396. Question Time: It's over for Kemi Badenoch

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Welcome to the Rest is Politics Politics Question Time with me, Alistair Campbell.

And with me, Rory Stewart.

And first question for you from one of our very favourite countries, which is Australia.

Tom says, what on earth is going on on the Australian election?

And Alastair, in particular, are your predictions on Dutton's faltering performance being vindicated?

Well, of course, you're the master of election predictions, Rory, you know, you who put a large sum of money on Kamal Harris.

I'm not a betting person, but if I were a betting person, I would put my money on Albanese right now, because I don't think Dutton is fighting a good campaign.

And by the way, we should tell listeners that all being well, our next guest on leading will be Mr.

Albanese.

Mr.

Albanese, the Prime Minister of Australia.

Unbelievable.

Congratulations.

That's amazing to get the Australian Prime Minister right in the middle of an election campaign.

Yeah, but

I think we have a lot of listeners out there.

He wouldn't be doing it for the good of his health.

I think he's fighting a pretty good campaign.

I listened to an interview he did with Letika Burke, who's somebody who knows Britain and Australia very, very well.

And actually her first question was, you seem a lot more confident than you were last time, in the last campaign.

And I wonder if that is because he's sort of feeling the Dutton balloon

slightly bursting.

So what is it that Dutton's done wrong?

So we've seen people saying that his anti-woke drive hasn't worked out.

There's been a certain amount on his pitch somehow being out of date, that he's sounding too Trumpian.

What's your basic take on what he's doing wrong?

I mean, possibly a bit unfairly.

He's being allied very closely to Trump and he's trying to get away.

And the more he tries to get away, the harder it's getting.

He wasn't helped by

one of his candidates talking about making Australia great again.

And he was standing in the back room wincing as she said it.

But also this working from home thing, I think he just thought that as part of the sort of Trumpian and anti-woke so-called agenda, saying there'd be a big crackdown on working from home would go down really well.

It went down really, really badly.

There's a new thing that's developed today.

The big story today is about

Russia doing some sort of defense deal with Indonesia, which Dutton is trying to get up as a sort of, you know, labor week on security.

But it felt a bit desperate, to be honest.

The next debate.

uh is happening i think on wednesday but it's feeling it's look a long way to go but it's feeling that Dutton's just not really cutting through in the way that he probably wanted to.

And I think, I think some of his MPs are starting, candidates are starting to say there wasn't really a very strong plan.

Part of the problem seems to be that he had some strong plans, you know, like the stuff from working from home, but that he dropped them.

And do quick things.

There's a guy called Kos Samaras, who I follow a bit on polling in Australia, who said that the big difference is emerging in housing policy.

and that Labour is targeting individuals who struggle to save for a deposit, middle-urban middle areas, regional Australia.

But the weakness is that this is an electorate that doesn't believe that the government will build the promised homes.

And in contrast, the coalition is focusing on outer suburban communities,

particularly resonate with the Indian Australian diaspora and people who favour new home ownership in those areas, but may not resonate with the Balkan renters.

Anyway, that was a sort of kind of detail around housing policy, but it's sort of a bigger question for you, which I think relates to a question that we've just got from Will, which is, is Kemi Badenock right not to have any policies?

And maybe a bit unfair to Kemi Badenock, but it sort of relates to this Dutton point, which is that in the modern world,

there seems to be a real problem with announcing too many policies.

Because as soon as you announce a policy, people attack you and you frequently feel...

inclined to backtrack on it.

You could argue that Labour to some extent won the British election without putting out too many policies and without seeming largely relying on, I don't know, the Conservatives just seeming hopeless and useless and everybody wanted to get rid of them.

But the reason the question to Kemi I wanted to pose is

she's presumably between a rock and a hard place.

On the one hand, she could think, okay, I don't want to put out too many policies because I'm going to be attacked for them.

On the other hand, if she doesn't say anything, she's going to lose momentum, reform is going to develop, labor will develop, and she'll become almost invisible.

Over, do you you want that?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a bit harsh to expect her to be putting out policy on the same level as somebody like Dutton who's right in the middle of an election campaign and wants to be prime minister on May the 4th.

She's got a while to go if she gets there.

I think at her stage in opposition,

you need policy.

But more than that, you need policy argument and you need a story that you're telling the country about yourself, about your party party and about the country.

And my sense of her is that the story that she's telling is very locked in that sort of right-wing media ecosphere.

And I'm just not sure the public are listening to it.

So like, I'd be very hard pressed.

And I'm somebody who, you know, like you follows this stuff fairly closely.

I can't really think of anything that she has said or done that has made a lasting positive impression upon me.

I could look at Dutton, who I don't think is having a good campaign, but I have seen him.

For example, I've seen him sometimes in the Australian Parliament being really strong and really quite powerful in the way that he speaks.

And I've seen him say stuff about defence and foreign policy.

And I thought, oh, yeah, he's kind of thought about this.

I really don't quite get where she's going.

And of course, she's up against...

Farage, who gets away with murder, partly because of the media.

I see he was on the Laura Koonsberg show again.

He'll doubtless be on question time next week.

He sort of gets an easy ride from the media, but he also gets an easy ride from his opponents.

You know, Labour and the Tories don't seem to me to have worked out what is the best way to attack reform.

And that means that he just sort of floats from one talking point to the next.

So I don't think it's about policy for her.

I think it's about overall big picture strategy and what's the story she's trying to tell about the country.

Farage does have a story about the country.

Basically, he says it's wrecked and it's terrible and everything is awful and put me in charge and it will be fine.

That's his basic story.

And he's allowed to get away with it.

Okay, so Alison, just to try and get our heads around, because this is, I guess, central to what Bade Knock's going to be thinking about, but politicians all around the world think about,

which is

you could have a sort of completely novel economic analysis of how you transform British growth.

But nobody's got that, right?

There's no economist that anyone's got in their back pocket who has some brilliant new analysis of the country.

You could be a really strong House of Commons performer and I guess you also, we keep coming back to New Labour and what you guys did in opposition and how you got yourselves in a position by 97 to win.

Part of that is that Tony Blair was a very good House of Commons performer.

So presumably, unlike Kemi Bedenock, he was getting quite a lot of good press for how he was performing at Prime Minister's questions.

We're also told, but maybe this is ridiculous, that

this big speech on tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime was an example of how he managed to find a way of seizing the national narrative.

I mean, can you just make the case for if you were looking at New Labour coming in and applying to Bay Knock, what sort of things were you doing 94 to 97 that Bay Knock should be thinking about doing now and she isn't doing?

Analysing where they've gone wrong.

I think we did a lot of that.

Working out

how she can insert herself into the national conversation in a way that's interesting rather than predictable.

I'd say when I see her at question time, and I do, I agree with you.

I think question time, I think when you're the leader of the opposition, question time is incredibly important because it's, you know, even though it's not that millions of people watch it, but it sort of somehow feeds into the national conversation about whether you're doing well, whether you're doing badly.

And generally, Tony, most weeks, people thought he was pretty good.

I think with her, she's predictable

in that the subjects that she goes on are the subjects you might expect her to, but they often, it feels to me, don't speak to a bigger narrative that she's trying to develop.

I just have no idea about what she's trying to say about the country.

So when you say tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime, that was a message about an issue that people really cared about and it was a framing.

It was a framing.

What has she framed?

What argument has she framed?

And then if I look at what she, you know, the thing we didn't have in our day of the whole social media thing, I look at her social media and the Conservative social media, and again, I don't understand what they're trying to do with it.

They're just attacking Labour all the time.

Well, that's fine.

You've got to attack the opposition or the government.

But I just don't know what the story is.

Well, so final thing, you're being surprisingly polite, but let me ask you more bluntly and to be more outspoken.

Do you think she's going to be here?

at the time of the next election?

No, I don't.

I don't.

I think the Conservatives will look the Conservatives.

Look, I don't know

a lot of the ones that I know have kind of gone.

They've vanished.

But the Conservative Party generally is pretty ruthless and brutal about its leaders.

And I was talking to a Labour MP the other day who said it's really interesting watching the Tories during PMQs.

They started off thinking Keir wouldn't be very good at it and he's got better.

And they say that when she's on her feet, they look just a little bit soulless and lost.

Now, she will feel that.

If she's got any empathy at all, which I'm sure she has, she will feel that.

She won't survive unless she finds a compelling narrative about who she is, how she relates to the party she leads, and how that relates to the country.

Until she gets that, she's not going to break through at all.

Very good.

Okay, now we have a question on Labour and the trade unions.

The trade union movement.

Mel, Alistair, you often mention Labour's role in the trade union movement.

Can you tell us a bit more about it and how you see the relationship evolving today?

And I guess also, Captain Kushnan, given the Birmingham BIN strikers have rejected another offer, is there a government override to end a strike?

Some complaints from Birmingham that we were not serious enough about what this bin thing means.

Can we just explain to listeners, particularly international listeners, just how...

bad many people in Birmingham feel things have got.

Yeah, although there were two Birmingham people on on the radio this morning say they were fed up of everybody saying that everywhere you go at Birbie all you see is rubbish because actually it's being one of the interviewees actually said it's the bags are being piled up very nicely.

Come to Birmingham.

The bags are piled up nicely.

No, this is a strike over changes to working conditions, job descriptions, which the unions say means that some of their members are going to be thousands of pounds worse off over a year.

They've had another ballot and they've voted to continue the strike.

The government wants the

benzoft cleared up.

So it's a pretty grim situation.

I mean, Labour and the Unions is a really interesting story this.

I actually wonder if at some point we shouldn't, we keep promising these mini-series and we're going to do, we're going to be doing one hopefully not too long on J.D.

Vance, but I wonder whether at some point there isn't one to be done on Labour and the Unions, because it's a story that's more interesting than

the caricature.

I mean, the Labour Party essentially was formed and funded in part by the trade union movement around about 1900.

And membership, so today

there are something like 6.5 million trade union members, or that was 2023, the last sort of reliable figures.

The peak, you won't be surprised the year that trade union membership peaked, it was 1979,

13.2 million.

So that was the year that Margaret Thatcher was elected.

And the decline since then, then, interestingly, most of the decline has been in the private sector.

Public sector union membership is still pretty high.

And the other thing is,

partly because of Thatcher and because of the power of the Thatcher myth, which I think a lot of it is, and also the fact that she did, there's no doubt she did bring the trade unions down.

And also the fact that most of our media framing about the trade unions is very negative.

It's still very negative.

But it overlooks the fact that historically,

and particularly, I would argue during the Second World War, the unions were very, very popular.

Union membership soared during the war, and I think a lot of the reason for that was: we all know about Ni Bevan, who created the National Health Service, but Ernest Bevin,

who was this amazing guy born in the early 1880s,

orphaned at eight,

no next to no formal education, started work at 11.

And by 1922, so he would have been his, what's 1922, he'd been about 30 odd.

So by 1922, he'd basically created and was running the Transport and General Workers Union, which became the biggest union in the country.

And which is connected to the Birmingham bin strikes, right?

This is the Birmingham bin strikes.

Well, this is Unite.

Which is the descendant.

Exactly.

So the TNG no longer exists.

Yeah, it's the child of Ernie Bevan's union.

I think he'd have sorted it by now.

But the big thing was that during the inter-war years,

even though he was not in Parliament, he was a big figure in the Labour Party.

In fact,

there is an argument that he was responsible for Attlee because he made this amazing speech at the Labour Party conference that

essentially led to Attlee replacing George Lansbury as leader of the Labour Party.

But then come the war, Churchill clearly recognised something very, very special in Ernie Bevin.

And he put him in in the cabinet essentially in charge of turning Britain into a war economy and he did it very very well

and so and that's when trade union membership doubled so you had a union leader the leader of the TNG in the cabinet big part of the industrial war effort this leads us to the the disagreement that we had this fractious disagreement last week about the composition of parliament and i was trying to use ernie bevin as a classic example of this incredible foreign secretary who came in older actually you've just pointed out older than I realized at the time.

I mean, he's almost 70 when he's coming into that job, and proved to be this incredible Foreign Secretary, replacing the sort of moustache-twirling Anthony Eden and demonstrating that he was incredibly good at managing the Russians, managing the Americans.

And I was setting up this story that in the good old days,

instead of having a bunch of people whose parents were politicians and a bunch of political professionals, we had these amazing trade union legends that gave Labour this incredible confidence and presence in the House of Commons that was lacking.

And you then came back to me to say this was all complete nonsense and all your friends who are Labour MPs have been rioting since.

They weren't rioting, but

no, because coincidentally,

I was asked to go and talk to lots of people who work for Labour MPs.

young researchers and what have you.

And so I was asking lots of them about the background.

And somebody's done a thing using AI, which says that something like 22% of Labour MPs have what he defines as very political parents.

I don't know what the very political parent means, but the ones that I talked to, very few were children of MPs.

Some were children of councillors.

But I think yours was a bit of a caricature, Roy.

Yeah, Samuel Colvin, who's one of our members, in response to the rest of this politics discussion, politicians, political parents, spent a couple of hours using pydantic AI to extract political relatives from Wikipedia pages for UK MPs.

23% of UK MPs have political parents, 66% more than the general population.

No, I think it means 66 times more.

Sorry, 66 times.

66 times more than the general population.

Yeah.

IPPR has also done some really good stuff on this.

What they've pointed out is that Parliament's become much more diverse in terms of far more women.

So I think it's now 35% of parliament are female, more diverse, 10% from minority ethnic backgrounds.

Both those are lower than the general population, but it's getting up there.

Big transformation in sexuality.

But when it comes to people from working class backgrounds, there have been a couple of different studies.

Oliver Heath, 1964, 20%

of Parliament was working class, now 5%.

And in 64, that was when the general population was 50%.

It was 20%.

It's now 5% compared to 25%.

We got a lot of pushback on this as well, because what's your definition of working class then and now?

So IPPR defines working class as manufacturing or manual backgrounds or unskilled service work, for example, care work, or trade union employees who came from the working parts of the trade union.

And on those metrics, they say that in 1987, 28%

came from working class occupations.

Today, 13% come from working class occupations.

So the big discrepancy, the way in which Parliament doesn't represent the general population, is no longer in terms of women, no longer in terms of diversity.

It's increasingly in terms of two things.

Far fewer people from working class professions and far more university graduates.

There are in fact more university graduates than the Labour Party than the Conservative Party.

In part, that's because there are more university graduates and also there are fewer traditional working class jobs.

But IPPR sets up that.

So it compares to the general population.

So, you know, 34% of the general population go to university, 89% of MPs.

And when it comes to working class occupations, again, the number of working class occupations to the country has come down, but it hasn't come down anything like as steeply as the number of MPs from working class backgrounds.

I think it's partly though that class has changed.

I think our understanding of what class means has changed.

So, for example, you know, if you're a university student working in a bar and then you end up going into the gig economy for a while, we used to have a much clearer sense of what working class was.

And I'm not sure now that, I mean, I agree with you, more than more Labour MPs are now educated at a degree level than would have been the case in Ernie Bevan's time.

And I also agree, by the way, that we could do with a few more Ernie Bevans.

But the other point you made last week is there aren't so many characters then, and now as then.

I think people like, you know, it's rare that you get somebody as special as he was and who was clearly so capable.

And I think, by the way, you could make the case that in part because of Attlee as the deputy prime minister in the war cabinet and Bevin doing the job that he did, I think it was partly because of that and the country getting used to them as figures of government.

that

helped lead to the landslide that they got in 1945, which included then the implementation of the Beveridge Report, which was in the, I think came out in 1942.

So he was a transformational figure.

I mean, just to close off the sort of brief history of Labour and the unions,

the first really big falling out was when Wilson was Prime Minister, and that was over Barbara Castle's famous white paper on industrial relations in place of strife, when the unions ultimately forced the government to back down.

And then the winter of discontent and the social contract, which the Tories, you know, the winter of discontent, they still talk about because that was, if you imagine the bin strike in Birmingham, but that sort of thing happening all over the country.

But what I think is interesting about the way that Bevin did it, he tried in as a wartime leader, tried to bring business and unions together.

And Tony, when Tony was prime minister, I think that was his approach, trying to not like the Germans with the kind of you know the whole tripart economic structure, but trying to get better relations between business and unions.

And I think them when they feel that there are opposite sides of every argument, then I think your economy is likely to be less efficient.

But anyway, we should maybe revisit this because I do think there are some fascinating characters and stories going way back.

And of course, you know, when I was growing up, these trade union leaders, they were household names.

So just as we go to the break, I mean, Joe Keenan.

As someone who looks at becoming a politician but works odd hours and is very much part of the gig economy, do you think part of the problem in entering politics is the amount of unpaid work and time that's required by local branches of parties.

Absolutely, this is the other thing we don't, we're not honest with the public about.

To win a marginal seat now, you basically need to be full-time in that seat for two years before the election.

That means leaving your job, moving to that constituency, screws up your mortgage.

If you are not employed by your professional, right, if you're not a SPAD with your party, if you're not a comms person with your party, or if you don't have a private income and a family supporting you, how on earth are are you supposed to do it yeah you know how on earth is somebody from a genuinely working class background supposed to find the money to spend two years completely without an income working full-time on trying to win a marginal seat

and and that's what the trade unions used to do they used to pay people's salaries to help them get into parliament yeah last time around you had organizations like labor together who were supporting certain mps and the trade unions still do have try to help mps but you know that's a fair point but joe don't let it get you down do it find a way.

You can do it.

Get stuck in.

I'm assuming now that you're a kind of modernising Labour person who wants to

help the Labour Party.

Let's have a break.

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Welcome back to the Resistance Policy Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

And me, Rory Stewart.

Here's a nice, polite, friendly question.

Rory, Ross Martin.

Do you two represent the failed old politics of the past that's enabled the rise of populism by not allowing enough political bandwidth in an essentially two-party winner-takes-all system?

Huh, take that.

Ooh.

Well, good chance to plug our leading interview with Ezra Klein, which is doing very, very well.

Because Ezra Klein formulates it as people from the centre, like you and me, have fallen into the trap when he's being rude.

He says that the trap is that the centre-left end up defending the government even when it's indefensible,

and the far right end up always attacking the government, regardless.

And that this is actually the basic dynamics of politics.

So I guess the there are bigger things we can say about how we screwed up, right?

2008 financial crisis, Iraq and and Afghanistan, horrifying wars,

the sense of

so many economic problems that are leaving people online.

But perhaps more fundamentally, the risk is that we got into a habit of always saying, oh, you can't do that.

You know, that's too risky.

That's, you know, not in accordance with the law.

We can't do the process.

And every time anyone said, this is ridiculous, the government's screwing up,

the default is to spring to defence.

I mean, Ross, when you say the failed old politics of the past, I worry, I worry that what you're saying in that is that actually democracy has failed.

And that's why I have a really big worry that that's what's happening in America right now.

That essentially what the Trump people say the whole time is everything's broken.

The Democrats feel they have to defend the institutions.

And it's the institutions like the courts and the rule of law and a free media, they come to represent, in Trump's eyes and his followers, the failed old politics of the past.

And I worry there's too much of that in our politics at the moment as well.

So if you're saying that politics has failed, you're basically saying democracies fail, because I would argue that the democracies have done better in terms of delivering prosperity for an opportunity for people than the dictatorships.

But if we're not careful, that is the road that we go down.

And the other thing I think that you mentioned Ezra Klein there, Rory.

The other thing I was really struck by in the interview with him, he was great and he's such a clever guy, but he was making the point in a way that most politicians can't make the point because it sounds like you're saying people are stupid.

But he made the point that actually we are, as people, becoming more stupid.

We are becoming less curious.

We are becoming less able and willing to use our powers of reason to think beyond an instant reaction to anything.

And I mentioned that piece that David Brooks had written in the New York Times.

It was the data backs that up.

You know, when you look at exam results in America and you look at people's ability to do, maybe this is why Trump's obsessed with his cognitive test.

Because the thing about Trump is you usually have to, you know, whatever he's saying is the opposite of what he actually thinks.

So he's saying, I'm really clever, I passed this cognitive test.

Maybe he's worried about his computer skills deep down.

But no, so I don't think we represent the fair old politics of the past.

I think we represent a different generation.

And we need a new generation to come along and devise the new politics of the future, but don't throw out democracy in the process.

Very good.

Okay, Tat Kiran B.

This might be a bit basic, but how important is a party's colour for its perception?

Ah, well, Rory, do you know why my book, the book I wrote for kids, do you know why the colour was pink?

No, why was it pink?

Because the publisher didn't want it to be red, because that would be too labour, and they wanted it to be unbiased.

And pink is the only major colour that's never been used by a political party.

Ah, so there you go.

Very good.

I think the important, I think the, I think the the colour's important.

I think Labour being red is important.

And I hate the fact that in America it's the Republicans that share the same colour.

And red's important because it is revolution, it's socialism, it's...

Yeah,

it feels passionate.

It feels passionate.

Red feels passionate to me.

Blue feels sort of dull and safe and conservative.

So that's why it works for the conservatives.

Green feels green.

And how about black?

What would you think about a party that was using black?

Well, like the Christian Democrats in Germany.

I wouldn't go for black.

I don't like black.

Does it not feel a bit kind of extremist, black?

Or am I getting something wrong?

Yeah, it does.

No, it does.

It's like we see a lot of football hooligans, you know, the ultras that get together, they all wear black.

It looks a bit scary.

When they wear white, they look quite sort of lively and nice and friendly.

Do you think yellow might be...

Isn't that a bit of a problem for the Lib Dems that it might come across a bit sort of wet?

And yellow is traditionally associated with cowardice isn't it yeah but yellow is more smp yellow and black and and the lib dems are more orange

okay

the trouble is there are there aren't that many colours i think i think more important is the is the design and the style around it but no i think i think red is you you probably won't be surprised to hear this really i think red is the best political colour

Well, it really, this stuff really, really matters less in the United Kingdom, but in many, many developing countries where many of the key voters in rural areas are not literate.

Yeah.

The question of colours, the question of your slogan, the way that that's presented on the ballot paper, if you can't read the name of the party candidate, really matters.

And one of the things we've seen in electoral chicanery stealing elections around the world is changing the rules on how you display symbols and colours on the ballot paper can have a huge impact.

What's your favourite colour?

I've never asked you that question.

Oh, thank you.

Oh,

I like dark blue.

There we are.

You see, I'm a Tory.

It's been proved.

Been proved.

I like claret.

See, my favourite colour is claret because of Burnley, but my favourite personal colour is definitely red.

Apart from Burnley.

Look at me at the moment.

I'm in dark blue from head to toe.

It's literally nothing that's a dark black.

With a branding logo.

Right.

Finally, Rory.

Sandra Stevens, you've not done book recommendations in a while.

What have you read or reread?

That's Rory, that you enjoyed.

We did actually, I was rather, if you've listened to Ezra Klein, I hope people understood my last question.

What he give us three book recommendations, because that's what he does at the end of his podcasts.

So what have I read recently?

One of them I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I think it was, and that is this book here, Israel Le Piège de l'Istoire, that Jer Arro, I hope an English publisher translates it because it's really, really good book about if you want to understand Israel from the perspective of a European diplomat who's who's worked there and tried to be fair to both sides, it's a really good read.

We've got coming up on,

would I have read this anyway?

I might have done, but we've got coming up soon on Leading Jonathan Haidt, who's written this brilliant book, The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

And it's one of those books that did convince me.

It moved me in the way I think about this stuff.

because it's just so well written, so clearly written, the data backs it up.

So when that interview comes up, I hope people enjoy it.

And my third one is a book that actually was dropped off for me by a fellow swimmer who's Scottish but lives in Australia.

And she knew that I swam at the

Lido around the corner.

And she'd left a book for me called Going Under.

She's called Shana Smith.

And it's a very, very, very powerful account of her descent into alcoholism and

her recovery.

And there'll be lots of recovery books, but hers is really good, mainly because she uses diaries from, as it were, you know, all the different stages of her life.

So

there's three for you.

What about you?

Very good.

A couple for me then.

New book coming out by John Gantz called When the Clock Broke, Conmen Conspiracists and the Road to Trump's America.

He basically argues that a lot of the stuff that we're seeing now really begins in the beginning of the 90s.

We've talked about this kind of Newt Gingrich, Polarization America, but also the way in which Reagan...

The Thatcher-Reagan Revolution.

Thatcher-Reagan Revolution.

That's right.

So he's absolutely with you on that, with you and your friend John MacDonald and Jeremy on that.

He's, you know, he very much

finds the story in the 1990s and the beginnings of America's collapse back at that period.

The other book, which I didn't talk about enough when we did our Greenland stuff, is one of my favorite books in the world, which is called An African in Greenland by Tete Michel Compassy.

And he's from Togo.

And it's just absolutely astonishing.

This is a book written

in the 1950s.

Tete grows up.

His dad is a small-time employee in the local electricity company, but at home he's like this sort of grand patriarch and he has different wives and different huts around his own larger hut.

And each month he invites a different wife in to feed him delicious food.

Is this in Africa?

This is all in Africa before he goes to Greenland.

So what happens is Tete gets ill as a little boy and his dad is like, don't worry, I've got this.

And he comes out and he starts ripping a chicken to pieces and doing a voodoo dance.

And Tete's mother, who's this very sort of put-upon junior wife, suddenly loses it with the dad and says, you are a total idiot.

You have no idea what you're doing.

I want my son to see a doctor.

And this is the beginning of Tete's break with his father and his decision to go off to Greenland.

So he arrives, not in the Greenland of today, but in the Greenland of the 1950s, right?

As an African.

And he basically hitchhikes across Europe.

Yeah, he basically hitchhikes his way across Europe.

And then he finds himself, obviously, in a pretty unique position because nobody in Greenland had ever seen an African before.

So it is the most incredible travel book because you have the perspective of somebody who's grown up on the edge of...

literally on the edge of the jungle in a very, very traditional polygamous society in Togo, suddenly looking at this, the extremity of northern Europe.

That sounds brilliant.

It also sounds like a really good film.

Talking to Greenland, Rory, I was going to mention this on the main podcast, but I thought I'd probably rant and rave about Trump and Vance enough.

How pathetic was it that the woman who runs the American military base in Greenland has been sacked because she sent an email after J.D.

Vance's visit to Greenland?

And I've got it here.

She said this.

I've spent the weekend thinking about Friday's visit, the actions taken, the words spoken, how it must have affected each of you.

I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is the concerns of the US administration discussed by Vice President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pitofik's space base.

In other words, she doesn't agree that Denmark is a heap of shite, which is what he said.

Words to that effect.

So she's been sacked.

This is the country of free speech, these are the people of free speech who now want to shut down CBS because 60 Minutes did an item that Trumpy Wumpy didn't like.

Oh,

God.

Right.

Well, on that cheerful note, farewell.

Let's have a speak soon.

See you soon.