504. Is Trump Losing His Tariffs War? (Question Time)

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The Supreme Court has just slapped him not on something marginal. I mean this is something right at the very core of his power. It's fundamental both to his economic policy and to his foreign policy. It's his favorite instrument. It's the thing that allows him to play the mini emperor.

uses when he doesn't get his own way does underline the worry that people have that he basically is a wannabe king, a wannabe dictator. He actually said at one point, I have the power to destroy the country. Brackets if I don't get my way. We really are now looking down the barrel of somebody's who wants to run this country like Putin runs Russia. That's why I think it is so significant.

Welcome to the Rest of Politics Question Time with me Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Apologies if you're confused about question time coming before the main episode. That is because for the main episode, Rory and I are gonna talk for the whole episode about Ukraine. The war four years on from Putin's so-called special military operation, which of course was a full-on invasion. It's the anniversary of. of the war. Indeed, it's also the anniversary to somebody said

of this podcast because you may remember we started the whole thing roughly around the time of the Ukraine war. So that will come a day after this question time. where we're gonna talk about Trump and tariffs, we're gonna talk about former Prince Andrew and Epstein, we're gonna talk about the school's white paper. Rory, where do you wanna start? Why don't we start as you say with

Tariffs which we got a lot of questions on, and I'm gonna take uh one particular one, which has come in from Ben. Could Trump simply just ignore the Supreme Court ruling on tariffs? My understanding is Supreme Court decisions have been ignored before, see Andrew Jackson and his callous slaughter of Native Americans. If you instructed the government to ignore it and try to suggest that people

that he alone was the sole answer to America's existential crisis and exploitations, could he? I mean it's not like Congress could impeach him. Let's before we get into the sort of details of Ben's question, tr try to just remind people where we are because I think oddly, this is something we covered a huge amount On this famous Liberation Day tariff, so about ten months ago, Trump announced these associations.

astonishing array of tariffs where people will remember islands full of penguins were getting tariffed, Lesotho was getting terrible treatment, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. That was sort of one big wave. Listeners who are really paying attention will also remember He used tariffs violently against the India and Brazil, and indeed Switzerland, for different reasons. So India was a spat about Russian oil, Brazil was about Prosecuting Bolsonaro?

Slap fifty percent tariffs on. Switzerland, as he confirmed in Davos, was because the president of Switzerland he thought had not been polite to him, so he whacked their tariffs up to thirty seven percent. Canada and Mexico has been a different form of psychodrama back and forth endlessly with different types of

types of tariffs going up and down. But the end of the story,'cause I think we we often like like I suppose many people in the news, we often tell the story at its height, but we don't necessarily keep people up to date with what's happened since. The broad story is that since then, after countries like Brazil and India and Switzerland went through really sort of four months of hell, eventually most of these things

settled down with what people call napkin deals. In other words, Trump made these back of an envelope deals, which in the case of Britain's deals seemed to be a blank sheet of paper. But anyway, broadly speaking, what happened is that he would say to Vietnam or to wherever. If you uh agree to be nice to me, and in many cases if you agree to give me a lovely present or invest a lot in the United States and give me some pretty nonspecific promises about not doing too much with China.

I'll bring the tariffs down to what on average ended up mostly around the world being about fifteen. percent. Over to you. I want to give a shout out here, Roy. You talk about how we we we cover the big moments, but maybe not all the little details in between. VOS Selections are a wine importer.

who took the Trump administration to the US Court of International Trade. Learning resources and hand to mind, they are the ones who challenged the legality of Liberation Day tariffs in the federal court. And essentially they had one. The court granted in their favor, the administration went to the Supreme Court. and they via several other courts and the Supreme Court has struck down Trump's authority to impose these tariffs without Congress, that's the key point.

in a vote of six to three. Q Trump going absolutely bonkers, doing an immediate press conference, one of his mad rambling press conferences Where he basically attacked the judges, praised the ones who'd backed him, attacked the ones who hadn't. And then the next day, having slept on it, He he then produces this you know how I I love analysing his posts because they're so clearly written by him, usually in the middle of the night.

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And carrying all the groceries in one trip. Try Quaker Protein, instant oatmeal, granola, and bars. Great taste and a good source of protein. Quaker, bring out the good. Based on a thorough, detailed and complete review Yeah, of the ridiculous, poorly written as if he could judge good writing, and extraordinarily anti American decision, what could be more pro American than standing up for the Constitution?

On tariffs, after many months many and caps of contemplation, the contemplation he's saying is by the court, not by him. He doesn't really do many months of contemplation. Please let this ther statement serve to represent that. Now, the next word is meant to be I. But he's actually used the figure one. So which is kind of maybe temperature represent the figure one.

As President of the United States of America, comma will be comma, effective immediately, raising the ten percent worldwide tariff on countries. many of which have been ripping, in quotes, the US off for decades, without retribution brackets until I came along, exclamation mark, to the fully allowed and legally tested fifteen percent level. Get this bit during the next short number of months. The Trump administration will determine an issue the new legally permissible tariffs

which will continue our extraordinarily successful process of making great again. Then we go into full caps, greater than ever before. Exclamation, exclamation, exclamation. So much to unpack here, but I had a a a lovely long conversation uh yesterday with my tariffs hero, Dmitry Grozubinsky in Switzerland. He's in Switzerland, I'm in Switzerland.

And he is just wonderful on this stuff and and again I find myself slightly parroting his views, but the thing that he's good at pointing out is that right at the heart of this whole thing is that Congress is supposed to have the power of the purse. They're meant to be the people who are really in charge of taxing and spending. And tariffing.

are a massive part of the power of the person. In fact, you know, Trump has generated about two hundred billion dollars worth of revenue off these tariffs. And what the Supreme Court ruling did, and very unusual. six to three, big slap to Trump, is to challenge his use of emergency powers. So he essentially said that there was an emergency. He used something called AIPA, which is a particular act. And he tried to use it to say.

that he could, as president, unilaterally impose tariffs on basically any country for any reason what the emergency was because at the start in relation to Canada and Mexico is a fentanyl. But then with every other country, I'm not aware that Switzerland

has a big fenty fentilar relationship. So what was the emergency that he was addressing? So that's absolutely right. So that that's one big problem which the Supreme Court could have looked at and actually they decided to stay off the emergency thing. They got onto another thing, but the emergency thing, you're completely right. was nonsense.

He decided that anything he wanted was an emergency. So two classic examples. When Ford in Canada put up some advertisements quoting Ronald Reagan on free trade, that was considered an emergency. An emergency that justified putting tariffs up on Canada. Again you would have heard in Davos, I don't know whether you were in uh meeting or listening to it, but when Lutnik was talking about why they were threatening to impose tariffs on Europe over Greenland

He said it was an emergency because in some non specified time in the future China might occupy Greenland. So it was a an emergency, right? So the Supreme Court could have really got into that. They decided not to because they decided that they don't want to get involved in micromanaging what a president does or doesn't regard as an emergency. Instead what they said is that quite clearly in their view the act

did not allow him to raise tariffs. If Congress, who passed this act, had intended the President to be able to raise tariffs, they would have said tariffs in the Act. The fact that they talked about economic instruments and not tariffs From the Supreme Court's view makes it pretty clear that Congress was proposing to retain its traditional control over tariffs.

That then has given Trump a big, big problem, because we've just removed his flamethrower that he's been throwing at the world, and it pushes him back basically to three other options that he can use. There's something called two three two. So that That's uh something that he could use in a national security emergency. So a classic example of that could be you could say, for example, I'm gonna put tariffs on Chinese steel because I need to con make uh my own steel in order to make battleships.

Right, that would be two three two. He could use something called three oh one, which is what the his um guy who does all the trade negotiations is now threatening. And three oh one is about unfair trade practices, but instead what you're seeing in that True Social Post is that he's gone with something called one two two. And one two two gives him the right, if there's a balance of payments crisis in the US.

to impose fifteen percent tariffs for a hundred and fifty days before it goes back to Congress. The reason I'm being boring about all these different things and I could also talk about some called three three eight, is that they're all very cumbersome.

They they're not gonna work for him in the way the other stuff worked. And they're all open to legal challenge in different ways. And the problem is they're much more bureaucratic and procedural. So for a man who wants to play the hokey kokie and say Uh, you were rude to me in a meeting and I'm gonna put up tariffs by seven percent, and now you've given me a gold Rolex, so I'm gonna bring tariffs down to fifteen percent.

These instruments wouldn't really allow him to do that. These are instruments that usually require a full investigation by US commerce, huge documentation. Once they've gone up, yes he can bring them down, but if he brings them down

He's then open to legal challenge right across the board that could be very expensive. I mean it's possible he's gonna have to repay a hundred and fifty billion dollars to all these companies because his tariffs may be illegal. Although the dissenting judges, the three arch conservatives who will largely view that Trump can do no wrong, they pointed out that it is very, very, very complicated process for people, be they countries or companies

to try to get refunds. But that is gonna set off a whole new wave of activity for the lawyers.

The section one hundred two two that you're talking about, this is the first time this has ever been used and it was part of uh the Trade Act of nineteen seventy four. Now what's really interesting about this, given that the original judgment is about the powers of Congress over the power of the Presidency. is that this can only apply for a hundred and fifty days, at which point Congress

has to step in. Now, of course, this is all leading us to the midterms in November when people assume there is going to be a shift of power. But what I think you've seen both in his reaction And the the sheer violence of the language against these judges, I mean The reason why they talk about the founding fathers and their love for the Constitution is because you have these d three parts of it, one of which is this Supreme Court.

And for him to come out and basically say, I don't need to worry about Congress. Yeah she said at one point. I can destroy the country. I just you let that say good. I can I have the power to destroy the country, brackets if I don't get my way. And the interesting thing I think for me, you and I both being very critical about the Supreme Court, the The seeming willingness to

to go along with all these businesses and the tech bros have all caved in and the media caving in one by one. And I think once you get the habit, any institution Once you get the habit of saying, right, I've crossed that Rubicon, I've given him that slap on the face.

maybe there will be more of that down the track, especially when he reacts in the way that he has. I mean, calling these people a disgrace to their families, anti American the violence of the language he uses when he doesn't get his his own way does underline the worry that people have that he basically is a wannabe

King, I want to be a dictator. But it it is interesting, isn't it? My mother, that great figure on our podcast, was saying to me last night um that She was very surprised because the impression she'd got, reading the news, was that the Supreme Court were total Trump loyalists.

thanks to some of the recent appointments, and that basically the Supreme Court and Congress weren't gonna stop him from doing anything. So she was very surprised to discover they'd voted six to three, particularly on something that, as she points out Is so central. It's it's it's it's an issue. Tariffs is something he's made core of his brand. It's something he thinks about all the time. It's his favorite instrument. It's the thing as we've said.

that allows him to play the mini emperor because every company has to come in and bend the knee and he'll give him a few percent here or take off a few percent there and every country has to give him gifts and all this kind of stuff. So the Supreme Court has just slapped him. Not on something marginal. I mean this is something right at the very core of his power. It's fundamental both to his economic policy and to his foreign policy. So that's why it is a kind of double slap.

And the the other thing, because because we know that Trump a little bit like Putin, we know that Putin values loyalty to his vision of Russia. Almost more than anything, if you don't share that loyalty, if you be if you become disloyal, then you risk I'm just reading this extraordinary German book at the moment called Der Stille Krieg. the silent war. And I'm on the chapter about Putin's use of murder.

And we know all the famous ones that have been dropped out of windows and died in baths, but there are so many others who if they are deemed to be disloyal they get dropped out of out of hotel window balconies. And Trump seems to save his greatest bile for the two conservative in quotes justices that he appointed, Neil Gorsuck and Amy Coney Barrett. John Roberts was appointed by George Bush, so he's seen as a conservative.

But he's not Trump's conservative. So the absolute total disloyalty that Trump cannot stand is where it's somebody that he has appointed. And it's interesting that they in a way where the key arguers on this. So I think it's gonna be it's gonna be really interesting how this plays out. There will be c the le the legalities are complicated. Friedrich Mertz, the German Chancellor, he said something very interesting. He talked about this being a poison.

in the world economy. He's really hitting back. Britain, I think, which got this sort of slightly special deal that we don't know whether it's actually been implemented and we don't know what the effect of this will be. So those countries that did well before are kind of sitting back, those countries that maybe got whacked a bit more uh uh using it to to really go for Trump. My sense is that I think people like Amy Conway Barrett, yes, are very conservative.

But often when we say that we mean that they have been very conservative on issues such as abortion. I don't think that necessarily means that we could have assumed that she's always going to give in to Trump. I mean she's a extremely

bright in fact actually all to be fair, most of these Supreme Court justices are technically very, very bright, very well qualified, most of them lawyers and I think she's n she's a very good example of that. She's just very conservative and I think quite religiously conservative in her views. Um, yeah. cheering up though, deeply, deeply cheering, is that it shows that the US institutions are beginning to function and mu and because the way in which populism uh really took off around the world

And you can see this in Venezuela, where the Supreme Court basically upheld Maduro stealing the election. You can see this in Turkey, you obviously can see this in Russia. All these countries where elections continue to happen, but what really goes wrong is that the courts get seized. Uh well you saw this in Bangladesh. I mean that was one of the things that Sheikh Hosina was really doing. She

stitched up the courts. And I guess w you know, two hundred and fifty years for American democracy is really paying off here. In the end, these institutions are holding better than people feared. Well, I don't think we should get too cheered up because I I think this is getting such attention because as you say it's so fundamental to his overall foreign and and economic policy.

But they've let quite a lot go by. And I was reading a piece at the weekend, one of the a progressive think tank had done an ala an analysis of Project Twenty Five. And it is pretty amazing when they go through line by line just how much of Project twenty twenty five has been has been carried out, stopping foreign aid, stopping the DEI stuff.

the the really tough stuff on immigration, going for the public broadcasters, Venezuela are a big, big thing part of this. So I th I think we should still be worried because Trump is doubling down. The fact that he could have that response, a normal response of a an American president, would have been, well, I'm very disappointed by the judgment. We now have to make sense of it. Instead of which, your family's ashamed of you. You're a disgrace to America. Now, hopefully that will shake up.

the legal system and these media cowards to think, hold on a minute, we really are now looking down the barrel of somebody who wants to run this country like Putin runs Russia. That is what we're getting to on this, and so that's why I think it is so significant. I guess in the back of their minds in the Supreme Court Justice minds is they're balancing two things, aren't they? They they're balancing

what they think is their responsibilities and constitution and the law. But the background, and I think you're right to raise Project twenty twenty five here, is that the big narrative, the big populist narrative in the broad sense, is that we're being crippled by the law. And you hear it from the right in Britain, You hear it from the right all over the world. The story is that we've become too slow moving. As somebody who I saw in in Munich

said to us we've gone from a world where the people running our countries were engineers to a world in which the people running our countries are lawyers. And we you know we talked about the fact that every democratic presidential and vice presidential candidate for forty years, with one exception, was a lawyer. And of course Kirstan is a lawyer. Right. And there's a general sense that governments find it very difficult to get things done. You talk about, you know

How come China can build all these airports? We can't. You know, why are we still talking about the third runway since nineteen ninety seven? And so there's a general sense in modern politics that we're being out competed by authoritarian states like China because they don't have to worry about

public inquiries, consultations, planning processes, and above all lawyers. And of course, ministers, you know, when I was a minister I felt this a lot. When I wanted to try to uh put metal detectors at the gates of prison The first thing I was told by my civil servants is it's illegal. You know, the lawyers won't let you do this, right? And you have to spend a lot of time endlessly talking about what's legal and what isn't.

So I suppose the Supreme Court and we get a hint of this in their decision to say we're not going to double guess whether or not something's an emergency, we're going to look at this narrow subject around Tariffs is they don't want to be drawn into the culture wars of being accused of the lawyers and the blob.

stopping governments getting on with things. Yeah. Anyway, we will doubtless be coming back to Trump and his tariffs'cause uh he is not gonna let this lie. But I th I think you're right. I think the world was Broadly cheered up by this, you certainly saw a lot of positive reaction from different parts of the world, albeit worried. in terms of, you know, whether they can now waste lots of money trying to get their money back or whatever it might be.

into the mad old system. We were beginning to get a sense over a year of what he was doing with his AIPA powers and how to deal with him. He's now going to be working with his own teams to try to come up with other ways of torturing the world with tariffs. And so there's gonna be a moment where countries and businesses are gonna be Lurching around trying to understand what this means, what other tricks he's going to try to pull out of the back of his pocket. And if he decides that

somehow he can't quite continue using tariffs as his tool of torturing people. What other things is he gonna try to find? Because he's want gonna want to continue torturing people. He's gonna want to continue to have short term transactional things that allows him to humiliate, bully, extract concessions, threaten, intimidate. So what's next? And that's where I begin to worry, you know, what's he gonna do with American control of tech, cloud computing?

AI, sanctions policies and others at the dollar, payment systems, other other tools that he could have to torture people. Yeah. move to the sort of dropping people out of the window phase. I mean don't forget we have got ISA out killing people on the streets and Trump defending it. So, you know, we're on a very dark path, I would say. Should we take a quick break? Yeah, quick break and then back for more.

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Welcome back to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. Dave McGlade is a TripPlus member on Discord. There are few dramatic changes in the relationship between monarchy and parliament. Is the arrested former Prince Andrew of such a scale it will be seen as a similar sort of change?

and be in school history books a century from now, or will it be forgotten except by specialist historians? Now you always sort of I think get the feeling that I get very emotionally disturbed. when things bad things happen to the Labour Party. I get the same feeling with you at the Bollock.

It's it's I'm sure that's right. I'm sure that's right. I think it's a good it's a good challenge. And I think it's certainly true of you and me. I suspect it's probably more true of of the whole world than we want to acknowledge. There are certain kinds of things that outrage us and certain kinds of things that don't and a lot of that is to do with where we're coming from. So it it's easier for the two of us to get really outraged by Boris Johnson's conflicts of interest.

Uh, we we agree violently on that. And then once once we get on to Peter Mandelson or the monarchy, we tend to differ. Well, I I I think I was fairly frank about Peter Mandelson. What what did you make of Charlie Faulkner's take on the emergency podcast he and I did? Where he basically said he thought this was potentially a real crisis for the monarchy. Yeah.

So I think um firstly if if anybody's not listened to Charlie Faulkner and you, they should. I thought he was great. Um I mean, you know, this is a guy who was the Lord Chancellor and he boy, he knows his law and he's extremely good at expressing complicated ideas powerfully. So what did I what did I think? I don't know. I mean, what's your inci I mean uh my instinct but again this may be my prejudice, but my instinct in relation to Dave McGlade's question.

is that it's not something that will be in school history books a century from now. My suspicion is that actually it will be forgotten except by specialist historians. Um and that that's because in the end I think uh institutions survive scandals. And I think that will be and I so I'd be very, very surprised if in a century's time people were going to be studying this in history books. What do you think? I think they might be. Um I mean obviously a lot depends on what now happens.

I mean you've you've got a you've got the situation where until recent quite senior member of the royal family has been arrested. yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw Which could lead to him being imprisoned. That's not impossible. They arrested him. They're still se they're still searching his properties. They've taken away electronic devices and and this is not about the sexual offences.

Which he's always denied. This is about misconduct in public office when he was a trade envoy. And in and in particular, the allegation is that he within five minutes of receiving his government briefing for his trade trip. forwarded them on to Jeffrey Epstein. And should say Andrew Martinbatten Windsor has consistently denied any wrongdoing. Charlie did make the point, and he's right, that there's a very, very high bar. This is a really, really difficult thing to prove.

But my point is if it does go down that route. if it does go to what Charlie calls the trial of the century, and it does lead to a conviction, I think that is a f really big problem for the monarchy as a whole. You're right that they've survived a lot of scandals, but I think this has the potential to be to be d b to be more serious. Now, the other thing, Roy, which I think we w th we should you know, I spend a lot of time criticising

uh our beloved media. But the other reason why I think this is g this this might be studied in history books is because sometimes a photograph will be central to history. The photograph taken by this Reuters photographer, Phil Noble, Who'd waited? He got a tip off that Adrey was at the Aylsham police station. There are any number of police stations he could have been taken to. He gets taken to this sleepy police station, this sleepy part of of Norfolk.

This guy, along with others, gets a tip off that's where he is. He spent six hours or five or six hours waiting He drove from Manchester, so he five hours drive from Manchester to Norfolk. He gets there. And I've worked with photographers, a lot of photographers in my time, and sometimes and he's honest enough to admit it, sometimes it's just luck. They see the cars leaving

And he gets this he just bang bang bang bang bang using flash, which is why you've got the red eye in the picture. Bang, bang, bang, bang. It turns out most of the pictures were of the police, or whoever was in the front, one of whom had remarkably looked like the driver looked remarkably like Steve Whitcoff. Trump's special envoy. Don't know what he was doing there. Anyway, there's Andrew in the back and it is just such a picture of

Panic, devastation. And the guy's admitted it's luck. He just hit banged him off. He didn't know whether he was sitting in the front or the back. It was getting dark. And he gets this picture. That picture was on every single front page in the UK and a ha hundreds of front pages around the world. That I think is one of the reasons why this because it captured something.

Truly phenomenal. This is a guy who spent his entire life being entitled, obnoxious. That's the th that that's the generous description of most of the people who've ever had anything to do with him. And he suddenly, like a mortal human being in the back of a car. filled with absolute panic about what he's just been confronted with and what that might mean for the rest of his life. So I think this has the potential

to be really serious. Now where I Charlie and I both agree that your friend the King, I thought his statement was very, very well put together, and the timing was right because what they're obviously trying to do is to build a total firewall between the institution And Andrew. And that I think is the right approach.

one of the lessons, at least as a as far as I understand it, is is that you need to try to move as quickly as possible and get ahead of these stories. So I guess if we go back on how they've tried to do this.

The first step and this is some years ago were was to sack him from his trade envoy role. I think that was maybe ten years ago. Then he was taken off public duties. So he ceased to be a kind of public member of the Royal Family, became a kind of private citizen. And then in, I guess, September he was stripped of his titles, then he was

evicted from Royal Lodge, uh stripped of the Knight of the Garter. So I guess what they've been doing is to try to move quite quickly. The temptation in all these scandals is to hope that it can pass over, to try not to comment, to just be like, well, let the law take its course.

In which case there would be a continual drip drip of people saying, How come this guy's still a prince? How come he's still in this grace and favour lodge? Yeah, you see, I I think you could make the case that they've actually been very slow to deal with this because

It's not as if Prince Andrew doesn't had a certain reputation. I think there were lots of sort of rumours and stories about the the way that he conducted himself and So once the Epstein thing started and this is this is where I think they will be a l perhaps a little bit worried, is that there will be I mean I don't know what the police will be able to have access to. Um

You know, there w there was a time w in fact I think there still is a time when you're n the police are not meant to enter royal palaces without permission. That's why Charlie and I had the discussion about was the king tipped off? And Buckingham Palace was clear that he wasn't.

But the precedent was that you couldn't go into a royal palace without being invited or being summoned. I don't know if you know this, Roy. This is why it's good that you spend so much time with the king, if you ever get up to anything wrong. You're still not allowed to arrest somebody in the presence of the monarch.

I've been looking at some of some of these crazy laws. I tell you, this is my one of my favourite extraordinary moments in my early time in Parliament, where a Labour MP had got really uh drunk in the bar and had started hitting some Tories. And someone called the police officer. And the police came, and they grabbed him, and he turned on them and he said You are not allowed to arrest someone within the palace of Westminster. And they were so Eric Joyce, would it?

Tory MP before they finally brought him down. Anyway, he was making the same argument about no arresting in palaces. Well the other one, the Cultural Property Armed Conflicts Act twenty seventeen, so that's less than a decade ago. That forbids police from searching royal estates. for any stolen or looted artifacts. But just to come back to this, I I think what has happened is that instead of hiding behind those kinds of laws, they have moved very, very quickly to say, A

we won't inform B, let them in, let the police do their job. And in that statement, the rule of law must pass its thing. So I think the one thing that the one thing that they're not doing is trying to claim royal privilege and exemption on Andrew. I would argue that they've moved they've moved very quickly in relation to what happened last Thursday.

I think the more this goes on, the questions that will be asked and w eviden we heaven knows what evidence is going to emerge from from Andrew's phones and laptops, not just in relation to Epstein, but in relation to everybody else that he's had dealings with. And of course the other thing that's happening, Rory, the Liam Burns Select Committee, Business Select Committee, they're looking at the whole issue

of trade envoys. Because, you know, as you well know, we keep bumping into people say, Oh, Kirstar was appointed to be trade envoy to this and that and the other and sometimes it's to Is to let somebody down who thought they were gonna get a different job. Or always in in the Tory system, always. It was about managing backbench rebellion. And we ended up Cameron ended up appointing dozens of these people. Some of them were backbenchers who were going to cause trouble.

Some of them were ministers who'd just been fired. And it was a really disturbing thing because almost every little country ended up with a trade envoy, countries with whom we did almost no trade at all. And the embassy would then have to deal with an MP who wasn't considered by the government to be the kind of person they actually wanted as a minister. Suddenly rocking up, taking the ambassador's time, trying to get a meeting with the president.

And claiming what they're doing is promoting British trade with their country. So we there are currently thirty two trade envoys covering the world, and according to the government website, they play a crucial role in supporting the department's growth priorities. Well

They don't get paid, so they might get their expenses paid, but that to me is an open door to say, well, okay, I don't get paid, but what I've got these other business interests going on, I'm not tarring them all with the same brush. Some of them will be genuinely driven by a desire to support the government, support the country, etc. But you can't say to me that there isn't at least the root.

to double to uh to to conflicts of interest which, you know, I suspect Liam Byrne will get to the bottom of. The final thing which I ha hadn't taken on enough, which you're completely right on, is if they get into all of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor's emails, WhatsApp, It's gonna be terrifying. It's gonna be a monstrous Hornets' nest. I mean, even before you get on to whether there's crime. As soon as you start going through the emails of somebody like that.

it's unbelievable what you'll find. I mean what one of and I I keep uh it it sort of brings me back to my main point, which is at the heart of the Epstein scandal, is that for the first time we were actually released to the public three million emails of this almost billionaire who knew all these presidents and billionaires and tech people. We don't normally get to see that. And as soon as you get to see it, it's very, very, very nasty.

Even I suspect for people who aren't engaged in criminal activity, and I don't know whether this is gonna continue to happen, you know, are all of Mandelson's emails and WhatsApps seized? Are they all gonna be released?'Cause that's gonna be not pretty because, you know, wha what do we know about all these people?

they are flatterers, networkers, pushing the boundaries, striking deals, trying to get themselves invited to parties, try I mean, I can think of another twenty people in public life whose emails you would not want to see. released to the world and the number of people they would drag down in the context. Oh yeah. And of course what happens sometimes when people are being dragged down is they want to take other people down with them.

Right. You know, you and I, Rory, at the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, we were in Belfast, we were there, we interviewed Senator George Mitchell, sort of hero of the peace process. We were there for the unveiling of his bust at Queen's University. They're taking it down. Yeah. Because of what they say has been revealed about him in the files. have turned up in these emails. Um I I it would be interesting, I don't know whether he'd be prepared to come on, but Michael Wolfe

seems to have been very, very close to him and sending an incredible number of emails to and from Epstein. Now, none of this is an accusation of wrongdoing, but one of the things we're not getting, and maybe if Wolf were prepared to come on he could tell us, is

What was it about Epstein that seemed to make him so sort of magnetic for these people? And I I I've been reading these biographies trying to understand it. And because he was this Extremely evil, criminal, abusive man who did horrifying things to numberless underage girls. people are not trying to understand what it was that was attractive about him'cause you don't want to talk about that. But clearly he must have been a man with an incredible charm, sense of humour.

I mean who knows what it was, but there was something that was fine. Well I mu as I've said to you before, Rory, on my one meeting with it definitely passed me by. He absolutely gave me It absolutely And this isn't hindsight. This is this is recorded in in my diary at the time. He absolutely gave me the creeps. Yeah, gave me the creeps. But I t my final point on this Roy is is I think that I still am troubled

by the extent to which the American angle and all this is so underplayed. Here we have we have uh Glaine Maxwell in jail, Peter Mandelson disgraced, Andrew now disgraced. Now, there have been some people, as Charlie said, Larry Summers, the George Mitchell I've just mentioned, but there is some stuff in here about Trump. Продолжение следует... For some reason the media seemed not to want to cover too much. Because there's so much material.

So the economists have got a full time team on this. The New York Times have got a full time team on this. They're still digging in and sort of finding all these stories. And this is happening, by the way, because what we're seeing with Epstein is not just the criminality, it's the cronyism, it's the corruption, it's the total corruption of public life in a way. I mean when you look at some of the stuff that I was reading over the weekend about

the way that the markets were moving on the back of some of some of the the the c including the Supreme Court, where people were making money out of the expectation. Allegations that Lutnik's children anticipated. So the Trade Secretary for for uh trade and commerce is children. somehow anticipated that the Supreme Court might overrule their father's policy and therefore took huge positions to benefit themselves and their clients on that assumption.

Pretty extraordinary stuff. Totally agree. And we've seen the same. I saw an interview with Trump's uh sons, Don Jr. and Eric. their inability to think that there might be such a thing as a conflict of interest, given their nature and what they're all about, and given the nature of their father and what he's all about. So in a week, when he says, I don't care about Congress, I don't really care about the courts, I'll do what the fuck I want.

And they're basically saying, Well there's no problem with that as they go around the world doing deals, making

Billions, etcetera. So Alison, next question for you. Connie, Trip Plus member from Manchester. Will the send reforms, so for international listers, special educational needs reforms in the school's white paper? Strengthen inclusion in mainstream schools or risk stripping essential legal protections from children with special needs.

Can you explain briefly what it is that England and I guess it's only England, right?'Cause Scotland will have a different policy, is trying to do in terms of children with special educational needs in schools? Mm-hmm. Well the direct answer to the question is that I hope

that it will lead to greater inclusion without compromising standards, either for children with special educational needs or for children who are being educated alongside them. Yeah. So in the current system Many parents feeling that there isn't good provision for their child that has special educational needs.

is frequently pressing for them to go to a specialist school, which is costing the government an enormous amount of money, and also many educational people would say isn't good. They'd rather have these children in mainstream schools. So the idea is to try to have fewer places in specialist schools and more children with special educational needs in a normal school supported in the normal school, is that right? Yeah. And and and also just to point out that

Private equity has got into this space in a massive way. And, you know, we mentioned this last week. Georgia Gould is is the school's minister. She's been given the task of reviewing the whole policy on send. What they're trying to do is to get far better. teacher training. There's two hundred million pounds going into training teachers on how to deal with children with special educational needs. more an incl what they call an inclusion premium, new funding for mainstream schools.

conditional on them showing that they can accommodate more children with special educational needs. The challenge back, I guess, will be people saying, uh uh The schools are no good at this. My child has real needs and I'm in no doubt as a parent that I can get better care and education for my child going to a different

provider, could be a charity, could be a private school, could be a private equity funded school. But what I care about is my kid and the government's not good at this and here's somebody who is good at this in the local area and the council can pick up the bill. Right. And the councils at the moment have got a massive double figure billion cost that they have been struggling with. So look, this is a system that I think both the main parties accept.

is pretty broken and in need of fundamental reform. And just to give you some of the stats underlying this, one point six million children now identify with special educational needs. the cost of educating a child with special educational needs in the state system is about r worse out at twenty six thousand pounds. This private equity running independent system, we're talking sixty three thousand.

The other point that I think is worth making that comes through the the arguments about the special education debate is that where children are accommodated Even with all the difficulties that might apply to school as a whole the school as a whole, you are seeing a better performance both of the children with send and children without. So I think that what the argument the argument Bridget Phillipson's putting forward is that inclusion is

and standards need not be in conflict, provided you have the resources. I'm I'm really sympathetic towards this j just personally. I mean, so as you know my little sister Fiona has Down syndrome and my parents put a lot of energy into making sure that she was in mainstream schools. Yeah. And these schools were very, very supportive and flexible because obviously her reading and writing skills would be similar to maybe a six year old

Yeah. And it worked really well for her. And they felt that that was a much and many parents listening to this will have different views on their child and their child's needs and this is gonna be why Presumably this is going to be violent politics on the back benches because there'll be a lot of constituency MPs. under pressure from parents who disagree with my parents and who feel that their child would do much better in another system. There will definitely be people who are worried.

that what they feel has been a real struggle to get the support that they need, often involving the law, that any worry that that's being taken away I think will provoke a a huge debate. However, I think you're provided there are the resources there and the numbers they're talking about in terms of money are good, where that money's coming from is another question, whether that affects other parts of the education debate, that will also come out.

as well. But I th I think the principle of trying to accommodate as many children who identify with S A and D in the mainstream I think is a good one. Um provided that those who cannot be accommodated have the support that they need for the very, very complex needs that they have. This is probably one of the biggest problems that government faces well beyond children with special educational needs because it it's also echoes

the fact the government is spending an unbelievable amount at the moment on disability benefit. Yeah, correct. And without sounding too much like a Tory, we're spending more and more of our GDP uh on services we're not as productive as we should be, our economy's not growing properly. We've got to find some way of rebalancing our books and we've got to get out of a cycle which is very understandable, but which the Labour Party is going to be particularly vulnerable to.

Which is hard case is making bad law which is endlessly Labour backbenchers pointing to really moving and terrible individual cases. where people with disabilities or special educational needs aren't getting the support. Yeah. B simply because you you just

Rachel Reeves isn't going to be able to run a government if the bills on these things keep going up and the way they are. So it's gonna and and the result will be, unfortunately, that either you're too generous or you're too mean, and if you're too mean, there will be people who are affected. But The government's our economy is not growing fast enough.

It's not big enough, I fear, for us to continue to keep our spending on these things going up. And that's a tough conversation with the backbencher. Yeah, but that's why all this other stuff that's going on, Pat McFadden's welfare reform, Alan Milburn's review on so called NEETs, not in employment, education or training.

all has to wrap into this. What I like about the the way that the government is thinking in relation to this school's white paper, the w a lot of the focus, no doubt, will be on both politically and media, will be on send. But what I also read within this is an attempt to

to reframe a really important debate about childhood. There's some there's some stunning, awful facts in here. So one in five children between the ages of eight and sixteen now has a what's called a probable mental health disorder. That's up from one in nine

in twenty seventeen. So whether that's to do with COVID, don't know. Whether it's to do with social media, don't know. But there's something going on. Another stat, Rory, I mean, I don't know, you know, I I can remember when growing up, I walked to school on my own to primary school. I don't remember what age I was, but I did that. In nineteen seventy one, eighty percent of seven and eight year olds walked to school alone.

By twenty twenty, and it's probably got worse since, it's one in four. And here's one, you'll lo you'll like this, Roy. Well you might you'll hate this, but given your interest in prisons and my interest in prisons, children now spend less unstructured time outdoors than prisoners. and have fifty percent less free playtime than their counterparts in the eighties. I'm guilty of this too. So we live only ten minutes from school and I keep trying to

cross that threshold and get our eight year old and eleven year olds to walk to school. Of course every time I try to stalk them and follow them to school to let them do it independently, I see them not looking as they're crossing the road and I'm just like they're such space cadets. They're gonna be talking about Pokemon and they're gonna step in front of a truck and I I mean but i it is very, very tough as you can imagine as a parent to think Yeah, listen, if this idiotic child doesn't look

Properly for Ecosta Ros and get flattened. I would hope that I'm not going to be able to do that. If this idiotic child I mean this is your son you're talking about. I'll tell you but I I I think there is something about th there's a line in the in the white paper about, you know, r getting children to regain their childhood. And I I'm I'm sorry, I I mean I was on a train in France yesterday and I was I was sitting next to

these two girls that had been what, thirteen, fourteen. The entire journey From Nîmes to Paris to the they spent on Instagram. The entire journey. But now, that letter we had last week from Serafina Jennings, you know, there is good on social media, there's no doubt about that. There is good in the mobile phone world. But I hope that part of this reclaiming childhood really does step up the debate.

about how children are spending their leisure time consuming, the addiction to phones, the addiction to social media and what have you. There's a f there's a few other things which I thought you'd be interested in, Roy. There's a thing called Rise, Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence. When we were in power we got a lot of credit, but some appropriate outside London, but we really tackled the ch educational problems in London and it really had an impact.

And this white paper is targeting the north east and also coastal England. And I think that a d identifying where there are particular problems and then taking the best people and taking the best practice and trying to integrate that into the the system there. There's good stuff on school building, there's good stuff on sport, there's good stu stuff on inclusion and and creativity. But an and it reads to me, Bridget Phillipson gets quite a lot of flack for being seen as a bit sort of you know

I think this is your view generally, a bit sort of, you know, pro union on the left, all that stuff. But this this reads very much like a sort of David Blunkett approach to education. But I think the big issue will be money.

both in terms of the new teachers that they're promising, the new teacher training that they're promising, some of the hubs that they're promising. There's a lot in here that will require money. But I think as a as a vision for education, I think there's a lot to there's a lot to commend it.

Lovely. Well Alistair, listen, we we've run relatively long. Um so I I think maybe we should wrap it up. But I think there's three great things. We've done tariffs, we've done Android Epstein, and we've done I think quite a thoughtful piece on education schools in Britain. So thank you very much. And I I you're about to go on travels, but I look forward to seeing you uh on your travels uh in a couple of days' time. Yeah. So this week's main episode will be devoted entirely to Ukraine.

4-year anniversary of Putin's invasion. I should also give a shout out to Olaf Scholz. who is this week's leading episode and also to part two of our mini series with Ken Rosen on the Arctic. Um but anyway, and Rory I've been enjoying your skiing videos, but I want to test your knowledge. Who is Johannes Hosfut Clayboat? Well, he's the great hero, hasn't he, who's just got all these gold medals. Well done. How many did he get in this single Olympic? I don't know.

He got every every gold in cross country skiing. I believe he's a he's a Norwegian. And he would be he as an individual would be in the top ten of the medals table. But Norway are winning the medals table by a mark. I once my only boast is I once skied with a guy called Tony Seiler, who's from Kittsbullen. in in Austria who got I think three gold medals, um, or or certainly three World Cup prizes in a single thing is the mid fifties. Yeah. Um but it's funny how these kind of legends

are kind of forgotten. Um, you know, by Early nineties you could still say to people I skied with Tony Sider and they sound a bit like People say you I know you play football with Maradona. But nowadays you say it to a young ski instructor, they've got no idea who he is. I guess that happens eventually. What about Jean Claude Keely who is the one that I always remember as a child? Yeah, Keely and Valdisaire, he's from Valdisaire, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

France Klammer, you remember France Klama, the downhill? I remember France Klamour, yeah yeah. But we're we're dating ourselves here. I'll tell you what I've really enjoyed though, Roy, is I I've been there's two things I've really enjoyed. One is Mark Carney's social media congratulating every medalist and just clearly loving it. But the other thing I've really enjoyed is these sports I didn't know existed.

Some of the kind of acrobatic stuff, but uphill mountain uphill skiing, what is going on? Yeah, it's mad They're going uphill. And at such speed. I mean at such pace. I mean I I I do a bit of uphill stuff and boy it's not like that. Um anyway, thank you, Alistair. And um we maybe we could even share my ridiculous new video of me in the trees'cause the snow here has been unbelievable.

Yeah, I think it snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed and a lot about notch is certainly. No, I listen, uh be you'll be pleased to know you talk you talk about your mother a lot, I talk about Fionn a lot. Fiona was moderately impressed by your skiing video. Moderately impressed. And it takes a lot to moderately impress Fiona, please be. Oh, very good. All right. Have a great day. See you soon. Bye. See you soon. Hello everybody!

Book Club, a new podcast from Goalhanger. Hosted by me, Dominic Sambrook. And me, Tabitha Cyrus. As some of you may know, I've been Dominic's producer on The Rest's History and we even did a mini series last year about all And since we enjoyed that so much, we have decided to roll it out as its own show. So it'll be coming out every Tuesday. We'll be doing a different

Each time and digging into all the stories behind them. And we are going to be talking about the historical contexts behind some of the greatest and most famous books of all time. We're going to be digging into the remarkable people behind them, the unexpected stories behind the stories, and also unraveling the plot of each book a bit and delving into the depth.

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Did Vladimir Putin interfere in the US 2016 presidential election? I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist. And I'm David McCloskey, author and former CIA analyst. And we are the hosts of the Rest is Classified, and in our latest series, we're going deep inside the twenty sixteen election to reveal the true story of whether the Russians helped Donald Trump take the White House.

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