Alastair Breaks Rory's Zen With The Latest Political News.

So much has happened in the world of politics in recent days, sometimes frightening, sometimes farcical, often outlandish.deeply infuriating but my co -host on the podcast Mr Rory Stewart has witnessed absolutely none of it because Rory has spent 10 days cut off from the outside world on a silent meditation retreat.So you're about to see Rory's first reaction to the ceasefire collapse in Iran, the court judgments for Marine Le Pen and indeed Prince Harry, Nigel Farage's implausible battle with Count Binface and Donald Trump's overturning of a red card.I'm slightly worried that Rory's going to think I've made the last two up.I'm intrigued to know what he makes of it all because, of course, it says so much about just how combustible our politics has been in recent times, that so much can change so quickly.Well, first of all, let's just kick off with something that's sort of not that political.

England are still in the World Cup.

Brilliant.And this is pretty cool, right?Because we're getting towards closing stages.What stage are we at now?They're in the semi -final.

Oh, wow.Semi -final?

Yes.So they're the last four?

That's what it means.They've won every game since you went away, which I think is three.They have been drawn against Argentina in the semi -final and the other semi -final is France against Spain.

Okay.Oh my goodness.

So that's the first thing.

So sorry, am I right?Three more matches to go in the World Cup?Two.Semi -final and the final.But the other team is also going through a semi -final.Yeah, three total.

Three total.And they've really pulled together as a team.You're feeling optimistic about them, that they're playing well?

Well, as you know, Rory, I'm a Scotland fan.They have been playing.They had an extraordinary win in Mexico, one of the most extraordinary games in the history of the World Cup, actually.They won their quarterfinal against Norway.The highlight for me as a communications guy was the manager Thomas Tuchel basically telling them all that they weren't good enough at the end of the game.That was really, really interesting.

We basically said that we just weren't good enough.We were lucky.We didn't really deserve to win.We made so many mistakes, et cetera.Yeah.Very interesting.

We interviewed Gareth Southgate.Is this very much a team that was largely built by him?80 % of the players are Southgate squad?

Yeah, I mean a lot of them are, the core of the team is pretty much his, but the absolute stars have been, well Jude Bellingham has been an absolute star, Harry Kane has been pretty extraordinary.Yeah, but they've done well, they've done well.I still think France have been, France and Spain I think will, very hard to beat, well one of them has to lose their semi -final, but it's going to be hard to beat those in the final.So that's the sports news.This episode is powered by Fuse Energy.Right now, Fuse Energy's tariffs are up to £200 below the Ofgem price cap.

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So don't just listen to another price cap story.Switch to Fuze, save up to £200 and get TripPlus free with code POLITICS at fuzenergy .com slash politics.The Iran ceasefire is over.You're not surprised about that?No.

Trump is bombing again.The Straits of Hormuz are back.Not quite as bad as it was, but pretty good.And world leaders arealarmed.That being said, the NATO summit passed off relatively calmly, given that Trump was on the rampage.

OK, so that's genuinely interesting for me, because of the way the news works.I guess anybody following the news over the last four months will have been straight open, straight close, straight open, straight close, ceasefire, broken ceasefire agreement.And of course, the oil price would dipping up and down crazily and the global economy was going into a real crisis.people decided, finally, the whole thing was going to settle down.So I suppose, a couple of questions.What was the trigger?

I mean, how did that go wrong?And what are the consequences?Are the oil prices still going up and down?Are people really worried now, again, about the global economy and jet fuel?Or somehow, has it just happened so much that people have just become completely indifferent to it?

It's not that they're indifferent.Everybody, I think, is very worried about it.At the NATO summit, there were obviously other world leaders were trying to sort of get him into a better place.But it's really interesting how it hasn't been.In some places, it wasn't even leading the news.It's almost like it's just sort of priced in that this is going to be a bit crazy.

And then the other thing that was happening alongside it, that finally, the Ayatollah's funeral took place.And that was, you would have just been mesmerized by it.It went on for days.Millions and millions and millions of people turned out.The sun, the new Ayatollah, did not appear.So he's clearly, there's something really deep going on there.

But the very, very, very interesting thing is that there were protests against, including senior people in the regime, with people shouting at them death to the appeasers.They don't think they're hardline enough.So there's obviously a pressure within Iran to keep this war going.So I'd say the economic situation, not great.People are very worried about it, but it's not been quite as cataclysmic as the first time around.Another big news.

This one, I don't thinkyou'd be too surprised by this one.The case against Marine Le Pen in France was upheld by the appeal court, but she will be able to stand as she takes it to the next stage of the process.The first opinion poll had her quite substantially ahead of Edouard Philippe were he to be the the mainstream contender.

So that means she's genuinely cleared a run and she's got a decent chance of being the next president of France?

Well it's up to her.Basically what he said is that where they left things is that she is guilty, the case has been upheld, However, they sort of found a way that would be...I got the sense the judge didn't want to say, I am blocking you from standing for the candidature.It's kind of up to you if you think you can do that in these circumstances.

So the end of the Trump presidency could potentially have George Maloney in Italy, Marine Le Pen, in France, and then who knows what else is happening with AFD, certainly in regional elections.This could be a big populism inflection point.

It could be.It could be.It could be.I still think Edouard Philippe, if it is going to be him, I think he's got a chance of coming back.We'll see.Totally not surprising, but quite big news, Andy Burnham was formally nominated By more than 300 MPs for the Labour Party leadership, no other candidates have come forward.

He will be our Prime Minister next week.Next week?Sorry, no, week on Monday.Week on Monday he'll be the Prime Minister.Yeah, yeah, yeah.He also, very interestingly, released a social media post distancing himself from the Labour government's handling of Gaza.

And he used another social media post to announce he's going to be touring the UK over the summer.

The Gaza thing, was the sense that he was going to be more on the Palestinian side and he thought that they'd been unsympathetic towards Palestinians, right?

Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

It feels as though the policy is going more pro -Palestinian under Andy Bono.

Yeah, I would say so, I would say so.We're now going to get into some I think you'll be shocked.I think you'll be shocked.So the Nigel Farage finances drama has been rumbling on.Had that begun before you left?

Yes.And you had begun by saying, I guess, a few weeks ago, why isn't everyone covering it enough?And then people began to get a bit of head of steam.And we had this amazing sequence of him saying, I've taken five million and I'm using it for security.And then he decided he could maybe buy a Ferrari with it if he wanted.and that's where we were.

Okay, thankfully, many years late, given that a lot of these stories have been around for a long time, the media did start to sort of kick into gear.somebody by the name of George Cottrell, aka Posh George, he was put right into the center of the thing, not least because his mother, Fiona Cottrell, who is described by Richard Tice as a very successful aristocrat.I'll come on to why that's important.The police are involved in that, so we have to be a little bit careful.

Sorry, just a quick thing, because it always sort of slightly annoys me when the public are trying to get to the bottom of what malfeasance is going on.Because we had a lot of this going on with Peter Morrell and the allegations around, you know, Nicola Sturgeon's husband and the SNP, of everybody saying, well, you know, we can't really talk about this because the police is investigating.I mean, I can sort of see that sometimes, but sometimes it seems to me a bit mealy -mouthed that presumably there's quite a lot of things one can say about stuff.

Oh yeah, okay.I've not been mealy -mouthed, I just think because of other things I'm going to tell you shortly, maybe just be a little bit careful for now.A very un -mealy -mouthed thing to tell you, I don't like to promote the books of people for whom I have no respect, But George Cottrell wrote about it.How to Launder Money.I think he might be regretting that.I think he might be regretting that title.

We have the five million pound donation which keeps going and going and going and Farage keeps being asked about it and he can't get away from it.We then have Post George comes in and all sorts of stories that people like Carol Codwallader were shouting about years ago suddenly are being written about by the papers that back then said she was a, what was the word, she was like one of those single cat ladies, whatever that insult was that people used to throw about.

I hope some listeners have been listening to our mini -series on the funding of reform which it's now presumably ever more relevant because it's giving a lot of the background to this stuff.

Totally, totally, totally.It's given a lot of the background and so that's all been going on.Farage is getting more and more agitated, more and more agitated.Like all good patriots, he and Rupert Lowe, who we'll come on to in a moment, they both went separately to America to celebrate the British king giving away the United States to the Americans, because they're such take -back -control patriots.On his return, quizzed by a reporter from Sky News, he completely and totally lost his shit.The next morning, the world, of media and politics was a buzz because Nigel Farage put out a statement saying, I will be making a statement about my future in public life at whatever time it was, okay?

So we all sat around waiting for the statement.As a result of the statement, Roy, I can now tell you Nigel Farage has resigned his seat as the MP for Clacton.He has announced, however, that he will be standing in the by -election that he is causing, and he is billing it as Nigel Farage against the establishment, because this whole thing is the establishment trying to take him down.It gets better.The parties, very smart.I was recording.

If you know, we brought Mehdi Hassan off the bench to stand in for you.We were recording our main episode when this happened.I actually suggested as we were talking, well, maybe we should do what we did with Martin Bell in 1997, get all the parties to pull out and just put up a kind of serious, credible figure that everybody likes and so forth.Instead of which, All of the main parties basically said this is a pathetic stunt by a desperate man, none of us are taking part.So the main contest that is being covered in the last few days, which is getting coverage all over the world, is that Nigel Farage's big challenger in Clacton is Count Binface.

Oh my goodness, it's what he's been leading up to all his life!His whole life!His whole life!Count Winfrey says he's been preparing for this whole thing.Oh, how brilliant!I'm so pleased for him, he's finally... found his moment.

Farage literally has nothing to do except campaign against a man with a dustbin on his head.

And Count Binface has been getting a lot of expressions of support from a lot of different people.

What a brilliant move, because a lot of people vote for Count Binface.I mean, they obviously can't defeat Farage, but that will be an amazing insult to Farage.Instead of actually the establishment being against him, it'll be people really sticking up two fingers to him, won't it?

The other thing, and I've got the full list somewhere, there are about eight independents, including Jeremy Corbyn's brother and Lawrence Fox.You get all sorts of, you know, misfits and attention seekers, but Count Binface has caught the imagination of the world.I mean, he's been all over the television in America and Australia and New Zealand.So Farage is looking utterly ridiculous.

The politics on this, I don't know, you probably covered this already, but did all these parties convene toThey must have.What do you think happened?It's very clever to coordinate and end up with just Count Binface.I mean, that really is smart.

They might have convened, but I think the first one out of the traps, I think, was Kemi and then Keir and then even Rupert Lowe.And I'm going to come on to him in a moment because he's been making news as well.So anyway, when I said to you, Nigel Farage resigned his seat, what did you think I was going to go on to say?

Oh, I thought he was over.I thought he was leaving and he wasn't going to be the leader.And then I had a whole pompous phrase about how, just as Le Pen might take over in France, populism had collapsed in Britain.Okay.I think he's in a very, very bad place.And he looks terrible.

I cannot.So wonderful to say.I'm standing against the establishment and the establishment turns out to be a dustbin with a black cloak.

Oh, especially as, and Richard Tice by the way, he did an interview at this from his car which looked suspiciously to me like a Bentley and he's in his car doing an interview with Times Radio.This is where he said, that this is the smearing of a very successful aristocrat.So it's not only are they for the little people against the establishment, but they're standing up for very successful aristocrats who are being investigated by the police because of Posh George, who, by the way, apparently calls Nigel Farage daddy.So it's all been very, very weird.How wonderful.

And I love the idea of being a very successful aristocrat.I mean, you could write a whole essay on what it would take to be a very successful aristocrat.but it's presumably about how you handle the great luck of your inheritance in some way.Anyway, back over to you.

So Rupert Lowe, who for our international listeners who maybe don't know who Rupert Lowe is, but they might know a little bit better now because it's something he's done this week.He is the former Reform UK MP who was elected alongside Nigel Farage.They fell out and he's now set up Restore Britain.Rupert Lowe became this week'sthe first British politician to go on the Joe Rogan podcast, the biggest podcast, I think, in the world.And I think he may have been very badly affected by what we commonly know as hubris combined with utter stupidity, because he made headlines that I'm absolutely sure he would not have wanted other than when appealing to MAGA gun fanatics, because He described the Dunblane massacre of 16 children and one teacher as one murder and said that his father, who liked to shoot things, had all his handguns taken away from him because of one murder.

Cue outrage everywhere apart from in Magellan, who couldn't quite understand what the fuss was about.So what that says to me, it's basically you have a sense of Farage imploding and then Rupert Lowe, probably carried away by the fact that he was apparently going to be meeting Elon Musk, his new benefactor.He was on Joe Rogan, probably fixed by Elon Musk, I don't know.And he just got carried away.And by the way, maybe when we talk on Tuesday, we can talk about the other mistakes he made, but he made several.

But there's a classic one, isn't it, which you must see again and again and be trying to warn politicians against.Firstly, doing an interview abroad with another media and thinking it's not going to get back home.

Yeah.

Secondly, thinking you can flatter an international audience by sort of sounding like you're down with them and agreeing with them because you think Joe Rogan's listeners want to hear you be pro -gun lobby, you know, pro the National Rifle Association.And then this strangeness about actually whatever low -represents, whatever the British far -right might be, anti -immigration, anti -Muslim, it's not the same as Trump's MAGA.And that's something that actually all these guys are navigating, isn't it?And it's something that the Pen has to worry about, the AFD has to worry about.But it's tempting, isn't it?Because I think other people have got in trouble doing this over the years.

I mean, let's say you went and gave an interview with Al Jazeera.Jeremy Corbyn, I think, got in trouble for doing this sometimes.I think in North Africa, he went to a a, I don't know, vent connected to Hamas or something and said something which he might have thought goes down well with the crowd at the time.And yeah.

And also he was slightly led into it by Joe Rogan.And the other thing, of course, this grooming gangs where they've sort of, you know, this absurd figure that they've calculated, 250 ,000 rapes, etc.And Joe Rogan just sort of got him to kind of be He kept saying, you know, quarter of a million, and then Lowe say, oh, probably more.And then he came up with this other one, that if you're an immigrant, if you're an illegal immigrant and you come into Britain, you get dental care ahead of British people and so Joe Reagan said what you're saying these illegal immigrants come in and they get NHS care before the British people do yes that's right Joe I mean it was he exposed himself for what you know for what we know here so that was that was him he's not made as much he's made massive news in Scotland he was big big big when you go back to Scotland you'll find it was big news people really upset or you know lots of families of children who were killed coming out etc.

Very significant political death in the United States was the death of the U .

S.Senator Lindsey Graham, age 71, who two days ago was with President Zelensky in Kiev.So the conspiracy theories there are saying this is the Russians.and again without evidence.But he's, you know, he was in Kyiv, he saw Zelensky a couple of days ago and he's back in the United States now and he is dead.

That's very big news because Senator Graham was of course a big Iran hawk, a big champion of what Trump was doing there and in many ways kind of an important figure on a Republican outrider, wasn't he, for that kind of foreign policy.

He was, however, somebody who was pushing for more and more sanctions on Russia.

Zelensky put out a very, very, very warm tribute to him.

And then sticking brieflyin America, somebody we've talked about on the podcast several times, Graham Plattner in Maine, he has had to withdraw his candidacy.

Oh, Lord.

Because of these sexual offenses, allegations that were being made against him.

So that finally got too much.I mean, so Plattner, the tattoos, which is the New York Times said, looked like Nazi tattoos, the allegations of sex abuse, all this sort of stuff.finally got too much from Plattner.And it's an interesting point.When do you reach a stage in a political career?Because people must be thinking all the time, if you're Farage or Plattner, well, Trump can just man it out.

Trump just takes scandal after scandal after scandal.He doesn't step down.He doesn't apologize.He doesn't go anywhere.And in the end, people forget.So in that style of politics, which Trump and Plattner at other different extremes are, which is, yeah, I've got a lot of strange stuff in my life, but my voters don't care.

when the moment comes when you have to give up.

Well, just on your point on Trump, the other big news that emerged while you were away, Trump added $2 .2 billion to his personal wealth in the first year of his presidency.Wow.Yeah, 1 .4 billion of which was crypto.

And that's all those weird investments in crypto where people get to buy crypto and they get to have dinners and people seem to get pardons when they invest in certain funds.

I've done one leading in your absence, by the way.I interviewed Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who have written this book, Regime Change.Oh, yes.Lots of talk about Trump and corruption in that.Very big news in Jersey.We don't say that very often.

Their parliament has been the first part of our great islands to have passed assisted dying legislation.That's happened.The Bayeux Tapestry est arrivé.Very good.I've booked my tickets.Excellent.

Prince Harry lost his case against the mail.Prince Harry may or may not have met his father.I can't quite work it out.I don't know if you can see that I'm sweating reallyhad another unbelievable heatwave.Spain has had deadly forest fires.

And I told you about the World Cup, but the other big, big, big news that dominated the news for a couple of days.Do you remember?I think this was the last episode we did before you went away.I said I was really surprised that Donald Trump had basically been keeping out of the World Cup.The next day he intervened by phoning the FIFA president Gianni Infantino to ask or to suggest that a red card that had been given against an American player should be lifted.

That's brilliant.And guess what?Wait, no, you're not going to tell me Infantino agreed.

It was suspended for a year, but said Infantino, that was the work of the independent committee that looks at these things.

Is this actually going to affect the Cup?Is this an important player who's going to have a decisive impact on what happens?

Well, he did.I think it did affect what happened because America were doing very, very well.And this guy, Balligan, who is actually, and this is the best irony of the lot, he's only playing for America.If you hear him, it sounds like you're talking to a kid from South London, okay?Yeah, I played all right.It was all right.

Yeah, the game was all right.We did all right.Yeah.Because he was born in New York, because his mother was very, very pregnant on holiday and they wouldn't let her on the plane.So he was a birthright citizen.

Oh, brilliant.

He's exactly the sort of person that Donald Trump wants to put on the first plane out, but he'd been their best player.So Donald Trump does this literally in the Oval Office.First of all, he says, I mean, it's really unfair.He's our best player.We can't take our best player out.What if I took Messi out?

What if I took Harry Kane out from England, he said.Oh, he also revealed that he's played golf with Harry Kane and Harry Kane confirmed that this is true some time ago.So this was a massive, massive, massive story aroundworld.The real football aficionado, people like Jurgen Klopp and Gary Neville and Wayne Rooney, they were all saying this is the end of football if this is allowed to stand.But it did stand.

He played, but the best thing is Belgium absolutely destroyed them 4 -1.So the Americans are out.

But how wonderful that Infantino has reached the final stage of literally taking a call from the President to lift the red card.Oh, this is so wonderful.The rule of law, football, the rules of the game.Oh, it's wonderful.That's the greatest story of all.No, I wasn't expecting the punchline of actually the red card being suspended.

That's really, that's really impressive.

For a year.So if he commits another offence, in the next year, they're going to take that one into account.And then, of course, in England's game, the next game England played in the day after this, they got a red card and the guy got a too much ban.So there's all this stuff around here is, you know, who's going to phone Trump, who's going to get it lifted, etc.So there we are.That's I think I've covered most of the big things sort of home and abroad.

It's no, it's it.No, that's it.That's that.Thank you.And that's an amazing kind of reminder.My general sense is nothing really much happens.

You go away, you come back, you open the newspaper and nothing seems to have changed.I think that's true.I think I missed a lot.So thank you very much.