, as it were.

34:05Now, they've discovered, and they're now using another deterrent in the form of the straight Hormuz, but I was talking this week to somebody who has been, who works in the region, who has been in the region quite a lot, who was British, tearing his hair out, saying, the Americans have got no idea what they're dealing with. The idea that the Iranians are going to, on the back of this campaign, in the way that it's been done, with the damage that's been done and the people they've killed, the Americans keep saying how great it is that they've taken out all the top levels, okay? He was saying that is what is making them even more determined on the nuclear front.

34:44That the nuclear, you know, when we talk about red lines in these situations, and there's Vance going to Islamabad if he is going, and with Kushner and Wyckoff, for these hapless negotiators that Trump still seems to believe in, even though, you know, for the 10 wars that he claims is solved, I can't really point to any of it. You could actually say they've done a good job. But this guy was saying that the red line has got a lot redder in the Iranian mindset. The Americans still think that they're winning.

35:10Rory Stewart:And partly, I think what your friend is picking up on is that since the senior leadership was killed, you've removed the only people who really remember the normal world of Iran, or the more normal world of Iran before the revolution. So all the new generation are people who've grown up in the Islamic Republic in this paranoid, theocratic, the world is trying to destroy a state. And you've got a big split between people like the foreign minister Arachi who put out this tweet saying they were going to open the Straits of Hormuz and the Revolutionary Guard Corps, this kind of heavily militarized, theocratic organization, which is very suspicious of him and has always been much, much more hardline and never liked the JCPOA in the first place.

35:53Rory Stewart:So a real question of who are you negotiating with, who can really deliver? And then stepping out to the next stage, how do you get a negotiation together where one side is a bunch of paranoid, theocratic, militarized Iranians who are fighting for their existential survival and they're trying to sweat every sentence around exactly how uranium enrichment works and where the monitoring is on the one hand and on the other hand. An American regime, which seems completely careless, feckless, incapable of defining what its real objectives are, hardly paying any attention, largely interested in generating social media stories, making strange comments about Jesus, showing films of Marines rappelling onto boats.

36:39Rory Stewart:What is that negotiation? How do you have a negotiation between this kind of grimly serious paranoid regime on the one hand, and Trump who can't quite decide whether he cares about what's happening in the stock markets, oil markets, or not? Well, and on that, by the way, why is this such little coverage? Every time I mention Kushner there, even I've fallen into this, where we describe him as a negotiator. I mean, the level of corruption related to just his existence there. This is a guy who became a billionaire during the first term on the back of his dealings, partly on the back of his dealings with the Saudis.

37:12And he's now just, it's just sort of given within the American system that this guy is the negotiator. And you said earlier, Rory, about Trump sort of moving one way or the other. Somebody said, no, right? So on Friday, Trump said, the situation with the strait is over. Okay? Well, it's not. On the same day, he said Iran had agreed never to close the strait again. The next day, they closed the strait. On Sunday, he said Vance isn't going to Pakistan for talks, and the White House press release at the same time said that he was. Yesterday, he said Vance had left to go to Islamabad, and the White House said he was going the next day, i.e.

37:52today, yesterday. He says Iran have got no military anymore, but then complained about these gunboats that were attacking tankers in the strait. He said the Pope had said Iran can have a nuclear weapon. He never said any such thing. He said the gulping attack was a surprise. Years of evidence that that's what Iran said they would do if this happened. And then he said that the US only lost planes to friendly fire in Iran, which he said at an event where he'd just been speaking about Iran shooting down an American plane. This is not clear. It's not clear.

38:28Rory Stewart:And it means that if you're negotiating with Kushner and Witkopf, you have one set of problems, which is that they're not on top of the technical details. So as you can imagine, the Iranians are obsessed with how you do verification, what the difference between 3.7 % enrichment is, 20 % enrichment, exactly what type of devices you use to do your enrichment, whether you can move from gas to solid state, all these technical questions, right? And they can't do that. Second problem you've raised, Jared Kushner is a massive example of what we covered in the first half, which is this question of security clearance, right?

39:04Rory Stewart:Jared Kushner doesn't have a formal job in the government. He's President Trump's son-in-law. He was denied security clearance in 2018 and was then overruled by Trump, who granted him permanent security clearance, and Trump won. As far as we can see in Trump too, none of this is happening at all. The guy doesn't even have a job in government, And yet he's doing negotiation. But the third problem is, even if you get a deal with Vance or Kush or Witkoff, and of them, and it sticks in my gullet to say, Vance seems to be the most serious. And Vance's aide seems to have some idea about how to deal with Iran and some knowledge of how to deal with Iran.

39:39Rory Stewart:As soon as they get on a plane back to Washington, you have no guarantee that Trump isn't going to say, while they're on the plane, by the way, I reject everything my negotiators have negotiated. Yeah, absolutely. It's an utterly dysfunctional system. Shall we talk about Sudan? I mean, I don't think there's much that we can say that we haven't said before, but I think it's worth recognizing that it's probably the worst war in the world right now. I'm not saying, you know, I don't want to have a league table of wars, but Sudan is kind of almost uniquely horrific, both the scale and the horror. And we're now into the fourth year.

40:17And there is so little attention to it. There was a meeting in Berlin last week, and quite a lot of the big powers were there. But I kind of felt, I'm not denigrating them at all, and it's right that they should sit and talk and try to work out how to resolve this thing. But it sort of felt like the world's saying, oh, God, maybe this is what we're doing in the podcast. We better do something about Sudan, because we're coming up to the third anniversary. But you don't have a sense of the international community really with its eye on this in a way that you can see any way forward.

40:46Rory Stewart:Well, in a way, Sudan is the canary in the mines. Sudan is really what shows what goes wrong in the new Trump world. I mean, this is a conflict where, as you've pointed out, hundreds of thousands have been killed. Millions have been displaced. Tens of millions are now facing food insecurity, where there is credible reports of genocide, rape, and it's being driven as a proxy war. Right. This is a war basically driven by the United Arab Emirates funding. And there's so many credible reports on their bases in Chad and their relation with Hermetti, the RSF. And on the other hand, support coming in for the Sudanese armed forces, which retake in Khartoum from Egypt, Turkey, and the use of Iranian drones.

41:34Rory Stewart:Now, this is exactly the kind of situation that the international, much lamented, hypocritical global world order was set up to try to deal with, right? If you cannot deal with a situation in Sudan, of course you can't deal with Iran. Of course you can't deal with Ukraine. Go back 10 years, 15 years, the response would have been pretty straightforward. The United States would have deployed a really big, serious super envoy. the european union britain britain of course has historical connections to sudan would have got involved the african union would have got involved pressure would have been put on uae egypt turkey and there would be a real attempt you know in jedda with saudi or in geneva to try to work out a peace deal to stop something which is now obliterating tens of millions of lives yeah Instead of which, all the instruments, almost everything I've mentioned, people just groan.

42:32Rory Stewart:If I mention the African Union, the United Nations, UN special envoys, US special envoys, pressure on UAE, everyone's like, forget it. Right. Even a relatively, in global terms, a medium-sized power like the United Arab Emirates appears now to be able to operate, or Israel, with complete impunity. There don't seem to be any leverage or control at all over what these people can do, and in the case of UAE, what they might be doing in the Horn of Africa. But you could extend it. You can talk about what's happening in Libya. You can talk about what's happening in Sahel. And I just think we need to keep coming about Sudan for the sake of the horror of Sudan, but also because it tells us so much about a world which is unraveling.

43:14Rory Stewart:I mean, this is the really clearest example of that unraveling. Yeah. And it's unraveling at a pace and amid a geopolitical and media climate of alongside the impunity of those who are carrying out these atrocities, a kind of indifference. There's been such little media coverage of the war in Sudan. If Trump, and this is the Trump genius, and it's what gives us Trump derangement syndrome. If Trump were suddenly to say on True Social, we mustn't forget about Sudan, and start to have an opinion and voice view, we'd sort of think, oh, well, something's happening. But then, you know, it would just be for the sake of the True Social pose, not because he wanted actually to do something about Sudan.

44:01So it is, I was reading the Spiegel at the weekend, they call it the, you know, they've done quite a lot in Sudan, but they call it the Forgotten War. And it has, I think, become that. And on the point about sexual violence, Rory, I was at an event yesterday with Carey Mulligan, the actress who's an ambassador for War Child, and she's been to Sudan in the near past. And some of the stories she was telling about the scale of, and of course, we can have the stats, you know, Medecins Sans Frontières, they said there had been 4 ,000 cases of sexual violences at facilities that it was working in. 97 % of the victims were men or girls in South Darfur, 20 % under 18, including 41 children under five.

44:45And their report said sexual violence is now part of everyday life for these people in most parts of Sudan. and Kerry was sort of talking about she was making the point that you know you hear the statistics but then you hear the stories of these children just saying what happened to them and the trauma they're then living with without any kind of support to to deal with that trauma in fact the trauma then increased by the fact that they've been displaced there's food there's food insecurity and what have you and I just think we've lost there's something gone badly wrong with the world's moral compass, that we know that's going on.

45:22We can read the stats, but actually there's not much that we feel we can do about it because we think the people in power aren't up for taking it on. It's horrible.

45:32Rory Stewart:Question just to finish maybe this episode, and maybe brings us back to Iran. I was trying to get my head around this in terms of Trump and what you think about Trump and his motivations. So I keep being stuck in the slightly lame position of saying it's impossible really to predict what Trump's going to do next. And I can't quite work out whether that's a piece of immense wisdom or just a total cop-out. But let's just take the Iran thing. So there are three broad possibilities. Number one, he ends the war, ends the blockade, announces victory down. Number two, he just keeps the blockade running indefinitely while these talks go on.

46:15Rory Stewart:Number three, he actually starts deploying Marines and ups the ante and goes back to violent conflict again. And if he did number one, we might say, okay, he's ending the war because he's bored of it, or maybe he's actually worried about the midterms and Republicans and others are putting pressure on him about gas prices in the US. And he's worried about the stock market and the oil price. Number two, he keeps going. Well, he keeps going with the blockade because it turns out he doesn't actually care that much about the gas price. And most of the consequences are being felt by Europe, by the Middle East, by Asia, whose economies are being wrecked by this.

46:51Rory Stewart:But the consequences for Europe, Middle East and Asia are much more profound than they are for Trump and he doesn't care. Number three, he puts in the Marines and ups the ante because somehow his pride is offended and he wants to do something sort of spectacular in order to demonstrate that he's the tough guy. How do you think about this? How can one work out which of those three is most likely? I honestly don't think we can, because it goes back to a point we've made right from the start of this war, is that it's never been clear what his big strategic purpose is. And unless you have that, if you're dealing with somebody who's volatile, unpredictable, driven by spasm, tweeting through the night, making policy, as you say, regardless of what the facts are with the people who are actually on the ground, then it's impossible to work it out.

47:43There's no doubt he wants the war to end. There's no doubt that whatever the circumstances in which the war ended, he will claim with the backing of the sort of MAGA machine. Although I think the MAGA machine is getting a bit frayed by this. I don't know if you saw the interview with Tucker Carlson recently, where he's basically saying, you know, he's kind of ashamed to have backed Trump to the extent that he did. And he feels he's misled people by, you know, we always knew there was a character issue, but maybe it's a lot worse than we thought. And I mean, you know, So you've got to be pretty blind not to see that one.

48:14But so I don't think you can predict. And I think that's what does actually give us the Trump derangement syndrome, because with most leaders, with Putin, you can kind of work out where he's coming from. With Xi Jinping, you work out where he's coming from. By the way, on China, Roy, did you see that graph that I sent you about China's export of solar and EV and batteries? It's gone. The graph goes like that. And then suddenly Trump goes to war in Iran. and people start to think, oh shit, another oil price shot coming and bang, it goes like that. So I don't know. I think we could all go mad predicting what Donald Trump might do next.

48:49One thing that I have noticed talking to a few Americans is how much they're saying, we've kind of stopped listening as much as we did. Now you and I are finding that impossible, partly because we have to talk about it, but also because he's so kind of high volume. But now of those three, I think this is going to be, I said this right at the start, I think this is going to be a longer war than people imagine because I think the Iranians are prepared to endure more than the Americans think. And the Iranians, I think, have a couple of pretty big cards that they're not going to play anytime soon.

49:23Rory Stewart:Okay, well, on that slightly depressing note, and the big theme that we'll keep returning to, I fear, for many months to come, which is how on earth one makes sense of what the US is doing and his incredible carelessness, That's fecklessness. Yeah. Lack of focus. Thank you very much. See you soon. Bye-bye.