543. The Disaster Britain Still Can't Escape and Trump’s Iran ‘Deal’

22:14Rory Stewart:And the real indicator of why this went wrong is that we haven't got, I imagine one of the only benefits of Brexit might be that we'd get a bit more accountability and a bit more trust in government. If we go back to that fundamental idea that we love, the buck stops here. The only advantage of Brexit is we might end up in a situation where ultimately ministers, prime ministers, councillors are able to say, the buck stops here. I made this decision. It's not the fault of. But instead of which, we've just found another baddie. It's not the European Union. Instead, we blame laws. We blame the European Convention on Human Rights.

22:49Rory Stewart:Exactly. We blame processes. We blame civil servants. They've moved on to a new set of lies. Listen, let's broaden it out to other bits of Europe. So I mentioned in the introduction, Switzerland had this referendum at the weekend. Now as it happens, it lost. But it wasn't, you know, people said it was a comprehensive defeat for this idea you have a population cap, but it's 55-45. I mean, it's like, you know, it's a lot of support, quite a low turnout. Not a mad idea, right? Seems to be a perfectly sensible idea on the surface. that you decide what kind of population you want and you plan towards it.

23:19Rory Stewart:But the problem is, the small print was, if you breach the population cap, you would leave all the European agreements on movement of people, et cetera, et cetera. Exactly. So Switzerland would have had to completely reorder its relationship with European Union. And it was interesting how the immigration debate here tends to be about low labor cost, people who are working in the lower end of the economy. There, it's about the Swiss saying, why these French Germans taking all our top jobs as scientists and doctors. It's a very different sort of debate. But then the other thing that I think is worth talking about, which I'm going to bring together, we had this extraordinary story.

23:58I've been worried about this for some time because remember when we were in Poland, I was in Poland, Donald Tusk said, I'm really shocked that the prime minister's house and car get attacked. And it's covered in the British media like Liverpool 2, Arsenal 1, on the one hand this, on the one hand that, he thought it was truly shocking that the Prime Minister's house and car were being firebombed. And it now transpires, and there was a, you know, I regularly criticise the BBC political coverage, but there was a brilliant investigation on the BBC yesterday, the background to this case of this Ukrainian and Romanian who have now been convicted on these offences.

24:39And basically, they're organized by a Russian dirty tricks. And the far right are, instead of, this is Tusk's point about it, you see it as a football match. So Tommy Robinson, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who's just been in Moscow at one of Putin's jamborees, and he has been ventilating this conspiracy theory that what this case was actually about was that Keir Starmer was involved in sort of sexual relations with these three Eastern Europeans, even posting fake pictures of them together. Okay. And if you, I don't know if you've been across this, but that has been quite a big

25:19Rory Stewart:thing. The idea that Keir Starmer is like kind of a threesome or foursome. Well, all that he's, that he's, he has these Ukrainian rent boys. Oh, they're men. I'm sorry. They're men. Oh, right. Okay. And, and, and yeah, so it's like, you know, so does this really sit with our normal idea of Keir Summer. It's quite an interesting thing to do. I don't understand these social media campaigns. I mean, normally you find someone who looks a bit dodgy and then you project these things. Or does it work better if the guy seems really respectable and then you're like, he seems respectable and service - Yeah, totally.

25:48But the thing about a lot of these conspiracy theories, when they start online, they get ventilated, is that the more outlandish they are sometimes, look, Hillary

25:57Rory Stewart:Clinton and the pizza, the sort of bloodline. QAnon. QAnon, all that stuff. So that's partly all this is about. And so you have people, I felt this, I mentioned the troubles in Belfast and we talked recently about Henry Novak's murder and the way that Farage responded to that. The instinct of a lot of our political base now on the right is to say, whatever happens, our job is to try to turn that into a problem for the government so why tusk is right we should all regardless of our politics we all should be appalled if keir starmer's former house where members of his family are living gets firebombed okay and listen i don't want to be pompous about it but i imagine 10 years ago we would all solemnly have stood up in the house of commons given condolences, said we stand full square behind the premises.

26:53Rory Stewart:Well, 10 years ago, for example, when Joe Cox was murdered. Regardless, yeah, of party. Yeah, absolutely. But Nigel Farage did not attack, condemn the violence. In Belfast, he said, this is going to happen. This is going to happen unless you deal with it. Now, the Belfast situation is very, very interesting because horrible, horrible stabbing, asylum seeker stabs somebody, it's filmed, it's horrible. And again, I think 10 years ago, yes, there'd have been a visceral reaction on so many levels, but you would have at least listened to the police, listened to the politicians for a bit, instead of which, not least ventilated by people like Elon Musk and people like Tommy Robinson, etc.

27:33It's whipped up literally into a riot. And also there's been some very interesting reporting. And then there's the hit list.

27:39Rory Stewart:And then the hit list. And then the use of checkpoints. I mean, one of the things that's interesting in reporting you sent me is the sense in which they're using a playbook that goes all the way back to the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 80s and 90s, which is you use checkpoints to delay people, and that then stops the police getting. And even the firebombing was another thing. I think there were tens of thousands of people displaced from their homes during the Troubles through firebombing. So it's as though people are learning from paramilitary techniques. Well, I think the police are reluctant to sort of load it onto paramilitaries, but there's some very interesting reporting in the Northern Ireland press from journalists who live there, who know this stuff inside out, who are saying without any doubt in their mind, there was paramilitary involvement to this.

28:26But my point, again, you're saying what would have happened 10 years ago. 10 years ago, most paramilitary activity would have been condemned across the political establishment. But no, what you have on the right is, well, you know, they've got a point. They've got a point. They are having their jobs being taken. So these, what used to be kind of British National Party BNP argument is now with people like Lowe, Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore, center stage in part of our politics.

28:52Rory Stewart:Well, let me see if I can sum it up in the way that I see this. I think what you're saying in both halves is our whole politics is about finding problems. Most of those problems are actually internal to do with us and blaming someone else. It's a classic nationalist move. If Scotland's not performing well, it's the fault of London. If Britain's not going great, it's the fault of Europe. If my life's not going well, it's the fault of the immigrants. And what we found, if I just thought, I maybe wasn't worried I wasn't structured enough in thinking through the European Union. If we go through the little list of arguments they would have made, they would have said 10 years ago, Britain was too regulated, too uncompetitive, Europe was growing too slowly, and politicians weren't accountable.

29:38Rory Stewart:And I think it's possible for us to say all those things were correct, but leaving the European Union didn't fix any of them. Yeah, or what you could say is there is a point, they had a point, whether that point was sufficiently strong, in my view it wasn't, to say let's tear up the whole thing and then pretend that we're going to tear up the whole of Europe. Because what it turned out what happened is that we left the European Union, we didn't fix any of those things. So it would be a bit like my life's going badly and I blame my friends or I blame my partner and I imagine if I just leave my partner, right?

30:08Rory Stewart:Don't talk to my friends anymore. Everything will be better. Norma Percy, the veteran documentary maker, I couldn't watch the whole thing because watching Gove and Johnson and these people just sort of, you know, the whole thing was like a sort of boy's game, Cameron as well. But the end of Norma Percy's two-part documentary on Brexit, essentially is Boris Johnson admitting there was no plan. And that's the worst thing. Final point, Germany. There's something really quite interesting happening there, which, and I'm really interested in your take on it. So, Dmitriev, Putin's right hand man, has been busy posting absolute peons of praise to the alternative for Deutschland.

30:45And when I posted a reply to one of them, he came back straight away, warmonger, you know, the change is coming. So, they're very on this all the time.

30:57Rory Stewart:So, Kyrgyz Dmitriev, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, has his Alistair Campbell dossier. Well, it was basically saying that the warmongering bureaucrats who opened the borders, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, they're the ones who need to wake up. Now, what's interesting, though, is that the Russians openly, like J.D. Vance did in Munich, like Donald Trump does, you've now got MAGA and the Russians basically saying in Germany, AFD's our party, okay, at a time when the AFD is doing quite well. Now, if you're a German person who believes in the constitution, and they've got a written constitution unlike us, so there's something very interesting going on, which there are only three bodies that can refer anything to the constitutional court.

31:39That's the government, the Bundestag, the elected chamber, and the Bundesrat, which is made up of the lender, okay? And there's a debate going on at the moment. The government is weak, the parliament tricky, as whether the Bundesrat should not refer the AFD to the constitutional court because there are a lot of their leaders who are on record as saying things which go fundamentally against the constitution.

32:07Rory Stewart:Again, just to explain to the audience, basically, this is about banning the AFD. Or banning parts of it. Parts of the AFD. So what you would do is you'd use this procedure to say, actually, this is a neo-fascist organization that is a profound danger of the German constitution. These were the things that were put in place after the Second World War. What are the lessons that how would we have stopped the Nazi party from rising? Well, we should have said in 1929, the Nazi party is not a legitimate democratic political force. It's banned by the constitutional court. It can't run. So all that stuff there.

32:39Rory Stewart:And there are two questions. Can they do it? And should they do it? Back over to you. Well, can they do it? Yes. And the constitutional court in Germany is respected much more than most institutions are in most countries. And the case that I think would be made, and it all depends on, there are two very popular leaders in the Länder. There's this guy, Özdemir, who's the new leader in Baden-Württemberg, and a guy called Wüst in Nordrhein-Westfalia, who are, one's Green, one's CDU. And essentially, if it happens, they are going to have to lead this movement within the Bundesrat. And they could do it because it's been done before.

33:16The thing is, it sounds extraordinary to us, you ban a political party from standing, but they did it twice under Ardnau, and then they did it twice with the neo-Nazi party, they were called the NDP, they're now called Die Heimert. So it's been done before, but you have leading figures in the AFD. A lot of this is, you know, we've talked before about Martin Selma, this Austrian identitarian guy. A lot of this is about remigration.

33:39Rory Stewart:And re-migration is about people who generally are not white and generally Muslims being hundreds of thousands being booted out of Germany, including, it seems, German citizens. Including if they've been born in Germany and they have a German passport and German citizenship. So that says in the constitution, they're all equal. Okay. So that policy basically says, no, you're not equal because if we get into power, you're gone. And the reason why these lender elections coming up, particularly in Saxony-Anhalt, are so important is because they have policing powers. And the other thing that I read this week, the Bjorn Hucker, who's this very out there, very, very, I can call him a Nazi, a neo-Nazi on here now.

34:21And not be sued. And not be sued because a German judge has decreed that that is a fair label for him. And by the way, Turingia, where he is from, that's where Hitler got his first sort of electoral foothold. The AFD are going to be deliberately holding one of their main conferences on July the 4th, 2026, because on July the 4th, 1926, was one of Hitler's most famous rallies in Weimar. It's kind of deliberate trolling. But so I think this, you know, to us, it sounds like, well, let's say the government tried to ban Tommy Robinson from Rupert Lowe. Right. You and I both probably think, well, that's not going to, people are going to think, But in Germany, I think it might be a little bit different, partly because of the history, partly because of the respect of the court.

35:06But also, so many of these people are on the record saying things which, on the surface, are anti-constitutional. And then the question, sorry, just to fast forward, is that if the AFD actually ultimately takes power in Germany and starts pushing ahead with remigration and 800 ,000 Germans are expelled from the country, we would then be asking ourselves, shouldn't

35:30Rory Stewart:we have taken them to the constitutional court and banned them? Because it's too late by the time they're actually running a neo-fascist state. Well, that is the argument. That is the argument. And look, even within the people who absolutely loathe the AFD, there is that worry. Their big worry was you'd take them to court and you didn't win the case. But I think if you look at the, you don't have to say it's the whole party. So I think they're going to be focusing on Turingia and Brandenburg, where they've got some pretty extreme leadership, and also on some of the youth organizations. But I think we need to understand that this stuff happening in Europe is linked.

36:04and the point to make, you've now got Trump and MAGA, you've got Putin, you've got the hard right here who are all basically pushing the same message that you sort of limp-wristed European liberal Democrats, you're done and we're coming for you.

36:18Rory Stewart:And my final thought, which I keep saying again and again, is when you see the same thing happening in America, Britain and Europe, it's probably not about any of the things we think it's about. We tend to think it might be immigration, a European Union, economic growth. No, nonsense, right? America's growing strongly. It's got strong employment. Europe's not growing. Some countries got high immigration. Some have got lower immigration. Some have taken back control. Others haven't. It's social media. The only thing that can possibly explain in such a short timeframe that 30 countries with completely different socioeconomic trajectories, constitutions, structures end up in the same place, I'm afraid, social media.

36:56Okay, before we go to the break, a couple of plugs. You mentioned James Cleverley. He's the former foreign secretary for the Conservatives, still in the shadow cabinet now. And he is our current guest on leading.

37:07Rory Stewart:And that's good because if people want to hear a pro-Brexit argument, don't rely on me to try to ventriloquize. Listen to James Cleverley. He's quite tough. He's quite clear. He's a Brexiteer. And he does his best to call us out and push back against our arguments on Brexit. So want to hear the other side of the story? Listen to James cleverly on leading. Pretty half-hearted, I thought. Just search Restless Politics Leading wherever you get your podcasts. And another plug, finally, before the break is part four of our mini-series on reform that we've done in conjunction with The Observer. And this one focuses very, very heavily on Mr.

37:38Farage. So just go to therestlesspolitics.com to find that. And now we'll have a break, and then we'll come back and talk about Iran. Hello, dear listeners. As many of you will know Father's Day is coming up on the 21st of June.

37:53Rory Stewart:And we know that a good number of you will be wondering what to get your centrist dad this year. And we have the perfect idea. Get him a membership to the Rest is Politics Plus and make the most of our 25 % discount on a gifted annual membership. And that gives you access to all these members-only miniseries that we're making. It gives you early access to question time. Just head to therestispologies.com and click on gifts. The gift will land straight in your dad's inbox on the day. It's the only present for a centrist dad. Did you know about one in three people with plaque psoriasis may also develop psoriatic arthritis, which causes joint pain, stiffness and swelling?

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39:28Rory Stewart:Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for$15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three month plan equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. Default terms at mintmobile.com.

40:03Welcome back to The Rest of Polities with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Rory, you sounded very excited about this Iran deal in the introduction, but I am far from convinced that this is actually a deal in the conventional sense. It's a memorandum of understanding. It seems to me that the really difficult stuff is now being parked for these negotiations. So we're going to have Vance and the hapless Kushner and Witkoff up against the Iranian nuclear scientists again. Yeah.

40:30Rory Stewart:So listen, it's far from resolved, but it's a hell of a big change because it's what we've been waiting for for two months, which is finally the Iranians and the Americans signed a memorandum of understanding with the Pakistanis. And they've both said publicly that they've signed off on this MOU. And the key point is that the Straits of Hormuz now look like they will reopen. Not immediately. And there's many things that could go wrong. could be the Iranians, could be the Americans, could be the Israelis, could torpedo the whole thing. But it feels to me as though finally Trump and Iran actually want to get this done.

41:09Rory Stewart:My mother's theory is Trump wants to get it done before the 4th of July, 250th Independence Day celebrations. He doesn't want to be distracted by everyone endlessly grinding on about Hamus. That's the Sally Stewart view. The Iranians, listen, they have really enjoyed the fact that despite the American and Israeli bombardments, 75 % of their entire ballistic missile launch capacity and indeed their missile stockpiles are still intact. Three quarters are still intact. This is some of the largest bombing on world record. The number of targets, they were doing 500 targets a day. This was the highest precision weapons, the greatest targeting ever, and actually it barely took out a quarter of what Iran has.

41:52Rory Stewart:So, big story there. But nevertheless, the Iranian economy is groaning. They're desperate for the oil exports. Trump's announced that he's stopping the blockade and they can go through and Iran's announced stop. Now, how could it go wrong? Many, many different ways. And I've been talking to friends in the Gulf about this. And I've talked to a bunch of people who were in Pakistan, people who've read the MOU. they think that one of the big sticking points, which is Lebanon, may be less than in the past. So the big sticking point there was Iran was saying, so long as Israel keeps attacking our allies Hezbollah in Lebanon, we're not going to sign this deal.

42:26Rory Stewart:And that's why Trump got very, very angry with Netanyahu because just on the cusp of the deal, he struck Lebanon. Yeah, but look at the response to this deal in Israel. The hard drive figures that we talk about a lot, Spottrich and Ben-Gavir, they've come out and said this is bad for the world and bad for Israel. The politics of this in the United States are really, really tricky. He does seem to have lost that sort of grip on Trump. You've put your finger on it. How important is Israel? You're absolutely right. Israel's furious. They want to continue the war with Iran. They want to continue the war with Lebanon.

42:54Rory Stewart:They're being stopped, not just in Iran and in Lebanon. So the question is, is that going to be enough? Will they be able to derail the US and Iran? They've been able in the past because basically, they do things in Lebanon without US permission. The US feels forced to support them and the Iranians are outraged. I think though what happened with this deal is finally the US and Iran decided, we're going to get beyond the Israel thing. We're going to see Israel as a spoiler. Netanyahu tried a last minute attempt to derail with another attack in Lebanon and actually it just hurried up the MOU which got it out.

43:28Rory Stewart:I think the sticking points that could unravel it, are firstly that there's a lot of legal argument inside the MEU, literal legal language, on a non-aggression pact between the US and Iran, and on sanctions relief and release of assets. My guess is Trump will probably not follow through, particularly on the latter. Then what is Iran going to do if he doesn't lift sanctions, if he doesn't release assets? Do they return to war? Well, the gamble is they might not. Or do they just turn the tap off in the straits of the war? That is the terrible thing about this. They basically have been handed a tactic that they probably, I'm not sure they thought of using before.

44:09If they thought of it, they never did it. But they now realize they can do it with catastrophic consequences and that Trump doesn't have the global support that he thought he would have. So I think, look, I think this deal, well, we haven't seen it. The Memorandum of Understanding is pretty short. A page and a half. A page and a half. The JCPOA was like hundreds and hundreds of pages backed by incredibly detailed documents. So it feels to me a little bit like the Gaza plan that was projected as this is peace in our time. but then the detail wasn't there and we're still in a complete mess there and i think with this i think there's so much that can go wrong and go wrong quickly this is fascinating because because if you go back and i know trump's rhetoric you've got to so he basically said that the attack was to deal with an imminent threat okay well it wasn't we're going to destroy their missiles and raise their missile industry to the ground you've given you've pre-rebutted that one it will be totally obliterated we're going to annihilate their navy they've done a lot of damage to the They have.

45:14We're going to ensure that their terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack all forces, no longer use their IEDs or roadside bombs. We'll see.

45:24Rory Stewart:Well, on that one, the key two proxies are Hezbollah, Houthis, and probably you'd add the Iraqi militia. And actually what we found, oddly, is that despite Israel's amazing intelligence operations and attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Pager attacks which killed 1 ,500 people, Hezbollah remains surprisingly resilient. And they're now managing to manufacture their own drones. And it turns out they can manufacture them without Iranian backing. Furthermore, the Houthi, who are their proxies in Yemen, fired a missile at the Red Sea, reminding people they can still shut that down. So they did not achieve the objective on the proxies.

45:56Right. So, and then let's go into what I think is the big one. I'm going to read the whole thing. To the members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the armed forces and all of the police, I say tonight, you must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity. Or in the alternative, you face certain death. Lay down your arms. You will be treated fairly with total immunity, or you will face certain death. Finally, to the great proud people of Iran, tonight, the hour of freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don't leave your home. It's very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping. When we are finished, take over your government.

46:27It will be yours to take. This will probably be your only chance for generations. In other words, regime change. And that has not happened. The regime was toppled in terms of the top people, but the regime is still in place. It's stronger.

46:42Rory Stewart:So just in that final one, there was always a fight, even at the top of the Iranian state, about where their security lay. Did their security lie on reaching out to the international community, getting support in the UN, getting peace deals in place, making agreements on sanctions on nuclear? Or did their security lie in rearming, building up massive missile bases, pushing ahead with a nuclear program? And the problem is it's the hardliners who've won because every Iranian will have concluded the one thing that saved them was not being nice, being moderate, negotiating. The only thing that saved them is that they buried their missiles a long way underground and they were able to disrupt the Straits of Hormuz.

47:25Rory Stewart:And the Revolutionary Guard has been completely vindicated, narrowly in their view, that actually what stops regime change is being armed to the teeth and refusing to cooperate. If you're an average Iranian, I don't know what an average Iranian is, but if you're a kind of middle-of-the-road Iranian, not a massive fan of the regime, but you're just kind of keeping your head down, what do you think in terms of who has won or lost this? I think the Iranians think that survival is winning, and they've survived. They now have a strength because of the way they've handled the strait reform use that they didn't necessarily have in the same way before.

48:03They've shown American power to be weaker than the Americans projected. And the Americans keep saying that the great triumph in this, I saw an interview with Pete Hexer, the Secretary of War, and the great triumph is that, you know, they've made sure Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. But that was signed up to in the non-proliferation treaty, it was signed up to in the JCPOA.

48:25Rory Stewart:And in fact, there were moments when Ayatollah Khomeini suggested that he thought it was un-Islamic to have a nuclear weapon in the first place. Yeah. And 97 % of the stuff was kind of moved out of the country. So I think it's very, very hard, unless you are absolutely believing every single word that Donald Trump says to you, to see this as a victory, even by the objectives he set out for himself. So I think the answer on Iranian people is 90%, 85%, 90 % of Iranians absolutely hate their regime. They think they're a bunch of violent, corrupt, theocratic people who've locked them in a horrible, isolated world.

49:01Rory Stewart:And they would be hugely relieved if this regime went and Iran could become a normal country. They're totally fed up with the Revolutionary Guard trying to turn their whole country into a crusade against Israel and the US. They think this nuclear program is mad and they think that this regime has invited war and horror. But also, they are so furious with what US and Israel did. Why? Because what they did is they bombed Iran, they killed hundreds of school children, and they did not topple the regime. All the people who were supporting the crown prince, the formal Shah and everyone who were promising that if we're nice to the American and Israel.

49:41Rory Stewart:There's going to be a lovely toppling the regime and a democratic future is going to emerge. It's all nonsense, right? So I think they're in the sort of bind that you would feel in if a government that you really, really hated and that you'd been trying to get rid of suddenly vindicated you in a war against someone else. Yeah. Anyway, I think you're right. I think Israel has the potential to be the real difficult thing because the iranians will be on the lookout for israel trying to undermine this the israelis it seems to me netanyahu will be under pressure to undermine it including from within his own cabinet and then the question is how trump reacts and we're talking about a 60 day period where these continuing negotiations go on and we've also talked a lot about um the economy and the impacts on the economy and we'll be doing some more episodes around this and the honest answer is the economic damage of this is very, very lasting.

50:35Rory Stewart:In the best case scenario, vessels might start moving through the strait next week. But you can see all the ship owners saying, we need many, many more assurances before we start sailing our vessels. There's going to be a massive log jam because there are thousands of vessels and it's quite difficult navigating them through. There are thousands of sailors who need to be evacuated from these boats. There are certain bits that are ready to move. Fertilizer, for example, is ready to move. It's stockpiled in places like Qatar, but it's missed a lot of this year's growing season. So the impact on this year's growing season is dramatic.

51:04Rory Stewart:Oil can be moved relatively more easily. Gas is a problem, partly because the Iranians attacked some of these gas fields. Some of them will take two months, four months. It's difficult to put a number on it to get going again. Some percentage of it won't be able to get going again for some years. And none of these states still quite know, are Iran going to charge tolls? They're going to try to charge a million dollars They said they won't, but there's some weird ambiguous language in the MOU. Nobody can model this. Nobody knows whether the impact. If you're a cattery, is it going to be in the best case scenario, okay, there's been a bit of disruption for a few weeks, but we'll be able to get back to where we were within a year or two?

51:44Rory Stewart:Or is it going to take three years or seven years? Is your economy contracting 17 % this year, 10 % this year? Dubai, I was talking to someone in the UAE who was being very optimistic and saying, listen, yes, Dubai is suffering, but people wrote us off in 2008. They wrote us off in COVID and we bounced back, so we'll bounce back again. But to be honest, nobody knows. And it isn't just the Gulf, as we've said before. The Asian economies are shattered by this. The European economies are shattered by this. And it's going to take a long time, even in the best case, to untangle. Well, there we are.

52:1810 years on from Brexit and now a few months on from the launch of the Iran war. Both of them pretty difficult big subjects. We've got more difficult big subjects to cover in question time. We're going to talk about defence. We're going to talk about AI and in particular this extraordinary decision by the Americans to say to Anthropic, you cannot give your latest frontier model stuff to anybody who is not American. You know a lot about that and we'll hear about that. We're going to talk about an astonishing close election in Peru. And we're going to reflect a little bit on possibly the greatest, well, Donald Trump said it was the greatest sporting event in history.

52:53That was the UFC fighting on the lawn of the White House, which made me throw up.

52:59Rory Stewart:Brilliant. And I'd like to do a bit of a deep dive also into what is actually happening with British defense spending. How should we be spending this money? Why did Healy go? What's this new man going to do? Cool. See you then.

53:21Rory Stewart:Hi, it's Rory here. To celebrate the release of my book, Middleland, in paperback, I'm doing two live shows on stage in London in September, and I'd love you to join me for the conversation. Middleland is my portrait of rural Britain and politics. It draws on a decade of living in Cumbria, being the Member of Parliament, writing about its resilience, its beauty, and what this corner of England can teach us about community, purpose, and if you'll allow me to sound a bit grand, democratic renewal. Every ticket to the show includes a copy of the book, and it should be a great opportunity. I'll be in discussion with people, we'll have questions, I'm happy to engage with almost anything.

54:00Rory Stewart:We can talk about global politics as well. I'm playing the Dominion Theatre in London's West End on Sunday the 13th of September, and the Richmond Theatre in Richmond on Tuesday the 15th of September. If you'd like to buy tickets, you can head to feign.co.uk forward slash Rory-Stewart. That's feign.co.uk forward slash Rory-Stewart. Finally, on day eight of the World Cup, England play tonight. We've assembled a top team to work out how we win it. Harry Maguire and Micah Richards at the back, Georgia Stanway, Jinkin in midfield and it's Shearer and Lineker up top. Come and join us on The Rest is Football on Netflix.

54:42Rory Stewart:Available right now.