475. The Budget Backlash – and Trump’s Plan to Profit from Peace in Ukraine

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Welcome to the Rest of Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me Rory Stewart.
So Rory, we're going to do first half UK focusing on the fallout from the budget last week.

And then we're going to do second half various elements of Trump, but in particular Ukraine and this extraordinary situation in Honduras and Venezuela. So where do you want to start with the budget?

Well, I think the obvious place to start

is that a lot of the UK press has been caught up in the last few days with whether or not the Office for Budget Responsibility had told Rachel Reeves that the fiscal situation was better than she feared.

And basically the story here is that the briefing to the press, and indeed it seems to the cabinet colleagues was that they had got some pretty worrying information from the OBR and therefore a few weeks ago the idea was that because they were going to be getting less income in that they hoped and their productivity was less good than they hoped, they were actually going to have to put up income tax which would have been a really big move because it would have broken the manifesto commitment.

When it actually came to it, she didn't put up income tax, she put up other forms of tax and largely got most of her revenue by just freezing the thresholds so that that increase in people's salaries would naturally drag them into higher tax thresholds was going to generate her billions.

And I think the complaints are basically twofold.

There's the complaints from journalists like Robert Peston, our colleague on The Restaurant's Money, that he felt effectively lied to, that he was briefed and given the impression that there was a severe fiscal crisis, basically, which was going to require these very dramatic measures.

And it turned out that wasn't really the information she'd got from this independent office at all.

And then there were complaints from Labour colleagues saying that they had walked them up the hill, saying there'd been a crisis, they needed to raise income tax, and then they brought them down again.

And this has now all resulted in the resignation of Richard Hughes, the head of the Office of Budget Responsibility. Over to you.

Yeah, I think the resignation is more related to the fact that, in what everybody recognised was a complete fiasco, somehow the Office of Budget Responsibility released the budget before it had been delivered, which is

sort of beyond belief on one level. But I think underlying it, there have been tensions with the OBR.
There have been tensions about its remit, about its role.

It was interesting yesterday that Keir Stahmer made a speech and then did a little press conference where he actually spoke up for the OBR in terms of its existence and its remit.

So given the pressure Reeves has been under this week, I think we're going to do two things here.

One is Alistair has got some very interesting points about actually the way the media operates in Britain and the way that it's not serious and it's biased.

And then we'll wrap up by actually looking at the substance of this. Is Rachel Reeves a good Chancellor or not?

So first we'll talk about some of the coverage and then we'll talk about the substance of what she's doing.

I think on the bigger picture, partly because Rachel Reeves is getting such a kicking and has been ever, well, for a long time now, I'm going to put the case for the defence on this one.

And it's interesting how you say that journalists feel they've been misled. A lot of the misleading in the build-up to budgets is done by journalists.

And I think that this relates to the totally different context in the way that the modern media now operates.

I've told you before, when I was a political journalist and I was once called in by my editor, Richard Stock, this was about when Nigel Lawson was chancellor.

And I'd written a sort of trailer of the budget. And it was very, very speculative.
I wasn't saying anything that justified taxes to go up, taxes to go down.

I was reflecting the sorts of conversations I'd been having. And bear in mind, this was on a labor-supporting tabloid newspaper.

So I wrote this piece and Richard called me in and he said, he always called me old man, he called everybody old man. He said, have you seen the budget, old man?

And I said, no, of course I haven't seen the fucking budget. Nobody's seen the budget apart from the people who've written it.
And he said, well, why are you writing this crap then?

Now, I just don't believe that conversation would happen. Never mind in the Daily Rail.
I don't think I've been in any newspaper.

So, and the other thing, it used to be accepted across politics and across the media, by and large, budgets didn't leak. And that has steadily changed over the years.

And in part, I think, again, because the press want to have their cake and eat it, to quote Boris Johnson. So they will speculate on all sorts of ideas.

I think the one that did the damage, when Kemi Badenock talked about the markets, I think it was this idea floated of an exit tax. If you leave the country, you're going to have to pay.

And I'm not sure that that ever came from anybody within the Treasury. I think that was media speculation that then took

on a life of its own. Now, here's a bit of advice.
I saw that on the back of the West Streeting mounting a leadership challenge against Keirstarma, Keir Starmer apparently briefed the cabinet.

He didn't want to see any briefing coming out from number 10 other than from number 10 comms team headed by Tim Allen, which I think was a way of saying to Morgan McSweeney, stop spending half your time talking to the media.

I think now would be a good time for Starmer and Rachel Reeves to make clear a genuine determination to get back to a place where the golden rule governing statements about the economy like the budget and others public spending and so forth is that unless it comes from somebody authorized to speak on behalf of them, it has no merit whatsoever.

And I think that can be done even with the media making stuff up. So I think, you know, you mentioned the speech that Rachel Reeves made, and we said at the time it was rolling the pitch.

And we both thought that it was, and so did the markets, that she was going to put up income tax. I watched Kirstana's speech yesterday and I watched the press conference afterwards.

I think what you've got to understand is that with something like a budget, there is a mixture of politics and economics going on.

Now, you can argue the merit of doing what she did and you can argue the demerit. We thought she did it for a purpose.

That purpose then changed because I think probably number 10 had said, we are not going to put up income tax.

But if you think about what the budget actually achieved, I think the biggest thing that it did, and this is what kind of settled the markets, was actually the creation of that.

far bigger than expected fiscal headroom. Now, she did that by putting other taxes up.

So it's possible for conflicting, contradictory statements that are being made now and analysed to the nth degree by journalists who don't really want to write the story the budget went down quite well with the markets, went down quite well with Labour MPs.

They want to say it was a complete fiasco because that's what they said it was going to be. So I think they should calm down a bit.

Let's step back from the subject of the comms and whether or not she was right to use the OBR in the way that she did and just look at that statement she meant.

The budget went down quite well with Labour MPs and quite well with the markets. If I was being challenging, I'd say that's the problem.

That if you wanted to analyse what's wrong with Rachel Reeves, what's wrong with her is she's trying to produce a budget which goes down quite well with Labour MPs and doesn't spook the markets.

And that that isn't actually what Britain needs at the moment. Our productivity is pathetic and has been since 2019.

And we need a story about growth and how on earth Britain is going to compete over the next 10, 15 years.

And she is a Chancellor who basically, in the end, is largely concerned with not upsetting Labour MPs and not spooking the markets too much. And that means she ends up in the worst of all worlds.

She's neither doing the kind of radical pro-business reforms because she doesn't want to annoy the Labour backbenchers, which would please, really please the markets, nor is she prepared to really lean into the kind of instincts of her backbenchers because she's worried about worrying the markets.

And she ends up up in a grey muddle in the middle, which in to my sense, I don't really see anything big enough, clear enough in what she or Starmer is communicating, which would really give a sense of business confidence.

I'll respond to that actually by going through in some detail what Keir Starmer said yesterday. Now, this goes again, I'm sorry, this does go back again to how the media frame stuff.

So Keir Starmer, he is the prime minister, right? If Keir Starmer makes a speech about anything, it should have some news value to it, okay?

The news value that the media decided in advance was that Keerstarmer was shoring up Rachel Reeves' position, defending the budget, and claiming that there was no misleading going on.

If you go into the number 10 website and read the whole speech, there is a lot in it. Very little of which was reported yesterday or in any of the newspapers today.
Why?

Because that framing has been set. So if I just go through it, now, and by the way, BBC Sky, they will say, well, we covered it live, okay? Yeah, and fair enough, they covered it live.

So Kierstahma started his speech essentially by talking about how proud he was of lifting the two-child benefit cap. Now, you could say a journalist might go back and say, well, hold on a minute.

Not long ago, you were expelling MPs.

from the party for saying

let's stop on that Alistair for a second because I think it is worth reminding people of that.

They came in just over a year ago and one of the really difficult, tough decisions they made challenging their backbenchers was to say, we're going to keep a cap that beyond two children, you're not going to get welfare benefits.

And when Labour MPs voted against that policy, they expelled Labour MPs from the party. They were that hard over on this policy.
Correct.

So it's very odd to say, I'm very proud that I've lifted the two-child benefit cap when you were expelling people a year ago.

Okay, you've partly made my point for me.

So, Gierstama finished his speech. There was actually quite a lot in it.
I'll go through it in a minute.

After which, they do that thing, Chris Mason of the BBC, Beth Rigby of Sky, Robert Peston, ITN, somebody else from somewhere else, then a couple of kind of influencers, and they go through.

Virtually every question was about the pre-framing. Okay?

You say you're defending your Chancellor, but on this day she said this and that day said that. Don't you think she should resign? Whatever.

A better question, I think, would have been, given that I could have told him what he he was going to say about that, because he'd written in the Bloody Observer the day before, would have been, hold on a minute, can I just remind you what you said about the two-child benefit cap when you were expelling MPs?

Okay.

But he did that. He then goes through, he said, we had to face choices.

We could have cut public services, we could have ignored child poverty, we could have done extra borrowing, and then he kind of did a little subliminal reminder of list trusts, etc.

He then talked about austerity. Austerity has scarred the long-term productive capability of this country.

Now, for the next bit, Rory, Rory, I want you to imagine that the Daily Mail, The Sun, The Express, The Telegraph, The Times that their psychology is not to look for stories the whole time to denigrate and damage the Labour government, but it's actually to act as cheerleaders, as they did, for example, when Liz Truss did her budget, which smashed the economy, as they do a lot of the time with Nigel Farage.

Okay.

He then went through, he said this point about, if you'd have said to me that when we took power, by now we'd have cut NHS waiting times, got immigration down, cut child poverty, cut borrowing faster than any other G7 country, fiscal headroom up, economic growth beating the focus, wages up, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, I can imagine a Daily Express front page that goes immigration down.

waiting lists down, wages up, all that sort of stuff, right? Freezing rail fares, freezing prescription charges. So my point is none of that gets covered.
Now, we then go on to

the next thing, which I think is really, really important, because you said you're one of the few people in all of the coverage who mentioned this thing called the Fingleton Report on nuclear power and the building of nuclear power stations.

Keir Starmer set out three areas where he said there has to be major change across the economy. He quoted the Fingleton recommendations on nuclear power.

He talked about a mindset that favours process over outcome, which I think you had referred to.

He talked about gold plating, well-intentioned, misguided environmental regulation, and then said that in addition to accepting these recommendations on nuclear power, I'm instructing the business secretary, Peter Kyle, to apply these lessons across an entire industrial strategy.

Now, all I would say is if this was France or Germany, even America or Australia or any country with a serious media, that would have been part of the news coverage. I've not seen it anywhere.

I guess that what one wants, ideally, from analysis is not either cheerleading or trashing. One wants an attempt to step back and objectively look at it.

So part of the question is, have Keir Summer and Rachel Reeves won people's trust?

When he says, I'm going to cut process, focus on outcomes, do people really believe on the basis of what he's done over the last 18 months that that's where his heart is and that's what's going to really happen?

And part of the problem at the back of all of this is there's a general sense which has been going on in British politics for a very long time, which is that the

government makes endless announcements and they want the press to report them as though they've achieved them.

I agree with that.

And actually what I think the public sense, and we can get into this a bit more, but when I look at this government, I was trying to think at about six this morning what it is that really troubles me about this government.

And I've concluded that it's in every department of government that I worked in as a minister, I cannot see that they're making the right decisions.

The departments I know really well. So I served in DEFRA, I served in the Ministry of Justice, I served in Overseas Development, and I served in the Foreign Office.

And in every single one of those departments, this feels like a government that isn't gripping it and isn't ultimately making the right calls.

So when he says waiting list down, immigration down, I'm afraid my instinct is, okay, how much down? Why is it down? How much is the government to do with this?

How much is this about net migration when, in fact, we've got astonishing figures for the number of people choosing to leave the United Kingdom?

150,000 British citizens have voluntarily left the United Kingdom because they would rather be working in Poland, Romania, Australia than working in the UK.

That's not necessarily something to boast about. Anyway,

I'm not pretending, and I'm not going to pretend that this government has, and I said this when we were on tour recently, I said to virtually every audience that it's got before me in a way that I was hoping and would like it to.

I'm trying to make a bigger point that I still think that

they're trying to do the right thing in a very, very difficult media environment, way worse than we had. It's on a par, I think, with the way the media covered Michael Foote and Neil Kinnock.

They were sort of just constantly, the media saw his role as denigrating them, and that's possibly one of the reasons why they never made it to power. But this is a government in power.

And I think part of what's happened is that they're so used since

the sort of churn of prime ministers and chancellors and foreign secretaries and all the reshuffles and all the madness of truss and johnson and what have you it's all about getting scalps and they've got a few angela reiner peter mandelson and so forth but let me just finish a couple of points rory because the other these are all relate to things that we've talked about the second point so you made that first point about the fingleton review and said that's going to go across government and i agree with you and let's see my point is about the media that is a serious proposal analyse it test it force them to ask questions nobody asked about that not a single word then the second point was welfare he said we've got to reform the welfare state.

And then he said, that's why we've asked Alan Milburn, one of your heroes, to report on this issue of young people inactivity and work. And again, interesting area.
Look at it. Test it.

I guess the test is that the idea that he's floating is that they will cut some of the payments to young people. And instead, one idea is that they will provide incentives for people to employ them.

So let's say you were going to get £3,000.

When you weren't working, your employer might be given matching to employ you so that you'd be transferred in the workplace.

But I guess the issue that we're struggling with here and the journalist needs to test is every time so far

Reeves and Starmer have talked about radical welfare reform, their backbenches have broken. They lost the vote, for sure, for sure.

But that's why, so for example, just going back to what a serious media would do with that, I would go off and I'd say, okay, let's go and, and you can do this now with ChatGPT and AI AI and all that stuff, let's go and find out everything Alan Milburn has ever said about reform of welfare, both when he was in government and since.

When we interviewed him, did he talk about it? What are his principles in this? Start a debate about that. And then the third area, this is the one that really cheered me up, of course.

We must all now confront the reality, said the Prime Minister, that the Brexit deal we have significantly hurt our economy. We have to keep reducing frictions.

We have to keep moving towards a closer relationship with the EU. Now, Rory, to be fair to the Daily Express, can I say those words? To be fair to the Daily Express.

They are the only paper that led today on Kierstarma's speech. Under the headline, Fury, as Underfire Starber says Brexit has hurt our economy.
Oh, no, how could he say that?

So he's cutting through that. A bit, a bit, a bit.
There's a bigger point, though, isn't there, which is sort of part of the whole thing, which is, I guess,

if you were actually to say to a a highly intelligent, well-informed reader of the Guardian or the Times or a listener to Today programme, what is actually happening in Ministry of Defence spending?

You know, Putin's threatening Ukraine, he's threatening Europe. What's actually the deal here? My sense is it's not been reported in a way that has got through to anyone.

I think vaguely in people's mind, they would think Labor's increasing defence spending, but the reality is in real terms, it probably isn't going up.

And most of the money is going to be absorbed in the nuclear program. And we're woefully underprepared.
But that's almost the same thing, isn't it? This isn't just about

the media being very right-wing. It's also about a media environment that's very, very uninterested in holding people to account for details.

They're not, you know, how much real reporting has been done on the fact that the Foreign Office is now losing something like 30% of its staff.

And what that actually means for Global Britain and post-Brexit Britain and how we're going to operate in the world. Were those 30% of staff necessary, unnecessary, etc.?

Just on that specific point, so you know, before we started recording, I sort of just had a quick look through some of the news websites.

And there's a story on the BBC, Yvette Cooper angry that tents that Britain has paid for have taken a year to get to Gaza.

Now, I didn't read the whole story, but if I was a journalist, I'd be coming straight back at them on that. So, hold on a minute.

When we had a properly funded overseas development agency, and we were and DFID was leading the world in this so it works both ways this okay I think it's the short-termism it's the lack of we're going about critical thinking in education there's so little critical thinking I would say in modern journalism and listen I'm not tiring them all with the same brush but if you followed our media over the last five days And I suspect this story about, you know, so you've now got John Swinney, you've got Nigel Farage,

you got, you know, Badenock, you got them all sort of say, Rachel Rees must resign. And that's what everybody's talking about.

I get the feeling, looking at Keir Starmer yesterday, he's not going to suck her.

He doesn't think it justifies it. And I actually, I think this is reaching a point.

And I know that my old colleagues at Lumber Ted will be going, oh, God, here he goes again, wants to declare war on the media. I don't want to do that.

But I actually do think from time to time, politicians should do a better job of explaining to the public about some of this stuff.

Like we've both said that we thought that the build-up to this budget was pretty chaotic, okay? And I think it was. There was far too much talking out the side of mouths going on.

There were far too many people who felt they were licensed to get talked to the press. Stop it.
Just grow up and stop it.

But that being said, I think this so-called mess that we're in is as much about the way the media now operates as it is about any mistakes made by the Treasury. And you're right.

There's obviously a right-wing bias and a huge amount of the media, and there aren't that many left-wing supporting papers.

But it's also true that if you were Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt listening to this, you'd be saying, hold a second.

How do you think the media treated us in our last two and a half years? Every single thing we did was treated as a joke. Every announcement we made was ignored.

Every attempt to lay out serious principles was swept aside. The stuff we did on AI wasn't taken seriously.
I'm not sure that's true. I'm not sure that's true.
There is a big difference here.

They were the fag end of a government that most people thought were going to lose, including them we know that talking to jeremy i

he said he knew he was going to lose but he had to stay we're talking about a government that was elected just over a year ago with a majority now you and i can agree as we do that labor haven't necessarily used that majority well that they haven't set out big things on ai whatever it might be but i actually think yesterday was a very good example whereas if you actually took what kir salma said

and analyzed it with a journalistic mind that isn't party pre to say this is a shambles this is a disaster There was a lot to talk about. I saw very little of it being talked about.

So maybe two ways in which I'd agree with you. First is that Keir Starmer is definitely not as bad as his net popularity rating suggests.

He's got about 20% of the British public think he's doing a good job. I mean something like 41% of the American public think Trump's doing a good job, to put that in kind of context, right?

He's got half the popularity rating of Trump. So I think that is not justified.
Normally, you would look at

Keir Salmer and you'd look for an analogy in history. You know, he's not there with the worst prime ministers on record.
He's not, I don't know, Neville Chamberlain or whatever.

He's there with some of the slightly underwhelming early 20th century prime ministers that we can't really remember the names of. Or maybe he's with Alec Douglas Hume or something.

But Alec Douglas Hume didn't have a net popularity rating of, you know, whatever it is, minus 50. And he didn't win an election.

And he didn't win an election.

And the second thing is that your bigger point about the media is really important.

I was very struck by how when we did our emergency episode on COVID, people getting in touch saying, thank goodness, somebody's trying to get into some of the details of this thing, because this was a really big deal.

This was like 400 billion pounds hit to the British economy, massive effects on education, et cetera, et cetera, almost forgotten.

But also in that time, when you went through all the points in the Ukraine peace plan, we'll get onto this a bit after the break.

But again, the number of people who said, goodness, nobody had actually pointed out to us these commercial financial deals in the Ukraine peace plan. So there's clearly a big problem.

I don't think it's just, I think it's partly an anti-labor problem, but it's a bigger problem of the fact that for whatever reason, editors have decided that the public isn't interested in policy detail.

And yet...

Large members of the public, this isn't just blowing our trumpets, it's a fact, large numbers of the public listen to a pensioner and a middle-aged guy from you know your background talk about politics a few times a week so i think i this is the point i keep making the

i think they are wrong to assume that the public can only cope with one story at a time and the story this week is rachel reeves lied to us

chris mason at the bbc who's you know who had a kind of multiple orgasm when the obr accidentally released the budget live on television do your Chris Mason impression.

I like your Christmas impression.

The rise and rise of reform.

So he said, he wrote this long piece and he said, in other words, this is at the end of the analysis, nothing she said in that news conference was wrong.

But,

and this is the key point, we now know she knew something that she didn't share with us that morning. What's that saying?

It's basically saying, if you tell us something, you must tell us everything about everything that we might one day write about.

Look, I'm not pretending that journalists and politicians don't sort of, you know, they're always talking to each other. It is an incestuous world.
There's no doubt about that.

They, you know, Michael Wolfe, when he, I don't know,

one of his books have I read about Britain is this weird place where they're all marrying each other, shagging each other, all this sort of stuff.

He had this very, very dark view of our media political complex. But I do think there's something

gone very, very wrong that

I've gone across this period. And I'm not pretending I was a great journalist.
I'm not pretending I didn't, I wasn't biased. I was very, very biased pro-labour.

But to go from a place where in the 80s, Richard Stott says to me, don't write this crap unless you actually know what you're talking about and you know what's in the budget.

Otherwise, just, you know, write a column, but don't present it as news,

to a place now where news and comment is virtually completely fused.

Okay, Raul, listen, thank you for allowing me to present that fairly one-sided, but I think quite analytical view of the way this media stuff works.

But you started off, and I described it as the case for the defense. Before we go to the break, why don't you just give the case for the prosecution, as it were?

Well, let's go back to our interview with Rachel Reeves before the election. One of the most telling things she said when we asked, why do you want to be Chancellor?

is she said, I think I'd be a good chancellor and that's really important because what she was saying there is not ideas this is not my analysis of the economy this is not the two big principles that are going to drive growth I'm pitching for the job on the grounds that I'd be good at it I'm sort of competent technocrat right

what she's demonstrated is that she's not a good chancellor in that sense She's clearly, you know, nobody would suggest she's been good at the comms.

Nobody suggests that she's been good at articulating a clear vision for growth.

Nobody would even suggest she's been very good at rolling the pitch and handling how you head up to a budget. So that then drives us back onto the question of what are her big ideas?

What's Labour's vision for the British economy? And there I think

we're in real trouble. I think the most of a clue we can get is probably this figure, Torsten Bell, who used to run the Resolution Foundation.

And the sense one gets is that Torsten Bell is still very much stuck in fighting the 2010 to 2019 conversation.

In particular, the Resolution Foundation was around inequality. And the big question for Labour is, is this a government about inequality or is it a government about growth?

Now, they'll try to say they want to do both. I get that.

But in the end, there needs to be a relentless idea driven through government of what the priority is here.

My instinct is that actually many of the inequality figures that Torsten Bell was focused on have actually changed over the last few years.

And since 2019, there's been a very different type of economic problem. British productivity, actually 2008 to 2019, was more in line with the US than it is now.

Something's happened over the last six years that we don't really understand and we can't really explain.

And what one needs from this chance, I don't care what it is, could be right-wing, could be left-wing. I mean, I'd obviously rather be on the right, but could be right than left-wing.

Here's an analysis. This is what's fundamentally wrong with the country.
This is what's holding it back. And this is what we're going to do to fix it.

And it can't be a series of kind of small measures dressed up after the event. I mean, that's what I feel about the way that Reeves and Starmer do this.

They reach for what somebody says, you know, check what we've done over the last year and a half, and then let's try to make a little speech which ties it together and tries to provide a narrative explaining why we're doing good stuff.

No, it's the other way around. Start from the what's the problem you're fixing? Is the problem you're fixing that too much money is going to pensioners?

Is the problem that you're fixing that the state has got too big and that there's too much process and there's too much bureaucracy and too much regulation and we need to unleash entrepreneurial spirit?

Is the problem that you're fixing that we haven't built enough infrastructure? Is the problem that you're fixing that we have have... I don't, I don't care.

What's the problem you're fixing and what are you doing about it?

And that's why I think she's no good, because I still think fundamentally they came into office believing that the problem was that the Tories were

stupid, incompetent and a bit evil, and she would just be a better chancellor.

And what she meant by that is she thought that fundamentally running the economy was pretty straightforward and if you put in a good person like her it would all be fine and that the problem was people like jeremy hunt george osborne were either poorly intentioned or didn't know what they were doing and i think everything stems from that look i i agree with some but all of that um i think if what i think motivates her and what she keeps saying and this is a consistent theme since she was in opposition is this thing about she goes on about you know she grew up in a school where the roofs were leaking and and and girls like her didn't really have the chance to sort of make the most of their potential i think that that is a big driver but where i profoundly agree with you, I think a lot of the problems this government faces are about that sense of not having the driving narrative that everybody understands.

You get the narrative and then you get the policy areas you want to focus on and then you get the policy solutions. And sometimes it feels to me that that's disordered.

But I do think, going back to my point about Girstalm's speech, if they did manage to fix trade through a proper look at regulation, planning, etc.

If they did manage to sort welfare through Milburn, etc., if they did manage to get proper trade relations with the European Union to take all this friction, that would be a big step forward.

A shared disappointment we had about the budget was next to nothing about AI.

And actually, if you look at the OBR, Richard Hughes organisation and the report they published, the one place where they actually decided there was going to be economic growth.

I don't know how they worked this out, but their AI was actually the driver of that. So they've decided there is something in that, but we're not really hearing that.

Since Peter Carl left, we're not really hearing that from the government. And I think the risk then to finish is that in her obituary, the risk at the moment is

my story is I managed to get budgets through in a way that didn't alienate my backbenchers and didn't alienate the markets. She's not dead, Rory.

No, but that's that's I think that that framing that you put at the beginning catches very well what they're doing and that that's not enough because in fact Britain's in trouble so you would have to be very brave you'd have to pick enemies you'd have to decide you know if you're Polanski and we'll get on to this when we do an episode tomorrow you're going your enemies the bond markets if you're on the right I guess your enemies might be the labor backbenchers trying to steer your way neatly between the two without annoying them might work in very positive situations where the economy is growing and everybody's happy with you but when productivity stalled and you're massively unpopular you've got got to take some risk and you've got to make some enemies.

Okay, well, let's not take any risk. Let's take a break.
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As the year draws to a close, it's time for our annual reminder that even in an age of political noise and division, one national consensus still stands firm. Roast potatoes.

Oh, God, all this British stuff.

If you're wondering, however, what to buy the politically obsessed person in your life this Christmas, might I gently suggest a year's membership to the Rest is Politics Plus?

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Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell.
Now, exciting announcement before we get into Ukraine, Honduras, and Venezuela.

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So we've done the UK. Let's go to the US.
There's so much going on in the foreign policy field.

But I think particularly in relation to Ukraine yet again, and also this extraordinary intervention by Trump in advance of the election in Honduras. Do you want to start with Ukraine?

We talked in the first half about bad journalism. Here's unusually a shout-out to good journalism, but unfortunately it's American journalism.
But with a British editor.

Emma Tucker. So Wall Street Journal, incredible detailed reporting on what was going on behind the scenes in terms of the Putin plan.
So this is the plan that you took apart in our emergency podcast.

And what they've pointed to is how deeply this is all a commercial deal.

And what they've talked about is both Witkoff's meetings with the head of the Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund and then many, many other encounters. Roommates of Donald Trump Jr.

bidding for Russian assets, Trump donors bidding for Russian assets, an incredible web of moves where it seems as though the Kremlin policy since January is being vindicated, and the Kremlin policy since January towards the US has been to say, forget about Europe, we will give you lots of juicy deals.

We'll give you deals on rare earths and minerals and Siberia. We'll give you access to gas.
We'll give you some of our government assets a knockdown price.

And American, particularly American individuals, some of them close to Donald Trump, will be able to make an enormous fortune and will cut the Europeans out of the picture.

And in return, what we want is basically your recognition that Ukraine is effectively part of the Russian sphere of influence. NATO is going to be driven back.
and Russia is going to be left alone.

And it's an extraordinary move. I'm going to come to you on this.

But one of the lines in another article in wall street journal which really sat with me is that putin thinks this is like stalin dealing with roosevelt and truman about dividing up europe after the second world war he thinks he's as powerful as stalin was the end of the second world war and that his legacy will be to convince the us that he is this giant superpower who therefore deserves to put most of eastern europe under his sway i think his his ambitions in terms of his historical legacy they go even further than that.

He's had this idea that there's Peter the Great, Alexander the Great, and Vladimir the Great, and

the Great.

Stalin never got that one. Just a sort of side note before we get into the substance of this.

Yesterday, and I think we've got to be really careful with how we talk about Ukraine and Trump and Gaza and Trump, because we keep, this is like Groundhog Day.

So you turn on the radio this morning, watch the television. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are meeting Vladimir Putin to discuss the latest stage in the da-da-da-da.
We've been here so many times.

Can I just interrupt on that on the media point here? How is it that, as you say,

Rachel Reeves can't get away with anyone taking her budget seriously, but somehow Trump gets away continually with fooling the media almost every day into believing that he's on the cusp of an amazing breakthrough and comprehensive peace deal, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Why are they not as cynical about Trump as they are about domestic politics? Well, they are probably as cynical, but I think there are various things going on.

The first is Trump, unlike Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeve, is an intimidating bully when it comes to the media.

Piggy, the woman who get called as being piggy, had another one woman the other day said, Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?

I actually think there comes a point where the media, if they had any bulls whatsoever, they're just all down tools and say, we're off. You know, have you, Marjorie Taylor?

I don't know whether Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend is still in the inner circle or not, but keep your little influences and all your sort of MAGA crowd, but the rest of us are off and we'll cover you from outside, which kind of is what the Wall Street Journal are doing, because you don't forget the Wall Street Journal is one of those papers that Trump is suing over the story they ran about him and Epstein.

For some reason, Trump has got this hold over the media because they know

that he is newsworthy. Whatever he says, whatever he does, people will tune in.

When we did the series on Murdoch, one of the points that, you know, digging into the research, that it became apparent to me is that Trump out-foxed, no pun intended, Murdoch by becoming more important to Fox News ratings and success than anybody else, including Murdoch.

On this one, I'll say, if you were an editor, why would you not be saying all that we know about the last two and a half years strongly suggests that Putin is not going to accept anything short of getting his hands on the whole of Donetsk and Luhansk and ensuring that Ukraine is weakened and NATO push back.

So it doesn't really matter what Europe and Ukraine have just produced and that Witkovsky just set off to Russia with.

He's not going to get it. Why is it reported as though they're on the cusp of a deal? Because they report what Trump says and they feel they have to because he's the president.

It goes back to this point we've made a lot that a very abnormal presidency is being covered largely in normal terms.

So, I mean, I would say, I would suggest that it is utterly abnormal that Jared Kushner's there. He's his son-in-law.

We know that when he was very close to Trump in the White House in the first term, he became a multi-billionaire on the back of deals done whilst being responsible for and getting praise from Trump for helping deliver the Abraham Accords.

This sort of fusion of money and power. I was talking to one of the ambassadors who was in Washington at the time, and I said, what was Jared Kushner like? And he said it was completely terrifying.

Every time he went in as the ambassador from his country to seat Jerry Kushner, who then had an official position in the U.S. government, half the meeting would be about business deals.

Kushn would basically say, well,

let's stop talking about whatever kind of geopolitical issue we're talking about. By the way, I'd like to do this deal.
Do you think you could help facilitate my business deal?

So the situation today, Putin's there. Putin, as we've said many times, he hasn't really changed his position at all.
He occasionally drops hints that he might.

Trump then celebrates and says we're on the cusp of a deal, and then Trumpin just pushes in the same direction.

And the point you made about Europe, this goes back to what I think was one of the most consequential moments of the year, J.D. Vance's immunity speech.

The threat that I worry the most about, vis-a-vis Europe, is not Russia. What I worry about is the threat from within.
Sometimes you've got to take this people at face value.

That was him saying, you lot don't really matter to us. The idea that they're working for peace in Ukraine in the same way that Kirstama, Merz, Macron

think they are working for peace, they're operating in a completely different lens.

And the fact that Rubio, who has actually, I think, been more sensible, I mean, it was interesting when they met the newly formed Ukrainian negotiating team, because Zelensky's lost his chief of staff, Yermak, through this corruption scandal, but they met the new team, and it was a pretty high-powered Ukrainian team.

And there's Rubio sitting there, because he's the Secretary of State, flanked by Witkoff and Jared Kushner. That was the American team.
It's all about the business deals.

Witkoff famously being the golfing partner. I mean, this is the real thing that we don't keep.
I mean, the reason he's so trusted is that he was one of Trump's favourite golfing buddies.

The reason why Witkoff would be a very good golfing partner is because to be a good golfing partner for Trump, you have to be willing to lose every game that you play.

And you have to be able to turn the blind eye when Trump hits the ball into the rough or into a bunker and then miraculously that ball moves via the caddy's pocket into the middle of the fairway and then you have to say great shot mr president and that is what makes you a good golfing partner and he refuses refuses to use secure telephones he insists on using unsecure mobile telephones for the most classified details of the russian negotiations when one of the European security agencies tried to reprimand him and said, could you please use a secure line?

He said, No, I find it very inconvenient that that machinery takes too long to set up. He doesn't inform the U.S.
government when Witkoff was doing prisoner release.

He didn't tell the CIA, which is actually in charge of that type of prisoner release, that he was doing it.

The US Treasury only found out about the fact that he was deciding to suddenly lift sanctions on this man, Kirill Dmitriev, who was banned from visiting the US to bring him in after the event.

It's the British that had to tell US officials what Witkoff is up to in Moscow sometimes.

I mean, and Kellogg, who is the general, he's gone, serious figure who was doing the Ukraine stuff, has announced he's out.

And as you say, Paul Rubio has become this figure, a bit like Rex Tillerson, who was the Secretary of State in the first Trump administration.

Rubio is on the right of the Republican Party, but he is becoming now and is being sidelined because he's seen as the voice of the establishment, because he's at least listening a little bit to the State Department, listening a little bit to the CIA, listening a little bit to experienced generals, trying to make the normal arguments that America has made for 80 years.

And as a result, he's treated as a joke. I thought one of the most interesting moments, though, in that meeting the other day was when Rubio used the words sovereign and independent about Ukraine.

Witkoff looked physically ill.

The social media was flooded with these pictures of Witkoff just looking like he'd been forced to eat the most disgusting food imaginable. But then who wins in that? Nobody.

It's just the next chapter. Just the next chapter in the show.
Exactly.

And presumably Trump given a decision to choose between, I don't know, Rubio and Witkoff, or let's say Rubio and an extraordinary series of wonderful rare earth and mineral deals with what he believes is the great superpower of Russia, will choose the latter, right?

One day this war will come to an end, because in the end all wars do come to an end. But it will only come to an end if both sides decide that

there's nothing more to be gained from fighting. We're nowhere near that yet.
Nowhere near it. And the idea that that plan is the basis to stop it is just completely for the birds.

There's also some very interesting reporting on drones again and the way that Russian is currently using new generation of fiber optic drones so you can't jam them through electronic warfare because they're literally linked by a fiber optic cable which they're buying by the hundreds of kilometers from China at the moment to push much further behind the Ukraine front line.

So Ukraine's still doing a really good job at drones right at the front line within about 12 miles. You can't pop out without being hit if you're a Russian.

But the Russians are now able to hit much deeper into Ukrainian territory and take out the drone operators themselves.

So this is a moment where Russia, which was behind in the drone story, now seems to be getting ahead. One final point on that, Roy.

I thought it was really interesting this week that the Ukrainians have been hitting the shadow, the Russian shadow fleet a fair bit as well, because that's that's been a very, very important part of Putin's economic strategy.

So listen, the war is still going on and I think we're kidding ourselves if we think that we're quotes on the cusp. I would love it if we were proven wrong, but I don't buy it.

Right, Honduras and Venezuela. Very quickly on this, two stories which you've been looking into a bit and I think are fascinating.

One of them is Venezuela that we have talked about in the past, but essentially there are more and more American troops now gathering around Venezuela, huge US aircraft carriers, strikes against Venezuelan vessels.

The report is that there was a single strike on a Venezuelan boat on the 2nd of September in which nine people were killed, leaving two alive.

And then there was a second strike which killed the two survivors. And the story is that Pete Hegseth had had given orders to kill everybody on board.

The Defense Secretary is distancing himself from that and saying that the Admiral who commands Special Operations Command has his full 100% support.

That's implying the Admiral's sort of done it without him.

Meanwhile, US lawmakers are demanding answers and Senator Chris Van Holland said it's very possible there was a war crime committed if Trump's construct of an armed conflict with drug gangs is to believed, or plain murder if it isn't.

And meanwhile, Lori, in another

very, very suspect move, Trump did another post announcing unilaterally that all pilots and all planes should regard Venezuelan airspace as closed.

And then we have this question around Honduras where Trump has again followed in his new pattern, which is of picking winners in other people's elections and threatening the population of Honduras and saying, if you don't vote for my candidate, I'm going to cut economic assistance.

Over to you.

Yeah, and related to that, shortly before the election, Trump announced on a Truth Social post that he was planning to pardon the former president of Honduras, Hernandez, who was serving a 45-year jail sentence in an American jail, having been convicted by an American court of charges related to flooding the U.S.

with drugs, hundreds of tons of cocaine. Now,

here's the thing. Trump's stated reasoning for

taking out these boats from Venezuela is that they're flooding America with drugs. Literally on the same day, he is pardoning or saying he's going to pardon a man who's been convicted for

forty five years, who was told when he was convicted that the judge expected him to die in jail, and Trump says he's going to be let out and worse than that, says unless Honduras elects the party, this guy, Nasri Tito Asfura, who is the Conservative presidential candidate in the party of Hernandez, then America will stop supporting Honduras in any way at all.

Am I getting this right? So Trump's policy is essentially, I want to kill you because if I don't kill you and you get arrested and convicted by a U.S. court, I'll pardon you.

I don't think he's quite that. I don't think these Venezuelans, and here's the thing about, we shouldn't really laugh because this is, look, they may well be drug dealers.

Well, the point is, we don't know. They've not been tried.
There's no evidence put forward and they're just being killed.

We don't know who they are.

We're now close to 100 people that we know of. We don't know of them.
We don't know who they are. But the numbers, we're into the 80s of people who've been killed whilst at sea by American forces.

And as you say, in some instances, including when they have turned backwards. And again, to remind people that you are not allowed to conduct extrajudicial killings of this sort, right?

The whole international legal system broadly was built to resemble the principles that we have in our own countries, which is you don't get to, in Britain, for example, send vigilantes down the street or even policemen down the street and just shoot people saying, well, we thought they might be drug dealers, right?

You arrest them, you bring them to trial, you convict them, they're innocent until proven guilty, etc. But overseas, it's even more extreme because this isn't your country.

These are not your citizens. So in order to be able to assassinate the citizens of another country, the U.S.

Congress very controversially, after 9-11, authorized laws which were about protecting America from clear and present dangers to the U.S., essentially terrorist attacks, imminent terrorist attacks against the U.S.

It was authorized. You could kill an al-Qaeda person if you could argue that they were about to mount some new 9-11 in the U.S.

But at no point does the legal system exist to say you can just go around randomly assassinating other people's citizens on the grounds that you think that they're carrying drugs, right yeah and although the administration is now saying they're acting legally jd vance of course is on the record when challenged about legality of this to say i don't give an f i don't care i don't care about the law right

so we're now in a position where the head of special operations this admiral is not just attacking these boats but it seems as though they have also been killing the survivors of these attacks so 11 people on a boat nine of them are killed two of them survived the first attack and are presumably bobbing around in the water, waiting to be rescued, and then they're killed too.

The other thing is that Venezuela, and I'm not defending Maduro, a terrible human being, and he'd rigged the election and all that, but Venezuela is not as big a source of America's drugs as, say, Honduras.

The court case that Hernandez was involved in, which ended him going to jail for almost half a century, as I say, they talked about how he'd opened a super highway for cocaine between Honduras and the United States.

And I think what this is, what this is indicating, and the message that this sends, and it's the same with Netanyahu.

Remember, Trump went to the Israeli parliament, spoke in the Knesset, and with his usual sort of half-jokey, half-serious way, pointed to the President, pointed to Netanyahu, and said, Come on, Mr.

President, just give the guy a pardon. He's got a water fight.
And now, a few weeks later, Netanyahu formally asks for a pardon from the President of Israel.

What Trump is doing here is signaling that if you are part of his gang, his political tribe, you're Millay, you're Netanyahu, you're one of his crowd, you should be entitled to do anything you want.

And that goes up to and including flooding America with drugs. As long as you're my guy, it's okay.

And this election that's taking place now, while we're speaking, Rory, on Tuesday morning, they're saying that the ruling party, you're only allowed one term under the Honduran constitution.

The candidate for the ruling party is in a very distant third place. The two candidates are literally, they are locked virtually in a tie while the voting is still going on.

It's a few votes, either way. I mean, it's literally what you'd literally be asking for a recount, wouldn't you? Correct.

When you start staring at ballot papers, and also, and this in an election where there was very little focus on policy and a lot of focus on the other side are going to try and rig it.

So this is absolutely made for Trump Trump to come out at some point and say, my guy's won, this is being rigged by the other lot. And what's interesting as well is that

the two who are leading, they're both essentially on the right. They're both right wing.
But he's decided his guy is the one who is the successor to Hernandez, this guy Astura.

And Astura, by the way, because the Hondurans don't particularly like, there were massive celebrations in the streets when Hernandez got jailed.

So Astura's thinking, I've got to distance myself from this guy. So, I mean, Trump may have helped, he may have hindered, but it's so close, it's impossible to work out.

Final one is the way in which the traditional allies of Venezuela, so particularly Russia, China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, haven't really come to Venezuela's defense. No.

And if you were going to explain what's going on here, it is that Trump has got Russia thinking they're about to get a great deal. from him in Ukraine.

So they're not going to go out on a limb for Venezuela. The Chinese are in the middle of these huge tariff negotiations.
They're not going to go out on a limb for Venezuela.

Iran, of course, nobody came to their assistance when they were struck by Israel and then by the US. So this sort of axis is really not holding together at all.

And in the short term, this very, very disruptive, aggressive behavior of Trump around the world with these very unpredictable and frequently unjust resolutions is working in his favor in relation to leaving Venezuela exposed.

But the other thing is, when he does these things, like say, I'm going to pardon the guy, do you think think he or anyone in his team even bothers to go and look at the evidence in the case?

Because what he said, he was asked about it on Air Force One. He said, well, a lot of people whose judgment I trust, they told me this was a bit of a political fit up, like Biden did with me.
Okay.

But when you go and read the evidence of this case, I mean, this guy Hernandez,

he was in league with El Chapo. El Chapo is one of the most famous drug dealers in the world.

And the whole thing got triggered because Hernandez's brother was arrested whilst taking a million-dollar bribe. Other cartel leaders gave evidence of how they were giving,

in some cases, quarter of a million, and in other cases more, some cases less. They were just giving this to the president and his family

as a payment for not being prosecuted. And the reason this is so nuts is that, as you say, it was an American court.

Because normally what Trump is claiming is that the courts in Latin American countries are biased against political opponents. That was the case that he was trying to make in Brazil about Bolsonaro.

But in this case, it's a U.S. court with unbelievable detailed information on exactly the issue that Trump claims to care about, which is governments involved in narco-trafficking.

And clearly, what's happened, presumably, is if you're smart enough to employ the right kind of lobbyist who can get to Kushner or can get to Donald Trump Jr.

and pop a word in his ear, all you have to do is say to the president, this is, you know, another one of these Biden things. Would you mind pardoning this? And off you go.
We know what he said.

Trump is on the record, statement given to the New York Times. Trump said, many friends, many friends had asked him to pardon Hernandez.
They gave him 45 years because he was the president.

You could do this to any president. In other words, this is never going to happen to me because I'm going to make sure that it doesn't happen to any of them.
What you'd love, though, Rory, I read

extracts from Hernandez's statement when he was setting out why he was the victim. And it was a very, very long statement.
But you'll be pleased to know he quoted the Bible,

Martin Luther King Jr., and Edmund Burke. Ah, there we are.

Well done you on reading the statement. Gosh, you've already been doing a lot of work on this one.
Okay, well, I think on that

off your mastermind subject, I think we're going to come to an end on that. But maybe we will return when we get the result from Honduras.
And look forward to speaking to you tomorrow.

And in question time, we're going to talk about Zach Polanski. We have so much feedback about our interview on leading Rory.

Zach Polanski, the leader of the Green Party in the UK with his radical economic policies, for those listeners who are not right in the heart of the British system.

And more importantly, our current episode out on Restless Policies Leading. We're going to talk about your party.
That's not your party, the Tories. That's the Jeremy Corbyn Zara Sultana Party.

We're going to talk about climate change. So we're going to talk about the horrible tragedies in Sri Lanka.
and in Indonesia.

Yeah, and we're going to talk about my secret campaign to get back in the European Union. Very good.
Looking forward to speaking all about that. See you soon.
Bye.

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