423. Question Time: Glastonbury’s Israel fallout, New York’s socialist mayor and why NATO called Trump ‘daddy’

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

And with me, Aleister Campbell.

And Rory, by my reckoning, in the main episode, you mentioned Zoran Mamdani three times.

And that's very good because we've got lots of questions about him.

Here's one from Henry Allen.

What do you think the impact of Zoran Mamdani's win will be globally and for the Democrats?

So this is the guy who has beaten Andrew Cuomo in the Democrat primary for the mayor of New York and who has, you know, I'd say given quite a lot of hope to people on the progressive side of politics around the world.

Well, it's an incredible story, an absolutely incredible story.

So just to remind people a little bit, even friends of mine who really knew New York politics had not heard of Zoran Mandani.

Came from absolutely nowhere.

The only people I knew who knew him well were

intellectuals, because his parents are an amazing celebrity intellectual couple.

His father, Mahmoud Mandani, is one of the great kind of post-colonial theorists.

He's a big professor at Columbia.

His name was very much associated with the big demonstrations at Columbia University.

His mother is a very famous filmmaker who made, you know, monsoon weddings, Salaam, Bombay.

So that a lot of my South Asian friends knew them.

A lot of my friends in New York knew them.

Because the parents are darling of the Cannes Film Festival, the London Review of Books.

But Zoran is young, bright,

liked by people, but my goodness, nobody in American politics was talking about him.

And because the person running who seemed absolutely guaranteed to get it was Andrew Cuomo from the great political family of New York.

Totally stitched up.

He raised an incredible amount of money.

And I was talking to someone who said that basically you turned on a local television in New York, you would get 19 or 20 ads in the hour you were watching just for Cuomo.

And that the traditional story in American politics is all about television advertising.

Raise enough money, buy enough television ads.

and you can win.

Now, of course, that model began to creak 2016 with Clinton and Trump.

But my goodness, Zori Mamdani has totally blown it up, came from nowhere, and used essentially TikTok

to cruise to victory.

Over to you.

Well, he actually did a version of what you did, Rory, when you were running for London Mayor,

the famous Rory Walks.

He walked the entire length of

dozens of kilometers, and he was visiting sort of here, there and everywhere.

Brilliantly made little media packages.

He had very, very simple policy messages, free buses, and a lot of

interviewing.

I mean, I think one of the other things that I learned.

Listening interviewing.

Yeah, exactly.

I learned this doing it in a much less successful way.

But in the moments running for London Mayor, where I actually thought I had a chance of defeating Sadiq Khan were the moments where I really went viral by listening, staying in people's homes, being out in the streets, being challenged by people.

Because I think we're in a world where we want the raw reception.

But he's really demonstrated.

I mean, far, far better than I ever could, because

he's really native to this medium.

Yeah, and what he did was

a lot of people when their party loses an election thinks, oh, well, it wasn't that bad and we won anyway.

Let's go and we'll just sort of carry on with the message.

But what he went out is he noted the data said that actually Trump in the presidential election did far better in the poorer areas of New York than historically would have been the case.

So one of the first big things he did was to go out with a camera crew, with his own people, and genuinely talk to people, not just sort of tell them what he thought, but ask them again and again, why did you vote for Trump?

What was it about him?

What was it about our campaign, et cetera, et cetera.

And then that sort of was reflected back in some of his campaign messaging.

He cut through all the sort of big money stuff.

And by the way, our colleague, Rest His Policy US, Mr.

Mooch, he was big for Co-O-Mo, big against Mamdami, slightly buying into the idea that this guy is a terrible kind of lefty.

I mean by our standards he's not that left-wing you know free buses what's not to like

there's a bit of there's a bit of analogy with Ed Miliband who we just did a long leading interview with who also had this Ed and David had this famous a very famous public intellectual left-wing father, which is true for Sauran as well.

But he himself doesn't come over as a sort of, you know, lofty intellectual.

And he's got a wonderful smile, which, you know, we talked about Kamala's smile.

Smiles in politics are very, very important.

Also wears a suit, which is interesting, stands out in the street because he's quite formally dressed, given that he comes from the sort of Bernie Sanders AOC edge of American politics.

So what are his policies?

His policies are free bus passes, city-owned grocery stores, rent freezes, free childcare.

A lot of focus on transport.

Communism, as Donald Trump calls it, communism.

He's an out-and-out communist.

He's talking about a 2% tax, flat tax, on the wealthiest in New York as well.

The reason I was talking about him the last podcast, though, is that he suggests where I think Labour inevitably is going to go.

So my big prediction on UK Labour is that in the end, they're going to go left.

They're going to embrace wealth taxes and they're going to realize that the way that you have to operate in a populist environment is not to try to hold the centre.

But in fact, what they're going to have to do is go left.

And I think Mamdani senses that.

He senses that he's in a moment which is much more comfortable with wealth taxes, much more comfortable with a more

soft socialist, social democratic approach to the world.

And I think that's where UK labor will follow him.

They'll take his example.

Yeah, I was actually talking yesterday to an American who works for the

kind of he helps progressive politicians get elected.

And he was, he made a very interesting argument.

He says that we've got to somehow get away from these labels of left and right.

And

that in the current circumstances, taxation should be seen as an issue of fairness, of equality, and also of actually trying to get the economy going.

Because one of the best ways to get growth going is to give poor people a lot of money to spend rather than have your money wrapped up in rich people keeping their savings and their assets.

So I think that, and

thank you to our listeners who've been nagging us to interview Gary Stevenson.

We have done it.

It will be coming out in the next few weeks.

But I think there's something in this.

And look, I think that the other thing that he's done, I watched his interview.

I heard he was on Meet the Press on the weekend, you know, one of the famous Sunday shows in the States.

So I watched it.

And actually the other guy who was on it was Chris Murphy.

And we should give him a shout out because he's been brilliant on Trump and corruption, which we talked about in the main podcast.

But what was really refreshing about watching Mamdani is he's very relaxed when he's talking.

Now, listen, they're all going to pile on him now.

Eric Adams is going to go for him.

The establishment is going to go for him.

The Republicans are clearly going to go for him big time.

Trump's already started.

But he's got this very refreshing manner.

He was given several sort of opportunities just to whack back at the Republicans, whack back at Trump.

And he didn't.

He just kind of, he's got his own message, he's got his own framing for it, just kept coming back to it, speaks very fluently, very naturally.

No, I think he's a breath of fresh air.

And the fact that we're talking about him here in London.

just underlines how much people are yearning for these sort of young progressive voices to give us a bit of hope.

Final one for me is that, of course, he's coming in on the back of the Eric Adams corruption scandal.

So the existing mayor of New York got up to extraordinary shenanigans.

The FBI and the DOJ were after him.

They were just on the cusp of being able to really pin down the kinds of benefits he'd taken from the Turkish government in return for granting favours to them, including tapping his phone.

And then Trump decided to drop all charges against him.

And Adams went from being the darling of the Democratic Party in New York to becoming a Trump synthesizer.

He's now thinking of running as an independent again.

He's very pro-crypto.

Back to that story again.

So crypto money could come in behind Adams.

But he's been banned from the matching funds program in New York.

So we could end up in a world in which Adams is running as an independent, Cuomo is running as an independent.

And Mamdani's trying to run against both of them.

Anyway, good luck to Mamdani.

It's the first time we've talked about him.

I suspect it won't be the last.

Now, Rory, this one's from Jess.

After Glastonbury's displays of support for Gaza and accusations of BBC censorship, is impartiality becoming a cover for moral failure on Palestine?

What are your thoughts on this and the coverage of Bob Villains Chance?

Don't forget, kneecap, people.

Well, again, I mean,

I've been slightly out of it because I've been in and out of doing stuff, including some medical stuff.

So what I

saw was emerging and suddenly seeing the astonishing anger on every side.

Obviously front pages in the Telegraph, many friends reaching out to me saying, this is completely disgusting, this is the end of the BBC, how dare Bob Villen do this?

And what I haven't seen in the reporting is anybody finding a way of expressing disgust and outrage at people calling for the death of soldiers and linking it to what it would feel like to be calling for the death of national soldiers in any country, along with the way in which this whole thing has become sucked into the vortex of people's views, either pro-Israel or pro-Gaza, and that we can't actually step back and let, I suppose, if I was going to be clichéd, let the police do their job, work out whether these people have committed a crime, work out how they're prosecuted, instead of immediately deciding whether we're against them or for them.

Let me have a go at being measured and sensible and all the things that people look to us for.

Point one: musicians down the years

have, as part of their stock in trade, said and done controversial things,

often because they believe them, but often because they want attention.

And we are living ever more in an attention economy.

Is the Sex Pistols and the Royal Family an example of that?

That would be a very good example of that.

But so would Elvis gyrating.

I mean, Elvis started a global moral panic by making sexual gestures while he danced, okay?

I'd say the Beatles have done stuff, the Rolling Stones have done stuff, Frankie goes to Hollywood, sex pistols, as you say.

It's just part of what musicians do.

Second point that I would make is that it is entirely possible to be offended, upset, disgusted, particularly if you are Israeli, let alone an Israeli soldier, to have a guy standing up on a stage in front of thousands and thousands of people live on the television saying death death to the IDF okay

and at the same time feel that the reaction to it and this is where I'm coming from I think the reaction to it underlines the complete loss both of genuine moral bearing and any sense of perspective The fact is that, so this guy, guess, I don't know about you, Rory, I'd never heard of them.

I definitely never heard of them, but I mean,

don't know about me.

I mean, I've obviously barely heard of the sex pistols.

Right, well, you've mentioned them.

So I'd heard of Nekap.

I was aware that Nekap, that one of them was involved in a court case, that he'd been pictured carrying a Hezbollah flag, etc., etc.

This guy comes along and starts going death, death to the IDF.

As it happens, I was watching it because I couldn't work out when Rod Stewart was coming.

Obviously, I wanted to see how many Celtic shirts would appear on stage with Rod Stewart.

And we look shadow on that, just not to trivialize this, you just both of us have said to Rod, if you're listening, that we would be very happy to appear on the stage with Rod if he would ever have us, but not at least because he's obviously my cousin, he's a Stuart, but also because you're a huge fan of his.

Yeah, I was less of a fan of him saying that Nigel Farage is worth a go.

I mean, I don't know what that was about, but anyway.

He's trying to wind you up.

It's musicians being outrageous.

He could be.

He could well be.

It's getting ahead of it.

Exactly, exactly.

Because just before the election, he said Keir Stan was a good bloke and he should give him a go.

So blah, blah, blah.

The minute he said it, this guy, the minute he started that chant, and my sense was when they were doing free, free Palestine, I reckon 80% of the crowd was going along with it.

When they went to Death, Death, the IDF, I think it, my sense was the volume went substantially down, but thousands of people were saying it.

Okay.

The next point I would make is that immediately,

Kemi Badenok, Nigel Farage,

all out there, Richard Tice,

and they were all making the difference between this woman, Lucy Connolly, who's in jail because she did a tweet saying, I can't remember the exact tweet, but it's basically, you know, it was interpreted as saying these people deserve to have their hotels and their homes burnt down.

Okay.

Surely we can differentiate, and I'm sure when it comes to this criminal investigation, this is where it will probably go.

In the middle, of riots that are taking place in your country where you are covered by the law of that land

any suggestion of it's okay to burn people's houses and hotels down i think that's a bit of a problem you can argue about whether the sentence was too long too short you can have those arguments in the end we've got law judges who do that stuff

and are we seriously saying that as a result of this guy standing up there and doing these chants, somebody in that crowd is going to say, oh yeah, I haven't really thought about that before.

I think I'll get on a plane to Tel Aviv now and I'll go and kill an Israeli soldier.

It's just, we've just lost our bearings.

And meanwhile, Rory, meanwhile, and by the way, I didn't think the music was very good, the bits that I heard.

I thought the attention seeking was off the scale.

Meanwhile, the same day that we're all getting excited about this, there are children queuing for food at these so-called humanitarian centers being shot

by Israeli soldiers and it's not even on the news.

Last night, Channel 4, and well done, Channel 4, by the way, for showing the documentary that the BBC have refused to put out about the healthcare system in Gaza.

So last night, Channel 4 News, they did a

report

on

the activity of Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

When was the last time we heard about that?

In our debate.

So we have Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenock, Nigel Farage, all of them out there, absolutely terrible, terrible, this guy, Bob Villain, this band Bob Villain, right?

Where's the outrage?

Where is the outrage about

thousands of kids?

I mean, I just think it's sort of, it's exasperating.

And meanwhile, Roy, the BBC will do what the BBC usually does when it's under pressure.

It will now sort of cave a little bit the other way.

Not a single national media outlet covered the report that was published a couple of weeks ago, vested interest,

not a vested interest, but I contributed to the report,

an analysis of the BBC coverage of Israel and Gaza, which far from being anti-Israel is actually

this analysis showed pretty compellingly, they analyzed over 30,000 pieces of content on language, on prioritization and so forth.

And actually the very, very strong conclusion was, if anything, there is a very very strong pro-Israel anti-Palestinian bias and I just think what are we talking about we're on day three four of talking about Bob Villan and yesterday it was his agents dropped him he's had his visa to the US revoked I've got to be honest I don't care that much but I do care a lot about what's going on in Gaza right Rory let's um let's have one of your famous explainers because that's what people are asking for Lizzie in your emergency episode on Sunday you mentioned Trump taking credit for the Rwanda-Congo peace deal.

How true is that claim?

The claim that he's taking credit, I think, is true.

The actual role he played, I don't really know.

What's the real story behind the agreement?

Looks like the U.S.

is in it for more minerals and trade.

I'd love to understand more how this has come about and why it's not making other news outlets or headlines because it feels very significant.

Okay, quick explainer.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo, which used to be known as Zaire, Zaire,

is geographically the largest country in Africa.

Stretches all the way from East Africa right the way to the West Coast.

And it's been a very, very tragic place.

In 1994, a war, civil war, broke out in Rwanda that brought in a lot of the neighboring countries.

Three million people were killed.

UN peacekeepers were deployed.

By the time I was the Africa Minister, there was a moment of kind of temporary peace.

The Kabila Kabila family had been ruling it.

I went to see Lauren Kabila, the president.

He stepped down, a man called Felix Tishkedi took over.

But over the last couple of years, there's been an explosion of violence again in eastern Congo.

And in particular, the center of this is a group called the M23.

And the M23 are predominantly led by Tutsis, Kinya Rwanda speakers, connected to the government of Rwanda, so that's the government of Paul Kagami.

And since the beginning of this year, they captured Goma, which is an enormous city in eastern Congo.

And then they've taken another major city down called Bukavu, down on the south edge of the lake.

3,000 people were killed as they took Goma.

570 children being raped a week, according to UNICEF, 700,000 people displaced.

The airport was closed.

A lot of this connects to Coltan smuggling, gold smuggling, minerals moving through into Rwanda, a completely dysfunctional Congolese state.

It's almost two large ethnic divisions.

And Qatar and the US have been involved in peace deals.

And as you say, Donald Trump announced this great triumph, which is the government of Rwanda, government of Congo, signed up to a peace deal.

And what's the contents of the peace deal?

The contents of the peace deal is the stuff that you often see in peace deals.

So demobilization, reintegration, ceasefires, refugee return, joint coordinating mechanisms for security.

But how does it work?

And as far as we can tell, the M23 isn't really involved in these conversations, nor are the governments of Uganda and Burundi who had troops on the ground along with the Rwandans.

Angola isn't really featuring in this.

So there is a real risk that, although it's absolutely the right thing that the US, Qatar and others are trying to bring some kind of peace and that they're getting Rwanda and Congo involved because Rwanda is the major player now in eastern Congo, I still have my doubts that it's going to be able to bring peace to a completely tragic situation.

I mean,

if you look at the pictures that emerged of the thing, it was classic.

You had Trump sitting at the Resolute Desk.

You had leaders from Rwanda and the DRC there.

You had Vance and Rubio standing behind Trump.

And of course, he signed his thing.

He loves his signature.

And then he holds up the thing.

And

for him, I suspect that'll be job done according to according to Michael Wolfe.

I don't know if you follow Michael Wolfe on Instagram, Broy, but

he's so sardonic.

And he's still clearly quite well plugged in.

He said on one of his posts the other day that Trump was phoning all his usual sort of his big friends the other night and saying, I'm going to get it.

I'm going to get the Nobel.

I'm going to get the Nobel.

And

the story there is, of course, all these countries, the Pakistanis did at first, but now this is true from Congo, Rwanda, they nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

I mean, I think we should go into a break, but I'm not going to be very surprised if your friend Mark Rutter, the head of NATO, doesn't nominate Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, too.

I mean, it is incredible that Trump sort of...

By behaving outrageously, humiliating people around the world, undermining the international legal order, the result is that everybody kowtows flatters him.

It also leads to bad policy, because what's happened is Rubio, who presumably has done with the US diplomats quite a lot of the groundwork on this, they are under pressure.

Trump's got to have something to sign.

He's got to have something to sign.

Then the leaders come over or the politicians come over in the countries and they're under pressure, got to have something to sign, got to have something to sign.

And then as you say, back in the real world, you have all these groups who are not being brought into the process.

And they're the ones with the arms.

They're the ones with the grievances.

And then what happens when they decide, you know what, we don't like this deal, it doesn't really work.

So they haven't done the work to give this deal a chance of sticking.

And why would people stick?

Because the experience of Vladimir Putin, the experience of Netanyahu is that you can apparently make a deal with Trump and then you can flout it and just go on and do what you were doing and nothing happens to you.

The M23 in Rwanda, which now controls Goma, is incredibly well armed and organized.

And this is partly to do with support from the government of Rwanda.

We should point out for our British listeners, we are not talking about the motorway from London to Brighton.

Not talking the motorway.

No, exactly.

This group, if you go and see them, I was talking to a friend in Goma recently.

They are very, very

well-armed.

They have very fancy high-tech kit.

They're operating as a government.

They've basically shifted the international border and they're issuing passport stamps.

Their political head is the old head of the Congolese Electoral Commission.

Goma is a city that I love.

I mean Congo is a, I mean, one thing maybe that gets lost in this is that along with all the horrors that are happening, it's the most wonderful country on earth.

Goma is very beautiful, right against this lake.

Congo has this incredible history of, as you know, music.

We should talk more about Congolese music.

It's got some of the most stunning natural landscapes in the world.

It's got the most incredible potential in terms of its mineral wealth.

Actually, if I wanted to move somewhere in the world, I'd probably want to live in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It's one of the most attractive, astonishing places left on earth.

And yet at the moment, as you say, being driven into horror, with Trump putting this sort of peace process on top, I struggle to see how it's going to work.

And also, his peace process embedded into it some of his big donors who are the guys who are already looking at the minerals and the wife.

So I don't know whether we've answered the question.

Just before we go to Breyer, my favourite cartoon of the week, I can't remember where it is.

It was an American newspaper and it was the Nobel Prize Committee that you mentioned sitting around a table at the couch.

I just said, shall we just give it to a barber again as a joke?

That would be good global trolley.

Anyway, let's come back.

When we come back from the break, we'll talk about Gavi and USAID.

Hello, everyone.

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

And with me, Alistair Campbell.

Question for you, Alistair.

Why has the U.S.

Health Secretary pulled funding of Gavi, an organization that helps children get vaccinated?

What are the global and geopolitical implications of this?

Well, the reason that he's pulled it is because he is a vaccine sceptic.

And it's not as if we weren't warned that he's a vaccine skeptic.

He's been a vaccine sceptic for an awful long time.

His argument, the argument that Robert F.

Kennedy made was that

he thought that there were legitimate questions about vaccine safety and that Gavi, the organization that comes together, which is a mixture of governments and people like Bill Gates, that they were silencing dissent.

So we're totally into the kind of health conspiracy world.

That's where he is.

And the worst thing about it is he did it as a so gavi was having this this annual big event where all the big donors and gates was there ursula von der Leyen was there representing the European Union and to be fair to them they came up with nine billion dollars to go forward so they were I think two billion short of what they were hoping to raise which is pretty good considering you know the Americans are pulling the plug and Kennedy couldn't even be bothered to sort of turn up he just sent them a little video message saying by the way we're we're pulling the plug so that's the reason he's a vaccine sceptic and that's who Trump's put in charge.

And people are going to die as a result of this.

Just a quick explainer on Gavi.

The Global Vaccine Alliance is one of the most simple, straightforward arguments for international development aid anywhere in the world.

It's not one of these things which gets discredited by people talking about

countries stealing the money through corruption or incompetent NGOs.

This is very straightforward.

It's remarkably cost-efficient.

It's literally vaccinating people with basic vaccinations, so meningitis, polio, typhoid, yellow fever, and many others.

And the funding for this organization was basically the UK, the US, and the Gates Foundation.

And it was the one thing when I was the Secretary of State for International Development.

European Union is a big donor, really.

Yeah, but the three biggest are traditionally were US, UK, and Gates.

And when I was the International Development Secretary, this was the least controversial thing that we did.

It was the one thing where every year we would put billions into it because you could see that it was going to save tens of millions of lives around the world, preventable deaths of children.

And the cost of it is not many dollars per person saving lives.

If you're looking for a way to really get value for money, you cannot do better really than vaccination in terms of saving lives.

And we began began to see the problems emerging when, to remind people,

Trump and Musk cut USAID.

Basically, stopped all the money that the US government gives all the way around the world for every kind of project, right?

Ranging from projects working with humanitarian aid and food right through to vaccination, et cetera.

And it became apparent, of course, immediately that nobody was going to be able to fill the gap.

So the Wellcome Trust, the Danish foundation that owns Zempic, Gates thought, okay, can we step into this breach?

They can't.

They just don't have the money to replace these big donors.

And then the UK government cut its funding for international development as well at the same time as the US was cutting it.

Not as much, but took billions out of the system.

So thanks to this cut, and a lot of it is to do with this cut and the other cuts that USAID have introduced, 14 million people will die prematurely over the next five years.

And if you want more details, please listen listen to Atul Gawande on Leading, which is an incredible insight into how this is all playing out.

Yeah.

So the Médin Son Frontier, they have said there is absolutely no doubt countless children will die from vaccine-preventable diseases as a result of the U.S.

withdrawing support for Cavi.

Another major charity in the States to invoke misleading and inaccurate claims about vaccine safety as the pretext for cutting all global vaccine funding is cruel and reckless.

And Rory, the thing about the 40 million, this is a report by the Lancet,

which, you know, so we're talking sort of serious medical journal rather than, you know, headline grabbing, clickbaiting media organization.

And they have done, you can model these things.

You know this from the times at DFID.

You can model.

um how you put investment in when you take investment out and this report has concluded that low and middle income countries are now going to face a shock comparable in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict as a result of the decision that Trump has taken.

Marco Rubio, I mean that guy has lost his soul because he's somebody who has spent his entire life believing in, supporting, advocating for USAID.

He is now sort of standing there alongside Musk and Trump, although they've fallen out now, but Musk and Trump sort of saying that nobody needs to die.

It's all about abuse abuse and waste and fraud, etc.

This is, you know, we talk about the unreported stuff of the Trump administration.

We did corruption in the main podcast yesterday, but this is a really, really big one.

And, you know, I just worry that people are going to shrug their shoulders and move on.

Where was the rebellion among labor ranks about labor cutting aid?

Yeah.

Question from Liz.

Has a former prime minister ever come out against the sitting American president as strongly as Sir John Major has just done against Donald Trump in his speech this week.

Is the special relationship irreversibly damaged?

Give us a bit of an explainer on what John Major said in that speech.

Well, he was doing the Ted Heath lecture.

Ted Heath, former British Prime Minister, John Major, former British Prime Minister, both Conservatives.

And John Major's speech, which was

It was a really good, I mean, you know, I thought it was a very, very well-crafted speech.

And he made some very big points.

And essentially, he's saying is that we can't take American leadership for granted.

He was calling out the, as he's done before, the damage that Brexit has done to Britain.

He was saying, within all of our politics, that this sort of focus on standards in public life, partly what we were talking about yesterday, is being eroded.

So it was a very, very strong analysis.

Solutions?

Well, you know, that's the hard bit at the moment.

We'll put the full speech, a link to the full speech in the newsletter.

I think it's worth.

Yeah, well, I mean, here's just a little

quote to get a sense of Major on Fire.

Is barbarianism now acceptable if the barbarian is strong enough or the victim without friends?

Can it be that our world is so exhausted, politics so tainted, self-interest so predominant that it has abandoned compassion?

Is might now right?

Has the law, human decency, and political morality been cast aside?

Or is it perhaps as simple as this?

that our world is now beginning to elect leaders concerned only about national self-interest?

If so, if politics leads countries to hunker down in their own little trenches of interest, ignore reason, bypass diplomacy, forgo enlightened self-interest, then heaven help us all.

Well, that is pretty strong.

I'll meant to all that.

One thing that I felt that he emphasized, which we haven't done enough and which made me sit up, is we've, of course, in many ways sympathized with the push to increase defense spending.

But of course, what Major is pointing out is that increasing defense spending is at the cost of other budgets.

In Britain, very explicitly, we're increasing defense spending and we're cutting aid money.

But he's also pointing out that the reason we're cutting defense spending is partly because Trump and others are creating an ever more unstable, violent world, and in which the US is effectively forcing everybody to increase defense spending by saying we're not necessarily going to hold to our Article V Commitments on NATO.

We're going to let Putin get away with what he's doing.

So we've created a world where populism creates violence, conflict, forces an increase in defense spending, and in doing so, will take a trillion euros, so 1,000 billion euros, out of the money that otherwise could be spent on welfare, social justice, international aid, is all going to go to defense manufacturers.

I mean, you frame the speech in the context of a jigsaw, all these different pieces and how they fit together.

And that's what I find so sort of impressive about it as an analysis.

But you're right.

He's basically, he's saying that you know, we're allowing this one man essentially to drive policy in different countries around the world.

And maybe that's a good place to go to the NATO summit.

Phoebe Walker, what do you think about Mark Rutter calling Trump daddy?

Has there ever been a politician worthy of that title?

We'll come on to this quotes, fun element of that in a minute.

But the NATO, so I was talking to one of the NATO leaders who was there who said that it was the most bizarre event they have ever been at?

It was like everybody was waiting for the king to arrive, and we were all reduced to courtiers, just sort of wandering around, hoping that he didn't ruin everything and celebrating when he left.

I mean, it's pretty nuts what went on there.

Now, if you're Mark Rutter, the head of NATO, former Prime Minister of the Netherlands, he's probably thinking, my sort of prism of objective, strategy, tactic, objective, get more money for NATO, strategy, use Trump, tactic, flattery.

And it sort of worked, but it's just, it's humiliating.

It was unbelievable.

So to remind people, he sent Trump a WhatsApp message, or at least so Trump claims.

Trump released this thing, which was

Rutter verified.

It was true.

I'm still sort of stuck in a conspiracy theory on this, that the thing reads so much as though it's Trump saying, I wish someone had sent me a message praising me and thanking me for how awesome I am.

And then Rutter felt that he had to say, I wrote it.

But in a way, it doesn't really matter whether the story is that Rutter Rutter was mad enough to cosplay Trump and send Trump, or whether Trump put it out himself and Rutter acknowledged it.

It's all the same story.

Just remind people, the message goes like this.

Give us the caps, Rory.

Give us the caps.

Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran.

That was truly extraordinary and something no one else dared to do.

It makes us all safer.

You are flying into another big success in The Hague this evening.

It was not easy, but we've got them all signed on to 5%.

Donald, you have driven us to a really, really important moment for America and Europe and the world.

You will achieve something no caps, American president in decades could get done.

Europe is going to pay in a caps big way, as they should, and it will be your win.

Safe travels, and see you at His Majesty's dinner.

Quite interesting conduct of Her Majesty, the Queen of the Netherlands.

She was sort of looking a little bit of she was doing these little mimickings of Trump's body language.

I get that

when you're dealing with a country which is a quarter of the world's economy, you don't want to go love actually.

So obviously by love actually I mean you don't want to necessarily go out there and mount a massive attack.

But what has gone wrong?

I mean, let's go back to Angela Merkel and Theresa May when they were dealing with Trump the first time around.

Okay,

they were not openly out there attacking him, but it was very clear with Angela Merkel and Theresa May that they were retaining their dignity,

that they were not endorsing this guy.

They were dealing with him professionally, but my goodness, they were not going out there.

Basically, saying everything that Trump has done to demolish the rules-based international order since January is terrific.

Good on you, Mr.

President.

You've done it in a big way.

Nobody could have done it without you.

You're the best American president ever.

I mean, it's unbelievable.

On one level, what Rutter said is sort of debasing, humiliating, but he will have left that NATO summit thinking, phew, we got there, we got through it.

He didn't do what he did in Canada and storm off in a huff.

We've got people to sign up, although there'll be a lot of devil in the detail.

Because the only thing they know about Trump, he doesn't do the devil in the detail.

He does the big thing, then he moves away.

So then he's on his plane and he's posting, had a great time, these people love their countries, etc.

I still think the one that's really interesting in this, the one that sort of stood aside from the sort of more obsequious approach is, of course, Mark Carney.

And Mark Carney's now having to deal with the fallout of Trump basically saying, Canadians, give them a go, they're bad people, no more deals.

But this is why we should have stayed together.

Yeah.

I mean, Carney was gambling that there was still some self-respect in Europe and the United Kingdom.

that we would stand up together for these values.

And I think what Rush has done is not just demeaning, but it doesn't work.

Because what we know about Trump.

It works short term.

You can't remember next week what he said last week.

Exactly.

I mean, literally, again and again, he will attack Putin, come back on side of Putin, attack Iran, come back on side.

The fact that he says last week, these are great people who defend their country, does anyone think he can't literally tomorrow come out and say, they're all a bunch of criminals, non-democratic, ungrateful human rights abusing people, I'm going to slap a 20% tariff on them.

them.

Well, of course he can.

So what does Russia think he's gained?

I mean, unless he thinks that Trump is just trying to win a few days, what is the point of doing this?

How is this a way to manage someone?

What he thinks he's gained is

the political buy-in and support now to keep pressing the other members of NATO to deliver on the things they've said they would, knowing that Trump will move on to other stuff.

So I guess he's that would be his short-term argument, I imagine.

But listen, listen, I'm not disagreeing with you.

I think that the demeanor of a lot of our leaders has not been strong.

I actually think that Trump will have given more respect to Mertz for him standing there and saying, no, we don't want Putin at the G7 because the guy's a criminal and a warlord,

than he would for Rutter.

doing what he has done but i think rutter will say my job was to get them all to sign up to more money for NATO, and I used Trump to get that.

It's shameless.

It's shameless.

And we will post in the newsletter also a picture that tells you a lot about Rutter, which is him sitting at the Oval Office desk with Biden behind him, pretending to use the telephone and pretending to be American President.

There's something fundamentally childish and ridiculous about Rutter.

I know, I'm so disgusted.

So disgusted.

I can't believe that Europe and the United Kingdom is making Trump feel that he's completely won, that he's totally vindicated in all his disgusting international behaviour.

Well,

I said in that, in the mini-series that we've done on J.D.

Vance, which, and thank you to all those of you who'd become members on the back of that, I would have thought the reaction of Europe to J.D.

Vance's speech at Munich, when he basically went there and said, you're all a bunch of losers and you don't represent your countries and why the hell should America protect you the whole time, would actually have been for Europe to stand up pretty strong against that.

Now they've done it a little bit in relation to Ukraine, but generally the posture has not been strong.

And I agree with you.

I think long term that's a mistake.

Alistair, I agree very strongly and it's something we're going to have to come back to again and again.

So as we close this question of how you handle Trump, how you get that balance between not provoking him, but actually caring about your own dignity, caring about your principles, caring about the future of the world.

I'm much more taken with the way that Mark Carney's approached it, much more taken with the way that John Majors approached it, much more taken with the way Ma'am Darney's approaching it than we are with what we've closed this podcast with, which is the Mark Rutter poodle.

Okay, well, Mark is in Roy Stewart's eyes, Mark Rutter is not the daddy.

See you next week.

See you next week.

Bye-bye.