Is Trump about to put boots on the ground in Iran?

[MUSIC PLAYING] This is a global player, original podcast. Trump's latest salvo. He's threatening to obliterate Iran's car island if he can't get the deal he's offered. I don't think the Iranians think at the moment they are on the edge of defeat. The fact that American Marines are now threatening to take your island does not make you want to come to the table. There are options for America. Something is going on here. Trump likes this sort of element of surprise. What are we doing? What putting boots on the ground? In Iran, are you mad? But they have to open it up. They have to open up the straight of Trump. I mean, harmless. Excuse me, I'm so sorry. Such a terrible mistake. Fake news will say, he accidentally said, now. There's no accidents with me, not too many. If there were, would ever major story. Well, we do. And there are. And once again, Trump is laughing about something that's left the rest of the world reeling. But is he about to put boots on the ground in Iran now? And where will that lead the rest of the world? But putting boots on the ground, trying to forcibly take to the carg island involves the most enormous risks to American lives. Is Donald Trump really prepared to do that? Welcome to the news agents. The news agents. It's John. It's me, it's. And we're going to start with Donald Trump's a truth social post, which, classically, in Donald Trump, fashion looks both ways at once. So let me just read a bit of it to you. The United States of America is in serious discussions with the new and more reasonable regime to end our military operations in Iran. Great progress has been made. But if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be. And if the hormones straight is not immediately open for business, we will conclude our lovely state in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their electric generating plants, oil wells, and carg island, and possibly all desalination. And possibly all desalination plants, which we have purposefully not yet touched. Once again, we're back on Monday morning trying to work out how to read Trump's words. And Iran is trying to do the same. Iran has called America's terms illogical and excessive. It says the American proposals re-opening the Straits are unrealistic, illogical, and excessive. And I think the problem is at the moment that much as you'd like to rubbish the Iranian response to this, that's kind of where a lot of the world is right now because we are trying to make sense of, as you would say, two things at once. He's talking about taking the oil in Iran to put this in context. 90% of Iran's own oil. It has been bombed previously two weeks ago. But at the time, Trump very carefully did not take the refineries. He did not want to shut off Iran's own source of oil. This time round, with what looks to be an amphibious response, I mean, I always feel weird saying that word, because I think of frogs, but you get what I mean. These troops are arriving, the expatry force essentially is arriving in the seas around Iran. Cargailand is not in Hormuz. Cargailand is, if you like, to the left, I guess we'd say, the west of Iran and the Hormuz Straits are on the east of Iran. But the boats are carrying US Marines now who would presumably have to go on shore to go aboard and actually take the island by force if they want now to control Iran's oil supplies. Now, if you're Iran, right, a week ago this time, you were told that there had been a peace plan put on the table and that you had known all about this 15-point peace plan. We've now learned a little bit more about these 15 points, which was essentially 12 of them were demands from the Americans and three were offers to remove sanctions or to make life slightly easier for the Iranians. And at the time, Iran just said, sorry, that we've had no direct communication, we've had no part of these peace plans, we don't know anything that's going on. Now, even if they were lying at the time, right, even if there was something afoot at the time, even if there was a sort of intermediary using a man or Pakistan or Turkey at the time, sort of trying to soften the way for these talks to happen. The fact that American Marines are now threatening to take your island does not make you want to come to the table, right? It's illogical in the extreme. Go back to your frogs and amphibious landing. So, you know, Marines are in theatre. The Pentagon last night. A weird phrase. A weird phrase. But the Pentagon last night released pictures of Marines sort of tooled up with their weapons and their headsets and their helmets on and their dark goggles and all the rest of it. And it was to show the Iranians, look, we're here. We're ready. We're ready to do all this. It would mean sending boats and amphibious boats up the Strait of Hormuz, which so far no American warship has dared enter to forcibly land on Harg Island, which is presumably heavily defended. And then you will have presumably as well 82nd Airborne trying to land on Harg Island as well. And the danger of that is that it becomes a Turkey shoot and you are putting an awful lot of American lives at risk to retake this strategically, vital piece of island, a piece of real estate in the Strait, but at what cost, at what risk? And Donald Trump, is he really prepared to do that? At the same time, he's saying, "Yeah, the talks are going really well." With whom? We're still unclear about who is negotiating. We know that messages are being passed, but our negotiations really under way. I don't think they are. Let's hear from Donald Trump himself on Air Force One. And I would only say that we're doing extremely well in that negotiation, but you never know with Iran, because we negotiate with them, and then we always have to blow them up, whether it's the B-2 bombers, or just terminating as an example, the Iran nuclear deal done by Barack Hussein Obama, probably the worst deal we've ever done as a country. What are the dumbest deals we've ever done? Well, he's talking about blowing Iran up, and Iran's parliament, the speaker there, said that forces were waiting for American ground troops so that they could rain fire upon them. Look, I think something is going on here, which is that Trump likes the sort of element of surprise, right? He thinks that he's unpredictable. In my head, that is one of the most boring, aggrandizing cliches of our time, that Trump is always this, "Woo-oo-oo, what's going to happen?" He's like, he's sort of like, "What was the Pink Panther movie guy called Kato Fong, who sort of comes out of nowhere and karate chops and swings from the chandelier and tries to give the whole world a sort of reflex test at the same time?" And I actually think there's less sort of Kato Fong and more Inspector Cluso to Trump, which is that he's sort of haplessly bumbling around, leaving this wake of chaos in his steed. And we all respond as if like, "Oh, what's he going to do next? What's he going to do next?" We know. We've seen how he acts, right? There is a pattern to how he acts, which is generally on a Monday, you hear about calming things down, right? Because that's where the markets are. The markets don't want to hear bad news. So they kind of get very jittery and the whole idea of the taco then came from traders, right? Originally, when Trump choose a position that's really unpopular, then they kind of go, "Oh, the market's not going to like this "and he chickens out." If you look at when Trump bombs, it's always on a Saturday morning or a Sunday morning, or late, late Friday night after the markets have shut. So where are we now? We're in a place where he's threatening. He'll watch the markets go down and then I'll go, "Oh, actually, we're going to deal. "It's all going to be fine." Because that's how he does it, right? The trouble is now he's got all these military troops. He's got all these sort of people, personnel, who are waiting for their next sign. What do we do? Do we listen to Trump say, "Oh, actually, we could still do a deal." Or Hexer, who's saying, "Well, crazy Hexer things. "Just listen to him over the weekend." That is why President Trump has drawn a new strategic map from Greenland to the Gulf of America to the Panama Canal and its surrounding countries. At the Department of War, we call this strategic map the Greater North America. Why? Because every sovereign nation and territory north of the equator from Greenland to Ecuador and from Alaska to Guyana is not part of the global south. Each one of these countries border either the North Atlantic or the North Pacific. Each one of these countries sits north of the two basic geographic barriers that exist in this region. The Amazon and these mountains. This is basic geography. Hexer left with the mammoth task of trying to find a strategic map to America's neighborhood. In other words, basically anything that Trump looks at that he wants to take the car spot. Exactly. the definition of the American empire. Look, you talked about Cluzon a moment ago. There is a phrase in French, "Il f'est un port de quoi", which roughly translates as "he doesn't know what he's doing", but it's more than that in French. It's just such a great phrase because it also hints that it's observed, it's irrational, it hasn't been thought through, there is no analysis, and you just go "Il f'est un port de quoi", and you know, we shout at referees during a football match that they don't know what they're doing. This is somehow kind of worse because it's suggesting that the behaviour is irrational and ridiculous and it goes on. And honestly, I'm now at the stage where I think that Donald Trump's behaviour is "Il f'est un port de quoi", because it seems to me that every day you reach some new absurdity, some new irrationality, and some weird justification for the behaviour that the more you look at it, the less you see of how it makes sense. And you know, so you let's go back to Carg Island and whether the Americans are going to take it by force. The Iranians are still firing missiles a month into this war that are hitting targets in the Gulf and in Israel. They are being very effective, they may not be firing as much as they were, but even the Americans are now not saying, "Well, we've reduced their capability by 90 percent", they're just saying they're firing 90 percent less than they were at the start, which means they've still got stockpiles, they've still got command and control. And so for America to go into Carg Island, say, and try to retake it, could be absolutely perilous. And if the Iranians know that they can do such damage, they probably think, "Why am I going to sit down and agree to a 15 point police plan dictated by Donald Trump that is very unfavorable to us? I don't think the Iranians think at the moment they are on the edge of defeat that annihilation is coming and that they have to wave a white flag and surrender to Donald Trump right now." Look, we're always asking, aren't we, who are the gatekeepers around Trump? At the moment, there are very few, right? Within his own cabinet, we're hearing Sauragat's gone air, you know, the whole time defending how great the strategy is and how he's winning the war, not least, his own Secretary of Defense, Stoke War. But there is the Israeli cabinet, who actually may very well prove to be the guardrails on this and the Israelis are not prepared to follow Trump into a ground war. And I think that is really important. The other person who's missing from this is JD Vance, right? Now we've raised an eyebrow about JD Vance's commitment to any kind of sort of overseas war. If those negotiations with Iran were even beginning to take shape, right? If there was anything to them, we would see JD Vance as promised in the middle of them coming out and saying these are going well. The fact that it's just been left to Wicoff and Kushner, the sort of chuckle brothers in this scenario, right? I think tells you that they're not sending in the Vice President, they're not sending in somebody who can get Trump on speed dial anytime, you know, he wants to say we think we're making progress. Vance doesn't want to be near here or there's nothing for him to do or there isn't the room at the moment to see any kind of peace taking shape. So I think that kind of puts the peace thing in a whole new light. And I think the amphibious landing when Israel is basically waving a finger and saying, are you sure about this? Are you sure? Because we are definitely not. Is something that actually might stop him and is? Yeah, and you go back in history and you quoted you have Galant there. The turning point in the Second World War as far as Britain and America was concerned was D-Day, June the 6th, 1944. That was an extraordinary landing on the beaches of Normandy. But my God, the cost in lives was huge to kind of land on to mainland Europe and start retaking parts of Northern France. Now, I just don't see that Donald Trump has public opinion in a place where it is anywhere near ready for something like that, which they do not understand, which the American people understand, do not understand why Donald Trump is doing this, particularly when Donald Trump promised the exact opposite when he ran for office. And even within his mega coalition, I mean, the thing that strikes me, listening to Lewis, his stuff from CPAC over the weekend, the conservative political action committee conference in Texas was how many of them are still with him, but there are undoubtedly fractures appearing with saying, what are we doing? And again, this all underlines to me that some people think that Donald Trump is the great Savant who kind of knows and plays this game of three-dimensional chess that only mere mortals can watch and wonder at. I don't think he's anywhere near that. I think they're making it up as they go along, that there are options for America and all those options right now are bad. It is curious, I mean, that you use the word Savant. The FT dug out this quote from Trump, you know, the FT has been speaking to Trump on the phone again, which is kind of how you get him these days. In 1988, so coming up for what? 40 years ago, Trump said, I'd do a number on Carg Island. He said that in an interview with the Guardian, I'd go in and take it. Iran can't even be Iraq, because this was in the Dye Days of the Iran and Right War. And yet they push the United States around, it'd be good for the world to take them on. So, I mean, there is a world where you think Trump had this idea 40 years ago and now thinks, nothing's changed and he might as well just do it now because he's in a position where he can. I don't know if that shows what foresight or some kind of long-term strategic thinking, or if it just means that he's never really dealt with reality, he's just had a fixed idea that stays with him and now thinks he can do what he wants because he's actually got the military behind him. The other aspect of this, which we haven't spoken about, which has changed over the course of the weekend, which is the Houthis starting to fire missiles at Israel. A different bit of the map if you kind of get it out, but it's the Red Sea that leads up to the Suez Canal. It's not just oil we're talking about, it's containerships with all sorts of goods that are delivered around the world. If the Houthis start trying to choke off parts of the Red Sea, then again, that is going to add another economic blow to world trade. We're already seeing the world reeling as it is from the rising oil prices, the limited amount of fertilizers that are getting through to other places, affecting what farmers are going to charge for their foodstuffs, for their crops in the next season. If we are also going to have the Red Sea kind of with limited amount of deliverance because shipping, they're not going through the Red Sea either. Then you can see that Iran, because it's the Iranians that support the Houthis, Iran is playing this. I mean, they're an evil, terrible, awful regime. They're playing it very cleverly, and they're using the weapons that they've got. They haven't got the firepower. They're kind of explosive firepower that the Americans have got, but they've got economic power, and they are using that. From a range of trusted voices and award-winning journalists. Find out the latest news and hear every side of the story. But we're dealing with some people that I find to be very reasonable, very solid. We have a very serious chance to make it a day on which almost all of the world recognized that Donald Trump is a deranged liar, so what on earth happens next? The fallout of the Iran War, follow it live on LBC. Listen on our free global player app or the LBC app. The news agents. Look, I think even if there was a Thunderbolt and the whole America, Iran thing ended overnight. Don't think that oil prices would just like revert to means, right? It will take weeks. The journalists predicted it could take six months to actually see oil prices go back to normal levels. And this is clearly on our government's mind. And Kirstaama is right now trying to find the path between a defiant message to Trump. And what the hell happens? Because this is not our war. And we are not going to be dragged into it. [Applause] Yes, of course, we will defend British lives and British interests in the region, we'll stand by our allies in the Gulf region. But we're not going to get dragged in. That's my values. That's my principles and that's what we've applied to our decisions, whatever the pressure and whoever it's coming from. But what a contrast if you took Kenny Baid or not, or Nigel Farage. What did they want to do? They wanted to go straight in with both feet into the war without thinking. Okay, so there was a little bit of, let's call it, early local election campaign going on at the tail end of that speech, I think. Kirstaama sounds very bold, doesn't he? You know, we're not going into this war, compare me to the others. Interesting enough, Kenny Baidnock has also confirmed today that she would not welcome, she would not be part of a push to get ground troops in British forces into the area, but I still. think it doesn't explain to us what part we will play. Right? There's the question of, do we send the anti-mindship? Is that considered to be a provocation to the Iranians? There are people who are sitting in Dubai jails we read for their part in sort of filming Iranian warfare who are finding that they're being targeted for, you know, why hasn't your government done more, why haven't British, British people put more pressure on on your government to help us out more. Starmars talking about helping allies in the Gulf, right? But what does that involve doing then? What does he send? So I think the answer to that is that there's going to be no British kind of warships anywhere near the straight of almost until there's some kind of agreement. In which case the British could be part of the policing of the straight of Hormuz. But they're not going to go through it. So once it's all done? Yeah, yeah, once it's all done. So you don't send your mind sweepers in just just yet. Okay. Unless it gets mind and then there is a real kind of battle going on and you could send, but I don't think. Well, it is mind, isn't it? I mean, isn't that the whole point? There are a lot of reports of 12 minds that have been put into the straight of Hormuz. And the reason that shipping isn't moving is Iran is saying you're not moving. And that's good enough for most tanker captains to think I'm not going anywhere near. And for insurance companies to say forget it. We're not ensuring you to go through when the Iranians are saying you can't. So it's possible that you could have some kind of fragile agreement and Britain sends mind sweepers into at that point to try to kind of check that the shipping routes are clear before the tankers go through. That is perfectly possible. What Britain is doing at the moment is it's got its Air Force. It's got, you know, kind of anti sort of missile bases around the Gulf and trying to take out, you know, Iranian attacks and mitigate those. I think the question that's really interesting is what can Kier Starmad do at home? I think that's the critical one. Oil prices are going up. We've seen in other countries around the world people start to talk about petrol rationing. We haven't had petrol rationing for decades. And the idea that pumps could start running out of, you know, unledded petrol or diesel. And therefore people are going to have to queue at pumps to get their fill up their cars and that there is some kind of rationing in place. Well, it's already going on. We were talking, I think, about the measures in Southeast Asia last week. Yeah, but we're already seeing some countries saying you can only drive on alternate days. I mean, that's a measure from the 1970s. I think Australia has now introduced two states in which they are keeping free transport. Public transport is free for a month. Right? In other words, leave your car at home, but this is a car at. Come on, come on to our subways, come on to our buses, come on, the trains, do whatever you want. But don't believe the car in the car. But don't, but don't bring your car in. And the Philippines, I think, is now rationing how much oil people can buy when they can drive. Thailand, we talked about the air conditioning being turned off. I mean, these are kind of, these are proper sort of, you know, it's bigger than the stuff even during austerity, right? Where the state is intervening now to tell you how you can or can't live. Yeah, right? When I was based in France, there was a big tanker's driver's strike and there was no fuel anywhere. And it was alternate date. If you had an even number plate, you could drive on Monday's Wednesdays and Friday's. And if you had an odd number plate, you could have a, you drive on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. I mean, kind of nuts. But the idea that here we are in 2026, and this is being seriously talked about is really interesting. Well, it's not being talked about by our government yet. So, Gostarma has got at the moment the senior executives of Shelby P Norwegian energy company Equinole in Downing Street, discussing contingency measures. And if you listen to Bridget Phillips and at the weekend, she is basically screaming, don't panic. Keep calm and carry on. Do not go to the pumps. Do not fill up your car. Do not, in other words, take matters into your own hands. Otherwise, we really will have a great privilege. Yeah, exactly. Let's just listen to her tone here on the Sunday shows. Look, it's clear that there could be. We don't know yet, but there could be shortages of oil and gas even food because of this war. What is the government doing to ensure that emergency vehicles, hospitals, schools don't run out? As a government, any government would always have contingency plans to make sure that we can deliver what is necessary. But I would just say that where it comes to what consumers will say in their day-to-day lives, you know, the trade bodies, the RAC, the AAR have been absolutely clear that if you go into the pump, just fill up as normal, continue as you are. We've got that security of what is coming in and production isn't affected. And I think people should take note of what those trade bodies are saying. Of course, governments will always plan for what we need to do to make sure in the event of any disruption we are well prepared. But of course, what we are working to do is to support that de-escalation of the conflict. Yeah. So the question is, does the government convey a sense of we've got this, we're looking at all contingency measures but don't panic, or does the government say, actually it'd be really helpful if you could look at the lights you're leaving on, the petrol you're using, the heating you're using. Are we all going to be told to turn down, you know, the thermostat, just wet, pushes some time gets to its coldest weekend of the year. So the problem that Kirstauma has got and the problem that Britain has got, which is different from other countries, they're all grappling with rising prices as far as fuel is concerned, is that our cost of government borrowing is going up. So people look at Britain and think, well, if I'm going to buy your government debt, you're going to have to give me a bloody good rate of interest before I buy it. And so the government is having to give out more and more money to fund government debt. And that means, you know, what fiscal headroom you've got is being taken by that. So if the government suddenly announced, right, we are going to drop fuel prices or subsidise or lift VAT on fuel or, you know, reduce VAT on fuel, then the government is going to face even higher borrowing costs. And so it's got very limited room for maneuver of what it can do because of, you know, past history of the Liz Truss shock and the lack of confidence in economic growth in this country. And what we did during COVID, all those things are adding up to make us with very, very limited ability to come in and help consumers. So although, you know, Rachel Reeves wants to give targeted help to certain groups. It's very difficult to see how that works. Yeah, but if you are listening now to sort of industry figures who kind of are watching the trajectory on this, they're warning that the UK could start to see fuel shortages within two weeks. Right. I mean, this is not sort of somewhere over the horizon or somewhere in sort of late August, September, if we don't get things. So if that's actually what's coming to us, right, we are just about to go into a period of, um, local election campaigning, right? I mean, imagine what that feels like the country if you're going out and saying, it's all fine, we're too fine, but just, you know, we're going to run out of oil and fuel in two weeks time. And that thing about running out of fuel in two weeks time, I mean, look, you know, there are still oil suppliers going in and I'm sure that the government has got contingency plans of what it's going to do about this. But what creates a fuel shortage is people changing their behaviour. It's like a run on a bank. Banks don't run out of money unless everyone suddenly turns up at the bank and says, I want all my money out now. And what you're going to find is that people who've got a car sitting at home with half a tank of petrol thinking, oh, Christ, I better go and fill out now. And hey, press that overnight, you're going to have cues outside filling stations. They can't get the petroling fast enough. And you will create the oil shortage. Yeah, but I think I think we're in a very different place now to the sort of the origins of the keep calm and carry on slogan, which is there is much less trust now, frankly, you know, people who stayed at their desks in 9/11 who were told, don't pound it, you're going to be fine with the ones who never got out of their life. You know, people who have been told, it's all going to be fine. You'll get your money from the northern rock collapse. Many of them lost money because they couldn't get it out because there was the run. And I don't think that people listen to their governments in the same way now. I think that's something that has materially changed, right? COVID or the infected blood scandal or Hillsborough or any of these things, right? It's not the problem of one government or of one electorate. It's just that we are much less willing, I think, to put our faith and our trust in government. You know, government's going to bail you out. Well, what if it doesn't? What if we don't? I think I'll take care of my own car now. Thanks very much. And you can see why Kierst Amhery's meeting with these oil executives, because he knows that, Rachel Reeves knows that. Yeah. And that the risk of people taking matters into their own hands and thinking, right, I don't, when as soon as the government says to me, keep calm and carry on. Right, I'm going down the petrol station and filling up now because I'm worried. that we are going to run out and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So your point, which you made a couple of weeks ago and it is weird, I mean we should sort of, you know, be frank about this, we are sort of going round the same questions really as this war goes on. I think frankly because I don't think we'd still be sitting here five weeks on, did you? I didn't think we'd still be kind of leading on Iran because we genuinely don't know if it's going to become a ground invasion in the next 48 hours or not, right? That's where we are now. Well, two or three weeks ago it felt much more limited and much more localised and much more discreet as a conflict and we've now seen in the past three weeks it spreading, it magnifying and the situation getting worse not just in the region but for the global economy. Yeah, so your point that you made I think about a week ago, 10 days ago maybe, was that the winter of discontent was about the winter, right? It was the fact that it was cold, it was dark and we really felt, I mean I remember as a kid we felt the power cuts, right? It was scary, you know, at home I candlelight and all the rest of it and you'd be cold and you couldn't cook your food and it was winter. In summertime, just put this into context for me, we need less oil for heating, right? Unless oil for what? I mean, is it an easier thing? Is it altogether an easier thing? Yes, for Britain because we've got a temperate climate so we're not firing up air conditioning units. So energy use goes down. Anyway. Britain over the summer. Yeah. Obviously if you're in the southern hemisphere you're going into winter now and you're going to be needing all those things. So people will be. And if you're in Southeast Asia you're going to be boiling anyway and you definitely need the AC units running. So in Britain, you know, and it will be that people will kind of maybe drive less or whatever. But I think that there is it, that's an important factor. But if you've got fuel shortages and problems with supply and people want to have their cars filled and be able to get around the country and you know, obviously if it's the summer then people are driving off on their holidays and going down to wherever they are for a couple of weeks. They want to be able to have the, you know, their car available to them. And if you are airlines you want to be able to buy jet fuel and that as well is going to be hit by this. So you're going to see flight cancellations if this goes on. And I think it's so important what you said and yeah we are going around in circles about this in some extent but you know how can you ignore something of this size. We are going to go around these issues. That doesn't mean that any less important. They're getting worse as time goes on. The news agents. I'm going to start with a quote which you will find quite ironic when you hear why. This is from Sam Leith in the spectator and he says sometimes a nickname comes along. So accidentally unkind that you know it's going to stick. One such is Matt GPT. This is about the ral that has erupted over the failed reform candidate for Gordon and Denton, Matt Goodwin, a former academic who has written a book and faces accusations that actually much of it or substantial amounts of it came from AI chat GPT. This is the exchange that he had on GB news with Mewiam Kate's hosting and a writer called Andy Twelves picking him apart. I ran it through chat GPT. Do you want to know what chat GPT says? It said this does not read like an AI written book. There is no credible evidence this book was written by AI. In fact no let me finish because this is important. This is about integrity. In fact the dominant signals in this book point the other way. There's prohuman authorship. There's emotionally driven language. There's escalating rhetoric. There's signature voice writing. There's long range argument structure. There's intentional narrative control. You have deliberately misled people this week by taking some historical quotations. Where are the quotes from? Where are the quotations which are misled? Tell me where the quote is from. Just to imply. Just to imply that I have written this book basically on AI. I am hoping in here as the judge. You've been apologising. You've had a week. I am jumping in here as the chair. The specific accusation is not that you've used AI to write the whole book. That's what Andy said. The specific accusation that Andy has made today on this show is that there are various quotes that appear in your book that don't have references and that Andy and others can't find incited literature. He's not accusing you of writing the whole book by AI. I might do later but that's not the accusation now. Where did you find those specific quotes? Let me give you an example and then I'll come back to the scrootern and the walker corner examples. One of the things I wrote in the book was this. The state should begin with the people closest to us, which was Cicero. Do you know what he actually said? According to a Cicero scholar in the times this week, the supreme duty of the state is to protect its own citizens. So if there are misattributed quotes such as that, they will be corrected within 48 hours. But what Andy and the critics of this book are doing? Let's just be clear, Miriam, because it's important. They are focusing on minor typos like Boris Johnson being in opposition. Minor typos are fundamental typos. It's a minor typo. It's a minor typo because they don't want to engage with the argument of this book. The argument of this book, let's be clear, is one that you completely disagree with. I would like to ask you a question. What part of the argument of suicide of a nation do you actually disagree with? Well, I think the whole thing is just based on falsehoods, which we're getting into in the second. Now there we go. Now there we go. Now there we go. So this is quite a long exchange between the two of them. At the end of which, I feel like we can say we're non-the-weiser as to where he got some of those quotes from. He hasn't managed to respond to Andy Twelves in a way that clarifies where the people he quoted in his book got their words from. Also, when you're doing a book, you know that you're going to face scrutiny. So, you know, often I would think, "Oh, I want to use that quote." And then you check it and they say, "Well, it's widely attributed as being too such and such, but there's argument over it." In which case, you think, "Well, you might say widely attributed." He's given a series of quotes, which no one can find where they've come from. Do you know what? I mean, I think the wider question is the whole sort of career trajectory of Matt Goodwin, which we are starting to sort of reconsider, sort of post facto now, because a decade ago, we would invite him onto the BBC on to Newsnight, he would be this sort of respected academic. He was somebody who we trusted with poll numbers. He was somebody. Well, he was a populous academic. He was an academic studying populism. Yes, but it shouldn't matter what you study. It shouldn't matter whether you're studying antifur or populism or the far right or the far left or whatever. You expect an academic to be getting their facts right and their numbers right and their polling right and you expect them there to be a weight of some academic research and what they were doing. I mean, we never questioned at the time the things that are now becoming much more obvious, which is that, you know, he makes up numbers. He makes up facts. He got into a big rar with Medi Hassan a few years ago because he was talking about the percentage of foreigners that were living in London housing, I think it was. And Medi Hassan, who is just a commentator, had to put him right. You said on GB News, for example, falsely, and I quote, "more than 50% of social housing in London is now occupied by people who are not British. This is not acceptable." I think. Well, forget not being acceptable. It's not true. I think it's about that. It's not. It's not. It's not 4740. It's not actually. The percentage of people who are not British in London social housing is about 14%. 85% of people are British, doesn't? Now you've got a guy who's been writing the spectator Andy Twiles, who's just a commentator who has to put him right. What kind of academic were we dealing with all those years ago, who clearly has no kind of love for or basis in fact or truth? And I think why this is so interesting politically is that reform selected him for the Gordon and Denton by election. He obviously wanted a political career. He was disappointed not to win the seat. And I think that what reform were hoping was that he would be some intellectual underpinning for some of what they're saying, that they had some bra. You know, a brain's trust behind their politics and politicians. And he was kind of considered an attractive addition to that. And yet now he's intellectual credibility. He's an embarrassment to reform. I mean, that's quite an honour isn't it? Yeah, it's quite an honour. I mean, after Gordon and Denton, you know, Matt Goodwin was known as Matt Badluse, rather than Goodwin. And now he's Matt GPT. Neither are great places to be. I'd just like to end with this wonderful quote from again, at some leave who says, "made up quotes," as Mrs. Thatcher put it, "are the giveaway sign of somebody using chat GPT for research." On that bombshell, we will disappear. Bye bye. Bye for now. This has been a global player, original production.