537. Indicting Trump, Israeli Prisons, and Rory vs. Ed Miliband

22:52Rory Stewart:Yeah. And that tells you a lot about politics. I mean, I'm doing this. You're in Hong Kong. I'm two miles from the Israeli border in Jordan at the moment, talking to you. I mean, I think one of the things that is so striking for me is how radicalized people are becoming on both sides. The local Starbucks, for example, no longer exists because people have boycotted it. I went into the local bookshop. And where there used to be lots of children's books and travel books, the tables are now simply piled with books about Palestine and people's experience of Palestine and their memoirs of Palestine and what's happening in Palestine.

23:28Rory Stewart:And I also feel that there's a risk that he gets away with Ben Gavir and Smatrich by saying to people, of course, I don't want them in my government, but I leave them in as finance minister, security minister, because it's vital for my political survival and my coalition. and that he shouldn't be able to get away with that. One should be able to say, Ben Gavir and Sumatritch are horrifying people. If you put them in your cabinet, you're endorsing them. You don't get to say, well, I don't really like them, but I'm keeping them anyway because they're important for me to be prime minister. I don't think he even goes around the place saying he doesn't like them.

23:59I think he felt on this one, he had to condemn it because virtually most governments around the world were doing so. But I think all of that will have boosted Ben Gavir's own sense that from his perspective politically as a guy who's known to be such an extremist and who says some terrible things about Palestinians and he probably felt the same about these people I mean he was he was abusive he was insulting but look the point you're making about your Australian friends though is I've not got anybody quite like that I but I do think there is is definitely of all the issues around which there is this extreme polarisation, I would say it's probably top of the list right now.

24:41It's very hard to have conversations with people on either side who feel really, really, really passionate. But I think that's what we've all got to try to do, even when provoked by something as bad as this has to be called out. But then we somehow have to get back to some of the basics. The worst thing for me in relation to Gaza is that we're not talking about it.

25:03Rory Stewart:And what's happening with the settlers? I mean, that again, I mean, many of the people I've seen recently are people who are Palestinians and who have relatives in Nablus and Hebron. And as we've described, the settlers now seem to be able to do almost whatever they want. They can drive in with FGVs into the middle of olive groves, wave guns around. One friend of mine was saying settlers can almost go into the main streets and shoot someone and the Israeli army will protect them. And the gamble, I think, is that they're just hoping that Palestinians will leave. The economy is collapsing in Ramallah and in other Palestinian towns.

25:39Rory Stewart:The Israeli controlled areas are expanding all the time and they're coterminous. And I think any idea of a two-state solution is completely, completely out the window. I mean, and Smotrich appears to have a kind of cruel and inevitable logic on his side in suggesting the whole thing is just going to become Israel. Right, well, on that very depressing note, let's take a break.

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28:09Welcome back to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. Now, Rory, Vinod, a gentleman by the name of Vinod, have you seen the car crash interview that Richard Tice did with Bloomberg, where he refused to engage with simple factual questions about the science of climate change and its economic realities? Curiously, this is getting virtually zero coverage.

28:31Rory Stewart:Right. Well, let's first try to sort of summarize what actually happened in this interview. So he was presented with graphs. He refused to look at them. He calls it net stupid zero. You can't present with a whole lot of graphs that I can't read that may well be bullshit, but this terminates now. It's the end of the podcast. I want to do two things. I want to agreeably disagree with you on your friend Ed Miliband's energy policy, which I think is actually becoming a real problem. And I'm hoping strongly, but I think it's unlikely that whoever comes in gives them the heave-ho. But I'm not prepared to go as far as defending Richard Tice, who I think is clearly a climate change denying Bizarro on this.

29:12Rory Stewart:And over to you on Tice first. No, I want to go straight into why do you want to get rid of Ed Miliband? Are you buying the Richard Tye's arguments that Ed Miliband is in trying to sort of, you know, play a leadership role on climate change? He's kind of destroying the world. Is that where we are? No, I don't think Ed Miliband is destroying the world. But I think that in looking for the kind of things which are causing a big problem for the British economy and its competitiveness and its productivity, we've got to be honest about the fact that our industrial energy prices are very, very high. I mean, they're four times those the US and they're one and a half times those of key European competitors.

29:54But how does that relate to what Ed Miliband is trying to do on the green agenda?

29:57Rory Stewart:Well, because the reason why the energy prices are high is because of the policies pursued by the government. I mean, we are gas dependent, but in theory, that should apply equally to France and Germany and to other countries that use a lot of gas, including the US. The reason our prices are so high cannot simply be about the wholesale gas price. Or if it is, we're doing something weird in the way that it's calculated, which again falls at Ed Miliband's door. But it's about the way in which the whole energy market is run in the UK, and in particular, the hurry with which Ed Miliband is pushing ahead for his particular 2030 targets.

30:37Rory Stewart:And why does it matter? Well, it matters because if you're a steel producer, it's really difficult to compete with European steel production. But most importantly of all, I'm, as you know, obsessed with AI and what we can do for our sovereignty and how we can stop ourselves being completely in hock to the US and China when it comes to AI, we need to build data centers. If we don't have in the UK the chips and the data centers and they consume an enormous amount of energy, we're going to be completely vulnerable to the US destroying our economy, taking away all our jobs, threatening our national security, and we can't get them built.

31:14Rory Stewart:And one of the major reasons we can't get them built, along with normal British problems with planning, is the energy costs are just too high. I mean, many cases we're paying 24 pence when people like the Norwegians, the Portuguese are paying 10 pence for the same unit of energy. But you can't put that all at Ed Miliband's door. Listen, Rory, nor can we have a question about Richard Tice become a big discussion of Rory Stewart saying Ed Miliband should go. Can I just say something interesting on AI, Rory? I was at a lovely place called Brescia yesterday in Italy. You just jumped from Italy to Hong Kong in a day.

31:47I know. My green credentials are not very good this week. But anyway, this conference in Brescia is called the Future Proof Society. And it was sort of looking all sorts of, you know, different this and that. But you'd have loved this discussion I had with a couple of people. Actually, one of them was totally against AI and just wants to stop the whole damn thing. But one of the other people who's involved in this discussion we're having He said that the UK is actually extraordinarily well placed. America and China are absolutely running away with everything. That is true. But if you were looking for a kind of, you know, best placed to get into the runner up slot, it is the UK.

32:25And this was an American guy who basically said a lot of it was about our education, but also about some of the stuff that the government was doing. He mentioned that two billion pound thing that we do on quantum last week. but essentially the infrastructure that's been built, and I guess Rishi Sunat was part of this when he was prime minister as well. So I was quite cheered up by that.

32:47Rory Stewart:You're completely right. We've got outside the US and China, we've probably got the strongest global talent pool. So we talk about Demas, the Sabas and DeepMind. We've got language, we've got legal system, we've got time zone. Our real problem is energy and the data centers. these new frontier models can involve hundreds of thousands of advanced chips, even a million advanced chips. So you can be looking for one gigawatt, two gigawatts. In the US currently, they've got about 45 gigawatts of built power around these data centers. And that's probably going to double in the next three, four years.

33:27Rory Stewart:In the UK, we're hovering around, depending on which figures you look at, between 1.6 and 3, to give a sense in the difference. UAE is looking to build out 5 gigawatts. Now, why does that matter? It matters because at the moment, if all the large language models exist in the United States, President Trump can do effectively what's happening at the moment with Mythos, which is say, this thing can't be exported from the US. And all the latest technologies in the US, all the innovations in the US, all the growth is in the US. It's an extreme example of what's going on already with the Magnificent Seven, with all these hyperscalers stuck in the world economy.

34:03Rory Stewart:And we will then find that all the native AI law firms are created in the US, not with us, all the tax revenue will go to the US, we'll lose jobs. So let's say, we talked about this in the last episode, we suddenly start massively laying off people in banks, people in call centers, people in software. Suddenly the government, the UK government's got to find the revenue to pay the unemployment benefit, but it's not getting any taxation revenue because it's not taxing any income and all the companies in America. So how do we deal with that? I think having the data centers allows you to do one of three things.

34:32Rory Stewart:In the best case scenario, you could actually build your own frontier model and actually be able to run it and have the chips and have all the parameters and the weights in the UK. Second potential is you could provide a safe haven for one of the American companies. So let's say Trump suddenly decided to go crazy on Anthropik or OpenAI. You could actually say, why don't you come to the UK to host your model here, which you can't do at the moment because we simply don't have the infrastructure. They couldn't come here. And the third thing is, even if you weren't able to do that, maybe that's unrealistic.

35:02Rory Stewart:If these companies were able to use data centers in the UK to run even 20, 30 % of their models, we would have leverage. A future President Trump wouldn't be able to switch the stuff off and say, I'm going to abuse the United Kingdom and get the handover, whatever, because we would have leverage over the United States. But to get there, we've got to build these data centers. And one of the major reasons we can't build them, to kind of link back, is that our cost of energy is too high. Well, I'm going to issue an apology to Vinod, because he asked us a question, basically he wanted us to put the boot into Richard Tice.

35:36Since when you took us down the Ed Miliband rabbit hole, and I then led you into the AI rabbit hole. So Vinod, what I'm going to do to hit back at you, because I feel I should defend Ed Milovan because he was my politician of the year last year. He's a regular listener. I'm going to ask whether he might do his own rebuttal for the newsletter. I think that would be a very good thing to do because I want to get back to the point about why reform don't like being scrutinized. It's very, very true. Look at Farage with his... I mean, Farage will normally leap in front of any TV camera anywhere in the world to give you his bonhomie and his shtick, this 5 million donation where he keeps changing his story, he's nowhere to be seen.

36:17The funding generally of reform, nowhere to be seen.

36:23Rory Stewart:And they won't come on our show. I mean, you started by trying to get Nigel Farage on and he wouldn't come on. I've now asked reform MPs, I've asked reform policy leads, all of them say, I'm afraid this isn't one for me. None of them will come on their show. Now, open invitation. We're very happy to have an open conversation. Look at our interview, even with people we have serious disagreements with, like President Vucic in Serbia. We'll give you a fair hearing, but why won't you come on a huge show where millions of people can hear your views? What's going on, reform? And also, we discovered that we do have some reform supporters who listen to the podcast, probably so they can shout at us.

37:05But even so, we do have some. Now, I think, look, the answer to the question, Roy, is that Trump has created his own media ecosystem. And that's what Farage is trying to do in the UK. Trump has Fox News and the MAGA people. That's their safe haven. Farage has GB News. Farage has several newspapers that absolutely give him the easiest ride in the world. As Vinod says, Tice's interview where he just behaves like a child gets zero coverage. This is a guy who's going to, if reform become the government, he's going to be a very, very serious figure. There's these amazing videos doing the rounds online of some of these reform councillors who basically, the one that's really sort of, I think, please stop selling to me people, is the one where the woman who says, you know, I don't know what constitution is.

37:52I don't understand what a standing order is. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. And she's still leading a council. So you've got all these counselors are falling by the wayside. But do you see any of that in most of the media? No. So basically, Farage thinks, if you just ignore this stuff, he'll go away. Now, if I were him, if I were Nigel Farage, I'd think, well, when he was presenting LBC, I used to go on his show quite regularly, and we had perfectly civil conversations. We did once have a very aggressive shouting match on television, but that was right after Brexit. Nearly came to blows, but not quite.

38:25But if he came on our podcast, we would do what we do with every other guest. We would go through their childhood. We'd go through their life. We'd ask them what they think. And yes, we would want to challenge him and press him over certain things. Yes, I would absolutely want to hold his feet to the fire about the damage that Brexit has done to the country. But we would not do it in a way to try and get cheap headlines, gotcha stuff, and the rest of it. But I think Vinod's got a point. I think they are scared of genuine scrutiny. They like nice short videos. They're like newspaper headlines that they write with the right-wing press.

38:59And they're like GB News. Anyway, on the subject of reform, we had a wonderful discussion in the main episode with Vicky Spratt, who did our miniseries on Gen Z. Lo and behold, we've got another miniseries. And the first episode arrives this Friday, the day after this Question Time episode. And it's all about reform and where the money comes from. And it's very, very interesting. The first episode will be available for everyone. Mr. Tice, by the way, features prominently. But to enjoy the whole series, you'll need to sign up to The Rest is Politics Plus at therestispolitics.com.

39:32Rory Stewart:Well, Alistair, here is a question, which comes from Matthew, who's a Trip Plus member from Biddingham, that he's been wanting to ask you for a couple of weeks. And I think you mentioned that you were going to answer it for us. So go on, give us an answer. The question is this. I recently watched a documentary that Alistair featured in, and it was a clip of TB and Alistair, Tony Blair and Alistair meeting Vladimir Putin. And I saw that Alistair shook Putin's hand. Question to both Rory the Tory and Alistair, well, Rory the Tory, Rory the Tory and Alistair, who's the most evil person you have shaken hands with?

40:07Go on, then you first. I've thought about this a lot.

40:10Rory Stewart:Oh, blimey. I haven't thought about a lot. Okay. So I think I would put people into three different categories what i would call the brutal leader the violent warlord and the careless destroyer right so first category brutal leader i mean i have shaken hands with president suhato who we were talking about president kabila in the congo president emerson manangagwa in zimbabwe in the second category down of the people who actually commit the violence on the ground in iraq the heads of all the shia militias that were putting shaped charges against this in one case a guy called asad who i had lunch with in the morning and who attacked my compound the following evening.

41:10Rory Stewart:Afghan warlords like Abdul Rashid Dostam or Sayyaf. And we've, of course, both shaken hands with the former head of Al-Qaeda, Syria, now the president of Syria. But the category of evil that I'm most interested in is one which we don't talk about much when we talk about evil. And I think it's something that C.S. Lewis is quite interesting on, which is that we tend to think about evil as though it's sort of Voldemort or Hitler, sort of very, very extreme cartoonish figures. My sense is that evil is often something closer to each of us. And partly it's about extreme carelessness and selfishness and not really caring about other people.

41:53Rory Stewart:And that's where I feel people like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson come closest. What I felt with Boris is, Of course, he's not a genocidal guy. He's never killed anybody. He's sort of hail fellow Wilmette. But in the extent of his carelessness, his recklessness in private relationships, his relationship to truth, what he did with Brexit, the way he ran the country, the sense that everybody else is a sort of joke or a game, that also is a form of sin. and if I was going to push it higher, maybe even a form of evil, and maybe one that I'm closer to myself before I lay into Boris Johnson. Then, over to you.

42:39You sort of sounded a bit like a vicar there. That was a very good sermon. I enjoyed that. I think you'll have a published one in the morning. Roy, it's very just what you said about evil and the various categories of evil. It could be a great book. We got the question a couple of weeks ago, as you say, and I've been thinking about it, And I'm assuming that he imagines that it would be Putin. And certainly Putin, I think, in my defense, I didn't think he was totally evil at the time. But I also think the truth is, you've gone through with some of the names you've mentioned, that in politics and in government, you have to shake hands with a lot of people that you wouldn't necessarily want to go on holiday with them.

43:19During the Northern Ireland peace process, I definitely shook hands with quite a lot of people who'd killed people. I remember once meeting a guy who had been on the IRA Army Council and somebody told me afterwards that he was the guy who really knew how to do the bombs and made them and all the rest of it. So Putin gets close because of course the other definition I think of political evil, at the moment President Zelensky is responsible for a lot of deaths of Russians, just as the Russians are responsible for a lot of deaths of Ukrainians. Putin also does kill some of his own people. We mentioned Navalny.

44:00Fiona and I were in the car last week. We were listening to this amazing book, London Falling, by Patrick Raddenkeith.

44:07Rory Stewart:I've been reading it on your recommendation. It is extraordinary. Incredible, isn't it? Small subtext on that. Did you know that he, at the age of 50, got a J.Crew modeling contract? No, I didn't. Is this because you just turned 50? There's hope for us all. but it's but one of the sections of the book where he's just going through because you know russia gets involved in at a certain point just going through all the people who kind of fell out of windows and and i'm reading at the moment i'm now reading the book nordstrom conspiracy um and again putin and his ability to to i mean honestly angela merkel has not come well out of this book because basically you get the sense that russia is playing her and keeping her in the Nord Stream thing.

44:50And anyway, it's just, it's a bit like the, it's a bit like London Falling. It's a kind of, it's a, it's a nonfiction book written as an absolute thriller. So Putin sort of weaves in and out all these terrible stories. But I think the reason why he's only my runner up is because the winner of the most evil hand I ever shook was actually somebody who really killed a lot of his own people and just ruined his, totally ruined his own country. and that was Mugabe. I really had a sense meeting, did you ever meet Mugabe?

45:21Rory Stewart:No, because that's why I went to Munangagwa's inauguration. Oh, of course you went to the inauguration after you'd gone, yeah. After Mugabe was toppled, yeah. And he was just, he just emanated. You just didn't enjoy being in the same space. He had this horrible manner about him. He was surrounded like a lot of authoritarian leaders are by sycophants sort of you know bowing and scraping as he walked he had the most ridiculously expensive suits i think even xi jinping would struggle to match the mugabe on the suit front and his little his handmade shoes with his little with his initials on inside them and all this sort of horrible stuff um but i just think in terms of what he did to his own country absolutely evil and of course you know going back to the the discussion on the main point about in the main episode about corruption all that too so i think it's probably him i think that he takes he takes the gold medal from from vlad good okay a final thing you would be tempting with book recommendations which we sometimes do at the end and in doing a bit of research on corruption shout out for three books i really took to and what actually one of them was london falling of course which links quite a lot to issues of money in london yeah totally kleptopia by tom burgess which is an extraordinary story about international money um money land by oliver bullo they're they are both absolute those two guys have done and i've got to be honest reading their books which i did a while back and listening to this the corruption part of of this book it does make me feel slightly sick that when we were in government we didn't do more to stop this whole russian laundromat situation in london because there's no doubt that we were i think there's a line in in London falling.

47:08We didn't just sort of open the door, we kind of rolled out the red carpet. So yeah, both brilliant books.

47:15Rory Stewart:Well, my final one is Sarah Chase. And Sarah Chase was in Afghanistan when I was there, running an amazing non-profit in Kandahar. And she became very focused on corruption in Afghanistan, and then became an advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and tried to make anti-corruption central to the project in Afghanistan. But she's now written a book on corruption in America. And it begins with this McDonald case that I was talking about in our main podcast yesterday, this case of this governor basically getting away with taking this huge amount of money and not being prosecuted. And it hasn't got the pickup it should have done.

47:53Rory Stewart:People seem to be much happier buying her book, Criticizing Corruption in Afghanistan, which was really celebrated everywhere. When she starts trying to point out corruption in America, people sort of struggle a little bit more. I think the story is extraordinary. And I think it's partly, to return maybe to what we were talking about, what Sarah shows us is how the American legal system and the constitutional system is just not fit for purpose in an age of billion dollar campaign financing, crypto, and the growth of the new tech sector. And I think we should maybe, maybe listeners, tell us who your most evil handshake ever is.

48:28and you can't say, nobody's allowed to say they're in-laws. I was actually trying to write down a list and it became a very long list in the end.

48:35Rory Stewart:Well, I mean, of course you met Jeffrey Epstein, didn't you? You shook his hand too. I did shake his hand, yeah. Yeah, so there's very different forms of evil we could be talking about. I mean, I was trying not to say that I had teachers at school who were subsequently prosecuted for child abuse who I knew well. I mean, so there's lots of different types of evil from inflicting horrible pain on children right the way through to conducting genocidal campaigns in the Democratic Republic of the Congo through to the casual carelessness of some of our Democratic politicians. There's also the thug who stole my Burnley hat when I was eight at Main Road in Manchester City.

49:18What?

49:18Rory Stewart:A man stole it from an eight-year-old? An adult. Stole it from an eight-year-old? Yeah. Well, that's a bit mean. That is a bit mean. That's a kind of steamy-pounding. Evil. It's evil. Yeah, that's pretty bad. Yeah, if you're listening to this in your old people's home, I hope you're sorry. Yeah, and I hope, you know, baby serves you right that Arsenal won the Premier League and you didn't, eh? I've got a long memory, Rory. Anyway, lovely to talk to you as ever. Lovely to talk to you. Speak soon. Bye-bye. See you soon. Bye.