455. Question Time: Is Europe Already At War With Russia?

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Well we have done a deep dive on immigration for the members channel.

And we've got some very different voices.

We've got Zoe Gardner who is, I guess we would say, on the liberal side of immigration.

Probably actually, she contributed a video, which she sent in.

She's a listener, and I think she had a lot of popular support from a lot of our members and listeners, who broadly sympathise with her much more open, liberal attitude.

And then we had, I think, this really interesting, challenging voice, Gerald Canels, of who, over to you.

Well, Gerald, who's written a book about immigration and who regular listeners will have heard on Friday talking about the rise of the AFD, but he's somebody who's absolutely devoted the last couple of decades of his life to studying immigration and immigration policy.

They've got a different take.

They're both really passionate, really interesting, both got different sorts of insights.

And I think this is, as you said on the podcast last week, this is one of the debates of our time.

And really relevant for the whole world.

I mean, we'll get on in this question time to talking a little bit about Moldova, Czech Republic, the Netherlands, where immigration are huge issues.

But of course, one of the things that's interesting about the debate is that Gerald and Zoe very much root it in Britain.

What should Kirsama be doing?

What is Farage proposing?

How do we think about these issues?

How do we deal with them?

Yep.

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The fact of the matter is, we depend on immigration.

But that's not necessarily a reason not to have a cab.

If people have a safe pathway to reach the UK, they don't get on the boats.

You need a way of controlling borders that does not end up going down the Orban route, the Trump route, or the Gaza Ridge.

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You'll also enjoy complete ad-free listening, early access to question time episodes, members-only mini-series like the one we did on JD Vance, deep dives, and much more.

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Ry Rory, we had a lot of questions on the back of our discussion last week about Moldova.

And here's one from Tilly Abrahams.

Wants to know our predictions for the Czech election, which is at the end of this week.

As with Moldova, says Tilly, this feels like another significant event to test if the people will continue to resist Putin.

What are your thoughts?

Well, I was very, very happy about the result in Moldova.

Yeah, so often actually, I think we want to remember to update people on these issues that we raise.

So what we did last week is to talk about the fact that the Moldovan election was very tight.

There was huge evidence of Russian interference.

And indeed, a lot of the things that we predicted might happen did happen.

There were indeed bomb scares at polling stations around Europe, even one in the United States, because Moldovans living outside Moldova are really important in the vote.

We've talked in the podcast before about Moldova's very unique positions, right there between Romania and Ukraine, and there's this territory called Transnistria, which is a Russian satellite which has broken away.

And Maya Sandu, who was a World Bank official who came back to become the prime minister.

And she's a really interesting figure, maybe a little bit reminiscent of the Georgian president that we interviewed.

Little bit, you know, when you hear World Bank official coming back, does it feel a bit sort of 90s technocrat or a bit like Mario Monti taking over Italy?

But she's been a miracle.

She won an absolute majority, set up her own party, won with that party, has now won a referendum for joining the EU, won a majority again, and

it's really good news for Europe.

Yeah, and I've done some stuff with her before, and she's I find her very impressive.

I think it's really terrifying to be the leader of a country like Moldova right now.

Population around 2 million, on the border of Ukraine, absolutely on the list of countries that Putin would like to have within his sphero orbit.

And what we talked about last week, we said that the poll suggested it was going to be very, very, very, very close.

She got over 50% of the vote and the block of three parties that was second got just over half of that.

About 25%.

Yeah.

Turnout, though,

they were celebrating the fact that the turnout was higher than before, but it's still only 52%,

which is low.

Very low.

And there was a lot of problem accessing these polling stations.

Of course, the pro-Russian side was saying that they were prevented from accessing the polling stations.

And of course, the pro-European side was saying, well, one of the reasons why you had to get from the Transnistrian border and then travel 20 kilometers to get to a polling station is they were worried about disruption on the other side.

Just as we transitioned to the Czech Republic, it's something that maybe in Britain, because we're a little bit further away from the front line, we forget how in Moldova and as we're about to discover when we discuss the Czech election, how for countries in Central Eastern Europe, Ukraine defines so much.

In this case, of course, it's all about Ukraine.

Her economy is barely moving.

She's been hit by these terrible energy price spikes because Russia controls her energy.

And yet she's won.

So the normal story would be, well, technocrat, World Bank, cost of living bad, energy bad.

She's going to be booted out by the populace.

And that, as we transition to the Czech Republic, is broadly the soaring of the Czech Republic.

So all my friends who are kind of educated university professors and journalists in the Czech Republic will say basically about the last four years of the Czech government, the sort of things that one might be tempted to say if one was defending Kiostama, which is really good on foreign policy, serious people, but unfortunately have a real problem communicating.

And they've had a tough time with costs of living and energy prices in the Ukraine war.

So this is Peter Fiala, the Kiostama figure that you're talking about, and he's up against Ballis, who

has been prime minister before.

I wonder whether the Moldova election will have a bit of an impact on this, because I get the sense, and this may be wishful thinking, but I get the sense that the sense of Russia being related to these populist parties of right and left, I think is out there.

Maybe not yet in the UK, as out there as it should be, but it's getting there.

And so we'll see what happens in the Czech Republic because the reason why Europe is watching this so closely is because if the pro-Russian, the more pro-Russian candidate gets in, then you have this little this little grouping of FICO in Slovakia, Orban, who for leader of a country of five million, we talk about an awful lot this podcast, for very good reason, by the way, and then and then Babis, and you've got a little kind of eastern bloc that is, frankly, you know

tending to act as a break on what the european union is trying to do so yet again this is this is essentially uh within with all the domestic stuff going on there is also this battle between europe and russia and this is a kind of bit of a proxy vote yeah the czech tradition since the fall of the berlin wall has been two totally separate traditions that the one that that listeners will be very familiar with is the tradition of vast habel who was president for 13 years extraordinary writer, dissident, and who really was a visionary in international affairs, helped to bring the Baltic countries into the European Union.

Czech Republic very much performing at a much bigger scale, you know, extraordinary for quite a small country that it was really shifting the world.

And then there was an alternative nativist tradition represented by a guy called Vastlav Klaus, who I think you would have dealt with when you were in government.

And we have this kind of playing out again.

You know, yet again, we've got a president who's a sort of rather respectable senior figure who gives speeches at Harvard.

We've got a prime minister who's been there for four years, who was a head of a big university and wears a very formal suit all the time and gets huge respect for what he did standing up to Russia because the Czech Republic was very, very quick to sign up.

to the Ukraine war, to production of drones.

A lot of his party's policy is about investing in defense,

clear funding for the Czech army.

And then against him, again, an oligarch, basically, or maybe an oligarch is a strange way of putting it, a multi-billionaire.

It's a man worth approximately $4 billion.

That will put him in probably the top thousand wealthiest men in the entire world.

That's putting him into the level of the big, big American guys.

I mean, slightly below the level of Elon Musk, but well up.

And below Trump since his second term.

Below Trump since second term.

And Trump's granddaughter, who's now advertising her wares in the White House.

Colossal, unimaginable amount of money.

He's a guy who has now started appearing at conferences with Orban.

As you say, people like Anne Applebaum, who we envied on the podcast, when we spoke to her, picked him out as somebody who's very much a fellow traveller now of Russia.

And I suppose the final thing, as I come back to you, is this story that Fiona Hill, who we envied on leading, has now really been pushing, which is say we are basically now at war with Russia.

And we've seen that with drones going into Denmark, we've seen that with incursions into Poland, we've seen this with incursions into the Baltic, and we've seen it with this electoral interference which has gone Moldova, Romania, etc.

Any final thoughts on that one?

Well just on that the

I mean the disinformation and misinformation in this election is off the scale.

Conspiracy theories abounding, real attempt not necessarily just to undermine the other candidates but also to basically try to undermine the institutions.

And there was one report that said that fake news, fake news outlets controlled by Russia, were producing more content within the Czech current debate than the entirety of the Czech conventional mainstream media.

Now, it doesn't seem to have worked in Moldova, so we'll just see whether it works here.

I'm actually reading this amazing book at the moment.

I've nearly finished it.

Quite short.

It's called Ven Uslant Gavint.

What if Russia wins?

And it's written by this, he's actually a lecturer in international politics at

the Bundeswehr University of Munich.

And it's half geopolitics and half half novel.

Essentially what happens is Ukraine is forced to make peace at this peace conference in Geneva.

Not implausible.

Not at all implausible.

And it's forced to make peace because a lot of the European countries and America basically think we can't just keep doing this.

Zelensky has to go.

Zelensky goes.

Not implausible again.

Not implausible.

And then this is possibly implausible.

Based on what is projected in Russia as this massive triumph, Putin steps down and he makes way for this financial figure, 47-year-old guy, comes along.

Then what happens?

You have all these different plot lines going, one of which, this relates to our discussion with Gerald Knauss, where the Russians in Africa, Wagner group type people, are basically putting lots of Africans onto boats and flooding them into Europe as refugees.

And of course, the example of that is we did see this through the Belarusian border, where the Russians and Belarusians were pushing migrants up against the Polish border.

Correct.

And Gerald said that Putin wanted to get 10 million Ukrainians into Russia.

He ended up getting four and a half.

And just on this, I mean, in the Czech election, one thing that we haven't talked about is that although there isn't a traditional migrant issue in the Czech election, they have accepted 350,000 Ukrainians.

That's about 3% of the Czech population.

That would be like about 2.5 million Ukrainians coming into Britain.

So then what happens is that the West, a bit like we did with Putin, we think there's a thaw and we think this new modern guy from the financial sector is going to be okay.

Turns out Russia is rearming.

Three years later, they take a small town and an island in Estonia.

And then he then provokes this Article 5 debate where the American president, who's never named, but one assumes it's Trump, and the new president of France, who is Raisemble Mont Nationale.

Le Pen figure.

They basically do not think that a small town in Estonia is worth protecting through through Article 5.

Cut a long story short, the end of the book, the new president comes forward with Putin, now this aging sort of hero in Russia, and Lukashenko from Belarus to announce that Russia and Belarus are uniting as one country for the next stage of the Russian program within Europe.

It's an amazing book.

Now, next question.

Lucas van den Huvel.

Does the Netherlands still have the political stability to be a serious player in Europe, or is its fractured system now the biggest threat to its influence?

Well, I'm guessing that Lucas van der Heuvoor is probably better placed to answer than us, because he sounds very Dutch.

And we have a lot of Dutch listeners.

I've just come back from Rotterdam.

Yeah.

Extraordinary.

Have you been to Rotterdam?

Many times.

Yeah, it's a very striking city.

Secondly,

you like it, do you?

This is going to get me in hot water.

I prefer Rotterdam to Amsterdam.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah.

Because it's quite, I mean, people who know

it's quite a gritty port city.

It is a real...

Yeah.

I mean, Amsterdam's lovely, don't get me wrong.

I'm sitting over the canals and all that stuff.

But I found Rotterdam.

I once played the bagpipes at a football match in Rotterdam.

When I was a student, I was drunk.

Anyway.

So yes, I just came back from Rotterdam talking at Erasmus University with something called the Nexus Institute.

450, mostly young people there.

A lot of them listeners to the podcast.

I think we did an hour and 45 minutes of really interesting conversation about populism, elections, European politics.

But of course, the big story in the Netherlands Netherlands is Hert Wilders of course got the most votes in the last election.

His position in the polls hasn't really gone down very much.

A little bit.

Gone down a bit, but probably still as they go into the next election he will come out with the most votes.

So he's a far-right anti-Islamist populist.

And actually in some ways, I hadn't quite got my head around this, but the Netherlands is quite lucky.

Because the right is actually, the far-right is split.

Because a guy called Just Ederman has taken some of Hert Wilders' vote.

And then there's a guy called Thierry Bode, who's well out there.

You know, he's a self-styled conspiracy theorist, but loves the British-American philosopher Roger Scruton, talks a lot of the J.D.

Vance language, very, very interested in sort of theories of conservatism.

Put all those votes together, in fact, the right-wing votes in the Netherlands might well be well up above 30%.

They might well be.

They might well be, but then none of the other parties...

They're all now committed to saying they would not serve with Wilders.

So the last election, it took them seven months to form a government and it came together of four parties in the coalition.

But part of the deal was that Wilders could not be prime minister.

So Dick Schouff, this former intelligence chief, he was the prime minister.

The coalition has achieved next to nothing without being too rude about it and it's disintegrated in stages.

But the fact that they're all saying they won't serve with Wilders' party means that it's likely...

You're right that he'll probably come first in the poll, but it's likely that whoever comes second is likely then to be asked to form a government.

And that might be the guy we had on leading, which is Frans Timmerman, who put together this coalition of this alliance of Labour and the Greens.

There's this new guy on the block called Henry Bonenthal, who's a kind of conservative leader, Christian Democrat.

But the big loser.

He's more sort of centrist.

Centrist, yeah, yeah.

And he was a guy that I got a, it seemed to be, certainly within my sort of tiny student audience poll of that, seemed to be getting a wonderful sort of Nick Clegg effect.

I agree with Nick as they go into the election.

That's exactly what's happening.

That's exactly what's happening.

So he actually might end up as being the one that kind of emerges as the leader of a possible government and he's come out of nowhere.

Looks like on track maybe for 2024 seats.

I don't know why.

But the big loser since the election is your friend Mark Rutter.

Trump daddy.

His party, the VVD, have really suffered for having gone into coalition with all this.

Well, it's, I mean, this is a story we have to keep coming back to to because it's a sort of parallel to what seems to be happening to the Conservative Party in Britain in relation to reform.

It's certainly an absolute parallel with what's happened in France, where the traditional right-wing party that dominated government for many years vanished in the face of the right.

What do you think about how France Timmermans, who we've been interviewing on leading, how he's been doing?

Well, listen, I like him and I liked, I enjoyed the interview that we did with him.

And he's showing guts because they had these pretty bad riots, worse than the kind of Tommy Robinson stuff here.

Yeah, it was which just I arrived just the day after those riots.

Yeah, and they were bad.

And a lot of it was football hooligans coming together.

Some of them were doing Nazi salutes.

Some of them were carrying the the the the flag, the pre-trickler flag, which is the old kind of, you know, we support the Nazis flag.

A lot of violence.

And then other sorts of flags which are quite complicated because a bit like in Britain, where there's controversies now about very straightforward things like carrying the Union Jack or the flag of St George,

one very popular flag they were carrying was traditionally just one of the flags of the House of Orange, has suddenly become politicised.

Yeah, and when,

in the aftermath of these riots, the right-wing parties did not want to say that this was far-right violence.

They wanted to kind of, somebody called it, they were trying to whitewash it under the banner of football hooligans.

And Timmermans stood up in

really, really strongly and just called it out for what it is.

And

I think we'll get credit for that because the more centrist parties were sort of basically a bit worried about offending these people who'd been out sort of beating up policemen.

Final thing just the culture war thing.

I was talking to people who were really cross with Franz Timmermans because

I think it was Amsterdam had published a series of leaflets on religious festivals in Amsterdam and they had every religious festival imaginable from every religion imaginable, except they decided not to mention Christmas and Easter.

And they were talking about how Timmermans seemed to find it sort of impossible to take a pretty obvious line, which is to say, why don't we include the Christians as well?

But maybe that was unfair to him.

Anyway, you can see the culture war stuff going there.

The Netherlands is such an extraordinary country.

The average person in the Netherlands works, I think, an hour less a week than the average person in Britain and is 20% wealthier.

Lovely book, actually, by a former Conservative spad called Ben Coates about the Netherlands, which I share with people.

The lowest debt in Europe.

Lowest debt in Europe.

Has these sort of extraordinary stories.

I mean,

100% of the key printing for the chips, which are right at the core of the AI revolution, are produced in the Netherlands.

So in a sense, they have a stranglehold over the American economy, or is it the other way around?

Shell, people know about.

And then other bits are sort of quite complicated.

This Catholic-Protestant split, you know, what's going on down in the south, where the...

the famous Phillips electronic factory used to be, now fallen on slightly hard times.

But the thing that struck me most is that there is still a bit of an undercurrent of who are we?

What do we stand for?

You know, people, older people grumbling that in order to study Dutch now in the Netherlands, you have to study it in English.

Basically, everybody's now studying English.

And that they are worried they've become a little bit too sort of bland and globe.

Do you mean at a Dutch university?

If you're doing a degree in Dutch literature, you have to do it in English.

Well, somebody can feed back in to explain what this story is and whether it's fake news.

But all the older people around the table.

Well, you can't just spread fake news on this.

These were professors around the table.

All of them nodded at this statement that basically you can't really study Dutch and everything's now in English and they were blaming Mark Ruscher for it.

I don't know whether he's basically pushed more and more education away from Dutch and into English.

I have to say, when I was a busker nearly 50 years ago now, the Netherlands was my favourite country because the Gilda was just the perfect busking currency.

Why?

Because it was worth, you know, everybody gave you a guilder and it was just worth more than the franc, the lira, I mean, certainly the lira.

Busky in Italy was a nightmare, throwing you sort of bucket loads of paper.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've always liked the Netherlands.

I actually wonder if Wilders cannot make the election about Islam, which is his big thing and about migration, I wonder if he will do it as well as last time.

We both thought that if he won the last election, which he did, but didn't get into power himself, that that would then fuel this sense of grievance, which he would exploit.

I think he's struggled to do it this time because the framing of political debate has been so so much more about international stuff, Ukraine and Gaza.

Gaza has become a massive issue within this election.

I mean, I saw a poll, something like 40-odd percent saying that the different parties' stance on Gaza will impact the way that they vote.

Now, I think that says to me that probably means they're leaning more towards the left than towards the right.

Final point is the odd parallels with Nigel Farage, which is that, again, it's a one-man party head villas.

It's in fact not really a party at all.

It's just him, and he seems to find it very difficult to get on with other people, which was always traditionally the story about Farage.

And the question is, will Farage be able to overcome that in a way that Builders has not?

Well, we shall see.

The other thing, Roy, you'll love this.

In fact, you should put this in the updated version of Politics on the Edge.

One of the big moments in the campaign will be on the 10th of October.

Something called the Central Plan Bureau, which sounds like a sort of OBR for campaigns, they independently present the results of all the different party programmes.

And they say how much they think they will cost and whether the claims about how they will fund them are credible.

That's quite good in the world of fake news, isn't it?

Absolutely, yeah.

But they've got 27 parties.

Yeah, that's a lot.

A lot of parties.

25 parties running the check election.

Anyway, time for a break.

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

And with me, Rory Stewart.

Now, Rory, of course, dear to your heart.

Question from Julian.

Soon we're going to be celebrating the 70th anniversary of the first national parks, one of the many great achievements of the post-war Labour government.

Today they're needed more than ever, but they're under huge pressure.

And now there is shocking talk, says Julian, that the government wants to water down planning protections that only came into law a couple of years ago.

What's your advice, Rory, on getting this government to see the importance of national landscapes and parks and back the cause in the way that Clement Attlee did all those years ago?

Well, listen, it's an interesting story, this, which maybe hasn't got quite enough coverage.

So the government's considering now putting in an amendment into their bill

to water down

how much attention the planners need to pay to the fact that something's a protected landscape, a national park or an AOMB.

And it's slightly technical language, you know, whether you have to take into account or have regard for.

But the basic drive of this is the Treasury and others are saying it gets in the way of growth, having to worry about a protected landscape.

Now, I think that's daft because my question to the Treasury would be this.

What are you trying to do, right?

Are you trying to build 10,000 houses or some big AI data center in which case sure as eggs as eggs you should not be putting it in the middle of a national park right or are you talking about some small thing like some car park which is what the current controversy is about in which case it's not really that vital to your growth agenda and you might as well keep the protection national parks in place is there any suggestion that they want to do the latter the former they're talking about growth so i want to i'd like to know from them which bits their growth agenda are currently impeded by the national park and what exactly are they trying to build there the principle that these things that Clement Attlee set up are

amazing.

We're going to have to build a lot of houses, our landscape is under a lot of pressure, the government is committed to biodiversity targets, to nature, to climate, and that they're also talking about nudging into the greenbelt.

So they better look after the national parks and the protected landscapes because it's going to be precious not just for us but 50, 100, 200 years time.

People will regret it if those things start.

That's the first I've heard of any suggestion that they might want to build on the national Parks.

Well, they certainly want to be able to have more freedom in planning.

They don't like the fact that the current law seems to restrict and make planners be very careful about what they build.

And meanwhile, they have announced that they're building the first three new towns they hope before the election.

Yeah, I would suggest this is not a fight the government should be having.

I think that they should probably drop bringing that amendment in.

Okay.

Listen, Rory.

Let's cheer ourselves up.

A few months ago, you will remember, we mentioned a policy competition for young people by Politica, and this was called Policy Ideas for Positive Change.

And the challenge that we threw out, along with Politica, was for young people to write a 1,000-word policy proposal, and they could choose from the online world, social inequality, AI, healthcare, climate, crime, education.

And we said we would discuss the policy that was chosen as the winner.

The winner is Rosie Holsall.

She is 18.

She is from Yorkshire and the Humber.

And her proposal is that there should be annual provision of free sports bras and fittings for all secondary school girls.

Yeah, and the argument basically is that women participate in sport less than men.

And there are lots of issues that come from that, osteoarthritis.

And actually, there was some interesting coverage in the newspaper last week that people who participate in sport are much more likely to be confident and successful in later life.

I guess that's stuff that you'd really buy into.

Totally.

Massive, massive sport fan.

I just met Rosie by accident in the street walking up here.

She was walking with her friends past the embankment tube, so that was lovely.

What are the chances?

She's from Yorkshire.

In Canada, she must have been...

What are the chances?

Yeah.

On the day that we're going to talk about her proposal of you bumping into her.

Spooky, isn't it?

It is really good.

It makes you wonder whether there isn't a pattern to the universe.

Anyway, huge congratulations to Rosie.

And people may also like to look at the paper, which we'll share in the links.

Some of the stats are quite interesting.

One in two women suffer from osteoporosis risk compared to one in five men.

Women lose up to 10% of bone density in the first five years after menopause.

This condition costs the NHS £1.8 billion annually.

Only 36% of girls wear a sports bra for PE, although 84% believe it's essential.

72% feel self-conscious exercising without one, and 69% say they can't run or jump freely without one, which I guess is completely essential for sport.

I imagine a sports bra is only part of the general story on women's sport and many, many other things, but I'm really pleased that Rosie is drawing attention to how incredibly important sport is for development and how sad it is that, according to these statistics at least, women are currently participating less in sport than men at school.

And I think, as we're talking about sport, Rory, we should just acknowledge

the women's rugby team winning the World Cup.

Did you watch that match?

I did against Canada in front of Mark Carney, who looked very glum by the end.

And we should also, even though there were no sports bras involved, we should welcome the fact that the Europeans,

I was going to say, thrashed.

They thrashed for the first two days and then just held on in the Ryder Cup against the United States.

And I loved, even though it was a bit childish, I loved watching the entire squad celebrating by singing, Are You Watching Donald Trump?

Final thing, just to wrap up.

It's been sadly a time of deaths.

Quick thoughts about a number of people who sadly died this week.

I went to the memorial service of John Sandwich, the other sandwich, a crossbencher peer who did really wonderful things quite quietly for international development, worked with Save the Children, other major charities through the 70s and 80s, including some pretty tough solo trips through the Sahel.

And when he, as a hereditary, entered the House of Lords after 97, became a real

quiet, I mean, he's a real sort of old-fashioned voice.

He was very tall,

a very quiet spoken very modest listened very well but very very steely and standing up for things like Afghanistan but we've also seen this week the death of Charles Guthrie Ming Campbell both of whom you knew well yeah Charles Guthrie was chief of defense staff in our early time in government he was an amazing guy he really was i absolutely adore charles guthrie i mean he wore a pinky ring rory he did

i knew him since I was a kid.

He was my neighbour in South Kent when I was growing up.

Yeah, I knew him when I was one or two years old.

Because he was into his 80s, wasn't he?

And his wife had already died.

So he was a young colonel when I first met him.

And my dad, who liked this kind of guy, they were great friends.

And Guthrie was a kind of all-out, you know, guards, parachute regiment, special forces star.

He was the first special forces guy to head the armed forces.

That's right.

And went into operations quite late.

And I injured himself, I think, falling off a horse and treating the colour quite late on.

Yeah, he was, as you know, I don't like pink.

You don't like pink

at my ring.

I liked his.

I think I've told you before, one of my proudest moments was when he asked me to go and address a load of military top press, and he said, Anastra Campbell is the echo of spin.

So that was a great review.

Mink Campbell, I really liked Mink Campbell.

Remind us who he was.

Well,

he was a Liberal Democrat MP.

He was the leader of the Liber Ms between Charles Kennedy and Nick Kleck.

Never quite rose to it.

I think, even though he was only 65 at the time, there was quite a lot of ageism.

Tony was still around young.

David Cameron was around young.

Charles had been young.

So he kind of made way for Nick Cleck.

And his younger life?

He was a great sprinter.

But I mean, like a serious Olympics.

He ran in the Olympics in Tokyo.

He was the captain of the Scottish team in the Commonwealth Games in 66.

He was once described in the media, regularly described as the fastest white man on earth.

famously beat O.J.

Simpson.

Remember him?

He beat him in a race once.

And a lovely guy.

The other person who died this week that was really, really sad to anybody who's involved in the Good Friday Agreement was a guy called Martin Mansa,

who was one of the Irish key people in the Good Friday Agreement.

So it's been a sad week all around.

Yeah, Mick Ming was on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee with me, so I saw a lot of him.

We travelled to Afghanistan together.

The lovely thing about these parliamentary committees is you travel around the world together.

And he was a, I mean, he was a real kind of classic elder statesman, a very, very distinguished, quiet, distinguished Scott.

And I wonder whether there isn't a sort of group of these rather interesting people.

Maybe George Robertson is part of a younger group.

Maybe David Steele is part of

another generation.

But they were quite an interesting...

Yeah, the other thing about Ming, because he became quite a sort of high-up lawyer.

And he was very kind of, even, you know, when he was kind of getting on a bit, he was very kind of straight-backed.

And so you always had a sense of him from being quite a posh background.

He actually came from a very humble Glaswegian background.

He also had this wonderful wife called Elspeth, who she was absolutely brilliant.

And he proposed to her.

She was married to a baronet and they got divorced.

And he got to know her, I think, during the divorce through a friend of his, a lawyer.

And he proposed to her after two weeks.

And they were absolutely this sort of amazing, rock-solid couple.

She died a couple of years ago.

But she was always very funny because she was called Campbell, as am I.

And she always always used to say, I know how much you hate the honour system.

I insist that you call me Lady, Lady, Lady Campbell.

She was entitled three times to call herself a lady.

And he would sort of sing three times a lady to her.

She was the daughter of a sort of classic,

almost sort of Charles Guthrie type figure who's portrayed, I think, in, is it Bridge Too Far or Bridge Over?

Bridge Too Too Far.

Bridge Too Far, yeah.

By Sean Connery.

There we are, very good.

Yeah, yeah, that was her dad.

Yeah, her dad was played by Sean Connor.

There we are.

They don't make characters like that anymore, Rory.

No, no, no, except for you and you.

Yeah, except for you.

Right.

Anyway, we did have a question last week, and sometimes it's nice to come back to questions from last week.

And a really good listener, in this case, Victoria Moore, who was wine editor of the Daily Telegraph, really got into this question of the wines that were served at the Trump dinner.

So she says it was Worcester Estate 2016, really excellent sparkling wine, made on the Goring family estate in West Sussex.

So this is how she explains what was served.

The wines were carefully chosen to cover off the host country, which was the Worcestern wine, the visitors, which was Ridge Vineyard's Montebello, 2000 US, even the big ticket Burgundy paid subtle respect to the visitors because the domain was bought in 2017 by Stanley Crocker, the American billionaire and Arsenal FC owner who donated a million dollars to Trump's inaugural fund in 2016.

How lovely, how generous.

And a rare Scotch originally bottled for the late Queen's Golden Jubilee, and a 1912 cognac from the birth year of Trump's Scottish-born mother, and War's 1945 vintage port in honor of Trump having been the 45th U.S.

President.

So they really thought through that list.

If anyone's interested, the list was Worston Estate Cubé 2016, England, Domaine Bonneau de Martre, Corson Charlemagne Grand Cruis 2018, France, Ridge Vineyards Montebello 2000, U.S.

Pol Roger Extra Cubé de Reserve 1998.

Do you think they made a big deal?

Because Trump is teetotal.

He doesn't drink at all.

That's unfortunate.

He never drinks.

But do you think they explained, do you think they told him all that stuff?

And would he have been interested, do you think?

Do you think?

Is your sense of his personality that he'd be flattered by all that stuff that it was the birth year of his home?

I think if he thought that they went to these extraordinary lengths to celebrate his presence in our country, even though he didn't drink, I guess he drinks, did he drink water?

I bet he probably took the wine list back home.

And of course, I guess.

Yeah, and also those things.

They always remember, I've got quite a few at home of those sort of wine lists and menus where everybody at the table signs them.

He wouldn't have got all their signatures, but I guess he does like that sort of stuff.

And then we'll probably see it pop up on eBay in a few years, sold by one of his granddaughters.

I mean, Rory, what do you make of that?

His granddaughter flogging hoodies and t-shirts from the White House.

It's unbelievable.

I was just talking to David Olasuga, who does the Journey Through Time podcast, which is one of our goal hanger family of podcasts.

And we were talking about the way in which you know he used the word Overton window,

in other words, the window of what's acceptable has shifted so far under Trump, too.

I mean,

I notice people say, oh, well, Trump's not so bad because he's not Hitler, he's more like Mussolini.

And then people will then say, and Farage is not so bad because he's not quite Trump, you know, and on and on.

And I guess the daughter, the granddaughter, comes somewhere into this.

Something that would be kind of unimaginable and barely mentioned, barely gets 10 seconds at the end of question time.

Indeed.

See you soon.

Bye-bye.