588. Is Britain Prepared for Cyber Warfare and The ‘Plot’ to Undermine the UN

One of the saddest sights of recent weeks was of millions of pounds worth of food being destroyed in different parts of Europe because of a cyber attack on supermarket fridge systems. France has directly blamed Iran for hacking into fridge systems, changing the temperatures, rendering the food inedible and unsellable in no time at all. Then we've had the bomb scares which have been causing mild chaos to European aviation. All signs that hybrid war is alive and well and doing real damage to our economic and social fabric. Which is of course why the Iranians, the Russians and other bad actors do it in the first place. It partly explains why the British government has launched the Be Ready campaign to prepare for emergencies and disruptions. And the public do seem to be listening. Which is why last Friday saw record withdrawals of cash, would you believe, from ATMs. So are we ready for what's apparently about to hit us? This episode is powered by. Most energy companies are counting on you doing absolutely nothing. Not questioning what you're paying, not switching, just letting your tariff roll on which is costing you hundreds of pounds every year. But the apathy goes deeper than our bills. We've almost given up on energy itself. We seem to all be accepting energy is expensive, the system is outdated. But that complacency is costing us. Fuse energy does not accept that because the energy transition is not something that just happens somewhere else. Fuse is building an energy company which is designed to bring down the cost of energy. And right now its tariffs are up to £100 below the Ofgem price cap. So switching isn't just about paying less, it's about expecting more from your energy company. And it only takes you three minutes. Switch to Fuse at FuseEnergy.com slash politics. Use the code politics and you'll get a free Trip Plus subscription allowing you to hear all the extraordinary members content that Alistair and I are now producing for you. Visit FuseEnergy.com. FuseEnergy.com for full terms and conditions. Observe the North American dad. 50s. Great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval. No haggling. No hassle. No one called him boss. He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car. Today on Carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply. Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And Alistair, let's start you with, I mean, we've got a lot of things to cover, some fascinating questions this week. Thank you to listeners and to Trip Plus members who've come in. We've got a lot of questions around cyber threats, a lot of questions around the big new run for the New York Times. We've got a lot of questions around the big new run for the new UN Secretary General. Huge momentous decision, which will determine the next 10 years of the United Nations and the international order that almost nobody's talking about. And then we've got questions about elections in South Africa and much more. But let's start with cyber threats. So, Kate and Dan might be a good way to start. Kate, can you talk about the bizarre fridge hacks over the last few weeks and what that means about defence investment in the modern age? And Dan, what would someone have to gain from the European aviation bomb threats? So, Alistair. Well, the fridge threat, the fridge thing was, I mean, really, I found it really sad because he, I was, don't ask me why, I was watching Belgian television. And there was these pictures of just tons of food just being thrown away. And what had happened, and the French foreign minister has come out definitively and said this was the work of Iran. One assumes that they discovered a way to know that. And so this was an attack, a deliberate cyber attack on. Supermarkets and supermarket refrigeration systems in several European countries, Belgium, Luxembourg, and then a smaller number of stores, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Estonia, and Finland. But millions and millions of euros of food has just been literally thrown away. And these, just sort of quickly to explain to people, these are fridges which can be remotely, the temperature can be adjusted and monitored remotely. The idea of, say, if you're a big supermarket, you get your engineer presumably in headquarters to check what's going on in the fridge. And the problem is that. In this particular case, as usual, people have left their passwords as 1, 2, 3, 4. So it was a very, very easy hack. Well, one of them, the default username was supervisor and the password was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And they'd never been changed on some of them. And some of them are, and of course, this suits maybe the fridge companies, but they're saying these are older models that didn't get their software updates and all this sort of thing. But as we have more and more smart devices, more and more devices that can be controlled. Through the internet, it's easier and easier to do what happened here, which was not a ransom demand, right? It's not someone making money. It's somebody thinking it would be disruptive or amusing or just wind people up to essentially turn a fridge into an oven. I mean, they were heating them up to 50 degrees centigrade, weren't they? And then the other thing that was happening in France, which I think they managed to foil was that they were changing the temperature where plasma was being kept for donation, blood donations. So look, this is. This is serious stuff. And it relates to the concept of hybrid war. Now this could be, the truth is we don't, we don't yet know all of it, but it could be that this involves a state like the Russians, like North Korea, like Iran, and the intelligence agency will say that is happening and it's happening more and more. It could also be some clever kid in his bedroom at home, just able to work it out. But the point is. That this is, this is partly what has led to our government launching this be ready campaign. This really, I found this really interesting actually. So the government launched the be ready campaign, which is basically, and it said, you know, make sure you've got some cash stored away, get some wind up, wind up lighting and all this sort of stuff. My mother has a wind up radio, which she keeps showing us. She's taken this very seriously. A lot of people have the last Friday was the record for ATM withdrawals in Britain, which shows this idea that people don't listen to governments. It's just. Yes, they do. Well, my, my mother though, is I'd, I'd be interested to hear from listeners what other people have got on their preparedness set up. So, uh, Mrs. Stewart has, uh, I noticed bought huge, a lot of bottles of water, some tuna fish. She's got a wind up radio, but she also bought five bottles of brass polish. She clearly thinks when the Armageddon comes, there's going to be a shortage of brass polish. So you've got quite a lot of things around the house. I've been in that house. You've got a lot of, you have got quite a lot of brassy type stuff. Yeah. She clearly thinks when Mad Max is happening and all these guys are going around on their motorbikes, like stealing our cattle, she'll be able to polish the brass as well as eat tuna fish. What would you put in your emergency supplies? I must admit, Roy, this is, this is provoking a real angst in me because I had a technological disaster at the weekend. Oh no. So as you know, Fiona is the best person in the world. Yes. I wrote a chapter about her and her perseverance to that effect. You do. Yeah. Yeah. And I interviewed you about that. Yep. And I, she gave me a cup of tea. Yeah. Saturday morning while I was sitting at my laptop, variously writing my column for the new world and researching for this episode. Wait, and the cup of tea went over the laptop. Well, worse than that. I mean, do you think we could afford a new mug? We have hundreds of mugs already. Fiona had decided to glue a handle that had come off the mug. Well, it's impressive. Is it? Yeah. I didn't really like people mending things. Well, that's fine. But it wasn't properly mended because I'm just holding it like that and the thing fell off. I went all over the laptop. Oh. So, you know, I hate tech anyway. I hate it so much more. Did you manage to turn the laptop over and get the tea out quickly? No, not quickly enough because I was shouting and ranting and raving. My son Callum found a really nice guy in Archway who was able to get it back on, but I've lost a lot of stuff. Anyway, but so what these guys are doing is, is, is, so if they can hack fridges in big supermarket chains, and then we also had the, um, this thing about the, and nobody's got to the bottom of this surprise I can work out. These. Persistent bomb scares on planes, which had been getting planes grounded, canceled, diverted. One of them having to be escorted by the Hungarian military out of somewhere. So it just shows that where there's a, a will on behalf of state actors or just people who want to mess around, this stuff is quite easy to engage in. And what I want to know is whether we do it to them and whether we should. Well, we, we have, oh, that's a really big question. Let me just pause that for a second. Cause I think you're really. Tempting me into an amazing ground that the answer is we, we have something called the UK defense cyber and electromagnetic force on a major general Mike fares, and we've got the cyber and specialist operations command under Rob McGowan, Rob McGowan. So we do have thousands of people that are supposed to be able to do defensive and offensive cyber. We also have the UK national cyber security center, uh, within GCHQ. So there's, there's, it'd been increasing investment trying to do this stuff. Mm-hmm. The government had a preparedness plan and 200 million, and, but still, it's a hell of a difficult thing to do. If you look at the details of that plan, I think they're gonna be behind schedule behind time. That's barely coming process. But I just wanted, before we got into that, just to take people back on the side of story. So the real question around cybersecurity actually begins with the internet. I mean, until sort of 1988, 1989, there really wasn't much to do in cyber because we weren't all connected. We didn't have smart devices. We don't even computers weren't connected. It. Really. Gets going in the nineties when people realize criminals that your credit cards are being stored. Your address is being stored. And. You start getting really big attacks. It's not a new thing. 20 years ago, Estonia, 2007, the Russians mounted a massive attack. And they became percivilient and became the most digital country in Europe. Absolutely. On the back of it. They responded to that. In 2015, the Chinese stole 22 million U.S. government records. By 2014, there was something like 4 billion transactions taking place a year on PayPal. 200 million records were stolen from Target. I mean, this is like 12 years ago. So ever since then, we've been in a world in which there's been an endless race, obviously, between the poachers and the gamekeepers. But the thing that's changed it all is, of course, my favorite thing, which is AI. So it's going faster. There's more of it. Absolutely. Because something that you, Alistair, sitting there in your bedroom hacking something. I wouldn't know where to start, but anyway, yeah. But you're now replaced by thousands of agents. So I was just looking at a recent attack. Microsoft found that there were, thanks to AI agents, 2,900 login attempts against 2,250 organizations in under a minute. So the point is that AI is now able to explore simultaneously with multiple agents in a few seconds every combination of supervisor 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And in particular, they are finding vulnerabilities that nobody expected. One of the reasons why. One of the reasons why Anthropix, Mythos, and Fable were not released is that they discovered vulnerabilities on iPhones that no human had ever discovered very, very quickly. And although there is a huge debate around this, I am in what I would call the Azim Azhar camp. Azim Azhar is a British tech analyst who I admire and follow. Does he know he has a camp? I think he should now. He now has a camp. Azim, you have a camp. Because he described what's been happening during Black October, which is a number of these attacks, as the Wuhan moment. And this is the moment where I think we may see that the first real negative impact of AI on the world will be a massive proliferation of cyberattacks. I've been predicting this for three years. It's completely logical, right? If they can just mount millions of attacks and try and try and try and try every different thing, and every time you respond, they try another thing. You can imagine a swarm. Swarm of AI agents doing incredible destructive power. Now, the response from the AI companies is that's why you need to put your foot down on AI, because the only way of stopping that is through ever smarter defensive AI. Yeah, but let's just say you're, because we've been talking about this hybrid war for years, okay? And we know that the Russians do it. We know the Iranians do it. We know that North Korea is very, very good at this type of stuff. And the answer is we do do it. We do it, but we don't do it. We have a greater propensity not to want to break our own laws. Or other countries' laws. Is that not fair? That is true of Britain, but if you talk about British and American allies, the most famous example of an attack ever mounted was not by the Iranians or the Russians. It was Stuxnet, which was an Israeli attack against the Iranian centrifuges in 2010, where they literally got all the centrifuges going. My point, though, is that we've been talking about it, and it just felt, and I'm not criticizing the government for this, but it just felt when they came up and said, you know, get a few more candles. Get your wind-up radio. Put a bit of cash away under the mattress. It didn't feel to me like it was, are they setting us up? Are they teasing the way, do you think, to actually warning us? Because West Street has said, you know, we're probably a thousand days away from possibly being under attack. So my sense is, and I'd love the government to correct this, as we're acting now as government communications, is that the UK government, like the European government, want everybody to be able to survive for three days without internet. Electricity and supermarkets and the governments are gambling correctly, I think, that within three days, they'll be able to get stuff to you. We're not setting ourselves up for kind of Mad Max, you know, living for 10 years with no government support, because it's amazing what governments can do. You know, I've seen it even in places like Somalia, how quickly they can get emergency supplies through to people if you properly organize yourself, but yeah, the governments want three days to be able to sort themselves out, and they want you to be able to look after yourself for three days. That strikes me as being extraordinarily optimistic. You just imagine, right, you've just described something where you get these thousands of agents going in. So if they, if you're sitting there in North Korea, or you're sitting there in the Kremlin, or you're sitting there in one of these kind of units that exists to do this stuff, and they've got thousands of people doing it, and they decide, let's absolutely wipe out the effectiveness of the NHS appointment system. Okay. Yep. Not least with With Palantir's involvement, I'm sure they could work out how to do that. Let's say that they then go and they work their way through all our traffic light system. Let's say they then work through and do the fridges thing here. It wouldn't take you long before you have absolute chaos and meltdown. And I think what the hybrid, the impact of this, or the purpose of this, is this goes back to a point I keep making about the difference between democracy and dictatorship, is that the dictatorships who are doing this know that the instinct of, of the population in the democracies is actually to point the finger at their own governments, as opposed to point the finger at the people who are doing this, because they just come out and deny it anyway. And the Kremlin says they're paranoid. This has got nothing to do with us. It's because they haven't invested over time. And they were doing that. The Iranians would do that as well. So I just wonder whether we don't have to be a little bit more upfront about what might happen in the future and how, and then try to explain. What you might do to defend it, because I didn't feel terribly confident in just being told. Well, so do you think the government should say, listen, let's take North Korea as an example. They've got 8,400 specialized trained staff being put through three years of advanced training on cyber attacking. They've just stolen $6.4 billion in crypto from Binance. They've stolen $12.8 billion since 2017, and that the Chinese have invested, you've covered this before, massively in this, you know, tens, of thousands of people working on this. I went to this, um, MOD place that does some of this stuff and a couple of years ago now, and, and they were saying that, you know, I think the reason they wanted me to go there was not necessarily to talk about it, but maybe then to emphasize to government. Yeah. So I said to, I said to them, how many of these have you got in the UK? And they said, well, this is it. And I said, I mean, the Russians got the thousands. So I, I just. I just think that that, if this, if this threat is real, if this hybrid war is the future of modern warfare, if it's about technology, if it's about infrastructure, if it's about destroying morale and creating division, which is why they invest so much in the social media bot space, are we, are we responding in kind? And I don't just mean responding in kind as in, do we do it to them, which I think we should have a proper conversation about, but also are we responding in kind in terms of preparing ourselves as people? As citizens, as a country for what might come, because what you're describing is a, is a Mad Max hell hole down the track. Well, this is something that we're going to have to get into in our existential threats miniseries. And again, do sign up to follow all our miniseries. There's a lot of interesting ones coming down the line at the moment, but we've just done the latest installment of this. We'll move on to cyber later, but we've about to get an interview with Umar Mohammed. He's describing what Mosul was like. This is really looking at terrorism, terrorist groups, the rise of the Islamic state, the experience of living in Mosul during Islamic state occupation. But so much more to be done because I think we shouldn't just be doing the way that AI is increasing cyber threats. We should also talk eventually about how AI will increase bioweapon threats, how it could create, in effect, a combination between, let's say, Ebola. Is spreading as COVID. It's a bit of a paradox there, which biologists will point out. But anyway, the way in which not just finding medicines that cure drugs, but actually creating viruses could be something that comes out of AI. Let's talk about United Nations Secretary General. Antonio Guterres is leaving at the end of the year, and there is a race on to replace him. Toby, who do you think is most likely to replace Guterres as UN SecGen? Simone, the UN is in dire need of strong leadership. The race to replace Guterres, as chaotic as it is, do you think it's going to get the leadership that it needs? Well, let me… He's got his head in his hands. Yeah, well, I mean, I'm putting my head in my hands because the first thing is, where the hell is the reporting coverage and focus on this in the British Parliament, for example? I mean, I've discovered sort of two references to this in Parliament. And we are a P5 member. We're a member of the Security Council. We come boasting about this. We have incredible power. We have incredible power in this. If we eschew a discouragement as a permanent member of the Security Council, we can steer this whole thing, instead of which the whole thing is being steered basically by Russia and the United States working together at the moment, right? It's really nasty. And this will determine the next five, ten years of the United Nations at a critical moment for the rules-based international order. So where the hell is the discussion about this? I mean, it's unbelievable. And just to set it up, this was supposed… opposed, basically, I mean, it's not a formal rule, but in formally supposed to be Latin America's turn. And probably people were expecting a woman. Because there's never been a woman headed to the US. Yeah. And people were thinking Rebecca Greenspan from Costa Rica would probably come through or not, if not her, Rafael Grossi, Argentinian from the IEA. And people thought maybe Rafael Grossi, you know, because Trump likes a melee, the Argentinian candidate could come through. But it feels as though, and this is going to happen very soon on Thursday, there's going to be an indicative vote. Well, I've heard there might not be, which makes me even more worried. Okay. Because if there isn't, what that says to me is that America and Russia, this sort of trilateral that is pending with Xi Jinping later this month, whether that is when they try to stitch it up. Okay. Well, let's then get to the elephant in the room, right? The elephant in the room is the UAE candidate, Lana, Lana Nusebe. So Lana is, a very, very bright, able woman who was the UAE ambassador to the UN. She's highly educated. Her father was a minister in the UAE. Her grandfather was a Jordanian minister. Her great-grandfather was a senior Palestinian politician. Her family, the Nusebes, held the key to the Holy Sepulchre since the time of Saladin. I mean, this is really going some in terms of, you know, the Arab, the grandest Arab aristocracy imaginable. And she's charmed a lot of people. So this is not a personal particular attack on Lana, but there has never been a UN secretary general who hasn't come from what was at least theoretically a democratic state in the whole history of the United Nations. And say what you like about the UAE, that is not a democratic state. More than that, if you look at what the UN association has just said, you're looking for a UN secretary general who's going to uphold the rules-based international order and international humanitarian law. The UAE is absolutely at the center of the conflict in Sudan, where they are supporting a genocidal rebel faction against the government and the army of Sudan. And Lana, for all her merits, has defended it, has refused to accept a UN independent, neutral investigation into what's happening. She's actually challenged the UN inquiry into what's happening. She also, as the ambassador, refused to openly condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine. She led UAE's abstention on the Russian-Ukraine issue. So as secretary general, if Lana wants this job, she's going to have to say, what is the independent investigation she's allowing into Sudan? What is her position on Russia's invasion of Ukraine? How can she be standing up for the rules-based international order and international law? And finally, and maybe most uncomfortable of all, is she actually really independent from the government of UAE, and particularly from Mohammed bin Zayed? Because if she is simply a proxy, for better or for worse, for MBZ, you are putting the autocratic leader of, to put it politely, quite a controversial Middle Eastern state, essentially in charge of the whole United Nations. And that may suit Russia. Why does it suit Russia? Russia-Ukraine, you know, the UAE position on that. Why does it suit the US? Impunity. Right. And it might even turn out to suit China. And France has huge equities. And Britain, and this is the challenge to Britain, right? We have a foreign secretary who has said, you know, well, what's his great phrases? Enough is enough, or we're going to do something this time. Let's see him stand up. Let's see Britain take a position on this. Is Ed Miliband really saying he's happy for the United Nations to effectively be run by the United Arab Emirates, given what the UAE is doing in Sudan, and given what the UAE took as its position on Russia-Ukraine? Come on, Ed. Ed Miliband Right. And the answer to that question, I am relatively confident, would be no. Ultimately, this will become a very big decision for Andy Burnham as prime minister. My fear, and I could be wrong, because there've been several straw polls, and I don't know if it's true, but I don't think it's true. I don't think it's true. And just, we talked about the electoral systems in Israel and New Zealand in the main episode. The system, somebody at the UN said to me, the system to get the secretary general is more complicated and more opaque than getting the Pope. You have these straw polls where the Security Council vote, and you have white polls and colored polls. And the white poll is where all 15 say, which encourage or discourage. Now, Rebecca Greenspan has led every single one, apart from one, when there weren't many people there because it was the middle of the summer. So it looked like, based on the fact it would be a woman, based on the fact it's meant to be Latin America's turn, that she was out there. For some reason, and it doesn't appear to be to do with her views, because Costa Rica is actually a pretty close ally of the United States, the United States just decided it's not going to be her, but don't necessarily want to veto. But then when we get to these colored votes, the P5, they have a red ballot. So you know, if somebody is going to potentially use the veto. So the question you're putting is if at this summit, Trump and Putin, and as you say, we can understand why Putin wants this, because it's a country that you can do business with, and it's a country that has not been gone from over Russia, Ukraine. Trump probably fit it in, just fit it in with the fact that he did the diesel deal, he did the sanctions deal. Let's be truthful. He quite likes being on the same side of this as Putin, because they're the big strong guys in their minds together. They get Xi on board. The Chinese have said, by the way, that they think it should be a woman, and they don't like the idea of going against the rotation idea. Africa, of course, hates the idea of going against the rotation idea, because they should be next. So all that's being in the mix. But if the three of them get together, and the French, by the way, so the P5, just remind people, USA, China, Russia, France, and UK. The French, I think, despite. My understanding is the French foreign minister is very against Lana Lucebe. Despite all the French equity in UAE and their very close relationship with the MBC. But the president, because of what you just mentioned, is your friend Emmanuel Macron, is actually very unlikely to want to veto this. So as you say, that then leaves the UK. Come on, Britain, your last chance. Rules-based international order, people question why you're on the P5 in the first place. Well, you're there. This is your last shout to stand up for it. And hold on. Okay, let's just. So you're Andy Burnham. You're sitting there looking at all the papers. And then throw into the mix the Manchester City situation. Absolutely. And the role of the UAA in investment in Manchester and all that. So this is a big call. Okay, so let's say you're Andy Burnham. I think I'd say to you, firstly, do you care about the UN? Does it actually matter? Because you could take, I think, be horrible. It doesn't really matter. Let the UAE run it. The UN's irrelevant anyway. That is a terrible statement. I agree. And also, you didn't have the UAE-controlled United Nations alongside the Board of Peace as the two sort of overarching things. No, not good. So let's assume he still thinks it matters. Then what kind of UN do you want? Do you want a secretary general whose good offices allow you to intervene? Do you want a UN as a development entity? Do you want a UN as a guarantee of the rules-based international order? There's some strategic choices because. One of the things that seems to be going on with America is they claim that the reason they're against Rebecca Greenspan and others is they don't want anyone really, and grossly, is they don't want UN bureaucrats. They want, surprise, surprise, somebody more like a property developer coming in. In other words, they want some kind of outside. Kushner. Guy to come, exactly, Kushner to come in and run. One of the American papers said that Trump was trying to put Orban forward. Ah, I see. You can see that. I think we'd veto that. And what worries me more, though, it's not that they're trying to send in someone disruptive to reorient the UN bureaucracy and make it, you know, suitable for the 22nd century. More likely, actually, Trump and Russia probably just want the UN to be completely irrelevant and marginalized because they're not interested in a rules-based international order. Everything the UN does annoys them. Get rid of it entirely by appointing somebody who will either make it do what they say or make it. Make it completely irrelevant. Or make it irrelevant. Look, Trump is, over the two terms, and particularly this term, Trump has had a strategy to, I don't know if this word exists, derelevantize the United Nations. And it's been effective. Look at how little the United Nations, apart from the wonderful stuff they try to do on the humanitarian front, but where have they been on the politics of Israel-Gaza? So that has been a deliberate strategy. That's what the border peace is all about. Or Russia-Ukraine. Or Russia-Ukraine. And so you see why, you can see why they want to be there. And it is, it is extraordinary. We are basically hanging our hat here on the hope that China will want to get involved. Just on the voting, by the way, I've just looked it up. So the last sort of the, there was a straw poll on October the 30th. Rebecca Greenspan got 11 encouraged votes and four discouraged. Okay. Lana was in fourth place with seven encouraged and six discouraged and two no opinion. So that is not an overwhelming mandate at all. But if you've got America and Russia working together, leaning on the Chinese with the French, they think just wanting to park it. Then I think this is going to become, and it's amazing, you talk about it's not being discussed in parliament, et cetera. It's amazing it's getting so little media coverage this, because this could become one of Andy Burnham's first really big foreign policy decisions. And ultimately these decisions, you can talk about Ed Miliband all you want. And look, you know Ed Miliband well enough, I think you know where he might be on this, but I think this is going to be tough. And the other thing, by the way, this is the other thing that the derelevantization has done. I suspect it has put a lot of people off thinking that they might want to go for this job, because the truth is, one of the reasons they're struggling is there's been no stellar candidate. It's not an amazing range of candidates, is it? It's weird that, isn't it? And I think there's also a risk that we could end up with no secretary general at all, that you'd end up with a sort of acting secretary general. So the deputy secretary general or one of the other senior UN figures in office indefinitely, in which case you have no leadership, you have no voice. I think that's the other risk. Yeah. Should we take a break? After the break, we're going to talk about the South African election, which has been an extraordinary upset for the ANC that's dominated South African politics since the end of apartheid. We're going to talk about the King and Andy Burnham as different models of international British presence. We're going to talk a bit about reading, and I think analysis might get around to plugging a rival podcast. This episode is brought to you by Barclays Premier. Now, you might look at your pension as some sort of end goal, but there could be a lot of future left to plan for. A lot could change, from personal circumstances to new rules around how you save or how you invest and pass on your wealth. So we're aware of things like policy changes well in advance, but you cannot predict everything. And that's where planning and advice exclusively for Barclays Premier customers comes in. A dedicated wealth planner builds you a personalised plan around your goals, while your wealth manager helps it evolve. as life and the world change. They're here to help you navigate your next steps because it pays to be a step ahead. Search Barclays planning and advice today to learn more. You need to be a UK resident with at least £150,000 available to invest. Other eligibility criteria apply. Money invested for over five years has historically delivered greater growth than cash savings, although investment values can rise and fall over time. We are getting a statement from number 10 on that flight with 350 passengers on board. The great game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia. We assess Prime Minister with high confidence it was Russian. Holding the Russians accountable is World War Three. They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people. The man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. 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 are our most valuable weapons. Devised as a technically rigorous, geopolitical action thriller. We have two times friendly key ideas. Where Britain plays its strongest hand. He's the best. Against its strongest foe. Don't do it, Duffy! Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Devised as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller. We'll see you next week. We have two times friendly key. He's the best. against its strongest foe bear hunt available now wherever you get your podcasts welcome back to the rest is politics question time with me rory stewart and me alistair campbell Now, Alice, a question from Dylan. The ANC has eventually lost support in South Africa. How did we get here? What does it mean for South Africa? So South Africa is a country you've been very, very interested in, all the way back to apartheid, Nelson Mandela. Tell us what you make of what's happened to the ANC in South Africa. Well, they've just had a huge defeat in their local elections under a third of the vote. So if you go back 65% a couple of decades ago, 46% five years ago, and the Democratic Alliance is on the move. This is a party that has generally been seen as very much a party of the whites for the whites, but they do appear to have picked up a fair share of the black vote as well. You're absolutely right. And perhaps the best illustration of the fact that the Democratic Alliance is no longer simply a white party is that they got nearly 25% of the vote and whites are only 7% of the population in South Africa. So the overwhelming majority voting for them would have been black South Africans. go into alliance to the EFF led by Julius Malema, which is this more extreme party as well. Yeah. I think we're interested in South Africa. Do listen to this week's leading with Paul Van Zyl, who is a guy who's in the age of 25, was executive secretary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And I loved the stories of how that commission came together, how it worked, some of the evidence sessions that he described the day that Mandela went there. It's a really beautiful conversation, I think, about how they went, talk about perseverance, going from something so bad as the apartheid regime to within across a period of four years to have, and he kind of admitted there was reconciliation, but not necessarily full truth. And I thought that was a very interesting insight. But I asked him, I said, you know, what do you think the two kind of giants of that process, Mandela and Desmond Tutu, what do you think? What do you think they would be feeling about South Africa today? And he said they would have their head in their hands in total despair. And he was also, I thought, brutally frank about the way that corruption, back to, I'm afraid, the old issue of corruption has really damaged the ANC. And he says, this is a guy who, you know, devoted his kind of youth and his young adulthood to delivering South Africa, helping to deliver South Africa from apartheid rule. And he said, maybe it's a good thing for the ANC to be out of power, because when you're in power for too long, it does corrupt, and it's been corrupted. Actually, Paul said that when Tutu died, he worried that this was the path that South Africa was on already. But Mandela must have thought South Africa was going to be better than this. I'm recommending here a book by Sigrid Rauschen called Ghosts, which is a book about, partly about her husband, Eric Abraham, who was a big ANC figure and a director and very interested in. And developing theater and speaking up to young journalists in South Africa. But it's an account of her spending time in South Africa and experiencing, I think it's done very beautifully and very sensitively, both the sense of hope, but also some very practical things. I mean, you know, I was talking to someone this morning who's in Johannesburg, who says they basically lose water and electricity every single day at the moment. I mean, the inability to deliver the most basic municipal services. That is just a fact of everyday life. And so you'd have to think that the time that they've had since the end of apartheid, not to being able to deliver those basic functional public services has got to be ultimately damaging the government. And again, I had this sort of cliche in the main episode where I said that the big theme across the world for the last seven years has been cost of living. Actually, interesting in South Africa, it's unemployment more than cost of living. Maybe that's a kind of small difference, but it really, it's 74% named unemployment. 21% cost of living and then quite a lot on corruption. Well, Paul was saying, he was talking about the NEETs crisis in the UK, Alan Milburn's reports coming out on Tuesday. He was saying it's six times worse in South Africa. So these are economic challenges that simply haven't been met. And if you have corruption on top of that, it's no surprise that the government is taking a big hit. Energy, infrastructure, electricity. And then the final thing that we've discussed previously with South Africa, which is the rise of populist anti-immigration sentiment, particularly directed against people from, for example, Malawi and Zimbabwe. Yeah. So they're dealing with a lot of the same problems, but they've got coming from a base of far bigger challenges, which just don't appear to be being met by a party that I guess did think, given they delivered what they delivered, probably did think they could be in forever. Nobody should be in forever. Not even new Labour. Well, do you think the country's been a better place for the fact that we had austerity and the Tories, et cetera? Question from Ben, which I'm going to direct at you. Who's more influential on the global stage, Alistair? Do you think the King or the President? I'm going to throw that right back at you. Who do you think? The King or the Prime Minister? I think they both have different levels. of influence but i think the king because he's been around for so long not as king but because he's been such a part of the global furniture for so long and because as you know i've written a chapter about him in perseverance because i think he has really cemented his authority could you have like a kind of strategic theory if you were the prime minister thinking about what things the king leads on what things the prime minister leads on are there certain kinds of issues which are kind of easier for the king to lead on would things like ai and climate be those kind of things or i mean other sort of global i mean how would you sort of or i don't know dealing with trump and state visits how would you sort of divvy it up because they are a team right i mean i think the nice thing about it is it's not like poland where the head of state and the head of government are on opposing sides the king i think is very comfortable being part of the prime minister's team whatever party there is yeah which which is yeah i thought it was amazing watching the senator ceremony on sunday i mean god on my they're going to have to extend it down as much as possible i mean i think it's going to be a lot of work but i think it's going to be a lot of work but i think it's going to be a lot of work but i think it's going to be a lot of as far as the gates to downing street there were 10 prime ministers and i actually thought of him as he sort of went to lay the king's there late off setting up to lay his wreath he has to walk past this line of politicians and of course farage got in there because he's finally crossed the threshold the mps you need it would have been funny to see him seen him and polanski going alongside each other together that would have been better i think in a way this all depends upon the character of the person because you know we talked a lot when johnson was prime minister that so much of our constitution depends on the good chaps theory well the same goes for the monarchy if you had a monarch who actually decided no i'm more important the prime minister yeah that would not work i walk into the room before he does they bow down to me not to him they sing my name not his if that was translated into policy that would become very very difficult the british royal family kind of worked that out in about 1688 yeah but it doesn't mean you don't get one person who comes along and actually thinks you know i'm different the queen who's been there for all of my lifetime and then the current king they're not like that so that means then if you're the prime minister you're probably sensible to think right well they've got all the constitutional stuff that they do so he does lay the wreaths on november the 11th he does do the state opening of parliament the foreign secretary does accompany them on state visits we decide where he goes yeah but the government goes with and i thought it was interesting to watch at chogham there were actually some really nice pictures commonwealth heads of government which was in the caribbean so andy burnham wrote a piece in the guardian in advance where he said he was open to the possibility of the country the state eventually going having a process of dialogue and perhaps issuing a formal apology on slavery on slavery and immediately most of our media went into position of wanting to say this is embarrassing to the king right whereas in fact the king had already gone considerably down that path himself in previous iterations of the on the issue i don't believe that i could be wrong but i don't believe that andy burnham would have committed that thing to print without the palace knowing that was coming so therefore i think that was part of a kind of a tag team going to the chogham summit then you need pretty good teams in number 10 and with the private secretaries in the palace making sure all this stuff is sorted and coordinated quite carefully but if you get that coordination right you can be more than the sum of your parts right you can you get a really interesting tag and also i thought you know again i've said to you i thought his speech to congress was extraordinary and he was saying things which keir starmer then prime minister would have found very hard to say yeah so i think that was another example of where the king would have been very hard to say yeah and i think that was another example of where the king would not have been saying things without you know we were involved when we're doing all the state visits okay america's a bit different but for example when we had it was a chinese state visit i remember here where the where the king when he was prince of wales refused to have anything to do with it because of human rights and all that stuff now i don't think at the king level he'd be able to do that so i think it's you're working out you know famously the letters that he's spider writing and all that stuff and i think ministers and prime ministers they use those to work out what really i think on the environment i think on biodiversity i think on some of these the stuff that he's done over time you're pretty clear about what he's really really cares about and as you know from your what's called the king rory stewart jen yensen huang summit at dumfries house now he's got this particular interested in ai it is interesting you're right i think i think the way to think of it is as a as a sort of tag team and the other thing the other difference of course is that the king the head of state sort of pops in and out of the debate the politicians are in the debate all the time day after day after day after day so i don't know i don't know the answer to that question i'd say right now possibly the king has greater international influence but that that could change did tony blair and margaret thatcher have less or more international influence at the time than the queen i'd say blair and thatcher i think the queen also played it very differently didn't she now rory i mentioned in the main episode the um really nice newsletter that bella wrote and allowed you a few quotes along the way and i just loved this image of you reading as you were driving along you were he had a collection of books you were reading to the team as you drove along i want to i want to know about that what was it well it's an amazing vision i mean the first huge shout out to bella who was actually driving us all the time and it's a lot of driving i mean do you have a driving license i do have so why did you drive why did you not drive because i was reading okay so reading and pontificating so it was terrible and bella was taking i mean you know she was driving on the wrong side of the road from our point of view and doing an amazing job and she was just continuing like we went all the way down from ohio into east kentucky east kentucky west of jenny and did you read the whole time i actually celine has a driving license too and daisy i think doesn't have a driving license but anyway there were four of us in the car bella was doing all the driving as well as producing as well as being our bosses say like for a 10-hour car journey how much of that time were you reading aloud quite a lot of the time and it's quite difficult i mean with daisy and celine in the back to work out quite how much they're listening to if there's occasionally i notice that daisy would sort of put her head on a pillow on the window and she would very sweetly say i find your voice relaxing just i'm just resting a little bit well we both get people telling us they fall asleep to us so anyway listen wendy wants to know this i read your road trip report with interest there's one thing i need to know how did rory manage to do all that in six days while reading seven books it takes me at least a week to read just one what are both of your top reading tips right now but i've seen you read you read books like most people read newspapers you're dipping in and out all the time you're on a kindle i i have books okay well this time i did i had seven books so the whole floor of whatever it's called it's called a car no no there's there's a what's it called the foot hollow the the anyway it's a technical word for it around my feet in the passenger seat the front of the car i had a massive pile of books but they were i mean it's a very most of them not published in britain and you can't actually get them on uk kindle okay because they are americans generally rude uh progressive left-wing americans heading off to east kentucky west virginia and writing about poverty in those places and sometimes i mean it's a wonderful book that i was really enjoying called stolen pride by arlie russell hosschild but arlie hosschild is a lady of a certain age who is a professor of anthropology at uc berkeley and one wonders what happens when she turns up in east kentucky and says i just like to interview you about your support for the neo-nazi party and what you think about this right so there's quite a lot of that going on wonderful book by stephen soul called ramp hollow um and and some of the stuff you would have really loved i mean these the devil is here in these hills is about the miners and the union movement and what was the devil the devil was everything it was the companies particular corporations okay wasn't the devil no but it's corporations blowing off the top of the mountains polluting the water driving children underground the black lung didn't it make you feel that maybe rampant american capitalism isn't all it's cracked out to be it's absolutely unbelievable i mean by the 1920s they were deploying private security teams who were gunning down miners and streets they were sending in planes dropping poison gas on demonstrating i think elon musk would go for that it's unbelievable yeah right i mean it's no this this is this is this is the the real stuff for the american labor movement which i think was probably some of it i don't know probably crushed in the anti-communist movement switch trials the 50s but this was the beginning of this stuff but was also a hotbed of corruption as well also a hotbed of corruption so there's something about american corruption as well although right seven books okay yeah what percentage of the words in those books have you actually read arlie ross saw host child 25 what are you getting rid of wrong about appalachia 95 dispatches from rural america by wendell berry 20 factory man and dope sick by beth macy 50 okay not bad i feel i feel if i like a book though i want to be a hundred percent would you read i mean i think you might find if you've read seven books about earnest progressives going around talking about the story of mining and opioid crises in appalachia you'd be flicking by the end yeah i mean they're beautifully written but every story begins you know jeff is sitting on the front deck of his trailer you know he's 45 years old and then there's you know four paragraphs a description of the appalachian mountains and then we get three pages on his family story and his grandpa with a black lung and i mean i don't want to be mean but you know and i also read i mean there's a wonderful reporting larissa mcfarquer george packer brilliant reporting the yorker shout out to a wonderful guy came to me just in ohio called alec mcgillis who's written a beautiful book again on ohio what proportion of that did you read i read probably 40 percent of that because i was going to meet alec did you say to him i've read your book yeah i probably misrepresented the amount of the book that I'd read, yeah. I'm afraid, yeah. But remember, people like George Packer are foreign correspondents. So they're people who I knew from Iraq and Afghanistan who are going into West Virginia. Sabrina Tavanese, who does this stuff for the New York Times, sort of well over a decade now of reporting of Trump America, was somebody who I knew from Iraq, Libya, places like that. So there is something, if you wanted to be a bit cheeky, if you were from the Republican right, you might question, is there a slight sort of anthropology of the poor American as though these people are most travel writers or going into war zones? J.D. Vance did a version of that himself. I mean, I know it's his area. And of course, hugely popular. I mean, it's a real thing. But as I say, this isn't a genre which breaks through to the U.S. anymore, to be fair, than my book, Middleland, really breaks through into the U.S. market because deep descriptions of rural Cumbria maybe are not things that Americans tend to read. No, whereas I think Perseverance is what America is. J.D. Vance is what America needs right now, don't you think? J.D. Vance Final shout out to you, because I very rarely praise you enough on this. There was a moment on the tour when we were sitting around the table in a diner, and I think Daisy said that somebody was Perseverant. It was a woman that we just interviewed in May 1 in West Virginia. And I went, no, come on, surely we can come up with another word. And the four of us around the table were unable to come up with a better word than Perseverance. So in the end, you filled the gap there. J.D. Vance Now you've got to come up with a good word for blue-green, because, well, you know, orange describes red-yellow. We got a single popular word for red-yellow, which actually was a really revolutionary, you'd be interested in etymology. It was a revolutionary discovery in the Middle Ages. We didn't have a proper word for orange until that thing, the narange, came over from Asia to Europe. The fruit arrived, and then we found this color called orange, right? We never really developed, a popular word for blue-green. J.D. Vance Is there not? J.D. Vance No. And you've got to develop it, and that could be a new word you could- J.D. Vance Okay. Book number 23. J.D. Vance Next year's- J.D. Vance It's not the word the world needs now, though. It doesn't need that word now. J.D. Vance Yeah, it will be. You get that- J.D. Vance Perseverance is the word the world needs now. J.D. Vance Think about the word orange, whoever introduced that. I mean, you imagine getting through your life without the word orange for the color. J.D. Vance I must give a shout out to a rival podcast. J.D. Vance No, what? Why would you do that? J.D. Vance Yeah, I must. I must. I must do this. J.D. Vance No, what were you talking about? J.D. Vance I'll tell you why. Because Harriet Harman- J.D. Vance Yes. J.D. Vance Who is one of the presenters of Electoral Dysfunction- J.D. Vance Ah, yes. J.D. Vance They were discussing this new word, "mogging." And Harriet in the discussion said, "I don't like that new word. My favorite new word is 'perseverance.'" And she explained why. So, Harriet, I love you. I thank you. J.D. Vance And if you praise Alastair, you get a shout out. Your podcast gets a shout out. J.D. Vance No, because I get praise from so many people. Shall I tell you the praise that most touched me this week? Talking of books. I was in Westminster yesterday going to the launch of this wonderful Back Young People Now. Back Young People Now. Six guarantees that we want all the parties to go for. And I'm coming out the tube with this young guy who's looking after me for the campaign. And this young woman walks by me and nods, and I say hello, and she says hello, and then she runs past me. Then she turns and she shouts, "Alastair!" And I look back and she comes to me and says, "Look, I've seen you going to the live show." J.D. Vance I know. J.D. Vance Goes swimming. And I've never, I've always been too sort of embarrassed to talk to you. But do you mind if I tell you something? You changed my life. She said she picked up But What Can I Do, my previous book, as a result of which she said, "I've got to get involved. I've got to do something." She's now a spad in number 10. J.D. Vance Well, there we are. It's good. An encouragement for anyone listening to write books, because you can genuinely change people's lives. J.D. Vance And an encouragement for anybody to go into apologies. J.D. Vance Just after your podcast plug, I should plug my friend Ben Goldsmith, who just had his birthday, Rewilding the World. Podcast, where he and I get into a massive row. As usual, I'm standing up for small farmers in Cumbria. He's standing up for reintroducing wildcats and lynx. But anyway, if people want a good rural Britain environment farming exchange. Ben Goldsmith I watched it. I thought it was quite agreeable. J.D. Vance Oh, good. Ben Goldsmith I mean, you weren't too bad tempered. J.D. Vance Weren't too bad? Okay, good. Ben Goldsmith No, you weren't nearly as bad tempered as you were with Kevin Rudd. J.D. Vance Very good. Okay. Ben Goldsmith Or Jonathan Powell or Sadiq Khan. J.D. Vance Yeah, yeah, that's it. That's it. That's it. Ben Goldsmith Can I plug a couple of novels? Because I've been going through a bit of a novel phase. Ben Goldsmith Just describe. For those of you who are listening as opposed to watching, Alistair is holding up Back Young People Now: The Six Guarantees About Making Young People's Wellbeing a National Priority and Winning the Changes That Will Improve It. J.D. Vance Which are school being more than exams, teaching life skills, looking after mental health, tech, something to do, youth clubs, etc. and apprenticeships. And Rory, I want to give you a little lesson in presentation. There's the slogan. Okay. My contribution to the slogan was that full stop. So it's Back Young People Now. Ben Goldsmith Good. J.D. Vance As opposed to Back Young People Now. Ben Goldsmith Well, that's the thing. People underestimate punctuation as power. Punctuation can be very powerful. J.D. Vance So I've been going through a novel phase. I don't know whether it's because I've been having all these kinds of accidents to me and dropping tea on laptops and having a couple of diary malfunctions and doing too much in Australia, which is, by the way, PSA, for the first time since the launch of this podcast, I will not be appearing for the next two weeks because we've just not made it work. It's impossible. Ben Goldsmith From Australia. J.D. Vance It's just been impossible. The time difference and the commitments of both of us, not being possible. Ben Goldsmith Well, let's have a little competition on who people think, when I'm going to reveal, I'm going to bring in a status. Will it be Michael Gove? Let's find out. J.D. Vance Well, it won't be Michael Gove. Ben Goldsmith It won't be Michael Gove, no. J.D. Vance I can tell you that now. Ben Goldsmith But anyway, let's have a little competition. J.D. Vance We've got to get Labour people, surely. I always go for Tories. I know Mehdi had Mehdi Hassan, didn't I? I can't say that. Ben Goldsmith Yeah, well, let's see. J.D. Vance What's the prize? Ben Goldsmith Let's see. Let's see. J.D. Vance What's the prize for the first person? How many people are you going to have over two weeks? Well, here we are. Signed Perseverance and signed Middleland to the first person who accurately guesses one of the four. Ben Goldsmith No, no, two of the four. Two of the four we'll have. Guessing one's too easy. Two out of the four and you get a signed copy of both. J.D. Vance I think it's quite hard. Ben Goldsmith Anyway, tell us about your novel. J.D. Vance So the first one a lot of people will have heard of, The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Sprout, which I think was up for the book but didn't get it. It's just absolutely brilliant. And even though it's not a book about politics, there's a lot of politics in it because it's included in The Things We Never Say. It goes a little bit to what you discovered in America. It's basically a story about a relationship and relationships more generally. But The Things We Never Say include in this book and in America, people not wanting to talk about politics. And there's this extraordinary bit where the guy, the husband, develops this, this friendship with somebody who helped save his life. And as the friendship develops, there's sort of months into it before somebody says to him, you realize that guy's a massive Trumper. And they've just never, ever, ever talked about politics. And then there was called The Green Highlander, which is actually the name of a fishing hook. And it starts as a story about, it's by a guy, Robin Coupland, who's an old friend of mine. And it starts as a story about family fishing holiday. But it becomes a kind of geopolitical murder mystery. So I read them both in a day. Oh, that's very good. Okay, my little shout out, which is a bit niche. Marilynne Robinson, who people will know for Gilead, has written a book called Reading Genesis, which is quite serious, but it's a wonderful tribute, in a sense, to Judaism. And I think that there is a tendency with all the conflict in the Middle East to forget just how much the Old Testament and Jewish belief enshrines such extraordinary, inspiring, humane, loving vision of man, woman, and God. And what a universal message the message of the Old Testament is. So, yeah, Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis. Very good. All right, Roy, see you next week. No, I won't see you next week. I'll see you in two weeks. See you in two weeks' time. Have a great trip to Australia. Of course. And apologies to listeners in New Zealand. They can't make it this time. What if I told you that there is a one in six chance of human beings being wiped out in the next hundred years? One in six. We're facing a crunch point in human history. A handful of threats could end life as we know it. It might be nuclear war. There is high risk in a confrontation between Europe and the United States. In Russia or between the United States and China, there will be no food, ears without sunshine, but the catastrophe will be global for artificial intelligence. At the highest level, there are risks of AI takeover. Even Hitler had to sleep because he was an organic entity. AI doesn't sleep. This is the moment that we completely lose control. It could be engineered pandemics. If every five days I infect 10 and then 10 infect 10, it would take about 39 days to get to 70 million people, which is about the population. In Britain, the jump from 70 million to 8 billion is just another 10 days. Or is the greatest threat we face actually less tangible? Could it be economic warfare or the collapse of our political systems? You know, the choke point of all choke points in the global economy is the US dollar. All it takes is Donald Trump taking out his Sharpie in the Oval Office and signing a document, and that's it. You could send another country into a recession if you wanted to. Or perhaps are we the real existential threat? The strange ways in which humans convince themselves to do very, very awful things. The question is very simple. How do we continue to live together? To hear my new series on thinking the unthinkable, sign up at TheRestIsPolitics.com.