563. Britain’s Afghanistan Shame and the Jason Arday Tragedy

Five years ago this month, the last plane left Kabul. 20 years, $2,000 billion spent, 457 British dead. And this week, the anniversary, no statement from London, no statement from Washington, no statement from NATO. None of them are saying anything about it. Here's what makes this hard to talk about honestly. Go to Afghanistan and you will find that the security is better than it's been any time in 40 years. Nobody's shaking you down at checkpoints. You can have a picnic by the roadside. I've seen it. It's what Afghans will tell you. But at the same time, 2.4 million girls are currently locked out of secondary school. The UN rapporteur is calling it a crime against humanity, gender apartheid. Both of these things are true at once. And there are 14 million people facing malnutrition and hunger. One in nine getting any food from the World Food Programme. So what did 20. 20 years actually buy? What do we owe the Afghans that we promised to protect? And does sanctioning a government like the Taliban punish the government? Or does it punish tens of millions of Afghans? This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. Changing your energy supplier should be fairly straightforward. Yet many of us still put it off, even when we might be paying more than we need to. It becomes one of those jobs we know we should do, but never quite get around to. Switching energy suppliers always manage to somehow get pushed to the bottom of the to-do list. And it's probably because we think the process is going to be really, really complicated. But with Fuse, switching takes you just three minutes. So roughly about as long as it takes you to make a cup of coffee. And with 24-7 support to guide you through the switch, it's easy to break away from your old supplier, leave that expensive tariff, get a fresh start. Right now, Fuse Energy's tariffs are up to £100 below the Ofgem price cap. So stop overpaying. Out of habit. Switch to Fuse Energy in just three minutes. Get Tripp Plus for free with the code POLITICS at fuseenergy.com slash politics. Visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions. This episode is brought to you by NordVPN. And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich. Against Burnley. But I managed to watch it. There you go. I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creef. And of course, the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks. Well, I think you're not really sort of proud of me. I managed to do this. Or should I say Fiona managed to do this? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to NordVPN.com slash Restless Politics. That's NordVPN.com slash Restless Politics. And the link is in the episode description. A better help ad. Imagine carrying a backpack every day. Every conversation, every mistake, every expectation. You probably wouldn't notice how heavy. Maybe it was until someone asked if you wanted to put it down. Sometimes feeling better starts exactly like that. Better isn't one size fits all. Better is personal. It's therapy tailored to you to help lighten what you've been carrying. Match with a therapist who truly gets you. Visit BetterHelp.com slash Rest Politics. Welcome to the rest. Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. A number of things to be getting on with today. We've got Afghanistan. We want to talk about what's happened in Afghanistan five years on. You had some very interesting issues that you wanted to bring up and discuss around Russia. Parties in Russia in particular. The one anti-war party being banned from running and what's happening to grain exports. And we were also going to touch on Jason Arday. A lot to get through. It's been quite a week. Where are you? You look like you're in yet another. A kind of quite weird hotel. Well, I am in fact in Edinburgh. And on my way in, I must say I saw a Grace Campbell ad. Because as you will be aware, your daughter is performing here in Edinburgh. She is. Quick plug for Grace. You should go and see her. It's your wife's birthday today. You should take her to the show at the Gilded Balloon, 8.30pm. The lady is a tramp. That's what the show's called. Very good. 8.30pm, Gilded Balloon. Anyone in Edinburgh, a chance to see Grace Campbell. Alison, let's go. Let's start though with Afghanistan. So it is almost exactly five years since this chaotic, catastrophic withdrawal. Those scenes at the airport of Afghans chasing large planes down the US Marines at the gate. Months of desperate Afghans trying to get evacuated from Afghanistan. And the end of 20 years of what was in fact, people now believe, a $3 trillion war. The numbers depend on whether you're Harvard counting it or others. But certainly thousands of billions. Billions of dollars spent, country invaded to get rid of the Taliban after 9/11. 20 years on the ground. And then the country's handed back to the Taliban again. What have you been thinking about in relation to Afghanistan? For what it's worth, I've been talking to a number of people over the last few days. I've been talking to people in rural areas. I've been talking to people working in NGOs. I've been talking to business people. So happy to go in any direction you like. I guess I've been thinking on two levels. Today, and the state of Afghanistan today with the economy that's dire, rights for women and girls, dire, foreign policy in Afghanistan, place in the world, dire, one point about today, which I think is worth noting, I haven't seen a single piece of commentary or analysis by any of the governments involved at the time, including our own. I find that quite extraordinary. Normally, big anniversaries. And it is a big anniversary. And, you know, Lise Doucette on the BBC did some really interesting stuff the other day. But normally on a big anniversary of a historical event that we've been involved in, you'd think there'd be something coming from the Brits, the Americans, all the others who were involved. So that then takes me, I guess, back to when the whole thing started. You mentioned 9-11. I was obviously alongside Tony Blair at that time. And I guess this is where history becomes so difficult. What we were doing at the time honestly felt like we were doing the right thing. It really felt like we were doing the right thing for the world and indeed for Afghanistan. Fast forward to today, as you say. And an incredibly costly military intervention, which cost a lot of lives and a lot of money, has left, well, you tell me, is the place better or worse than it was 20 years ago? Well, it's certainly not anything like what we dreamt of. I think the story on the intervention is still going to be fought over for years. And one of the strange things is that more work is not being done on really learning the lessons. I mean, given that this was a conflict in which. So many hundreds of British lives were lost, so many people were wounded, so many billions were spent, given that this was, some people might argue, along with Iraq, a real inflection point in the whole rules-based international order, a moment at which people's faith in the U.S. and coalitions collapsed. It's extraordinary more study isn't happening. I mean, America, to do its credit, I spoke to a congressional team that's been set up that's doing a very, very detailed analysis and came in and did two different sessions. I think it's a very, very difficult thing to argue at the time, but I felt very strongly that actually a light footprint on the U.S. was the Taliban. I think it's a very, very difficult thing to argue at the time, but I felt very strongly that actually a light footprint would have been much better. Letting the Afghans run things, taking risk, accepting it wouldn't be quite the country we wanted, but not getting dragged into trying to micromanage. Anyway, that's a bit of waffle. How is it now? Well, it's horrifying. I mean, it's a very, very depressing, brutal situation. Now, in detail, different people will tell you different things about what's going on. But the fundamentals are that the Taliban are an extremely conservative government. Whose number one distinctive characteristic is that they wish to not allow women to get into normal education. They don't want women to function in so many parts of society. I mean, it's central to so many of these edicts that comes out of Kandahar. Add to that, it's not a democracy. So it's a place where you can be arbitrarily arrested, tortured, killed. And that is happening to people. It's also a country which is. It's a country which is very, very poor. It's getting very little revenue. It's basically under sanctions from almost the entire world at the moment. And there are millions of refugees that have been pushed back across the border out of Iran and Pakistan. A million more to come. People think up to six million refugees are coming back into one of the poorest countries in the region. That's part of the story. And I can get into other parts of the story. I mean, in some ways, life has improved since we left. It's more secure, safer. Fewer people are getting killed. You can travel freely around the country. The government, the Taliban government, seems to be much more effective at building roads, setting up infrastructure than the previous government. governments. And although there are allegations of corruption, it's nothing like as corrupt as the old Afghan government. So it's a dictatorial, brutal regime that is delivering services and stealing less money than the previous government. But it's not a place where I think any of us would want to live. Should we bring in somebody who knows even more about Afghanistan than you do? Because I think, you know, we like to, unlike Michael Gove, we think expert voices are very, very important to have. So why don't you introduce our special expert guest on Afghanistan? Well, it's a great privilege because I am bringing in, for the first time ever in four years of the show, Shoshana, my wife. She's, of course, in no way an expert on Afghanistan or the way that an Afghan would. And I'm very grateful to all the people I've been talking to over the last few days. For example, my friend Saad Mohseni, who definitely is an Afghan and knows Afghanistan very well. But Shoshana has been working in Afghanistan since 2006. She speaks Dari. She lives in Afghanistan. She's been working in Afghanistan for a long time. She's been full-time on the ground for many years in Afghanistan. And she's seen the full 20-year change. And it's also her birthday today. So happy birthday and welcome for the first time to the podcast. Thank you very much. It's wonderful to be here. I am a regular listener. Oh, are you a subscriber? I am a subscriber. Excellent. That's good. We like subscribers. Shoshana, when we in the West talk about Afghanistan in the way that Roy and I have just done, what do we get right and what do we get wrong? I've only ever been to Afghanistan. During the period immediately after, well, while the war was going on, but also then in the period immediately after, I've not been back. So what do we get right and what do we get wrong? Ooh, yes. Well, what we get wrong is much more interesting. What we get right is the macros that, you know, you and Roy just laid out. There's so much about the situation, particularly for women and girls, it's just impossible. But what we get wrong is it is the most spectacularly beautiful, fierce, unbelievable country, platitude, platitude. But when I arrived in 2006, I get out of my car at the gates of this huge mud fort with three foot thick mud walls, incredibly ornate carved wooden doors. And on the other side of it are 300 men with wheelbarrows and shovels, just clearing the site, restoring the building. And today, you know, the old city of Kabul in this neighborhood where we restored 150 historic buildings, it's morning glory, blue flowers on vines going up the sides of these, these courtyards. So it's very beautiful. The mountains are unbelievable. They look untouched. And everywhere you go, as soon as you, you get these photographs from Afghanistan of, of in particular men staring very intensely into the camera, which is the look that Afghan men give you. If you, if you're just walking along the street, as soon as you put your hand to the heart, a sort of gesture, and you say, all of a sudden, eyes light up, we're joking, we're greeting, it's a five minute long greeting, the hospitality is fierce. So Shoshana, try to explain maybe what it's like for friends of yours who are still working in nonprofits on the ground. What are the kinds of things that people are struggling with? What are the kinds of things that are depressing people? What are the kinds of things that are giving people hope? It is difficult, I think, to summarize the situation as a whole, for sure, because you've got rural urban differences are unbelievable. But if I, let me give you an example, one of the women we work with, I'm obviously how to use a false name, it's very boring, but Shabnam. So she lives in Jowzjan province, way up in the north of Afghanistan. She's a weaver. She learned to weave from her mother, her grandmother before that, as did, by the way, about a million women in Afghanistan are already trained weavers. If you roll back the clock on her life, she finished high school, studied veterinary medicine, was in a degree in university in history, Taliban takeover, women's ban on education goes in through the age through grade six. So she used to leave university. She then starts studying midwifery, which was allowed at the time, no longer allowed to study anymore. I'm interrupting here, because this is a key, key point, I think that listeners have got to get because the Taliban government is demanding that Afghan women can only be seen by women when they go in for medical care. And at the same time, they have stopped women being able to train as midwives and doctors, which is leading to, I mean, there are still obviously midwives and doctors, and Shoshana's nonprofit, Turquoise Mountain on the Ground in Afghanistan has a clinic with female doctors, midwives, but they're getting older. And the new generation is not coming in. It's just one example of the complete sort of senselessness of this thing. Anyway, back over to you. So she trains as a midwife. And she needs to earn an income from her family because the Afghan economy is contracted by about 25%. There are just no jobs in rural Afghanistan. So she goes back to carpet weaving. Let me explain what she's making. So this is a halfway college educated woman who has multiple degrees and qualifications. She's weaving carpet. She is the sole Redwin in her family. Her husband wants a job. Her sons want a job. There just aren't jobs. Let me tell you what she's weaving. She's just finished. She's the leader, the manager of 100 women who've just finished a carpet that's 90 square meters. So it's going to Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland, the rural residence. It's a masterpiece. It's six meters wide by 15 meters wide. There's long. So it therefore needs a six meter wide loom and its own loom house in Northern Afghanistan. So these 100 women have finished this thing. And it will go on show very shortly in Northern Ireland. It's traditional Persian carpet design, but also with the flowers of Northern Ireland and of Afghanistan in it. So it's thistles. And it has about 12 little bees that are woven into it so that kids when they're visiting this historic royal palace can find the bees that are woven into it. So it's this little bee that has been in charge of this group of 100 women who've been working for a year on this thing, right? I don't think you or I have any idea what it is like to be an Afghan woman, to go through that roller coaster and to now be the sole breadwinner in your family. By the way, she's also the community health worker for her area. We provide health care for about 35,000 people this year. But part of that is community health workers in these weaving villages. What the ups and downs of that are like, I think are even though I've been working there for 20 years, I simply cannot imagine it. Is it true, by the way, that, you know, if you are a woman in Afghanistan now, you cannot speak audibly, you can't speak in public, in a way that men might hear, you know, is that have I fallen for fake news there? Is that is that one of the things is No, you haven't. No, you haven't. A decree banned that. But that is like the reality of all of those decrees, which are issued by the Supreme Leader in Kandahar, which is that their implementation is mixed. It's very weird. So Kandahar is very, very conservative down in the south. And there it is vice and virtue ministries walking around. It's extremely brutal. It's very conservative. If you get up to Kabul, the old capital city, it's not quite like that. It's a little bit more open. The shops seem to be flourishing, quite a lot of new housing is being built. Quite a lot of investment is coming in, get up to Bamiyan in the center, which is a different community. It's a Shia community. The governor has tended to be a little bit more open. Harat, which was traditionally more liberals, got a more conservative governor. So I think one of the things Alistair, which is going to be something to watch over the next few months is this tension within the Taliban, which is there's a very conservative factions putting out these decrees. And then there's clearly other bits of society resisting them. And that can't go on forever. I mean, that's gone on for five years. And one of these two is going to dominate either this country is eventually going to become an unbelievably locked down conservative country, or it's going to push back in a more progressive direction. Is it also right that because I'm interested in the kind of, you know, the where they see themselves in the world? Do they even think about this? Am I right that Russia is now the only major state in the world that has even recognized this government? We don't have an ambassador there, do we? They're allied in that way to Russia. They've lost so much. You know, the big donors have pulled out, USAID has pulled out. So they're facing these massive problems where they're ever more politically isolated, ever more presumably being hit financially, I just wondered for the women, even worse, but for anybody there, how do you kind of just get through your, how your daily life and do they think about the outside world? Do they want the world to be more interested, more engaged and more involved? I mean, I do not know what is going on inside the hearts and minds of the Taliban. And I think it is really mixed by person. I don't want to sugarcoat the situation at all. They are different from what we've seen before and that they seem to be trying to do things for the country. And I think that's a really important thing to do. And I think it is really important to do things for the country. Now, I don't, again, I don't want to project why they're doing that. It also helps them stay in power, but they are building roads, they are collecting tax revenue and spending it and things like that. And so it means, I mean, this is what I think is more interesting for people because I think people know broadly the terrible things that are happening. The interesting bit is the gray area where it is possible to operate actually, and it's possible for Afghans living there and for the organizations who stayed to do stuff. So for example, 400 clinics have been closed across the country. That's lack of money and some other complicated things. But if you can still run a clinic, it's an amazing ability to be able to do something. I think that's not just for us as an international NGO, but actually for our Afghan staff and the doctors to be able to come out of your house every day and actually do something for the people around you is quite a special thing when things are so difficult around. And I've actually never met a place in the world where there is such a coming together of need, because it's brutal, with the ability to have an impact on the ground not true everywhere there are some places where the need is incredible you just can't do anything i do want to say thank you to your listeners and viewers because actually there have been a number of people who have been very generous to turquoise mountain who listened to the podcast one person in particular who reached out recently totally transformed what we're able to do in afghanistan so that's good thank you to everybody rory can i just ask you both the same question and i want you to answer at the same time because i want to see if you're going to give me the same answer so this has to be an instant answer to this question should the british government recognize the taliban and should we have an ambassador there to reflect britain's interests you've got three seconds three two one yes i'm officially no comment i'm going to put the boring switch on that that's the that's the absolute thing that i won't say in any of the countries in which i work okay super boring switch sorry let me make the case i mean afghanistan we haven't talked about afghanistan for a long time but i think afghanistan is a international stuff either it's in a conflict as as you know and many listeners will know with pakistan i mean incredible conflict pakistan literally bombed kabul killed about 240 people in the center of the city on what they claim was a terrorist camp and the taliban say was a drug rehabilitation center the taliban are quite clearly allied with the pakistani taliban that's trying to undermine a very fragile pakistan government as in munir the pakistan chief of the army staff that we talk about a lot who's the de facto ruler of pakistan the military is very powerful is determined to try to do all he can to effectively bring down the taliban government it seems although in many ways any british soldiers or american soldiers listening to this will be sort of spitting out their coffee because it was the pakistan supporting the taliban against the british and the americans when we run operations there for 20 years yeah so all that's going on um i think the brutal truth is that sanctioning afghanistan excluding afghanistan just hurts ordinary afghanistan afghan people this is one of the poorest places in the region by a country mile this is a place where millions of people are in malnutrition some of them on the edge of starvation with refugees flowing in we're not going to change i'm afraid the behavior of the taliban however terrible however much we profoundly disapprove their ideology these are people who spent 20 years living in caves they're not trying to go shopping in harrods the taliban leadership is not going to be affected by what we say what is the problem with the taliban leadership is that they're not affected by our refusal to engage is ordinary afghans and as you say the people who are engaging are russia increasingly china but i don't think it's in anyone's interest to have people on the edge of starvation did you find it as odd as i did that there was such little political and diplomatic commentary around the fifth anniversary i can't believe it i mean look it's painful for all of us but it's been amazing i mean i remember talking to the ex-permit secretary of the foreign office and the national security advisor back in 2014-15 when they were talking about the war in afghanistan and i said how about doing a commission inquiry in iraq and i said how about doing something on afghanistan he looked very very uncomfortable because the story was as you know obama would say afghanistan's the good war iraq's the bad war gordon brown said very very similar things we've had johnny mercer just on the show last week talking about what he experienced in afghanistan the terrible loss for him and his friends but also the astonishing killing of afghans i mean that's something i maybe should have pushed johnny on more understandable i felt uh reading his book but i understand it his view of afghans are not very positive shoshana and myself i think we think afghans are the most extraordinary people on earth i sometimes think i'd move the whole family back there i'd find them some of the kindest most generous funny warm people on earth it's a terrible mutual tragedy and and we're just not thinking about something which literally consumed thousands of billions of dollars thousands of international lives hundreds of thousands of afghan lives and we're not even really doing an inquiry into it i'm actually not surprised that people aren't doing something for the fifth anniversary because i experienced mostly just a deep shame from both the american european british general public and governments at our involvement in that country over the last decade so i'm not that surprised but what you said where i couldn't agree more with the sanctions are not they're just killing lives of of the economy and individual afghans but the world is more like this today than it was five years ago and ten years ago which is you have more countries which are in conflict and we don't agree with what the governments are doing and we either are going to be black and white about it or we're going to do what we can do and we can do quite a lot in afghanistan you actually deliberately working in a lot of these countries you're working in myanmar you're working in syria you're working in the west bank and you're having similar conversations all these places syria people would say well this is a guy who used to be an al-qaeda al-shara who alistair and i interviewed myanmar there's a brutal military government taliban afghanistan yet you still think that it's worth working tell us why you think it's worth working in these countries that many of us would just rather ignore or pretend didn't exist or i don't know it were too uncomfortable to engage with yeah we bury our heads in the sand and we just sort of go oh it's a black hole we can't look at it because we're so embarrassed by our our role in it how difficult things are because you can do things i mean if i look at the news at a place that i'm not engaged in sudan it depresses me when i think about the countries that i worked work in that you just listed that's i don't get that feeling because i can do something i can create 10 000 jobs a year put 35 000 people through health care and that's enough for me in the day i also think i've come to find that the sort of ecosystem around all of us of activism political choice organizations on the ground we don't all have to agree on the same things it can be important that activists and think tanks are doing their job and they're doing their job and they're doing their job and they're doing their research and putting out what the problems are and demanding that we don't engage and it can also be true that i should go and work even when we don't agree with what governments are doing if we just leave afghanistan today right if we say okay it's too impossible for for women and girls we're just going to go that just means we don't employ thousands of afghan women or put tens of thousands of people through health care it's as simple as that why would i do that i think it's amazing privilege to be able to go and work in these places also i get to work in cultural heritage so i make pretty things i'm wearing my afghan dangly earrings i've got lots of props afghan pottery i i can i can go on here it's a really fun way to work in a country actually it's what's beautiful about a country it's not what's wrong yeah you use the word shame do you think that shame is exacerbated by the sense that we maybe haven't done enough to protect those afghans who actually supported our military in a very very practical way and also the other thing johnny mercer talked about rory was this ongoing into some of the atrocities that appear to have been committed by by some of our troops so i just wonder whether that feeds into this and also shashana if you can just give me a sense of what if you say to a to an afghan or i'm married to a brit what is their feeling about britain and what is their feeling about america i think they say well well we beat the british i mean afghans have a very long memory and from their perspective they have never successfully been and you're welcome to come and visit thank you very much i also think that the taliban is very open to tourism and and very welcoming of people coming because they they won right the war is over and they are in charge so there i don't have any concern being an american or or american and british passport holding person in the country i do think to your question about shame i think the question about the way that we have dealt with resettlement refugees and the evacuation it is unbelievably important i don't want to say that it's not but it's the thing that's about us not about afghanistan afghanistan is a country of 45 million people and what we have an obligation to or what we just feel if we have an obligation to people in the world what can we possibly do to make x number of afghans lives better i think the more fundamental question is what we are doing or not doing in afghanistan and the british government does continue to engage even though we don't recognize as do most governments around providing aid and i wish we did more of it there is though i mean you're completely right that particularly for people who worked as soldiers in afghanistan or for the government in afghanistan we spent 20 years telling people that they were safe encouraging them to take huge risks to sign up with us against the taliban from the very beginning they were facing taliban reprisals against themselves and their family and we were saying don't worry we've got you we're here to stay and then we pulled the plug on them and it because obviously we spend most of our time on the podcast attacking trump it was biden completely unnecessarily at the moment at which he pulled the truck plug five years ago in afghanistan there had been no british soldiers killed for five years and there had been no american soldiers killed for 18 months that was not a live combat zone we were sustaining that government with troops in bases and with air cover and the first thing he did is he pulled out well over 10 000 american civilian contractors many of whom were maintaining the afghan aircraft so that the planes that the americans have provided couldn't fly they require very complicated software updates every time they land so suddenly you have afghan troops stuck in forward operating bases with no medical evacuation no ammunition coming in and no support we collapsed it like a pack of cards and we didn't plan for it i mean it was really staggering that absolutely staggering i remember shashana and i were staying with ashraf ghani who was the president of Afghanistan then, a few weeks before this all happened. and I was trying to say to him, look, if Biden follows through on this, what on earth is going to happen? And the truth was that he and the United States were in complete fantasy land. I remember him taking down books on French poetry from the shelves of the presidential library when we could literally hear gunfire outside in the streets. I mean, it was like something out of an evil and war novel. And the result, of course, is that many, many Afghans, particularly those who served in the special forces alongside us, found themselves in incredibly dangerous positions. And we didn't look after them properly. We didn't bring people home. And if I'm going to be brutal, there's an element of racism in this. These people were as much fighting alongside us as our British colleagues. And we put all the energy into looking after the British soldiers, but not into the Afghan soldiers who were effectively fighting with us and for us. So Shani, you were there five years ago. Just give us a taste of what you saw, what you heard, how you felt. Yeah. I do remember that day very well. Middle of August. So if you begin that morning, the Taliban were at the Kabul city gates. They paused there. And in the weeks and days before, all the provincial capitals had fallen. It happened pretty quickly. So we convene a teams meeting in the morning to go over our sort of plan for what happens if and when they take over. But everyone assumed there was going to be a six-month fight for the capital. There was no possibility that it was happening that day, right? Sitting there, one of my staff members gets a text message. They have come in through the Kabul city gates. By late morning, they were in the presidential palace. Halas, it's finished. They are in charge, 100% free and clear, not a shot fired. So we're all like, what? What do we do? Next morning, the Taliban actually went around to all the clinics and hospitals. And we're like, right, let's go, people. The war is over. You're welcome. Come back to work. Come back and serve your Afghan brothers and sisters. And so, my staff are sitting there going, do we hide or do we go to work? And somehow we thought right and wrong. If we don't open when they ask us to come out, it's going to be suspicious and it's going to be harder to open later. So some very brave doctors got up and went to work that first day. And then a few days later, so the men went first. A few days later, the female doctors and nurses came out and we were able to open every bit of our project over the course of those weeks and months. I genuinely believe that it's because we opened the first day that the Taliban encountered us as just doing stuff for people around us. And I think that's why we're able to operate today. But yeah, that's what the day was. Wow. So this was a project which was conceived by the king, who thought that it would be a great idea to combine working on craft training, cultural heritage, building restoration, employment. So the sort of things that he does with, did with the Prince's Trust, or the King's Foundation in Afghanistan. But Shoshana's grown it now to operate in places like Syria, places like Myanmar. And it is extraordinary because it's basic healthcare, it's primary education, it's water supply and sanitation, but it's also these really beautiful traditional crafts. Why is it that you think culture and crafts matter in conflict? I did not see this coming, if I'm totally honest, because I arrived in Kabul 20 years ago as a science teacher. I studied astrophysics, cultural heritage was not my thing. But I've watched over the last five years in particular, right? Began with COVID, then there was a coup in Myanmar, then the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, October 7, all of these wars, right? You figure out real quick whether what you're doing is a good idea or not. Because when wars start, when regimes change, if it doesn't work, if it doesn't matter, people aren't going to come, the artisans aren't going to work, they're not going to make. And we watched it work better and better. We could do more and more every year over the last five years. Why? I think that when everything falls apart, when security disappears, your sense of the future disappears, public services stop working, hospitals close, you have to be able to feed your family. So the economic bit of what we do has to work, we have to be able to create employment. But there is something else about it. There's a mindfulness, a therapy in making, and you're making something beautiful, you're bringing something beautiful into the world, you are fundamentally doing the thing that is beautiful about your culture. It's not just about what people will pass down to you, what you'll pass on to your children. So weirdly, it seems to work just as well, if not better, when things are terrible, which I, as I say, it was a surprise to me. Excellent. Well, I'll look forward to our next trip to Hillsborough Castle. We were there not long ago. Shoshana, thank you so much. I told Fiona that you were coming on and she said, well, we still haven't done that thing where you get us both, as you talked about for years and years and years. And she said, maybe you should get us on to talk about how couples disagree agreeably. Wow. That is a high bar, Fiona. I'm not sure we want to do that. I don't know what you guys think, but I'm worried about that one. Anyway, thank you so much. And, you know, good luck to you and all the work you do in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Thank you. I'm so grateful to you all. Thanks. Final plug, Sunday Read on our wonderful newsletter. We've got a piece from Solori Bristow. We talked about whether there should be a British ambassador in Afghanistan. Well, he was the last British ambassador to Afghanistan, and he's going to write a piece for us about what happened back then, as well as his reflections five years on. So sign up in the description below to get that. Brilliant. Well, let's take a quick break, Alistair, and then back to concentrate on Russia in two dimensions, and then talk about the tragedy of Jason Addy. The strategic struggle between Britain and Russia. We assess a prime minister with high confidence it was Russian. Holding the Russians accountable is World War III. They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people. The man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. You've got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not? You're the prime minister. You've done nothing! We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, and disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO. A FRAGO that says to kill the president of Russia? Yes. New from Goldhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off? You're my soldier, are you? Sergeant Tom McDuff. Duffy! An audio drama journey like no other. Men like Duffy, they're going to be able to pull this off. Sergeant Tom McDuff. Duffy! like Duffy. They are our most valuable weapons. Devised as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller. Where Britain plays its strongest hand against its strongest foe. Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Now, so you were very, very patiently and sweetly asking lots of questions towards me and Shoshana, so I'm going to flip it around. There's a couple of things caught your eyes this week in Russia. One of them was to do with elections and parties, and the other was to do with grain exports. Do you want to give us a bit of a sense on what you thought was interesting there? And there's a third thing that has happened since I've been looking at that, which is this extraordinary closeness now in the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un in North Korea, at a time when Donald Trump seems to be distancing himself from South Korea. So that's becoming very, very complicated. But here's the thing, Rory, did you know there's going to be a general election to the Russian Duma, their parliament, a month from now? Now, who, you got the American election wrong, but who do you think is going to win this one? Well, this one, I mean, and let's hope that in the same way that my predictions on the American election went wrong. I predict Vladimir Putin, but let's hope I have the Kamala Harris effect on him. Yeah, I think that United Russia is going to win, and there's yet another new reason for that. The Supreme Court has banned Russia's only liberal anti-war party. Now, they're not massively anti-war, because they're scared, like all the opposition parties are, but this is a party called Yabloko. There's an appeal process going on, but the chances are they're not going to stand. Can I ask you that question? Because I think that's the thing that will confuse people. So, Yabloko is a party that, as you say, has been getting 1.4, 1.6 percent of the vote over the last 10, 12 years. One kind of wonders, what does it say about Putin or Russia that he would want to work to ban the party? How did he ban it, and why does he feel threatened by a party that he's allowed to run for so many years and seem to be, in the past, almost electorally irrelevant? Well, they haven't won a seat since 2003. As you say, they've never been above low single figures in the polls, and it's very hard to work out whether the polls are accurate, but they've never really made an impact there. They were cleared to run by the Electoral Commission, which is run by the Kremlin. So, that is the question that people have been wondering. Why now? Why do this now? Now, if you look at it from the perspective, is he weak? Okay? Then, basically, the weakness says, I don't care how few votes they get, I don't want anybody saying. Having the opportunity to say that party is against the special military operation. If it's a sign of strength, it's basically him saying, I don't care. I don't care. I'm just not going to have any opposition. You know that anyway. The thing about Russia, I listened to this extraordinary podcast in German, Die Lage der Nation, and they had an extraordinary woman on called Gesine Donblut. And she's written several books about Russia. She's worked in Russia as a journalist for German broadcasting company. She was saying what we get wrong about Russia is that we apply our logic to the way that they make decisions. Okay. So for example, we think because we see Donald Trump thinking, I've got to sort out this bloody war in Iran because of the economy for the midterms coming up. So we think, well, Putin must be worried about the economy in Russia. And her point was, no, he doesn't care about the economy, the impact of people. You and I have said many times, you've got all these Russian families who've now lost somebody in the frontline through this meat grinder strategy. Surely that's going to get to Putin. No, because if he now needs this war to keep his grip on power, because if he loses his grip on power, he's probably now, the rational part of his mind is thinking, what's the lesson of most dictatorships when they end? They end in death or they end in prison. And she was making the point, he's a hunted war criminal. Okay. He gets the cover at the moment from Trump, but he's a hunted war criminal. And when the war is over, unless he wins, he's done. So I think the logic of why does he ban a tiny little power? We're thinking that from a Western perspective. He's basically saying, I'm going to pretend we have a free and fair election. I'm going to behave as though I'm really surprised and honored when I win it again. And meanwhile, the thing goes on. And she also makes the point that Russians are not that used to genuine democracy. And of course, state assassinations have become normalized. People falling out windows. We know that Boris Nemtsov was bumped off. We know Navalny was bumped off. Litvinenko was bumped off. This is what they do. Yeah. Well, it's such an amazing story, this. So Yabloko has been the one genuine liberal party in Russia, as you say, for more than 20 years. Sort of tolerated because it didn't get anywhere. One of the things that's been very striking about it is that like all progressive parties, it's completely riven by internal dissension. So it expelled Alexei Navalny, who was originally a conservative. And Navalny was encouraging people to do tactical voting, for example, to vote for the Communist Party against Putin's party, if he thought the Communist Party was more likely to beat him. And they're real purists. And they said, you know, this is ridiculous. How can you possibly encourage people to vote for parties that we profoundly disagree with that then managed to have a fight with the most liberal radio station in the country and boycotted it so that they're right in the middle of these kind of tiny factual things. But as we came towards this election, I think a lot of the people who were leading endorsed them. And a lot of the Russian opposition has begun to get behind them. So along with your point about swatting flies, I think there's also a genuine anxiety that maybe the Kremlin thought that they could become a proxy for expressing anti-war sentiment. Even if they only got four or 9% of the vote, it might be a bit destabilizing for the regime to see that four or 9% of Russians actually are publicly so against the war on Ukraine. They're proud to vote for this party. It's also interesting, you pointed out this strangeness that Sasha was getting to be at. He said, what do you mean they have elections? I thought Putin was a dictator. And you know, there are people saying he's not going to accept a peace deal in Ukraine till after the elections. It's like when people say, you know, Netanyahu's not going to accept a sort of Gaza deal until after the elections. The pretense of this stuff is very strong. The party wasn't banned officially by the Kremlin, although some pretty good reporting says Putin gave a direct order. The way it happened, is that a judge heard a civil case brought by Rodina, the motherland party. Another party, yeah. Another pro-Putin party, which accused Yabloko, amongst other things, of breaking copyright because they'd shown in one of their ads an image of Hiroshima, which they claimed belonged to the US Army for copyright. The whole thing. But this is what they do. They make us sort of laugh by saying, this is quite funny, right? Just unpick what you just said. So it's the Supreme Court making the judgment on the case brought by another party that, as you said, is pro-Kremlin. Why do you have a pro-Kremlin party when Putin's already got his own party? Answer, to pretend that you can vote for other parties, okay? So this guy is called Alexei Zhuravlyov, and he's quite a kind of, he's got very good teeth, and he's got very well-managed hair and facial hair, and he looks really tough. You make it sound like a sort of tougher version of the mooch. He's a much tougher version of the mooch. Much, much, much tougher version of the mooch. He doesn't dye his hair. He doesn't have Botox. He looks rugged. It looks like you wouldn't want to meet him in, you know, coming out of a nightclub. So he brings the case. Now, what was the judge deciding? Some of the complaints they were deciding was, for example, this you can get because of Putin's very profound anti-gay stance. Yabloko were accused of publicly supporting an extremist organization. What's the extremist organization? LGBT movement, okay? Which the Supreme Court designated as extremist three or four years ago. Second, this is another thing that gets said, Yabloko received money, no evidence given, through third parties from Germany and the US and other countries, okay? So that's the sort of thing, okay. But then you go into this nonsense. The copyright wasn't just the Hiroshima photo. They were accused, Rory, of using the lines of Soviet songs, including these lines. Let there always be sunshine. And if only there were no war. They take these lines from old songs. How dare they? The copyright is owned by the person who wrote that song. Well, can I just on that one? There's also, I think, possibly, and actually a Russian joke here, that they're upholding the copyright of Stalinist Russia and the US army. I mean, particularly that last thing, you're upholding the copyright of the US army. In order to stop someone campaigning against the Ukraine war. How dare you take a photo that was actually a photo from the Americans insulting our good friend, Donald Trump here. But you know, I mentioned in the discussion with Shoshana, how strange I thought it was that none of our governments came out and said something five years on. Not one foreign government has objected to this Supreme Court decision. Now that just shows you how normalized this has all become. We're going into an election, and they've banned the only kind of real opposition, liberal anti-war party, and not one foreign government has come out. The OSCE hasn't come out. A few NGOs haven't. That's about it. So that's that. And don't forget, look, I'm not, these guys are unbelievably brave. Sometimes they get criticized for not being strong enough against the Ukraine war. When you think how many of their opponents, Putin's opponents have been put in jail, exiled or murdered. So these are pretty brave people are doing what they're doing. And they had a big protest outside the court of young people. They've now got 40 party activists who are facing prosecution. Well, I think we know what's going to happen to them. So as you say, the other thing that I thought was interesting is this, the grain store wars that are going on. So right at the start of the war, one of the big worries was that Ukraine, wheat basket for the world, that the grain stores were, and the Turkish government got involved and some kind of deal got put together. You've now got them firing off at grain stores. So that's going to have an impact upon our economy, European economy, and so forth. But it just shows you to me, I mean, my sense is that this war is nowhere near ending. Well, let's just look at that story. Because people will remember in 2022, that when the first disruptions happened, there was a massive problem with world grain. Russia and Ukraine together provide something like 30% of all the world's grain exports. And Ukraine's providing over 50% of the maize for many markets, huge numbers of European countries, a lot of countries in sub-Saharan Africa, some of them dependent 70% on Russian Ukrainian grain. And then there was this Turkish broker deal through the Black Sea that began to let this food come through again, and the grain prices came down. Since then, there's been a bit of diversification. But what's changed, as you've pointed out, is that since the middle of the summer, this is really a story just over the last couple of months, a new air war started. And this is the use of drones taking out these boats. Brutal. I mean, there's incredible reporting, the AP and the New York Times, from people interviewing an Indian Christian seaman who was on one of these boats that was hit by a drone. And the whole thing obviously explodes. The stagger into the pilot's boat, the boat sinks. And what happens is we're seeing now, I guess, a piece of what we see in the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea, which is increasingly the UN Convention on the Law on the Sea is going out of the window, right? It's very, very fundamental to global trade since the Second World War is free navigation. The United States didn't sign up for the declaration, but the US Navy was all about this. The British Navy was all about this. And it's really important for the world when we've got globalization just in time to supply change. So now we've got Strait of Hormuz basically closed. We've got the Red Sea, where the Houthi are able to close it. And now it looks as though the Black Sea is going down. And a lot of this is driven by the insurance markets because as you've often pointed out it's not necessarily that they need to strike every vessel strike one it's just that they need to strike one or two and then the insurance companies say well we're not going to do this anymore so yeah russia is being is in real trouble because they're losing a lot of their grain exports but ukraine's in even more trouble because unlike russia they can't balance it as much with the oil and gas exports and this is going to remove three billion euro a month from their exports yeah the maritime insurance industry is a big player in this war the decisions that they make are having that kind of impact you mentioned the turks there a couple times rory and i said last week that the foreign minister hakan fidan if there are any turkish government people listening we would love to talk to hakan fidan because he's a really interesting guy but his it seems to me that again on this on the grain that turkey is driving the only live diplomatic track he said um a few days ago all commercial vessels are now being attacked indiscriminately turkey has divided they they did the black sea grain initiative as it was called turkey has apparently passed a ukrainian proposal on how to end this to moscow and is now awaiting a reply so it's very interesting the turks yet again getting involved in this now obviously they're going to get directly impacted but so are we all why are we not getting involved in that why are the americans not getting involved yeah and and and then there's the question of escalation we're reporting of course that ukraine is striking deeper and deeper into russian territory so they they struck something recently an oil refinery which is 500 miles east of moscow deep deep into russia um but some of these strikes are killing dozens of people russian children are being killed by ukrainian strikes the strikes on the port the russian port i think an eight-year-old was killed and of course the russians are killing enormous numbers of ukrainians and ukrainian children but as you get this retaliation in which ukraine is effectively saying look russia's been striking our civilians striking our critical infrastructure we're going to start striking the russian infrastructure you get the russian government today saying we hold britain responsible ukraine is holding using british drones to strike deep inside russian territory and killing russian children britain is now responsible for this you can see the same with the ships that we talk a lot about taking out the shadow fleet which is the russian vessels carrying sanctioned russian goods out of russia and that's partly how ukraine would describe what they're doing but from the russian point of view this is ukrainian attack on russian civilian vessels and then from the ukrainian point of view russian attack on ukrainian civilian vessels all of this is escalation right all of this over the last few months is you found here with the grain something which is in a new development but also builds on what's happening with drone warfare which is a war which is broadening all the time and i i'm worried that as this escalation takes off we're only at the beginning of something that could go very badly wrong yeah and the other thing that has really caught my this week are all these signs in relation to north and south korea donald trump had a massive hissy fit in the oval office yesterday because the south you know he was being grilled you can always tell when when trump's feeling vulnerable about the issue because he gets really bad temper with the journalist and it's usually a woman who asks him a question he says quiet quiet shut up you're where are you from cnn fake news fake news you made up this story about the mental health problems on the uss abraham lincoln all he got very antsy and again i thought why can no other journalist stand up for somebody when they're under attack like that but the issue that was getting under his skin was south korea he appears now to be falling out with the south koreans and meanwhile he was so nice about kim jong-un now kim according to zelensky the north koreans are about to send another 50 000 troops to support the russians that is not the sign of a war that's coming to an end and and your point about his troops social posts on on south korea if people haven't seen it i mean it's staggering it says let me just read it to people based on my very good relationship with kim jong-un of north korea i am not happy with the fact that the united states has long ago agreed to participate in joint military exercises with south korea these exercises are not only costly with much of these costs paid for by the united states of america as usual but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile to a country north korea that as long as donald j trump has been president has been unstraightening and respectful therefore and based on the fact that it's too late to cancel i've instructed secretary of war pete heads to substantially reduce the joint military exercises while somewhat unrelated and then he puts in a comic question mark in brackets i recently asked the president of south korea if they would like to join us in the denuclearization of the islamic republic of iran and they said no thanks thank you for your attention to this matter present well it was a no thanks it was the no thanks that triggered this hissy fit that then led to him sort of you know abusing this young woman so now if you're putin and i don't know whether putin gets early access to trump's truth social by paying a hundred thousand dollars whatever it is but he could read that and he's thinking oh he's coming back on side again and to be doing it through kim jong-un who was now i don't know if zelensky is right or wrong in saying that 50 000 north korean troops are on the way to to russia one thing we do know is that north korean troops have been there and what else are they doing they're learning the north koreans this is the thing that's worrying the south koreans the north koreans are learning an awful lot from russia and from ukraine about the way that this war's being being fought listen we talked about the taliban um and the taliban are a brutal government but north korea is another level it's unimaginable that any american president since 1945 would say what trump has just said about north korea this is the most brutal unpleasant dictatorship that has driven north korea to be one of the poorest countries on earth i mean you can see the potential of that country from the fact that south korea is one of the wealthiest countries on earth little border between the two and you can see diversion it's a country which is developed its own nuclear weapon program that is testing ballistic missiles that's threatening its neighbors that's directly undermining a peaceful democratic prosperous american neighbor and now as you say funneling troops into russia's war against ukraine how is it possible if you were looking for one country on earth that the united states should not be having a relationship with it's north korea from every way from human rights rights through to nuclear and there he is putting out a truth social saying he's going to stop joint military exercise with south korea and partly because south korea has not given him enough money uh he actually increasingly is talking like a mafia boss you know i asked for 10 billion for the protection they said well how about three well three is okay for now but you know it's gonna have to be more than that over time you know you want your cafe to be blown up or not it's up to you i mean it's anyway there we go let's talk let's we've managed to get through this episode without too much trump deronging syndrome let's just calm okay now rory before we go um jason arday i think this is one of the most horrible stories from so many different angles i just think the whole thing is truly truly truly horrible but the bottom line is somebody who should not be dead is dead and it's worth saying because you know we should be very very careful when we're talking about these kinds of events that you know we don't know there will be an inquest and the facts will one day be known better than they are now but the horrible fear i have is that we're talking about a human being who was driven to a place where he just felt like he was going to die and he was going to die and he was going to die and he was saying to his friends we've had several on the record saying he's saying to them i cannot go on i cannot you know he's losing the will to live and that is a tragedy a genuine tragedy for him for his family for his friends and i think we all of us just have to just step back and think and just be a little bit more empathetic than a lot of the coverage has been well it's it's it's um well let's start with that i mean this was a person who had a very difficult childhood you know whatever the details of it were he had dyslexia he had learning difficulties he was very vulnerable he deserved support which he didn't get but in the end wherever we go on any of this and what he did the bottom line is that he's dead and i think it's highly probable that he killed himself still needs to be looked at but that i think is the bottom line and that should inform the way in which we think about everything else that's going on in this discussion i mean there were so many things i thought and one of the things i thought is this question of um whether we're honest enough with ourselves all of us he was accused of self-mythologizing and it seems as though some of that may have been true that he probably exaggerated what he'd done in some of his running he may have exaggerated some of his childhood experiences or achievements um i've done the same i mean i feel the temptation to do that a lot i feel you know people say rory's stewart speaks 11 languages i don't point out that i don't really speak 11 languages that i've studied 11 languages most of my really crap at i'm certainly when i was a politician i wasn't good enough about uh correcting people when they suggested i'd been in the army for much longer than i was i was in for a very very brief period etc etc and look i i can keep going on myself because i feel myself in jason but i also think that many of us are like this i mean if you look at politicians who get in trouble for embroidering their cvs exaggerating lessing it a hear that they did more impressive things than they really did. Why does it happen? You know, sometimes it's vanity, sometimes it's pressure, sometimes that you're flattered into it, sometimes you're telling yourself stories and you're getting carried away. I think it's very relatable. And that was one of the core things that I thought was so brutal about the media coverage that there is, look, there were serious allegations, which Cambridge has been investigating around plagiarism, and we have to take seriously academic standards. I don't, you know, I really want to say that. Of course we do. And of course, professors will feel very strongly that that must be held to. But I also do feel that when the media is doing this, I just feel that could be me, could be any of us. I didn't comment at all on this story through the whole thing until his death. And one of the reasons, I mean, I guess partly because I'm away, but as you know, I don't really switch off and I don't really have holidays and I'm always sort of, and I'm very, very interested and engaged in issues of mental health. And the reason I didn't get engaged is because I felt very, very early on, this is becoming one of those frenzies. He is becoming one of those people who in a story being driven with literally dozens of stories. This is the other thing about social media, which was social media. This is about national newspapers, particularly, you know, mail, the Telegraph, the Spectator, the Times. They were writing dozens of stories about this guy, dozens. They were even putting out appeals. Do you, have you ever met Jason Ardy? Do you know, were you ever taught by Jason Ardy? Get in touch with our news desk, et cetera. So it became one of those frenzies where he ceased to be seen as a human being. Now on the macro level, I've, I found that is probably ultimately what happened to Princess Diana. I think Princess Diana became, now she's different. She's a, she's a, she was a member of the royal family. She was married to the future King. This guy was a, an academic with a good track record in several universities. The plagiarism that people most talk about this, this story was started by somebody who openly said, if anybody black gets a senior position in the academia, it's because they're black. It's because of D E I. So John Moore's university investigated and found that he may have made mistakes as lots of people do, but there was no sort of the plagiarism that people were talking about. But by then it was too late. Every single story became bigger than it deserved to be. And I think I'm afraid why, because he's black. It was othering. And then I think the other thing that I've seen since then, I mean, I just wonder how you, what nastiness you have to have inside you that even on the day the guy's body has been found, you want to have the same argument. I mean, some of the stuff about, Hey, personalizing it, but some of the stuff that Julia Hartley Brewer was putting out, some of the stuff that Isabel Oakshaw was saying on the media, I mean, just try and have a little bit of empathy, just a little bit. It doesn't harm you. I had a bit of a, not spat, but Piers Morgan posted the article in the daily mail because of course they all went a bit neutral. Jason Arday's body found at home. Okay. And a few people said, well, I don't know. I don't know. Okay. And a few people saying how tragic it was. And Piers quoted, posted this, the daily mail thing. And he posted saying, Cambridge university has a lot to answer for. Okay. Well, maybe it does, but the way that we take these incredibly complicated human situations, yes, Cambridge has answers, maybe ask questions. Now we will never know what went on in his mind, but I've been in that place. I've been in that place where I'm thinking, I don't want to live anymore. And one of them, by the way, I've been in that place where I'm thinking, I don't want to one of them, by the way, was a media frenzy. Now, and that media frenzy gets thrown at me every day because the only person who did take their life was, was somebody else, David Kelly. So none of us know what's going on in people's minds, but I have the worthlessness that he maybe felt was because he was, these stories were saying he was, he was utterly worthless. And there's a piece that somebody sent me this morning by a guy called Sam Chris, the headline is the carrion eaters, what we did to Jason Arday. What is interesting when you read this piece, a long piece is that it touches on all of these complications. And of course what the social media world and what our modern media world doesn't do is the complicated stuff. I feel sick about the whole thing. And I also feel there was a point at which I thought I should get ahold of this guy. I've never met him. I don't know that I know what's going on here. I know exactly what's going on here. And I know it may have made absolutely no difference at all, but I sort of wish I'd got in touch with him and just said, listen, I can imagine what you're going through. It will pass. It will go. It will go. There will come a point when people are not talking about this anymore. One of the problems is that, um, that there is a really strange thing that I I'm always struggling with, with this stuff. Where does the forgiveness come? Where does the moment come when you can actually reach out to a friend and say, you may have done awful things. I'm also really sorry for what you're going through because I don't think, uh, people who haven't been through it understand what it feels like. I mean, the closest I ever came, only time actually I've ever come to feeling like take my life was when I was under a full media assault, which now seems a bit silly when I look back at it, but it is, you're right. It's about the sense of worthlessness. It's the sense that what's happening is they're destroying everything that you thought about yourself. And maybe, you know, people in public life are a bit fragile and maybe we put ourselves on pedestals and, and maybe it's true that part of the reasons why, you know, a politician or a more vulnerable is that maybe you've allowed yourself to be set up with profiles saying that you're a great star and you're a wonderful thing. So then it's, it's that much more brutal, but I, yeah, anyway, over to you to finish, but that was some of my thoughts. Yeah. Of course, if you're a public figure, if you do things that are wrong, um, the press and the media and other politicians have a, have a right and a duty and a responsibility to go after you, to expose that and to, and to, and to see you challenged. That's part of the, how politics is. I was talking to somebody about this last night. He said, you know, we're conscious of the sense of difference between the military and civilians. And he was saying that in public life, there is military and civilians. You and I are not civilians when it comes to politics and public life, because we've chosen to be political public figures. We put ourselves out there, we make arguments in public and therefore we expect comeback. I would say that Jason Arday was a civilian. Okay. Now he was a civilian attached, to a big institution, Cambridge university that has standards and should have standards. And those standards should be seen through the extent to which it became a fact that he only got this job because of DEI. He talked to the people in Cambridge and they say, no, that's not the case. That is not the case. He, he, he was, you know, very good academic. He did a lot of good published work. Now there'll be others who say, well, no, it wasn't good enough. So, but, but, but what I can't stand is how people go out and they, they say, well, the opinion that I had about these issues, before this terrible story happened, this has confirmed me in those, in those views. This has confirmed me in the view that when anybody gets into a, one of these frenzies, we've just got to try and step back a little bit. I think there's something about, there comes a point in these frenzies where we just lose humanity. We lose empathy and we also lose, without being too pompous about it, we lose forgiveness. Where, where is the possibility of forgiveness? Where's the possibility of saying, you've screwed up. I mean, let's think about how we think about people who go to jail, people who commit crimes. Exactly. Exactly. That means they get no visitors. Nobody ever goes to see them. Yeah. Yeah. No. And then, and then I, I had, um, you know, the usual crowd. I mean, uh, I don't know whether I should just come off social media completely like Fiona's done. I don't know, but I feel I've got to be on there because you do see things that inform what we talk about, but the number of people, usual suspects, Julie Hartley Brewer, Aaron Banks, all the usual lot, you know, the minute I literally said anything about this, like, you know, could we just understand this is a, this is a father, this is a, this is a son, this is a partner of a woman who's grieving and literally come back, you know, you hounded a guy to his death, me, right? David Kelly. And now I know that I didn't, but I know that I was part of a, involved in a complicated process during which this guy took his own life. Yeah. We all of us have to think, well, could we have done this? Could we have done that? We don't know the answers. We have to think about that. And that is, I think then what creates the sort of understanding and empathy that was just lacking. It was lacking on so many levels. And I really, and the fact that I haven't seen with the exception of, was it Matthew Syed? Somebody wrote a piece saying, we've all got to look at ourselves. I just wish a few newspapers, have any of these newspapers and broadcasts actually sat down and said, hold on a minute, when we did have that guy, Simon Baron Cohen, and we did have Jolly and Maugham writing to us and saying, this is a very vulnerable man in the center of a media storm. Did you, did any of them actually say, yeah, okay, let's just, let's just pull back a bit. I'd love to know the answer to that. Well, thank you, Alistair. And of course, tomorrow in question time, we're going to do a big domestic chunk, some really interesting listeners questions on Andy Burnham and his media and comm strategy, which of course, Alistair is going to be talking about. So thank you, Alistair. Alistair is a better place than anyone in the universe to think about. And then we will talk about the West Bank and what's happening with extreme settler violence in the West Bank and that very underreported part. of the Middle East conflict. Yeah, and we're not going to talk about Clacton by-election at all. And we're not going to talk about Clacton by-election at all because Binface has done it for us. He won, he won, Binface won. He won, he won, he won. See you soon. Bye-bye.