Will Farage and Lowe team up or tear each other apart? | The News Agents

Restore have basically managed to either make the difference or affect a significance of support from reform.We saw that in the Manchester by -election, the Mayoral by -election just last week, where Restore got about 7 -8 % of the vote and even out -polled the Conservative Party.That is the context basically to this rapprochement or attempt of a rapprochement between the two men with lots of people online saying that the radical right vote can no longer be split.Cue Rupert Lowe's olive branch, which we saw at the weekend.

Did he just set a trap for Farage that he knows Farage will not accept?In other words, it makes Lowe look magnanimous, but Farage can never acquiesce to that.The News Agents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity.

This is a global production.

It came in a very unusual way.I have responded to it, potentially, you know, with an open mind, as I would, but I'm certainly not going to be ditching people that I view to be allies.

Restore's Rupert Lowe has set out five conditions for cooperation with Reform's Nigel Farage, including a referendum on the death penalty.Could anything bring these two men back together again, or do they hate each other a little bit too much?Welcome to the News Agents.It's Maitlis.

And it's Lewis.And it's sort of, I think we've just got to kind of take a little step back and remember how we got here in terms of this relationship between Lowe and Farage.Of course, Rupert Lowe was elected as a reform MP at the 2024 general election as the MP for Great Yarmouth.That relationship quite quickly broke down.Basically, I think it's fair to say that the reform town simply weren't big enough for the both of them.At the start of 2025, Lowe was getting a bigger and bigger social media profile.

You can imagine why that might have annoyed Farage.And the decisive rupture between the two men came in the March of that year.Lowe basically, cut a long story short, Lowe gave an interview to the Daily Mail questioning Farage's leadership, described Reform as a protest party led by the Messiah.Within days, Reform suspended Lowe, citing allegations that appeared of bullying and threats towards party officials, including the now shadow Home Secretary or Home Affairs Spokesperson Zia Yousaf, basically descended extremely quickly into a bitter public feud and eventually Lowe launches, in response to all of this, Restore UK, a breakaway splinter party on the even harder right from Reform, which eventually becomes backed by Elon Musk.Now, initially Reform at the time had no particular problem with this.They were glad to get rid of Lowe.

Farage and Lowe did not get on.It was considered the two men were just incompatible, kind of personality -wise.But slowly over the course of the last year, partly because Restore have had this remarkable online presence boosted by, among others, Elon Musk, you've seen quite remarkably really for such a new party, them slowly gain traction in the polls to the pointwhere in by -election after by -election of late Restore have basically managed to either make the difference or affect a significant, significant or take a significant amount of support from reform.We saw that in the Manchester by -election, the Mayoral by -election just last week, where Restore got about seven, eight percent of the vote and even out -polled the Conservative Party, something that they did in the Makerfield by -election.That is the context basically to this Rapprochement or attempt of a rapprochement between the two men with lots of people online saying that the radical right vote can no longer be split.

Cue Rupert Lowe's olive branch which we saw at the weekend.

Yeah, if you want to look at that in terms of the numbers, what the Manchester vote tells you, and I think it speaks to the timing of why this has come now, is that probably in the Manchester mayoral, Labour was unbeatable.They got, you know, 47 % share of the vote.But if you add together all reform and restore, you are looking at something that looks like a 30 % share of the vote.If you throw in the Conservatives, you're getting to a 38 % share of the vote.So somewhere in those leaders' minds is a sense of the need for collaboration, I guess, if they want to beat the newly reinvigorated Labour Party under Andy Burnham.So what happened over the weekend?

Essentially, on Sunday morning, Rupert Lowe told Farage they needed to bring together a patriotic government at the next election.But here's where it gets sticky.Lowe then says he would only agree to a pact if Farage agrees to five policies, including mass deportations, a ban on the burqa, and a referendum on the death penalty.From the sound of it so far, Farage doesn't actually have a problem with conceding ground on any of those policies at all.But where he's actually digging in is at Rupert Lowe's demand that he ditch former Conservative ministers, many of whom, as we know, have now gone on to frontline positions in reform, people like Suella Braverman, people like Robert Jenrick.Lowe is saying they would have to be excluded from any future reform, restore cabinet.

So I guess two things going on here.One is that Restore and Rupert Lowe genuinely feels that kind of harking back after old Tories are sort of killing the Lowe brand, which is about moving forward, modernising, not being a party of the traditional Tory right.But I guess the other part is, did he just set a trap for Farage that he knows Farage will not accept?In other words, it makes Lowe look magnanimous, but Farage can never acquiesce to that.And this was Farage's response when he was asked about it in today's press conference, which we should say was all about the small boat operation, about essentially returning migrants after a a biscuit and a drink of water back to exactly where they'd come.He was asked about any kind of future restore pact and this is what he said.

On the Rupert Lowe stuff, well my understanding is that he had a bit of a fallout last week with the Conservatives, who you know he'd been working, he had been working quite closely with for some time.You know, he said that he had a deal with the Conservatives and Kemi Badenoch said they had an arrangement.I don't know what that was.My understanding is there was a bit of a fallout.Look, I mean, if you want to do a political deal with somebody, you know, you would contact them privately and not do a 12 -minute video.That said, that said, I did actually reach out back yesterday to him.

I did say, look, should we have a call?I haven't heard back yet, so I don't know what the sincerity of this is, but it seemed to me that he was sort of, more than anything, perhaps putting out this gesture, saying, look, I'm the good guy, Nigel is the bad guy.Well, that's not the case.If you look at my history, you know, in politics over the last few years.I am prepared to do things and make sacrifices if I believe it's of a national interest.I certainly did that in 2019.

I would do whatever I could for us to have a sane centre -right alliance that beat Labour at the next general election.

So essentially, Farage has said he's open to something, but he doesn't like Rupert Lowe going public without contacting him.And Rupert Lowe has come back on Twitter and said, I don't want to make private conversations public, but Farage has just done so at a national press conference.He just stated, he said to me yesterday, shall we have a call?Sadly, that is just a lie.But then he goes on to explain what happened, which is that at 10 .30, Nigel Farage did in fact message Rupert Lowe and he puts the words will call later, but there is no call forthcoming.Now, I mean, it seems to me a fairly trivial question this as to whether Farage said he'd call, but then didn't hear back from Rupert Lowe or didn't get a sort of thumbs up emoji, so didn't call or wanted to call, but didn't manage to.

But you have to stand back and say, I'm not sure how well these two guys will run a party together if they can't actually organise a phone call.And so you have this sense of what do they call that?The rutting stags, you know, they're sort of they're trying tocome together, but the antlers are just getting in the way already.They haven't even got to stage one and already they've locked horns.

Yeah, I mean, this is sort of, the latest episode in the long storied history of Nigel Farage's career of him not being able to get on with anybody for very long.And one of the most damaging things about the low split in the first place was it reinforced the idea that basically reform is a one man band and is only held together and is only a vehicle for Farage's own career, which has obviously become a problem for reform over the past few weeks as Farage himself has become so diminished by the allegations that have been coming forward about his personal finances.There isn't a kind of, there are no other strings to the reform bow really on which to play.But I think that like, you know, if we take a step back, why does this, why does any of this sort of matter?I think it tells us, it matters because it tells us a lot about the state of our contemporary politics, particularly on the right.This is a moment which is revealing of and adverting to Nigel Farage's profound political weakness right now.

Make no mistake, Farage would not be doing this.if he did not feel that he had to, if he was not feeling politically feeble, if he was not backed into a corner.He loathes Lowe and he loathes the people around Lowe as much as anything else.Yes, there's politics involved here.I think there's no doubt, you know, Rupert Lowe is definitely on the harder right.He says things and talks about politics in a way.

in such a hard edged way that even Farage would not dare.You know, Farage, as we've talked about before, very good at knowing where the line is, getting to it, and just staying just on it rather than going over it.You know, Lowe goes way over both rhetorically in terms of the policy.You know, he's talked about sending migrants to Scottish islands and letting the midges consume them, stuff like that, right?But he would not be doing this, this is as much as anything though, it's not just political, it's a personal thing.So many of the people around Lowe are people who used to work for reform and for one reason or another have come to loathe Farage and the people around him.

So this is a deeply personal, bitter feud between groups of men, and it nearly is all exclusively men, and Farage would not be overcoming that animus and making this offer if he did not feel that his political position right now was so powerless that he had to do so.And that is coming both as a result of the financial stories, as I say, but also it adverts to the fact that the right, more generally right now, have been concerned for some time that the right -wing vote, the radical right vote, is deeply split.That cost them in Gorton and Denton, it cost them in Makefield, it cost them in the Manchester by -election, it cost them in Caerphilly.What we've seen in by -election after by -election and in election after election is that the left -wing vote, the progressive vote, generally is coalescing very successfully behind an anti -reform candidate or position in a way that the right -wing vote is not doing.So you're getting all this pressure online and the Tory papers and elsewhere to come to some sort of accommodation but the fact is is that Farage would not have been doing this three months ago, six months ago, nine months ago because he felt politically strong.He's doing it now because he feels politically weak partly as a result of all the things I've said and partly because of course we see in Andy Burnham and Labour a governing party which has got its act together.

It's very interesting that we used to talk about Keir Starmer trying to work out his positioning vis -a -vis reform, you know, was he trying to appeal to reform with those kind of crazy lines like the island of strangers, or should he have been playingto the people on his left, the people who are leaving to go to Zak Polanski's Greens or to the Lib Dems.And curiously, you now have this sort of mirror image of where Farage finds himself.Because today's announcement is about pledging to send the Royal Navy into the Channel to intercept all migrant boats and migrants under this plan will be detained, given food and water and then returned under escort on naval vessels to France or to Belgium, facing presumably huge legal hurdles and also incurring the wrath of many of our European partners.And I think Farage has sort of managed to find, as you said, that sort of line which didn't sound completely off the charts until this point.He would sort of try and find the right words on the economy because the Conservatives were weak on the economy.

He'd try and find the right words on immigration because Labour were weak on immigration.And now what is essentially happening is that the Conservatives are concentrating much more on the economic message and Labour, partly through what they've already done on immigration, partly through presumably this sort of reinvigorated leadership from Burnham, have just found their feet and they found their their skin really.They've worked out how to feel good in their skin.And so it's Farage now who's trying to shapeshift and follow.I mean, the fact that we've had sort of no comment really on a referendum on the death penalty from Farage, I think is quite indicative.When we were growing up, we used to kind of laugh about the idea that The reason you don't have referendums is because, frankly, the British public would just say, bring back the death penalty.

That was always given as a reason to not go to the country with your latest crazy ideas.You know, we only just ended the death penalty in the 50s.And here we are sort of, you know, whatever, 70 years later, with somebody who wants to be part of a major coalition saying, shall we bring back the death penalty?Farage isn't even responding to that at the moment, because he's still trying to, I think, feel where the political waters are.And I think you're right.I mean, all politics is personal.

all politics is deeply personal.But what is happening to Farage now is for the first time possibly in his entire life, he's coming under relentless scrutiny and reinvigorated scrutiny from parts of the press that he's never had it from before.And just over the weekend, A new report in the Times suggested that he'd struck a secret deal to return as leader of a former UK months before the general election of 2024.In other words, why is it important?Because we were made to feel, all of us were made to feel like he suddenly said, oh, fuck it, I'm going to go for it.I'm going to try and win Clacton.

And if I do, then, you know, I will become party leader and this will be a sort of breakthrough.But if, in fact, there was a deal already in place with Tice many, months ahead of this, then that £5 million donation looks even shadier and invites even more questions.So it is that pincer movement really.He can't move at the moment for somebody revealing something new about his finances or about his decision making process or about deals that were struck and never declared.And he's trying to work out how far to the right Rupert Lowe is making him shift now to find his own ground.

Yeah, I mean, this is something that Farage has never had to do with you.You're right, Emily, that thelevel of scrutiny that he's, to which he's now been subject, has been at a level that he's never really had.And it's had an effect.I mean, he now is by some margin, having been briefly the most popular politician in the country, he's now the least popular politician in the country, by quite some margin.And that has really happened over the course of the last few months.

And that's not just, of course, the scrutiny.It's the way that he's responded to the scrutiny, not least with this.this deeply eccentric move to have a by -election where, you know, he's going to win, but he's going to lose 30 % of the votes who have been.Just at the moment when Andy Burnham has been coming in, he's basically absented himself from the political fight because he's been fighting a contest in his own seat.You know, very eccentric, very odd, the whole public, the public, I think, deeply confused by it, as is, you know, quite a reasonable proportion of his own party.But he's also had to deal with something new as well, which is doing what he has done for the best part of 20 years, 25 years to the Conservative Party, which is to have an affliction from his right, to have a political problem from his right.

And it is very telling, I think.I mean, I think this is another reason why today is a moment.Over the past 18 months or so, since the general election, and since the rise of reform, which obviously hit its peak probably about this time a year ago in 2025, all of the talk in the Conservative papers and the right -wing press and so on was, would there be an accommodation between the Conservative party and Farage?And would there be a coalescence of the right in that direction, which, you know, I think was always not particularly likely to happen, but it would have been potent.And it certainly tells you something about the way in which Farage was looking, you know, this time last year, when, when reform were at their, their maximal kind of strength, you know, if you spoke to them privately, they were talking about hoovering up what was left of the Conservative Party vote of becomingcentre -right, right party of British politics.

Now that is not the direction they're looking in.Today is not about an alliance or a deal or an accommodation with the Conservative Party, which has its own problems, by the way.It's about a deal with a radical, hard -right, in many cases, let's be honest, far -right party.And the signal that that sends to the electorate is a party which is looking to consolidate part of its politics and part of its coalition that a year ago it would have assumed it would have sewn up.And I think why today is important is that, you know, I don't think reform are going anywhere.I don't think Farage is going anywhere for the time being at least, although I've still got a big question mark about whether he makes it to the general election.

But I think what the story in a way of the last 12 months and today is a kind of full stop on that for me. I think the story of the last 36 or 12 months is reform having to battle and basically stay in its comfort zone rather than doing the thing that people inside internally and others hoped it would be able to do, which has become a big issue.bigotent version of itself that would be a potent, more potent force, not in the centre of British politics, but certainly on the mainstream of British politics.The last 12 months has been a retreat, I think, for reform to its eccentricities.

Yeah.And I think there's another awkwardness, which again, Lowe has managed to kind of tease out of Farage.And it's this, that the people who are now bulking up reform in terms of the sort of serious politicians, the serious players, are all these ex -Tories, many of whom were in charge of the immigration policies that went so badly wrong.And if you cast your mind back to the day that Jenrick, he didn't defect to reform, he was booted out by Baidnock because she discovered that he was sort of having thoughts about it.She kicked him out the party and so he had toannounce that he was joining Reform slightly too early.

And the welcome that Farage gave him was not the warmest, actually.Farage sort of seemed to be saying, oh, well, come on, then, you know, in you come.I wasn't really expecting this, but let's see.And he's had now four or five very senior old school conservatives, which I think have taken him off track of being this insurgent, new, nimble party.And the fact that Lowe has said, get rid of those guys, they're not going to be part of any cabinet for me, has made Farage have to go out and defend them.And while it's very admirable that he's remaining loyal to these new colleagues, there is something quite awkward now about Farage having to defend the very people that in a sort of previous incarnation, he was slagging off for having sort of failed the country so badly.

I just want to play you that clip where he could not sound warmer.

I don't ditch my friends, I don't ditch my allies, whether that's Suella Braverman or Posh George, you know, I do not ditch people because somebody else wants me to.And there's an irony in this, which is that two years ago, Rupert Lowe said, what a fantastic job Jenrick, Braverman and Kruger were doing inside the Conservative Party.And, you know, unlike Chris Philp, who failed completely, but now wants us all to forget it, in the case of Braverman and Jenrick, They resigned from their positions in their frustration that the government wouldn't get a grip.So that would not be a part of a negotiation.

So, I mean, he makes a point, which is that Lou is probably just as hypocritical as Farage has been, and they're both guilty of the same sort of thing.But they've now got thissort of slightly embarrassing baggage of the Tory part of reform.And they don't really know whether to embrace that even more while still harping on about returning migrants, or to kind of say, well, maybe, maybe they are worth, you know, maybe they can be the sacrificial lamb, if, you know, if there's something to be done with Restore more broadly?

Well, I mean, and the fact that it's, you know, it's received wisdom now, or many people would say that Farage made a mistake by accepting too many kind of, you know, Tory, dispossessed and never possessed or the, you know, ne 'er do wells and so on.But I think the fact that he did, again, sort of points back to what I was saying before, which is that, you know, at that time, Farage, what was Farage trying to do in accepting these people?He was trying to send a signal that the Conservative Party was dead and that Conservative voters, even if maybe, you know, Farage wasn't necessarily their cup of tea, maybe they found him a bit harder edged or they had sort of worries about his past or whatever, he was trying to send a signal to say this is a moribund party, the Conservative Party.It's dead.It's buried.We are the only game in town.

Of course, the cost of that has been that it has allowed someone like Lowe to try and paint Farage and Reform as just, you know, Tory -lite or New Tory or Tory and the different guys and grabbed all of the of insurgent energy, particularly from the online space.It's worth saying, though, I mean, I have to say is that, you know, we're talking about Farage and Lowe's problems or Farage's problems in particular.You know, what about Kemi Badenoch and the Conservative Party?You know, Kemi Badenoch gets a really great press, and she's got a lot of friends in the Conservative press.Don't get me wrong, I find her impressive in quite a few ways.And I think she's grown into the job.

She's good at PMQs and so on.But we keep getting told, I mean, this is a sort of reminder of the extent to which the Conservative Party, yeah, they've, you know, they're just about hanging in there.But they're showing no sign, really, of resurgence or vivification, right?I mean, look, they've now been outpolled.two massive elections that we've had in this country, in the Makerfield by -election and in the Manchester mayoralty, right, which we saw last Thursday.They've not just been out -polled substantially by the Reform Party, they were out -polled by Restore.

You know, this this one man band is basically kind of like Great Yarmouth Independence Party basically is defeating the oldest party in British politics in arguably the second or third most important conurbation in England.I mean, you know, people think of Manchester as being a Labour stronghold.This is great in Manchester.We're talking talking about places that used to return, you know, slews of of Conservative MPs, whether it was in Bury or in Bolton or in Trafford, you know, deeply Tory areas.And this, you know, Kelly Begnock revived Conservative Party we keep reading about in the press and in the commentary shows absolutely no sign of taking place.You know, I interview Conservative shadow ministers regularly on Sunday and I keep asking them, they keep saying, you know, Kemi's turning this party around.

At some point, she's going to have to actually show in actual elections outside of the rather unique circumstances of Aberdeen, actually show in an election that she's actually doing it rather than just having vibes.

Yeah, and I guess it still does beg the question, what was it that happened between the Conservatives and Restore, which Farage nods to, that may be leading the Conservatives away from Restore when, you know, two weeks ago, I mean, just before I left, she was kind of, they were all over each other.You know, it looked as if there was something sort of quietly going on there, which has now vanished.

Gianni Infantino, because I know you've had an opinion on this story, should he be replaced?

I do not believe that he is the right man to lead football forward on the world stage.The plan that was put forward was offensive to many people, football people around the world and it can't be the case that we just move on and forget that.It wasn't acceptable.And as I say, I don't believe he's the right man to lead FIFA forward.

That was Andy Burnham, Prime Minister Burnham, fast out of the traps at the end of last week, calling on Gianni Infantino to go.This followed a leaked plan which suggested that Infantino and FIFA were trying to create a commercial subsidiary to run its main events, that includes World Cups and other tournaments, by essentially selling shares, getting external investors to buy stakes and shares in the most popular contest, the most popular sport in the world.Now, this morning, the English Football Association have suggested they are now ready to withdraw support for Infantino's re -election next year.Wales announced the same move overnight, and it followed a really strong, vocal, vociferous backlash to Infantino's plans, not least when the European governing body, UEFA, said it had lost confidence in the FIFA boss and that they would boycott any future World Cup, all the European countries, if he went ahead with this plan.So Infantino has really in the space of a week gone from feeling like the president who delivered the most lucrative World Cup ever to somebody who is wondering about his job right now.

Yeah I mean that is, it makes sort of half of British politics look competent and not least when we've got a situation where, I mean what sort of fascinates me about this is that as far as the report that I've read suggests that New York, from New York Post, suggesting that Infantino wants the Trump administration, he's actually clinging, he's the one lifeboat for all of this,is Trump.And obviously they've had this like checkered weird relationship with the absurdity, like the absolute disgusting absurdity of, you know, creating the FIFA Peace Prize and all that.And, you know, we saw obviously the ridiculousness of Trump getting involved, of trying to reverse a red card during the World Cup and Infantino making it happen.But now Infantino apparently wanting Trump to return the favour, asking the Trump administration to keep him in office and has scheduled private talks with Marco Rubio to try and shore up his position.Rubio at the moment trying to, at some point, we're told, finally either bring an end or do something about the Iran crisis.

Actually scheduling talks to talk about keeping the FIFA president in office.

Yeah, it's really interesting the way this has all emerged because the offer from Inflantino was for all the 211 sort of member countries of FIFA to get this bung bribe, $40 million payout.And whilst you had UEFA saying, absolutely not, we will not be bought.And you had CONCACAF, which is sort of the Latin countries, the Caribbean countries, they didn't go as far as UEFA, they didn't say they boycott, but they definitely said, I'm not sure about that.And you had the Asian nations saying in their sort of polite form, I'm not really sure that this is a plan that holds.You do have a lot of the African countries genuinely thinking about it because the way FIFA works is it's curious.You can be a massive country like China or India, you can be a massive footballing nation like Brazil or Argentina, or you can be a tiny little speck of a nation like Montserrat and you still get this payout.

So for countries that don't have that much investment in football,for countries that are frankly a lot poorer, you'll probably look at Infantino and going, oh, this could really help us.This could be great.There is a fair amount of corruption in a lot of the countries that are probably looking towards FIFA and thinking that could come in handy.Thank you very much.And I guess what we learned from this whole process was that Infantino could have had sort of idea which really was trying to give some of the poorer nations more money from, you know, this is a non -profit organisation, FIFA.

It could have been trying to share out more money from the pot a little bit more fairly.But the way they went about this was through, I mean, you mentioned Trump, the guy at the very centre of this is Josh Kushner.Now, Josh Kushner is brother of the more famous Jared Kushner, as in Trump's son -in -law.Josh Kushner has this company called Thrive.and what we're now learning is that Josh Kushner and Infantino essentially went off to Sun Valley, you know, the sort of the billionaire playground sort of event, sat under a tree in Idaho and concocted this deal between them without even telling other members of the FIFA board, without even telling the vice presidents of FIFA, one of whom has now resigned in absolute disgust.And essentially, what they arrived at was this idea that was a deck by JP Morgan, the bank, the entrepreneur Josh Kushner, son -in -law, brother of Trump, and Infantino himself.

So the whole thing felt really stitched up, really private, lacking all transparency.And when it was leaked out, I think it was the FT that picked it up first, the fact that UEFA bosses receivedto the reporting before they've even had confirmation from FIFA itself, they've even seen the FIFA statement, I think tells you that there has already been quite a lot of suspicion around Infantino about the way he was handling this whole thing, about, as you suggest, the Balogun red card, which was the first time, I mean, the really the quintessential moment of the World Cup where fans and football lovers saw for the first time what Infantino was capable of.They probably didn't care about Trump and the statue.They probably didn't care about Trump getting the World Peace Prize or whatever it was, you know, fine.But the moment Infantino looks ready to suspend all governance of the actual game, All the fairness of football rules was the moment, I think, a lot of people looked around and thought, what is this guy doing?

What is he actually playing at here?

Rule breaker, stitch up, doesn't like scrutiny.I mean, of course, he could end up being the new leader of Reform UK if he plays his cards right.It's a thought, isn't it?I mean, they've had everybody else.I mean, you've got Stoella and Generic.So, I mean, why not?

I mean, it's funny you say Reform UK because I think a lot of people are drawing parallels between, you know, the Trump playbook and the Infantino playbook.And one of the things that's actually underreported was that, well, Infantino came to power in 2016, the same year that Trump was to win the election.And the following year in 2017, Infantino had a meeting, again, quite a private meeting with Trump.And Trump apparently at that point called off the DOJ into looking at corruption at the top levels of FIFA.So he was already making Infantino's life much easier in 2017.So we are talking about, you know, you sort of talk about this checkered relationship, but actually, those two have been pretty interwoven for nearly a decade.

Although what's funny is I noticed in the last 24 hours, as always with Trump, right, you're his friend, right, up to the point that you're not his friend anymore.And Trump 100 % I think it's fair to say dropping Infantino like a stone listen to this.It's brilliant, isn't it?I mean, who?Who?

You know, exactly.Exactly.Deny your friends, you know, three times and Gianni Infantino will be no more.This man who has been glued to Trump's side or who Trump has been glued to for the entirety of the World Cup is now basically persona non grata because essentially he fucked up and Trump doesn't like losers.What do you think?I mean, I don't know.

What do you think, Infantino?What's the story he tells himself, right?It's a story he tells himself because presumably he just goes, he sees himself in the kind of, you know, Trump type mold of sort of basically standing up to all of this sort of establishment stuffy old game, right?Who they always think the World Cup needs to be done in this way and football needs to be organized in this way.And he's bringing it to the whole world.His whole shtick, right, is about making sure the World Cup is truly global and football is truly global and breaks outside of Europe and everything.

Presumably that's what That's the story he tells himself, right?Because he doesn't sit there, you know, very few people actually sit there and say, you know, I'm corrupt.I'm going to try and make as much money as possible.That's presumably the story he tells himself, right?That's the sort of way that he casts himself in his own mind.

I think the flaw in that is that he's probably not the first person to discover that football is profitable.You know, if he was,doing this with sort of archery or badminton or the sort of little explored sport of petanque or something like that, you kind of go, isn't this amazing?He's really found a way to monetise something.Exactly.But FIFA already sits on reserves of $4 billion.

In other words, FIFA has a lot of money.It doesn't need to sort of find a way to refinance itself.It doesn't need to sort of, you know, find a way to sort of explain its debt.It's got a lot of money.So it's quite hard to pretend a that you're having a novel idea.about, you know, football monetisation and b, to not make it look really awkward when reports are coming out all the time about the millions that you personally would make Gianni Infantino if this deal were to go through.

And I guess to your point, Lewis, is yeah, if you want to democratise the sport, if you want to give smaller countries a bigger share, I mean, the way the IOC would do it, you know, they would follow a process.They would set out the rules.Well, I mean, I guess it's all relative, isn't it?But, you know, we've now had Sepp Blatter coming out twice to condemn Infantino for his corrupt practices.You know, Mother Sepp Blatter Teresa, as it were, kind of coming out to condemn Infantino.And I guess, you know, the sort of the joke doing the rounds is that, well, they're both as bad as each other, but at least Sepp Blatter liked football.

You know, Gianni Infantino It doesn't even seem to be that connected to the game, which I guess is where the sort of the Balagan thing ended up.

He's a corrupt bastard, but he's our corrupt bastard.

Yeah, he's our one.He quite liked to kick around.I want to play you this clip and I'm going to explain in a second why it's so interesting if you actually see the video of it.This is Infantino, to your point, explaining what the whole thing is.about.

Well, FIFA 4 Enterprise or FFE is actually a proposal, an offer, it's part of a democratic process, a consultation process.And above all, it is an opportunity, but not an obligation.And as I said, it kicks off the consultation process.

Now, When you watch that clip, you can see Infantinos speaking off camera to the left as if directly to an interviewer.In fact, there is no interviewer there.It is a statement that he has prepared and he's actually reading off an autocue which is hidden from view.So the whole style of it is made to look as if he's answering some robust questions in the aim of transparency, in the spirit of a proper conversation.There is no interviewer there.So this is part of how Infantino is working now.

If you were confident with what you were offering, if you were confident with questions from the press, Go out there, sell it, you know, have a press conference, let people ask you.Come on the sports agents, even the news agents.But don't sidle off to pretend you're doing an interview when you're just making a statement that is prepared and put on an actual autocue camera so that you don't screw it up.

Right, just before we go, just part of our ongoing Trump drops you like a stone series, two in one show today.Donald Trump has expressed displeasure with once again one of his own Justice Department and indeed one of his own picks for the federal bench, i .e.a judge, basically expressing a great deal of unhappiness with the Justice Department's decision to drop a felony charge againsta former Olympian accused of damaging the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.This is something that Donald Trump has been obsessed with in recent months, the renovation and changing the colour and all sorts of stuff.

And he's decided to lambast his own US attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, on social media saying, I disagree with 100 % with Jeanine Pirro, the U .S.Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the reflecting pool.I don't know what she was thinking.To me, it was a pure case of vandalism that included the grass, which had 8647 emblazoned in giant letters on it and other elements of the surrounding area.There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by vandals.

This has, among other things, got his own party pretty irritated, including Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, who has been expressing his thoughts on the president's increasing deranged rantings.

Well, the whole thing is a multiple vehicle pileup.Let me start with the president.The president says it was caused by vandals.I don't know whether he really believes that.or it's part of his political messaging, or he's just thinking out loud.You and I both know the president well.

He exists loudly, and he grows anxious when he has an unexpressed thought.I'm not saying he doesn't really believe it.I just don't know.Now, the stakes are a lot higher for U .S.Attorney Bureau.

You can't lie to a federal judge.A multiple vehicle pileup is brilliant.I mean, just to give you the context for this, in case you're a beat behind, Trump has in the last few weeks been trying to create a new look reflecting pool just by the Washington Lincoln Memorial.And the way he did that was for the 250th anniversary, he essentially repainted the bottom of the poolAmerican blue.But the contractors did such a shit job that the paint started peeling off and it came away in big sort of flakes and the whole thing looks grey and ironically rather swampy.

And all that David Hearn, who is the former Olympic canoeist, did was sort of go and have a look at the pool, as many of us have done, reach down and realise that bits of it were literally floating off into your hands, a whole sort of crusty sort of slabs of this new paint was sort of floating around in the top of the pool.And from what I understand, he photos it or he tweets it or he makes a comment about how terrible it is that the whole lining's falling off.And Trump turns around, unable to concede that it's his major fuck up and says, this guy must be arrested for vandalism, which is why It should never have gone to court.It should never have gone to court in the same way that James Comey taking a picture of shells on a beach should never have gone to court in a way that so many people should never have gone to court under this vindictive administration, whereby if Trump gets something wrong or decides you're a political enemy or just doesn't frankly like the embarrassment of somebody pointing out things that are not working to plan, then they're sort of off with his head.sort of first shout from the emperor.And it is a pretty pitiful scenario when this is the stuff that is clogging up the US courts when there's so much other stuff that needs to be sorted.

Jason Vale And just also, it's also just part of, I mean, you know, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, like, this is all just part of, as anyone who's been to Washington recently can see, it's just part of like, Trump's ongoing project, this will be his sort of real legacy, his ongoing project to basically make the place look like Disney World gone wrong.I mean, like, I mean, genuinely, I mean, even if you look at the pictures of the White House now, like every room, like,just outside on the outside wall, in kind of, you know, italic handwriting.I mean, basically, his aesthetic, not just for the White House now, but also Washington overall, is somewhere between Mar -a -Lago and a Bond villain's waiting room.It's just genuinely grim.The sort of backlash to that, is all part of this story because basically he is bit by bit turning every bit of Washington, which is obviously, you know, so much of it is known around the world, this kind of, you know, alabaster marble, you know, almost sort of Roman style, sort of neoclassical city.

He's basically turning it into complete shit, bit by bit.

Yeah, I mean, I was in Washington last week and I can tell you it is quite hard now to take a picture of the White House without seeing a whole row of diggers.We'll be back tomorrow.We'll see you then.

The News Agents Podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity.

This has been a global production.