553. Farage in Meltdown and The Killing of Ann Widdecombe

21:05Rory Stewart:That's very big news, because Senator Graham was, of course, a big Iran hawk, a big champion of what Trump was doing there, and in many ways, kind of an important figure on as a Republican outrider, wasn't he, for that kind of foreign policy? He was, however, somebody who was pushing for more and more sanctions on Russia. Zelensky put out a very, very, very warm tribute to him. And then sticking briefly in America, somebody we've talked about on the podcast several times graham platner in maine he has had to withdraw his candidacy oh lord because of these sexual offenses allegations that were being made against him so that finally got too much i mean so platner the tattoos which is the new york times said looked like nazi tattoos the allegations of sex and abuse all this sort of stuff finally got too much and planner i mean a bit and it's an interesting point.

21:54Rory Stewart:When do you reach a stage in a political career? Because people must be thinking all the time, if you're Farage or Plattner, well, you know, Trump can just man it out. Trump just takes scandal after scandal after scandal. He doesn't step down. He doesn't apologize. He doesn't go anywhere. And in the end, people forget. So in that style of politics, which Trump and Plattner at other different extremes are, which is, yeah, I'm a pretty, you know, I've got a lot of strange stuff in my life, but my voters don't care. When the moment comes when you have to give up. Well, just on your point on Trump, the other big news that emerged while you were away, Trump added$2.2 billion to his personal wealth in the first year of his presidency.

22:30Wow. Yeah.

22:31Rory Stewart:Wow. 1.4 billion of which was crypto. And that's all those weird investments in crypto where people get to buy crypto and they get to have dinners and people seem to get pardons when they invest in certain funds. I've done one leading in your absence, by the way. I interviewed Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who have written this book, Regime Change. Oh, yes. Lots of talk about Trump and corruption in that. Very big news in Jersey. We don't say that very often. Their parliament has been the first part of our great islands to have passed assisted dying legislation. That's happened. The Bayer tapestry est arrivé.

23:07Very good. I've booked my tickets. Excellent. Prince Harry lost his case against the mail. Prince Harry may or may not have met his father. I can't quite work it out. We've had, I don't know if you can see that I'm sweating, we've had another unbelievable heat wave. Spain has had deadly forest fires. And I told you about the World Cup, but the other big, big, big news that dominated the news for a couple of days. Do you remember, I think this is the last episode we did before you went away. I said I was really surprised that Donald Trump had basically been keeping out of the World Cup. The next day, He intervened by phoning the FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, to ask or to suggest that a red card that had been given against an American player should be lifted.

23:58That's brilliant.

23:59Rory Stewart:And guess what? Wait, no, you're not going to tell me Infantino agreed. It was suspended for a year. But, said Infantino, that was the work of the independent committee that looks at these things. Is this actually going to affect the cup? Is this an important player who's going to have a decisive impact on what happens? Well, he did. I think it did affect what happened because America were doing very, very well. And this guy, Baligan, who is actually, and this is the best irony of the lot. He's only playing for America. If you hear him, it sounds like you're talking to a kid from South London.

24:29Okay. Yeah, I played all right. It was all right. Yeah, the game was all right. We did all right. Yeah. because he was born in New York because his mother was very, very pregnant on holiday and they wouldn't let her on the plane. So he was a birthright citizen.

24:44Rory Stewart:Oh, brilliant. He is exactly the sort of person that Donald Trump wants to put on the first plane out, but he'd been their best player. So Donald Trump does this literally in the Oval Office. First of all, he says, I mean, it's really unfair. He's our best player. We can't take our best player out. What if I took Messi out? What if I took Harry Kane out? from England, he said. Oh, he also revealed that he's played golf with Harry Kane, and Harry Kane confirmed that this is true some time ago. So this was a massive, massive, massive story around the world. The real football officiato, people like Jurgen Klopp and Gary Neville and Wayne Rooney, they were all saying, this is the end of football if this is allowed to stand.

25:24But it did stand. He played, but the best thing is Belgium absolutely destroyed them, 4-1. So the Americans are out.

25:32Rory Stewart:But how wonderful that Infantino has reached the final stage of literally taking a call from the president to lift the red card. Oh, this is so wonderful. The rule of law, football, the rules of the game. Oh, it's wonderful. That's the greatest story of all. No, I wasn't expecting the punchline of actually the red card being suspended. That's really impressive. For a year. So if he commits another offence in the next year, they're going to take that one into account. And then, of course, in England's game, the next game England played in the day after this, they got a red quad card and the guy got a too much ban.

26:09So there's all this stuff around here is, you know, who's going to phone Trump, who's going to get it lifted, etc. So there we are. I think I've covered most of the big things sort of home and abroad.

26:20Rory Stewart:No, that's it. Thank you, Alistair. And that's an amazing kind of reminder. My general sense is nothing really much happens. You go away, you come back, you open the newspaper and nothing seems to change. I think that's true. I think I missed a lot. So thank you very much. So Alistair, I think on that, let's take a break.

26:45Hello, The Rest is Politics listeners. It's Gordon and David here from The Rest is Classify, and we've got an exclusive preview of our latest series on the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. A Russian security service officer is living in London with his wife and son when he suddenly falls seriously ill. He has been poisoned using a rare and highly radioactive toxin. But who gave the orders and why? In our latest series, we investigate the mysterious murder of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko. In a sinister plot that goes all the way to the top of the Russian state, we delve into the murky circumstances leading up to Litvinenko's death and how foreign agents pulled off an audacious murder on British soil, one which which put the entire population of London in serious danger.

27:35This is a story of personal tragedy and of cloak and dagger espionage, but also political conspiracy. Litvinenko's murder sheds light on the cost of speaking out in Putin's Russia, but also the extent to which the British state has been willing to suppress the truth to maintain its political relationships. To hear the full series, listen to The Rest is Classified wherever you get your podcasts.

28:08Rory Stewart:welcome back to the rest is politics with me rory stewart and with me alistair campbell and as i said at the top if you saw the first half we recorded on sunday so if we're looking like we're in different places we're in different clothes we are it's now tuesday that we're recording and we're going to talk a little bit more about farage and about clacton so rory i think there's a lot to separate here. There's the by-election caused by Farage's hissy fit when he wasn't enjoying scrutiny over his finances and now trying to frame everything against him and the establishment. There's the comedy value of Count Binface, who's making headlines right around the world at the moment.

28:43And of course, because he was a reformed politician, Anne Whittacombe's murder is in some cases being lumped in as part of one big story about reform. So it is hard to separate. But I think we should try to stay focused on the by-election for now, what we think about that, why he's doing it, whether actually Count Binface has any chance of winning, and then also just some of the politics around it, and then maybe go into Anne Whittacombe a bit later.

29:09Rory Stewart:Well, I think that the thing that struck me most coming back and getting into the reading around this is how fundamental, in the end, the money was to the collapse of Farage and the triggering this by-election, looking into the story of George Cottrell, posh George, becomes more and more mesmerizing. And I think we should pay tribute to some of the journalists who've been covering this story over the last few years. I mean, there's been extraordinary articles, actually, in The Spectator, Sunday Times Insight team with Gabrielle Pogrand. There was a great series of Guardian articles about this.

29:45Rory Stewart:But what's interesting, when you read back over these stories, which have been coming for years and years and years is how difficult it was for any sort of this stuff to break through, given how mad the story is. What I hadn't quite taken on board is this guy, George Koshrell, who had grown up on the island of Mustique, been to more than school, doesn't go to university, and drifts into Nigel Farage's orbit when he's barely 20, 21. He takes Farage to the States on his great visit to meet Trump. And he's with Farage when he's detained at the airport by IRS agents who bring 20 charges against him and eventually put him in jail.

30:24Rory Stewart:He does a plea bargain where he agrees to explain how he does his stuff. And in return, he only gets eight months in a federal penitentiary. This guy, you would have thought, that's it, right? And the posh George is not going to reappear then in the life of Nigel Farage. He then goes on to become this amazing sort of, well, it's like something out of London Falling. You remember that book, London Falling, you enjoyed, Frank? A young man who is living the most extraordinary fantasy life, who's claiming he's inherited£200 million of trust fund, which his mother says is total nonsense, and he's actually inherited nothing from them.

30:55Rory Stewart:Who's telling Tatler magazine that he's just lost£56 million at a poker table, £23 million in other poker. He's clearly very, very into gambling and somehow rebuilds off the back of gambling through some very strange relations with Tether, which has Chris Harbourn set up, a whole life in Montenegro, which involves private jets and planes. And then you see Farage is reappearing. He's turning up in Montenegro. He's becoming part of this life. And in the end, as these rather brilliant journalists have established, you end up with these incredible transactions, including one of which I still haven't seen properly reported, which is that Nick Candy, the treasurer of reform, gives an£8 million house in downtown London to George Cottrell, for which George Cottrell doesn't pay.

31:45Rory Stewart:You can see in the land registry, it's 0-0. Later, he claims that Cottrell has bought shares in an offshore company in Guernsey, but they refuse to divulge the amounts gone by. Meanwhile, the security, the social media team that's built Farage, the transport, all of this stuff appears to be coming from Cottrell. That, That for my mother, for example, is the thing that's already stuck. Not for Ashman and Donald Media. She's had it because of the money. She can't believe the money stuff. The thing that I think has taken this, sometimes in these situations, you need a tipping point. So with Boris Johnson, who you and I knew as being a complete charlatan, but people liked him, thought he was funny and what have you.

32:21And there was all sorts of things that you and I and lots of people like us would have said, this guy is not fit to be prime minister. He should be gone by now. I would say his management of COVID, even before party game. The tipping point was his defence of Pinscher, the guy who was accused of sex offences. With Farage, I think the sense of the tipping point, maybe we're not fully at the tipping point, but the beginning of the tipping point is him defending himself over something that is utterly indefensible. Because you mentioned Christopher Harbourn. Christopher Harbourn has given£5 million to Nigel Farage.

32:52And if Nigel Farage expects us to believe that it's just a gift, it's no strings attached, actually doesn't want anything from it. Then we hear that it's free security. And we'll talk about security when we get on to Anne Whittacombe. But as I've said recently, I think that was unbelievable, not believable. Then it was because he campaigned for Brexit. But the more you read about Cottrell and about Tether, which is becoming, you talk sometimes about these trillion dollar companies with AI, they're going to have 10 employees. It is a massively wealthy, not really putting much back, I would argue.

33:24So you then start to think, and then you think, well, George Cottrell, I think he will be regretting, whatever the motivation or whatever the book, because I've not read the book, writing a book called How to Launder Money. Because this feels like a group of people using very opaque systems and national borders and technological advance to do things that most decent people would think you shouldn't be doing that when you're a politician.

33:50Rory Stewart:Just on that How to Launder Money, because I've slightly got into that. So the reason, and of course he's written the book, is that he was sent to jail in the United States for laundering money. Well, for wire fraud. It was for wire fraud. Yeah. Part of the plea bargain was that he would explain to the federal agents how he had laundered money. And therefore the book conceit is I was a former criminal and now I'm going to explain to the world how I did it so that law enforcement agencies can get on it. But what's so odd about it is that what he's gone on to do since his conviction seems to be, and to create sock puppets.

34:25Rory Stewart:So a lot of the business seems to be about buying up gambling accounts of ordinary people so that professional gambling syndicates with enormous compute and money can bet on ordinary people's accounts, which they wouldn't normally be allowed to do. So a huge amount of what he's doing is trying to get around the terms and conditions of UK gambling companies or enabling people to place bets they wouldn't normally be allowed to do. And this is what this whole Montenegrin universe seems to be about. And some of the crypto. So in other words, it may not be exactly the type of stuff that he did when he literally sat down with federal agents who he believed to be drug dealers and agreed to launder a million of their money.

35:12Rory Stewart:But it's certainly a world which you would have thought any politician who wasn't greedy, and this is the other thing. I mean, Farage comes across as unbelievably greedy. Why did he take 50 ,000 to go to Davos? When we were in Davos, that whole trip cost 50 ,000 paid for by somebody else, not declared. If he's already received 5 million pounds from Chris Harbourn, and he's already getting all his security covered by Cottrell, and there's already free accommodation in London. I mean, is there any limit to how much money Farage wants? Well, there's two points that you made. There's that one. I'll come back to that.

35:45You made the point earlier, why does Farage keep somebody who's not just controversial and colourful, but has actually been to an American jail for committing quite serious financial offences? I think there can only be two reasons. And bear in mind, they are genuinely close. Otherwise, it would be very, very, well, it's weird anyway that George Cotterall calls him daddy. So there's that. There's the personal relationship. He's clearly, Farage sees him as somebody who is very, very useful to it. So he's kept him for that reason. But I think the main reason is that Farage actually, and this is where I'm critical of our media, Farage actually has been able to get away for too long with things that a bit like Trump, that most politicians wouldn't get away with.

36:26And that's because he's very cleverly and very successfully created this shtick as a kind of cheeky, chappy commentator, as opposed to somebody who even dreams one day of being prime Minister. So the drawing towards the tipping point has come from the fact that people have started to think, I wonder if he could be Prime Minister. You know, Labour aren't doing very well in the polls. They've been ahead in the polls for so long. They've now got loads of money coming in. And of course, when it was starting, they were, do you remember, he actually did an advert, reformed the only party in Britain that welcomes cryptocurrencies.

37:01In a way, they've been hiding in plain sight and all this stuff. Then the other thing that happens, if you think you can get away with stuff for long. Once the scrutiny does start to become a bit more difficult to handle, and then he did this thing, he went on a reform podcast, because of course, a bit like Trump again, they've got their own media infrastructure. They've got papers like the Express and the Telegraph will just pump out, although they're all turning a bit, but they'll pump out his stuff, you know, whatever he says. They've got their own podcast. He goes on one of Reform's sort of favourite podcasts, and he says, quotes, I'm being treated like a war criminal.

37:32Well, I know what it's like to be occasionally treated like a warquiver and called one every day of my life. He's being treated at last with some scrutiny. And the scrutiny is showing up very, very quickly. One, that he's not very good at standing up to it. Two, that he regularly does things which anybody with serious intent upon being prime minister would never, ever do. Five million pounds is one of them. some of the others advertising gold bullion, even the stuff like doing the cameos for peanuts. What does that say if it's not greed? Why does he need a hundred quid to say up the rah to somebody?

38:13Why does he need a hundred quid to wish somebody well on their birthday? If you like somebody, you want to wish them well, you do it for nothing. If you're a nice person, a lot obsessed with money.

38:23Rory Stewart:Presumably, if I'm Chris Harbourn seeing all this, I'm like, what the actual fuck? I gave you 5 million pounds so that you weren't going to have to worry about any of this. Plus 10 or more to the party. I've given 10 to the party and I've given five to you. And why did I give it to you, Nigel? I gave it to you so that you could focus on becoming prime minister. You wouldn't need to get up to any of your dirty financial dealings. You wouldn't have to do embarrassing little endorsements on videos anymore. You wouldn't have to take strange loans from people running gambling syndicates out of Montenegro.

38:56Rory Stewart:You can just get on with stuff because I've given you£5 million and that should be enough for you to live on comfortably with your MP salary. And he hasn't done it. I mean, if I'm Harbaugh and I'm just thinking, this is insane. I mean, the only possible justification of writing a blank check is to save Farage from all this monkey business. And Farage just kept getting deeper in it. Right. And he gets deeper in it. And then how is he trying to frame this by-election that he has triggered, it's me against the establishment, right? As if one, he's not the establishment. Richard Tice, who talks about a very successful aristocratic family, I think he we can put down as the establishment.

39:36Zia Yusuf, very much the establishment. I mean, the whole thing is utterly absurd, but this is what he's trying to do is to frame now anything the police do as they investigate reform and the Cottrell family that they're doing, as they investigate generic and some of his funding, they are now trying to put in the public mind the idea that the police cannot be trusted. We'll come back to that when we get to the way that they've reacted to the Anne Whittacombe murder, which I have real, real concerns about, the way that they've reacted to this. So I think what you're seeing now with Clacton, I mean, look, you, Rory, I think you thought it was wishful thinking.

40:10When I said at the turn of the year, I wouldn't be surprised if Farage is not leader of the Reform Party by the end of the year. I think he's peaked and I think he's on the way down. He's still got a Trumpian appeal. I was talking to Steve Rotherham this morning, the Liverpool mayor, friend of Andy Burnham. We were talking about reform and he said, look, you know, they've definitely, I think they've peaked, but he's kind of in that space that Trump thought he was. I could shoot somebody in Fifth Avenue and my supporters are still going to love me. I just don't think, this is my hope, Britain is not America.

40:39Britain in the end, I think has enough basic core decency to say, you know what? I'm not sure a politician should take 5 million pounds off anybody. I don't think it should take 50 ,000 pounds off anybody.

40:49Rory Stewart:I also think that Trump's brand in the end was different. I mean, Trump from the very beginning, faxed in, was this sense of this rickety, debt-ridden, multiple bankrupt billionaire with loose money flowing in and out in every direction. That wasn't actually Farage's brand. Farage's brand was supposed to be the bloke in the pub with the pint. And Trump has more control of more media than Farage does. He is in a much more powerful position as an incumbent. I mean, I think what we've seen with Farage and what I think we saw with Graham Plattner, the insurgent in Maine, who was supposed to be taking on Susan Collins and who's also collapsed, is that it's very, very difficult actually for anybody really to do the full shameless Trump, unless you've baked in that whole Trump story over 40 years.

41:37Well, maybe we should turn to Anne Whittacombe and perhaps do this in two parts. First, all just talk about what happened what's happened and maybe talk a little bit about her career but then to what I see as this sort of attempt to politicize it in a way that is deeply unhelpful to the police and also I think is just again playing wrong.

41:56Rory Stewart:Let me just do a quick quick quick explainer on Anne Woodacombe and you I'm sure knew her much better than I did and but I was just reviewing her life and it's rather extraordinary so she what wasn't that old actually in comparative terms, born in the late 40s, came into conservative politics in the 70s in what would have been a pretty classic Tory route. So she'd studied PPE at Oxford, having studied Latin before. She then became an assistant to Michael Ankrum, who was then a Tory MP. She became a local councillor. She then went through the tried and tested route of running in no hope seats in 79, 1983, finally gets into the past parliament, the late Thatcher era, and then becomes quite quickly a star, really, in a way, in the terms of it.

42:46Rory Stewart:Within a couple of years, she's a junior minister. Relatively quickly, she's a minister of state. She ends up, and one of the things I've always resonated with, she became, she had my job. She was a minister of state for prisons in the last two years the major government spent. And she did this thing, which David Hansen did, which is to attempt to visit every prison in the United Kingdom. And she managed it. It's a hell of an achievement, actually. You have to, I mean, because there's some pretty remote things and you've got the whips and all this going. You're going around well over 100 prisons.

43:16Rory Stewart:And she did that. And after the loss in 97, she was in a pretty powerful position. She'd become the shadow home secretary under William Hague. So she was quite a kind of cornerstone of the Tory party. she was already beginning to develop pretty independent views. So she, on the one hand, was much more Catholic. So she was very anti-abortion. She was somebody who never talked about her own personal life, shared a house with her mother till her mother died at 97 in the late 2000s. Doesn't seem to have had romantic relationships. But as well as being very, very conservative on social issues, she also agreed with you on things.

43:55Rory Stewart:She was very anti-fox hunting, for example, which would have been unusual for a Tory MP at the time. She fell out with Michael Howard. She was the one who produced this great line. He had something with the night about him. When David Cameron becomes leader, he's very much from her point of view, a young whippersnapper who's hardly been in the House of Commons and hasn't been through anything. She has and she's a little bit derogatory about him. And then after she decides to step down, but she leaves parliament pretty young. So she's only barely 60 when she steps down when she could have had her, just as the conservatives are coming into power for 13 years.

44:30Rory Stewart:So instead of what she would have expected, which is to be at the absolute summit of her career, being a minister in various conservative governments over 13 years, she goes off and becomes really one of the first politician celebrities of every different sort. She has agony aunt columns in The Guardian. She has a BBC and ITV programs where she's being an agony aunt. She's going out to being an MP, challenging vandals. She's going on Celebrity Big Brother. She's going on Strictly Come Dancing. One of the first real MPs to do all this kind of stuff. And then she becomes increasingly pro-Brexit, increasingly close to reform, and becomes from the point of view of the sort of Cameroon wing of the Conservative Party, no longer fully one of them.

45:17Rory Stewart:But anyway, give us the sense of her. Did you know her well? Did you appear on any of these shows with her? Well, I would never do the reality TV shows, as you know, Rory, but I did regularly joust with her on television, but also in private as well. I'm trying to remember what role she had in the 97 election. She was certainly one of their big hitters. And as you say, she had a succession of serious jobs. And that something of the night about Michael Howard, that showed you her ability to really cut through in a way that that phrase, I'm afraid when Michael Howard dies, that's going to be part of his obituary because it just, it really damaged him.

45:54It really damaged him. Look, her and my politics were a long, long, long way apart. But she was one of those people you could really have interesting discussions about. You said about when she, you're right, when she was prisons minister she was she was obsessed with this idea you have to go and see every prison inside you have to get a real feel for it she also he was really interested in homelessness and I don't know whether that was something that was always with her or whether that was something that she got through seeing you know the link between prison and homelessness but she was so there were lots of things that she was passionate about that I would have been passionate about as well and I think she I think you're right about the judgment of Cameron I think she felt she was more of a real Tory than him, even though he had the sort of, you know, the Eton background and all the rest of it.

46:40I think what made her cut through in the way that she did was because at a time when maybe politics was becoming much more about conventional looking, sounding politicians, she was just very, very, she was different. There was nobody else looked like her, sounded like her. And I'll tell you the other thing, my son, my Rory, was on the day that I left government in 2003, this is 22 years ago now and we had you know dozens of cameras outside the house all day i'm sorry nigel it's happened to a lot of people before you and you know they're all out there waiting for fiona me fiona me to come back the boys are downstairs watching the television all day where it's wall to wall on sky and news 24 and all that stuff so i came back in came through the crowd of cameras and then sat down had a cup of tea and talking to the kids and i said to rory did anybody say anything particularly interesting he goes no not really they all said what you expect them.

47:31You know, he said this, he said this. The only one that was really in this was Ann Whitticombe. I said, oh, what did she say? She said, well, she thought that my impact upon political life was not wholly positive. She thought that my conduct during the war was not as she would have liked it to be. She felt I was far too tribal in politics. But she said his biggest service to life and the nation was to show that you could do a very difficult job with a mental health condition. And she was the only one who said that. And so that actually sort of, I don't know, whenever I bumped into her thereafter, because I don't know whether there was anything in her life that made her particularly interested in mental health, but I know that she was.

48:16Again, it might have been through the prisons experience. So I think it was, I was genuinely shocked when I heard that she was dead and sad. But then since then, and this whole murder thing, and it's like, it's just become one of those stories that has cut through to everybody. Every, you know, every go to them and people say, what is this Ann Whittacombe thing all about? So you were in your retreat, wake up one morning and on the news, Ann Whittacombe has died. She's 78. So we think, oh, didn't know she wasn't well. But that's sad. And then people start to pay tribute. And then through the day, it emerges that police have launched a murder investigation.

48:53and then the police, Devon and Corp, and this is where I start to feel sorry for the police, because straight away people are saying, is there a terrorist political motivation? They say, we are not aware of a terrorist motivation. This becomes, blanket, police rule out. I read the words very, very carefully. They didn't rule it out. So what's happened now, a few days later, Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, announces in the House of Commons, this is now being handled by counter-terrorism. Q, lots of people on the reform for our supporting side of things, basically, oh, I told you, they're covering it up.

49:30Rory Stewart:Sorry, for international listeners, though, just to explain what we mean by terrorism. We don't know exactly what they mean, but there's no reason to believe that by terrorism, what they mean is some jihadi Islamist group putting together a coordinated group attack in order to bring down the government. At the moment, the suspect appears to be a young white man who was arrested in Yorkshire, and the police have found material in his home. So the statement seems to be that he may have killed her because of her political beliefs. But it's not terrorism in the sense in which one talked about terrorism 20, 30 years ago, which is people blowing things up in order like the IRA.

50:10And the definition, because there has been such an increased threat towards people in public life, it's about the use of terror and intimidation tactics to intimidate and terrorise people, prevent them from doing their work, or, you know, and in this case, literally end somebody's life. So the police come out and they say it is not helpful to speculate. Nigel Farage, meanwhile, gets on, I think it was a helicopter, paid for, I don't know by who, flies down to Devon, where this murder has taken place, is advised that, no, we don't want you anywhere yet. This is a murder scene. So stages this kind of walk with a wreath, lays a wreath in front in this field, and then does this great tribute to Anne Whittacombe.

50:52Now, okay, you could just about say that's justifiable. Then says, I think this was a premeditated murder, but I don't think it helps anybody to speculate. So I'm going to speculate and then say it's not helpful to speculate. Zia Yusuf, with the police then saying, this speculation is really unhelpful. Zia Yusuf says, don't speculate, in quotes, means shut up and accept the establishment narrative. In other words, we don't believe you if you're the police. This is all so Trumpian. This is populism. What it actually means, and we should put in the newsletter a very interesting thread, I think I sent it to you, but you may still have been in the retreat, by a lawyer called Dennis Noel Kavanagh.

51:32And he explains in this thing how he says he's done a lot of murder cases as a lawyer and how this sort of speculation can have a direct impact upon cases if and when they reach court. And that defense lawyers are very skilled these days of looking for the kind of material that amid the speculation could help them get their guy off.

51:56Rory Stewart:I would have thought presumably actually that the main reason that one's trying to control speculation is that it's politically explosive. I mean, with the Southport murders, with the killing that was reported recently, I mean, we're in a politics in which large numbers of very, very angry men are mobilizing into the streets and families too, mobilizing the streets of Britain and attacking the police. And in the end, she was a reform spokesman and very close to Farage. And she's been murdered. So the real thing that everybody's bracing for in Britain is whether this is weaponized and politicized and turned into something that releases mobs onto the streets.

52:36Rory Stewart:And again, there will have been total sort of, I mean, and it's the other thing that's so sad at the moment. every time anything happens if there's a stabbing in edinburgh the politician is killed everybody is sort of keeping their fingers crossed that it hasn't been a muslim or an immigrant who's done it it's a sort of almost a sigh of relief oh that was done by a white person because then we're not likely to have huge demonstrations in edinburgh against the stabbing we're not going to have huge demonstrations against the king of amwoodicum but exactly the same crime committed by an immigrant is now explosive in a way that a crime committed by a white person is not.

53:11I still think this is going to be very explosive or potentially very explosive. But I think the main reason the police have this no speculation, when I was, funny enough, not far from where this murder happened, Fiona and I were training as journalists in Devon on local newspapers in Devon. We were trained in, there's a book which everybody had to read and sort of no inside out called Essential Law for Journalists. And it seems to me a lot of that stuff has broken down. But just to give you one example of this guy, Dennis Kavanagh, that he made this point. So there's something called the Criminal Evidence Act 1984, okay, under which lawyers can submit in criminal proceedings that evidence should be excluded if it's thought to be unfair.

53:53And he then sets out an example, and I won't apply this to Ann Whittacombe because I don't know if this is relevant at all, but just let's imagine there's a crime that takes place, a serious crime, and there is CCTV in existence of a suspect arriving at the scene of the crime. Now, if that were the case now, you would have Zia Yusuf saying, why can't we see the CCTV? Well, what if, the police might say, they are pursuing a case against a suspect which relies upon an eyewitness account from a real person who saw them. A defense lawyer will get up and say, no, no, no, you were influenced by the CCTV that you saw on the television, weren't you?

54:36Well, how do you know you weren't influenced by that? You say that that's the person that you saw, but can you remember what they were wearing? And so it goes on. And the other thing he said, there are operational reasons why you might not want to release evidence. So for example, you mentioned this is the suspect that they're talking to now is up in yorkshire once it's let's just imagine that there's there was a group of them involved in this and that they're all in yorkshire and they did this together let's just imagine that they hear that the police in yorkshire have arrested this guy they think shit they're onto us flight risk away they go and then the other thing is that there are resource issues.

55:18The police these days, we saw, as you say, in Southampton, in Belfast, they're having to deal all the time with rumour and conspiracy theory driven by people who say, well, this is what happens if you don't tell us what's going on. There are good reasons sometimes why we are not told what's going on. And to see Yusuf saying, don't speculate, is don't say anything against the establishment. I mean, these people, they're just, and this is why I think they're panicking, by the way, because I think more and more, if you only said this morning, more and more people are seeing them for what they are.

55:52The idea that they're for the establishment against the people, the idea that they believe in being tough on crime. If you're tough on crime, you support the police when there's a murder. Nothing else. Nothing else.

56:02Rory Stewart:Yeah, I'm with you. I think though, maybe just on the, you know, where it is now, I think there are two big issues that we maybe need to talk about. One is security of MPs, but the other is this notion of the politicization of police investigations. I was very struck by something Penny Mordaunt said on the radio the other day. She was interviewed, I think it was on Times Radio, and she was talking about Farage. And she said, the death threats that Farage gets are not exceptional to him. They apply to a lot of MPs. It does not mean he shouldn't be subject to scrutiny on donations. she said just because we face threats does not excuse us from facing accountability for political donations that are made to us and i do feel that what's happening at the moment is that reform jenric was on the radio this morning i mean to be fair to nick robinson he really you know put him through the ringer on it but this seems to me him yusuf lots of the social media influencers they're trying to shift the narrative very firmly away from farage is a bad guy who takes dodgy money to Farage.

57:05He's only accused of this because he's against the establishment. And he's the victim in all this.

57:11Rory Stewart:And then there's the censorship thing, isn't there? Which is that you can see in the States after Charlie Kirk's assassination, which is you can't go around criticizing us because if you go around criticizing us, some mad person is going to take it to heart and try to assassinate someone. And you've had people in the Israeli government making the same statement. You can't criticize the Israeli government because if you do, some crazy terrorist might use that as a reason to mount an anti-Semitic attack, it is absolutely necessary for us to be able to criticize people and hold them to account. And I'm afraid it isn't fair to say that calling out people for their views, for their donations, for their conduct has to be suppressed for fear that some mad person might use that as a pretext to do something horrible.

57:57I also think that, you know, I mean, Nigel Farage is a very high profile political figure. No doubt about that. But it was Joe Cox who was murdered during the Brexit referendum. It was David Amos who was murdered. It was Stephen Timms who was attacked by a guy in his surgery. I don't hear Stephen Timms going around saying, I demand more and better protection than everybody else who's been in my circumstances. I see Stephen Timms and Kim Ledbetter, Joe's sister, who's now doing the same job. I see them thinking, we have institutions, They assess threats. We have to trust them. And what's happening here, Jenrick was doing this this morning.

58:33It was basically, so it now emerges that Nigel Farage was offered the same level of state protection as Kemi Bader not gets. Now, Kemi Bader not, she's the leader of the opposition. It's an official government function. Okay. And of course, now that we've got so many former prime ministers, so many former foreign secretaries, so many former home secretaries, there's so many people at the moment who might think that they need protecting. And, you know, look, Fiona reminded me last night, I'd completely forgotten about this, but five years ago, I had to give evidence in a case where a former soldier was threatening me with, quotes, putting a bullet in the back of your skull and also threatening my family.

59:15Now, I certainly didn't publicise it, but I did take it to the police. There are so many incidents when I haven't gone to the police. We've had attacks on the house, which thankfully, from the old days when I sort of vaguely mattered in public life. We have reinforced windows, but we had bricks being thrown out the windows. We had huge graffiti, war criminal graffiti at the top of the road. I've had my fair share of verbal, physical altercations in public. But the bullet in the skull threat, and particularly the reference to my kids, was one of the very, very few times I went to the police. I think the police have got a lot on.

59:51I also think it would be terrible for democracy if all MPs had to have protection. It would be incredibly expensive. And I just don't think it benefits anyone to have public figures constantly demanding more and more security. I'm afraid you do sometimes have to trust other people to make judgments.

1:00:08Rory Stewart:Alison, I think we've had so much news to cover, as you say, this week. And I think we may need to leave some of this stuff for question time. But can I just sort of finish with a little bit of a, yeah, I suppose a gentle tribute to Anne Whittacombe, who is a very, very, I think when I think back to a very kind of distinctively British figure, a very wonderful kind of combination of old-fashioned conservatism, outrageous views, views that provoke people like you and me. She became a Roman Catholic because she was so appalled by the ordination of women in the Church of England, which again, a very strange thing for somebody who in some ways was kind of feminist role model.

1:00:49Rory Stewart:Yeah. But who also, as you say, had a sort of, I think there was a wonderful authenticity. And I think I do wish, in a way, whatever we think of their views, we were more comfortable with politicians having unusual views. the fact that you know again i disagree with her about fox hunting when you agree with her just that sense of the oddness of her deep compassion for certain issues her willingness to live in housing estates spend time in prisons work on homelessness take unpopular positions and also do these yeah do these things to engage with the public and so i thought she's a rather splendid splendid figure and in a real loss i don't know if you heard thought for today this morning on the today program rory but we were honorably mentioned in thought for today because they were the speaker i didn't catch the name at the start of it she was making the point that there is so much toxicity in our politics and we all need to disagree more agreeably as rory stewart and alice campbell say on the rest is politics so yeah now i agree as she she was without doubt a very very very big character i mean it's horrible when anybody dies um but the circumstances of this death are particularly gruesome.

1:02:02I'm also not sure that she would have welcomed the Charlie Kirk-ization around it. I don't know, but I just think we should. My message to Zia Youssef and Jen Rick and the rest of them, shut up, let the police do their job, and they'll have a better chance of doing it if they don't have endless political commentary alongside it. Okay, Rory, so great to have you back. And we've got question time tomorrow. We are going to talk lots about Andy Burnham, soon to be our prime minister. We're going to talk about Iran, ceasefire over. We're going to talk about the climate and the heat waves and all the craziness that's been going on on that front.

1:02:41We're going to talk about the campaigning for Count Binface. We're going to talk about your meditative retreat and whether it's made you any calmer than when you sat down with Gabriel Zuckman a Paris. See you then. See you then. Bye-bye.