442. Question Time: Trump's Plot To Cancel The Midterms

Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics.

Sign up to The Rest is Politics Plus to enjoy ad-free listening.

Receive a weekly newsletter, join our members' chat room and gain early access to live show tickets.

Just go to the RestisPolitics.com.

That's the RestisPolitics.com.

The Restis Politics is powered by Fuse Energy and Fuse are now offering £20 credit and free Trip Plus membership if you switch to a fixed tariff before the end of August.

They've listened carefully to their customers and the number one request was gas tariffs.

So now at last you can switch both your gas and electricity to Fuse.

One supplier, one bill, one less quockmire to navigate.

It's also cheaper.

Fuse gas and electricity customers typically save £150 versus the price cap.

Today's political climate is full of talk about control and clarity.

Well Fuse have quietly exercised some, at least when it comes to your energy bill.

And they began with a mission which was to make electricity cheaper, cleaner, simpler.

And Fuse now supplies over over 50,000 homes across the UK, all done quietly, efficiently, and without a single campaign bus tour.

Fuse's support is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with real people replying in under two minutes.

So go to fuseenergy.com forward slash politics to switch your gas and electricity to Fuse and get your £20 credit and free Trip Plus membership.

Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

And with me, Alistair Campbell.

And Rory, I think we did, that must be the first time in a long time that we got through a main episode without talking about Trump or Israel.

We're going to do both in question time.

Let's start with Trump.

John Nixon, Trip Plus member from Morbourn.

If it's true that Trump is sending the military into blue states, Democrat states like Illinois, is it also conceivable that he plans to incite such civil disobedience that he can claim claim a national crisis, cancel the midterms on the basis of preventing civil war, and repeat for the 2028 election?

We've got a lot of questions on this sort of theme.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's absolutely stunning.

I mean, basically what we're seeing now is stuff that would have been unimaginable a few months ago in the way that Trump is using the military.

I mean, traditionally, the military is only deployed into civilian contexts in the most extreme situations conceivable.

He's now making it almost the norm for the National Guard, who are really the equivalent of the Territorial Army, in fact, a much better armed, much more full-time version of the UK Territorial Army, people who deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, are now being deployed into Washington, D.C., deployed into California, and now the story is they're going to be deployed into Chicago.

in order to deal with what he calls an epidemic of crime.

And basically, what with pumping up homeland security and deploying the National Guard in this way, Trump is essentially creating a militarized state.

And part of this is just about intimidating opponents.

I mean, part of it is, you know, he raided John Bolton, who was his national security advisor and who's become a prominent critic, sent people into his home.

And you can see this.

I was talking to American lawyers who...

Over the last five months, I've been shocked at how people I knew who were very critical of Trump are now beginning to be very careful what they say about him because they're seeing what's happening to real people in their careers.

University is another example.

Anyway, over to you.

Yeah, I mean, just to go through some of the things in recent days that sort of play to this theme.

So they've sacked the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Why?

Because he contradicted Trump's contention that Iran's nuclear sites have been obliterated.

They've fired now, I think, two dozen law enforcement investigators who were involved in investigating January the 6th.

They've They've sacked the director of dance programming at the John F.

Kennedy Centre for being too woke.

And then here's another one, Rory, which relates to the discussions we've been having about energy.

They've ordered that all construction stops on revolution wind.

And a 4 billion wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island is already almost built.

And that is a classic example of doing something because I can and because it speaks to what I think.

And I think this whole thing about, you know, this is about making people feel that they can't speak out against something that is non-Trumpian.

And one of the most extraordinary sites this week was, I think it was Hexeth Vance and Stephen Miller being heckled.

My favorite heckle was a guy shouting out, did you shag the couch, Vance?

I thought I quite liked that one.

But Miller, I mean, the guy is just, he's not even a kind of politician.

He's an advisor.

It would have been like me when I was working in number 10, standing up and in his case, saying that we've got all these 90-year-old hippies protesting against what we're doing.

They don't belong here.

These were people who were protesting against the National Guard stuff in Washington.

So I think it's very hard to say these are not ⁇ they're more than creeping signs of authoritarianism.

They are very powerful signs of authoritarianism.

John Nixon's question on whether he might cancel the midterms on the basis of preventing civil war, I think it's very worth thinking now about all the different ways in which Trump can play with the midterms and use intimidation of the military to do that.

So he could say, unfortunately, we can't hold elections in these strong democratic voting states because there's too much of a crime wave.

He could say he could refuse to certify him, and of course, the majority of his team still insist he won the 2020 elections.

But I think what he's proving is this line that Bannon produces again and again, which is, we're not afraid, we'll do anything.

And we sense that our opponents are afraid.

Great speech.

There's just a shout out before we move on to the next question to Pritzker, the governor of Illinois.

I don't know whether you caught his

incredible response.

But the bit that struck me most, which I think you'd like, is to the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country, I'm asking for your courage to tell it like it is.

This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to the story.

This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see, where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president's actions.

And that's something you say a lot about the British press, but

this idea that there are always two sides to the story or reducing everything to who's up and who's down and distracting people from what's really going on, because as Pritzker points out, it's putting the National Guard in an impossible situation.

They have to deploy because they could be court-martialed if they don't.

But there are Republican governors in other states talking about sending their National Guards from their states to Illinois, which is really testing the boundaries of the U.S.

federal settlement.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I think it's horrific in getting ever more so.

And he did one of his sort of Ramble weave press conferences yesterday, which just, I mean, I didn't watch the whole thing, but just the clips of it were absolutely mind-blowing.

We're now up to ten wars that he's that he's solved he's decided six was boring seven was boring he's now solved ten hasn't explained yet what they are now presuming the next war will be the civil war in the United States which I mean he's his his secret isn't it is basically to encourage wars and then claim that he's solved them by giving in to the aggressor exactly Gaza Martin West famine in Gaza can the international community create a group of the willing to provide Gaza with food trucks from the land borders?

Would Israel bomb the trucks?

Do you see a way out of this horror?

They wouldn't bomb the trucks necessarily,

but I think there's no doubt that they have been pretty active in making sure that trucks don't get through.

I mean, this has been a pretty horrific week on the famine front.

So the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, IPC, which is backed by the United Nations, it's the world's leading monitor of hunger.

And they have these three key indicators, and you have to meet two of them

for them them to say that famine is taking place.

Starvation, at least one in five households facing extreme shortage in food.

Malnutrition, roughly one in three children or more acutely malnourished.

Mortality, at least two in every 10,000 people dying daily because of outright starvation or the combination of malnutrition and disease.

So they have decided that is happening.

The UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk has reminded us that it's a war crime to use starvation as a method of warfare.

And yet, of course, the Israeli line remains that this is all down to Hamas and it's all down to the failings of the international community and blah, blah, blah.

Just a sort of short one on that, as somebody who was a development minister.

This IPC classification is a very, very serious international process with a lot of international NGOs involved.

And usually, the IPC is accused of being too cautious.

But definitely, if you take it back in the day when I was the DFIT Minister, if a official came in and said an IPC5 classification, which is the most serious in the world, has been declared in Somalia or South Sudan or Congo or Ethiopia or Yemen, that would be the immediate trigger for the UK government suddenly announcing a massive hundreds of millions of pounds contribution to a big UN fund on dealing with famine.

And for that to happen in what's basically a middle-income country, I mean, there's other places I've described as some of of the poorest countries in the world, but Gaza before October the 7th was a country with one of the highest literacy rates in the world.

It was a middle-income country with people living lives very similar to what you would have seen in a lot of southern Europe, the Middle East.

To trip that into famine is extraordinary.

And for the IPC to call it is, as you rightly say, is very extreme.

And when you dig into the detail of the reports, I mean, obviously, there's a lot of focus on death, there's a lot of focus on pictures of

children with their bones sticking out and what have you.

But

get this, fishing facilities destroyed, 90% of commercial or industrial assets required for any kind of food production destroyed, 62% of the road network destroyed, 82% of agricultural wells destroyed as of April 2025, 71% of greenhouses destroyed, 90% of cropland destroyed.

As of June 25, 26% of sheep have survived, 34% of goats, 3.8% of cattle, 1.4% of poultry.

So when you read stats like that, you are basically seeing the absolute breakdown of an ecosystem that is meant to keep people alive.

Yeah.

And let's just

point out what's hidden behind those figures, because Israeli journalists have now got hold of documents from the Israeli army that suggests that the Israeli army itself is acknowledging the very, very high number of civilians that are being killed, that this isn't a question of everybody being killed being Hamas.

But the story on the killing of civilians, of course, is that they're used as human shields by Hamas.

To put it very bluntly, that is not true of sheep.

And it's very, very difficult to understand what the explanation is for

the death of that number of livestock and the erosion of that amount of agricultural land uh unless it's a deliberate policy i'm afraid or a very very odd policy of targeting munitions when you end up with that kind of destruction and again the water

is uh electricity provided from israel to run desalination plants in in gaza directly controlled by israel when the water is turned off 96 percent of people report moderate to severe water insecurity municipal water production is 28 percent of what it was in 2023 78

have lack of access to sufficient required toilet use.

80% no income, no savings.

During July, this is July, and things have got a lot worse since, 43% of children had diarrhoea, 58% reported fever, 16% had vomiting episodes, 25% acute respiratory episodes, and 49% of children had skin conditions.

I mean, this is off the scale.

It is man-made and it can be addressed by the international community.

But if Israel doesn't let people in, they don't let them in.

The final thing, which I think you've said in the past, worth re-emphasizing, is that that then contributes to so many other problems.

So much more difficult to survive surgery if you're malnourished.

Much more difficult to get vaccines to work if you're malnourished.

So

the starvation then will contribute to a whole series of other...

very, very extreme life-threatening conditions facing people in Gaza.

Question from Tom McEwen, who is a Trip Plus member from Leamington.

Assuming that Putin will continue to sacrifice men and materials until he's able to claim victory against Ukraine, do you think that he would be able to hold such a huge territory populated by a determinedly anti-Russian population?

And if not, what then?

When you think about how many words we and everybody else devoted to what happened at the meeting in Alaska and then the meeting with the European leaders in the White House.

I mean, has there been any progress on the political front?

None that I've seen?

I think broadly speaking, that was our sense, which is that the only policy Trump really had

was hoping that by conceding everything he could to Putin, that that would bring an end to the war.

There was no real search negotiation.

I'm afraid this is, you know, returning to my boring metaphor that the Europeans feel all the time, so they're just sticking their finger in the dike, that the basic direction of Trump is to get behind Putin and Selzelensky down the river.

And the Europeans have spent months hoping that they can sort of stop that from happening.

But we've had revelations now from the Washington Post confirming that the Americans prevented Ukraine from using its attacker missiles, and indeed from using British Storm Shadow missiles, to fire

into Russian territory, hoping that by reducing attacks on Russia, they would encourage Putin to stop.

But Putin isn't going to stop because he feels he's got momentum.

He doesn't feel he has any incentive to stop.

There's no leverage that Trump has over Putin, and increasingly no leverage he has over Zelensky.

On the question though, and I'd love to hear a little bit about

Independence Day and your reflections on that and your reflections on North Korea as well.

But on the technical question, I think Putin's hope is to take control of the Donbass.

He hasn't at the moment been talking about permanent occupation of western Ukraine.

If he attempted that, that would be a complete nightmare.

I mean that would be another Afghanistan for the Russians because he would be facing a continual insurgency from a profoundly anti-Russian population against Western Ukraine.

Yeah, I thought the Independence Day was profoundly moving.

I thought his speech was

I thought it was very nice that he wore a suit.

It was a more traditional suit than the one that JD Vance told him he ought to wear.

I thought it was great that Mark Carney was there and I had an exchange with Mark Carney last night who said he found it one of the most poignant

things that he's done in his entire life, never mind since he became prime minister.

But I think

there's an understanding that Zelensky is, as you've said in your radio series on heroes, I think he is the closest we've got to a sort of modern-day political hero and he's a very, very impressive guy.

I think the fallout in a way from the whole sort of fuss that there was last week with Trump and Putin and then the European leaders is we are pretty much back where we were and then a lot of this is about whether Zelensky can maintain the levels of political support and

I think he does this is what's so remarkable about it if you read Markarni's speech you know that was somebody who is not remotely moving away from a position of absolutely solid solid support the Kim Jong-un

thing that you mentioned was was fascinating.

I saw this on Der Spiegel.

I don't know whether it got much coverage in the UK, but have the North Koreans admitted that they've been sort of sending lots and lots and lots of soldiers to help the Russians?

Because this is the first time.

Initially, it was a secret, and initially it was broken by some very courageous journalists.

I think it's no longer a secret, but initially it was a real surprise for people.

But what this was, and we should put it in the newsletter, because it's a pretty remarkable piece of film of, it was from

North Korean state television covering

live,

so we were told, the return of troops, North Korean troops who had been killed fighting for Russia against Ukraine.

Now, they've now said they're going to send another 30,000, but he put medals, they had pictures of all the soldiers who'd been killed.

I couldn't get the number, but it was a lot of them.

And he was pinning medals to the pictures.

He was hugging the children of these soldiers.

And then he was crying.

And I don't know whether that was, you know, I don't imagine anything gets put out on the media without them wanting it to be put out in the media.

But he obviously felt that this was an appropriate response to seeing these fallen soldiers and their bereaved families.

And

he was literally sort of, you know, weeping as he watched these coffins come off the plane.

Yeah.

Well, you very kindly did a little plug.

So the last episode of my five-part BBC series on heroes, and this one focuses on Zelensky, goes out on Monday, 9 a.m.

in the UK.

As one says, you can catch up on BBC Sounds.

But it's been really interesting getting responses on trying to work out who our heroes are today.

You know, what do we make of Trump?

What do we make of Musk, who of course dresses like a superhero?

Is Zelensky really a hero?

You know, people now talking about corruption allegations and in Ukraine and what does it mean to be a modern hero?

But I wanted to finish with one last question about one of our mutual heroes, Mark Carney.

There seems to to be a debate in Canadian foreign policy about whether they should focus, for example, on Ukraine and Hawaii, or whether they should continue to be a big international convener going around with international coalitions.

And I favour the latter.

I think Mark Carney's in a very interesting position.

He's got the credibility and the international leadership.

And I think at a time of Trump, we desperately need Canada to help form these international coalitions with UK, Europe, South Korea, Japan in a way that probably wasn't true in the past.

And it would be a great pity if Canada said, instead of doing all this international stuff, we're just going to knuckle down and focus on a couple of places.

Aaron Powell, well, I think the only thing I'll say about that, he was the world leader that was there in

Ukraine for their Independence Day.

I think he's very much of an internationalist mindset.

And I think he's obviously top of his agenda most of the time is going to be how he manages the sort of big, the big bear next door

but no I think he's I think he is absolutely stepping up to the market as a correctly to see him continuing what he's doing and and you know as I said it would have been lovely to see Matt Cross Starmer and Khani together doing their announcement on on Palestine it would be great now to see Khani really pushing because I think that there isn't necessarily the international leadership there yeah and I think if Canada used to beat itself up a little bit a few years ago because it sort of thought that it was just sort of meekly going along behind a western consensus that now can really lead the western consensus agreed right let's take a break then we'll come to walk back another hugely consequential leader that you're always very nice about that said davey

this episode is brought to you by nord vpn summer the season of sunburns sand in your suitcase and unsecured hotel wi-fi called something like guest123.

So from Conwell Wall to Croatia, people connect to whatever network is nearest.

No password, no protection, just you, your inbox, and a stranger monitoring your keystrokes in flip-flops.

That's a very good reason to use NordVPN, which is what I use.

It encrypts your connection.

NordVPN masks your IP.

It blocks unwanted trackers.

So it's not just safer, it's also smarter.

Whether you're booking last-minute flights or chasing end-of-season hotel deals, NordVPN keeps online prices honest.

It's the one bit of your setup that works exactly as it should, whether you're at home, abroad, or somewhere in between.

So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to NordVPN.com/slash rest is politics.

Our link will also give you four extra months on the two-year plan.

There's no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee.

The link is in the podcast episode description box.

This is an ad from BetterHelp.

All of us, I think, often do find guidance in very unlikely places.

An accidental meeting, seeing someone that we haven't seen for a long time.

But there's something quite different that you can get from a therapist, from a trained professional who has actually had the discipline and the experience to engage.

And BetterHelp has been doing this, finding the right matches between people and their therapists for over 10 years.

They start with a short questionnaire, which helps you connect to an experienced therapist whose expertise aligns with your needs.

And if the match isn't right, you can change it anytime, at no extra cost.

It's entirely online.

You can pause your subscription whenever you wish.

BetterHelp has already supported more than 5 million people worldwide.

And for many of them, a right match can guide them through not just the moment, but can make a real, real difference.

Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/slash restpolitics.

That's betterhelp.com/slash restpolitics.

Welcome back to the Rest as Politics Question Time with me, Rory Schuard.

And me, Alastair Campbell.

This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy.

And we're talking about how global politics has a direct link into the energy that you're using and the cost of the energy inside British homes.

Wars and rivalries may feel very remote, but when Russia squeezes pipelines or China tightens supply chains, the ripple effect can be on your heating bill.

Yeah, we've had a great question from Kate Maddox from Brighton.

Are we just too dependent on imports?

And is that why global tensions hit our energy bills so hard?

I mean, definitely true we're very dependent on imports.

I mean, it is pretty amazing, the story of energy and geopolitics.

People remember 1973, the Arab-Israeli war drove up oil prices fourfold.

And if you look at the kind of stuff we're talking about on the podcast, it can all push in very different directions.

So, for example,

If Trump's tariffs go wrong, we could end up with a situation in which global demand drops and the oil price drops.

If, on the other hand, there are sanctions on Iran and Iran produces a million fewer barrels a day, if I've got fewer or less there, Alistair.

Fewer, that's fine.

Few, thank you, yep.

Then the price could go up again.

And then there's other questions.

Are we going to be able to develop our own domestic supply?

There was an article by my old sparring partner, John Redwood, in the Telegraph today.

I think the combination of John Redwood and The Telegraph can give you a bit of a pulsing glass.

I did see it trailed on the front page.

I can't pretend that I picked it up to read it.

Well, he's pointed out that the government is really struggling to sell licenses for offshore wind at the moment.

In its latest auction, it had offered £73 a megawatt hour and couldn't get anyone to buy it.

It's now up to £113 a megawatt hour.

And it's still struggling to get people to come in because some of the policy uncertainty and planning uncertainty means it's quite difficult.

Anyway, any last thoughts from you on geoportics?

I mean, I think it's a great question.

And it's true that this stuff has a direct impact on oil prices, the one that people always go to.

But, you know, we regularly get asked by people, you know, why can't Europe just pull the plug on all Russian energy?

And,

you know, the honest, straightforward answer is that, you know, we've got to keep the lights on.

So this stuff really matters.

I think we're going to see it matter more because the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is going to continue to be a factor.

We've got rivalry between China and the America, which is influencing supply chains and liquid natural gas flows and the energy market.

You know, you and I both talked to sort of people who work in these kind of risk assessment places and political consultancies.

They now look at energy flows every bit as closely as they look at the politics of a country.

So this stuff really, really matters.

Because in Britain we have this very liberalized system, changes in global energy prices hit very, very directly into your bills.

So they can fluctuate pretty quickly.

Which of course brings us back to our sponsor, Fuse Energy.

So households can't control what happens on the world stage, but they can choose Fuse.

Cheaper tariffs today, with many saving £200.

So switch your gas and electricity to Fuse before the winter price hikes.

Find out more at fuseenergy.com slash politics.

Okay, Roy, listen, let's get back to the Lib Dems because we've talked about them the last couple of weeks.

And last week, when you were sort of saying that they never say anything terribly interesting and nothing that goes through we said to them if any of the libdem team were listening um could they send us some of the things that Ed Davius said and done in recent weeks and months and they did

speeches big conference speech that sort of set out the whole agenda one on Europe one on the future of the economy article on Brexit saying that Starma must find the courage to change course.

So what did you make of them and have you shifted your view at all?

Well, look, I think some of them are good speeches.

Some of them are serious good speeches.

I am really very strongly in favour of his idea that we should join the European Union Customs Union.

I'm sorry he didn't make more of that in the election campaign.

They'll probably say they made a certain amount about it.

But I absolutely believe, and I think you do too, that that's a critical part of restoring confidence in the UK and would make a lot of difference to trade.

I think his policy on Palestine was very good and that was a very good speech.

I'm much more sceptical, I'm afraid, about him on the economy.

Good that he's speaking up for free trade, but really the speech, which is, you know, the importance of education and training, something we've always emphasised as liberal democrats, or another speech which I'm afraid I sent you, which I was slightly, I'm sorry that I've put on a voice where I'm being mean to him, aren't I?

You are.

You have Christian Schmidt yesterday and Ed Davies today.

I don't know.

So here is.

He's got a slight tendency to go for sort of grand rhetoric and then slightly pathetic final sentence.

So

because Donald Trump is not only betraying Ukraine, it's not only their sovereignty he's selling out.

It's our security.

The security of Europe.

The security of our United Kingdom.

And that is unforgivable.

But Roy, you read it in a certain way.

I could deliver that in a way that you roll and you roll and you roll.

And that is unforgivable.

Round and applause, round, applause, round, applause.

Much better.

I thought his,

I mean, conference speeches are very, very, they're hard gigs.

And I thought the conference speech they sent was good.

I thought his stuff on Brexit was good.

This goes back to a point that we were making yesterday in the main podcast.

It is absurd.

So yesterday, the BBC News, I got off the plane, I get in the car.

I'm having a look at sort of some of the websites websites where I view the BBC News.

One of the main headlines was, Farage says immigration is a scourge.

Tell me the newsworthy value of that.

That is something that he said.

That's like, so if Ed Davies said care is very important,

would that get covered on the BBC?

I don't think so.

So I think there is a real problem

with the way the media view Farage and the way they view the other parties.

They've got 72 MPs.

Yes, they could do a better job.

I think where they're caught, we talked a little bit about this last week.

I think they're caught the whole time between

local strategy and national strategy.

And maybe they need to find the best single issue that brings those two together.

Because as you saw in the speech, he does have a very strong line on Trump.

He does have very strong lines on Europe.

But is that the thing that's going to bring a national and a local strategy together?

It's so interesting because we're plugging the interview with Nicola Sturgeon.

And the one time when she really sort of gets cross is when we suggest the Lib Dems to her.

She really thinks that's the most shocking idea.

And it is something, I'm afraid, that traditionally as a Conservative, and most of my Labour colleagues too, we like to grumble about the Lib Dems.

There's a hilarious piece for real political geeks.

If you read Tim Shipman's account of Sam Jima trying to, my friend and former Conservative tried to defect to the Lib Dems during the 2019 election.

And it was meant to be this big thing.

They'd got this Conservative minister over, and he was joining the Lib Dems, and he was going to run.

And the description of how the Lib Dem press team managed to destroy that moment is one of the funniest pages you'll ever read in your life.

I mean, it begins with them putting Sam Jeamer in a hotel, which he describes as being like something out of the shining.

I mean, kind of peeling walls, kind of crazy.

They then try to creep him up through the fire exit and distract by using, I think it's somebody like Gied Verhofstadt or Franz Timmermans to make a speech, which they think is really going to attract the

attention of the media.

Well, they slip Sam in through the back door.

And by the time they've got Sam in, they've missed all the front pages of the newspapers because they've got all the timing out.

Just tell me, Anastasia, seriously, I mean, why do you think

at a time when I believe there is a massive story to be told?

You know, I'm afraid Rachel Reeves hasn't got a grip of the welfare budget.

I think she's going to be in real trouble with the next budget.

They haven't managed to deal with the criminal gangs on boats.

There's a real story about not getting the growth that we want.

Massive space, I think, for somebody to make a good, pretty technocratic argument for a different type of government.

Why do the Lib Dems not fill that space?

And why, when you're not endorsing Ed Davies' book and I got you off camera, might you secretly agree that there's sometimes something a little disappointing about the Lib Dems?

No, there's not.

I've always been slightly of the Nicola Sturgeon view that their problem is that, you know, where it suits them, they sort of, they lean towards Labour-style style arguments and policies and where it suits them they lean towards the Tories.

What I'm suggesting is that they find something that sort of that breaks through that.

No, it's not that I look I voted Lib Dem once and that was a protest vote and I and I I'm you know I'm not a natural Lib Dem at all as Clegg and Miriam regularly tell me because they say you're not really liberal is their view of me.

So but I I I honestly do think I I think this media point is is a fair one.

I actually if I were them I'd I'd make far more complaints about the way that our media culture has developed and the way that our media landscape is.

I'll read you the message that I got from one of their team.

He said, I know I've got a vested interest in making excuse for us not cutting through, but at a time when the far right control one of the biggest social media platforms, the BBC follow around Farage waiting for him to say something mean about immigrants, the Conservatives are great fund for the media and the government is having a bit of a shocker.

It's pretty hard to get noticed by saying progressive things, doing okay in opinion polls and doing very well in local elections.

That's their complaint.

I think they should find

they should keep complaining.

There's nothing wrong with complaining about the way that our media is.

I used to do plenty of that myself.

But I think you have to have that bigger message and strategy that's cutting through.

And I think that the closest he gets to it really is with the personals through, but that's not enough.

You've got to have a policy and an area that you identify with.

And I think at the moment they're caught because they're doing Trump, they're doing Gaza, they're doing Europe, and then they've also all this domestic stuff.

If I were them, I'd pick one max two and say, right, that is going to be our national story.

Okay, well, let's keep coming back to it because I still think there's something difficult to explain to anybody, really, which is

why when we all feel that there's a and which is Jacob's question, what he asked on the pod, why is it when we all feel there's a massive gaping hole in the centre of British politics and we all want an alternative to for arch Conservative, and in my case, an alternative to Labour.

Do the Lib Dems not naturally occur?

Yeah, no, it's fair.

And it's been a problem since the 1920s.

I mean, there is that space, and I don't know what the problem is.

Okay, we'll come back to it.

But thank you for listening, Lib Dems, and thank you for sending us.

At least you thought that there was a bit of substance in them.

That's quite important.

Here's one for you, Rory.

Nula O'Connor.

I'd love to understand more about how politicians get their data before making big policy decisions.

Having never myself been asked to take part in a government survey, I wonder how representative these really are.

It's a big problem.

The Office on National Statistics, which is the key to everything, and I guess the two biggest issues we've been talking about this week are probably immigration and the economy, I guess is where I was with Lib Dems.

We don't have good data.

I mean,

when I say that, I mean it's completely shocking.

I mean, some of the government data has had to be removed and rejected something like seven or eight different times.

And it's a problem in a whole series of ways.

There's some very straightforward bits of problem.

I mean, one of them is that, unlike most countries, you'll notice when you leave Heathrow, you don't go through a passport desk.

So people don't actually know how many people are leaving the country.

We don't have ID cards, all that sort of stuff.

Secondly, I think there are also potentially problems around the UK census and how people respond, how much detail they respond.

And there's another issue, which is that Scotland now runs a separate census from England, which causes on a different day, which causes other complications on people moving around.

But I think the basic stuff, immigration economics, is the stuff where we really don't know.

And we've had to continually revise.

I remember Afghans saying to me when the figure was there were 30,000 Afghans in Britain.

My Afghan friends were saying it's complete rubbish.

We think there's 150,000, 200,000 in London alone.

Thirdly, I think as our economy becomes more complicated, I really felt this in Cumbria, that we didn't really know what was going on.

It's a true in the Orkneys here.

If you try to look at the economy of rural Britain particularly, everybody's got multiple jobs and a lot of these jobs are very difficult to categorise and nobody actually from the government is going around asking what anyone does.

All we've got is sort of basic tax statistics.

So

you're in a situation where policymakers are making decisions without really knowing what's going on.

And that's why I think we see a lot of the problems.

You see these situations where the government will say, we're going to put inheritance tax on farmers.

And they've done some treasury indication running through their figures, and they've convinced themselves it's going to affect almost nobody.

And then the NFU will come out and say, Well, this is insane.

This affects almost all our members.

The government will say, Well, it's not what our figures say.

Why is this happening?

Well, it's happening because something's gone really badly wrong with statistics, and most of our policy is based on statistics.

Final question, Lucy Parker, Stratford and Avon.

With the lineup for Strictly Come Dancing having now been announced, can either of you dance?

Would either of you ever consider going on the show?

Well, my answer is no to both.

I'm a very, very bad dancer.

I've been asked God knows how many times to do it.

I see, I read that some bloke who's, quotes, famous, whatever that means in the modern age, for saying bosh a lot and being a friend of Nigel Farage is on this year's Strict to Come Dancing.

And is now being endorsed by Dominic Cummings to be the new Mayor of London and met J.D.

Vance.

There was this very odd meeting that J.D.

Vance held in the Cotswolds where he got Dan Krueger along.

Is this all part of the BBC's getting with the anti-woke zeitgeist that we have to get somebody who's famous for saying Bosch?

Well, it's also something where we've got to be serious about how famous people become.

I guess this is why Matt Hancock made these slightly embarrassing decisions to go on, what was it, Celebrity Jungle and S-A-S-A-U hard enough, because people become really famous.

I was talking to your friend of mine, Krishnan Guru Murthy, when he went on Strictly, and he said it was absolutely unbelievable.

Once he'd gone on Strictly, he couldn't walk down a high street without being stopped and photographed by every um i love dancing completely love dancing um you've been to one of my dancing partners i've seen you dancing with theresa may you seen me dance at the palladium on stage at the palladium when you were you were channeling what's it called the cheeky chap max miller the cheeky chappy max miller the cheeky chappy yeah um but yes no i i'm not going on celebrity shows like that no i mean i'd love to be able to dance

I mean, I can dance like, you know, I used to do something called polygliding when I was a student, which was this sort of thing where you kind of bend northern solely you move across but I don't know you just need the are you would you say you're a good dancer Rory?

I don't know about that but I love it.

I mean I do a lot of it and I think it may be here's a completely totally non-scientific theory.

I wonder whether because I'm not actually that musical, whether I'm not more taken with the beat.

I'm very, very, I think I would have been a decent drummer.

I could have been a kind of Ringo star figure, but I think maybe if you're very, very musical, you get very caught up with the complexity of the music and you're missing

the basic movements.

Well, there we are.

Yesterday you were Luca Moderic, today you're Inga Starr.

That's it, that's it.

Good, it's good, marvelous.

All the

best-looking celebrities in the world.

That's it.

See you soon.

See you soon.

Bye-bye.

Take a good day.

Bye-bye.