Fanning the Flames (with Hugo Rifkind)

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Is Facebook dying? I'm Tristan Redmond, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. More than 15 years after the social network, a new movie on the inner workings of Facebook hits cinemas in October. The journalist who's reporting "inspired" the film tells us why Facebook stopped being cool and whether meta its parent company can reinvent itself. For more, listen to the Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your pods. Hello and welcome to Strong Message here from BBC Radio 4. A Guide to the Use and Abuse of Political Language. I'm imagine it's here. I'm joined this week once again by Hugo Rifkin from The Times and Times Radio. Hello. Hello. Hello. We're going to look this week at the phrase "Fanning the Flames". I wonder what that's going to lead to. The calculations politicians make about their deliberate choice of words and their readiness to charge their opponents with politicising an issue. Have you been interviewing a cow? Yes, this is up in the highlands of Poland. Yes. There is a cow called I think Mumentrey. Mumentrey? And she is believed to be able to predict the results of the World Cup. Right. What she has done in the company of other cows is she has been. Oh, they have a syndicate, do they? Well, no, she is apparently the psychic cows. The other cows are just. The other cows are just caching in. Oh, yeah. And she. The other cows are just stupid. She's presented with a variety of buckets with food and flags on them. Yeah. She keeps going to the Scottish one and eating the food there. Okay. Clearly, this means this cow is psychic. This is how religions start. This cow is psychic and it's predicting glory for Scotland in the sky. Or she's saying this is swell. Yes, she's saying that. Also, she is in Scotland anyway, isn't she? Yes. I mean, she might just be going. I prefer locally sourced food. I'm not sure really how much cows can perceive flags in the first place. I'm not sure about the decision-making process that has led to her being deemed the psychic cow with the other cows just being cows that like food. Not to throw any kind of aspersions on your new. The news values how time is radio, but would it not have been. Would it not have been preferable to interview the cow maybe once the World Cup started? Because then you could assess whether that cow had been accurate in. What budget? But then she might not have been and would have lost the story. Okay. I've seen. Not if you're getting her job as a work. Right. You realise you've said that into a microphone. Obviously, we couldn't interview the cow herself because she's not. She doesn't do talking. No. She wouldn't even move on demand, actually. No. Because we had to interview the cow's handler. Handler? Yes. Owner, farmer is the word I'm looking for. Who was. I would say defensive about the whole process a bit. I'm not. you know what? I don't want to shoot it down. I'm not sure this cow can actually predict. Right. sponsor fixtures. I mean, it's, yes, a thorny issue, isn't it? I mean, there will be opinions on both sides about this one. I think it might be fake moves. Oh. Okay. Okay. You're bringing the light entertainment value of the news to this podcast. I'm doing my best. Okay. Well, talking of light entertainment. I have a taskmaster update, I say. Right. When Munya to Ottawa was on a couple of weeks ago and he's done taskmasters well, I talked about coming up. There was a task in which I clearly had not had my afternoon map and therefore I was just confused. But followed by another task in which I had had my nap and I was amazing. Mm-hmm. And it happened this week. But all that's happened is that as a result, my social media feed has just been full of comments along the lines of, "Do you not know how a light bulb works?" I mean, I will say, but we're having watched it. Yeah, I hope so. And with respect. Yes. You didn't appear to know how a light bulb works. No. Yeah. Let me talk you through. Please. This could be my Ed Miliband baking sandwich moment. I do need a nap after lunch. I'm a tabling white. I just, my brain just goes into free form. Mm-hmm. And I need a very, very short 10 minute nap. And then I'm brilliant again. And light. Absolutely. How long does the nap need to be? 10 minutes. 10 minutes. You've got to set a timer. More than 10 minutes, then you're groggy. But the phrase I do want to, I have no trouble with, is power nap. Mm-hmm. I've always been an advocate of it in the middle of the day. It does, it does recharge you. The example here being that the following task, I managed to see through the rules instantly and work out well, even though I nearly missed that one because my nap was just, it was a Hampton Court. Am I boring here about my sleeping habits? It was a Hampton Court, and I wanted a nap. And I found a room in Hampton Court. It was just full of chairs and benches. And I lay down flat on a bench. But 30 seconds later, a sixth form group came in and went, "Excuse me, is this a cafe?" And I thought, "A, why do you think this looks like a cafe?" "And B, why do you think I look like staff at Hampton Court?" "I'm a man lying on a bench." I thought you were going to say you'd found a room to sleep in, but it'd be another wrong side of the maze. I'm still there. I'm broadcasting from there. Yeah. But it does make me think about politicians who say that they don't need much sleep. Because I am always very suspicious of them. Well, so, okay, so there's the efficiency of a nap is fascinating. Yes, yes. Because I'm a big fan of the 10 minute power nap as well. There we go, good, excellent. And yet, I'm well aware that if I get that 10 minutes between six o'clock and 10 past six in the morning is no time. No. You can't get anything done in sleeping dorms. No, no, no. Whereas 10 minutes at five o'clock in the afternoon, amazing. Yeah. And so maybe the politicians who do this, someone like Donald Trump, who sleeps four hours a night, at most. And look at the consequences. No, I'm done. But maybe he's just being very efficient. He goes, "I could, if I get an extra 10 minutes," or, let's be honest, four hours at night, that's not going to do me any good. Whereas if I get 10 minutes in an actual literal meeting with a lot of me as an advocate. Yes. That's charging me up. No end. So, but no one knows clips of him asleep in the middle of an awful office meeting. No one dare say he's power-napping. Yeah, you always wonder with those clips. I mean, I think he is asleep. But he might just be sort of rolling his eyes. Yeah. I mean, they say he's thinking. They say he's thinking. He's, you know, he's weighing it all up, while making a noise of someone's story. It's remarkable. I mean, it's remarkable how little he sleeps. He's about to turn 80. He turns 80 this week. And he sleeps so very little. Apparently, the time when this is a real problem is on official trips. Because no one wants to get an Air Force One with him. Because you go to sleep if you're macarubio. Yeah. And you want to get your normal six or seven-hour sleep, probably being macarubio hanging upside down from some sort of cave. But nonetheless, six or seven-hour sleep. You can't, because Trump gets 45 minutes and just comes and wakes you up. He wants to talk at you. And you're sitting there nodding. I mean, is there not a dark gun or something to produce? You know, nothing more sinister than putting in to sleep. That's all I'm saying. Nothing more sinister than that. But the bag on his head, like a parrot on my work. I get it, yes. Yeah. I mean, that's her famously only got four hours. Yeah. You can see it, couldn't you? Oh, God, yes. I mean, she's salt. She did also sell off all her infrastructure. Imagine what would happen if she'd slept more. She'd have been like a lippled Democrat. Yeah, hello. Okay. Anyway, right. The phrase we're looking at is fanning the flame. There's a whole subset to this, like, you know, stalking up division, piling on, only making things worse. And teetering on those other two, which is politicizing. Yeah. And weaponizing. And politicians are always accusing other people of politicizing stuff, which makes you think, yeah, but that's what politicians should do. And then there's when there's something being politicized, actually, tip over into being weaponized. So I think when something is politicized, or everything, if it's politics is politicized, a politician can't say anything, but politicizing it. Yes. I think when it's being weaponized is when you are using it to make a political point that is not the real political point. It's about, right? You know, you're using it, you're, you're twisting it. Yes. I think, I think if, if you're accusing somebody of something and they have done that thing, then you're not weaponizing the thing. You're just saying it. Right. So it's a sort of, there's a kind of dog whistle element to it in that if I say this word. Yeah. Certain people who are my supporters will know what I mean. Well, not just, not just even that. If you look at this horrible case of last week, the case of Henry Novak, the horrible case of his murder and the terrible behavior of the police when they came along. Now, it seems that although the police behaved badly, poorly did the poor job when they got there, you can't draw a direct link between how they behaved and the guidance that is given to police over race. That link just doesn't seem to be there, doesn't seem to connect with how they behaved there. That's what experts in policing have been saying. Right. All right. Now, those facts are available to anybody. If you choose to ignore those facts and say this is a case about how the police respond to people of different races, then you're weaponizing. Right. Yes. So that takes us into, I mean, a lot of discussion about the language used by Nigel Farage in his emergency address to the nation last week, which already ramps up the sense of drama. It's the four emergency services, isn't it? It's fire, it's police, it's ambulances, and it's Nigel Farage. Right. Yes. Well, there's the fifth one, podcasts. I was forgetting. The emergency podcast. Yes. Absolutely. Yes. And I will look at the language used by Farage. But it did make me think though in that whole thing of, are we just fanning the flames of this? Are we, are the jobs that we do like us now on this? And you're as a daily radio news presenter. In that need to to keep talking if you don't have a cow on Zoom or whatever. Do we fan the flames? I mean, sitting here analyzing what happened last week, is that fanning the flames? Is that prolonging the agony? Is that, I just thought it was an interesting question, I'm sorry, like for I just asked in the question. I mean, I think it's a fair question, it's a worrying question, because I mean, yes, of course. But you're doing that, you're doing that wherever you do, you're doing that unless you refuse to talk about it. If you refuse to talk about it, you're a new show that's not discussing the news. And that's, yeah, that's a questionable position. I mean, my answer would be providing you outline what it is you're seeking to do by discussing it. And then allowing people to assess whether you've, you've achieved that. Yeah, but I mean, I think if you're doing anything that makes the argument bigger, then you are fanning the flames. But sometimes you've got to make the argument bigger, because if you tell people that they are wrong, then you are making the argument bigger. And sometimes, you know, telling the truth involves telling other people they are wrong. So I think, but I mean, that's the, I guess that's the problem with they're being a fire in the first place. Yes. It does spread. Well, how about, since we ought to look at the emergency address, I mean, the phrase everyone responds to is pure cold rage. Yes. What's your take on that? It's a really interesting phrase, pure cold rage, because every word of that is interesting, right? Pure is interesting. Cold is interesting. Rage, rage is generally bad in public debate, I would say. I can understand you're saying people are angry. He wants to challenge that. Yeah. Cold. Yeah. Cold. Now, if he'd said respond with hot rage, that's definitely a call for riots, right? Yes. If he says, if he says respond with cold rage, that sounds like it's not, but that also makes it sound like lukewarm rage would be worse than cold rage. Yes. I'm not sure that's right. Cold rage sounds slightly sinister, really. It's a, what is cold rage, is that shouting? I don't know. It's like, I don't know, maybe it's a sort of a weathering rage. I mean, warm rage, a kind of a chummy, inclusive rage. I mean, yes. It would be very old as well. Cold rage sounds more hostile than hot rage, I'd say. It hot rage sounds not that, I mean, dorsely hot rage, but if your rage was hot, it sounds like hot is sort of an obvious description of someone who's in a rage, just a hot tempered hot. That's how someone to be in a hot rage. Right. If you're saying cold rage, it sounds very calculated. Exactly. It sounds deliberate rage. Yes. We're not going to shout and scream right now. What we're going to do is in 24 hours time, we're going to shout and scream. Yeah. We're going to plan this and synchronize it. Yeah. That's the kind of the, what I'm taking from it. And you're right about all the way, because the word that I picked up on was pure. Well, pure is interesting, because, of course, the BBC got into trouble, because news night said, a news night described it as a maturely said he'd said a white white, he said white cold rage and and had to apologize. And for Arjun reform were very cross. Although, well, he was saying pure cold rage and not white cold rage. And he's saying, if I've been saying white cold rage, that would have been racialising it. Although, obviously, it wasn't, it wouldn't have been meant in those ways. I don't know where the maturely was thinking of the white heat or something like that. Why do you have that technology? The reform objection saying that would have been racialising it, but I called for pure cold rage, not white cold rage. It's like, well, yeah, but he was calling for pure cold rage from white to people. And I'm sure he would deny that, but he did say he was talking about a two tier culture in this country where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities. So I don't think it's the ethnic minorities he thinks is going to be cross about this. Yeah. So that was, so the thing he was accusing, he was basically cross the news night had described him as saying what he meant, rather than what he actually said, which was very studiously not quite what he meant. There was something that I thought, and that's familiar, when on, I think he was on Times Radio the next day, he said, I use that term very, very deliberately for your cold rage. I suggested that rage was put in a cold way, not a hot way. Okay. We've discussed that. That's the relative temperatures of rage. Putting rage in a cold way sounds to me slightly more sinister than a hot way. You meditated rage. Well, yes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to find words to describe his technique, which is a sort of, it's a very specific speculation that hides a kind of encouragement, is it? Yeah, absolutely. It's speculative. Couragement. Well, there's the speculative. I'm sorry about that. There's something to point. Yeah. And I don't want to say anything like offensive, but old ladyish about Nigel Faroch. You know, he'd like, he can be a bit go on where he can be a bit like the way just the way he talks, he can be a bit like a sort of, like a sort of stereotypical 1950s gossipy housewife. Oh, yeah. You know, I mean, the kind of like she's no better than she ought to be type way. You know what I mean? It's like he channels that kind of thing. And also this phrase, "Too tier, too tier policing, too tier," as a phrase, as again, it's no becoming so regular that you almost don't have to explain it anymore. It does the work by just being pronounced, by being articulate, doesn't it? So anything can be "Too tier." Did we get it from COVID, do you think? Because we had the various tiers. Or the tier system. Yeah. I always thought it was because it rhymed with care. That could be, yeah. "Too tier care." But then it just became a generic, if you just want to label something as unfair, or you think is unfair. And something is to call it "Too tier." But then who is on these two tiers? So the horrible Novak case has been sort of called by various people, sort of Britain's equivalent of the George Floyd case. Yeah. George Floyd was killed, was actually killed by police in America. And when people started talking about Black Lives Matter, sort of it came off the back of that. But when the difference there is, when you have politicians, someone like Keir Starmer, who took the knee for Black Lives Matter, what he was saying there was, isn't it terrible that there are people who would be deemed on a lower tier than I am? And speaking from my position on the upper tier, on the upper tier, the keir tier, if you'd like. You could stick up with the people on the below tier, whether that's true or not, that's what he was doing. The weird thing about this is you've got people, forage and reform, plenty of others as well, saying there are two tiers, and we are on the bottom tier. But when I hang from anyone is on the top tier, you know, when I hang from any sort of 14 year old mixed race kids in London, going like, yeah, man, I'm like, I'm totally owning this country now. I'm in charge. Is Facebook dying? The journalist who's reporting inspired the film tells us why Facebook stopped being cool and whether matter its parent company can reinvent itself. Is everything my theme about the two tier thing? It's just that Keir Stamau was cursed with a monosolabic and eminently rhymeable with name. Yeah. Keir, because you get this two tier Keir thing, you get this, everything is two tier Keir. And, you know, it's just no chair is Keir, you know, he's still here, it's Keir. Take a long walk off a short tier. Keir. Yeah. You're up. You're the dropping you're polling has been sheer Keir. It's just that sort of, it just becomes a game rather like when everybody piled on, you know, the, you know, the Baltic make boat face. You know, it's just become funny to just keep going with it. I do wonder because a lot of people have been saying, I mean, he's not bad as in a person, but there's this loathing for us. Is it a sort of actually a performance thing in that it's just become a sort of public game, piling on about Keir and his eminently rhymeable name and all that, because if you look at other polls where people are asked, you know, who would make the best prime minister, he comes on top, a Bob Andy Burnham for our, so what's going on? Is it a canoes? Is it just the perils of having a rhymeable name? I think so. I think, I mean, it's a tabloid culture, like you can tell, they've got, I mean, you know, where's streeting? There's, there's fun you can have with his name, right? Yes. Stop bleeding. Stop bleeding. Stop bleeding. Or, you know, if he gets, if he got involved in a property scam, it'd be like, you know, Wes's Des Rez or something like that, you know, it'd be fantastic. Yes. There's not a lot you can do with Anne. Yes. I was going to do, I was going to do for your chances of becoming PM are more and more fleeting. Mr. Streeting. That's very good. Yes, yeah, yeah. Burnham. No, Burnham, I can't do much with Burnham. No. Burnham Woods. That's it. I keep trying to make that joke and I'm never sure it applies. But what is it? What is it? Well, we're talking about, you know, fanning the flames. People should be careful of the language of the Jews and so on. You've got me thinking of two different things. One is coded words when politicians use words that surprise you and, therefore, they've been used deliberately for effect as in, you know, all the analysts are going, oh, that's interesting. He's called it that, that means X, that means he's going to resign or that means, you know, the one I keep to show you how old I am, I keep thinking of Jeffrey Howe who had resigned as deputy prime minister. And so this was his, when a cabinet member resigns, they're entitled to a kind of resignation speech in the House of Commons. And this is where he outlined his reasons for resigning and included the phrase. It's like the team captain had come out at the break and tampered with it. It's like you were sent, it's like the bat, it was the batsmen are sent out to bat and realise when they get out to bat, the bats have been broken. By the team captain. By the team captain. It was a very, very specific and unusual cricket analysis, but it brought Mark gets hatched down. That was the extraordinary thing because it was suction unused. It was the most outrageous thing, Jeffrey Ho, could say. And I also don't know Jeffrey Ho. I mean, Dennis Healey famously described being attacked by Jeffrey Ho, it was like being savage by a dead sheet. But because this apparently mild mannered normally loyal, minister had suddenly accused the kind of team captain of cheating or less. It led to the chain of events that brought that to a down. I'm not sure we have any of those particularly mild politicians these days. No, I mean, I guess, I guess if we got a flicker of emotion from somebody like Pat McFadden, it could be quite upsetting, I suppose. But the one, you know, most of them, most of them sort of starter is at least the cricket metaphor level. Yes. David Lammy is pleasingly messy, though. Okay. Yes. He does say things. You never sure that necessarily the things he meant to say beforehand. Yeah. Well, yeah. Should we talk about his friend, JD Vance. Okay. Talk about shipping in and fanning the flames. So JD Vance in response to what happened last week, death of Henry Novak, righteous anger is the only response. He was there for me, our righteous, which implies, you know, kind of ground it in some kind of old testament. Yeah. Bible fundamentalism. I'm not sure I know what righteous means. Yes. Does righteous just mean you are right? I think technically righteous is, this is what God wants. Right. Okay. I think in practice, it's people who just think, I'm very, very correct. You're not. Yeah. You don't have to be religious to be righteous in that respect. But it does imply you, you adhere to a kind of set of moral values, doesn't it, righteous? It's, it's good anger. It's pure. Yes. It's pure. It's good. It's like, you know, the just war. And this is the just rage. But righteous anger is the only response. The only response is the other thing there that I find interesting. When politicians say, it always reminds me of, I did what I did because it was the right thing to know. That's the mic drop. There's no discussion after that. It was the right thing. Okay. Can we determine if it was the right thing? I mean, Vance was, you would think awkwardly, but turns out not that awkwardly, for him, fundamentally wrong. Because fundamentally he's good against righteous. He was righteously wrong. No, he was wrong. He was just wrong because he described the, the Novak story as being basically a story about immigration. You know, Novak, Novak's killer was, was born in Britain. So unless he meant it's a story about long term immigration, you know, the terrible arrival to the west of people like, for example, his own wife, then, or indeed, the entirety of America, then, then I think he was just making an error there. He just saw person of color and assumed this person must be an immigrant and he was wrong. Yeah. You think someone would have googled that for him? Yes. And he described it as again, it's just a weirdness of the, if the last few, he said, if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West, the last few, the last few generations of European elites. How many, how many, how many, how many, how many, what are we going here? Yeah. Well, I know. Is that, yeah, are we talking about, you know, church? Is that how far back are we going? Maybe it's been downhill ever since the Nazis. Maybe that's what we're saying. Yeah, the last few elites. So not politicians, because he's a politician who doesn't want to describe himself as a politician or who wants to describe the people who are, the politicians who he despises are not being labeled politicians. They're being labeled elites. I remember we were doing a thing, a white house correspondence thing when Obama was president and it was a skit with Joe Biden, who was the vice president. I mean, I had to rope in other politicians and every time we went to their office, like the speaker of the house and said, we're looking for some other politician. They say, you can't call him a politician. They don't like that word politician. You could say speaker of the house. Well, because the speaker has transcended politics. Like, well, it's Senator or Senator. No, you call them by their office. Right. Don't call them a politician because that's in his derogatory. Right. And that's interesting. I mean, yes, the politician. I like to do officials basically. That's, I mean, I guess it should be derogatory, but it's supposed to be. And just another thing that the Vance said when he was talking about this, the quote, the quote that he said, he said, Henry Novak died in the same way that a civilization dies abandoned handcuffed by the authorities who need the trust and all cared for him and accused of hate crimes. He did not commit. Now the last bit of that, it's powerful, it's powerful, reticates, righteous anger, I suppose, died in the same way as civilization dies. Is that how civilization's die? No, I don't think it is how civilization is. No, not abandoned and handcuffed. Well, one thinks of how the, how the Incas died, you know, I don't think it was, yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't due to, you know, sort of work policing. No, I think, no, I'm not an expert. It was very much, I mean, certainly policing was involved, but not well. Of course, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is how a civilization dies. I mean, bear in mind, this is coming from a white house that recently threatened to destroy a civilization. Exactly. Yes. Well, I bought them with all the bombs. Yes, yes, rain down lanyards upon them. I will go on to Trump in a second. Well, we're on subject of, you know, the last few generations of European elites, European governments and veterans of the D-Day landings in Normandy assembled to commemorate the anniversary of that moment. We had Pete Hegsert there, the American Secretary of State for Defense or War, as he's now determined. And he made this speech on the beaches in front of veterans and politicians from around the world, talked about sadly today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies, beaches in Spain, initially in Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Every bit of this is really confusing to me because he knows it was the good guys doing the invading on D-Day. You'd think. You'd think. Yes. Yeah, you'd think. I don't really quite know how else to say it. The parallel there, he's making the parallel of the Americans and British coming to liberate Europe from Nazism. Yes. And he's saying an even worse invasion is happening today, and it's like, well, an even worse one implies that one was bad. Yes, Pete. Yes. Yeah. And also, you're speaking to the people who still alive, who put their lives in danger to achieve that. Read the beach, Pete. Read the beach. No, it's not the time. But again, it's almost like he thought what I'm going to do to talk about immigration, and I'll somehow connect it to the events were meant to be commemorating. But the headline I want is the immigration. But it's just people coming up on beaches that that's meant to be clearly not seen saving private Ryan. Yes, I think. Yeah. Here's what we get to with them, though, with with headsets and drops of sun, is the blurring between metaphor and reality. So the reality was the history of the, but he takes it as, oh, that's a nice image. Yeah, beaches. Oh, use beaches for what I want to talk about. But I'll now discard the historic reality, you know, that's of no further use to me. What's I've used to me is the image of a beach being stormed. Do you wonder if we could have turned it right? If we could, I mean, like, just be charitable to him. Yeah. If we can help him make this work. Yes. If he could have been like, I say, we don't want to give him another girl. Well, he's like, he's like, he's like, here on D day. Yeah, next year. He's got a year to do this. Okay. Here we go. Yeah. I feel it's important to say the time not a fan of the Nazis. Right. However, one lesson we can take from them is how good they were at defending beaches. Okay. Until they weren't already. You're in trouble already. Well, the Nazis went wrong. Yeah. Was by letting it all fall apart on the beaches of Normandy. That's what he wants to say. Right. Yes. Okay. No. And in response to Hexeth, quite like Simon Sharma eminent historian Simon Sharma described what he said as a special kind of lawlessness, a blame of historical deafness, grotesque stupidity, comically ludicrous self-importance, which I quite like. I mean, it is, there's a sort of strut to it, which is, I know what I'm about to say. Well, really annoy a lot of people, especially all these people here in front of me. I don't care. Yeah. Because I'm American. I think that's the kind of. Yeah, but again, there should be a bit of him that's going, I mean, because like America venerates the D-Day landings, you know, America venerates the D-Day landings, you know, it's such a core part of it. You know, it is where the, I want to use the word myth that that suggests that it's not real. It is where the, the belief in America as the land that frees the rest of the world from the European economy. Actually, I'll qualify. He doesn't think, because I'm American, he's thinking, because I'm the right kind of American. I'm the right kind of American. I'm the current type of American that's in power. So we've done Vance, we've looked at Hague South, we might as well look at their boss, that the man who's completely in charge of what they say and do, Donald Trump, an interview on Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press, talking among other things about Iran. And he just did, he did a sentence that I just thought, this is magnificent. It's a complete 360 in 30 seconds. You're going to say, we've depleted their military, we've destroyed their military, their capabilities been absolutely destroyed. Was then asked whether he knew how many missiles Iran had left. And he said, quote, yes, but I'm not going to tell you, we've totally destroyed their military. Most of their capacity has been knocked out, but they still have some missiles. I would say maybe 21 to 22%. It's a lot of missiles. Does he need anyone else there? He's arguing with himself. No, no, and I think actually that's the key if you're interviewing Trump don't don't badger him because he'll just walk out which is actually what happened at the end of that interview when he was badgered about January the 6th and it was it was the election really stolen so he just walked out at that point if you just let him just give him keywords like how many you know and he'll just he'll just unravel in front of you he sort of did it again today although so in the up direction he was talking about latest negotiations with Iran that are apparently happening and he said he said basically we're having great and great negotiations they're going extremely well we're very close to doing a deal and we'll have total victory and it's not well you can't be both doing a deal and having total victory yeah you know unless unless Iran is going to sign up for your total victory yeah and it's going to be a total victory for both of you yes do you know there's opportunity here I guess I mean if the Iranians are listening they could just in a meeting they just wait and then he falls asleep and then when he wakes up they go well done you did it you made that great deal you might have missed it because you were asleep but it's all sorted now you can go oh my god yeah when he's asleep just put a pen in his hand and get to sign up he's a paper weekend of Bernie's is on paper yeah before we go words words of the week oh yes oh kind of there's a good one this week yes Keir Starmer has been keen to find before he leaves office as many expect him to do when Andy Burnham comes in to kick him out keen to find some annoucables annoucables annoucables annoucables are not announcements now annoucables that's it sounds like the Marvel movie nobody went to see an annoucable an annoucable in my best understand so the annoucable this week was the social media ban okay was now actually done it or indeed announced it but it's an answer ball so an annoucable is what will become an announcement once you announce it it's a pre-announcement it's a pre-announcement yeah it's a pre-announcement yes but although because it's only an answer ball and hasn't yet been announced it's also renounceable as long as it's pronounceable okay having been reminded of the world cup cow is there a known so bull that will determine which announceables will eventually be announced you know the bull will now go over to the buckets of announcement and shop whichever it's social media ban so yes so these are taught me through this these so these are policies that he says he's thinking really hard about it's something it's an idea that you can you can announce in order to seize the agenda so it's not doesn't have to be deliverable deliverables are something quite different oh that's when you'll ever achieve it that's way yeah yeah it's just it's an annoucable it's a it's to grab the media grab the media's attention grab the agenda and I had a look to see where the word actually comes from yes and so it's actually quite often used in both Canadian and Australian English weirdly not American or English English but the last time it really reared up was Gordon Brown was apparently a fan of anansibles Starmer's lot haven't talked about anansibles before the fact they are doing now and there was also all that talk post local elections of whether of whether Gordon Brown was going to become more involved yes so maybe they're getting their anansibles resurrectable Donald Trump right now I'm still trying to work it out it's announcing a policy but not saying you're going to go ahead with the policy just saying that you're thinking about no one is not it's not announcing it's not that no once you've announced it it's he's just to be an anansible it's not an announcement so it's a kind of it's like a quantum policy yes which may or may not be announced and that won't be determined until such time as it is announced again it's Schrodinger's policy it is yes as soon as you gaze at it and then turn it into an announcement it ceases to be an anansible so see when John Stuart I think the more like this time last year talked about Trump being the announcement presidency where it was about getting the headline rather than actual nitty gritty of the policy happening or whatever and that the anansibles strikes me as that's what that is isn't it it's it's sounding like you're achieving something by it but actually doing nothing other than suggesting a topic for discussion yeah you you line up your anansibles you have a conveyor belt of anansibles and you just um because it's much easier to come up with an anansible than it's to come up with a policy of course yes much easy and actually most policies cost money yeah actually the last thing you want to do is actually enact a policy yeah I mean I guess in the best case scenario you've got an achievable anansible right yes an achievable deliverable anansible yes yes yes but it has to be cheap it has to be low cost an affordable and yeah exactly I was looking for the word thank you an affordable achievable anansible that may even be deliverable thanks for listening to StrongMessage here I'll be back next week and why not go and listen to some of our episodes from our back catalog just search for StrongMessage here and subscribe on BBCSounds goodbye goodbye Greetings malevolent munchkins fiendish friends and devilish do-gooders welcome back to the home of the oxymoron evil genius I'm rattlecane and I'm delighted to be steering the ship the unceremoniously wrenches historic figures from their perfect pedestals so that we can decide whether they're evil genius or a heavy concoction of the tip it's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream yes it's evil yes it's genius get on board now and listen to evil genius on BBCSounds is facebook dying I'm Tristan Redmond host of the global story podcast from the BBC more than 15 years after the social network a new 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