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You will notice that we are dressed in a certain way now, me in a shirt and tie and Rory in one of his Afghan waistcoats, and then later in the program wearing very different clothes. And the reason for that is that we recorded most of what you're about to hear yesterday. And we also talked about Kashmir because we had a question from none other than a man named Mustafa Suleiman.
internet guru and who's been on leading before and he asked a question our introduction to the history of Kashmir was what he called extremely lightweight and completely glossed over the important colonial context so we talked about that and we talked about cashmere but of course since then And I regret to say, as we predicted after the terrorist attack in Kashmir a couple of weeks ago now, India has taken action against Pakistan, blamed Pakistan for the terror attack.
They've launched they've targeted nine different sites insisting that they're all what they call terrorist infrastructure So we have India saying that 10 people have died, 32 injured. Pakistan saying 26 people have been killed, 46 injured. and Pakistan also saying that they claim to have shot down five Indian fighter jets. So this is very, very, very tense. Rory, what do you make of it?
Well, two weeks ago we discussed the options that faced Modi, so there was this very, very disturbing attack in Kashmir targeted against Indian holidaymakers. where they were massacred in this beautiful Swiss Valley. And Kashmir, as we explained, is the absolute sort of crucible of a lot of the violence in India, in particular because a predominantly Muslim population.
which was reluctant to join India after 1947. We can get into the details of how that worked for Mustafa Suleiman's question later. But anyway, it became part of the Indian state. And after a period of relative peace, this terrorist attack happened. And that then, as we said, was likely to lead to a series of options for Narendra Modi. India did respond. And what we pointed out two weeks ago is that the big debate was what kind of response
Was it going to be a response within Jammu Kashmir? Was it going to be a response within Pakistan-occupied Kashmir? Was it going to be within Haibad Paktunwala, or was it going to go into Punjab itself? And the closer it got into Punjab, the more risky we thought it would be. And indeed, it has happened in Punjab. One of these attacks is only...
30 kilometers away from Lahore. And the reason that matters is that Punjab is the big population economic center of Pakistan. This isn't an attack simply up on the border region. So it's got symbolic importance. But as you say, it seems to have been a relatively limited strike. These are all relative terms. The footage suggests it was more on the precision end, and India at least is claiming that the people struck were... People actively involved in planning new terrorist attacks on India.
You and I will remember from Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere that that is what governments tend to say. And sometimes it turns out not to be the case. And you can hit the wrong targets and your intelligence goes wrong. But anyway, that at the moment is a story. Just jump in there. There is a guy, Maulana Masood Azhar, who is a UN-designated terrorist based in Pakistan. He has said publicly that 10 members of his family... and four of his closest associates have been killed in the strike.
Now, I have no idea of knowing that's true, but that's I thought that, although I can see why he did it and why he said all the things he did, in a way that may have helped the Indian narrative that we are only targeting people involved in what they call the terrorists. Absolutely. So the most optimistic scenario from the point of view of what I suppose the world is concentrating on most, which is peace.
would be that India's done a relatively precise strike against terrorist infrastructure. But, and here are the buts, I talked about the Punjab but. The next but is the but you mentioned, which is the shooting down of these planes. Now, India at the moment, I think, has acknowledged two planes down, not five. But Pakistan is saying that three of the planes shot down were...
Raphael fighters which India recently purchased from France and were meant to be great game changers in the Indian Air Force because they allow you to shoot from the Indian side of the border. So there is a real sense of potential humiliation for the Indian military that these famed fighters were shot down.
Now, again, that isn't necessarily the end of the world because, again, in 2019, Pakistan shot down a plane, captured an Indian pilot who was quickly returned, and Third World War indeed did not happen. But there is a question of whether Modi will come under political pressure because those planes came down. And then the bigger question, of course, is what does Pakistan do now? And in 2019, Pakistan responded with strikes into India, which India denied.
really happened at all and said didn't cause any damage. What sort of strikes can Pakistan do? Well, they are not the equivalent of these terrorist bases in India. So they would have to hit military, paramilitary infrastructure. And the question is, does Pakistan... hit Indian military bases with soldiers in, killing people? Or does it more symbolically hit half deserted border posts? And this is where the danger comes because there are certain factors which make it more dangerous in 2019.
One of them is the new Pakistan chief of the army staff. It comes from a more religiously conservative, more nationalist background and has been making... much more inflammatory comments about India. So you've got that Pakistan side. I think it was worth saying about him as well and about Pakistani military figures more generally. We think of our military figures and American military figures and European military figures.
who tend to be very much subordinate to the political leadership. This is a guy whose face you will see on posters, you will see it on the back of cars and lorries. He is a big public figure with a big public profile. Absolutely. In fact, to some extent, Pakistan is a democracy under a military government.
The decision to, for example, lock up Imran Khan was driven very much by the military. The military organized, in inverted commas, the elections, which means stuffed ballot boxes in quite a lot of the country. I think we talked about this. When you go to the Pakistan parliament and go to visit the chief whip's office, you see a colonel standing there.
in the Chief Whip's office, effectively telling people how to do the whipping operation. So, yeah, this man is probably the most powerful man in Pakistan, and so how he thinks about the world really matters. On the other side you've got a different mode here. a more confident Modi, an Indian economy that is in a stronger position that may feel under...
More political pressure to respond vigorously if Pakistan strikes him. We get the tats back and forth. And then the final difference is that we're in the world of Trump. 2016, 2019, there was a huge concerted effort, as you can imagine, by the old kind of international players led by the US to try to help broker peace. This time Trump signals strong supports for Modi, but more than that he signals indifference. He's not somebody who's particularly interested. and getting involved.
in an India-Pakistan dispute, and Modi may feel that he has more freedom, and even Pakistan may feel they have more freedom to be aggressive. Trump was asked about it yesterday, last night, and he talked about it almost as if he was a bystander. Yeah, I just heard about that as we were coming to the Oval Office. You know, these guys have been fighting for a long time. It looks like a bad one.
You know, I hope they can sort this out. It was like very, very, very passive in the response. And I guess the other point to make, I mean, it's not as if we don't have enough international crises going on. I think to have Russia, Ukraine Israel, Gaza, Sudan all the other conflicts that are going across Africa, and then to have India, Pakistan, and as we said when we discussed this a couple of weeks ago, with China very, very closely involved as having the third part of Kashmir.
I mean, I guess the other thing we have to be very worried about is in those countries, including ours, where there is a very large Indian population and a very large Pakistani population sometimes living in the same
same places i mean whether we just got to keep an eye on that kind of uh leading that those sort of tensions spilling over as well yeah you're completely right um when i was in parliament and it would have been true for you when you were in government that the Three biggest hues that really hit British communities were Israel, Palestine, Cyprus and
India, Pakistan over Kashmir. And you different MPs with different constituencies would come under huge pressure on those issues. They're very much live issues in the British Parliament. They're not just international issues. So I think we have to watch this space. It is a dangerous moment. The danger, of course, is around miscalculation.
Best case scenario is Pakistan responds with a relatively calibrated limited response. India says, okay, that's done now. And the whole thing dies away as it did after 2019. Worst case scenario, Pakistan hits in a way that Modi feels forced to respond to. And off we go. And then, of course, people will point out the obvious, which is that these are two nuclear arm powers.
Two nuclear powers with a very, very bad history of relationships between them. The chief minister in Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, and I don't know exactly where he stands on the political... He has been out straight away saying that the onus lies with Pakistan to, as he put it, lower the gun.
Now, is that because he is the chief minister of Kashmir wanting to bring down the temperature, or is that because he's the chief minister of Kashmir? Because what I'd heard before is he didn't have very good relations with the Indian government. So, Omar Abdullah is a very interesting figure. He is, of course, a Muslim who... strongly opposed the decision by Modi to make Kashmir a federal administrative territory.
He was criticized for having meetings with the Pakistan government. So to some extent, if you're a Hindu nationalist, Umar Abdullah is a slightly suspect figure. And in fact, he's actually been detained in the past. But he's also now the chief minister of an federally ministered Indian state, and therefore from the Pakistani point of view, a little bit suspect on that side. Probably, without sounding too centrist, doubt about it, maybe a sign that he's doing...
a good job if both sides are a little bit suspicious of his stance. Final thing on him. He was born in Rochford in Essex. His mum is English. And both his father and his grandfather were chief ministers of Jammu Kashmir. And we talk about this a little bit with Japan. We talk about this a little bit with India. But, you know, you with your class analysis of politicians and their backgrounds. Here's another example. I guess the other final point for me is that economically
This is going to hurt Pakistan a lot more than India. India, much bigger, bigger military and so forth. And Pakistan at the moment, they've got this massive IMF. bailout program underway and you know they've got real economic problems. So India can probably endure that. longer and with more titting and tatching than the Pakistanis.
Yes, although I think Pakistan's resilience and nationalism can be fueled by the economic problems so that we have these sort of weird things. Listen, because we won't now... have in this episode your answer to Mustafa Suleiman.
Would you want to just briefly give the an edited version of the answer that you gave and rebut the idea no I don't think we should rebut it because what we said was we said when we discussed this let's start in 1947 and he essentially Mustafa is essentially saying we didn't focus enough on this Fair point. Yeah, so Mustafa's point, which is a good one, is that a lot of the tension between Muslim and Hindu communities in India... does partly reflect the fact that the British Empire, the Ra,
emphasized those identities, lent into them and created different legal structures for Muslim communities. And part of this was a policy, frankly, of divide and rule, putting communities against each other in order to keep the British... government in place and partition which created the problem in Kashmir. India apart was put together very very quickly very hastily the Radcliffe Commission that drew the border And this is something I'd love to talk to.
Willie Dalrymple and the EmpirePod team about how odd it is. Britain in India, along with all the unbelievably negative things, racism, colonial exploitation, killing, looting that took place. The one thing they traditionally prided themselves on was granular knowledge. So, you know, John Lawrence, who was the viceroy, spent 40 years in India, spoke Indian languages fluently, spent a lot of time in rural areas.
And yet, when it came to partition, Radcliffe, who chaired the commission, hadn't visited India, and the thing was put together in five weeks, drawing lines right the way through the middle of villages and somehow ignoring 200 years of British granular study of India and the process. It's also finally true that the creation of this
Kashmir problem is about the Maharaja of Kashmir, and that's partly about the British relationship with what's called the princely states. In other words, the British Empire in India directly administered certain places, you know, Bengal and Calcutta, for example. But there were 537, I think. currency states ranging from tiny things about the size of my constituency around Penrith to enormous places like Hyderabad which were ruled indirectly through political agents and Kashmir.
was one of those territories. So thank you, Mustafa, for drawing attention to the fact that British rule is also part of the backstory for the tensions happening in Jammu Kashmir, although I would also say it's a very, very... classic situation, which reminds you, Alistair, a bit of Northern Ireland, of the real problems of government increasingly Hindu nationalist government administering a predominantly Muslim
territory, wherever those sectarian divisions came from, even if they were exaggerated by colonial authorities, are very real. Well, I think I've told you before about a time when we were in India and Pakistan and we went to Pakistan for... And I remember as we were leaving the dinner to go to India, one of the military guys just saying to me, just remind them that the missiles are not...
and then with this sort of big toothy grin. The hatred is deep, and the apologies is to a large extent defined by Kashmir. This has almost become an emergency podcast, Roy, but it's what we'll call a Q&A. top-up kind of emergency question, and now listeners can get on with listening to the stuff that recorded yesterday.
Welcome to the rest of this politics question time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. Alistair, just to put you on the spot here. Deborah from Germany. I think I can guess your answer to this, but... Should Tony Blair be expelled from the Labour Party for his egregious, backstabbing maneuver on the eve of the local elections, I'm quoting Deborah here, trashing the government's net zero policy, which led to rejoicing in the ranks of reforming the Conservatives.
and will definitely have caused some voters to switch to either reform conservatives or the Green Party, or Sam from Cambridge. Does Alistair think Tony Blair's climate change outburst was wise? given the clear conflict of interest with the Saudi interests, or perhaps more politely, so we don't actually get you back up from the beginning and put you into fuel defensive mode, Douglas Thackway.
Do you agree with Tony Blair's intervention regarding net zero policy in the UK? Do you agree? Well, I'm guessing. that Deborah and Sam and Douglas and the many many many others who asked questions about Tony Blair and Let Zero have not necessarily read. the Tony Blair Institute report that led to the screaming front page headlines. However, I did remind him in an exchange of messages and a phone call that He is a very experienced politician.
He knows that in the week of the local election, at a time when the reform in particular are banging on about net zero, the timing was far from helpful. Presumably in his defence, what he said to you on the phone, on the text. you know, that really wasn't what I meant. And if people had read the full report, they would have realised they had a much more nuanced position to which your response would have been. That's all very well, but we are three days away from the local elections and...
Nobody's going to read it in the way that you'd like them to. If you do read the report, which I did afterwards, actually there's lots where he supports what the government is doing. He's actually making a bigger point about some of the strategic issues involved in... I think it's fair to say Ed Miliband was not happy. Well, then let me try to play devil's advocate and see if I can make the case for Tony Blair. So, channeling Blair, I think what he'd probably...
is we're in real danger of ending up with expensive energy. We saw that British steel, 50% more for the energy to run British steel than European competitors, probably four times more than US. We are chasing dropping carbon production in the UK and killing our industries potentially in the present. And we're not making much impact on the big global picture in the end because we're a pretty small economy.
And that's why he was actually addressing the world rather than the UK. And we're not properly taxing carbon consumption. In other words, we push all the factories into China and we continue to buy just as many T-shirts and toys as we did in the past. so we're not actually affecting our full carbon footprint. So I think there are two sorts of pretty serious arguments you could make, politics aside, which actually have been made in some of our leading interviews.
The first argument is the argument that Dieter Helm made when we interviewed him on leading, which is that the whole thing is nonsense and the climate stuff is nonsense and the Paris targets are nonsense unless we actually put a proper global carbon tax. which properly puts the cost of embedded carbon into place. And the second argument, which is the argument that was made to some extent when we interviewed Bill Gates and Reid Hoffman on the show.
that the real answer to this is technology and that rather than Cutting production what we should be doing is putting a lot of money into carbon capture AI nuclear fusion. And that's exactly what Tony was saying. And presumably because he hangs out with people like Reid Hoffman and Bill Gates. Yeah, because I think he has thought it through and his institute is thinking it through. I don't disagree with that, but I don't resile from the point.
that is ultimately one of the most high-profile experienced politicians on the planet. Anyway, we had some very friendly, lively exchanges about... As I said yesterday, I don't want to sound like Roy Keane, but Tony, that wouldn't have happened in my day. Very good. Okay. Now, can I ask you about another fascinating... massively important political event. Well, it is an election, isn't it? Yeah. We've got quite a few questions about Conclave.
Hugo Craggs seems to think he speaks for all humanity. We have all watched Conclave. We don't know that we've all watched Conclave, but fair enough, Hugo. A lot of people have watched Conclave, the film. So question to you is who are the frontrunners for the papacy? From which wing of the church are they and how will the various different factions play out in this
Trumpian world. Well, of course, as we said yesterday, Trump thinks he should be the Pope, but let's park that. Let me begin by saying it's an amazing election. And people have really seen this in that film, that Robert Harris book and the film that came out. I've been talking to Rupert Short, who was the TLS religion editor and now teaches at Oxford and has written a really interesting book called The Eclipse of Christianity and Why It Matters. And he's been very passionate.
two hours on the conclave and what's happening. I'll try to digest it with apologies to Rupert who objects to simplification. I think the first thing he'd say is that every one of these elections is a massive, massive game. and the really classic example is Pius XII was in for 20 years They brought in someone called John XIII, who they thought was an elderly man who'd be a safe pair of hands and not shake stuff up.
And he came in and brought in the Second Vatican Council, which was this biggest thing of 400 years. Massive drive towards the kind of liberal-ling, got rid of Latin mass, blah, blah, blah. but unfortunately was only in for a few years, at which point Paul XI arrived, who suffered from something called Hamletismo, in other words, indecision.
and seemed to put it in Hamletismo. Is that a genuine word? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it a Vatican word or is it an Italian word? I think it's more Vatican. I think it's something that really, he embodied that. Then we had John Paul II, who was supposed to bring strength to the character, and who was very, very reliant on Cardinal Ratzinger for his theology, and was on the more conservative side, and Ratzinger, of course, became Pope Benedict.
And then Pope Francis came in. And again, this is another point, which is the complete unpredictability. And actually, I'm going to be very interested in this in a lot of these elections, because I think one of the stories of elections is you have, as you keep saying, no idea what somebody's going to be like as a leader until they're actually there.
You can't really tell whether they're sounding cautious before an election and then they come in and they're massively radical, or they're sounding radical before the election and they come in and don't really do very much. Are these guys allowed to campaign? Can they sort of go around the conclave?
is saying, look, I don't know if you've thought this about me, but actually I'm very this and I'm very that. Can they do that? Robert Harris illustrates it very well, what's happening. So they're all locked up together. All the cardinals are locked up together and it's very important for their selection. No phones? No phones, no contact in the outside world. There's a very naughty thing happening in Conclave, which is the man organising the election.
played by Ralph Fiennes, has a bit of contact with the outside world, but basically you're not supposed to have any contact with the outside world at all. And the Ralph Fiennes character in the film Is he the Irish guy who's the current sort of stand-in for the Pope, or is he the state secretary who's also one of the candidates? Can you be the organiser and a candidate? Yes, absolutely, which indeed Ralph Fiennes was in that movie, an organiser and a candidate.
So Francis, for example, came in and people thought he was going to be quite conservative. He'd been quite an authoritarian provincial and came in and became quite a liberal pope. And one of the big controversies, the heart. about what direction the church goes in is that a lot of conservatives, particularly American conservative Catholics, kind of J.D. Vance, wing of the party, did not like the fact that he thought that you could bless divorced couples.
And they also didn't like his line when asked about her sexuality. said, who am I to judge? The basic answer there is, well, you're the top man. You're supposed to be judging. You mentioned Vance there. Do you think that Vance's visit to meet the Pope and be publicly the last person to see him, which started all that stuff about, you know, whatever you do, don't meet J.D. Vance, you could die the next day, added to Trump. AI photo do you think that will
will weaken any American influence. Because the politicians do try to influence this event. Yeah, they do. They do. And Americans are the big, big fundraisers. Yeah. Big philanthropic fundraisers. One of the problems has been that some of the figures associated with sex abuse have been big American fundraisers, and that's been a big problem.
Sex abuse has kicked in again also because two of the leading candidates, so Paralene, who's the kind of continuity candidate. He's the state secretary, like the foreign minister. He's the guy who did this very controversial deal with China, where China seems to be given a sort of veto over the appointment of bishops, which led to Cardinal Zen, who's the very famous... Hong Kong bishop who bore witness against the Chinese. And there's some guy from the Philippines who would be the first
Asian poet for a long, long time. He's another one who didn't criticise him enough. He was a big leader, but there's been a big article in the Times. credible female journalists now coming out and pointing to their role in all of this stuff so they could be taken out at the last minute by this when you say taken out we're talking We're not talking.
We're not talking mafia. No, no, no, no. But you saw in the conclave that... Yeah, you're suddenly up and then you're gone. Then you're gone because you're up and it's very, very... The voting system is almost identical to conservative leaders.
election the way in which it works let's trust the Pope and also this sort of weird thing that you see illustrating Conclave which was true for someone like me running leadership which is you can get relatively few number of votes in an early stage but as people drop out you can suddenly jump Lots of artifacts and then you can drop again.
As people flip back and forward. I saw the film a long time ago. I can't remember. Does it go down in the end to a vote of two? Between two candidates? Two candidates. It's not a single transferable vote thing. You just drop out and then you have the vote again. Exactly.
Quite exciting, isn't it? So very, very exciting. Should be on tally, really. The question, I guess, for the church is... are they going to look and that the rumor is what they're going to be looking for is a slightly more conservative, steady hand than Pope Francis, because Pope Francis is a bit like Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs in Britain is somebody who was almost more popular with people outside the hierarchy, the sort of general population he was within the hierarchy.
was maybe a bit loose you know we were talking about tony blair maybe as an experienced man he shouldn't have been creating headlines quite as much as he did off there yeah so we'll see and there's some very interesting sort of marginal characters um There's a very interesting Ghanaian candidate. I've been reading a book recently by Robert Sarra.
who's from guinea who is a formidable intellectual very profound mystic but also can be extraordinarily kind of conservative and intolerant about the modern world. And I think that would be sad. And he's almost 80. I'm going for Matteo Zuppi. Oh, right. An Italian Pope again. I think so. Yeah. I think so. Although I want, the guy I want is a guy called Aveline.
And I don't know anything about him other than the fact that he's from Marseille. And I like Marseille. You love Marseille? I like the football team. And I like the place, yeah. There is an American-born guy in the running, this guy Robert Francis Prevost. Or Prevost. The other thing I didn't realise is that one of the things that's being held against my man from Marseille is that he's not entirely fluent in Italia.
And this is a really stupid question, but is Italian the language of the Vatican? Well, traditionally it was Latin, but actually increasingly they don't speak Latin to each other, they speak Italian to each other. So they do speak Italian, yeah. Or all the cardinals sort of speak. The reason I like Zuppi, and this is really trivialising and very important thing, his nickname is Don Mateo. who is a crime-solving priest on Italian television.
Alright, good. So I'm going for Zoopy, and I think it's happening. Ending in, beginning with Z is quite, quite dramatic. Thank goodness you're not voting. You're doing it all on the best in names. No, I do think it's important. And what's extraordinary, because when the white smoke comes out, which is how they announce, you know, we've got a vote. A person that now today you and I have probably not heard of is going to become overnight
one of the best known, most recognized, most talked about, most written about people on the planet. It's a really interesting thing that where suddenly they become big figures and they could become big figures which I think most people would argue Pope Francis did. or for bad. Well, I'm going to come now to a question for you from Ronnie, but just a sort of small note. The church in many ways pioneered democracy.
I'm very struck by the fact... That's not a small note, that's a really big note. We could do a whole episode on that. Well, I just struck... When I stayed in monasteries, it's almost always been the case that the abbot is elected. by the other monks. And that's been true from the very, very earliest days. And it's really interesting because I'll spend 20 years looking at this person.
Even trappers, whilst you don't even speak, they look at this person and choose and write. Ronnie, given Germany's history, it seems appropriate that the German spy agency has labelled the AFD an extremist group. Why have so many Americans leapt to the AFD's defence? So tell us about as our German expert. Well, so the German, it's not quite the equivalent of AI-5, but it's the intelligence agency that's part of its role.
is to ensure that the German constitution is upheld. And there's been this debate, there was a debate actually about whether they should have done this before the election and they felt they had to stay out of politics. So they didn't do it before, but it was widely expected that they would identify the AfD as a far-right extremist party. Interestingly, one of their MPs has stood down on the back of it.
I think if this was Trumpian, and it's the same as Le Pen. Le Pen, the judgment that she cannot stand, seems to have been broadly accepted by the public. and likewise so this is one of their representatives who said no if we're if we're identified as right when the extremists i can't be part But I think what the danger with it at a time when you've got the new government coming in, Matt, as we're speaking, has just lost
a vote to become chancellor in the parliament. He was expecting to win on the first vote. So there is the danger that you have the Romanian effect, the sense that if you're taking people away... from what the public have done. The public have voted for these people to have some say in their lives. And you're then saying, no, they can't be part of this debate. We're going to see similar here, by the way. We talked in our local elections.
yesterday you've got a very interesting case in Doncaster Where the matter has been related is Labor. But the council has gone overwhelmingly reform. And it's, you know, how does that relationship now work out? So I think this debate, the government, Merz has been quite cautious about it. He said, look, the interior ministry has to study the report, et cetera, et cetera.
but they're going to have to make big big big judgments because how can you identify a party as being right-wing extremists and essentially anti-constitutional.
And yet at the same time, they've got this huge block sitting there in the parliament. So it's quite a big problem. Yeah, a big, big problem. And of course, set up after the Second World War deliberately to prevent the rise of another Nazi party. And so there's a very... formal technocratic procedure where these agencies spies constitutional court weighs all the evidence and so they determined in the past that it was okay to refer to some afd members as fascist
Now they've been labeled as extremists, but this really matters because it's all about trying to protect the German constitution. And the other part of the question about the people weighing in, I mean, two of the first people to weigh in were J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio. If I were Mark Carney, ahead of the G7, I think I would, which is coming shortly, I think I would sort of write to all the leaders and say
I'm happy for this meeting to go ahead, but I really think it's about time that we stopped interfering in each other's domestic politics. Shut up about the 51st state. Shut up about the AFD. Tell your friend Musk to shut up about riots in the UK.
I mean, what the hell has it got to do with J.D. Vance? The Marco Rubio thing is also weird. And also he doesn't believe it for a second. So I was talking to a very senior American State Department diplomat who was responsible for all their policy in Africa. And she was explaining to me that in African elections, even as recently as former... It's inconceivable that they would ever have backed one party over another, made any public statements to the American government.
In fact, they actually went out of their way always to reach out with equal time to all the leading candidates. um this this thing of i mean the cia of course 70s and 80s yeah yeah but covertly but not the politicians i mean it's really really weird but also trump last week had is it the polish presidential election that's coming up and he had the opposition candidate in the White House last week saying what a great guy.
So this is absolute blatant interference. And it's usually based on ignorance. It's usually based on them not understanding. So the fact is, would J.D. Vance... understand what the German Constitution says, why this matters, why it's rooted in law and in history. I think what's so interesting about this particular...
Trump government, is I think I'm right in saying it's the American government, which is the least European in terms of its experience of any American government that I can ever think of.
Many of them in the past would have spent some time studying at European universities. They would have served in the military in Germany. They would have fought alongside Europeans. It's very... how little contact emotional they have to to europe the other thing about vance i thought this in relation to the pope when when the when trump did his the the ai picture of him as the pope here's this guy who's like you know allegedly got a really big
Why is he saying nothing? The MAGA crowd, do you remember when the French... the paris olympic opening ceremony there was that sketch about the last supper yeah the maggot crowd went nuts yeah they went absolutely crazy about it this is sacrilegious there's the his boss, Trump, posing as the Pope and Vance says, oh, that's all fine. Let me rant on about the AFD in Germany instead. Okay, Rory, quick break. Then I want to ask you about King Charles heading to Canada. Good. Look forward to it.
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get the best offer that's economist.com slash rest is politics I'm David McCloskey, former CIA analyst turned spy novelist. And I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist. And together we're the hosts of The Rest is Classified where we bring you brilliant stories from the world of spies. This week we're talking about one of the most significant stories of the 21st century.
Edward Snowden and how he orchestrated the biggest leak of classified secrets in modern American and British history. Snowden revealed that the American government was mass collecting data on its own citizens and it was really the first time that Americans and so many others around the world
understood extent of the US government's mass surveillance that's right the story I'd covered at the time and it so really gets to wider questions about what privacy means how technology has changed our lives and what the government and companies can was private and we'll take you through the whole story from snowden's early career in the cia and the nsa to his life in exile in russia so to hear more search for the rest is classified
Welcome back to The Rest of Politics. Question time with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. So Patrick Keelty, I'm assuming, because I do know he listens, that may be Patrick Keelty, the presenter of The Late Late Show in Dublin. What do you make of the timing of King Charles' visit to Canada, where he will open Parliament and deliver the speech from the throne? A monarch has not delivered a throne speech in Canada since 1977 or opened the Canadian Parliament since 1957.
Now, I think this is your friend, the King, sending a very strong message to DJ Trump. Well, yeah, to remind everybody, of course, King Charles is the head of state of Canada and Australia and New Zealand. and the united kingdom and other places too and he's in a very interesting position because the king is somebody that
Trump seems to venerate. He seems to have, and Trump claims it's because of his mother, this very strong interest in the monarchy. And I think the mooch has reflected on this a bit. Because maybe because Trump sees himself as a bit of a monarch. He's really interested in these kind of ancient institutions. And so the king is in a very interesting position.
because he seems to have this kind of credibility and leverage. It was used by Keir Starmer because, of course, King Charles is a constitutional monarch, so he has to respond to the elected government. Keir Starmer used a letter from King Charles. to invite Trump on a state visit which caused a lot of controversy.
And Canadians felt very angry about this because this was happening at the same time as Trump was saying that Canada should be the 51st state. What the king essentially symbolizes is a statement of, excuse me, Donald Trump, Canada isn't a 51st state. I'm the head of state of Canada. And insofar as you claim to have this great reverence for me and my institution, you're trying to...
take part of the country that I'm the head of state of. They also have a strong relationship, Mark Carney and the King, because they work very, very closely on climate finance and sustainable market initiative back when Mark Carney was working in the Bank of England. They had a huge interest in it. We talked about Tony Blair and Net Zero. What The King and Mark Carney were really focused on is how you get the corporate sector and the trillions of finance behind shift to renewable.
biodiversity um and of course mark carney visited the king when he was over so i i think it's it's something is very deliberate and is an interesting question of the ways in which... British soft power could continue to upwind this trouble. And also because, I mean, look, Mark Carney's had huge attention around the world because of the nature of his rise, becoming Prime Minister, winning the election.
But it also means that here we are today, we're speaking on the day that the new German government is taking office. Now, it might be on the news a bit, but it won't be kind of wall to wall across the news channels but the fact of King Charles going to open the Canadian Parliament means that Mark Carney's first King's speech is going to get way more global attention than it otherwise would. And you can bet your bottom dollar it's going to be shown live on all the American channels.
which, of course, Trump will be hopping between. I think it's a great move. And, you know, as you say, when the King does something on behalf of the UK government, whether it's taking part in the V-Day things or whatever, or, as you say, opening the parliament... He will not have done this without probably having had it suggested by Mark Carney. and would probably wanted to have checked with the UK government as well. I don't know how this specifically works. So that means he has...
Being confronted with a choice and he's decided, yep, I'm going to do that. Good for him, I say. Question for you on the UK and Europe. Geish Farm from Scotland. What effect would Britain returning to the European single market have on the British farming sector? Would it benefit or harm agricultural interests in the UK? Positive and benefit. And one of the things I said yesterday that I was worried.
that the reaction to the local elections will be to be a bit more reformy in some areas. I am really more and more of the view that on the Brexit issue... The government has to be less timid, more ambitious. Got this big meeting on May the 19th. Keir Starmer hosting European Union heads of government. I really think something... really big has got to come out of that in terms of signaling direction. It won't be this.
But I think there are so many different areas where the government could be coming to an arrangement with the Europeans that would get us in a better place. But it's a big, big, big political choice. And, you know, I do think we've just been too timid about this because we keep saying we don't want to revisit the arguments of 2016. It's almost a decade ago now.
But I think it's become settled, even amongst Brexiteers. I meet loads of them that, you know, well, regardless of what I thought at the time, it's not really gone as planned. So that gives the government an opportunity. On farmers, the small farmers.
were a real beneficiary of the common agricultural policy because France and many of the Mediterranean members of the European Union really believe in farmers, really believe in their role in culture, their role in communities, their role in landscape. And so they had these single farm payments designed basically to keep small farms alive and In Scotland and Wales.
Essentially, these structures remained in place. But England, under both the Conservatives and Labour, went really weirdly ideological. And basically against small farmers, put all the emphasis either on biodiversity and rewilding. from the environmental side or on production and scale, big farms on the other side. And in my former constituency, Cumbria, you can see so quickly that we're going to be losing, in some cases, hundreds of years' work.
of landscape and things we've preserved in some cases almost since the Norman Concrete. falling very very quickly away and within 10-15 years people will go into the landscapes of places like the Lake District and there won't be there anymore and we will miss them terribly and it's nowhere in our debate now we've got a question here rather shameless self-plugging by one of our colleagues in the podcast world mr al murray oh yes their podcast on the second world war we have ways Tchau, tchau.
We interviewed Sakir Starmer on the podcast yesterday. Episode is out today if anyone wants to listen. After our historical chat, I think by that he means they talked about history as opposed to it was a historic conversation in itself. Starmer mentioned the importance of rearmament for UK economic growth, not just strengthening NATO. Where should the government focus investment in terms of defence, land forces, naval strength?
emerging warfare like drone technologies we actually talked about to alex younger about that he was talking about the you know in the ukrainian context of the defense manufacturing industry is changing so fast So there you go. Help Al plug his podcast. He's obviously looking on the lookout for new listeners. Well, firstly, both Al Murray's podcast and our podcast are coming out on Victory in Europe 80th.
anniversary and many of you who live in London for example will have seen Lancaster bombers flying over on the bank holiday Monday. And I'm really struck by this. I've been doing a little bit for the amazing Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which helps preserve the graves, including my father's brother, my uncle's grave. in Sicily and the graves that I saw in Iraq and elsewhere. And it's also interesting in the family because my sister has been trying to get going on
VE Day celebrations in our town in Creef and has been sending my mother stuff from the Daily Mail about memories of people who remember VE Day. And my mother's like, well, don't be ridiculous. Why don't you talk to me? I was 10 years old when VE Day happened. I'm quite happy to talk to you about that. On this question, we should do a bigger... is changing very fast and what's happening on the battlefield in Ukraine is right at the heart of this.
particularly cheap drones, electronic warfare, raises huge questions about these expensive platforms, you know, $150 million F-35 planes. aircraft carriers all of them now under threat from drones that cost a few thousand dollars and there's a very very complicated story about how all these things are coordinated in the information space how an iphone links up to what you get from a plane and how this all works
So we should do this properly, but Alma is completely right to ask it. And if one was really brave about drones, AI, cyber technology. will become obsolete. But you still ultimately need to fire missiles and drop large amounts of munition on people. And have ships. And have an army. Have a big army. I think what would be interesting, maybe we should dig this up for next week and talk about it.
I know the technologies are changing, but if we just look at the sheer numbers and how they have changed in what were then the major powers and what are now the major powers. And I was looking at the stats the other day for the growth of the Chinese military. It is absolutely phenomenal. whereas we can now fit the entirety of our army into one of our bigger football stadiums. Anyway, thanks for that. Sticking on security issues
Mr. Dominic Thorington. I've just finished listening to the excellent interview you did with Sir Alex Younger. That's the former head of MI6 on Leading. At the end of the episode, Rory mentioned that he'd met Sir Alex in four different positions at SIS. I'm not for one minute suggesting that Rory's let slip any past work at SIL.
after maintaining for years that he's never been a spook. Dominic, I don't think you've been listening closely. So could Rory please discuss just a little how he managed to meet the future C whilst in these different roles? Um, well, I... Yeah, exactly. I met him as a minister, I met him as a member of parliament, I met him as somebody running a charity in Afghanistan.
but really encourage people to listen to it and also encourage people to listen if we haven't we haven't plugged enough Atul Gawande who I thought was incredibly wonderful who's this extraordinary impressive doctor who I'd like to see almost given a Nobel Prize, who talked both about what's happening in the world of international development and infectious diseases. but also about advanced medical technology. So that's me avoiding.
Right, over to you. Question on towns and cities. Will Barrow, is the political divide between the inner city metropolitan areas and the rest of the country now bigger than ever? How big a problem is that for our national politics? Quick explain or answer as we go into the question. Essentially, parties like the Conservative Party don't have any votes in the city metropolitan areas anymore. They're Labour heartland.
London's a classic example of this. Do you feel there's a big divide and is it a big problem for our national politics? I remember after the Brexit referendum, somebody said that this referendum was won and lost in towns that few viewers have ever heard of.
Because they don't have football league, football clubs. And I was over the weekend, I was in Gainsborough. I was in a couple of smallish towns in Lincolnshire. Lincolnshire, which is... always been pretty brexit-y but it's gone very reform and i think there is this sense of the divide and interestingly the australian elections One of the many, many criticisms that's being made against Dutton, the leader of the Conservatives there, is just lost.
is that he was open in saying that I'm going after, he called them the forgotten people in the suburbs. Now, obviously, Australia's a vast country, whereas we're pretty crowded. But I think there is a feeling in... I regularly hear people, you know, in fact, this time I went to the Burnley Player of the Year Awards the other day and there's quite a few of the fans were there.
Chatting away to some of them. They absolutely have this belief that London has everything. And then a sort of dialed down version of that is Manchester has everything. Leeds has everything. And I think there is, if you look at the people who Labour now look to, used to be sort of traditional working class voters. I mean, the classic Labour voter now is the sort of professional graduate.
I saw some data on this the other day that If you have no education beyond 16, you are four times more likely to vote reform.
than if you are educated beyond A-levels. And obviously you've got uneducated people in cities and you've got lots of educated people in towns, but I think that sense of cities feeling vibrant, dynamic... about the future and a lot of towns feeling pretty run down is a problem is a problem and i think the new towns fund although it's got i think a lot going for it i'll just give you a very very small example i had a phone call last week for keithley cougars at rugby league club
in Keighley where I come from and they'd been promised funding under the New Towns Fund and suddenly they see the council trying to undo it. And I think that's just because you combine resources, really tight control on resources.
And people feeling that in the smaller towns, maybe they don't have to worry so much because the backlash won't be that great. That is another message of these local elections. We were talking in the last podcast about what the difference might be between Britain, Australia and Canada, despite all the similarities. and it strikes me that the biggest difference is that those are federal.
where you have these very, very strong local regional governments. We interviewed Peter Malinowskis, for example, who's doing very different things in South Australia to elsewhere. And if you have a more devolved federal... you're going to get more investment and infrastructure prioritizing those places instead of what we have in Britain.
which is the Treasury gets its numbers out, does its calculations, and every pound invested in London always looks better on their spreadsheets because they get a better return from it. They're thinking short term, not long term.
I think if we're really going to fix this over the longer term and get moderate centre-ground politics back, we need to have something more like a federal system where we're properly devolving down. I was in Manchester, as I say, over the weekend, and Manchester just feels...
kind of buzzy and it's always been a buzzy place and it's always been one of our bigger better cities but it feels very very different I'm not saying that's all down to Andy Burnham but I do think that sense of Manchester having its own identity through the football club
through an elected mayor that people know inside manchester and outside manchester i'm i honestly do believe this and it's got to be more devolution but with the power and with the financing and not having screaming hab dab every time that, for example, Andy Burnham recently said we've got to start calling out the disaster breaks it so he has said the same ellen had morgan in wales saying that you know she's gonna
campaign against some of the welfare changes. Now, I know that Peter Carl, if he's listening, will say, oh, he's asked to go on his... You know, you say it would have happened if you were a day. It exactly would have happened to you a day that you'd have got a grip of all this. But if we believe in devolution, we've got to genuinely...
Genuinely believe it. Now, how about this as a final question, Roy, from Nick Longson. You can always judge a person's character by their musical tastes. What are you into? Can you expose any shockers or speculate on the taste of any world leaders? Well, of course, we know about Albanese because he told us about Yeah, and I pointed out he missed K-pop entirely. He did. But he's a big rock music guy. He's really into rock music. Tony Blazer was into rock music.
We had a band in the university. He was in the Ugly Rumours, yeah. So come on, I've never really got to the bottom of your lack of musical taste. Okay, so here's the shocker. I went to a Rester's history show, live show at the Albert Hall, where they were playing Tchaikovsky. Pedultery, we call it. Yeah, pedultery. And I suddenly realized that some of Tchaikovsky is actually my vision of hell.
I have never felt so bored, appalled, and sort of revolted. That's the podcast. What about the music? No, it's not the podcast. Tchaikovsky the composer Sometimes I sit there listening to some of his ballet music and I actually feel my life going away from me. I remember at the age of 15, a more painful experience than a nutcracker. More painful experience listening to that. And also one of his violin concertos. I actually...
I feel more unhappy listening to Tchaikovsky's music than almost anything else. So there's my little revelation. What is something you like though? That's something you don't like. I completely like it. church music. I love Mozart. I love Bach deeply, deeply. I can stretch as far as Beethoven and get about as far as Schubert. Okay. And now let's go into the modern age.
Yeah, my time I got to Tchaikovsky, I've given up. Rolling Stones. I like Rolling Stones. What's your favourite Rolling Stones song? You're not allowed to say Satisfaction. No. What I like. What's that one about? What's the one about? It's the devil speaking. This is all stay again. This is like Trump when he was asked about which is his favourite bit of the Bible. Anyway, listen, the reality is that I... I don't really listen to anything except classical music before about 18...
Right, right. Do you want to know what I listen to all the way from through Manchester, through the Peak District. ABBA. Which is beautiful. Well, ABBA was part of it because I was channel hopping. between Heart greatest hits, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. You can do it by the decade. So heart is your thing? No, not heart. Sometimes it's other channels, but...
What's the other ones you like, those radio channels you see on when you go to NUBA? Magic. I sometimes do the radio one to try and sort of stay in a bit. with what's happening but really what's a bit trendy for you is it it's basically yeah i'm the other one i listen is magic soul magic soul and you get like i mean i'm really into motel is it sex music do you do that yeah a little bit but you know
My devil song the producers just pointed out is called Sympathy. Sympathy for the devil. Sympathy for the devil, yeah. I just think it's sad because it's, I mean, I find music, I mean, I like some classical music. I'm like you. I mean, Fiona loves going to ballet and opera and all that stuff. And sometimes I like it. But sometimes I don't. But I could listen to... a lot of model pop music all day long. I could listen to Handle all day long. Yeah. I love, I love, I love tenor voices.
i love gregorian plain song yeah all that stuff philip gold he he when he was dying Listened to Gregorian chanting quite a lot. That's good. Hey, I had a final story on dying. One of my most grand aristocratic friends, her grandfather, when he was dying. He rigged up his bed with his pillow behind him, and he attached a set of reins, like the sort you use to ride a horse, to the four-poster bed at the other end. And his butler read him from his hunting diaries while he held on to his reins.
until he died. What's that got to be music? It's just a story about Philip Gould and dying. Oh, I see. There's a dying story. Okay, okay. Well, listen, I'm sticking with music because I'm leaving from here to go to Pentonville Prison to play my bagpipes to the prisoners if they haven't suffered enough.
They're going to have me explain how bagpipes work. Here's a final story from the same man. You should love that. We're taking music into our presence. It's really cool that you're taking music into our presence. I'm really pleased and also pay tribute to the amazing work it's done with the opera. Thank goodness there's not much ballet in prison going on, otherwise I wouldn't go and watch it. Listen, final anecdote to really annoy you in terms of this guy and his horse.
during the second war he was he was who was this guy a fox hunting i i don't want to come on but he's fox hunting and he's got his full hunting pinks on and he's charging with his horse and his hounds and things. He's a real hunter as opposed to. He's a real hunter chasing their fox and the fox gets it. into a football pitch where some young men are playing football in 1943 and the fox manages to get out the other end and so the hunt has lost the fox and the Lord leans down from his hunt.
and looks at these young men and he says, What the bloody hell do you think you're doing? Don't you realize there's a war on? You've got lame names for it. You can't tell stories like that about your fellow toffs. Well, there you go. We've covered a lot of ground today, haven't we? We have. Thank you very much. I'm still determined to educate you in modern music. Good luck. I'm going to take you to a happy voyage. Good luck. Thank you. See you soon. Bye-bye.
And I'm Gordon Carrera, National Security Journalist. And together we're the hosts of The Rest is Classified, where we bring you brilliant stories from the world of spies. This week we're talking about one of the most significant stories of the 21st century, Edward Snowden, and how he orchestrated
the biggest leak of classified secrets in modern American and British history. Snowden revealed that the American government was mass collecting data on its own citizens and it was really the first time that Americans and so many others around the world understood the extent of the
US governments, mass surveillance. That's right, it's a story I'd covered at the time. And it also really gets to wider questions about what privacy means, how technology has changed our lives, and what the government and companies can do might have thought was private and we'll take you through the whole story from snowden's early career in the cia and the nsa to his life in exile in russia so to hear more search for the rest is classified