406. Biden, Springsteen, and Trump: Dancing in the Dark

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Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

And me, Alistair Campbell.

And just a reminder to those who might have missed it on monday we've already done a fairly chunky um half hour on the uk eu summit down on a monday that will have gone out to members in their feed yesterday if they missed it and anybody else who wants to catch up it is there we may touch upon it in the second half of this one anyway because we're going to be talking about the the spate of European elections that were over the weekend.

But in the first half, we're going to talk about the United States and both the current president, but let's start with the former president, Joe Biden, and the news of his health, Rory.

Yeah, very sad.

So he seems to have been diagnosed with what looks like quite advanced serious prostate cancer.

And at the same time, there have been a series of reports and now a big book out

saying that his cognitive decline was very extreme and was concealed from people, including one very colourful claim that people may have come across, which is that

one of the reasons that George Clooney

decided not to endorse him and called for him to step down is that having known Biden very long for many years, it became clear to him that Biden didn't recognise him.

I had heard that actually from a UK cabinet minister who at the time swore me to secrecy but said that he'd been in a meeting with Biden and Biden had come in, said hello to them all, sat down, been taken out by his staff for a few minutes and then re-entered the room five minutes later and reintroduced himself again to all the same people as though he'd never met them.

And that was about 12 months before the election.

Yeah, I think the, look, the thing that brought it to a head was the Trump TV debate when Trump, as ever, was, you know, whatever you think of him, incredibly energetic.

And there was that killer moment when he said to Biden, I don't know what he just said and I don't think he knows what he just said.

Or so I don't know what he means and I don't think you know what he means.

There's no doubt now that lots and lots and lots of people were seeing him who were saying to each other and saying to others outside, he's not in a good way,

he shouldn't run.

But what the book appears to be saying is that he had this very tight circle, including part family, part advisors, who felt they could keep the show on the road.

I think it also maybe puts into look on the illness, and as you say, reading between the lines, I mean, I've drafted and read quite a lot of sort of dealing with health issues for politicians is always very, very difficult.

But reading between the lines on this one, it looks quite serious to me.

I also really wanted to just, I mean,

let me just read you this post from Donald Trump yesterday.

Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden's recent medical diagnosis.

We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery, which

is the sort of thing that a president should say.

Okay.

But it sits so badly alongside his relentless ranting about Joe Biden, pretty much up until yesterday.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's this interesting message, isn't it?

Because it shows that he can occasionally do the normal thing.

I was expecting it to lead.

to lead on to him saying, but, like his happy Easter message, which begins happy Easter and then attacks Joe Biden and everybody else.

We had that situation on the episode we did on Monday on the Kirstama von der Leyen summit, where somebody said that Nigel Farage was living inside my head.

It's very easy to get inside Donald Trump's head.

Did you see his tweet about Bruce Springsteen?

Absolutely amazing.

So Bruce Springsteen...

Pretty extremely.

Have you got the tour?

I've got it here.

Yeah, I've got it here.

So Bruce Springsteen's on tour at the moment.

He started, he's kicked off the tour in Manchester.

That's Manchester, England, and he basically stood up.

And I thought it was brilliantly done.

He basically said, he talked about the need for people to stand up, rise up, speak out, because my country has been taken over by a corrupt, incompetent, treasonous administration.

And then he went on.

Anyway, Donald Trump says as follows.

I see that highly overrated Bruce Springsteen goes to a foreign country, and that's you people in the UK, to speak badly about the President of the United States.

Never liked him, never liked his music or his radical left politics.

And importantly, he's not a talented guy, just a pushy, obnoxious capital letters jerk who fervently supported crooked Joe Biden, a mentally incompetent capital's fool and our capital's worst ever president, who came close to destroying our country.

This is the guy he's hoping gets well soon.

If I wasn't elected, it would have been gone by now, whatever that means.

Sleepy Joe didn't have a clue.

Oh, the country.

Sleepy Joe didn't have a clue what he was doing, but Springsteen is, quotes, dumb as a rock, couldn't see what was going on.

Or could he, which is even worse, question mark, this dried-out, quotes, prune of a rocker, brackets, his skin is all atrophied, ought to, caps, keep his mouth shut until he gets back into the country.

That's just standard fare.

Then we'll see how it goes for him.

I mean,

that is inside your head living of, I mean, well done, Bruce, I say.

Well done.

The boss is the boss, and he is right inside DJT's head there.

And it's also fascinating that you can, I mean, you don't need to be a sort of great kind of French critic to pull out the fact that the same themes come up in almost every post.

Absolutely.

So there's the Sleepy Joe.

There's the I'm the President of the United States.

There's the foreign country.

And then there's the threat on borders and immigration.

Just you come back to this country.

There's also the obsession with skin.

I mean, his skin, to require the level of makeup that he wears.

I mean, the mooch has described it as the process of makeupology of Trump.

And the mooch really understands skin, doesn't he?

That is, I thought, strange.

And he also had last week Taylor Swift.

Since she came out for me and I called her out, she used to be hot.

She's now not hot anymore.

He's gone off her and he now fancies Ahmed El Shara.

i was talking to somebody the other day roy who who who who i was

what do you mean he now fancies him what he basically said he was hot i'm sorry i've got to say this because i think it's important i heard this story about trump trump does sort of he he tells he likes telling men how handsome they are and how good looking they are apparently he went up to a couple of guys who were at mar-a-lago just said went over to them said you're beautiful can you just stay there forever

Now,

the thing about

the post about Joe Biden's illness, let's just accept for a minute, maybe it was sincere.

Let's just assume that.

It's hard to know because of what he'd said about him the day before.

This same person who knows Trumpland really, really well said that one of Trump's really big motivations is a pathological fear of death.

that he's really, really, really scared of dying.

And he even took this to the next level and said that, look, there's lots of reasons why he kind of likes to treat with Pew and with Pew Tin and Xi Jinping.

Obviously, the fact that they're powerful people, they've got, you know, they basically run their countries, like they're extension of themselves, etc., etc.

But he actually said to me, This guy, and he's, and I'm talking about somebody who's quite a serious person, well, very serious person, said that actually part of it is this fear of death because they've got a lot of nukes.

And this kind of, you know, a lot of what he's about is just making sure these guys don't use nukes on America because he really doesn't want to go like that.

What do you think of that as a theory?

I like it.

I mean, I've also sort of a kind of

meta-point which I'm becoming increasingly obsessed with, which is that we talk all the time about Trump's psychology, don't we?

You know, he's obsessed with death, you know, he

likes rich people, he's worried about his skin.

And this is what happens when somebody turns from being an elected president in a normal democratic system with checks and balances into

a king.

I mean, this is what used to happen with Louis XIV.

People spent their whole time kind of trying to get into his head.

Yeah, and

the court are all just hovering, constantly analysing their relationships with each other through the context of how is this going to appeal to him.

So you saw that with Mike Waltz.

I mean, Mike Waltz was his departure as national security advisor would have been accompanied by endless maneuvering by Vance and Hexeth and all these other people in the orbit.

And now he's gone and they're still there, but they might be next.

It's also weird that the psychology doesn't really help anybody, even people who know him reasonably well, to actually predict what he can do.

I mean, we can all say he's unbelievably unpredictable,

but you will see, you know, people who know him well predicting that he'll only put up with Musk for a day and then he puts up Musk weeks, or they'll predict that he's never going to put up tariffs and then he puts up tariffs and then when he's put them up, they'll predict him and bring them down and he brings them down and we just saw the same just to segue a little bit onto the Middle East tour because we we talked about that Middle East tour and it's all been happening between the last podcast and now so just to remind people he he went to Riyadh on Tuesday the 13th of May where he signed a $600 billion investment deal apparently or it was agreed it wasn't signed and a hundred and forty two billion arms deal then he went to Doha next day 1.2 trillion economic exchange was talked about Abu Dhabi 200 billion and stuff on AI, and then back to Doha again.

And

one of the things in it, which was really startling, which we trailed in the last podcast, was of course this decision on Ahmed al-Shara.

When we went to see Ahmed al-Shara, the conventional wisdom was this man is an international terrorist.

He very recently had a $10 million price in his head.

and nobody should be dealing with him.

And it was very controversial.

We even interviewed him.

Now, President Trump has said, as you say, that he's hot and he's lifted sanctions on him.

And it's very interesting he's done it because

again, two weeks ago, I had a lot of people explaining that he would never do that.

And they had two explanations.

One of them was that he was very influenced by Israel and Israel does not want sanctions lifted on him.

In fact, they want him gone.

They want El-Shara gone.

So he ignored Israel.

The second is he ignored a whole series of power players in his own administration.

The Assistant Secretary of State, for example, and a man called Gurka, who again is a very, very powerful, was supposed to be a very powerful player, who was really against lifting sanctions.

And Trump's ignored them all, and instead he's gone, it seems, roughly with what Mohammed bin Salman wanted and what the Qataris wanted, which is the sanctions being lifted.

And he met al-Shara.

Very, very unusual thing for a president to do.

So I just want to get to this because it's all part of, as we look at the next three and a half years of this roller coaster,

how unbelievably difficult it is, even people who think they know him well, like Gorka in the middle of of his administration, to know what he's going to do in two days' time.

Well,

the current episode of Leading, which I really, really, really read, I know we always plug the leading, but I think if there's one, if you don't listen to leading, please listen to this week with this guy, Arab Bhaguti, whose father, Marwan Barghuti, is in jail, has been for over 20 years, but is reckoned by many Palestinians and by moderate Israelis to be the guy who could be the key to trying to help

get Palestinian and Israeli relations into into a better place

but he we talked to him about al-Sharra and he made the point he said I've I've often I've thought ever since Trump came in that his unpredictability

might actually

lead to better prospects for for Palestine and you look you and I both of us before the presidential election we said look netanyah who's basically just waiting for Trump same as Putin is waiting for Trump but actually Trump not least has shown shown, not least by going to the Gulf without going to Israel and all the other things we talked about last week that he's done, the Houthis, Iran.

He is not conforming to type.

He is not following the narrative that everybody else has set for him.

And the Syria and the Al-Sharra thing, because when we talked to Al-Shara, he was not sounding confident about getting sanctions lifted at all.

He was based.

I think one of the reasons he did the interview with us was actually to try and get the message out into a kind of European, British European context that

why it was so important the sanctions got lifted.

But he didn't sound at all confident.

And there, and it's happened like that.

Let's just also step back.

I was talking to our friend Gerard Russell this morning, who's the Middle East

expert, former diplomat, former Foreign Office diplomat.

And he was raising the question of what an unusual presidential trip this was, how a conventional president wouldn't have gone on his first big trip to the Gulf.

And if he had, there would have been a much bigger agenda or story.

The president would have been trying to get much more out of it.

He would have thought about some big breakthrough on Israel or Iran.

So this was a sort of interesting thing.

I mean, it's, you know,

Trump gave a lot in this trip.

You know, he gave concessions on AI to UAE, which will have worried people.

He gave concessions on Syria.

He seems to have accepted the plane from the cataries.

Oh, I suppose he

had.

Sorry, sorry, Rory, is that a concession?

Reluctantly, I'll take 400 million pounds worth of a plane.

Yeah, I'm not sure about that.

And I suppose to some extent, maybe he thinks it trouble-free, looks good, enjoyable.

And there's this talk about money, but very little of that money is actually signed, sealed, and delivered.

And I wondered in the back of my head whether he might not have been hoping for a bit more.

You know, did he hope that actually he could have got a ceasefire

out of Israel-Gaza?

Even more ambitiously, could he have made a little bit movement with the Abraham Accords?

Or was he hoping to do something with Iran?

Was there something that didn't quite happen on the trip, or was it never about that in the first place?

Well, I don't know.

But the way they set the trip up was very much about money and about business.

I saw a French

TV discussion the other night.

They were talking about the visit and this guy said, I've trotted up all the deals that at various points Trump said had been done.

I've trotted up all the numbers and he said he's he's if these deals all came off brackets very large if

the total the combined total is greater than the size of the entire French economy.

So that's quite a lot of deals, right?

So I think there was I think the other thing don't look we as you say we do talk a lot about his psychology and I'm I'm very strongly of the view now that he's motivated by a desire to be the most famous person in the world, the most powerful person in the world, and the richest person in the world.

I think he sees that as a pretty good triptych to go for if you're him.

And so I think a lot of this was about

money and about showing his power.

And I just think he likes being in places where everything is glitzy, gold is everywhere.

He talked endlessly about how beautiful these buildings were and the carpets and the sofas.

And

I just think they know how to play him.

They play him in that way.

Well, there were marvellous moments, weren't there?

MBS literally drove him, Mohamed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, literally drove him around a golf cart, didn't he?

Yeah.

And playing YMCA was like a gay anthem.

But it happens to be so that they come off the stage to YMCA and he's thinking, hold on a minute, what's going on here?

But, you know, so I think a lot of it is about that.

And if you think that you you mentioned uh

gerald russell saying that this is an unusual first trip um historically the first trip of most presidents has usually been to canada or the uk um well canada at the moment he keeps saying he wants to be the 51st state so that's unlikely to happen and the uk we've done this kind of charity just on canada briefly the one thing that this guy was talking to

and i wish i could say it was because then you'd have a really good sense of why i'm sort of quite confident in this.

But he said, of all the kind of stuff on the foreign policy stuff that he kind of puts out there, he said, Canada, we shouldn't take that seriously.

They've got no intention of Canada being the 55th state.

That's just, that's going to disappear.

But the one you should really watch out for is Greenland.

That is serious.

Now, I don't know if you've heard that as well, but...

It does make sense.

I mean, taking Canada would be close to impossible with a Canadian population that is massively against it.

You've got 20 million highly armed people in an incredibly wealthy country.

Greenland is 50,000 people and it's nice.

But it's Denmark.

But it's Denmark, which is NATO.

Canada's NATO, but if you were trying to plan the logistics of one or the other, I'm afraid

Canada, he'd be facing

bloodshed and not in Greenland.

Maybe before we go to Bray Roy, I should plug it.

I've already mentioned, but I've seen the whole thing now, so I'm going to plug it again.

If people need a bit of light relief amidst all the kind of horrors of the world of Trump and Ukraine and Gaza and climate change and all that, Joe Lysert, the United States of Birmingham is one of the funniest, best things I've seen on TV for a while.

Joe Lysert, the comedian from Birmingham, he goes to every Birmingham in America, which includes Birmingham, Alabama, big ones, but also these tiny hamlets called Birmingham.

And he gets every single mayor in every single place that he goes to, or governor, whatever it is, to sign a historic, it's beautifully done, and it's basically become the United States of Birmingham, which could become a replacement for NATO.

If the worst is to happen,

it's very gentle and very, very nice.

This is what I like.

I mean, given I failed to convince the First Minister of Wales to even support me in my idea of teaching Welsh and English schools, his ability to get all these Americans

to sign up.

It was brilliant.

It was absolutely brilliant.

As you know, I was quite supportive of your idea.

I'm up for anything that keeps languages alive.

And I even had a bit of the football of the weekend, a couple of Scots fans going on about all the Gaelic signs everywhere.

Keep them, I say, keep them.

They're very, very important.

Right, should we take a break and then come back with Europe?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

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Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Roy Stewart.

And me, Anastas Campbell.

And we have quite a few elections over the weekend.

Romania, Poland, and Portugal.

So if I may, really cheekily, can we please start with Portugal?

Happily, happily.

Because the niche listener to the rest of this politics, those loyal listeners who've stacked up thousands of hours of listening, will know that we've actually done quite a lot on Portugal.

And one of the reasons we've done quite a lot in Portugal is there was in fact an election in 2022, 2024, and now there's been a third election in 2025.

And the big story behind it is that yours truly believed a myth which has now been completely exploded, which is that Portugal didn't really have populism.

There was in fact a very grand academic theory called Iberian Exceptionalism that said because partly because Spain and Portugal had had right-wing dictatorships, they were kind of immune to populism.

And that all all seemed to be pretty much true until things began to become apart sometime, sort of in the middle of COVID.

Anyway, since then, things have changed very quickly.

And let's just give you the figures on this.

So we started as quite fans of Mr.

Costa, the Prime Minister, who managed to take with his socialist party 120 seats and 41% of the vote in January 2022.

41% of the vote.

And at the same time, an eccentric man called Ventura, sort of part-time law professor, part-time football commentator, moved from one seat, which is what he'd got before, to 12 seats, but still only 7% of the vote.

And the big party still dominated.

So there was this big left-wing party, and then there was the right-wing party.

There was then another election, and Venturincheger began to creep up.

He only crept from 7% of the vote to 10% of the vote, but he hopped up to 50 seats.

Meanwhile, our friend Costa managed to get himself involved in some bewildering corruption scandal involving payments from the Portuguese airline and lithium factories and and goodness knows what and resigned.

We should point out Roy that that is despite that he maintained his own innocence but accepted responsibility for other people's failings despite resigning those circumstances.

He went on immediately to become the same Antonio Costa that we talked about as one of the two European Union leaders alongside Keir's Thalma at the press conference on Monday.

Oh my goodness.

Yes, of course.

He's the guy that we saw with Osiran Leon.

You're completely right.

No, so that's right.

Well done.

Well,

there's a future for all of us.

Because his final days were a little bit, I hesitate to say, Boris Johnson.

He had 11 secretaries of state finally resigning on him before he decided to do the honourable thing and maybe thought it was the time to move on.

Anyway, second election we talked about.

And then in the latest election, just to cut to the chase, latest election, Acosta's party, the socialists, now down to about 23% of the vote, 58 seats, and the far right, Cheger, up at exactly the same numbers, 58 seats, about 23% of the vote.

Meanwhile,

the other party, the sort of mainstream right-wing party, has come top, but will not be able to form a government, and is refusing to do a deal with Chaga, and therefore is likely to have another minority government.

So we could have another election fairly soon.

It's a bit of a mess.

A bit of a mess.

So Chaga is a

proper far-right populist party.

It's a party that it's discussed things such as removing ovaries from women who have abortions.

It's got a very strong Catholic base.

It talks about false false sterilization, life imprisonments.

Ventura has made very inflammatory comments about the Roma, Gypsy Roma community.

Big reduction in Muslim immigration.

One of the members of parliament, whose family originates from Guinea-Bissau, had made a statement about returning Portuguese colonial looted artefacts back to the countries they came from.

And Ventura said, why don't you go back to the country you came from?

So it's a proper,

proper, proper, proper far-right party.

A couple of points, though.

The first is I think that,

and you're right, we were very, very positive about Costa.

I remember writing a piece, a huge piece, profile of Costa in the New European, saying this is the guy who's defying the trends.

He's the one who's, and of course, and Sanchez in Spain, another one, left of centre leader, who seems to be doing pretty well.

That's what led to this.

The Iberian exception.

Correct, correct.

But I think that...

When you've had as much corruption as they've had, when you've had as many elections as they've had, that does lead to this feeling of they're all the same.

So let's look at something a bit different, added to which immigration, a big issue.

Also, it seems that there's a sort of bit of a north-south divide going on, that the Owlgarve, which I guess is the bit that

those Brits who will be looking forward to the new AE gate processes

know best, has tended to be left-leaning.

But they actually have gone pretty much to the right.

And the other thing I think, somebody, a company called Sciabra, which I think is one of these firms that like you got when we did the thing with Mooch about the bots and

all the sort of fake stuff about you, me and him when we're on social media, they sent me a really interesting report.

58.

This is the highest.

I'll go through the whole thing actually because they actually covered five elections and I read the methodology and it was quite interesting.

So in Romania, we'll talk about Romania in a minute, 16% of the protest accounts, i.e., against the guy who eventually won,

the the ones that were trying to help the hard-right candidate, Simeon, they were fake.

Philippines, where Duterte,

despite being sort of not allowed in the country, or not in the country, has just won an election.

And actually on trial in The Hague.

He's in Holland

waiting for trial, and he's just won an election.

32%

of the support for him was fake.

In the Australian election, 17% of accounts in election conversations were fake.

and in Canada, 28% of the posts attacking Mark Carney were fake bots.

Call it what you will.

In Portugal, 58% of the profiles that were engaging positively with Chega were fake.

58%.

58%, yeah.

So, as the report says, this is disinformation on steroids.

And although, as you say, they're neck and neck now with the Socialist Party.

So, you've got Farage here with these five MPs saying that we've, you know, broken open the duopoly of Labour Tory, I think that Chega, given that they are now literally neck and neck in seats as well, with in a parliament, this is a parliamentary election, not a local election, this is a really big, big, big deal in Portugal.

And it's going to be very, very hard for them, I think, to put together anything other than a minority government.

Two final things.

First, is I guess just to step back and say exceptionalism's finished.

Portugal's now about the EU average.

It's not unusual now across Europe to have these far-right parties into the low 20s.

And in fact, of course, in Italy, Maloney's coalition is getting sort of 40%.

In Austria, they're crossing 30%.

The second thing is

I'm often a bit,

I don't think I've ever, despite loving this podcast, ever really looked at political science.

And that always makes me a bit guilty.

I think it's all these academics studying political science and we're a politics podcast.

We don't talk about it.

And I did actually come across quite a good article by political scientists that I want to talk about about the Portuguese election.

So it's in political research exchange and it's Lee Hain and Luca Manucci and they do a really granular analysis of what it was that led to Chaga's rise and in particular young, less educated men, more religious in rural areas.

particularly connected with Facebook.

And the point they're making, I guess, in the end is that is against the Iberian exception, that the profile really of these Choga voters, and they're spotting this as early as 2021, is beginning to look much more like the European norm.

And they make the same point for Vox and Spain.

Anyway, enough from me.

No, that's really interesting because I've been digging into, because the thing about

every time I mention Farage and I, I've got this image of the guy who said he's a bad, but this is this is really interesting, Rory, right?

Yeah.

Somebody told me, somebody told me, if I'll tell you who told me, the real Rory in my life told me it worked out that Nigel Farage has got more TikTok followers than every other MP combined okay

every other MP combined well let me just go through this right so Donald let's go through some leaders in the world Donald Trump has 15.1 million TikTok followers yep but Bakali his friend from El Salvador 10.7 which is almost more than the population of El Salvador I mean that's really interesting because yeah with Trump we're talking about sort of one 20th of the population of the US with Bukeley could talk about every single person in this country and more but that's because that's partly because of this sort of right-wing you know they all follow each other it's like all banners has probably more i don't know how many all ban has on social media he's not in this list macron six million six point one lula in brazil 5.1 aoc

4.1 million giorgio maloney prime minister of isley 2.4 nigel farage 1.2 million now the labor cabinet i i could be wrong about this but the labor cabinet so far as i can tell zero because they don't have accounts so this i think this will surprise you rory so far is number one in the list of MP TikTok account holders.

Number two,

the suspended Labour MP with very, very, very strong views on Gaza,

which may explain why she has so many followers.

I'm sure it partly does.

453,000 followers, Zara Sultana.

And do you know who's number three?

It's just past 200 followers, 200,000 followers on TikTok.

Liz Truss.

Jeremy Corbyn.

Jeremy Corbyn.

So, well,

that's not Labour MPs.

They're the independent independent MPs we're talking about, aren't they?

Pretty much, yeah, yeah.

And by the way, look, you and I know this because I'm not on TikTok.

The podcast is on TikTok, but I find just doing

Twitter and Instagram sort of takes up enough time, just sort of posting a few things a day.

The idea of then doing sort of these complicated films and all that, which you have to do on TikTok.

But it's really, really interesting, that, isn't it?

I think that the...

There's Jeremy.

I'm not saying Jeremy's in the same boat as the populist right, but I would argue it shows that the populist right

have done a better job of populating what is now viewed as the most influential social media platform among these young men that you're talking about.

Just before we wrap up, because we promised people this would be shorter because we've already done this big thing on the UK-EU trade deal.

Yeah.

Little update on what happened in the Poland election.

Also, very interesting.

What have you got against Romania?

We're going to do Romania tomorrow in detail in question time.

Excellent.

I look forward to that.

So, Poland, well, Poland, of course, you've got Donald Tusk, who's the Prime Minister, and that does not change, but this was the

presidential election, and the right-wing law and justice guy,

very much an enemy of Tusk, he's gone because he can't serve more than two terms.

The guy who's replacing him on the right, the candidate main candidate of the right, is this guy Karol Naroki.

I'm really not good on Polish pronunciation, so please Polish listeners forgive me.

And then the Liberal candidate is the current mayor of Warsaw, Rafael Traskowski.

And he is slightly ahead after the first round.

And this is a classic, it's like the French system.

It goes down to two if you don't get over 50% in the first round.

So they will go to a second round in two weeks.

Now, again, our old friends, Brackett's enemies on the far right, the far right votes added up to over 20%.

Now, you have to assume, I guess, that quite a lot of those are going to go to the Conservative candidate, Naroki.

So the Liberal guy, the mayor of Warsaw, is going to have his work cut out.

He seemed very confident in his aftermatch interviews, but, you know, it feels a bit like a kind of a weighted leg second time round.

Well, we'll watch it very closely because one of the things that's been a constant theme since Tusk came in is the fact that the president had been elected and the former populist far-right party, which which took over Poland in 2015,

has been a real block to many of the things that he's wanted to do.

So this will be really interesting.

It'll either be Poland continuing down this anti-populist path, or it'll be a sort of more troubling sign of this much more complicated European narrative of people coming back the other way.

Yeah.

But when we do get to Romania in question time, that is part of the carny, Albanese

sort of fight back against the sort of right-wing populism, etc.

So, Rory, we're going to do question time tomorrow.

We've got loads and loads of questions there.

Some of the things that I'm hoping that we're going to get through are Romania, as we've discussed.

You mentioned in the main podcast you want to talk about Germany and immigration.

I'm very keen, not least because of some of the things I heard up in Scotland over the weekend, to answer some of the questions we've had about winter fuel.

So, lots and lots and lots to get through.

And there we are.

Well, final one, Alistair.

I mean, I know that Bruce Frankson Springsteen's not someone you love in the way that you love Abba, but I just wonder whether you'd give us a little bit of a sense of Bruce.

You're not going to sing him, are you?

But I know Obama loved him, didn't he?

One of the lines that I'm vaguely aware of,

which maybe applies to Trump, is poor man want to be rich, rich man want to be king, and a king ain't satisfied till he rules everything.

That's brilliant.

That's brilliant.

No, I do love, I think Bruce Bringstein's just awesome.

I love the legend of Bruce Springsteen as well.

And I love the fact that he's been churning this stuff out for over half a a century.

I'd love to be able to sing, you know, I do love it, I know it's a cliche, but born in the USC, I was.

I mean, that is if I just love that little bit, but I wasn't born in the USA, so I don't feel I can identify with it terribly well.

Well, I think you've given us enough to finish the podcast now.

So let's just finish it.

Bye-bye very much.

See you soon.

Bye-bye.