460. Inside Trump’s Gaza-Ukraine Playbook: Who Profits from Peace?

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That's the restispolitics.com. It was a real example of Trump's arbitrary power.

His approach on Ukraine is consistent. He's basically on the side of Russia.
Putin yet again has played Trump like a violin.

A lot of this presumably is also Trump feeling very, very arrogant after what he feels is this incredible success in Gaza. Nothing will prepare you for what it actually looks like when you get there.

So I do hope Vance goes to Gaza and takes a proper look. It's about money, it's about power, it's about influence, it's about thinking about rebuilding Gaza in terms of property deals.

We are in this world which is all about raw power.

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Welcome to the Restus Politics, Meanister Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart.

And often we do it the other way around, but this time I'm going to lay out the little menu, which he will then tell me off for having got wrong.

But my understanding of it is that we're going to start by talking about what we're missing about Trump.

In all this firoy about how he's the greatest president ever and what an extraordinary achievement he's done in Gaza, as his supporters keep saying, we're going to look at some of the other side of the chaos he's creating around the world.

We'll look at Gaza, we'll look at Zelensky and Ukraine, we'll look at maritime emissions, which is actually a really interesting example of Trump doing strange things.

And then after the break, we will look at Wales, where reform has gone from tiny showing in the polls to potentially winning a by-election with huge implications for the way that Wales is governed.

And we will look at the issue of mental health. But where would you like to start? Well, first of all, Rory, congratulations.
I thought you said it out pretty well there.

You know, very, very well done. You've read the brief.
Well done.

Where to start?

Well, I wonder whether we don't start with emissions, because it's probably for all of our well-read, well-informed listeners, perhaps the one that they've read and heard least about, Gaza and Ukraine.

I'm sure they've been following closely. So I was in the car driving up to Doncaster on Friday.
I was spending a day with Ed Miliband in his constituency, which we'll talk about a little bit later.

And on the news was this just this sudden announcement that

10 years of negotiations that had gone into a new regime for into the international maritime world world headed by the international maritime organization which was meeting in london and all these countries had come together and they'd after 10 years they they'd struck a deal that was going to change the way that the the fuel regime for for big ships and it would help with climate change and

literally out of the blue donald trump puts out a post on truth social saying this is a green scam and the united states won't support it and then overnight the saudi arabian contingent they got involved and so the thing has been postponed for a year, but essentially they've basically just, you know, 86ed it.

It's very sad. So 90% of global trade, incredible, I mean, almost all global trade goes by sea.
And shipping emissions are about 3% of global emissions.

And they're currently on track to grow very significantly because ships are powered off the very filthiest diesel.

All the good stuff is extracted for other things and all the filthiest stuff that's left over goes into the ships. And when you buy a ship, it's often in service for 20, 30 years.

The industry, this is actually driven by the private sector, has been pushing for a long time for some clarity on what the rules will be so that they can invest in the right ships.

And a lot of things follow from this. New investments in engine design, in fuel design, but also where the fuel is stored, so these ships can be refuelled, all their supply chains, etc.

And what they really want TID, they said, above all, was predictability so that they could make these investments 10, 20 years and not be left with stranded assets, not be left with ships that they'd bought that suddenly they weren't allowed to sail around.

And as you said, 100 countries gathers, 10 years of negotiations,

and it was a gradual process where there was going to be you could continue using polluting vessels, but after a certain date, if you did, you paid into a fund, which would then be used particularly to help smaller developing nations.

And if you modernized and got your emissions down, all's well and good. I think that's a a classic industry-led model.

And it was a real example of Trump's arbitrary power because what really swung it was not the US, Saudi, and Russia, who quite predictably, you know, big oil countries, but the fact that he put pressure on small island states.

Yeah. And we suddenly had Caribbean states saying, I'm really sorry, but the US is...
you know, a 400-pound gorilla and we can't afford to defy them on this.

And Marco Rubio then saying this is a great triumph for American diplomacy. Yeah.
And the reason why

they were moving in the direction that they did was not because they thought it was the right thing, but because as part of the threat was actually to impose fresh tariffs on anybody who backed this thing.

And this includes countries that are literally facing existential threat from the sea that are going under as a result of rising sea levels as a result of climate change and global warming.

And when you talk about arbitrary power, the other thing that's linked to this is the difference between what

the world and those who really dig deep into issues understand facts to be.

And Trump basically of a view that if he disagrees with those facts, as he does on climate, as Kennedy does in relation to, say, vaccines or whatever it might be, they just basically, they go with his view as opposed to what a factual basis might be.

And that is unbelievably dangerous. And of course,

for Marco Rubio to go out and say this is a triumph for American diplomacy, it's a triumph for American brute force.

Now, you could argue that's a triumph for diplomacy if you want, but I think it's the brute force that we should be pretty worried about. The international stuff is amazing, isn't it? Because

the courts have now ruled that a lot of what he's doing on tariffs are illegal.

that this is a power that was supposed to be with Congress and he shouldn't have been using presidential powers to do it.

He's also, and we've talked about this last week, been continuing his campaign against vessels off the Venezuelan Colombian coast. So he's blown up a vessel recently.

Every time they do it, they produce no evidence. There's no legal argument.
They say there's intelligence, but they won't share it.

In this case, the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, claims that it was a retired fisherman out with his boat. Just for saying that,

he was subject to the full kind of MAGA treatment in terms of abuse and threats and so forth.

So that's what we're having to get used used to and then if you take it to say what's been happening in in ukraine you've been making the point in recent weeks and months that we've just got to get used to the idea that actually his approach on ukraine is consistent he's basically on the side of russia but within that there are all these inconsistencies so it's not that long ago that Trump was basically, do you remember he came out and said, look, I can see a way that Ukraine can win this war and get all of the land back.

That's now forgotten. That led the news around the world.
Trump pivots on Ukraine.

He then, as a result of that, started to have these conversations with Zelensky about the possible use of the sale from America to Ukraine of these Tomahawk missiles, which can go way deeper into Russia, even beyond Moscow and St.

Petersburg, and that would help them take out Russia's military assets and energy infrastructure and so forth. One phone call with Putin.
to our phone call.

Zelensky is literally at the airport setting off for a meeting in the White House with Trump. And Trump has a phone call with Putin.
And by the time Zelensky lands, the position has changed.

And if this story, I don't know if you read the stuff in the Financial Times and Reuters had an account as well, that it seems that...

the cameras weren't in there, but the meeting was just as brutal as the one in the Oval Office with Zelensky and Vance and Trump, where Trump was allegedly throwing maps around.

Zelensky was trying to show maps of where things were, why the Donbass couldn't just be handed over in in the way that Trump was suggesting.

And Trump's picking up the maps and throwing them around the room and saying, do the fucking deal and get on with it and stop, you know, pussying around, etc.

So this is a classic example of where Trump indicated he was going one way, phone call with Putin, and he's back where he started.

And there's a very good piece on the conversation this morning by this guy, Stefan Wolff, who's a professor of international security at Birmingham.

And he just, he said, you know, Putin yet again has played Trump like a violin.

A lot of this presumably is also Trump feeling very, very arrogant after what he feels is this incredible success in Gaza.

And a lot of this will also be the way that he understands what he did in Gaza.

So you're beginning to hear people in his camp say the secret in Gaza was to allow Netanyahu to reject the march ceasefire and bomb Hamas much more aggressively.

And that that is what allowed him to bring Hamas to the table.

And that essentially the easiest way, I suppose the shorthand would be the easiest way to make peace is to push for unconditional surrender.

There are different ways of reading what's happening in Gaza, but one way that some people in Trump's camp and certainly the way that Netanyahu wants to present it is that in the end, what's called a peace deal is basically Israel winning.

And so maybe he looks at Ukraine and he thinks, okay, a peace deal is basically Putin winning.

And that we just let Putin get what he wants and then we'll announce peace and then there'll be this huge cycle let's say Putin takes the whole Donpass Ukraine basically gets very little for years of fighting there will then be a cycle of people saying well aren't you in favor of peace I don't notice you celebrating Donald Trump's great achievement in in ending the killing when all that's really happened is that Putin has got everything that he's been asking for for the last couple of years.

And he gets time to rearm and possibly have another go.

And what you're seeing now, even with, you know, we've said right from the word go, whilst being supportive of the attempt that is contained within that 20-point plan, there are so many pitfalls along the way.

And we're seeing them already. We're seeing them in recent days where Hamas is accusing Israel of breaking the conditions of the ceasefire.
Israel is accusing Hamas of breaking the ceasefire.

And therefore, a certain level of fighting has resumed. And the other thing is that, I mean, J.D.
Vance, the vice president, he's just landed in we're recording on Tuesday morning.

He's just arrived in Israel. You know, to some extent, Vit Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump's two sort of main point men on Israel, they're there already.

So it's good in a way they are staying focused. And the fact that Vance is going there, presumably to try to keep the show on the road.

But the point is, I was talking to Tom Fletcher, our friend who is in charge of the UN humanitarian effort within Gaza. And he was in Gaza yesterday.
And he, you know, we just had a chat on the phone.

And he said, it was, even for all the stuff we've seen on TV, it is beyond imagining.

He actually said that, you know, including him and his team, it is impossible not to cry when you see the level of devastation, the level of destruction.

He said, it really, it's like Dresden, it's like Stalingrad. It's like, it's like, you know, he even compared it with the sort of the aftermath of a kind of nuclear bomb, that

this is destruction on a scale we cannot see. And it's barely being talked about.
What actually now happens in Gaza is barely being addressed. Tom also has mentioned that there is now this big U.S.

operation now deploying, and that it feels very much as though these are American soldiers.

So to explain that operation, you've got Witkoff and Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, basically sitting in Israel, and the U.S.

military under CENTCOM, so the commander for the Central Region, has now deployed troops forward who are sitting in these huge, big bases on Israeli territory, now coordinating the aid moving in.

And there's a huge amount of aid now beginning to flow in. It's not perfect.
There are delays at the border, but there's much, much more coming in. Probably the 600 trucks are being achieved.

Tom said they were averaging about a million meals a day.

And he also said that kids who were 50% malnourished, they'd managed to get it down to about 30%.

So it does show if you get the aid in with professionals delivering it, they can make a pretty big impact pretty quickly. Yeah.

So the positive story that you'll begin to hear from people in the UN is, well, this is great. I mean, Witkoff and Kushner have at last recognized that the UN matters.
The US military has arrived.

They're telling the Israelis not to get in the way and the aid is flowing in.

But, but, but, but, but, I'm also very, very worried that we're in a period of totally unrealistic over-optimism.

I mean, I can see the relief, right? Thank goodness the aid's coming in.

And here are the US military apparently helping get the aid through the borders and telling the Israelis not to interfere with the borders. So people are feeling great and relief.

But fundamentally, we've been here before.

And the idea that the US military under CENTCOM command is going to be a remotely appropriate medium for thinking about anything medium, long-term in Gaza is the lesson that we've learned over again and again since the Second World War, which is there isn't a military solution, and foreign militaries coming in, particularly into a place as politicized as Gaza with Israel right next door, it's not going to work.

It's all about, and this is where I keep coming back to you in Northern Ireland or my experience in the Balkans, and indeed your experience in Kosovo.

In the 90s, when we did this, this is a complete opposite of the way in which we understand peace happens.

If you think about the Balkans, peace was about refugee return. It was about thinking about the rights of minorities.

It was about thinking about electoral systems, civil society, government, and this very complicated way of working out how Croat, Bosnian, Serb, and Bosniak Muslim communities were going to live together, how justice was going to be done, the setting up of the courts at The Hague.

In other words, liberal democratic principles, international legal principles, baked into every single stage of the thing, right?

Or again, you in Northern Ireland, we forget, along with the stuff that was done at the level at which you were working, or even the level that was being done by the political parties, the roles of women and civil society groups and all these other things that were really part of the success.

Now,

in Gaza, what we're hearing instead is Kushner and Witkoff sitting in Israel acting like sort of colonial governors, giving instructions with the US military and believing they're somehow going to be able to bring peace that way.

Kushner himself, by the way, I said about Tom describing it in the way that he did Dresden, Stalingrad, etc., etc. Kushner has also said...

It looked almost like a nuclear bomb had been set off in that area.

Now, if that is the level of devastation, that says to me that that is where the rebuilding should be at the forefront of our minds right now.

But it's difficult to get there when we're still actually in the weeds of phase one.

And going back to the main framing for this whole thing about the difference between trump's black and white primary colors communication and the many many many shades of grey that actually exist i think the fact of

the way that he presented the deal and he's done the same several times in relation to ukraine i've spoken to putin and we're just a couple of weeks away from a deal i'm confident we're going to get a ceasefire he he does all this he doesn't admit to the complexities as a result of which when stuff does start to go a bit wrong when you need the real focus, the political pressure is not necessarily there.

So, and I hope Vance goes to Gaza, because I think the point Tom Fletcher was making, no matter how much you've seen on television, nothing will prepare you for what it actually looks like when you get there.

So I do hope Vance goes to Gaza and takes a proper look.

Yeah, I'm very much hoping that we're going to be able to get to Gaza, which at the moment I think is pretty tricky because he basically needs full support from

I mean, even Tom Fletcher, I think, only got across the border because kushner and witkoff put pressure on the israeli government to yeah give permission for him to cross so i don't think that you and i are going to be yeah i think it would be png um if kevin rudd can get upbraided in front of his prime minister uh i don't know if people saw but when

a bit like post the epstein peter mandelson resignation donald trump who'd previously been lauding peter mandelson suddenly decided he'd never met him yesterday with kevin rudd in the room.

He said he didn't know who Kevin Rudd was, he didn't know who the ambassador was, and then basically said, when Kevin Rudd admitted he'd said a few critical things before I took up this post, Mr.

President, Trump responded, Well, I've never liked you, and I don't think I ever will, and then moved back to what he was talking about before. Anyway,

just one quick explainer, though, before we come in, because one of the things that we've mentioned in the past, and I think a couple of listeners asked about, is this issue about clans or what are sometimes called tribes in Gaza.

So in essence,

obviously Gaza is a Palestinian Arab society with a lot of different groups, urban groups, rural groups, and traditional Bedouin groups who were nomadic.

In the past, Gazan society in the early part of the 20th century would have been governed by what were called notables, which essentially were kind of senior urban figures. Later after 67,

and particularly in the 2000s when you got the Hamas-Fatah fights happening in Gaza, so the fights between what, Fatah, which now run the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, who won that election.

These various groups, these clans, which are, it's difficult to quite explain for somebody who's not in the Middle East, but essentially it matters a great deal which clan you come from because your extended family group, you claim a common ancestor, can provide you with social insurance.

In other words, if you're getting financial problem, they can bail you out. They mobilize and arm.
They can do some dispute resolution. So if people are disagreeing.

And their power waxes and wanes depending on the strength of the state. When states are weak, you end up often with these groups getting stronger and stronger.

And of course, since the start of the Gaza War, Israel has been funding some of these Palestinian Klan groups against Hamas and effectively using them as proxies in the war.

So up in the north, up in Gaza City, there's a group called the Dogmush group, which is quite a complicated group that had links into extremists.

There's another group down on the Rafah border which is called Abu Shabab which has more Bedouin links and had links into smuggling and they actually were involved in quite a lot of the looting when there weren't too many trucks going through these groups were looting and a lot of the fighting now happening in Gaza is Hamas saying these are criminal pro-Israeli gangs that we're now executing or fighting on the street.

And Israel then sending in soldiers to intervene on behalf of their proxies.

Something similar happened, happened, of course, in the reporting we covered in Syria, where the Druze groups, who are quite close to Israel, found themselves fighting the central government.

And the Israelis intervened on their side. The other thing was a very interesting piece in the News Statesman about my old friends Tony Blair and Jonathan Powell.

And it was written by a guy called Freddie Hayward. And it seemed to be...

pretty well briefed. He's a US correspondent of the News Statesman.
It obviously talked to quite a lot of people.

But the one thing that really I mean, you don't need me to remind you that I Tony Blair and Jonathan Powell are very, very good people who are capable of doing a very good job in this.

But the one thing I didn't know is that Tony's Institute had actually been polling inside Gaza.

And one of the pieces of polling, which apparently had quite a made quite a big impression on Trump when he saw it, was this polling shows that the people of Gaza, they found that under 4%

wanted Hamas to run the territory. And I thought that was, you know, because again, because we see Hamas, we saw them again when the hostages were being handed over.

You know, they are fairly sizable in numbers still.

But I thought that was a very, very, if that's an accurate reflection of political opinion, public opinion inside Gaza, I thought that was very, very interesting.

I thought it was a really fascinating piece. It's on the front cover of the New Statesman, last week's New Statesman.

And I thought that one of the things that I took away from it is the way in which Trump is making people like Tony Blair and Jonathan Powell, who were very much champions of the old rules-based international order, play by new rules.

So Jonathan Powell actually would have been one of the real central advocates for doing things legally, getting the United Nations involved, getting civil society involved, doing proper peace building and conflict resolution.

And he's sensed, of course, that we've moved into a new world. And a lot of this article is actually about how Trump has essentially created a court.

And it's about money, it's about power, it's about influence, it's about thinking about rebuilding Gaza in terms of property deals,

and that Tony Blair and Jonathan Powell have had to adapt to that world and to, I suppose, calculate that the lesser evil in this case is this American system, which has no legal status.

I mean, what is the legal status? Nobody, even in the senior members of the UN, can tell me what the legal status. of anyone operating inside Gaza is at the moment.

There aren't Security Council resolutions. CENTCOM doesn't have any.
Sorry to do this.

So really interesting that as Trump remakes the world in this system of power, people like Blair and Jonathan Powell are brought into it.

I agree with that. And I think that was one of the most interesting pieces in that article.
But

I think Jonathan and Tony will both be thinking that Trump having delivered what's happened thus far,

provided they stay involved in a constructive and positive way and yes, stay close, as clearly they are, to Kushner and Witkoff.

And I thought it was interesting, for example, over the China spy case, which we'll talk about in question time.

That actually Witkoff, when Jonathan was under attack, Witkoff came out and posted a very, very, very supportive statement.

But Jonathan will, Jonathan still believes in all that stuff, still believes in ground-up community action, still believes you've got to chiffy away at all the relationships.

So I think that's the downside that you have to adapt, otherwise you don't get in the room. Once you're in the room, you've got to make sure you stay as true to your principles as you can.
Yeah.

And I think that's the difficult thing with Trump, because it's what the Ukraine story is about, which is that everybody from Mark Rutter to Keir Starmer is doing everything they can to stay in the room, even at the cost of...

flattering him and feeding his enormous ego. But the question is, can you influence? And you can, of course, around the margins.

I mean, there was quite an interesting thing going on in Sharmal Sheikh, which was around the margins, Trump can be influenced.

So, for example, he said, now I'm in, you know, I'm inviting Netanyahu to come and join us. And people pointed out that actually Egypt is a signatory to the International Criminal Court.

So if Netanyahu turned up in Shamal Sheikh, he'd be arrested. So Trump sort of backed off that.

And then he didn't want Abu Mazen, so he didn't want the head of the Palestinian Authority on the stage.

And the Saudis and Qataris quite firmly said, no, he is going on the stage and brought him up onto the stage.

This is the man who famously Mike Pompeo said to you was the terrorist who the United States should not give a visa to to visit. And he appears on the stage in the photograph with Trump.

How long before are you going to get over the Pompeo interview?

That's a really good question of my moral character. And I'm afraid my capacity for forgiveness and tolerance is being stretched here.
I think we are in this world which is all about raw power.

A man, you know, we began with the maritime stuff. That's him using tariffs and threats to torpedo climate legislation.

We talked about him bombing vessels off the coast of Venezuela and Colombia, making no legal arguments for firing American missiles.

We talked about him shouting at Zelensky, throwing maps around the room, taking the Putin position. And then we talked about actually this more positive story.

And the more positive story is ceasefire in Gaza and aid getting in. But the question is, what is the limit to the Trump model?

All kudos to all the people, including Witkoff, Kushner, Trump himself, Blair, Powell, who've got towards the ceasefire and are getting the aid in.

But my fear is that although you can move Trump around the margins, such as who's on a stage and who isn't, fundamentally getting him to buy into due process, a legal order, proper authority, proper consultation, proper politics is almost inconceivable.

We're talking about the man who today is all over the media in America because he suddenly sent the bulldozers in to knock down the East Wing in the grounds of the White House.

I mean, he's pretty mind-blowing. And my final point, Ray, relates to what you just said about, you know, raw power

and how you have to adapt to this. So the next step on Ukraine, remember in Alaska he said there was going to be a trilateral meeting, him, Zelensky and Trump, not happening.

He's got another meeting with Putin, asked for by Putin as part of what this guy Stefan Wolf said was sort of being played like a fiddle.

And he made the point in this piece that for Putin to get to Budapest, he may actually at certain points have to go through, if not NATO, necessarily, maybe NATO airspace, but certainly the airspace of countries that are trying to get into the European Union.

And if they sort of complain about it, or let alone send up their fighter jets to kind of escort them out of their territory, then that will completely play into Putin's hands.

These people aren't serious about peace. So he's got his friend Orban there to say, yeah, we'll have it in Budapest.

And then that sort of further legitimizes Putin, which again helps your narrative about Trump that ultimately he's on his side.

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Welcome back to the Reciprocities. I'm Aristot Campbell.
And me, Rory Stewart. Now, one of the areas that we've sometimes been criticised for not covering enough is Wales.

And people who are interested in this great leading interview with Elined Morgan.

And in it, I believe, unless I'm blowing smoke up my ass, I did try to challenge her on the rise of reform and the sense that reform could actually sweep her away.

And now we're getting into a by-election where it feels like that might be the case. Just to give people the stats, last time round, Labour got 46% of the vote, reform got 1.7%

of the vote. Conservatives about 17 plied in the low 20s.
And now we're in a situation where it looks as though Labour's collapsed and reform is favourite to win this by-election. Over to you.

Not just favourite, but if you get, I've just got the latest

betting odds. And I know sometimes, Roy, you struggle to know what these terms mean.
Yeah, go on, explain to us. Yeah, I don't spend enough time at the bookies.

Reform are four to one on.

Basically means if you put on four pounds, you'll get one back. In other words, the bookies basically think

this is all over.

Plaid are three to one.

Labour are 50 to one. So if you put on a pound, you'll get 50 back.
And the Conservatives, they are basically saying it's a worthless bet.

I believe in worthless bets. How much can I put on the Tories and how much would I make back?

Well, this is what they call a rory stewart cavalar harris bet rory that's what exactly that's the one exactly that's how it's registered in the bookies now oh by the way on that rory on that i must tell you this because i i'm so angry with myself about this because dominique sandbrook is sort of basically making an industry out of the fact that he presents himself as the only person who predicted trump was going to win the election i was at a funeral the other day And a guy on the way in, who wasn't going to the funeral, he stopped me and said, oh, I don't know if you remember, but we met in the morning morning of the american election in new york you were out for a walk and i was out do you remember and i said well i'd be lying if i said i did but tell me he said well well you really depressed me because you told me you thought trump was going to win and why didn't i say that on air rory why didn't you say that

why did you get sucked down into the massive destruction of the all-public reputation which I experienced through my belief that African-American and Hispanic male voters would not turn out for Trump in key swing constituencies.

Back to Wales. Just before you get us to Wales, just a little bit of a sort of interesting stuff on reform.

I mean, it's been an amazing journey there, partly because there's this figure that we haven't really covered, Nathan Gill, who was briefly the reform MEP in 2021, and before that was the UKIP leader in Wales, who turns out to have now pleaded guilty to being bribed by Russia.

We'll come back to this in question time when we talk about the Chinese spying case, but he's pleaded guilty essentially to taking financial bribes from Russia to ask questions in the European Parliament supporting the Russian case over Ukraine back in 2019.

And

it's just intriguing and sad in a way that I think when you plead guilty, you don't get all the details on exactly what he's done because it's not all then dragged out in court.

But he will go to jail for this.

And the man that's running is having to distance himself, the reform candidate, very strongly for Nathan Gill because he worked for him and emphasise, you know, that he left him in 2021 and he wasn't part of this whole thing.

Well, I don't know if you've forgotten our previous visit. We have talked about Nathan Gill.

And if you've been following me on social media, I've been desperately trying to get the media and the labour party to get stuck into this story because i think it goes to the heart of one of the many vulnerabilities that nigel farage has and actually shout out to a welsh mp stephen doughty the foreign office minister he gave farage a good kicking in the commons yesterday farage was standing up groaning on about labour's policy the government's policy vis-a-vis Mauritius and he was saying you really have got a lot of gall to come along here and talk about national security when one of your mates has just been, you know, pleaded guilty to this and you're constantly peddling Kremlin talking points.

So I think this is a weakness, just as I think finally I see, Rory, Labour have started to point to the economic damage being done by Brexit, which they should have done from the word go.

But on this seat in Wales, the reason why this is so interesting and dangerous. for the government and for Labour and actually for the Tories as well.

This is a post-industrial town just north of Cardiff. By the way, we should say to our listeners abroad that this is a by-election in the Welsh senes, their parliament, not the UK parliament.

But the reason why it is so significant is that Labour currently can only get a budget through with the help of a lone Liberal Democrat.

This, if they lose their reform, they will lose the capacity automatically to get a budget through.

Ellen Morgan, the leader of the government, she's actually today meeting the Conservative leader, and they're having discussions about whether they couldn't do some sort of deal.

Otherwise, if they don't get a budget through by the time the parliament, the seneth is dissolved for the elections which follow next year, then it automatically means that the budget falls to 75% of what it is now, which would mean massive redundancies, further rises in council tax, further cuts to public services in a country that is frankly you know struggling on the public service front already so this is a local election in a a way, but it's got huge national stakes and it will create big, big problems for the two main parties.

Because

you described where Labour were in this area. They've won this seat every single time since 1999, since the Welsh Assembly was created.

And if it goes reform first, Plyde second, Labour third, then that is a big shift.

Also an interesting way that you can see reform adapting.

So the candidate they were originally considering is a man called Mark Reckless, somebody about my age who'd very much been part of the Tory tradition, went over to reform and instead they've decided to go with a man called Lear Power, who is a Welsh speaker.

You can see a lot of the interviews he's doing, he's doing in Welsh, that beautiful Welsh name Lear from a Celtic mythology. And

it's an interesting question

how reform manages to transition because the history of reform and its predecessors, UKIP Brexit Party in Wales, are all tied up, as you'll remember, with these very strange characters, Neil Hamilton, this disgraced Tory MP who took cash for questions, bribes, and then, as we were saying, Nathan Gill, who fell out of his relationship with UKIP because of this man, Gerald Batten, and his links to Tommy Robinson.

So I do think trying to work out whether reform is going to be able to rebrand itself and do what I guess Farage wants to do, which is position himself as the sort of mainstream heir of the Conservatives and separate himself off from all these rather unpleasant, frequently corrupt foreign agent, Tommy Robinson-linked figures that are part of the previous parties he's been associated with or not.

Although this guy, Powell,

he's right out there in terms of the left-right spectrum. He's right out there on the right.
And the other thing we're seeing, we're starting to see, I saw this up in Doncaster,

where the reform absolutely virtually swept the board in the recent local elections.

And every single person I met who was, as it were, a real person, as opposed to, I'm not saying politicians aren't real people, they are, but people who are out there in the community basically said, These councillors are a complete and total joke.

And we've seen the same in Kent this week, where some of them have been suspended following this leak of their discussions to the video of their discussions to The Guardian.

So, I think that will become a problem for Ars. It will play into the sort of existing problem in being seen as a one-man band.

So, listen, I I think reform are just thinking purely as a sort of from a campaigning strategic point of view, they're a very good target. But Labour have got to start landing real blows on them.

And that, I think, does require a level of pressure upon them that I think is beginning, but it's only just beginning. And the danger in the context of this by-election, it may well be too late.

I mean, I have had some very disturbing conversations recently with people who are increasingly pro, not just reform, but Tommy Robinson.

And it's something I think people have picked up in France where you begin to get professional educated people making very positive comments about Marine Le Pen.

And at some point I'd like us to dig into this more because what it's showing me is just how thin the support for traditional democratic values are and how easily figures like even Tommy Robinson become normalized.

And people begin saying, oh, Rory, I think it's very unfair for you to suggest he's far-right, very unfair for you to suggest he's racist, very unfair for you to suggest there's anything morally wrong with him.

And these are people with Oxford degrees working for investment banks beginning to say this to me now about Tommy Robinson in Britain.

And this is also part of the story going on with reform, that to begin to remind people in the age of Trump why more old-fashioned values mattered, why you shouldn't be able to run a party with people who are literally taking cash from the Russian government is going to become increasingly important.

Well, 10 years ago, that would have torpedoed Farage because despite his denials, he was close, very close to this guy,

Ditto Richard Tice, who now claims never to have met him, and the pictures and sound have emerged of him paying warm tribute to him, etc., etc., etc.

And you talk about the normalization of Tommy Robinson. And my God, was he normalized in Israel this week, invited by a minister, spoke at a packed rally, did his usual sort of, you know, pretty

hating the government, hating Starmer, basically running down Britain all day, but with a very, you know, a very, very, very attentive right-wing audience who was kind of cheering every word.

And that's in Israel. And of course, the other thing that's happening is the internationalization of these voices.

He, being supported financially and across social media by Elon Musk, is inevitably a bonus to

somebody like him. Yeah, my final point.

I was just going to say that this will link us to the next discussion about mental health because I suspect that even the journalists who will be covering this from Friday morning when we get the result may not even know the background to why this by-election came about, but it's because the previous

Seneth member, a guy called Hefin David, we often talk, Rory, about how individual people will, their own personal stories will become part of something much, much bigger.

And this is a tragic example of that,

because Hefin David, who was the member of the Seneth,

whose death led to this election, died in really tragic circumstances. And

I mean, the full inquest hasn't happened, but

this is a really, really, really sad story. Remember, we talked a few years ago about another former member of the Senate called Carl Sargent, who took his own life.

So, you know, I don't want to overdo it in the context of this, but this whole business about, you know, what it's like in politics, in public life right now.

I was talking to an MP the other day who was,

he was still sort of committed to doing it, but said that his teenage

kids were being really badly bullied at school because of who he was.

I think that politics itself is so damn toxic at the moment.

Anyway, that by-election, I suspect we'll be talking about it again next week and stand by for an avalanche of commentary from the Westminster bubble about it at the weekend.

Now, mental health, Roy, the reason I wanted to talk about mental health was because, as you said at the start, MIND do this kind of annual,

that's the MINED, the big mental health charity, this annual state of the nation report on mental health.

And I've spent the last two or three years, having been involved in the Time to Change campaign, which is about changing attitudes.

I've kind of gone around the place saying, you know, my problem with mental health is I think we've made massive progress on breaking down the stigma, but we've gone backwards on services.

And right now, particularly having read this report and then having spent part of last week looking at mental health services up in the north of England, I feel we're going backwards on both.

Part of this report records

real backward steps on stigma, both in the workplace, in relation to people's attitudes. For example, just to give you some of the

stuff that came out of this, the last time this report was done in the same way, 70% of people said they would have been comfortable with a mental health service opening in their area. It's now 63%.

The number of people who said that they felt they had nothing to fear from people coming into their neighborhood from mental health services had fallen from 70% in 2023 to 62%.

Workplace stigma is going up. So, as attitudes get worse,

I feel that the services

need to improve. And I worry that

we're going backwards on that too. I guess a couple of things that maybe some people who don't focus on this as much as you do will want to get a sense of.

The story I vaguely remember from when I was the minister was that what we were seeing in Britain over the last, let's say, 25 years is that the incidence of the most severe types of mental health problems, so self-harming leading to hospital or suicide, or the most extreme mental health conditions, was broadly stable over time, but that the incidence of other things, people reporting depression, anxiety, etc., was rising quite significantly.

Maybe can I start on that as the first one? Is that broadly true or not?

Well, I would say not. I mean, what is definitely true is that reporting of anxiety and depression has risen hugely.
But we've just been talking about Wales, for example.

This report covers England and Wales, not Scotland and Northern Ireland. It reveals that self-harm is now in the top five of reasons for hospital admissions in Wales.
And so I think

we're talking about a level of mental health burden. And of course, the reason why the stigma is so important is because that is what feeds this idea: oh, well, it's not real.

Oh, it's all just, you know, young people, snowflakes, they've got no resilience, etc., etc. etc.

And one of the key facts in this report is mental health makes up 20% of the burden of disease and yet receives less than 10%

of NHS spending. And added to which, the share of funding, rare criticism of Labour government incoming, the share of NHS funding in England allocated to mental health has fallen.

And that's despite a commitment in the Manifesto and the King's speech that it would go in the opposite direction. You've been campaigning on this, right, for a very long time.

I mean, this has been...

one of your really really big campaigns for i guess 20 years right so what's been going on with with with governments and where were the moments where you felt hope and despair, and what kind of changes have come in over the last 20 years, and why hasn't it gone as far as you'd hope?

And who've been part of this campaign, and which governments did you think listened more and did more? And what's your whole sense of this stuff?

Well, I think that, look, the Time to Change campaign had really broad party support.

And to be fair to Cameron and Nick Clegg, when they came in, they continued to fund it and actually funded it pretty substantially. And the point is that

there were really, really tough conditions attached to how you monitored whether the campaign was working. And it was these measurements about how you measure stigma.
They're quite complicated.

Academics ran them, but it worked. Attitudes towards mental health, towards mental illness really significantly improved.
Societally, within the media, within politics, and within the workplace.

And this report is very, very clear that we've gone backwards. So, for example, 2017 8%

of people said they were frightened if they had people with poor mental health living in their neighborhoods. It's now 14%.
10%

of people would agree with the statement that having a mental health service in your community downgraded that community. That has almost doubled.

And so these things, there's a whole stack of these things and they're all pointing in the wrong direction. So I think the stigma campaign needs to be reborn.

The time to change campaign as part of austerity, it was scrapped. And I think a campaign like it

needs to be reborn. And then, in relation to the services, I think they've all been very good at talking the talk.
I think all of them have been good at that.

And there have been some improvements through governments of both colours. But I think that what's happened, and whether it's Covid, whether it's social media, I don't think we really know.

But so, you know, related to this, the figures for school non-attendance, which often has a mental health component to to it, they have really risen dramatically since COVID.

Now, I don't think we've really even done the work to find out why that has happened.

And what I found, the reason I was in one of the meetings I had in Doncaster with Ed Miliband was with this amazing group of a mixture of people who were professionally employed in the mental health sector and volunteers, suicide prevention groups, men's mental health groups,

service users, groups that came together, Citizens Advice Bureau, MID, of course.

And they were all, when they took, there was a wonderful guy as well who was using football to improve people's mental health. And they were all doing amazing things.

But every single one of them said they were doing more with less. And I think we are,

I think we're really playing with fire here. I think we're really...

And I've got to say, Roy, every single one of them basically said the biggest causal issue was poverty.

It was people who were really struggling to make ends meet, struggling to feed their kids, struggling to just do basic things.

And so this report, I'm not going to sugarcoat it at all. The MIND report, I think, is pretty bleak reading.

And this is a charity, by the way, that doesn't kick and shout and blame government. It's very much, it's assessing the reality.
And then it's basically pointing to four areas.

We've got to improve access. We've got to do more for young people.
We've got to break down stigma and discrimination. and we've got to tackle these societal issues, particularly poverty and housing.

So I really, really hope, not just the health ministers, I hope that Rachel Reeves will have a read of it. I hope that Kierstalma will have a read of it.

It's not a happy reading. Okay.
Well, I think maybe we should do a longer thing on this. I mean, it's something you...

you know a lot about, you think a lot about, and a few minutes maybe doesn't do justice to it.

But I think a good subject maybe to end the podcast on, very serious, something where as you say all governments have been talking a good game I remember David Cameron doing this I remember Keir Starmer doing this saying how important mental health was but in the end when it actually comes to the money and the resources not putting it there and and we need to dive into that a bit deeper I'm determined that we we finish on a slightly more uplifting note but one before I do that there's a section within the report on current affairs and mental health and it and this is from an ONS survey Among adults, the leading sources of worry included social and political issues, 44%, money, 42%,

and health. These concerns were more common among those already experiencing mental health problems.

And a survey of young people, four out of five said they feel anxious about major political issues like war and conflict. 87%

said they worry about climate change. And look, you and I both talked about, you know, I don't know how much sleep you lose worrying about the state of the world, but I lose a bit.

And so that isn't that is part of this as well. But determined to be uplifting.

We got fantastic feedback, Rory, last week for doing our positive QA, where we were determinedly optimistic and positive about the subjects we've discussed.

So this week on the mainpod, we've been a bit

downbeat and a bit sort of, you know, grouchy about stuff. But

we are grateful to Jeff, who the guy who insisted we did the positive one we will do it again in the not too distant future and we will this is a great opportunity for me to finish the plug because of course we're going to do it again next week where you're going to talk to me about my book the middle land about cumbria which is full of positive stories oh rory you're shameless you're shameless you're absolutely shameless yeah that's the opportunity there it is there it is i've got to say i have started to read it and If you went back, so just to tell our listeners, this book called Middleland, Dispatches from the Borders, essentially it's a collection of columns that you wrote for your local paper when you were an MP.

I have to tell you, Rory, I actually went and looked back at some of my local, my columns from the Tavistock Times days of the 80s.

I wouldn't even begin to think about putting them in the book because they were too related to people and events that have, in a way, long been forgotten.

Whereas what you've done very well, I'm only a third of the way through, but what you've done very, very well, you've kind of, I don't know whether this is what your columns are always like, but they're sort of timeless.

They're timeless.

yeah. Here's my quote for the paperback version.
Most newspaper compilation books are really shit. This one is not.
How about that?

Wonderful.

On that positive note, let me finish with a huge tribute to you, Alistair, because you gave me one of the great ideas of all time, which was we suddenly discovered that Piers Morgan had just said, good morning, Elon Musk.

I've written a new book that I think you'll really enjoy. Maybe we could do an interview about it.
So inspired by you, I've tweeted out, Good morning, Elon Musk.

I've written a new book that I think you will really hate.

Maybe we could do an interview about it. Middleland, Dispatches from the Borders.
Very good. Or we could, maybe we could invite him to come on a special negative edition of Question Time.

Question Time tomorrow. We're going to talk about Maccabi Tele Avi football fans.
We'll be talking about the China spy case and how that collapsed, and Chinese espionage more broadly.

Talk about Prince Andrew. Lots to talk about.
Thank you. Look forward to it then.
See you soon. Bye-bye.

But in the low-level conflict that the two sides were engaged in post-October 7th, Israel was facing the prospect of a two-front war, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to take critical action.

As Hezbollah grew increasingly paranoid, they turned to the Pager as a secure alternative, but what they bought instead was a lethal Mossad plot.

Within days, Hezbollah's command was wiped out when the Israelis assassinated its leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

To hear the full episode, you can listen to the rest is classified wherever you get your podcast as we break down this incredible geopolitical gamble and all the spycraft behind the explosive attacks that permanently shifted the balance of power in the Middle East.