568. MAGA's Plan to Make Britain Look Broken and Iceland's 'Brexit' Moment

21:51And also that you have to be making the most noise. You must be making the most noise. And up against kind of fact-based, rational, calm people like Mertz and Klingbeil, you know, and even though Alice Vidal is not the most charismatic, but she's got a certain tone and a certain style. And then around her, these, I mean, some of these characters who are running for minister president, I mean, they are, I'm afraid to say they are very charismatic. They know how to communicate effectively. There was a piece in the Financial Times magazine, a huge piece at the weekend about the Sachsen-Anhalt, and the journalist followed this guy, Ulrich Segment, who looks like he could be the first minister president.

22:33That's a big step because they're then in charge, because of the federal structure, they're then in charge of policing. They have access to intelligence. Well, that'll be nice and useful to Vladimir, won't it? So yeah, this book is yet another one, publishers get it in English.

22:48Rory Stewart:And yet another reason why we need hope. I mean, all these people are giving us the pessimistic vision. We've got to have that hope. We've got to have hope. We've got to have hope. Well, listen, Roy, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back and find out from Izzy, who writes our newsletter and who wrote a brilliant piece this weekend about just why the MAGA lot are spending so much time saying that Britain is a total and complete basket case. And we'll talk about that. And we'll talk about the party conference season, which is upon us. Very good. Looking forward to it very much. See you soon.

23:26Rory Stewart:Welcome back to the Rest This Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell, and a special guest, which is Izzy Isabel Stanley. Isabel writes our brilliant newsletter, which I have to say, Izzy gets better and better and better. And the reason you're making your global international media debut in this way is because I thought and Rory thought that the one at the weekend was particularly good. So tell us what it was about by answering this question. Martin, Isabel Stanley's recent article in the newsletter on American attitudes to Britain made for interesting reading and gave more fuel, I would say, to the streak of self-abasement we seem to be indulging at the moment.

24:06But it left me wondering, what would a reciprocal survey reveal about our attitudes towards American Americans? As someone with an American wife, I rather fear the answer would be even more negative. What do you both think? Before we answer that, Izzy, just tell us who you talked to, where you went, how you talked to them, and the big impressions you were left with.

24:28Rory Stewart:Yeah, of course. Over the past few months, we've all sort of seen this string of attacks on the UK, this sort of negative commentary coming out of the US. Things like Trump, you know, he in June was saying that the UK is dying. Elon Musk and Steve Bannon both at different times said that the UK was heading for a civil war. And so we saw all of that and we were sort of thinking, well, that's all well and good. But what impact is that actually having on the way that the American public, so that's traditionally our closest ally, but what impact is that having on how they see us? So the first thing we did is we asked Ipsos in the UK to carry out some polling.

25:05Rory Stewart:They were super helpful and they found some pretty striking stuff. So they surveyed 1 ,100 Americans all across the country. and they found that one in four Americans, 25-ish percent, believe that British society is broken. And that jumps to 37 % among Republicans. And obviously, that's not everyone. That's not saying that the entirety of America thinks Britain's gone to the dogs. But the other very striking thing is that there's a very high sort of level of unengagement. So my favorite statistic that came out of it is that more than half of Americans admitted they had no idea who the British Prime Minister was.

25:44Rory Stewart:And, you know, fair enough, it's quite confusing. We've had a lot of them recently. But 3 % thought that it was still Tony Blair, which sort of shows when they were maybe last engaged. So we were we were sort of thinking about that. I went to the US as well, and did a very while I was there did a very sort of unofficial straw poll of what people were talking about and thinking about in terms of the UK. And most of the things that they mentioned were sort of related to crime, in particular phone snatching, immigration, sort of negative trends that were coming across. The main positive thing was Harry Styles, which again is great, but maybe not the engagement you hope for with your closest ally.

26:22Rory Stewart:Can I come in on this? One of the things that was also, I think, striking in what you did is that things seem to have changed quite quickly over time. I mean, I was very struck by data that suggests that relatively recently, 40 % of Americans said they wanted to visit the UK, and it's now dropped down to 20%. I mean, that's a really catastrophic fall. Exactly. Yeah. So that's data from the British Council. And they do this survey every year where they ask, like, how likely are you going to be to visit a country? How much do you appreciate its values? How much do you trust their politics? And they found in the past 10 years, so since 2016, Britain's attractiveness to America or Americans has fallen from 78 % to 59%.

27:03So it's

27:04Rory Stewart:exactly that. It's now only 20 % of people in America, young Americans want to visit the UK. They're less likely to want to study here. They're less likely to sort of appreciate our culture and values. And yeah, that fall is the really striking thing because it's like that demonstrates that it's not just a negative mindset now, it's that this has sort of been steadily dropping. Exactly. This also, though, speaks to one of the people you interviewed was Kim Darak, who I know very, very well, used to be our ambassador, got kicked out by, effectively, by Johnson caving into Trump. But he made the point that some of this is self-inflicted in that Brexit, we were at one point America's closest ally and, in a way, America's bridge into the European Union.

27:45Brexit has weakened us on both. but also i think that this is we have i've been saying this for months we've got to wake up to the fact this is a deliberate american strategy and rory and i talked last week to the mooch for an episode of leading that's coming out shortly and he was saying that the only institution in the world of which america has any real fear apart from china is the european union so this is part of doing down and doing in europe and so i just think we've got to wake up to that And the only way, Rory was asking how to fight how could the Icelandic Yes campaign have fought back harder.

28:24You have to rebut this stuff and you have to take a risk. I honestly feel when Musk comes out with his crap, I think, by the way, the crime stuff, a lot of this is about Trump's attack on Sadiq Khan. Trump has had a strategic attack on Sadiq Khan as mayor of London. So they just talk the whole time about London. You can't walk down the street. I was at a conference recently here in the UK. There was an American there who said, you know, I really thought long and hard about coming to London, but I got some protection.

28:50Rory Stewart:Fucking nuts. You need more protection in America than you do in Europe. Yeah, I mean, exactly. I think Laurel Rapp, she's director of the North America program at Chatham House, who I spoke to as well. And she had a great term for it, which was that Trump uses Britain like a, she called it a helpful cudgel. so sort of to reinforce his own domestic narratives and to essentially say look how terribly they have it we can't go down that path and then the other thing that um kim darick was talking about which is very sort of interesting is that there's been a massive shift in the u.s on a broader level so in 1980 i think something like 30 percent of americans trace their ancestry back to the uk so So that's census data.

29:30Rory Stewart:And now, or in 2010, the comparable figure was 12%. So he sort of put it like that. He said, you know, that's now a massive proportion of the country who look to other parts of the world, who see Britain as just another country. So those sort of historic ties are declining too. So two other things that maybe we didn't bring out enough. One of them is that British attitudes towards the US have turned significantly negative. I guess that was picked up in Martin's question with him having an American wife. And then the second thing was, there's also data that suggests that US views of the whole world are collapsing.

30:08Rory Stewart:Positive attitudes towards Canada has dropped by 20 points. Their attitude towards France has dropped by 19 points. I mean, are these young people basically saying, I don't want a passport? Or are they saying that somewhere else they really want to go? Somewhere else that they really imagine being terrific? Yeah, so this is what Christine Wilson from the British Council was saying. And it's fascinating. So essentially, there used to be from this survey, they do, they sort of have studied this, there used to be two things that would define if someone was going to be a young person was going to view a country as attractive, and that is if they were wealthy, and liberal.

30:43Rory Stewart:And so the US UK, you know, and now that's really no longer true. Instead, they're much more drawn to sort of traditionally authoritarian countries because they like, crucially, their stability. So while the UK has dropped, we are still very high up, you know, it's not all crisis stations. But while the UK has dropped two points since 2016, Saudi is up 17 points, China's up 13. Yeah, so there's been a real shift. She essentially says that the way that people view what's valuable is just changing around the world. It's also very weird. I'm sorry, final thing. One of the complaints from the US is we're not relevant anymore because our economy is not booming.

31:26Rory Stewart:We're a kind of museum. But you would have thought that a museum was at least somewhere you want to go on holiday. I mean, I'm not exactly sure that, I mean, Saudi Arabia got many strengths, but it's not exactly Venice or Florence. I mean, there's a limit to how many cultural sites you can fit in. I've got to say that, Roy, you know, Ferdinand and I just had this European tour. I think I told you that everywhere we went we're meeting americans saying god we love europe this just this you've got so much stuff that we just don't have and so i think there is a i think i've i'm not alone i know other brits who've taken the decision i am not going to america while trump is president i just think you know however pathetically you have to make a stand every now and then but i i just thought it was really interesting that we, because of Trump, and back to my point about Justice Bender's book and Trump saying, you have to be the loudest voice in the room, because Trump is the loudest American voice in our heads, certainly in my head and certainly in your head, Rory, then we sometimes forget there are millions of really good, decent Americans.

32:32And Fiona and I met lots of them wandering around Europe, basically saying, listen, we're really sorry. We're really sorry. We met this couple in France not long ago. I was sitting reading a newspaper and raging at the latest thing that Trump had said or done. And this woman just leaned across and says, can I just say we're really sorry?

32:52Rory Stewart:So, you know, there are good Americans out there. Issy, what was the most surprising thing you found in your research? Well, I was going to say I'll leave you on a slightly happier note. That same survey from Ipsos in the UK that found one in four Americans think British society is broken. 67 % of them think American society is broken. So, you know, it's not only us and potentially we don't have it that bad. So that's the sort of takeaway for you, Martin, as well. What surprised you about, I mean, you went to the US too. When were you last there? Have things changed? Did you get a different sense of a different tone?

33:28Rory Stewart:Were you meeting different people, seeing different things? So I lived out there for two years. And I mean, I was in New York, which is kind of, I guess, a bubble anyway, protected from some of it. But I think the striking thing really, when I was seeing to young people particularly, it's even that the soft power, so the things that we've always kind of taken for granted, so like our music, our culture, things like that. They were saying like, you know, I remember when I was younger and I would see on the TV all the time, I don't know, a band or a movie or British products. and now they're even seeing less of that.

34:01Rory Stewart:So I think it's a much broader thing and that's what Christine from the British Council was saying as well. It's like that is our biggest asset in some ways and that's what the UK should really lean into in going forwards is making sure that, you know, you don't take those things for granted and you know that they have to be worked at. Well, what was it we said to Lisa and Andy when we interviewed Britain as a cultural superpower? That has to be the global strategy. Well, Lizzie, thank you for the newsletter. What are you writing about this week? have you decided yet? This week I have interviewed David Blunkett which is going to be very good who all about sort of Andy Burnham he's his one of his greatest mentors as Andy described him and sort of you know what he thinks what he thinks should be next on Andy Burnham's agenda.

34:43All right Izzy thanks so much.

34:45Rory Stewart:Thanks very much guys. Take care. Thank you Izzy. Bye. Also I do think this this newsletter is been a real it's been a real boom and also shout out to Emily, who's been bringing it together and keeping all the energy going with it. It's lovely. I mean, I know it involves you suddenly having to do yet more journalism and yet more writing, but I think we're getting some really interesting stuff in. No, but also I think what's great about like, so Busy's piece on America, it feels like a proper old fashioned piece of newspaper journalism. It's like, it's the sort of stuff that newspapers just are doing less and less of because they're all click baiting and headlining.

35:26Rory Stewart:I was sort of thinking about that. I mean, I wonder actually how many, you know, would the Mirror still send someone like Izzy to the States to do long form interviews with young people and bring them back and write an article? Unlikely, unlikely. When I was on the Mirror, we had, in fact, sadly, he just died not long ago, but we had a New York bureau chief. We had somebody in Washington. We had our own photographer who just did Hollywood. The newspapers have become smaller and smaller in terms of their global footprint. And I think that's another reason why we've become more insular. No, so anyway, if you don't get the newsletter already, I do strongly recommend it.

36:04Right, should we go to party conferences? Tash, with the Reform Party Conference starting this week, what is the point of party conferences? How have they changed? What will each party expect from theirs this year?

36:15Rory Stewart:Well, let me begin with the conference that I knew best, which was the Conservative Party Conference. So I obviously was a MP and a minister when the party was in government. And it had moved from doing events in places like Blackpool, Brighton, to doing them in Birmingham and Manchester. And so you do them in these enormous conference centers. And it was very flashy. I mean, there were huge numbers of stalls hired by different companies. You had all the ambassadors coming in. And really, a Tory party conference was somewhere between a massive networking event, a chance for Boris Johnson to turn up uninvited and give a fringe meeting and completely destabilize the sitting government.

37:00Rory Stewart:It's also a place where young party activists go and get really drunk and misbehave. I think controlling them is quite difficult. But it wasn't, unfortunately, by the time I got to it, really something really for party members, which was what it was originally designed for, because the tickets got more and more expensive. And you'd gone from a world when my mother was young, when we had one and a half million members of the Conservative Party to about 100 ,000. And increasingly, it was corporate lobbyists, and very, very highly organized, choreographed speeches. and I wondered why journalists were still turning up.

37:40Rory Stewart:I could see why the lobby turned up, the kind of inner core turned up to get their gossip. But it was very, very rare to really find that anything happened other than Porto Theresa May getting in trouble because she would trip over or she would seem to be on the edge of tears. It was an opportunity to sort of look for symbolic moments in premierships. Over to you. Party conferences, there's no doubt about this, they have changed a lot. I sometimes get the blame for the change at the Labour Party conference, but I think it came at a time when they were all changing. And I think it was the television age that changed them.

38:11Because when I was a journalist, party conferences, particularly the Labour Party conference, they were, you know, the big political story came from massive, genuine political disagreement and debate. and so what that did was just communicate to the public a sense of a sort of disorganized rabble which of course you know didn't necessarily reflect terribly well on the party so we you know we had a very deliberate strategy to make them more organized but i think now i mean i'll probably go to i'm going to go to the labor party conference uh i was moderately tempted to go to the reform party conference but just diary means i can't the the other thing is that i think the Reform Party Congress will be interesting this time.

38:52They've got a lot of money. They're going to look like an American Party Congress.

38:57Rory Stewart:Boy, have they got a lot of money. They've got a lot of money. Don't want to ask too closely where that money came from. Well, can I just say to journalists, we do not yet have Nigel Farage on camera properly being grilled about the financing of reform. Any journalist who's going to Reform's Conference, if you don't get him doing that, then you're not a proper journalist. I'll just say that, put it out there. Now, if all you do is go and say, welcome to, you know, it's age 10. We're now going to talk to Zia Youssef about some latest bullshit line that Robert Jenrick has made up. Party conference, journalism, you should be there to scrutinize and challenge, not just to say what they're saying the whole time.

39:35Rory Stewart:Shout out to Tom Burgess, who's written another really good article in The Guardian called Arms and the Five Million Pound Man, Farage Megadona, Christopher Harbourn's Military Empire. Yeah, well, Tom Burgess, of course, is one of the great experts on dirty money in London. So I wonder why he's been drawn to talking about the reform financing story. Very interesting. Just talking to money, if you do go to the reform conference, Rory, for a nice£3 ,600, you can have breakfast with Nigel Farage. Beautiful. You get the food for that as well. You get eggs, you get toast, you get coffee, you get orange juice.

40:10Rory Stewart:£3 ,600. I mean, do you actually get to talk to him? Are you on like a table of 100 people where you get a little selfie? I suspect that for this platinum tier, they're basically saying, however many we get, we're going to take them. So if he gets 10 people paying£3 ,600 for breakfast, he'll have 10, but he might get 100, he might get 1 ,000. Then he's got, what's 3 ,600 times 1 ,000? 3 million. So that's almost as much, almost as much as he got from Christopher Harbourn for his gift. And the problem is you're joking about this, but of course, actually people will pay. I mean, if you're a company, you might well be tempted to think, I really need to get Farage because Farage's economic policy is not clear.

40:52Rory Stewart:So let's say you're an energy company, you want to know, has he changed his view on wind turbines? If you're a bank, you want to know, is he still talking about windfall taxes? If you are in the land property business, is he interested in land taxes? Whereas if you're an international investor, what's he doing about capital gains tax? So there will be a lot of people trying to find out what on earth this party, which still in some of the polls, James Johnson's poll, again, looks like they will have more seats than anyone else in the next parliament. Yeah, and that's why, if I can repeat my point about journalism, I can imagine the journalists going and saying that, oh, and business has got itself really interested.

41:32And there's the guy from this firm and there's the guy from that firm. The story is the money. We don't have the answers to where the money's come from and why and what they're doing with it. So can you just stop falling for the reform PR bullshit the whole time? Now, the other party conference is, Lib Dems have really got to find a way of cutting through, because at the moment they're not.

41:54Rory Stewart:Just sorry, just remind people, they have a staggering number of members of parliament. I mean, it's one of the most successful elections they've ever had in terms of members of parliament. And yet, oddly, despite having more than 10 times the number of members of parliament as reform, they get 1 % of the coverage. Yeah, well, that's partly because of the media, but it's also because they're not cutting through in the way that maybe they've got to find a big argument. How do they cut through? I think they need a national message. And it's true, every time I say this, they send me boring speeches saying, oh, we've already made that point, it's not fair.

42:22Rory Stewart:Well, the fact is they're not successfully communicating. It's all very well sending me speeches and saying, well, he made that point. I know there's a risk in this, but I think it should be Europe. I know there's a risk, but it should be Europe. And then you've got Labour, which obviously is going to be interesting because it's Andy Bernal's first conference and Labour's the party of government. Labour grassroots still do have a bit an ability to influence the debate. I mean, it's very controlled, much more controlled than it used to be. But I think Gaza could become an issue, you know? I think Gaza could become an issue.

42:52I wonder if AI might become an issue. So we'll see what happens there. And then the Tories, there's a bit of churn going on in the Tories, Rory. Pritja Patel out, Tom Tugendhat in, James Cleverley off to try to become London mayor. Now, here's one for you. I'm sure you don't know the answer to this because you won't have talked to Kimi about it. Has Priti Patel been given the boot? Or is Priti Patel telling the truth when she says she's going off to rebuild, develop links with other conservative parties around the world?

43:18Rory Stewart:I think that's an unlikely story. I don't think on the basis, I mean, this is pretty listening to this, maybe throwing things at the radio set. The Priti Patel I know would not have stepped down from being shadow foreign secretary to build links with other parties across the world around the world. Does Priti listen to podcasts via wireless?

43:40What about James Cleverley? Can you see him becoming the mayor?

43:44Rory Stewart:Well, interestingly, I got some polling on that. I mean, obviously, this is something I've got a set interest in because I ran to be a lot of mayor. But somebody's just sent me something saying, I don't think Cleverley can win. He can't get the reform second preferences a Tory would need to win. And it's too conservative for the left. Where would reformist second preferences go? Restore? That's a really interesting question, or there might be none at all. But this guy is obviously writing to me saying this is the perfect chance for the Rory independent candidate to come in through the centre that I get into second place behind Sadiq Khan and then I can scoop up the conservative second preferences.

44:20Yeah. There was, by the way, I went to Norwich Burnley on Saturday and there was a Restore Britain gathering protest outside the railway station. I don't think it was for me because one of them on the return journey asked me if I would stop to take a selfie. So he was much nicer to me than Rupert Lowe. Although Norwich fans enjoyed singing.

44:41Rory Stewart:Yeah, this was a pretty nasty story. Are you prepared to share that on the podcast? I thought it was quite funny. Well, it does show that you're quite famous, but it did sound quite unpleasant. Go on, tell us what happened. Well, what happened was I was going, because I loved Delia Smith and Michael, her husband, I was going to go to the director's box with them, okay, because they're big Norwich figures. But for various reasons, they couldn't go to the game. So I went in the weigh-in with my sons, Rory and Callum. But I was very, very close to the front. And it was bad enough that we lost 4-1, and we had a man said tops.

45:15It wasn't a great game out. But I started to hear these voices going, Campbell, Campbell, you're a word that cannot be repeated beginning with C. So I thought that was a bit unpleasant. But then they started seeing a much more innovative song about, I don't know how to put this without being too crude, fellatio and myself and a former prime minister who's well known to all of us.

45:43Rory Stewart:Maybe for the younger listeners, we could re-characterize that as a sexual relationship between you and a former Labour Prime Minister that you're very close to. And I did deny the centrality of the allegation, but it was moderately funny. I was very pleased that there was a couple of - But was this like a few people or did quite a lot of the crowd get into this chart? It wasn't a whole lot. It was about, I'd say, we were talking maybe about 100 or so, I don't know. Does that often happen to you at football matches that they start? It's not the first time. It's the first time I've had that particular song.

46:17I've had the first one quite a lot. I did have it once. We were playing at QPR once when this was during, I think it was probably after the Iraq war, but I was still around on the scene. And they invaded the pitch, these protesters. They knew where I was sitting. And they had these posters, Campbell is this, Campbell is that, war criminal, whatever. Anyway, I spoke to our manager, Ian Coyle, after the game, and he said, what's all that about? He said, oh, you know, it's just sort of anti-war thing. He said, one of the assistant coaches, Turchip, said, why are they protesting against soup?

46:54So at least the Norwich fans were sort of moderately well-informed.

46:58Rory Stewart:Oh, that's good. Let me do probably the most awkward tilt of all, which is to say that we talk a lot about politics in terms of communications, mood music, money. But in the end, it's policy. And we've bring in a very serious policy analyst, Dan Needle, to talk in particular about the options that governments could face around taxes, really relevant, because we've got a budget coming. And we've got stories now on the front of the papers that John Healy is considering, stealth taxes, wealth taxes. and this is Dan both arguing against things that a lot of our listeners like listeners who favor you know Gary Stevenson for example and believe that we should be doing more taxes.

47:43Rory Stewart:Dan's trying to argue why that's the wrong approach. He's a progressive labor voting tax expert who's making I think some very very sensible old-fashioned centrist arguments for how you should think about taxing people in the country, really worth listening to. And I'm desperately hoping the government's listening to it before the budget. I also want to recommend it because it reveals yet again that if there's one issue that can really provoke a visceral emotional response in the normally calm, collected Rory Stewart, it's wealth taxes. It really, really, really gets to By the way, just talking to John Healy, if it's true that he's going slow on the commitment to 3 % of GDP on defense, can you imagine how Keir Starmer feels right now?

48:37Rory Stewart:I know. I know. It's pretty amazing. Yeah. Just to remind us, if you haven't fully got that connection, John Healy, the sort of solid member of Keir Starmer's government, basically brought down his government resigning because it wasn't going to hit the 3 % commitment on defense. he's now a chance for the exchequer and charged the money. And it sounds like he said he's not going to hit the 3 % target on defense. Last question, Rory. Felix from London. It's a question to me, but I'm going to flip it to you. Alistair, I enjoyed your piece in the newsletter, another plug for the newsletter, about your trip to Slovenia.

49:09What are your favorite places in the world? Well, Slovenia has definitely gone into my list for sure. What's your number one? If you were only allowed to go to one place before you die, what would it be?

49:22Rory Stewart:I love places up on the edge of the Himalayas. So I would probably, if I had one last chance, I'd go up to Afghanistan, go up to the Bamiyan Valley, get up into the hills there. People who haven't done it, and it's difficult to do, and people have strong views on not maybe wanting to go when the Taliban are in charge. But Afghanistan is unlike anywhere on earth. I've just done an interview with Anand Gopal, who was talking to me about Syria, talking to me about Iraq. And he agreed with me that of all the places he's reported in the world, Afghanistan is the most unique, the most different, the most extraordinary people.

49:54Rory Stewart:And partly it is the dry, deep Prussian blue sky over the mountains that makes it so unique. I was only allowed to go to one country ever for the rest of my life. I think it would have to be Scotland. I love Ethiopia and I have really very, very fond memories of Ethiopia and back to mountains, some of the mountains above, I've just not that far from Addis Ababa. And I've got a very, very, very soft spot for different parts of Australia. Well, Scotland on that, I mean, I've just come back from five weeks in Scotland. And I was meeting as I came down to London, all these people who'd gone off to France on holiday, who were boiling.

50:36Boiled to death.

50:38Rory Stewart:And it's been incredible, particularly that whole region, which I love so much, which is less exotic than your Western Isles, which is the junction between the lowlands and the highlands, that whole Perth-Sharanga stretch that takes you from Locker and Head right the way up to Blairgowrie. I think it's one of the most lovely places on earth. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think one of the reasons I love Slovenia is actually in lots of ways they remind me of Scotland. Water, mountains, forests, really warm people, really warm people to Slovenia were really, really nice. So I would definitely recommend Slovenia Felix if you've not been there.

51:12So Rory, there we go. We've talked about what we talked about. We had a long shift today, haven't we?

51:16Rory Stewart:Well, we went from Iceland. We then did UK-Russia. We did UK-US with Izzy, the author on our amazing newsletter. And then we got into party conferences and we finished with what our favourite place to visit is. But along the way, we had the fans chanting at you at the Norwich game. I'm not going to sing the song although I am going to say this I am going to say this Matt Ford very funny comedian very very big Tony Blair fan he did send me a message saying is this true I'm jealous now what his wife is going to think of that I just do not know but there we are she's Scottish so she'll probably give him a bit of a hard time what I want coverage on actually Alistair is at some point if it ever becomes possible.

52:05Rory Stewart:And I know this is difficult because you keep popping up and down, but I'm very interested in the relationship between Burnley and Ipswich, just as I'm interested in the relationship between Alistair Gamble and David Gawke, who's my... Oh, why are you interested? Well, Burnley, Ipswich are in the Premier League and we're not. That's the... But do you not keep swapping? Are you not both on the margins back and forth? It's called yo-yo. It's called being a yo-yo club. And if we don't yo-yo again, I mean, we've got the parachute payments this time but you know some clubs once they've been yo-yoing and then they stop yo-yoing up they can go into sort of financial difficulties i hope we don't do that just talking about it's just though rory talking about hope well is this hope but it's certainly positivity most of the front pages today we're recording on monday really they've got the picture of the two sons of the police officer one of the police officers who was killed in the awful incident in middlesbrough and he was a big manchester united fan and so are they and they were the mascots yesterday at the man united game so fair play man united for doing that but also fair play to those boys i mean to do that they're aged eight and six and they're marching out and there's a there's a moment's sort of remembrance for their dad and and i've also noticed nigel farage yet to say anything about the uh death as i understand it of those police officers i wonder what he'd have said if the five people in the car had been called Muhammad or Aziz or Ali.

53:29There we are.

53:30Rory Stewart:Right. Well, Alistair, that's a slightly grim note to end on. But thank you. Look forward to speaking very soon. I'm off to California, off to the West Coast to see more of your dreaded AI people tomorrow morning. Excellent. And I'll report when I'm back. Yeah. See you soon. Take care. Bye-bye.