528. Trump vs. Germany and Farage’s £5m ‘Gift’

23:41Well, you know, we spoke to Radek Sikorsky on leading a few weeks ago. And of course, famously, he said that, what was the phrase he used? He said that I fear German power less than I'm beginning to fear German inactivity. So I think, and Tusk this week, Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, and you're right, there's this curious relationship because the president is, you know, let's say more leaning towards the Kremlin. Tusk is very much leaning towards Europe and the West, but has also been quite critical of the Americans and the way they've conducted themselves in relation to Ukraine. But Tusk has basically said he's worried about NATO collapsing from within.

24:17What he means, I think he means America. America. I'm glad we talked about this. I think Germany is central to this European debate. I think that the worries, the political problems that Germany, that Merz is having, are making the leadership role that you're suggesting you should carve out more difficult to do. Maybe he should have gone to this big event in Armenia. But meanwhile, what it shows is something we've talked about before. They're all just having to assess and reassess what it means to be a European leader at a time when Europe's closest historic post-war ally, the United States, no longer feels like it's either close or, in some instances, like it's even an ally.

25:01Rory Stewart:Good. Well, it's a great line to go for a break on. So let's take a break and come back to the UK equivalent of the travails which Metz is facing with the AFD, which is the question of our own May elections and what's going to happen to Labour, Conservatives, reform the greens the lib dems plied the smp and many others all right here we go 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.

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27:01Rory Stewart:welcome back to the rest of this politics with me rory stewart and me alistair campbell and now we're going as promised to get into the local elections which is big news because what is happening seems to be a seismic shift in british politics and we'll talk about the fact that often these are kind of overblown and the headlines try to make local elections more exciting they are but it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that something really fundamental is changing. We'll look at some of the figures. It could be thousands of seats being lost, reform in a completely different position, not just in England, but potentially in Scotland too.

27:36Rory Stewart:And the way in which Labour responds to this, are there going to be leadership challenges against Starmer? And how in the end do we get to grips with the figure of Nigel Farage? So much more to do. Where do you want to start, Alistair? So Rory, May the 7th, I'm sure most people in the UK know this, but maybe our listeners around the world not yet fully up to speed, but we've got very big local elections, more than 5 ,000 council seats across 136 local authorities in England, the Scottish Parliament, 129 Holyrood seats, and also the Senedd in Wales. So essentially, you've got the equivalent of national elections, general elections in Scotland and Wales, and very big council elections and not giving away too many secrets if I say that the polling suggests that Thursday into Friday on the weekend is going to be very very difficult for Labour pretty difficult for the Tories that reform and the Greens look like they're going to do pretty well and that it is and possibly that Ply the Welsh Nationalist Party will for the first time ever we will have non-Labour election winner in Wales.

28:47The Labour Party in Wales has got the longest winning record of any party in any country in any democracy in history. And it looks like that's going to go.

28:58Rory Stewart:We've become, weirdly by accident, sort of almost mini-veteran local election commentators, because we did a local election quite soon after we came in in 2022, too. And we've done a number of them. I've been looking back a little bit at it. And there's two themes. One is the tendency of the headlines in the newspapers to really lean into the local elections, every local election, I think, and it's probably been going on for 20, 30 years, saying, this is existential, this local election will decide the fate of the prime minister. And the second one is the one that you've pointed to, which is the Ken Baker phenomenon, which is, remind people of the Ken Baker phenomenon and how it operates and how it might apply to this too.

29:38Rory Stewart:The Ken Baker phenomenon, he was in charge of the Conservative Party strategy at a time when Labour were about to do very well in local elections against the Tories and he persuaded the media, and given our media is so right-wing, not difficult to persuade them at the time, that the only results worth looking at were Westminster and Wandsworth. If the Tories could hold on to Westminster and Wandsworth, it was a triumph. so and i just think that there may be some of that going on but the problem is our media is generally so biased against labor but i think particularly there was an interview this week with the actor mark gattis who um you know he's a pretty well-known and very very good actor and he was doing an interview i think it was on the new statesman and he was making the point which is a point i hear more regularly than i ever see it on the media which is basically that and he actually said, look, Keir Starmer's not Tony Blair, okay?

30:33He's not that charismatic. He's not that exciting. But my God, the way the media talk about him, you think he was Vlad the Impaler. And also, it does really annoy me. And I'm trying to be self-critical here because I did the same when I was a journalist. You have these local elections. You barely leave London. You don't go and torture any of the local candidates. You just turn the whole thing into a gigantic opinion Bowl about back then Thatcher, then the Tories, and now with Keir Starmer. But the truth is, it is going to be terrible. In that, it's going to remind people that just less than two years ago, Labour went by a landslide.

31:09And at the outer end of some of the predictions, we're talking about possibly the biggest loss or percentage loss of council seats that there has ever been. but I think that's partly because Labour is now as we've said many many times being attacked from from two sides you look at somewhere like Sunderland which has been you know Labour till I die as they say it it looks like you know reform can take that's that part of the world and meanwhile some of the London councils are going to go to the Greens and because this focus has been so much on Keir Starmer will he survive will there be a challenge all that stuff which is perfectly legitimate questions, by the way.

31:50But what it means is, one, there's been so little debate about what these local elections are actually about in each locality, including my own where I live in Camden. But secondly, I think that the two challengers, or those that are seen as the main challengers, it means that they are not getting anything like the scrutiny that they should be getting for what their actual policies for local government are. So for example, I saw a leaflet from the Green Party here in Camden the other day. It was about, the leaflet I saw, I think, from memory was about Gaza and proportional representation. Well, very interesting to have views on that, but they don't exactly, they're not going to affect my counsel that much.

32:29And likewise, you know, Nigel Farage, I'm honestly, I'm at the double standards at the heart of the coverage of this five million pound donation that he's taken from a guy who's given another X million to the party, but 5 million that he took from this crypto guy, Harbourn in Thailand, within the 12-month period before he became an MP, didn't declare it, and now is asking us all to believe that this was a donation with no strings attached to pay for his security. And it's not even, it's barely a story, Rory. Can you imagine if Keir Starmer, who remember got lacerated for having his specs bought for him and his wife getting a few dresses from Waheed Ali.

33:12Can you imagine if that was him? So the media, which keeps telling us that Farage might be the next prime minister, still cover him like he's just a kind of, you know, celebrity influencer.

33:24Rory Stewart:Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? I mean, it's part of the Trump phenomenon too. I mean, the scale of corruption. I was talking to people in the financial industry this week. All of them have been looking at these trades And the way in which just before Trump sends out a tweet on Iran, people who appear to be very close to the White House are buying or selling oil and making hundreds of millions in a few seconds. There's been some extraordinary reporting around the way that crypto buys influence. We were just in the Balkans where political operators were talking completely openly about giving hotel contracts to Trump's family, giving$20 million to Trump aides in order to get access, etc.

34:02Rory Stewart:And somehow, what's interesting about Trump and Farage is by being anti-elitist, we're shaking up the establishment, we're not like them. Somehow, also, none of the rules apply. The kind of things that would make you enraged if Keir Starmer did them, because the public would think, this is totally hypocritical, he's been found out. If Farage or Trump does it, it's sort of priced in, isn't it? They sort of manage to create a personality where everyone just shrugs their shoulders and says, well, that's, you know, at least he's not pretending to be anything he isn't. Yeah, but he is pretending to be something he's not, because they're saying that they're anti-elite.

34:37There's nothing more elitist than using the system to, you know, to make yourself even wealthier, which, of course, is what Trump and his family are doing. And, you know, this is a story, as I say, about media double standards, without a doubt. but it's also a story about a country in part because of our media that if we're not careful is doing in America and it's sleepwalking to a Trump style populism and if people go back to the series that we did with Liam Byrne about populism his three A's appeasement autocracy and avarice and we saw with Orbán it took over a decade for the Hungarians to decide Orbán's you know too greedy for his own good but what we see with Trump what we're seeing with Farage is the link between right-wing populism and the obsession with using politics to make money, whether that's cameos at 80 quid a whack to say happy birthday, or it's taking what could end up as tens of millions from crypto billionaires.

35:32This from a man, by the way, who's on the record in the past as saying one of his complaints about politics, you can't get rich. So you say it's priced in, it's only priced in if the media decides, well, it's a story if it's Keir Starmer, or it's a story if it's Angela Rayner, but it's not a story if it's Nigel Farage or Jenrick. Jenrick is under police investigation over a donation. How many of our viewers and listeners are even aware of that? If that had been Ed Miliband, if that had been Andy Burnham, it would have led the news.

36:01Rory Stewart:Yeah, quick explainer there. The claim is that somebody who gave a £100 ,000 donation to Jenrick has said, it seems that a large chunk of that, I think£37 ,000 of that came from an ineligible foreign donor who gave the money through this vehicle and it's being investigated by the police at the moment. Must put on the record, of course, that Robert Jenrick absolutely denies that any electoral rule has been broken. He denies that he's ever met or heard from the guy that is supposed to have given him the money and no charges have been brought against Robert Jenrick. Reminder, though, again, about the structure of the elections, just take you back to the kind of big, big picture again.

36:37Rory Stewart:So 2025 was the moment where fragmentation became kind of structure, where British politics, we've been telling a story for four years really, and watching it from a situation in which Labour and Conservatives very much dominated. This was a country which was defined by a two-party system towards these five or six party system that's emerged. And it was almost precisely a year ago that we suddenly had this moment where reform broke through, took, I think, 670 council seats from near zero, took the mayoralty in Lincolnshire and Hull. But it was the last election, there weren't that many Labour seats up for grabs.

37:19Rory Stewart:I calculated, I think there were 460 seats up last time for Labour, of which they lost. Still lost a lot of them. Yeah, lost 360. But this time they're defending 2 ,557, of which they could lose three quarters. So they could be losing nearly 1 ,900 seats, as opposed to 400, nearly five times as many seats. Reform is now consistently points ahead of the conservatives in the polls. And that's why you get these ambitious conservatives like Robert Jenrick and Danny Kruger and others beginning to move over to reform, because they're betting both on the green side and on the reform side that Britain is going to feel more like a lot of European countries where effectively the major parties, the right and left, collapsed.

38:03Rory Stewart:and these parties, either of the extremes of the center begin to emerge. Jason Cowley wrote an article in the Sunday Times comparing Starmer to François Hollande. He said, a bit like François Hollande is leader of the major left-wing party in France, he was a technocrat who had an ability to somehow alienate equally almost every faction of his party while failing to communicate a big narrative. And it was almost impossible to pin down what Hollandeism really was, what Starmerism really is. And of course, what happened to the Socialist Party in France is that it ended up collapsing down to 6 % in the polls.

38:41Rory Stewart:I mean, Labour's not there yet. It got lower than that, Roy. I was with Hollande on the day that it dropped to 4%, and I was able to tell him that is exactly the percentage of the global population that thinks Elvis Presley is alive. Was there a direct overlap between the two? Because the great thing about François Hollande, he does have a really good sense of humour. So he did sort of, he saw the bright side. But look, there's no doubt these results are going to be bad. You talked about the stuff about priced in, Farage's sort of, you know, misconduct and what have you priced in. There is an element to which Labour's defeat, as it will be defined on Friday, is going to be priced in.

39:20But I think because of the scale of this, I think it's like one of those things like, you know something bad is going to happen. okay and you can prepare yourself for that but when it happens it still feels really really terrible and it actually feels worse because it's real and you're talking about hundreds of councillors who are going to say to themselves and to each other i work my balls off i get next to nothing for it we're coping with terrible funding and we're getting the blame for what is actually failure at the center and now we've got these terrible people coming in to take our place and the other thing by the way i talked about the media hasn't really covered it Every single media outlet that has gone and actually looked at the effectiveness or otherwise of reform councils has come away saying, it's terrible.

40:06There was a huge piece in the FT at the weekend about reform in Staffordshire. I've read stuff about reform in the North East, about reform in Kent. Sorry to plug the New World again, but they've got a thing this week, four pages on things that reform councillors have said, which are, some of them, absolutely breathtaking, a lot of them related to race and to Islam and all that stuff. So back to my point about sleepwalking, because we're treating these local elections like a national opinion poll, we're not really analysing the issues that drive the demise, if we're not careful, of local democracy.

40:42And so I think we don't take it nearly seriously enough.

40:45Rory Stewart:A couple of things. Scotland. So we interviewed John Swinney, and we also interviewed Anna Sarwa, the Labour leader in Scotland. And that's part of our story. And we'll see what happens in the election. But just to remind people with that, shortly after the general election, it felt as though Anas Sawa and Labour Scotland were on course to become a majority and Anas was on course to become first minister. The most recent poll I've seen, just to give a sense of how much British politics changes and how quickly, from Sir John Curtis, who we all defer to, the in-joke here for people who don't follow us, that he is the great pollster who has for many decades now been produced to comment on things.

41:24Rory Stewart:He was projecting possible SMP 57 seats, just eight seats short of a majority, which is significant because Sweeney said he'd use the majority to go for another referendum on independence. But potentially reform coming in second as the largest opposition party at 19, and then potentially Labour at 16 and the Tories at 16 with a little bit of a recovery under Russell Findlay, who's the Tory leader in Scotland there. And just to illustrate what that would mean for us, we would have to change the way we cover Scotland a great deal. I mean, it's perfectly logical for us to be focusing on Anna Selwa and John Swinney, because that's the way Scottish politics has been for the last 30 years.

42:03Rory Stewart:But if we end up in a world in which reforms number two, Tories and Labour are neck and neck, you're going into a very different way in which we think about British politics. Yeah, and likewise in Wales. And we should say as well, that Wales is complicated further by the fact they've got a new voting system, which people are going to have to get their heads around. But essentially, if Plaid becomes the largest party, that's going to mean that for the first time, all three devolved administrations, assuming the SNP are in charge, are going to be headed by nationalists. Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin, Scotland SNP and Wales with Plaid.

42:39That is a big shift. So I guess then the other question let's force ourselves to do what most of the media are doing with this event on thursday rory let's say what do we think happens to labor and whether there will be a challenge to keir starmer and it's probably fair to say i'm more plugged into this debate possibly than you are but the truth is it honestly does depend who you talk to there is i think the feeling that if you look at the poll ratings and you you have a sense of how bad these results are going to be there is a mood that says, well, something's got to give. We can't go on like this.

43:14But then you'll get, including people who are not happy with Keir Starmer saying, yeah, but hold on a minute. One of the things people hated about the Tories was the constant change of prime minister. You've got Ukraine, you've got Iran. Is this the right time? And then the other thing, which I can't quite get my head around, is the extent to which the two who we keep talking about as possible challengers, who have the numbers to challenge, you need at least 80 MPs, to put their name to it. They'd have to be public saying, I'm backing Angela Rayner, I'm backing West Streeting, whoever it might be.

43:48I'm not yet convinced that either of them, for all they've been dipping their toes in, whether or when they might do it. Famous last words, I don't think there's going to be sort of seismic events over the weekend, and I hope not because I'm traveling. And then the other thing that's happening is I think there is a change of mood around the notion that Andy Burnham should be allowed to find a seat in Parliament. And if he's not allowed, that he'll somehow find a way to do that. So that is all going on.

44:15Rory Stewart:That's interesting, because, you know, I was very, very, very much, as you'll remember, on the grounds of Andy Burnham should have been allowed to run and outrage at the way Starmer stitched that up and stopped him from running. And at that moment, you were a little bit more sympathetic to Starmer, or at least you were playing devil's advocate with me and And I thought I'd been a bit over the top and saying Burnham needed to run. Have you shifted on that a bit? No, it's not a shift. I was sympathetic because I sort of felt, particularly at that time, it was like saying to a football manager, look, you've lost a few games.

44:45Therefore, we're going to keep you there as a dead man walking. But that guy there, we're going to bring him in as your number two. And his job is going to be to take you out. I think it'd be very odd to do that. But I think this may be the something that has to give that is given. because the other thing that is being talked of is people say, well, look, you know, Kirstein has done an amazing job. He transformed the Labour Party post-Corbyn. He won a general election landslide. Therefore, he should be allowed to sort of map out his own exit in a different sort of way. There's all that kind of talk going on as well.

45:15And actually, the tragedy in a way of this is he did a few interviews in recent days where I don't know if you saw or heard any of them, but I sort of felt there's a bit of message there. There's a bit of fight there. The thing is, if people only see that when somebody's back feels like it's against the wall, it's got to be there all the time, day after day, night after night.

45:36Rory Stewart:I think Starmer is rapidly becoming Britain's Joe Biden. We're rapidly getting into this world where all the loyalists are saying he's a good guy, he's had a great record of service, he needs to be able to time his own dignified exit. And the rest of us are saying he's not going to be able to win the next election. He just cannot take Labour into the next election. and we have to work backwards from that. If you're working backwards from that, the Biden lesson is you've got to get rid of him as soon as possible. You've got to give whichever Labour leader is leading into the next election a chance to really turn the country around in the next two and a half, three years.

46:09Rory Stewart:And there's no room for saying, he's a lovely man, you know, he's done great record of service, let's be gentle, let's give him time. Not least because like Joe Biden, he has no intention of going anywhere. He and his wife are going to be sitting there like joe and jill thinking i'm gonna make it true to the next election no one's moving me i'm wonderful because that's the way they get out of bed in the morning okay let me let's say you do your working back theory what's your working back theory insofar you've applied it to the joe biden what about the pierre polyerver mark carney lesson the lesson from that brory is you you you you wait and you get the right guy at the right time and the carney strategy i suppose works like this.

46:51Rory Stewart:You leave your useless Biden or Trudeau in or Starmer until the very last moment. And then you run a charismatic outside candidate who basically suggests they're running against the legacy of their predecessor. I mean, that's what Kamala Harris was unable to do. She was unable to say how she was different from Biden. Rishi Sunak wasn't good at describing how he was different from Boris or Truss. But then in the British system, I don't quite get how that happens. I mean, Carney was a major international figure with huge credibility. He'd run the Bank of England, essentially parachuted in on an anti-Trudeau ticket.

47:32Rory Stewart:And he got this amazing boost from Trump going against Polyam. It doesn't seem to be replicable in the British context. I think more likely is that it's going to feel like Kamala Harris coming in in a hurry after Biden. I guess the one who speaks to what you're saying about Mark Carney there, i guess it's andy burnham of all the names that are out there because he's the one who come and say i am change it's quite hard for west streeting and angela rayner to say we are change when they've been part of this this whole thing so but anyway so i guess i i don't know what's going to happen and it varies from conversation to conversation that i have and you even have the same people i was at a conversation with somebody yesterday who said all these extraordinarily contradictory she says, well, we're not happy with Keir.

48:22And it's perfectly obvious that there's got to be a change for the election. This is what he said, right? Okay. But nobody's really buying into the idea that Wes or Angela can do it. People say they've got the numbers, but they're not convinced that actually they have got the numbers. Because once the people who've said, yeah, I'd vote for you, actually say, I've got to put that down on paper and commit publicly. And what happens if Keir Starmer doesn't go? And there's all that. So they say that, and then they say, and so what you might get is a situation where Keir Starber just keeps going and he has people thinking that he might go nearer the end to let Andy Bredavid, but actually by then the world has changed and he's started to sort of pick up again and play to this idea of being resilient, what have you.

49:05So I wouldn't know how to predict this. I really wouldn't. I'm normally quite good at predicting and I've spoken to a lot of the key people and I don't think they really know where it's going to end. I think there are so many different gradations of what people think should happen. and none of them can see they're getting spooked by the risk. These are all negative. I'm not saying this is a great place to be in, but the fact of people thinking, not sure about the alternatives, world a very dangerous place, lots of bad stuff going on, and Keir doesn't look like he wants to go, are all sort of coalescing to go against the conventional wisdom right now.

49:42If I sound confused, Rory, it's because I am. Yeah.

49:45Rory Stewart:To add to my confusion, one thing I sometimes hear from Labour MPs, and I don't know whether it's true or not, is they say, yeah, West Streeting may be popular with MPs, but Angela Rayner is actually the one who's really popular with the party as a whole. and that traditionally in Labour, candidates like Wes, who are seen more as the right of the party, are not really likely to make it. And if you trigger the election, just the mathematics, the way the Labour Party wins means that Angela's much more likely to make it through. Yeah, I'm not sure about that. This is a point Merz made in the interview I mentioned on German TV last night.

50:22High profile politicians tend not to be very popular. So people talk about the popularity of Nigel Farage or Zach Polanski, they are popular with a certain, up to about 20 odd percent. They're loathed by a lot of other people. And if you're the highest profile politician in the country, which is the prime minister, I fear that in modern politics, it just goes with the territory, you're going to get loathed. It's not universal.

50:44Rory Stewart:I mean, Carney's not completely loathed, is he? I mean, it's not everybody's loathed. No, sorry, I was talking about Britain. And by the way, just on Carney, there is a little bit of a Gorbachev thing creeping in. You're starting to see Canadian media saying, oh, well, yeah, must be amazing to be feted abroad, like Jacinda Ardern was. You know, but look what happened to her kind of thing. So I talked to some MPs who say, are we really going to make Angela Rayner prime minister? Are you serious? Then you talk to other MPs who say, well, West Streeting, he talks a good game, but he's not that good.

51:14You know, you hear a lot of negativity about all of them. That's the problem. Because Angela Rayner, okay, she's outside in that she's not in the cabinet, West Streeting's in the cabinet, neither of them have really been able to project any sense of a different vision because they're they're part of what's happened and andy burnham's is very much focused on manchester he's got a national profile but his success as a politician very much focused on manchester i for example would would love it if there was a contender who came out very loudly said line one of my leadership manifesto is we're going back in the european union we're going to change the electoral system.

51:52There's not really been a sense of big ideas out there.

51:55Rory Stewart:A couple of things that really resonate with me, just as my experience as an MP, the first is this point that you made about local councillors. One of the things that was so definitional from local elections is Labour could be on track to lose over a thousand councillors. And as you say, those are the backbone of the local constituency. The Tories, for example, have almost entirely lost a mass party. They don't have, as my mother did when she was young, you know, 2 million members of the Conservative Party. Essentially, you are campaigning on the streets as an MP with a dozen councillors, and you're relying on the councillors to do most of your leafleting for you, organize all your local events.

52:34When they're angry, when they feel the

52:38Rory Stewart:party's gone wrong and they're losing their seats, the rage that you encounter very intimately, because this is every week you're in your constituency sitting with these people. And then you take that back to Westminster. So then suddenly, I began to feel in Westminster, a lot of my Tory colleagues carrying this rage back from their constituencies driven by the loss of council seats, which was one of the things that led to the undoing of David Cameron, led to the undoing of Theresa May. All of this kind of feeds through. The second thing is, I really resonated with what you were saying about leadership elections, and the sense that every single time we found ourselves looking at getting rid of someone, you would have exactly the same conversation.

53:20Rory Stewart:I mean, as you can imagine, when you're getting rid of David Cameron, you'll get one people saying, well, Theresa May, really? I mean, you know, she's fine as Home Secretary, but isn't she going to be a bit wooden as Prime Minister? And, you know, Sajid Javid, well, he's quite new. And has he really got what it takes? And Rory Stewart? you have rory stewart exactly right and that boris johnson seriously and then other people saying no no this guy's really charismatic am i saying no he's a terrible human being he's terrible moral he's gonna be a terrible prime minister well michael goes quite clever but is he really going to be so you can see all the second guessing and most of it's right of course probably what all the labor mps are saying about angela rayner and west streeting and andy burnham is correct.

54:02Rory Stewart:What I do think I learned, though, is that we are in an age that requires very, very good, bold, clear communication skills. And I think that needs to be tied to ideas. We have just been talking to Yanis Varoufakis. I'd like to encourage people to listen to that leading interview. He tweeted out this morning and he said, a surprisingly agreeable and wholesome discussion with Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart on their The Rest is Politics podcast. I wish there were more opportunities for political adversaries to engage in discussions such as this one. So Yanis, thank you for that. I mean, I think both of us went into it thinking you from a sort of being a Tory who thinks his economics are mad perspective, me from thinking that he's part of that sort of Corbynista clan that thinks people like me aren't really Labour.

54:52We went into thinking, oh, I'm not really going to like this guy. But actually it was a very, very, very interesting and enjoyable discussion. so i hope on the back of that perhaps jeremy corbyn and nigel farage might read that tweet and think well maybe we should go and have a what did he call it agreeable and wholesome

55:09Rory Stewart:refreshing excellent carry on it's good we should we should steal that no no well just to finish ideas and communication so the next labor leader needs to have a big picture we talked about what metz's picture might be but that's why i really am with you europe front and center geopolitics Ukraine, Trump, connected back to cost of living, getting the British economy going, deregulating, doing the stuff that Peter Kyle actually has been talking about quite powerfully. And let's not forget figures like Al Kahn's, who we're going to interview soon. I don't know why Labour is so entranced with these three figures.

55:42Rory Stewart:You know, I've mentioned Peter Kyle, I've mentioned Al Kahn's, there may be other people out there who might also be worth looking at. By the way, just on Peter Kyle, point of rebuttal, I said last week that the AI debate inside government had gone a bit quiet. And to be fair, Liz Kendall's spad, I do love a bit of rebuttal from a spad. She sent me a whole succession of actually really quite good speeches that Liz Kendall had made. So I'm making the point that maybe it's just that the media don't cover proper speeches anymore. So I want to say that. But my final point, Roy, is to go, if I can go back to the other Trumpian element, I just want to close off on this Farage 5 million donation, because as you can see I'm very exercised by it.

56:20And yesterday, here's one for you, Roy. It's local elections week. Nigel Farage, who normally will, you know, get a cab to any BBC studio in the land, was meant to be on the BBC breakfast show. And he pulled out at the last minute, okay, said he had other things to do. In other words, he didn't want to get quizzed about this donation. But the other Trumpian element of this is you basically just make up excuses. So back in October, reform, if you remember, they made a big fuss because they said that Nigel Farage's publicly funded security detail had been cut by 75%. This week, in claiming that this£5 million is all for his security, he said he'd never had publicly funded security, and all of it has always been provided by donors.

57:03Well, which is it? They both can't be true. And£5 million buys you a lot of security. And let me say something else. Yes, he's got security interests. Anybody with a public profile has security concerns. Okay. But I think there's also something about seeing the security people who surround Nigel Farage. I don't want to be unkind, but I wonder if part of it is actually just say, let's try and make him look like a prime minister. If you're surrounded by security, you look really important. If you have big men with earpieces wandering around behind you, you look like you might be a big deal. So if it's true that this is five million pounds for security, if he's learned the lessons of declaration and being open and transparent, why don't we just see which are the security firms that have been paid a share of this five million?

57:54Or maybe, could I suggest, Nigel, if you came on the podcast, we could ask you about it. Maybe it's not wholly true. How's about that?

58:05Rory Stewart:How's about that? Well, Alistair, thank you very much. Looking forward very much to getting into some great subjects on Question Time. But today, I guess we did deep everything from Germany through Trump to local elections. And I guess what we're talking about is firstly the struggles of Metz and Starmer in a modern age. I mean, these catastrophically unpopular ratings from figures who aren't really Vlad the Impaler, as you've pointed out, which suggests something about the media landscape. We're talking about fragmentation of the rise of the right. So, you know, we must do more on the AFD in Germany and what's happening there.

58:40Rory Stewart:It is astonishing how, you know, talk about the rise and rise of reform. They are in a very powerful position now. And there's big questions whether the Germans should be using the constitutional court to shut down people who are genuinely neo-fascists. And the rise of reform in Britain and what that means, you know, it's going to be very interesting as we get close to the election and we should probably, well, Kemi Betonox very kindly agreed to come on the show. And we need to look at what the Tory strategy is. Are they just going to become many reforms or are they going to try to move back and occupy the kind of centre ground that I would hope they could see opportunities in?

59:16Rory Stewart:And finally, devolved administrations. So, so much to see. Watch the results on Thursday and particularly watch, I think, what happens in Wales and Scotland. In question number, we're going to talk about anti-Semitism. We're going to talk about King Charles' very successful trip to the United States and two splendid speeches that he made, and we are going to talk about Mali. See you then. See you then.

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