563. Britain’s Afghanistan Shame and the Jason Arday Tragedy

23:27I'm actually not surprised that people aren't doing something for the fifth anniversary because I experienced mostly just a deep shame from both the American, European, British general public and governments at our involvement in that country over the last decade. So I'm not that surprised. But what you said, Rorah, I couldn't agree more with the sanctions are not, they're just killing lives of the economy and individual Afghans. But the world is more like this today than it was five years ago and 10 years ago, which is you have more countries which are in conflict and we don't agree with what the governments are doing.

24:07And we either are going to be black and white about it or we're going to do what we can do. And we can do quite a lot in Afghanistan.

24:14Rory Stewart:You actually are deliberately working in a lot of these countries. You're working in Myanmar, you're working in Syria, you're working in the West Bank, and you're presumably having similar conversations all these places. Syria people would say, well, this is a guy who used to be an al-Qaeda, al-Shara, who Alistair and I interviewed. Myanmar, there's a brutal military government, Taliban, Afghanistan, yet you still think that it's worth working. Tell us why you think it's worth working in these countries that many of us would just rather ignore or pretend didn't exist, or I don't know, we're too uncomfortable to engage with.

24:43Yeah, we bury our heads in the sand and we just sort of go, oh, it's a black hole. We can't look at it because we're so embarrassed by our role in it, how difficult things are. Because you can do things. I mean, if I look at the news at a place that I'm not engaged in, Sudan, it depresses me. When I think about the countries that I work in that you just listed, I don't get that feeling because I can do something. I can create 10 ,000 jobs a year, put 35 ,000 people through healthcare, and that's enough for me in the day. I also think I've come to find that the sort of ecosystem around all of us of activism, political choice, organizations on the ground, we don't all have to agree on the same things.

25:22It can be important that activists and think tanks are doing the research and putting out what the problems are and demanding that we don't engage. And it can also be true that I should go and work even when we don't agree with what governments are doing. If we just leave Afghanistan today, right, if we say, okay, it's too impossible for women and girls, we're just going to go, that just means we don't employ thousands of Afghan women or put tens of thousands of people through healthcare. It's as simple as that. Why would I do that? I think it's an amazing privilege to be able to go and work in these places.

25:53Also, I get to work in cultural heritage, so I make pretty things. I'm wearing my Afghan dangly earrings. I've got lots of props, Afghan pottery. I can go on here. It's a really fun way to work in a country, actually. It's what's beautiful about a country. It's not what's wrong. Yeah. You used the word shame. Do you think that shame is exacerbated by the sense that we maybe haven't done enough to protect those Afghans who actually supported our military in a very, very practical way? And also, the other thing Johnny Mercer talked about, Rory, was this ongoing inquiry into some of the atrocities that appear to have been committed by some of our troops.

26:31So I just wonder whether that feeds into this. And also, Shoshana, if you can just give me a sense of what, if you say to an Afghan, oh, I'm married to a Brit, what is their feeling about Britain? And what is their feeling about America? I think they say, well, we beat the British. I mean, Afghans have a very long memory. And from their perspective, they have never successfully been conquered. And you're welcome to come and visit. Thank you very much. I also think that the Taliban is very open to tourism and very welcoming of people coming because they won, right? The war is over and they are in charge.

27:08So I don't have any concern being an American or American and British passport holding person in the country. I do think, to your question about shame, I think the question about the way that we have dealt with resettlement, refugees, and the evacuation, it is unbelievably important. I don't want to say that it's not. But it's the thing that's about us, not about Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a country of 45 million people. And what we have an obligation to, or what we just feel if we have an obligation to people in the world, what can we possibly do to make X number of Afghans' lives better? I think the more fundamental question is what we are doing or not doing in Afghanistan.

27:48And the British government does continue to engage, even though we don't recognize, as do most governments around, providing aid. And I wish we did more of it.

27:56Rory Stewart:There is, though, Alistair, I mean, you're completely right that particularly for people who worked as soldiers in Afghanistan or for the government in Afghanistan, we spent 20 years telling people that they were safe, encouraging them to take huge risks to sign up with us against the Taliban. From the very beginning, they were facing Taliban reprisals against themselves and their family. And we were saying, don't worry, we've got you. We're here to stay. And then we pulled the plug on them. And it was Biden who pulled the plug on them. I think you need to be pretty brutal about this because obviously we spend most of our time on the podcast attacking Trump.

28:30Rory Stewart:It was Biden, completely unnecessarily. At the moment at which he pulled the Trump plug five years ago, in Afghanistan, there had been no British soldiers killed for five years and there had been no American soldiers killed for 18 months. That was not a live combat zone. We were sustaining that government with troops in bases and with air cover. And the first thing he did is he pulled out well over 10 ,000 American civilian contractors, many of whom were maintaining the Afghan aircraft, so that the planes that the Americans have provided couldn't fly. They require very complicated software updates every time they land.

29:08Rory Stewart:So suddenly you have Afghan troops stuck in forward operating bases with no medical evacuation, no ammunition coming in, and no support. We collapsed it like a pack of cards. And we didn't planned for it. I mean, it was really staggering that absolutely staggering. I remember Shoshana and I were staying with Ashraf Ghani, who was the president of Afghanistan then a few weeks before this all happened. And I was trying to say to him, look, if Biden follows through on this, what on earth is going to happen? And the truth was that he and the United States were in complete fantasy land. I remember him taking down books on French poetry from the shelves of the presidential library when we could literally hear gunfire outside in the streets.

29:49Rory Stewart:I mean, it was like something out of an Evelyn War novel. And the result, of course, is that many, many Afghans, particularly those who served in the special forces alongside us, found themselves in incredibly dangerous positions. And we didn't look after them properly. We didn't bring people home. And if I'm going to be brutal, there's an element of racism in this. These people were as much fighting alongside us as our British colleagues. And we put all the energy into looking after the British soldiers, but not into the Afghan soldiers who were effectively fighting with us and for us. So Shani, you were there five years ago.

30:23Just give us a taste of what you saw, what you heard, how you felt. Yeah, I do remember that day very well, middle of August. So if you begin that morning, the Taliban were at the Kabul city gates, they paused there. And in the weeks and days before, all the provincial capitals had fallen, and it happened pretty quickly. So we convene a teams meeting in the morning to go over our sort of plan for what happens if and when they take over. But everyone assumed there was going to be a six-month fight for the Capitol. There was no possibility that it was happening that day, right? Sitting there, one of my staff members gets a text message.

30:58They have come in through the Kabul city gates. By late morning, they were in the presidential palace. It's finished. They are in charge, 100 % free and clear, not a shot fired. So we're all like, well, what do we do? Next morning, the Taliban actually went around to all the clinics and hospitals and were like, right, let's go, people. The war is over. You're welcome. Come back to work. Come back and serve your Afghan brothers and sisters. And so my staff are sitting there going, do we hide or do we go to work. And somehow we, somehow we thought right and wrong. If we don't open when they ask us to come out, it's going to be suspicious and it's going to be harder to open later.

31:41So some very brave doctors got up and went to work that first day. And I, and then a few days later, so the men went first, a few days later, the female doctors and nurses came out and we were able to open every bit of our project over the course of those weeks and months. I genuinely believe that it's because we opened the first day that the Taliban encountered us as just doing stuff for people around us. And I think that's why we're able to operate today. But yeah, that's what the day was.

32:11Rory Stewart:Wow. So this was a project which was conceived by the king, who thought that it would be a great idea to combine working on craft training, cultural heritage, building restoration, employment, so the sort of things that he did with the Prince's Trust or the King's Foundation in Afghanistan. But Shoshana has grown it now to operate in places like Syria, places like Myanmar. And it is extraordinary because it's basic healthcare, it's primary education, it's water supply and sanitation, but it's also these really beautiful traditional crafts. Why is it that you think culture and crafts matter in conflict?

32:47I did not see this coming, if I'm totally honest, because I arrived in Kabul 20 years ago as a science teacher. I studied astrophysics. Cultural heritage was not my thing, but I've watched over the last five years in particular, right? Began with COVID. Then there was a coup in Myanmar. Then the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan October 7th, all of these wars, right? You figure out real quick whether what you're doing is a good idea or not. Because when wars start, when regimes change, if it doesn't work, if it doesn't matter, people aren't going to come. The artisans aren't going to work. They're not going to make.

33:20And we watched it work better and better. We could do more and more every year over the last five years. Why? I think that when everything falls apart, when security disappears, your sense of the future disappears, public services stop working, hospitals close, you have to be able to feed your family. So the economic bit of what we do has to work. We have to be able to create employment. But there is something else about it. There's a mindfulness, a therapy in making, and you're making something beautiful. You're bringing something beautiful into the world. You are fundamentally doing the thing that is beautiful about your culture, what was passed down to you, what you'll pass on to your children.

33:58So weirdly, it seems to work just as well, if not better, when things are terrible, which, as I say, it was a surprise to me. Excellent. Well, I'll look forward to our next trip to Hillsborough Castle. We were there not long ago. Shoshana, thank you so much. I told Fiona that you were coming on and she said, well, we still haven't done that thing. you get us both as you talked about for years and years and years. And she said, maybe you should get us on to talk about how couples disagree agreeably. Wow. That is a high bar, Fiona. I'm not sure we want to do that. I don't know what you guys think, but I'm worried about that one.

34:35Anyway, thank you so much. And good luck to you in all the work you do in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Thank you. I'm so grateful to you all. Thanks. Final plug, Sunday read on our wonderful newsletter. We've got a piece from Sir Laurie Bristow. We talked about whether there should be a British ambassador in Afghanistan. Well, he was the last British ambassador to Afghanistan. And he's going to write a piece for us about what happened back then, as well as his reflections five years on. So sign up in the description below to get that.

35:02Rory Stewart:Brilliant. Well, let's take a quick break, Alistair, and then back to concentrate on Russia in two dimensions, and then talk about the tragedy of Jason Adi. What are you doing on the 4th of September? Oh, you're still free. Why? Haven't you heard that me and me are all going to be at the Southbank Centre? We have full weekend live shows for you all from your favourite goal hangar podcasts. Hello all, Shep. I'm going to be there with Tom Holland talking about the most scandalous housewives of Regency England. And I'm going to be sitting down with the wonderful Anita Annen, my co-host on The Empire Pod, to talk about the history of modern Iran with the absolutely brilliant Ali Ansari.

35:44Rory Stewart:And Dominic and I will be telling a thrilling Victorian adventure on the Friday night to kick things off. And it's not just us. Mary Beard is coming. Stanley Tucci's coming. You really couldn't ask for a better guest list. Unless you were on it. If you want to join us, head to southbankcentre.co.uk for the full line-up and buy your tickets now. See you there. See you there.

36:14Rory Stewart:welcome back to the rest is politics with me alistair campbell and with me rory stewart and alistair you were very very patiently and sweetly asking lots of questions towards me and shoshana so i'm going to flip it around um there's a couple of things caught your eyes this week in russia one of them was to do with elections and parties and the others was to do with grain exports do you want to give us a bit of a sense on what what you thought was interesting there and there's a third thing that has happened since I've been looking at that, which is this extraordinary closeness now in the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un in North Korea, at a time when Donald Trump seems to be distancing himself from South Korea.

36:51So that's becoming very, very complicated. But here's the thing, Rory, did you know there's going to be a general election to the Russian Duma, their parliament, a month from now? Now, you got the American election wrong, but who do you think is going to win this one?

37:06Rory Stewart:Well, this one, I mean, and let's hope that in the same way that my predictions on the American election went wrong, I predict Vladimir Putin, but let's hope I have the Kamala Harris effect on him. Yeah, I think that United Russia is going to win. And one of the, there's yet another new reason for that. The Supreme Court has banned Russia's only liberal anti-war party. Now they're not massively anti-war because they're scared, like all the opposition parties are. But this is a party called Yabloko. There's an appeal process going on, but the chances are they're not going to stand. Can I ask you that question?

37:41Rory Stewart:Because I think that's the thing that will confuse people. So Yabloko is a party that, as you say, has been getting 1.4, 1.6 % of the vote over the last 10, 12 years. One kind of wonders, what does it say about Putin or Russia that he would want to work to ban the party? How did he ban it? And why does he feel threatened by a party that he's allowed to run for so many years and seem to be in the past almost electorally irrelevant? Well, they haven't won a seat since 2003. As you say, they've never been above low single figures in the polls. It's very hard to work out whether the polls are accurate, but they've never really made an impact there.

38:18They were cleared to run by the Electoral Commission, which is run by the Kremlin. So that is the question that people have been wondering, why now? Why do this now? Now, if you look at it from the perspective, is he weak? Okay, then basically the weakness says, I don't care how few votes they get. I don't want anybody saying, having the opportunity to say that party is against the special military operation. If it's a sign of strength, it's basically him saying, I don't care. I don't care. I'm just not going to have any opposition. You know that anyway. The thing about Russia, I listened to this extraordinary podcast in German, Die Lager der Nazion, and they had an extraordinary woman on called Gesine Donblut.

39:02And she's written several books about Russia. She's worked in Russia as a journalist for a German broadcasting company. She was saying, what we get wrong about Russia is that we apply our logic to the way that they make decisions. OK, so, for example, we think because we see Donald Trump thinking, I've got to sort out this bloody war in Iran because of the economy for the midterms coming up. So we think, well, Putin must be worried about the economy in Russia. And her point was, no, he can. He doesn't care about the economy, the impact of people. You and I have said many times, you've got all these Russian families who now lost somebody in the front line through this meat grinder strategy.

39:42Surely that's going to get to Putin. No, because if he now needs this war to keep his grip on power, because if he loses his grip on power, he's probably now, the rational part of his mind is thinking, you know, what's the lesson of most dictatorships when they end? They end in death or they end in prison. And she was making the point, he's a hunted war criminal. Okay. He gets the cover at the moment from Trump, but he's a hunted war criminal. And when the war is over, unless he wins, he's done. So I think the logic of why does he ban a tiny little power, we're thinking that from a Western perspective.

40:18He's basically saying, I'm going to pretend we have a free and fair election. I'm going to behave as though I'm really surprised and honored when I win it again. And meanwhile, the thing goes on. And she also makes the point that Russians are not that used to genuine democracy. And of course, state assassinations have become normalized. People falling out of windows. We know that Boris Nemtsov was bumped off. We know that Alexei Navalny was bumped off. Levinenko was bumped off. This is what they do.

40:47Rory Stewart:Yeah, well, it's such an amazing story, this. So Yabrka has been the one genuine liberal party in Russia, as you say, for more than 20 years, sort of tolerated because it didn't get anywhere. One of the things that's been very striking about it is that like all progressive parties, it's completely riven by internal dissension. So it expelled Alexei Navalny, who was originally a member. it then got very cross because nivalny was encouraging people to do tactical voting for example to vote for the communist party against putin's party if he thought the communist party was more likely to beat him and they're real purists and they said you know this is ridiculous how can you possibly encourage people to vote for parties that we profoundly disagree with it then managed to have a fight with uh the most liberal radio station in the country and boycotted it so that they're right in the middle of these kind of tiny factual things but as we came towards this election, Navalny's widow, who we interviewed on leading, endorsed them.

41:44Rory Stewart:And a lot of the Russian opposition has begun to get behind them. So along with your point about swatting flies, I think there's also a genuine anxiety that maybe the Kremlin thought that they could become a proxy for expressing anti-war sentiment, even if they only got four or nine percent of the vote. It might be a bit destabilizing for the regime to see that four or nine percent of Russians actually are publicly so against the war on Ukraine. They're proud of this party. It's also interesting, you pointed out this strangeness that Sasha was getting to me at. He said, what do you mean they have elections?

42:17Rory Stewart:I thought Putin was a dictator. And, you know, there are people saying he's not going to accept a peace deal in Ukraine until after the elections. It's like when people say, you know, Netanyahu is not going to accept a sort of Gaza deal until after the elections. The pretense of this stuff is very strong. The party wasn't banned officially by the Kremlin, although some pretty good reporting says Putin gave a direct order. The way it happened is that a judge heard a civil case brought by Rodina, the motherland party. Another party, yeah. Another pro-Putin party, which accused Yablka, amongst other things, of breaking copyright because they'd shown in one of their ads an image of Hiroshima, which they claimed belonged to the US Army for copyright.

43:02No, the whole thing. But this is what they do. They make us sort of laugh by saying, oh, this is quite funny, right? Just unpick what you just said. So it's the Supreme Court making the judgment on a case brought by another party that, as you said, is pro-Kremlin. Why do you have a pro-Kremlin party when Putin's already got his own party? Answer, to pretend that you can vote for other parties. Okay. So this guy is called Alexei Zhiravlyov. And he's quite a kind of, he's got very good teeth and he's got very well managed hair and facial hair. And he looks really tough. You make sound like a sort of tougher version of the mooch.

43:42He's a much tougher version of the mooch. Much, much, much tougher version of the mooch. He doesn't dye his hair. He doesn't have Botox. He looks rugged. It looks like you wouldn't want to meet him in, you know, coming out of a nightclub. So he brings the case. Now, what was the judge deciding? Some of the complaints they were deciding was, for example, this you can get because of Putin's very profound anti-gay stance. Yabloko were accused of publicly supporting an extremist organization. What's the extremist organization? LGBT movement, okay, which the Supreme Court had designated as extremist three or four years ago.

44:21Second, this is another thing that gets said, Yobloco received money, no evidence given, through third parties from Germany and the US and other countries. Okay. So that's the sort of thing. Okay. But then you go into this nonsense. The copyright wasn't just the Hiroshima photo. They were accused, Rory, of using the lines of Soviet songs, including these lines let there always be sunshine and if only there were no war they take these lines from old songs how dare they the copyright is owned by the person who wrote that song well we can kind of

44:56Rory Stewart:just on that one the there's also i think possibly and actually a russian joke here that they're upholding the copyright of stalinist russia and the u.s army i mean it's yeah i mean particularly that last thing you're upholding the copyright of the u.s army in order to stop someone campaigning against the Ukraine war. How dare you take a photo that was actually a photo from the Americans insulting our good friend Donald Trump here. But you know, I mentioned in the discussion with Shoshana, how strange I thought it was that none of our governments came out and said something five years on. Not one foreign government has objected to this Supreme Court decision.

45:38Now, that just shows you how normalized this has all become. We're going into an election, and they've banned the only kind of real opposition liberal anti-war party and not one foreign government has come out the osc hasn't come out a few ngos haven't that's about it so that's that and don't forget look i'm not these guys are unbelievably brave sometimes they get criticized for not being strong enough against the ukraine war when you think how many of their opponents putin's opponents have been put in jail exiled or murdered so these are pretty brave people are doing what they're doing. And they had a big protest outside the court of particularly young people.

46:13They've now got 40 party activists who are facing prosecution. Well, I think we know what's going to happen to them. So as you say, the other thing that I thought was interesting is the grain store wars that are going on. So right at the start of the war, one of the big worries was that Ukraine, wheat basket for the world, that the grain stores were, and the Turkish government got involved and some kind of deal got put together, you've now got them firing off at each other's grain stores. So that's going to have an impact upon our economy, European economy, and so forth. But it just shows you to me, I mean, my sense is that this war is nowhere near ending.

46:52Rory Stewart:Well, let's just look at that story, because people will remember in 2022 that when the first disruptions happened, there was a massive problem with world grain. Russia and Ukraine together provide something like 30 % of all the world's grain exports. And Ukraine's providing over 50 % of the maize for many markets. Huge numbers of European countries, a lot of countries in sub-Saharan Africa, some of them dependent 70 % on Russian and Ukrainian grain. And then there was this Turkish broker deal through the Black Sea that began to let this food come through again, and the grain prices came down.

47:28Rory Stewart:Since then, there's been a bit of diversification. But what's changed, as you've pointed out, is that since the middle of the summer, this is really a story just over the last couple of months, a new air war started. And this is the use of drones taking out these boats. Brutal. I mean, there's incredible reporting, the AP and the New York Times, from people interviewing an Indian Christian seaman who was on one of these boats that was hit by a drone. and the whole thing obviously explodes the ukrainian pilots killed his captains injured they stagger into the pilot's boat the boat sinks and what happens is we're seeing now i guess a repeat of what we see in the straight form is the red sea which is increasingly the un convention on the law on the sea is going out of the window right it's very very fundamental to global trade since the second world war is free navigation the united states uh didn't sign up for the declaration but the u.s navy was all about this the british navy was all about this and it's really important for the world when we've got globalization just in time supply chain so now we've got straight of hormuz basically closed we've got the red sea where the houthi are able to close it and now it looks as though the black sea going down and a lot of this is driven by the insurance markets because as you've often pointed out it's not necessarily that they need to strike every vessel.

48:51Rory Stewart:It's just that they need to strike one or two. And then the insurance companies say, well, we're not going to do this anymore. So Russia is in real trouble because they're losing a lot of their grain exports. But Ukraine's in even more trouble because unlike Russia, they can't balance it as much with the oil and gas exports. And this is going to remove 3 billion euro a month from their exports. Yeah. The maritime insurance industry is a big player in this war. The decisions that they make are having that kind of impact. You mentioned the Turks there a couple of times, Rory. And I said last week that the foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, if there are any Turkish government people listening, we would love to talk to Hakan Fidan because he's a really interesting guy.

49:28But it seems to me that again on this, on the grain, that Turkey is driving the only live diplomatic track. He said a few days ago, all commercial vessels are now being attacked indiscriminately. Turkey has divided, they did the Black Sea Grain initiative, as it was called. Turkey has apparently passed a Ukrainian proposal on how to end this to Moscow, and is now awaiting a reply. So it's very interesting, the Turks, yet again, getting involved in this. Now, obviously, they're going to get directly impacted, but so are we all. Why are we not getting involved in that? Why are the Americans not getting involved?

50:06Yeah.

50:06Rory Stewart:And then there's the question of escalation. We're reporting, of course, that Ukraine is striking deeper and deeper into Russian territories. So they struck something recently an oil refinery which is 500 miles east of moscow deep deep into russia um but some of these strikes are killing dozens of people russian children are being killed by ukrainian strikes the strikes on the port the russian port i think an eight-year-old was killed and of course the russians are killing enormous numbers of ukrainians and ukrainian children but as you get this retaliation in which ukraine is effectively saying look russia has been striking our civilians striking our critical infrastructure, we're going to start striking the Russian infrastructure.

50:49Rory Stewart:You get the Russian government today saying, we hold Britain responsible. Ukraine is holding, using British drones to strike deep inside Russian territory and killing Russian children. Britain is now responsible for this. You can see the same with the ships that we talk a lot about taking out the Shadow Fleet, which is the Russian vessels carrying sanctioned Russian goods out of Russia. And that's partly how Ukraine would describe what they're doing. But from the Russian point of view this is ukrainian attack on russian civilian vessels and then from the ukrainian point of view russian attack on ukrainian civilian vessels all of this is escalation right all of this over the last few months is you found here with the grain something which is in a new development but also builds on what's happening with drone warfare which is a war which is broadening all the time and i i'm worried that as this escalation takes off we're only at the beginning of something that could go very badly wrong yeah and the other thing that has really caught my eye this week are all these signs in relation to north and south korea donald trump had a massive hissy fit in the oval office yesterday because the south you know he was being grilled you can always tell when when trump's feeling vulnerable about the issue because he gets really bad temper with the journalists it's usually a woman who asks him a question he says quiet quiet shut up you're where are you from cnn fake news fake news you made up this story about the mental health problems on the USS Abraham Lincoln.

52:12He got very antsy. And again, I thought, why can no other journalist stand up for somebody when they're under attack like that? But the issue that was getting under his skin was South Korea. He appears now to be falling out with the South Koreans. And meanwhile, he was so nice about Kim Jong-un. Now, Kim Jong-un, according to Zelensky, the North Koreans are about to send another 50 ,000 troops to support the Russians. That is not the sign of a war that's coming to an end.

52:44Rory Stewart:And your point about his true social posts on South Korea, if people haven't seen it, I mean, it's staggering. It says, let me just read it to people. Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has long ago agreed to participate in joint military exercises with South Korea. These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America as usual, but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile to a country, North Korea, that as long as Donald J. Trump has been president has been unthreatening and respectful.

53:21Rory Stewart:Therefore, and based on the fact that it's too late to counsel, I've instructed Secretary of War Pete Hedges to substantially reduce the joint military exercises. While somewhat unrelated, and then he puts in a comic question mark in brackets, I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said no thanks. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. Well, it was the no thanks. It was the no thanks that triggered this hissy fit that then led to him sort of, you know, abusing this young woman.

53:52So now if you're Putin, and I don't know whether Putin gets early access to Trump's truth social by paying$100 ,000, whatever it is, but he could read that. And he's thinking, oh, he's coming back on side again. and to be doing it through kim jong-un who was now i don't know if zelensky is right or wrong in saying that 50 000 north korean troops are on the way to to russia one thing we do know is that north korean troops have been there and what else are they doing they're learning the north koreans this is the thing that's worrying the south koreans the north koreans are learning an awful lot from russia and from ukraine about the way that this was being being fought listen we talked about

54:33Rory Stewart:the Taliban. And the Taliban are a brutal government. But North Korea is another level. It's unimaginable that any American president since 1945 would say what Trump has just said about North Korea. This is the most brutal, unpleasant dictatorship that has driven North Korea to be one of the poorest countries on earth. I mean, you can see the potential of that country from the fact that South Korea is one of the wealthiest countries on earth, a little border between the two and you can see diversion. It's a country which has developed its own nuclear weapon program that is testing ballistic missiles, that's threatening its neighbors, that's directly undermining a peaceful, democratic, prosperous American neighbor.

55:17Rory Stewart:And now, as you say, funneling troops into Russia's war against Ukraine. How is it possible if you were looking for one country on earth that the United States should not be having a relationship with. It's North Korea from every way, from human rights, rights through to nuclear. And there he is putting out a truth social saying he's going to stop joint military exercise with South Korea. And partly because South Korea has not given him enough money. He actually increasingly is talking like a mafia boss. You know, I asked for 10 billion for the protection. They said, well, how about three? Well, three is okay for now.

55:51But you know, it's going to have to be more than that over time. You know, do you want your cafe to be blown up or not. It's up to you. I mean, it's anyway, there we go. Let's not, let's, we've managed to get through this episode without too much Trump derogant syndrome. Let's just calm. Okay. Now, Rory, before we go, um, Jason Arday, I think this is one of the most horrible stories from so many different angles. I just think the whole thing is truly, truly, truly horrible but the bottom line is somebody who should not be dead is dead and it's worth saying because you know we should be very very careful when we're talking about these kinds of events that you know we don't know there will be an inquest and the facts will one day be known better than they are now um but the horrible fear i have is that we're talking about a human being who was driven to a place where he just felt i can't go on and he was saying to his friends we've had several on the record saying he's saying to them i cannot go on i cannot you know he's losing the will to live and that is a tragedy a genuine tragedy for him for his family for his friends and i think we all of us just have to just step back and think and just be a little bit more

57:07Rory Stewart:empathetic than a lot of the coverage has been well it's it's um well let's start with that i I mean, this was a person who had a very difficult childhood, you know, whatever the details of it were. He had dyslexia. He had learning difficulties. He was very vulnerable. He deserved support, which he didn't get. But in the end, wherever we go on any of this and what he did, the bottom line is that he's dead. And I think it's highly probable that he killed himself. Still needs to be looked at. But that, I think, is the bottom line, and that should inform the way in which we think about everything else that's going on in this discussion.

57:47Rory Stewart:I mean, there were so many things I thought, and one of the things I thought is this question of whether we're honest enough with ourselves, all of us. He was accused of self-mythologizing, and it seems as though some of that may have been true, that he probably exaggerated what he'd done in some of his running. He may have exaggerated some of his childhood experiences or achievements. I've done the same. I mean, I feel the temptation to do that a lot. I feel, you know, if people say Rory Stewart speaks 11 languages, I don't point out that I don't really speak 11 languages, that I've studied 11 languages, and most of them I'm really crap at.

58:23Rory Stewart:Certainly when I was a politician, I wasn't good enough about correcting people when they suggested I'd been in the army for much longer than I was. I was in for a very, very brief period, etc., etc. And look, I can keep going on myself because I feel myself in Jason, But I also think that many of us are like this. I mean, if you look at politicians who get in trouble for embroidering their CVs, exaggerating, letting it appear that they did more impressive things than they really did, why does it happen? You know, sometimes it's vanity, sometimes it's pressure, sometimes that you're flattered into it, sometimes you're telling yourself stories and you're getting carried away.

58:58Rory Stewart:I think it's very relatable. And that was one of the core things that I thought was so brutal about the media coverage that there is, look, there were serious allegations, which Cambridge has been investigating around plagiarism, and we have to take seriously academic standards. I really want to say that, of course we do. And of course, professors will feel very strongly that that must be held to. But I also do feel that when the media is doing this, I just feel that could be me, could be any of us. I didn't comment at all on this story through the whole thing until his death. And one of the reasons, I mean, I guess partly because I'm away, but as you know, I don't really switch off and I don't really have holidays and I'm very, very interested and engaged in issues of mental health.

59:49And the reason I didn't get engaged is because I felt very, very early on, this is becoming one of those frenzies. He is becoming one of those people who, in a story, being driven with literally dozens of stories. This is the other thing about social media. We talk about social media. This is about national newspapers, particularly the Mail, the Telegraph, the Spectator, the Times. They were writing dozens of stories about this guy, dozens. They were even putting out appeals. Have you ever met Jason Hardy? Do you know? We've talked by Jason Hardy. Get in touch with our news desk, etc. etc so it became one of those frenzies where he ceased to be seen as a human being now on the macro level i've i found that is probably ultimately what happened to princess diana i think princess diana became that she's different she's a she's a she was a member of the royal family she was married to the future king this guy was a an academic with a good track record in several universities, the plagiarism that people most talk about, this story was started by somebody who openly said, if anybody black gets a senior position in the academia, it's because they're black.

1:01:07It's because of DEI. So John Moore's university investigated and found that he may have made mistakes as lots of people do, but there was no sort of the plagiarism that people were talking about. But by then it was too late. Every single story became bigger than it deserved to be. And I think I'm afraid, why? Because he's black. It was othering. And then I think the other thing that I've seen since then, I mean, I just wonder what nastiness you have to have inside you that even on the day the guy's body has been found, you want to have the same argument. I mean, some of the stuff about hate personalizing it, but some of the stuff that Julia Hartley Brewer was putting out, some of the stuff that Isabel Oakeshaw was saying on the media.

1:01:52I mean, just try and have a little bit of empathy, just a little bit. It doesn't harm you. I had a bit of a, not a spat, but Piers Morgan posted the article in the Daily Mail, because of course they all went a bit neutral. Jason Arde's body found at home, okay? And a few people saying how tragic it was. And Piers quoted, posted this, the Daily Mail thing, and he posted saying, Cambridge University has a lot to answer for. Okay. Well, maybe it does. But the way that we take these incredibly complicated human situations, yes, Cambridge has answers, maybe has questions. Now, we will never know what one's on his mind, but I've been in that place.

1:02:32I've been in that place where I'm thinking, I don't want to live anymore. And one of them, by the way, was a media frenzy. And that media frenzy gets thrown at me every day because the only person who did take their life was was somebody else david kelly so none of us know what's going on in people's minds but i have the worthlessness that he maybe felt was because he was these stories were saying he was he was utterly worthless and there's a piece that somebody sent me this morning by a guy called sam chris of substack the headline is the carrion eaters what we did to jason our day and what is interesting when you read this piece a long piece is that it touches on all of these complications and of course what the social media world and what our modern media world doesn't do is the complicated stuff i feel sick about the whole thing and i also feel there was a point at which i thought i should get hold of this guy i've never met him i don't know that i know what's going on here i know exactly what's going on here and i know it look it made made absolutely no difference at all but i sort of wish i'd got in touch with him just said, listen, I can imagine what you're going through.

1:03:38It will pass. It will go. It will go. There will come a point when people are not talking about this anymore.

1:03:44Rory Stewart:One of the problems is that there is a really strange thing that I'm always struggling with with this stuff. Where does the forgiveness come? Where does the moment come when you can actually reach out to a friend and say, you may have done awful things. I'm also really sorry for what you're going through because I don't think people who haven't been through it understand what it feels like. I mean, the closest I ever came, only time actually I've ever come to feeling like take my life was when I was under a full media assault, which now seems a bit silly when I look back at it. But you're right.

1:04:17Rory Stewart:It's about the sense of worthlessness. It's the sense that what's happening is they're destroying everything that you thought about yourself. And maybe, you know, people in public life are a bit fragile and maybe we put ourselves on pedestals and and maybe it's true that part of the reasons why you know a politician or a professor might be more vulnerable is that maybe you've allowed yourself to be set up with profiles saying that you're a great star and you're a wonderful thing so then it's it's that much more brutal but i i yeah anyway over to you to finish but that was some of my thoughts yeah of course if you're a public figure if you do things that are wrong, the press and the media and other politicians have a right and a duty and a responsibility to go after you, to expose that and to see you challenged.

1:05:03That's part of how politics works. I was talking to somebody about this last night. He said, you know, we're conscious of the sense of difference between the military and civilians. And he was saying that in public life, there is military and civilians. You and I are not civilians when it comes to politics and public life because we've chosen to be political public figures. We put ourselves out there, we make arguments in public, and therefore we expect comeback. I would say that Jason Arday was a civilian, okay? Now, he was a civilian attached to a big institution, Cambridge University, that has standards and should have standards, and those standards should be seen through.

1:05:41The extent to which it became a fact that he only got this job because of DEI. He That is not the case. He was, you know, very good academic. He did a lot of good published work. Now, there'll be others who say, well, no, it wasn't good enough. So, but what I can't stand is how people go out and they say, well, the opinion that I had about these issues before this terrible story happened, this has confirmed me in those views. This has confirmed me in the view that when anybody gets into one of these frenzies, we've just got to try and step back a little bit. I think there's something about there comes a point in these frenzies where we just lose humanity.

1:06:24Rory Stewart:We lose empathy and we also lose, without being too pompous about it, we lose forgiveness. Where is the possibility of forgiveness? Where's the possibility of saying, you've screwed up, you might even I mean, let's think about how we think about people who go to jail, people who commit crimes. Exactly. It means they get no visitors. Nobody ever goes to see them. Yeah. And then I had And, you know, the usual crowd, I mean, I don't know whether I should just come off social media completely like Fiona's done. I don't know. But I feel I've got to be on there because you do see things that inform what we talk about.

1:07:01But the number of people, usual suspects, Julie Hartley Brewer, Aaron Banks, all the usual lot, you know. The minute I literally said anything about this, like, you know, could we just understand this is a father? This is a son. This is a partner of a woman who's grieving. And literally come back, you know, you hounded a guy to his death. Me, right? David Kelly. And now I know that I didn't, but I know that I was part of a, involved in a complicated process during which this guy took his own life. We all of us have to think, well, could we have done this? Could we have done that? We don't know the answers.

1:07:39We have to think about that. And that is, I think, then what creates the sort of understanding and empathy that was just lacking. It was lacking on so many levels. And the fact, I haven't seen with the exception of, was it Matthew Syed? Somebody wrote a piece saying, we've all got to look at ourselves. I just wish a few newspapers have any of these newspapers and broadcasts actually sat down and said hold a minute when we when we did have that guy Simon Baron Cohen and we did have Jolly and Maugham writing to us and saying this is a very vulnerable man in the center of a media storm. Did you did any of them actually say yeah okay let's just let's just pull back a bit.

1:08:21I'd love to know the answer to that.

1:08:22Rory Stewart:well um thank you alistair and of course tomorrow in question time we're going to do a big domestic chunk some really interesting listeners questions on andy burnham and his media and comms strategy which of course alistair is better placed than anyone in the universe to think about and then we will talk about the west bank and what's happening with extreme settler violence in the west bank and that very under-reported part of the middle east conflict yeah and we're not going to talk about clacton violation at all and we're not going to talk about clacton by election at all, because Binface has done it for us.

1:08:55Rory Stewart:He's, he's, he won, he won. Binface won. He won. He won. Yeah. He won. See you soon. Bye-bye.

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