420. Question Time: The History of Iran vs. the West

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Welcome to the Rest of Politics Question Time with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart.
Today, an incredible amount going on around the world.

We'll, of course, touch on what's happening in the Middle East. We'll look at what's happening in the forthcoming NATO summit.

You've been in France a lot, so we'll touch on what's happening in France and much more to touch on, including President Zelensky's visit to the United Kingdom. So, over to you.

Okay, well, I think we should start with one of your explainers.

Lucy, Rory, given what's unfolding right now in the Middle East, please could you do one of your explainers on the recent history of Iran, including its relations with Israel, the US and the UK?

And I think I'll give you two minutes, 20 seconds. All right, here we go.
So Iran, enormous country, sits right there between the Middle East and Asia.

Ancient empire, one of the great civilizations of the world. So think about it almost as a civilization like China.
Persian-speaking, not Arabic-speaking, and originally Zoroastrian.

And the reason many people will have heard of it is, of course, the wars between Persia and Greece at a moment where Persia, and this is really important because Persians remember it today, had an empire that stretched from Egypt up into the Caucasus, the whole of the Middle East, right the way across to Afghanistan and Central Asia and the edge of Pakistan.

Went through many, many ups and downs, but there were many periods of incredible Iranian dominance.

It became Muslim not long after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, predominantly Muslim, and then it became Shia when a particular ruler took over in about 1500.

Fast forward to the 20th century, Shah comes in, who is a modernizing, autocratic military leader, makes the mistake of teaming up with Germany during the Second World War.

By this stage, Persia has really got a lot of oil.

And after a brief flirtation with a man called Mussadek, who leads them away from reliance on British oil in the US, the CIA puts a coup together where they support the Shah of Iran.

And from then onwards, from the 1950s to 1979 the Shah of Iran is the key American ally in the Middle East and Iran Persian speaking is known as sort of liberal progressive country where people dress in liberal ways but of course it's not the whole truth because in the background is a very conservative rural community And this is exploited in 1979 when Khomeini comes in.

And Khomeini is a grand ayatollah, an amazing religious figure, flies back from Paris, foments a revolution, the Shah of Iran flees, and now we have the Iranian revolution.

And from that point onwards, there are two major problems facing Iran. One of them is the attack on the United States.

So they take Americans hostage, creating massive enmity with the US, and then a war with Saddam Hussein in Iraq that consumes them for a decade.

As they come out of the Iran-Iraq war, there's a brief moment of flirtation with modernity and market liberalization, figures like Raf Sanjani.

But from the early 2000 onwards, Iran becomes increasingly conservative. And under its new ruler, who replaces

Khomeini, it finds itself increasingly seeing Israel as its major definitional enemy. That used to be normal.

Many Arab states denied the existence of Israel, but as they gradually reconcile, Iran remains very focused on it and remains very focused on US and regime change.

And a lot of the debate over the last 30 years is about whether or not it acquires a nuclear weapon and repression of people in Iran today. And I'm going to conclude on this final thought.

I walked across Iran in 2000 and it was an amazing experience because what it revealed to me is a country completely split on the one hand between a very conservative rural areas where I slept every night in a different mosque which was celebrating martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war, deeply committed to the revolutionary guard and the revolution, and on the other hand the cities which to this day remain dominated by a much more cosmopolitan, global, outward-looking elite with scarcely disguised contempt for the regime.

And where if you go to Tehran today, perhaps half the women are simply not wearing headscarves at all. They've just defied the regime and are not wearing them.

So it's a very, very fascinating country and a country pushing in two different directions and has been for 40 years or more.

Well, Lucy, thank you for your question and that demand for a brief explainer, which was over twice as long as the limit that I gave, Rory. He didn't even mention the UK.

We'll come back to that another day. Rory, Russia-Ukraine now.
And I think this is what I really kind of worry about.

Nan Howitt, trip plus member from Leeds, what does the Iran crisis, she calls it a distraction, mean for Russia and Ukraine and Gaza? And what do you think China will do?

I do think this is partly because we now have, as the most prominent public figure in the world, this guy Trump who is so obsessed by media, by what the story is, what the narrative is, and so forth.

And because we have a media in large parts of the world that it seems can only really focus with one

big thing at a time, I think there is a real danger now that Putin is sitting there thinking, right, these guys are now so consumed about this, keep them over there, and I'll just keep going on with Ukraine.

And Zelensky will feel more and more isolated. Zelensky will feel that the Americans and others are not going to be providing the arms that he needs.

And then you're absolutely right as well about Gaza. There was yet another horrific, horrific killing of people who were trying to get food from this new humanitarian fund.

And it's not even on the news anymore.

And so if you've got a combination of a media that sort of focus on one thing at a time, a president who commands so much of the airspace around the world and who also focuses on one thing at a time, whichever, whatever happens to be the thing he wants to focus on at the time, and meanwhile these other things are going on, then we shouldn't be surprised if the spotlight's not on them, that actually, given the history so far, the situation gets worse.

Yes, and

look, there have been big strikes, very dramatic strikes, by Putin on Kiev,

strikes in Odessa.

He's made a speech on Friday, so we're just recording here on

six days later, where he made it clear that he didn't rule out advancing on Sumy, and he keeps saying very openly that the Russian people and the Ukrainian people are one.

And one of the reasons he hasn't been jumping to Iran's defence quite as much is that I think he'll be seeing this as an opportunity to push forward.

One more thing that we should look at someday that we we haven't looked at enough is the effect of drought. So I'm talking to you from London, you're in Cyprus.

I don't know what it's like in Cyprus at the moment. They're really worried.
But boy is everybody worried. I mean northern Europe has been hit by very little rain.

I my my two famous Chinese pots that I discussed with the Chancellor are sitting outside without their tops on and they've been out there for three weeks and there's no water in them because no rainfall's fallen here in London on my pots.

And the output in Europe is scheduled to be down by 15%

and we're seeing similar effects in the US. There is going to be a big climb in global prices on wheat, beef, coffee, for example, is likely to go up.

So climate change affecting food supply. Russia-Ukraine is having a real problem with drought and wheat production.
So that's another thing to look at.

We we talk often about um global conflict in terms of leaders, but we're not necessarily looking at the way that climate is beginning to drive things in very, very disturbing ways.

Now here's a question for you from Amber, Trip Plus member London. With the NATO meeting coming up, I had a question about its future.

The most recent conversation had been around whether or not Trump would pull out of NATO or honour Article V.

But given that the only time Article V has been used is s to support the US, and that Trump is an unreliable unreliable actor who is potentially getting involved in a new war in Iran that NATO members don't seem to support.

Is it in NATO's interest now to have America step away? Do they want to be dragged into a wider conflict in the Middle East?

Well, let's mention again, as we did in the main podcast, the one we did live on Tuesday, the interview we've just done with the President of Cyprus. Because he was essentially saying America

can take the action that it's just taken and quotes whether we like it or not we are involved, because in his case, we're just down the road from where the Americans have just launched this extraordinary bombing attack.

And likewise for the European Union, it is, so the question suggests that would be an easy thing to do in NATO's interest not to have now to have America step away.

We're already seeing how difficult it is for NATO that America has pursued the policy that it's been pursuing since the re-election of Trump and J.D. Vance.

And, you know, J.D. Vance is who we've, and people, you know, will be aware we've done this mini-series about J.D.
Vance.

And one of the big things about Vance is this real disregard he has for Europe, in part because of what he sees as our sort of cowardly approach to defence, defence spending, to looking after our own backyard.

So I think we have to try to keep NATO going. And we have to, and this point about Article 5 is important.
So that's the basic thing that says an attack on one is an attack on all.

Essentially, Trump sees NATO as a bit of an international nuisance because he doesn't like international gatherings and he doesn't like international institutions that might try to hold him to account.

But I think it is absolutely in our interest to try to keep NATO as strong as it's been through most of our lifetime. It's going to be hard, though.
It's going to be hard.

Something very interesting happening, though, now, which is the clarification that all NATO members are now committing to 5% GDP on defence. And this is incredible news.

The small print is 3.5% of that is going to be classic defense spending. 1.5% is going to be things like national security, cyber protection.

Another bit of small print, Britain's saying it won't hit it till 2035. But it is still the most staggering amount of money.
And it's extraordinary.

Why has Spain been given no kind of opt-out, do you think? That's a really interesting question.

I haven't got to the bottom of how Spain managed to get its opt-out because everybody would want an opt-out.

And also, I think I've told you before that here I am not far from Greece, is I think that Greece has got pretty good numbers, but when you really dive into it, an awful lot of the defence spending is pensions.

So I think this is a very, very dramatic headline. But there'll be a lot of small printery, as you say, on the way.
The bottom line is that the numbers we're talking about are beyond imagining.

So let's say that the

GDP of Europe is about $20 trillion.

This will be $1 trillion

every year being spent on defense.

And again, to return to this ridiculous calculation that Elon Musk keeps trying to encourage so that we understand the numbers here, a million seconds ago is something like the 12th of June, recording on the 24th of June, so about 12 days ago.

A billion seconds ago is 1992.

A trillion seconds ago is 30,000 BC.

Wow. So the difference between a billion and a trillion is like the difference between 1992 and 30,000 BC.
And that's what Europe will have to spend on defence every year going forward.

The other thing that you often say, which I did memorise, but you haven't said it recently, so I've now forgotten it, is your stat about Nigeria and the birth rate.

One in ten children born in the world will be born in Nigeria by 2050. That's the one.
That's the one. So I've now got two.

That one I have to re-remember, and then I've got the trillion one is just amazing. Now, Rory, here's one.
I'm really looking forward to a discussion on this.

You upset quite quite a lot of people on monday i don't know if you know about this was it was this about talking about my mug no i'm talking about your our interview with gabriel atow oh sophie pedder oh yeah sophie pedder sophie pedder the great supporter of macro the one who said he made the right decision to call the election the one who never hears anything rude about macro or atow is it the same sophie pedder our producer has put the headline on this question hating the french question mark sophie question is as follows i have a question for rory stewart And the fact she calls you Rory Stewart suggests a bit of a kind of edge already, rather, most of our listeners say for Rory.

What is his problem with France and French politicians? Macron deserves plenty of criticism, she says. I cannot recall Rory Stewart ever having a positive word to say about him.

It's great to see you interview French politicians, as you just did with Gabriel Attal. But again, Rory seemed, lovely phrase coming, disproportionately disappointed.

It's time to hear, please, what really bugs Rory Stewart about the French. Listen, she wasn't the only one, Rory.
We had quite, including a friend of yours, got in touch with me.

He said, what did you do to Rory today? He was so grouchy and grumpy and rude with that man. Well, there we are.
So I think the first thing is it's really not personal at all against the French.

You have only to see my interview with Rachel Reeve to see that I'm absolutely...

No, no, no, that's not an answer. That's what a battery.
Tell me a French person that you've spoken about fondly.

Gérard de Gaulle. When? When was that? I don't remember.

I've definitely done it in the podcast. I talked a lot about General de Gaulle, and in fact, the fact that he made the right decision on NATO.

Listen, there's a lot positive to say about Macron. I think it was extraordinary that he managed to create a movement from the centre-ground.
I think it was very, very exciting.

It's risky because of what that's meant for the traditional centre-right and the centre-left in France. It creates the risk that you end up with a far right and a far left if the centre collapses.

But I think what he did was very exciting. I think his vision of the world is often very exciting, but I think he has been a great disappointment, sadly, as a European leader.

I may be holding him to higher standards.

That may be true, even for my grouchy conversations with some of the new Labour leadership and even some of my grouchy interviews from my Conservative colleagues.

He has incredible intelligence, incredible fluency.

And what he's decided to do, instead of crafting a detailed, coherent policy that brings Germany, France and Britain together, is, I'm afraid, to grandstand, is to give these huge speeches at the Sorbonne laying out grand visions of the future, which largely alienate the Germans, most of whom are pretty sceptical about what he's talking about, allows himself to get caught up in small things like disputes about fishing quotas, and hasn't really ever stepped up.

He's a great charmer. I mean, total credit to him for his lovely messages to Britain, his praise around D-Day, his messages to the king and all this kind of stuff.

But if you really judge him in the way that you want to judge, you know, people like Helmut Kohl or Mitterrand, I don't think he's going to go down in history as having really done it.

And his political judgment can be catastrophic, triggering an election which has effectively created a type of non-existent French government that has almost never existed in French history.

Sophie Pedder, I remember, disagreed with me when I criticised him for doing that too. So I might also ask the Economist correspondent in Paris.
Bureau chief. Bureau chief.
Subtle put-down there.

Yeah.

Does she ever question what actually he achieves as opposed to the way in which he charms the world with his intelligence, his youth, and his bravura? Oh, I think you're being very harsh on.

I think because Sophia likes the French, you're displaying that she's not wrong, that you've got a thing about the French, because Sophie Pedder has been critical. I'm an equal opportunity abuser.

You can see me being very rude about British politicians. Ah, in which case...
Well, let's get down to that. See,

I'm going to repeat my theory that I said at the end of the interview.

Can I just point this out? You don't know these people who are young who've achieved. Is it possible that I'm actually trying to hold politicians to account who you're giving an easy ride to?

I don't give anybody an easy ride. What I do, though, is I don't go into interviews thinking, right, this is what I want them to be and this is what I want them to say.

The reason why you didn't like Atal, he didn't say what you wanted him to say about the current situation in Israel, Gaza, where he was frankly just parking the bus because he was thinking i'm no longer in the government i'm just going to park it which we both do from time to time in interviews you tried to sort of make out that france algeria was somehow the same to stop the boats and he looked a bit confused i and i think some

wait do you mind explaining why that's confusing he's saying if people come to us from algeria we should just push them back to Algeria.

And when I suggest if people come to us from France, we should push them back to France. He won't accept it.
I think he was making the point about the French-Algerian history being a bit different.

My point about the thing is you shouldn't. The thing about an interview, Rory, listen to the answer and pick up on the answer.
Don't go back to what you wanted them to answer.

Wait, Alistair, how about you

listen again to the interview that you did with Speaker McCarthy, where you literally can't let anything go.

You ask him three, four questions to every one of mine because you're so excited about the fact that he's saying things about President Trump that outrage you.

In the same way, I'm totally outraged by Atel's refusal to stand up for international law. It's the biggest story in the world.
European leaders' failure to stand up for international law.

So I'm allowed two or three questions on that, just as you're allowed 15 on McCarthy. Rory, Rory, I let you go.
I just sat back.

And if somebody said, do you have a problem with McCarthy? The answer would be what?

I don't like what he stands for, and I don't believe that he's saying what he's saying.

And I don't like what Attal stands for in international law, and I don't trust him on immigration, and I think he's much more right-wing than people like Sophie Pedder want to credit.

Okay, I think that in relation to McCarthy, I don't believe that when he was sort of putting the line for Trump, that's what he believes and that's what I was trying to probe.

I was doing it based upon what he was saying and then having an exchange. I do think some people...

And I thought it was charming and lovely, Alistair, because you were passionate and you were engaged and I let you roll.

The only thing that goes wrong is when I seem to be a little bit tough on somebody who's one of your friends. That's when the objection comes in.
No, No, not at all.

I'm talking about a reader's objections. Sophie Pedder is not the only person who sent in this sort of question, Rory.

And I think if you go back to the ones where you really lost it, not lost it, but you know, be not your usual charming self, let's just go through them. Jamie Rubin, Jonathan Powell, Sadiq Khan.

Your friends? No, no, Rachel Reeves. Wait, wait, Jamie Rubin and Jonathan Powell, some of your friends.
Jamie Rubinie Rubin and Jonathan's friend. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They're close friends.

You don't like it when I have a girl. You're friends.
So Jonathan Powell, just to remind people, was basically saying Iraq would have been fine if we'd just done it right and planned well.

If you don't expect that to get someone wound up and challenged, just in the way that you do when McCarthy's defending Trump, it's the same thing. Our world views are different.

I thought the Iraq war was a catastrophe, and to hear Jonathan Powell.

I was thinking about it, you were fine. I think sometimes you don't like these guys who are doing jobs that you love to do.

You'd love to be national security advisor with Keir Starburg. You'd love it.
There may be a bit of that. There may well be a lot of that.

Thank you for getting us to do it, because people say that we agree too much these days. So Sophie, thank you for getting us to agree

what we were doing there. Disagree agreeably.
Alistair, well done on disagreeing so agreeably.

Listen, that's a great reminder for people who are listening to this thing, what on earth are they talking about?

Just to remind you, we have a separate feed called Leading, where Alistair and I every week are interviewing some of the most interesting people in the world. So that was our interview.

with the French Prime Minister that's just gone out.

We've just done an interview with the President of Cyprus, and of course, we have interviewed Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, and many, many more.

You get to see and decide when I'm getting too wound up and when I'm being unfair and when Alice is being overly defensive of his good old mates by triggering to leading.

So, anyway, see you after the break. Thanks again.
See you, Sud.

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So welcome back to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell.
The Restless Politics is as ever, efficiently powered by our friends at Fuse Energy.

Energy prices back in the headline. Here's a question from Emmett.

What's going to happen to global oil prices if things escalate in the Middle East? Isn't this yet another argument for the UK government to to invest in renewable energy?

Very quickly for me then, before I throw it back to you, the oil price is jumping around like you cannot believe. I mean, it was at a very low historical level.
Then there were talk when

the US strikes happened of it jumping up to $100 and $120.

Then as soon as Trump put out his true social thing saying there was peace, the global oil price has collapsed again.

But it really matters for Britain because basically, as we've found in a lot of our leading interviews, the energy prices in Britain track these global prices more closely, in fact, than they do in Europe and the United States.

So when oil prices go up, it really hits cost of living in Britain.

And of course, renewables is part of the answer to that, but renewables can't do it all because there's still the problem on how you store the renewable energy and what happens when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, which is why obviously things like nuclear become relevant.

Anyway, over to you. No, look, you know, you and I are both big supporters of sort of getting to net zero and renewable energy is absolutely at the heart of that.

And it was interesting, right at the height of the current Iran-Israel crisis, Donald Trump, another of the sort of posts that he did, was he did a big drill, baby, drill.

You know, oil price volatility means we've got to get, you know, more of our own and blah, blah, blah, blah, drill, baby, drill. So a very, very different perspective on it.

But, you know, just go back to what happened in Ukraine, that that had a direct impact upon energy prices for British and other consumers around the world. We were talking when the Israelis started

the recent attacks on Iran about one of the possible options for Iran in terms of retaliation was mining or closing the Straits of Hormuz.

Something like 20 billion barrels of oil a day are going through there. If that suddenly becomes difficult, then it has an immediate impact upon prices.
This is a very, very, very volatile market.

And if that's why when we talk about the need for stability in the world, it's not least because you have these spikes. And some people make lots of money out about that.

But ultimately, consumers, once it goes up, tend to have to pay a higher price on their bills. And energy debt in Britain is already nearly 4 billion.

So you get bills rising. It makes it even worse.

This is, I guess, where these energy companies come in. I mean, our sponsor, Fuse, for example, is locking in fixed tariffs for 18 months, keeping it on average below the cap.

But these caps, the price cap, limits unit rates and standing charges. It doesn't limit your total bills.
So there's a lot of issues around cost of living.

And the other thing I guess Fuse would say is they would say, in the end, you've got to double down on solar, that nuclear and carbon capture is absorbing a lot of money, but the real potential is solar, which is, they argue, cheaper, faster, more stable.

I mean, everybody listening will know the incredible story of the drop in the price of solar energy, that it's like one twentieth of what it was a few years ago, partly because this incredible Chinese transformation.

Well, Fuse are giving new customers a free Trip Plus membership for the whole of 2025.

That means you get ad-free listening, early access to episodes, discounts on live shows, and things like the mini-series that we've just done on JD Vance.

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Anyway, Rich C. Trip plus member leads.
Many conflicts, both historically and current, seem to be attributed to one person, usually a country's leader, as Putin is in Ukraine.

In reality, how important is the influence of one person? Aren't they actually just the face of the regime in charge? Surely wider factors are at play.

Well, this is a really interesting thing, isn't it?

Because generally, when you go back in time and a historian is writing, they will tend to diminish the importance of the kind of great man theory of history, and they will tend to explain how decisions emerge from a deeper economic crisis, social background, cultural moment.

But when we look at things today, we have a real tendency not to say, you know, Keir Starmer is the

sort of passive

victim of a slowing British economy, poor demographics, a declining power in the world, and there's not much he can do. We tend to put the responsibility right on him as leader.

And of course, they encourage that themselves, don't they? Because they want to present themselves as being in charge. I mean, what do you think about great men's theory of history? Well,

I think just to pick up what you just said there, so what they then do is this is what you'll hear people say, critics of Gierstar say, oh, he's no Thatcher, he's no Blair. In other words, they say

this is about him, it's only about the leader. Let's just take Richie's question, which talks about Putin.

It is about him, however, it's about him at the end of a very long period of time where he has aligned with the forces around him, forces that he can control and forces that he can't, to get himself into this position of extraordinary power within his own country and therefore within the world.

We talked on the main podcast about Ali Khamenei, very similar.

You know, I said, reminded people that at the start, he was in there as a sort of stopgap because he wasn't even remotely qualified by their own constitution. But over time, he cements that power.

Donald Trump at the moment is immensely powerful within his own country and its own in its politics, and therefore powerful within the world.

There was an interesting related question from Margaret William, another Trip Plus member, who said, I've not yet listened to your mini-series, The Real J.D. Vance.

However, does this new venture indicate that you and I are leaning towards the great man theory of history? And it doesn't.

But what it does is that often I think part of what we see our role as is trying to explain politics and political trends to people who at the moment are finding politics and political trends unbelievably confusing.

And often that is done through the personalities that people connect with. J.D.
Vance, in a very short period of time, has become one of the best known vice presidents of our lifetime.

You know, he is a household name around the world. That is very, very rare for an American vice president.
So he's become a significant figure already. He might be the next president.

So therefore, he probably merits, I think, more analysis than most vice presidents would get. I don't think he's a great man, by the way.
I think he's a pretty bad man. It's funny, isn't it?

It's great man. Very rare that we talk about great woman theory.
And I think that's because women tend not to start wars in the same way.

So, very quickly, before we get on to the great man theory, just wanted to say the second episode of our members-only J.D.

Vance series, which we've both recorded is out tomorrow, Friday, the 27th of June.

And we talk about the emergence of the new right, the influence of figures like the tech bro Peter Thiel, and how a shady network of billionaires want J.D. Vance to become an American monarch.

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So, The Great Man Theory of History is a quote from Thomas Carlyle's book, Hero and Heroism, and this is an early 19th century account.

And it's a real reminder of the gap between the way in which we tend to think in normal culture, which has gone a long way away from heroes, and then this weird phenomenon of Trump and populism, which has brought sort of pseudo fake heroes back into power.

So the basic story would be that for nearly, I guess, 2,000, 2,500 years, we had this idea of kind of great men, great heroes, kind of warriors, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, you know, even Victorian heroes.

And that collapsed, as you've pointed out, right? It collapsed because feminism feminism said, oi, what about the other half of the population? Pacifism said, enough of the war.

Psychoanalysis said these people are a bunch of egotistical narcissists. Class analysis said they tend to be elite.
Anti-colonialism said they tend to be imperial, etc.

So we get to the stage by the end of the Second World War where we're going for ordinary heroes, you know, clapping NHS workers, you know, the unknown firemen, trying to get away from the idea of these superheroes.

But there's a totally different trend, almost as though, and maybe this is the work that you're doing on men and young men, where there's resistance against getting rid of heroes.

And that deploys with superheroes in movies, celebrities, sports stars, and eventually Musk and Trump, where all that repressed desire that we're going to have these great men comes back in a much more sinister, contorted, immoral form, and leaving us really, I think, only with Zelensky as the only person I can think of today who I'm still prepared to really say this guy does kind of match up as a hero.

Interesting. I think you should take those sort of points you just made.

I think there's a sort of maybe not a book, but there's a very interesting, long article in that.

You're going through all those threads of

why the great man theory is rejected alongside why it appears to be coming back in fashion, Trump, as you say.

Do you think Farage,

who

you know, here we are, this week was the ninth anniversary of the referendum. He was a big factor of that.
Most people in Britain now accept that it was probably a really silly thing to do.

And yet he, Johnson, it's sort of ultimately, as he's been seen off, Farage is back as a force.

And a lot of his support is coming from certainly men more than women and disproportionately young men as well. Do you think that's related to the things that you've just been saying? Yes.

And I think one of the reasons why you and I tend to, I'm afraid,

probably underestimate figures like Farage over time is it's difficult to square the fact that on the one hand he's clearly a pretty absurd figure who gets an incredible amount wrong, contradicts himself all the time,

lost many, many elections, and yet is really making the weather. I mean it's a very odd gap.
I mean

we had a glimpse of it with Boris Johnson. There's a huge image of it with Trump.

Farage is part of this phenomenon which is, you know, not to return to Sophie Peddising, we'd want to believe that the people who are making an impact are these sort of earnest, very clever intellectuals like Macron making highly intelligent speeches, but actually we're in a world in which the people who really seem to be making the weather are people who on the surface seem quite kind of buffoonish and unserious, seem to be having more influence than the people doing the strategic analysis.

I was in France the other day and I did an interview for there's a Channel 4 documentary which I think is going out today,

I think, Thursday, if you're listening on Thursday, I think it's today. And it's Fraser Nelson next to the spectator.
And the premise is, Will Nigel Farage be the next Prime Minister?

Now, a few years ago, in fact, even a couple of years ago, that would have been a complete joke.

I still think it's highly unlikely, but it's not impossible because we're in such volatile times. As you know, Rory, I tend to prepare if I'm doing interviews or at least think it a bit.

And I jotted down a few notes, but I think my best line came just spontaneously. Tell me what you think of this.
I said, economically, Farage is Truss Mark II.

Politically and presentationally, he's Johnson Mark II. Are we really going to put a combination of the worst two prime ministers in our history into Downing Street? Are we really going to do that?

I thought it was quite good. Very good, with a little sprinkling of Trump on top.
Okay, yeah.

Oh, it's interesting. He's distancing himself from Trump.
He's not really getting engaged in Trump at the moment. And amazing that he's managed to do that, isn't it?

Given that there are all those photographs of them grinning together and so many record statements of him praising him. You know, it's extraordinary.
Okay, George Lambrew, Trip Plus member.

I'm a new father, five-month-old little boy. Congratulations, George.
Fantastic. And I'm growing incredibly concerned about his future.

Knowing what we know about politics around the world and the likelihood of conflict involving Britain, would you recommend having children? My answer is absolutely yes.

It's nothing I've done. And we're not really here to drive you into such gloom that you don't have children.
But listen, Rory,

a lot of young people are thinking in these terms because they're basically saying, can't afford a house, climate change, social media seems to be sort of destroying our brains, Britain is not as powerful as it was, the world is now led by complete sort of you know monsters, and Gabriel Attel's not going to save us.

So

you can't leave it alone, can you? You cannot leave it alone.

Je vaudrei, ma excuse devant tout la français, come on collègue, Henri Stuart, vou déteste, je c'est pas pour qua bé savo. I love the French.
I love the French.

You love French food. You love wine and food.
No, no, no, no. I really like the French.
I just was massively disappointed by this great Messiah.

But George, the other thing to say to George Lambreaux is that, you know, if we think about the sort of, I think there is also a patriotic case for getting the birth rate back up.

We are demographically in a mess. Are you going to.
Patriotic case for getting the birth rate up? Are you going to have Kier Starmer making a little speech encouraging everyone to...

That's quite old-fashioned.

That's a type of political communication we haven't seen for a long time. Just look at the birth rate.
Well, do you know what Orban did, which was very interesting?

I don't know whether it's fully been realised, but he announced that if you had, I think it's more than four children, you would be exempt from income tax from your entire life in an attempt to get the Hungarian birth rate up.

And that's a pretty amazing policy. The one French person that you like, De Gaulle, he was always trying to get people having babies.

And Nicola Sturgeon, didn't she have, she had a big push on

supporting children. But do you think, Alison? I mean, if someone had said to you, if you had four children, you'd be exempt from income tax for life, you might be quite tempted.
I'd be quite tempted.

Yeah, having had three, you'd have thought, yeah, let's let's go again. Let's go again.

Now, at the other end of things, from Poppy McGee, how would you both have voted in the debate on the assisted dying bill if you'd been in the Commons? I would have voted very much in favour.

I probably would have voted against reluctantly. And we got into that, actually.
We had quite a good series of agreeable disagreements.

If people are interested, we did actually quite a good leading interview, didn't we, with the author of

Kim Ledbetter, where we got to go to the next one?

if you had to say in sort of you know one sentence what your main objection

my main objection is a fear that an old frail person is going to feel not not that they're bullied but just sort of subconsciously pick up they're becoming a bit of a burden and they're costing their family money and maybe it'd be kinder and better if they just took themselves out of the way and and i i wouldn't want to feel that anybody

felt that. I also have been a bit troubled by some of the data coming out of the Netherlands.
I mean, it's an extraordinary number of applications now for assisted dying in the Netherlands.

I'd be a bit troubled if we were moving towards a situation where it was becoming very, very common for lives to end in that way. But anyway, this is a much, much bigger conversation.

But you were more, I think, concerned by the role, the constitutional role of the House of Lords on this, because this is something that got through the House of Commons, remind people got through on a private member's bill, which is a very interesting thing where just occasionally members of parliament get to bring stuff forward.

I remember Rebecca Harrison in my intake in Parliament tried to take one through to change

British summertime. She wanted to change our clocks and make sure the clocks weren't changing in a way that overbenefited Scottish farmers.

So we were going to actually, I think we were going to leave Greenwich Mean Time entirely if that bill have got through.

That would be very bad for soft power.

Well, I mean, obviously, massive Conservatives like me were just so attached to the symbolic value of Greenwich Mean Time that I failed to support my friend Rebecca when I should have done.

I agree with you.

I'd worry if the laws mess around with this.

I've already heard some of the members of the House of Lords saying that, you know, well, it's not a government bill, and it wasn't promised in the manifesto, and therefore, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I think this is a case where the House of Commons should show premise.

The House of Lords is absolutely welcome to put forward proposals to improve it, but I worry that those who have failed to defeat the arguments in the Commons will now try to use the House of Lords to stop this.

And listen, and I also wasn't that happy with Wes Streeting, who, okay, is entitled to come out and vote against against it.

But then I think to come out afterwards and basically say the health service can't afford this bill, I wasn't sure about that either. Interesting, isn't it?

Because he, as I guess, his objection is partly as a Christian to the bill, but it's interesting to then, as you say, use his position as health secretary to undermine it on a cost basis.

Yeah, because the Prime Minister voted for it. He could easily, well, he can come out and say, well, you know, okay, we have to make this work.

Rory, I'm going to put forward a very controversial idea here. Oh, yes, go ahead.
And tell me whether your Christian view thinks this is bad.

I would like to be able to say in age now, 68, compus mentis,

that if I get to a place where I don't have control of my own physicality, my own mental faculties,

that I would like to be able to say that in those

are the circumstances in which I would no longer like to continue living.

What do you think of that? Look, Ivan, I think you're expressing something that's really powerful in humans. I don't think we like feeling that we're not who we were and that things are falling away.

And that's, I think, I guess, one of the reasons why we used to love the idea of sort of people to come back to heroes dying young, because they die at a moment where they're at their absolute peak.

The only thing I'd say gently against it is maybe we also need to be kind to ourselves and we need to embrace aging and not, I was a bit, you know, I'd sort of slightly had a conversation when we were doing the leading interview with Kim about this when she talked about somebody saying she didn't like seeing her mother looking undignified in hospital.

I sort of think that we should be more comfortable with being undignified, that aging isn't awfully dignified and we should

embrace that as part of our mortality. But, you know, who knows? Listen, I'm not going to push that on you.
You've lived a tough life.

You've done a lot of things and you've got a particular way of viewing yourself.

But I wouldn't want everybody to feel that just because they're getting older and frailer, that they're somehow demeaning themselves and becoming a nuisance and they might as well pop on.

Final question, Landy Roberts. This is about Zelensky talking to the king and, of course, the queen.

If you put together the number of world leaders that the queen met and had private conversations with, the question from Landy is, what do politicians talk about when they meet the king?

How interested do you think the king is in geopolitics? Well, I think he's very interested in geopolitics. How interested he is in what a lot of the political leaders say is probably another question.

I think he's doing an amazing job. I mean obviously I keep praising him because I'm a huge fan, but Zelensky was over again just two days ago in Britain, did a visit on Monday.

And it's really interesting the way that the king has made a real effort to host world leaders. He's hosting many, many more of them than people realize because these aren't just state visits.

He's often, you know, he'll bring the king of Bahrain over to a meeting at Windsor.

And he's really, I think, being creative in the way in which he hosts people. He often thinks hard about what they might be interested in seeing, takes them to different places,

but really makes the effort to sit with them, spend time with them.

And as you say, he's got very, very clear views about the world, is fascinated by the world, and is really feels that he's got a role. I mean, I think he has got a role.

The one we talked about, I suppose, two weeks ago is that he's obviously the head of state at Canada at a time when Trump is talking about making Canada the 51st state and Trump likes the British monarchy, so he's got to signal, oi, hold on a second, Canada is, you know,

something associated with the royal family, so please back off.

But he's also, I think, able to, in the Gulf, he's got these relationships which nobody else has got because he's known all these people since they were children, since he was a young person, so he will have met them over 50 years.

Nobody else can quite do that. And that means that he can pick up the phone, he can steer things.

Presumably the challenge is he's also got to balance the fact that he's a constitutional monarch, the prime minister is the elected head of government, and he's therefore got to balance all the time his strong personal views about what's going wrong in the world and who he thinks is causing trouble with his responsibility to represent the state.

And the thing, though, about what they talk about, because they have this sort of inbuilt advantage because of sort of kind of general deference that is shown towards them,

including by foreigners. I mean, it's really quite extraordinary the sort of power they have.
You'll meet an absolute arch French Republican. I don't mean Republican Party.

I mean somebody who just absolutely doesn't understand or like the concept of monarchy. But you see them when they meet

the Queen when she was alive or King Charles now, and they will just sort of bow down. It's like this really kind of weird phenomenon.

And they do have so much of their time is with these endless small talk when they're doing doing garden parties and visits to villages and hospitals and the rest of it where you know the queen always used to say you know how far have you come and i don't know what charles has as a tick to sort of get people going he's very good at it i mean you may have seen chelsea garden show or the windsor garden show flower show i mean you can see one of the things that he's always doing is he's often looks back over his shoulder and points at someone with a smile, a sort of cheeky smile, to say, ah, yeah, I've just remembered that.

He's got a great way of, I mean,

more than his mother.

I think he actually really enjoys it. He's more like your friend Bill Clinton.
He seems to get genuine energy from not be drained. I mean, he's actually, in that sense, a bit of an extrovert.

He really seems to be enjoying it.

I can't remember. Somebody recently told me that when Trump was with the Queen, that she told somebody afterwards, all he wanted to talk about was my sister.
He was obsessed with my sister.

Why is he so interested in my sister? This Princess Margaret. Because the other thing they've got, let's say Prince Charles is meeting Zelensky, okay?

Now, it's obvious that because of the government position on Ukraine-Russia, he's perfectly able to sort of be very, very, very, very supportive.

But of course, you know, there was a time when Putin was not persona non-grata and when he will have had meetings, observations, and what have you.

I guess the question then is how frank can he be in a situation like that? Or is there always a part of him that's thinking, I have to slightly hold back?

Yeah, and of course he'll get, I mean, I think the other thing that you'll know, and I know, but readers don't know, is that, of course, he gets, like the Prime Minister, he gets a red box with all the briefing.

He gets very detailed speaking notes. There will be points to make.

I mean, Alison, maybe you could sort of explain to listeners this sort of weird thing that Prime Ministers and Ministers get, these sort of sheets of paper that sit in front of them when they meet someone else, where the civil servants have said, these are the points you must make, these are points that would be nice to make.

And these are the points to avoid.

Well, one of the lovely examples of this is John Le Carrey, who, you know, the famous spy writer, but who was initially a British intelligence officer, goes off to see Harold Macmillan when he's Prime Minister in the 60s with a guy called Fritz Erle, who's a German politician who the British think is going to be a potential future Chancellor.

It's quite interesting, actually, that the...

I don't know what would happen today. Would the Prime Minister spare time for a kind of upper-middle-ranking German politician who they think might become the Chancellor in the future?

Anyway, in those days they did. He takes Fritz Ehrler in to see Macmillan.
Macmillan has these speaking points in front of him.

And Macmillan is clearly a bit tired, a bit out of it, sort of stumbles through the speaking points that Fritz Ehrler and Le Carrie can all see sitting on the table.

And Ehrler leaves with absolute sort of amazing Olympian disdain for Macmillan and just how pathetic it is to see him sort of struggle through these speaking points when meeting him instead of feeling grateful for the chance to meet the British Prime Minister.

Now, I just want a little glimpse from you though. Gone, give give us a story, if you can, about what it's like dealing with these kinds of things, because I think you've got one up your sleeve.

Tony Blair, you know, with whom I've discussed most things, he was incredibly discreet. about his meetings with the Queen.

You know, he'd go off to see the Queen and then he'd come back and he'd say, what were you talking about? Oh, you know, this and that. I can't really tell you.

He wouldn't sort of say, oh, I'm the Prime Minister. I can't talk about it.
Constitutional propriety, etc.

Although remember when we talked to Jacinda Ardern, she did something which Tony was told not to do in his memoirs, which was quoted her directly.

And And one night he came back from a meeting at Buckingham Palace and said, oh, God, I think I really put my foot in it with her, Madge. And I said, what? He said, well, oh, God.

He said, she was wearing this green dress, a green suit. And she said that she was going to Scotland at the weekend to present the Scottish Cup football Celtic Rangers.

And he said, I hope you're not wearing that dress.

Green being Celtic and

the Queen having to stay neutral in all things. And

he couldn't quite work out whether she understood that that might be a problem. So he was really worried that actually she just went away thinking,

why is my new Prime Minister insulting what I wear? Yeah, yeah,

I can see that.

It's difficult getting the tone right now.

It's probably not great. telling any woman, you know, that you don't like her dress.
And telling the Queen, maybe it's not like that. No,

whatever the certs. Anyway, you got very good at saying ma'am.

It's ma'am, isn't it? Ma'am. I always used to say ma'am, but it apparently is ma'am.
You don't have a very very long A. At school, we said ma'am in relation to

our matrons. Right.
Yeah. So, sir, is just so much easier, isn't it, Rory? Sir is much easier.
That's what I tend to call you, Alistair, when we're not

on screen.

Have a lovely day. Have a safe flight from Cyprus.
Thank you. And just remind listeners and viewers: tomorrow, Rest is Politics Plus, episode two of Who Is the Real JD Vance? Very good.

Looking forward to it. Bye-bye.
See you soon. Bye.