400. Question Time: Has the US underestimated China?

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

And me, Alistair Campbell.

First one for you, Alistair Hanna.

Is Trump underestimating the ability of China to invest in new alliances at a time that the U.S.

seems intent on breaking theirs?

Yes, is the short answer.

This is what's incredible, because I think they're underestimating China on so many levels.

It really came home to me that clip that J.D.

Vance did, where he talked about, you know,

we're getting peasants in China to manufacture things and we're now buying from peasants.

And I think there is that sort of mindset that thinks China is the China of old rather than the China that's grown to the extent that it has.

And there's no doubt that China, we saw this immediately after the whole tariff thing when Xi Jinping went on that tour, went to Vietnam, went to Cambodia, went to Malaysia.

And, you know, we've got Alex Younger on leading on Monday, the former head of MI6.

And he makes the point.

And this is the point.

Kurt Campbell, who you remember, who was

an expert in China, and he was sort of, I think, partly responsible for the Obama pivot to Asia.

And he is always making the point that America's strength has been built through its alliances.

And I think there is this kind of hubris and arrogance that America

can do everything on its own.

So I think that's a very, very, very wise question.

And I was talking yesterday to a senior Indonesian.

So Indonesia, obviously, fourth largest population in the world and mattering more and more as its economy grows.

And I was saying, you know, how's this playing out for you?

And he said, well, how do you think it's playing out?

You know, you've got one potential partner who's sending you flowers, telling you you're wonderful, and another partner who's slapping tariffs on you, abusing you, insulting you.

Do you think that Indonesia is going to look more to China and the US?

And then on your point on technology and this idea that they're peasants, he described going to visit Yangshang port.

So he'd arrived, seen Shanghai, and somebody said, forget about Shanghai, go and see this.

It's an artificial island that China built 40 kilometers into the sea.

There's a bridge that they built in two and a half years going to it

with wind turbines all rolling around.

He arrives and he literally said he only saw two people on the entire island.

It's one of the biggest ports in the world.

The person who opened the gate and saluted as he went in and the person who saluted on the way out.

And the rest was all robotics.

Exactly.

Wow.

I've just googled a thing that Kirk Campbell wrote recently.

The greatest risk this is to America is not declinism,

thinking everything's going to get worse, it is complacency.

If anything, the United States, particularly in the era of Trump, risks overestimating unilateral power and underestimating China's ability to counter it.

And a new approach to alliances is the only viable way the United States can build sufficient scale on its own.

And if you think about the way he's handled his alliances so far, tariffs has damaged his relationship with pretty much every country in the world.

Canada, even on the day of the election, he was doing his 51st state nonsense.

And Poly Evre, the conservative, who's seen as the pro-Trump guy, came out and literally said, stay out of our election.

Australia, UK, these traditional alliances, he's not seeking to strengthen them.

And China, as you say, I mean, you go to Africa a lot, go to anywhere in Africa at the moment.

You feel China's power.

We've got two leading interviews.

One just out with Atul Gwande, which is an extraordinary account for somebody who's right at the top of USAID

about the way that Trump's dismantling of development aid has dismantled all these deep relationships around the world.

And a second one coming out next Monday with Sir Alex Younger.

which is an interview with the former head of MI6, which looks

at, well, what Younger says is one of the big problems, which is he said, Trump's gone so bad that people are almost seriously seeing China and the US as kind of equal.

And he does warn against that.

Yeah, however bad Trump's US is, it's not China.

And we've got to be serious about where we're going.

Quick question for me before we go to a documentary that we've got a good question from Sammy and James Kearney on.

What did you think about Ukawande?

I thought he was great.

Yeah, really good.

Very smart, very clever, very passionate.

I found the most powerful part of the interview for me was where he was talking about USAID.

Because it just, it's horrific when you see Trump.

Well, Trump doesn't even care anymore because it's the past, it's a previous episode of the reality TV show.

But Elon Musk constantly saying no lives are being lost.

And there's the guy telling you lives are going to be lost in their millions.

because of the cuts to USAID.

So no, really good.

I hope people listen to that.

And I think you're right.

Alex Younger has just got such a great kind of strategic mind and a frame on all this stuff.

So, the documentary,

I don't know if you've seen this yet, Roy, but

Sam, we've got lots of questions on it.

James Kearney, great to hear your reflections on Louis Theroux's new BBC documentary about Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

Sammy, Israeli settler ideology used to be relatively fringe.

Now, we even have an Israeli cabinet minister who is himself a settler.

And that's Ben Gavir, who's in this documentary.

Have you seen this?

No, I haven't.

Tell us about it.

Well it's really, really, really worth you watching.

I mean the combination of the book that I read, I mentioned last week, this German book,

War Without End,

and this documentary,

I just think it's getting harder and harder to be in the position that you and I have tried to be in throughout, which is to kind of be fair and reasonable about both sides.

What you see in Louis Threw's documentary is, and I saw the Daily Mail having a go saying he's only showing one side of the story.

He's talking to the settlers.

He's deep in with these settlers and he gets in with these people who are really, absolutely the heart of the settler movement.

And I mean, just to give you some example of some of the things that they say, there's an extraordinary scene where he goes to the border.

They're looking at Gaza.

You can see sort of smoke coming up.

And there's a rabbi who basically says you can never make peace with savages.

and I think he calls them these camel riders

there's another guy who's from Texas moved to Israel when he was 16 and who says and and and

Louis through uses the word Palestinian and he said I'm not comfortable with that word because they don't really exist

they're clear these people who you know represent a pretty strong and they're surrounded by protected by Israeli soldiers and they basically want to wipe Palestinians off the face of the earth.

I shall watch it.

Let's have a discussion.

Let's talk about this week.

We'll talk about a discussion about it next week.

But that does sound very, very worth looking at.

Here's one for you.

Yeah.

Adrian, what lessons can we learn from Poland's fight back against right-wing populists since the Law and Justice Party took power in 2016?

And maybe related to that, Akil Kumar, how can Labour beat reformers' rapidly growing populist momentum?

Well, certainly looking at Poland is not a bad thing to do.

Yeah.

And so this is something that my great hero, Gerald Knaus from ESI.

He interviewed me last week for his book.

And you liked him?

I did like him a lot.

And he's writing a book with his daughter about enlargement.

Well, he's a real, I mean, just to do a little plug for Gerald, he is absolutely amazing.

He has lived all over the world and with young children, put them in a...

government school in Turkey.

So these young girls, I think five or six, learnt fluent Turkish.

Quite tough transition for them.

And then moved them to France.

Then they had to learn French and Germany and Britain.

I've got to say to you, Rory, I did say to to you at one point, presumably you hear Rory describing you, you and David Gork as his hero every single week.

He says, no, I don't listen every week.

You should listen to this because

ESI, his think tank, has done a lot of very, very detailed work on Poland, did a great report on it.

But basically the story in Poland, to remind people, is that in 2015, this far-right populist party was elected.

Law and Justice Party.

Law and Justice Party.

And in particular, under their Minister of Justice, tried to dismantle the judiciary.

And they said about it firstly by taking on the constitutional courts, then taking on the prosecutors, and essentially tried to say that they would take over the appointments of judges and any judges who did not favour them, they would discipline, fire, get out of their jobs.

And there was an amazing fight back.

And the two bits of the fight back are Polish judges themselves, who were very, very courageous, about a dozen of them, who, despite the fact they were being threatened, attacked and eviscerated in the media, losing their jobs, stood up, said, we are not accepting these rulings from judges who've been appointed by the government and we're appealing to the European Court of Justice even though we've been told not to.

America Take Note.

And on the other hand, the European Union, which actually the European Court of Justice did quite a brave ruling.

It said that interfering in the appointment of judges, putting in basically political apparatchiks as your judges, is undermining the European legal system.

And Europe then withheld billions of Euros of funding.

And this story is really interesting because it's part of the story of how Donald Tusk came in because it turned out that actually 80% of Poles are pro-EU.

And the EU wasn't just a kind of judicial mechanism.

It's an idea.

It's an idea.

And Poles in the end preferred the idea of Europe, many of them, to the idea of this far-right nationalism.

The problem for Trump, of course, or the problem with Trump's America, is that you don't have that idea of Europe around it.

You don't have a European Court of Justice.

You just got a Supreme Supreme Court, few people, stuffed now increasingly with people who are more sympathetic towards Trump.

And it's very difficult to work out how even very brave American judges are going to be able to challenge his attempts to, well, talk about the kind of stuff France is talking about, not implementing their decisions, deliberately flouting them, impeaching them, undermining them.

One of the most alarming social media posts last week was this American judge who was arrested.

And Cash Patel, the head of the FBI, published a photo of her with being taken away by FBI agents in handcuffs with the message, nobody's above the law.

Could have added brackets apart from the president.

So that it sort of feels back to the point about feels very kind of 1930s Germany.

That does.

I think what's really interesting about Poland, and

it'd be great.

Donald Tusk doesn't do many interviews and he doesn't do much foreign media, it'd be great to get him on the podcast.

If there's anybody who works at Donald Tusk listening, please can we get him because we we both think he's really inspiring and and the other thing that's really important in that because what what's happened in some of these populist countries hungary being a good example

is the parties coming to the opposition parties coming together and thinking that if we all come together we can defeat them the trouble with that is you've got people looking at them one the state-controlled media takes you apart

whereas Tusk handle that really, really well.

But secondly, people are looking at you and thinking, well, hold on a minute.

This coalition, you've got sort of weird kind of far-right people over there who just aren't with the law and justice party because there's some particular policy they don't like.

And then you've got the sort of leftists and the environmentalists over here.

And where's the kind of thread?

What the Poles did was they maintained the opposition parties.

But they all then kind of the public sort of worked it out.

And I think they gave the Polish people a lot of kind of credibility and their understanding of what was going on.

Added to which, they campaigned like hell.

They really campaigned.

Tusk, he had this bus that went thousands of miles.

And they also, they had these big demonstrations, demonstrations for democracy.

And they were getting, towards the end, they were getting like, you know, into seven figures of people coming out on the streets.

So they mobilized.

So back to the point you were making about Canada and Australia.

When people think there's something really important happening, And you said the same about Corbyn against Theresa May, when people think there's something really important in election, people will turn out.

But you've got got to provide that mobilization.

So listen, there's lots of lessons in Poland.

Now we know we have a lot of MPs who listen, but it's very nice that some of them ask questions.

Here's one from Clive Lewis, Labour MP.

114,000 people, he says, have just signed a petition demanding public ownership of our water.

with 82% in favour.

Meanwhile, private water companies have paid out $78 billion in dividends since privatisation, even as they rack up debts of over 60 billion, debts which didn't exist before privatization.

When you add all this together, isn't it finally time for the government to bring water back into public ownership so it can be run in the public interest rather than for private profit?

So thank you for that, Clive.

Where are you on

water renationalisation?

Well I guess here

rather strangely I'm a little sympathetic with Rachel Reeves because the problem that Clive Lewis is kind of skirting around is that all those financial problems which those companies are facing would become the government's problems.

So the government, if it took over these companies, is suddenly going to have to find tens of billions of pounds to cover their debt.

And the investment in the public water network is hundreds of billions of pounds worth of investment.

And at the moment, the system that's been put in place is that that's financed through the private sector.

And of course, these private water companies, for a long time, had a very good story.

I mean, it's become really bad recently with terms of water, but traditionally the story was that they'd come in and it was costing about a pound for water and a pound for water out, and it was more reliable than it was when the government ran it, and they'd put all these billions of pounds into investment.

It's now clear that the model is really broken.

But ultimately, in a sense, it doesn't really matter whether it's the private sector or the public sector.

Somebody's got to find a lot of money.

And in the end, that's either going to come from your water bill or it's going to come from your taxes.

Yeah.

I mean, I think of all the privatizations, water is the one that people, maybe railways as well, but people feel has gone the worst in terms of where we are now.

And interestingly, I mentioned yesterday on the main podcast, main episode, I mentioned this report from Persuasion UK

about so-called reform curious Labour voters.

Interestingly,

this issue of water and sewage in our waterways was right up there in terms of what they really, really, really care about.

And again, that goes maybe against because what we think of when we look at reform is that they're sort of, you know, obsessed with net zero, climate change isn't real, all this sort of stuff.

Whereas actually, so these voters, this

so where I've got a lot of sympathy with Clive is on the politics of this.

Labour, having rightly campaigned a lot on this in opposition, Fergel Sharkey leading that sort of great

water campaign, sewage campaign.

I don't, I know Steve Reid is doing stuff in relation to water, but it's one of those issues that is so complicated that, out with the kind of sloganising and the campaigning messages, very difficult to know what the government will actually do.

And it's also a classic one where the Treasury and Rachel Reeves and the kind of technocratic solution

is looking at a particular very narrow cost-benefit model.

So I remember I was the water minister, so I used to do this stuff for a year.

What would happen is

you'd say, well, look, you know, 85% of our beaches that are an adequate standard, for which read 15% have bits of poo floating around on them, right?

Then the Treasury says, yes, but it will cost, you know, tens of billions of pounds to clean them up.

And this number of people use those beaches a year, and this particular beach you're pointing out, you know, according to our figures, only gets 500 people going on it.

Yeah, right.

So this is something that...

is very typical of a problem in modern government, which is that narrow economic calculus of the sort that Treasury does on cost-benefit doesn't capture the fact that actually maybe the public would be prepared to pay quite a lot of money to not have poo floating around on their beaches.

And an economist saying, well, yes, but if only 400 people use the beach and the cost of cleaning up the beach is X million, then you're paying the sound,

is missing.

something really, really important about our values, about the kind of country we want to be.

And of course, looking at Europe, where they seem to be able to do this stuff, and Europeans seem to be prepared to pay and to manage it.

Yeah.

Well, I can remember back in the day when we were in government and Britain was in the European Union, that one of the things that we used to track on our famous grid

at a lower level of communication was regular updates about beach cleanliness.

And it...

people really it really mattered and i don't i think if an economist says only 400 people use that beach and 30 000 use that beach nobody cares They want to know that our waterways are clean, our beaches are clean, and that should be.

I talked yesterday about a national narrative.

That should be part of it.

So I think Clive may be wrong about the, you're saying he may be wrong about the solution, but that, his analysis is spot on.

And the politics of this are really, really powerful.

Thank you, Clive Lewis.

He's occasionally a controversial figure in the Labour Party, as some listeners will know.

Yeah, he's, I'd say, on the left, as they say.

He's on the left.

But he can be an extraordinary charismatic speaker.

Yeah, he's a very, very good.

He's a very, very good communicator.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's take a quick break.

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Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Alistair Campbell.

And with me, Rory Stewart.

Right, Simon from the Clink.

And we know The Clink.

These are inside prisons, restaurants that are run by

the prisoners.

The question is this.

How realistic is it to expect radical change following David Gork's sentencing review?

That's your hero, former Justice Secretary, is doing a sentence review for the government.

The government has been admirably progressive, says Simon, in its approach to justice with the appointment of people like Lord Timpson as prisons minister.

But what will it take to create a justice system that focuses much on rehabilitation as much as punishment?

And of course, Simon, what you won't know is that last night, Rory and I were at an event and David Gort was sitting there.

So was Nadeem Zahawi.

We were.

And it was for the wonderful charity run by David Dean, ex of Arsenal of Fame, called The Twinning Project, at which clubs, football clubs, train prisoners to become coaches.

And grantskeepers and other things, yeah.

Exactly.

They then, when they get out of prison, and there were four people who made these fabulous speeches last night about how their lives have been transformed transformed by this project.

So it was kind of, it was rehabilitation in action.

It was amazing.

And they've done research with Oxford University and it's very, very clear that prisoners engaging with football clubs has a really positive impact on their optimism, their mental health, their confidence that their life's going to be better when they're out of prison.

And the problem underlying this that you know, you've seen and that I saw a lot when I was working in the prisons minister is that

reoffending rates are 50%,

half of prisoners leave and reoffend.

In certain categories, it's up to nearly 60, 70% reoffending.

And as they were pointing out, the cost of keeping somebody in prison is more than paying for an Eaton school fee.

It's £50,000 a year.

So it's good for society, above all, that's the most important thing, victims of crime.

You don't want people reoffending, criminals coming out committing more crime.

We've got to be sympathetic towards the public.

But it's also true that we need to think about the interests of prisoners.

And it's a difficult thing to talk about, but it's a form of shared suffering.

Suffering the victim, but it's also true that prisoners are often, as I think we said before,

from very, very poor backgrounds.

You know, something like when I was the prisoners minister, I think 40% of prisoners had been in care compared to 2% of the general population.

That tells you something like 20 times as many as the general population.

Almost half of them have been in care as children.

Almost the same number have been excluded from school.

Nearly half had mental health issues.

And there's something, again, you know, this relates a little bit to your conversation about Clive Lewis, about the way the government counts things.

So one of the problems is there's very, very little government money to support charities working in prisons because the Treasury does this calculation where they say, unless you can do a randomized control trial proving exactly how much money you're saving through stopping reoffending and compare it to alternative treatments, et We won't support it.

It was interesting last night,

there were people from Lox of University and Greenwich University who had tracked and monitored the rehabilitative effects of this scheme.

And it was incredibly positive.

It's incredibly positive, but the government won't fund it.

And I've seen this again and again.

The clubs don't really fund it.

Well, that's really good.

Let me just finish on the government.

I went to the clubs because you'll understand the clubs.

I mean, just on the government, I think they're missing something really important, which is actually providing environments in prison which are safe, decent, clean, non-violent, where prisoners can begin to sort themselves out and think about getting jobs and sort out their mental health is good for the prisoners, good for the way that we run prisons, and it's good for society afterwards.

And the bar which the government's holding to this very narrow numerical bar is really foolish.

And the government should actually, even American prisons are much more imaginative and generous.

You know, they support in small ways because the charities will put up a lot of the money themselves, but they'll support in small ways, you know, dogs coming to prisons for prisoners to spend time with dogs, training courses, et cetera.

We're just not doing enough of this stuff.

And that brings us to the question to you, which is,

why on earth are the Premier League clubs not putting the money in?

To get this into 100 clubs, 100 prisons, all the prisons in the country, basically, would cost only £750,000 a year.

That's nothing for these clubs.

I know.

The reason we were at this event is because it was a fundraiser.

Why is a fundraiser?

Because they need money.

Why do they need money?

Because they don't get money from the government.

And I was genuinely shocked.

I've known about this scheme for ages and I've been involved in it at different places.

And some of the clubs do fund it.

Some of them, some of the bigger clubs do fund it.

And it's literally, it's such a tiny part of their budget.

But a lot of the clubs don't.

So the reason the money was being raised so that it's clubs who are currently part of the scheme is so that the charity can pay the clubs to be involved.

And I'm not, they're not paying to make a profit, but pay them for the coaches, for the kit, and all this sort of stuff.

And I just thought, God almighty.

So, but one of the kids for example, one of the young men who spoke, there's one guy from Lincoln who had really quite a long sentence.

And he talked so movingly about how he had developed as a person through discovering that he could do something, be respected for it.

And he's now a coach.

There's another guy there, who's now, he's now a coach, he's part of the coaching staff at Queen's Park Rangers through their relationship with Wormwood Scrubs.

So you just think, and look, I know, and I said, you know, when we were doing our thing, you and I spoke, and then Arsen Wenger and Ian Wright did a turn.

Alistair McGowan, the impersonator.

Be honest, Rory, how many of the football managers that he did did you recognise?

Very, very few.

Very few.

You got Klopp.

This was actually a nightmare evening for me and a perfect evening for Alistair because we're there, like with Arsen Wenger and Ian Wright.

and all these kind of amazing celebrities like Henry Winter and all these people there.

And I'm sitting there with my book, which I think was on the peasants' revolt.

Yeah, you were sitting reading a book over dinner, Roy.

I thought that was a bit budget.

Let me just finish with a sort of small tribute to David Dean.

I mean,

I turned up because this man, David Dean, who set up Premier League, was absolute central and arsenal,

has been a really good friend to me.

He's the most incredibly charming, caring person, sends me WhatsApps, go up for dinner.

But I suddenly realized I was in a room where 350 people were a good friend of David Dean.

He is an extraordinary charismatic individual.

I didn't realise, by the way, he said when he did his speech setting the evening up that he got the idea from one of our rest is colleagues, Robert Peston,

who set up speakers for schools, which I'm also on, because basically private schools don't struggle to get good speakers.

Robert set up speakers for schools for people to go into state schools.

And David Dean did loads.

And he said that he just got the bug and then thought maybe he could do this in prisons as well.

Because he was looking for a captive audience.

A captive audience, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But he's been to every prison in the country.

And some of them twice.

Every prisoner.

Well, over 100 prisons.

Yeah.

And so he's trying to get every prison linked to a football club so that some of the prisoners, as they end that, towards the end of their sentences, can train to be football coaches.

And we saw last night three guys, one woman, who are now.

leading completely different lives and it was just really really moving so no i think i think david's a great guy and uh

my God, Venga's in good shape.

Looking good, isn't he?

And he's

got to, we've got to get him on the show.

We have got to get him on the show, yeah.

Right, Paddy from Dublin, could you discuss and compare what is currently happening in the US with Mao's cultural revolution in China?

My mother actually asked me the same question.

So, my mother was, uh, and my father actually served in China during the cultural revolution.

He was the, he was our man in Shanghai during the cultural revolution.

And my mother noticed this.

It does feel a bit like that.

Yeah.

It is, you know, when they start talking about going after professors, going after the media, going after culture, going after words,

it's a sort of cultural revolution feeling, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely.

And also this idea that you can't really criticize.

I was talking to somebody the other day who has, and I don't know, you've been going backwards and forwards to the United States.

I've not been since we were there for the election.

But I wonder if I would get in.

You know, if you think about the things I say on the podcast about Trump, things I say on social media.

So I was talking to somebody who says the next time they're going, they're taking a burner phone because they've heard too many stories of their colleagues who are being taken to one side and the border control people are going through their phones to check whether they've said this or said that.

There was the story of these two German girls who were, I think they were in custody for over a week.

And it was because of stuff they had on their phone about Palestine.

Yeah, it's extraordinary, isn't it?

Because it's also a government that keeps, Trump's government keeps talking about free speech.

You cannot criticise Trump, but at the same time, you have to pretend that you're a great believer in free speech.

We really must get on to do this Vance series, because I do think he is a driver of more of this than we think.

I think Trump is a vessel in some of this stuff, and Vance is the driver.

So should we line up a bit?

Yeah, go on then.

Do you know, Roy, this is our 400th rest is not even counting leading.

We've now done 400.

I didn't know that, but one of our eagle-eyed listeners did.

So, Gemma, Trip Plus member, happy 400th episode, says Gemma.

What are your highlights and lowlights from the last few years of doing the podcast?

What have you learned?

Favorite moments?

Challenges along the way?

I was really, really naive when I came into this.

No.

Yeah.

You naive, Roy.

I can't believe it.

So you contacted me very kindly and Jordan.

to ask me if I'd come on this podcast with you.

I thought, you know, I'm going to do a podcast, be fun.

You know, we'll do five or six episodes.

I didn't really have any idea at all what this thing was.

I just thought it'd be funny to do what seemed to me like a few radio shows with you.

And it's now become this enormous thing.

And then final thing for me is I've been through a journey.

I honestly got a bit sort of miserable probably nine months ago because I thought, why in the end can I really keep on?

sort of making minor grumbles about Keir Starmer's government, you know, and Alistair's going to be a bit pro, and I'm going to be a bit ante and I'll be like, you know, I'm a bit underwhelmed by Bridget Phillipson's new education policy every week.

And since Trump's come in, it's a horrible thing to say, my

motivation's gone up.

I'm working much harder.

I'm doing far more research.

Yeah, I've noticed you've worked a bit harder than you used to.

No, it's true.

I'm absolutely loving it.

And the real privilege for me is that I literally get to spend two days calling the smartest people in the world and being educated about Ukraine or Poland or Taiwan or whatever it happens to be.

I mean, admittedly, they're saints and I don't know whether at some point they're going to tell me to bog off.

I started off exactly the same thing.

I thought at the start we'd do see how it went.

Had no plan, no real normally I like to strategise.

I didn't really have a strategy at all.

I liked when we stumbled upon disagree agreeably as a sort of motif.

And I think, Gemma, one of the things that surprised me is I think it has changed the way that I debate politics more generally.

I'm much less likely to fly off the handle than I used to be.

I mean, you know, I think if I'm in a studio with,

there are certain politicians I can still, you know, flare up very, very quickly.

But generally, I think that that has been interesting.

I've definitely changed.

And that may just be age.

I don't know.

I've also loved leading.

Really loved doing those interviews.

And even some of the quite obscure people.

This week we've got Attor Gawande out.

And you talked about, you know, in fact, he's interesting on USAID.

I also thought he was an extraordinary soul.

I mean, sometimes these people just are the most wonderful human beings.

I love the way he talked about how you have to say yes to everything until you're 40 and then no to everything after you're 40.

I loved the way that he talked about his own mission in life, that, you know, his vision of helping bring longer, better lives.

to people not just in the US but throughout the world and the way that everything he does from podcasts to documentaries to teaching kind So, often those leading interviews, not all of them, but often I come away thinking, oh, goodness, what an extraordinary person.

You know, yesterday I was doing

the comedian, Catherine Ryan, has a podcast about your real,

I don't know, you have to do a blood test, and then they tell her how old you really are inside your body.

I'm not allowed to reveal my real age

until the podcast's now.

So it was at Bower Media.

And on the way in, I was with somebody

Random House.

And on the way in, a woman stopped me and said, Oh, I've just been listening to your podcast.

Oh, that's nice.

Thank you very much, Talida.

And then walked up the stairs.

And the next person we met was literally listening to the podcast.

And I know you find it difficult.

One thing I've really noticed about you is you find it quite difficult when people confront you in public to say things about the podcast.

Having had quite a few years where most of my encounters in the street were quite unpleasant.

It's quite nice.

I quite like it.

Yeah, yeah.

So people should feel free.

Anyway, no, it's gone very, very well.

So there we are.

A huge thank you to the listeners and a huge thank you to everybody.

I mean, whether you're a member or whether you're not a member,

thank you because obviously this only works because of you, because the questions that you've put in.

And I'm going to finish with a final one from a Trip Plus member, Roger.

Very important but divisive question.

for Rory and Alister.

Do you eat chocolate digesters with the chocolate facing up or down?

Well, one of the most, one of the,

I was going to say, one of the most irritating Rory Stewart habits

is the fact that you are addicted to snacks.

And he's now holding up a, what is it, a Costa.

Costa Millionaire's shortbread.

A millionaire's shortbread.

I mean, it's...

Salted caramel and white chocolate drizzle.

It's only got about 30 ingredients, I'd say, on the back.

Okay, and how many of them have got the letter E?

Well, since we left the European Union, none of them.

Well, I think the reason for this question is is the chocolate digestive, I read this the other day, is 100 years old.

That's pretty impressive, isn't it?

Chocolate digestive.

And so I didn't even know this was a debate, but apparently it's a real debate.

Some people eat their chocolate digestive with the chocolate up.

Well, I obviously do it with the chocolate up.

Do you?

What?

What do you mean with the chocolate down?

You're crazy.

You don't want to see the chocolate?

No, well, I dunk it in tea.

I dunk it in tea and I just leave it long enough for the chocolate not to melt and for the biscuit not to break.

That's a skill that I've developed over the last 67 years.

That is a skill.

No, no, I definitely want to know.

I mean, remember, I've been listening to Gulliver's Travels, which, if people want an audiobook, I mean, it's amazing 18th century prose, but of course, famously, the big fight in Lily Put is about which end of the egg you break, which leads to basically thermonuclear war between these two kingdoms.

So, we've gone, we had a trivial question about biscuits, which you have taken us into thermonuclear war.

My last question, also pretty light this one.

Stephen Monroe, trip plus member, who I know, he's the man on the Coron Ferry in the Highlands, but it's a very funny question.

As a long time listener and trip plus member, I think it's interesting as the main parties move to the right, you guys seem to be moving further left.

Let's deal with that one first, then we'll go into the second part of his question.

Do you think you're moving to I think I am moving to the left a bit?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I I am basically, if I could get over Ed Davies' antics,

I'm becoming more and more kind of lib dem in my policies.

Look, I remain a conservative in the sense I, you know, all the stuff we talk about, tradition, army, king, landscape, so.

But I do think that fundamentally the problem I increasingly see in terms of social justice, inequality,

not really addressing poverty in our country, not really addressing the homeless, not really addressing prisoners.

And I would have loved to see a Labour government come in.

that put those things central.

It would have given me a sense of moral purpose and excitement.

And one of the reasons I'm a little underwhelmed, to be honest, is that it does feel a little bit kind of austerity-light

and not a million miles away from where Cameron's Conservatives were.

Well, I think on that, I think when people, this is what I think is going to be the fallout of the local elections.

As I said yesterday, I'm really worried that they're going to take the wrong message from the local elections.

I think the Labour government's got to be more labour,

not more anything else.

It's going to be more labour.

And more labour doesn't, for my money, I mean, you differ, but I mean, for me, that doesn't mean necessarily more trade unions.

No, it means, but it means more social justice.

It means more anti-poverty.

It means more fairness.

It means more education.

It means more.

More of a moral purpose.

Yeah.

You were telling me off last night being too idealistic, but we need a bit of idealism, right?

I love idealism, Roy.

I wasn't telling you off.

I was asked a question.

What was the question?

It was about whether you could ever make me prime minister.

And you were like, not a hope.

And I didn't say not a hope.

I just said that I said that I sometimes worry that your idealism gets in the way of your political trajectory.

That's what I said.

And I think you'd have to say that's

not necessarily a bad thing.

Anyway, the second half of the question to close on,

Stephen's question is, is there any chance, this is because we've now allegedly moved to the left, is there any chance of you both completing the centrist dad journey by campaigning for the Lib Dems at the next election?

An abseiling Alistair and a bungee jumping Rory would be box office.

Well, we're definitely happy to abseil and bungee jump, I think.

But not for the Lib Dems.

Of course, I remain concerned about the association of the Lib Dem brand with stunts.

YMCA stunts with strange biscuits in his hands, which is what David was doing last week.

What was he doing?

He was sort of singing along to YMCA while pulling out strange British biscuits and cakes and singing about Trump's tariffs and eating British.

And I just

still don't guess it.

I mean, the answer from the the Lib Dems is, again, you're being too idealistic.

It really works.

I am looking for a party that's going to appeal to my moral soul.

You're not going to get there by doing a YMCA digestive dialogue.

No, I'm not really into that.

I do get why he's doing it, though, because he's trying to get noticed.

But he has set himself out as

the big anti-Trump voice of the party leaders, hasn't he?

And that is clearly a deliberate strategic decision.

Is that sensible?

Very sensible, but the way to do it, I would argue, now is to tack to being anti-Trump by being serious.

Yeah.

Which is what actually in the end is Carney's genius.

We're talking in a day when Carney's just winning the Canadian election.

Yeah.

Carney did not make anti-Trump into a winning strategy by doing little YMCA dances.

He was serious.

So I think, right, here's a bit of free advice to Ed Davey.

I think a series of very serious, heavyweight speeches about the history of the transatlantic relationship.

Very good.

Thank you.

See you soon.

Bye-bye.