565. Zelenskyy’s Corruption Problem and Is History Repeating Itself in Germany?

22:17Rory Stewart:The guy is a genuine war hero, but he's not somebody who's operated at a big ministerial level before. But he's also somebody who's unimpeachable a hero and is almost unsackable. So now Zelensky has some situation where he's got this guy in place and we've got to see what will happen. Yeah. Well, listen, before we go to the break and then Deutschland, I must tell you a story, Roy. So I was in Split taking part in this youth sport games of which I've been an ambassador for about more than 10 years now. This is an initiative which brings together children from a part of the world that is used to their parents and grandparents fighting each other.

22:53And they now come together and play sport. And it's been going on for 30 years now. It's a brilliant, brilliant thing. Serbia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Slovenia. This year, they had special guests, children from Ukraine. And it was absolutely extraordinary. So we had this ridiculous football match. When I say it's ridiculous, what was ridiculous is that I was the captain of a team which included Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Claude McAleely, William Gallas, Pavel Nedved, I could go on and on. It was ridiculous. I also ended up playing more minutes than any other player because what I discovered about old retired players is they don't want to play football much because they're worried about getting injured.

23:34Anyway, at the end of the game, we drew 4-1. Zlatan got a great goal. We drew 4-1. At the end of the game, the crowd sort of invaded the pitch to get selfies with all these amazing, famous footballers. I was mobbed by a group, by the Ukrainian children. And get this, Rory, two of them said, they listened to the rest of his politics, and they said, thank you for being so nice to Ukraine. And it was just like, and I thought, honestly, I was so moved. I said to them, I said, look, I'm not a footballer. They said, we know you're not a footballer. We know who you are. You came to Ukraine. You talk, you and Rory Stewart, you talk about Ukraine all the time.

24:13And we're very, very very very grateful and these were kids and i thought you know they're they were 14 so they've now lived nearly five of their 14 years in war they all knew people who died they all had family members who were involved in the in the front line and it's just it was just wonderful to see them just enjoying a sporting event like you know normal kids living a normal childhood do so never ever say, Roy, that sport isn't a force for good? And of course, while there, again, talking of Russia, very interesting, as you know, did an interview with Alexander Seferin, the president of UEFA.

24:51Rory Stewart:Yeah. And which incidentally is an extraordinary interview and a real scoop. It's Alistair's with his journalistic nose managed to get this very unique interview, which has gone all the way around the world. Anyway, back over to you, tell us a bit more about the Seferin interview. What was interesting, and obviously mainly we were talking about FIFA and Trump and in Fantino and all that. But we had a very interesting discussion about boycotts in sport. So when Russia launched the full-on invasion of Ukraine, UEFA, he said they felt real political pressure to ban Russia from UEFA tournaments, added to which he thinks it was the right thing anyway, but very little public pressure.

25:27Whereas he says in regard to Israel, they feel intense public pressure, but very little political pressure. Now that may be changing a little bit, but there aren't that many countries whose governments are saying we should kick out Israel in the way that so many governments say we should kick out Russia. And thank you for what you said. I found it absolutely fascinating talking. I know him reasonably well. He doesn't do many interviews. He's not like Infantino, who's obsessed with Instagram and being on the TV the whole time. He is so not like Infantino, who is just one of the most awful people in the world.

26:00And right now, and I do think actually, we need to understand, And I know you don't get this because you're just not a football person, right? But he made the point that football is so, so, so important to so many people around the world, billions of them. And you have a guy there in Infantino who's prepared to sell the game. And that's what we have to stop. I mean, these are people who would sell their souls, let alone sell football. And so I thought it was, I do recommend, even if you're not interested in sport, I recommend listening to him because he's a very interesting guy. So if you do want to hear the whole interview, just look up the Restless Polities leading wherever you're watching or listening to this now.

26:38Rory Stewart:Brilliant. Well, I highly recommend an interview. Also recommend Split. Absolutely unbelievable. I mean, the antiquities, the sense of a great Roman emperor's palace. I hope you will manage to do my little phrase. Chaya pushta Londra, no? Contra Sputograda. You didn't manage that? Rory, of course I'm getting sort of old and senile. I kept having to look at it and read it. And I know I'm sort of, you keep saying I'm a great linguist, but it is a lovely place. I think they could do with a bit of help on sorting out their transport. The traffic is grim. But it's true, narrow streets in all great ancient cities.

27:15But it's a beautiful, beautiful place. There are parts of it where you've got this extraordinary mix of new and old, and they've done it really, really, really well. A lot of Brits there. A hell of a lot of Brits there. I was really quite surprised by that. And then I went to Slovenia. Fiona and I went to Slovenia. Shout out to Slovenia. What a place. I'd never been before to stay. Absolutely. It's almost as nice as Scotland, Rory. It really is.

27:43Okay, well, shall we take a break and then come back and talk about Germany? Absolutely. See you then. Cozy season is ahead and you'll be spending way more time inside. Is your home ready? Don't worry. with Wayfair you can upgrade your space without breaking the bank score up to 70 % off during their Labor Day clearance on furniture area rugs mattresses and more plus surprise flash deals you can't miss whether it's one room or the whole house Wayfair has pieces for every style and budget shop Wayfair's Labor Day clearance now through September 7th at Wayfair.com Wayfair every style every home

28:24Rory Stewart:Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. So, Rory, Germany. Where you are. Where I am. I caught you in a service station yesterday just outside Munich. Yeah, yeah. On your way up. I've got to say, service stations, Rory. Austria, excellent. Slovenia, very good. Germany, not as great. Ah, okay. Well, interesting, interesting, interesting. Might just be the one that we chose, but there we go. German listeners back on that. Well, look, you couldn't be there at a more topical time because this is the big crunch time. We've been talking for four years about the rise of the AfD, Alternative for Germany, this far-right party.

29:04Rory Stewart:And they now look like they're absolutely nailed on to get far more votes than any other party in the election in Saxony-Anhalt and potentially take control of the lander, which would give them huge power over policing and many other things. So over to you on that. Yeah, and it'd be the first, if this guy, Ulrich Siegmund, the candidate in Saxony Anhalt, does become the minister president, it will be the first time that they've got into that level of power. And I wonder whether it's just worth, for those who are listening, this might be quite difficult to explain, but I want to introduce the theory of the horseshoe theory of politics, which is kind of pretty well known.

29:43So imagine there's the horseshoe, okay, like that.

29:47Rory Stewart:And at the top, you've got the center. Alistair is currently making a circle. No, not a circle. I'm doing a horseshoe. A horseshoe, very good. With a gap at the bottom. A gap at the bottom, right. So the top, if you put it at the top of the horseshoe, you say that's the center of politics. And we often think of politics as a line. You go from left to right, okay? And you're a bit right of center, I'm a bit left of center, and that's how we think of politics. In the horseshoe theory, the center's at the top. Then you and I are on the outer edge of the horseshoe, me on the left, you on the right, And then as it comes down into the horseshoe, the gap narrows, and the hard right and the hard left are a lot closer than we think.

30:25And there have been examples of that in history. And that's what's happening right now with, I think, potentially catastrophic consequences for European unity and, to go back to part one, for Ukraine. Because what's happened is that you've got this election coming up, as you say, in Saxony-Anhalt. Currently, the minister-president is a Christian Democrat, same party as the government, as Mertz. But depending which polls you look at, the AFD are about 20 points ahead. They're absolutely running away with it. And the smaller parties have to get 5 % to get seats in the parliament, okay? And some of them will and some of them won't, which probably means that to make, to form a majority, the AFD will have to have a partner.

31:05Now, we've talked a lot about the firewall, the famous firewall that says we will never operate with the AFD. But this hard-left party, well, it's not even hard-left, It's a very curious mix. But the Zahra Wagenknecht party, this is somebody who used to be a big figure in East German politics as a communist. She then was a leading figure in Die Linke, the kind of official hard left party. She broke away to form this party in her own name. It did quite well for a while. It didn't get into the Bundestag in the recent elections. But she has now basically said she would effectively help the AFD become the minister president if their numbers work out in this election.

31:48They're now so blatantly open, both of them, about their support for Russia, about their belief that there should be no further spending for Ukraine. And also, the other really interesting thing that I hadn't picked up until this trip is just how much they're pushing this sense of nostalgia about the old DDR, the old East Germany. I actually saw one of them saying, we may have been more restricted, but we had much more freedom. And so, and then, I mean, that's what I find slightly terrifying about this. So they're running these kind of, they're very effective communicators, some of them. Bjorn Hooker, who we talked about before, really, really far right.

32:28He's the guy that you can call a Nazi without, you know, having to worry too much, or you can call him a right-wing extremist without having to worry about.

32:35Rory Stewart:a fascist without you call him a fascist not considered libelous by the courts yeah correct correct he has now thrown out an invitation to zara wagenknecht that they she might become the minister president of his state teringia so this is bonkers stuff well some very very fine-eared listeners may pick up on the fact that there's a bit of background noise here um i'm like to pay tribute again very kindly to the grief leisure center but it's also includes the school so above me is a young person doing Alistair exactly what you'd want, which is practicing music. This particular case, not playing pipes, but it's a drum set with cymbals.

33:13Rory Stewart:So if you occasionally... Excellent. Excellent. And it seems to be whenever you make a good point, he hits the cymbals. So that's maybe a good thing. Listen, let's just maybe take back a little bit of a... Not quite an explainer, because I think people have got their heads around this, but the AFD is a very, very significant threat. We talk a lot about far-right parties, and it's quite difficult pinning down what that means, partly because a lot of things get normalized. In the age of Trump, in the age of Farage, these things get a bit muddled, and everyone's like, well, they're not quite Hitler, they're not quite the Nazis, there are no concentration camps, so what have we got to worry about?

33:52Exactly what they used to say about the Nazis before they became what they became. Absolutely.

33:57Rory Stewart:So in the case of the AFD, Bjorn Hooker is a man with piercing blue eyes, a schoolteacher with a strange past. His grandparents were thrown out of East Prussia, and he laments that a lot. His father appears to have been a major subscriber to an anti-Semitic magazine. He openly has appeared at these Pegida anti-Islam rallies, etc. He wrote articles which the German intelligence service now says that it seems vanishingly unlikely. He didn't write them, but he wrote them anonymously saying the Second World War was just started by the jealousies of other powers and that the Nazis need credit for their economic policy.

34:40Rory Stewart:He has this very sinister style where he makes these speeches which have sort of elements of politeness in them. So he will say, dear young African men, there is no home or future for you in Germany or in Europe. That's one of his phrases. Most famous one is he said in relation to the Holocaust Museum in Berlin, that Germany needs to take a 180 degree turn in the way that it remembers its past. Now, I don't need to illustrate like your horseshoe quite what a 180 degree turn on the way that you might remember Germany's past, how that feels. Now, over the top of him is this woman, Alice Weidel, who a little bit like the man who's running in Saxony-Anheld, often comes across as much more careful with what she says.

35:24Rory Stewart:It's quite difficult to catch her saying or doing the kinds of things Bjorn Hocker does. But what we notice with the sexy unhelp guy is that although he's careful what he says, the people he associates with are clearly very radical indeed. He will turn up at conferences with Martin Selner, who's the great re-migration guy. To remind you, re-migration is literally shipping hundreds of thousands of German citizens who happen to be Muslim out of Germany. A lot of their staff, and these are the people to really watch, are the kind of young party members who are incredibly radicalized. There's been some very interesting stuff done by the three former chairmen of the AFD who went on an extraordinary journey of originally tolerating these people and then trying to throw them out and were eventually thrown out themselves, who are perhaps the best witnesses to what's happening inside this party.

36:11Rory Stewart:The thing that maybe is the biggest threat that the AFD poses immediately isn't actually that it's going to make Germany into Nazi Germany, it's that it's going to destroy the European Union. Because Alice Weidel has said that she wants to put up walls, effectively breaking Schengen. She said that she wants to bring them out of the euro. So there is a really, and if Germany, I mean, this is what you talked about with Ukraine, if Germany, which is the cornerstone of the European Union, starts breaking European rules, leaving Schengen, leaving the Euro, putting up tariffs against Poland, that is almost the end of the European project.

36:51Rory, I'm going to recommend a book which Fiona and I have been reading. And it's extraordinary. And as you know, I normally recommend books written by Germans. This is written by a German, but it's in English. That is how good a linguist she is. She's called Katja Hoyer. she's a german british historian she's a she's a research fellow at king's college fellow of the royal historical society and it's vi is called weimar and it's about weimar the place between the wars and what is incredible it relates exactly to what you've just said how institutions which we thought were going to protect people make people stronger after the first world war are slowly steadily eroded the democratic norms the institutions are taken over and then before you know it you're doing experiments in racial and physical purity you're sterilizing anyone who has a history of mental or physical impairment and and that eventually of course leads to the

37:53Rory Stewart:entire expulsion and extermination of the of the german jewish population exactly but what you see as you go through this and she does it year by year and it's it's people's diaries it's people's letters to each other it's an ordinary people and what it shows is them going from being very very wary then moderately enthusiastic and then acceptance of all of these things going on and barely seeming to worry about this the rise of bodies in the crematorium coming out of buchenwald which is nearby so it's the story of the normalization of the totally abnormal quick shout out for what we've been doing recently.

38:33Rory Stewart:I've been getting a mini series together, which members will be able to hear once it's all finished and recorded. But I've been looking at different types of threat. But one of the things I did was spend a long time talking to Anand Gopal, who did this micro study, not a Weimar in his case, but a place called Membitch on the Syria border. So a much more contemporary example. And the question that we returning to is how did ordinary people end up either joining Bashar al-Assad's terror camps as guards or joining ISIS? And it's the most extraordinary story. And I think the conclusion one reaches is how fragile human nature is and how much effort one has to put.

39:14Rory Stewart:Because the story of people joining the Nazi party isn't very different from the story of how Anand finds with these very careful interviews of 300 people, people end up joining ISIS. One of his examples with ISIS is the guy is a very keen footballer who feels very bitter that he didn't, he came from a poor family, never got the time off to practice his football, didn't make it into the Syrian national team, ends up as the PE teacher in the local high school in Membidge, but with a loss of anger. But he's very secular. He's the guy who drinks. He's the guy who isn't particularly observant. And then ISIS takes over, the Islamic State takes over, and he becomes an Islamic State commander and becomes increasingly radicalized and pious and engaging in all that horror.

40:04Rory Stewart:Anyway, it was just a sort of reminder of this phenomenon you're talking about, that how fragile we are as people, how easily – and you've talked about this also with businesses – how many of the German businesses got behind Hitler. And we see it, I'm afraid, with Trump. You know, how easy it is to normalize this kind of stuff. First of all, you tolerate and accept, and then eventually saying, well, everybody else is going with it, I'll go with it. And then, of course, the other thing that's happening here is, I would argue, a pretty significant change in the media landscape. And this is related to the UK as well, and to MAGA.

40:38We've talked before about this guy, Matthias Dupfner, who's the boss of the Springer Group, which is Biltzaitl. He owns Politico. He's boss of Politico. Daily Telegraph. And did the Daily Telegraph and Develt. Now, Rory, last week, he had the front cover piece in The Spectator. Michael Gove, whose publication, The Spectator, was right at the forefront of the humiliation, degradation, and ultimately, I would argue, the destruction of the Cambridge academic Jason Arday, he gave the front cover to Matthias Dupfner, who wrote a piece, the headline of which the West must win. Now, this is a guy who parades as a kind of centre-right sort of person, a bit like you, right?

41:15Let me just read you some of the stuff that he wrote. For those using the phrase global south linking the West to colonial guilt is no accident. It's the very purpose of the narrative. Woke ideology bears the hallmark of good intentions, fight racism, protecting minorities, questioning privilege and confronting colonial history. In reality, it is the inversion of almost every value and objective of civilization. It now gets completely insane. In the West, being successful was once better than being unsuccessful. Wealth was better than poverty. Beauty was better than ugliness. Under woke ideology, all this is reversed.

41:52It resembles a manual for Western self-abolition, born of self-hatred. I mean, this is a guy who is he's obviously trying to become like musk or murdoch am i wrong to think that he's a borderline

42:04Rory Stewart:insane i don't think you're wrong at all um and he's he's a guy i know a little bit i mean he's not a friend but he's a guy whose hand i've shaken and i've been in conversations with him and one of the things that is happening with him which i think is true of a lot of wealthy powerful people is that he is increasingly entranced by uh u.s tech bros people like peter teal that you were just hanging out with in crozier the springer group have an annual major prize for freedom of speech guess who this year's winner is who peter teal there we are guess guess whose son guess whose son was financially backed and was at one point chief of staff to peter teal matthias Right.

42:49Rory Stewart:So the connection is very close. Of course, J.D. Vance is incredibly close to Peter Thiel, too. So there's that side of him. He's also, they used to have as editorial policy a very, very pro-Israeli line, but also a very pro-European line. They've dropped the pro-European line and kept the pro-Israeli line. So this is a very interesting, he's pro-Israel, he's pro-tech bro, he buys into the general idea that Europe is decadent, America is strong and ascendant. There were reports in the press that Doffner and Springer had put pressure on the CDU to make an alliance with the AFD. this is something that they absolutely deny.

43:33Rory Stewart:But it's interesting how, as Alistair, I think you've been finding how AFD-friendly they seem to be becoming in their reporting. I'm in Baden-Württemberg today and I picked up Die Welt, okay? Which Die Welt, I will have seen through the years as a really good, serious, broadsheet newspaper. Centrist newspaper. It was a sort of, it's sort of even more centrist than The Times, right? Yeah. So, page two and three, a two-page spread on AFD streamers who are shaping the nature of the election campaign in Saxony-Anhalt, and politics more broadly. And it's got a couple of very glamorous pictures of one of the streamers and one of the leading politicians.

44:20You then go to the main opinion page, and you have a guy, I've got no idea, apologies for that, Alexander Kekule. and the headline is neither lazy nor right nor extreme and it basically is a is an analysis of saying that the people who are voting for the afd have got lots of very good reasons so to do you then get to page the main fatal two-page spread pages 14 and 15 predicting or a scenario analyzing what a vital government in coalition with jens spahn who's a kind of you know leading CDU politician would look like in 2033. It is openly, aggressively, in my view, pushing for the AFD. So this is the guy who's got the telegraph, who at the time we were saying was much more reasonable than the other guy was coming in.

45:09I think the guy is really, really dangerous. The fact that he's now in league with Michael Gove, that should worry us as well. But his big goal is, I think, to turn the European Union into a far-right body. And he had this, again, a telegraph, this weird piece by a friend of his called Ulf Poshard. Let me just give you this one, Rory. Tell me if this one is mad as well. The British right, both within the Tories and in reform, should consider whether it wishes to become part of a new Europe that embraces market-based thinking and is anti-centralist and anti-bureaucratic. It would be a Europe that seeks to help shape the global shift away from left-wing fantasies and ideological missteps rather than merely trailing behind it.

45:49So this is subverting. Now it's Europe that's broken, and we need to have Britain back, a right-wing Britain back, to reshape it. Watch this guy, he's dangerous.

46:00Rory Stewart:I think many people will feel exhausted by the last four years, and exhausted by the sense of things falling apart. So much so that we almost can't bear really to remember what's going on. I find people actually struggle, I think, to remember what Trump's done. struggle to remember, you know, his threats against Greenland, his threats against Canada, which we're going to get on to, what he did with ICE, the corruption scandals. I mean, it's difficult keeping this in our eyes. And if you put together what's happened in the Middle East, what's happened with Trump, what's happened with the populist far right in Europe, everything becomes almost normalized, doesn't it?

46:40Rory Stewart:And we have to keep reminding ourselves why it matters. Why does it matter? You know, why are we not just going to cede the ground and say, well, okay, maybe Farage and Vidal and Trump are not too bad and you just let it roll. And I think the fundamental thing is about rules. We created a system after all the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust, which was designed to put laws and rules in place, predictable laws and rules in place that protected minorities and that found a really difficult balance between the interests of the majority and the rights of minorities. And actually, it's been amazing.

47:23Rory Stewart:The Basque country in Spain, 15 years, there's barely been any violence. The Basque language is stronger than it's ever been. The region is more prosperous than it's ever been. It's incredible, right? You can make similar statements about, I guess, the Republic of Ireland, right? We could keep going on incredible success stories, the Baltic countries. countries. Croatia. Croatia. But, but, but, but, now we have these guys and what connects Trump to all of them and connects him to Netanyahu and connects him to the fight against the International Criminal Court and connects him to the AFD, what they all have in common is they do not care about the law.

48:00Rory Stewart:I mean, all these definitions of populism, the easiest way of defining them is that they say, we speak for the people, we are the real people, and our opponents are not real people. And therefore, we're justified in screwing around with laws, elections, rules, in order to get stuff done on past people. And that's the fight we have to keep coming back to. And the problem is, it sounds a bit sort of highfalutin. It sounds a bit abstract. It sounds a bit legalistic. And when you tell me about that Weimar book, or when I'm talking to Anand Gopal about Membitch, you realize how difficult it is to try to remind people why laws matter.

48:41Rory Stewart:Yeah. Anyway, over to you. No, because what you're speaking to, Rory, is this thing that we talked about before is living in an era of impunity. I would say Infantino is the same thing. Infantino thinking that because Donald Trump phoned him, he can get a red card reversed is impunity. It's probably the best symbol, isn't it, of what you're talking about? Yeah. It's the most extraordinary symbol of what you're talking about. I mean, this is something obviously that you picked up in your incredible interview because it's extraordinary. I mean, it's just unbelievable that anyone could even contemplate such a thing.

49:14Rory Stewart:I mean, sport should be the most simple example in the world. Exactly. You have to have rules of the game. It's called rules of the game. But maybe just to close on this with a kind of British angle on this, one of the most horrible things that's happened in recent days has been this terrible crash in which two policemen, two police officers have been killed whilst in an incident in which five youths have been, this appears to be a bit of a craze for some people, filming themselves motoring down the wrong way down a road. Okay? Now, they're all now dead. With their lights off. With their lights off and with cloned plates.

49:46They're now dead, but also two police officers are dead. Now, I could be wrong, and I'm willing to apologize if I am wrong. Have you seen any condemnation, sympathy, any demand for white hot rage that the two police officers have been killed from reform uk well i haven't why because actually the police in their eyes are now bad people why because they're investigating stuff that reform uk are up to so unless we fight for the institutions yes always calling out corruption yes always calling out misdemeanors when they take place but once we actually say as Richard Tice, as it was Lee Anderson the other day, said, I'd believe Nigel ahead of the police any day of the week.

50:30Oh, would you? Oh, would you? Well, what does that say about your support for one of the most important institutions of a country which is founded on principles of the rule of law and law and order? So I think that all of this comes together, and Trump is such a big part of it, such a big part of it. But to see Germans going down that route is terrifying.

50:51Rory Stewart:It's also that as this happens, all the biggest issues are being missed. So this culture war stuff, which is what a lot of what the AFD is about, is missing the brontosaurus in the room in German politics, which is China and what's happening to the German economy. Hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs in the German car industry. And interestingly, Alice Weidel speaks good Chinese, spent six years living in China, did a doctorate on the Chinese pensions policy. I mean, anybody better equipped in theory, and yet she doesn't even talk about China. All she says is, oh, Germany needs to become more competitive.

51:35Rory Stewart:We need to get rid of the minimum wage. We need to drop regulations. We need to get rid of all this green stuff and everything will be fine. So that's another Another example of what's so striking, I mean, I feel this obviously with AI policy as well, and you feel this very strongly with climate policy, that obviously you'd make the same point, I think, about the AFD. You would definitely about Russia, Ukraine, that these populist movements are cruel, unpleasant, frequently racist, throwing rules out, but they're also not grasping the big issues which actually are going to define the future of their country.

52:09Rory Stewart:They're actually wasting time, wasting resources, and they're not making the strategic calls. Yeah, and a lot of them are on the take, literally, from Russia, including a Brit, Nathan Gill, who's in jail paying the price for that. And the other thing I have is vital. These populist right-wing parties, they do a big thing, Richard Tice, on this housing nonsense that they were talking about yesterday. And honestly, why do the BBC platform every single policy announcement for reform in a way that they never do for the Lib Dems or the Greens or the SNP. Why do they do that? This policy, I actually read, I listened to Richard Tyson Anderson talking about, a decent journalist could have taken that apart in 25 seconds.

52:49It's back of a fag packet, populist bullshit, okay? But the big thing at the heart of it was this thing about, you know, normal families. We're going to give the house to British families. Would a married family be better than a single parent family, etc.? Yes, yes, yes, says the unmarried to Isabel Oakeshott, Richard Tice. Alice Vidal is a lesbian, absolutely nothing wrong with that. Married to a Sri Lankan, nothing wrong with that. Who lives in Switzerland? Who lives in Switzerland? Now imagine if a British political leader, and Farage probably would get away with it because of the pathetic way that our media cover him while they whinge about being under attack the whole time.

53:31But imagine if Andy Bertha was gay, married to an Indian, and living in Ireland. I mean, it is utterly absurd that they're projecting this

53:48Rory Stewart:person as the reasonable, moderate face of AFDism. It's also amazing, because as you say, that Alice Weidel then is out there campaigning against what she calls mad gender ideology. She's in favor of the traditional family. She's against sexualization in school. She's against gay marriage. And she's very, very, very weird. And she gets very offended if anyone tries to ask her how many nights she actually spends in her constituency and how much time she's in Switzerland. Well, just presumably as Farage does on the Clacton stuff. Okay. Well, in question time, we're actually, I think, going to have a really interesting chance to develop with Canada and the US.

54:26Rory Stewart:So this incredible ongoing fight between Trump and Canada and with Israel and Palestinian elections, a lot of these really, really big themes, which are almost existential for the world. These are the big themes about rights, laws, democracy. So thank you very much indeed. See you then. See you then. Bye-bye.

54:52Cozy season is ahead and you'll be spending way more time inside. Is your home ready? Don't worry. With Wayfair, you can upgrade your space without breaking the bank. Score up to 70 % off during their Labor Day clearance on furniture, area rugs, mattresses, and more. Plus, surprise flash deals you can't miss. Whether it's one room or the whole house, Wayfair has pieces for every style and budget. Shop Wayfair's Labor Day clearance now through September 7th at Wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home