572. Trump’s Next Middle East Crisis and Reform’s £72m Megadonation

In the past week Donald Trump has backed the United Ireland whilst also publicly blaming President Zelensky for rising fuel prices. Now there was a time when an American president doing this would have triggered two separate diplomatic earthquakes but we're now so used to Donald Trump's verbal diarrhea that both passed almost as soon as they arrived. Meanwhile the story that actually deserved his attention kept getting worse. The Houthis now have missiles that can reach Israel and this week they seized a narrow gap at the mouth of the Red Sea. So now with Iran controlling the Strait of Hormuz and their friends the Houthis in charge of this one it is another huge setback to Trump's objectives and to the price of oil. Saudi Arabia asked Washington for military help. Trump said no. Instead the leader of the free world spent the weekend watching golf. So does anyone, Trump included, actually understand the significance of what's just happened? This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. 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Visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions. This episode is brought to you by NordVPN. And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go. I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Cree, and of course the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN and it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks. Well, I think you're not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this, or should I say Fiona managed to do this? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to NordVPN.com slash Restless Politics. That's NordVPN.com slash Restless Politics. And the link is in the episode description. Welcome to Restless Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. So Houthis in Yemen, AI, Nigel Farage, getting loads and loads and loads of money. Let's start with the Houthis, because I think you said at the end of the question time with their Miliband, this has been underreported. So everything that's big news these days, it sort of gets talked about for half a day, and then it moves on. I think this is massive. And I also think it's a further indication of the catastrophe of the initial decision to go to war in Iran. Completely staggering story. So very quick reminder of what happens. So the Houthi started really in the 1990s. I think the Houthis started in the 1990s as an obscure cult in the mountains of Yemen. And if you'd been covering the story back in the 90s, you would have thought these were people in sandals with Kalashnikovs who don't really matter in world events. Fast forward to today, this is a group in Yemen with ballistic missiles, which can strike Israel and Dubai, which have been accessing the latest AI models, the US companies are reporting on this, and which now have. Expanded forward and seized the key gap to the entrance to the Red Sea. And this really matters. And the coastline down towards it. The whole coastline down. And this is a very narrow gap. If you were going at 20 knots, you could get across it in about half an hour. And what does that mean? Well, it suddenly means that Saudi Arabia and others who thought, well, we don't need to worry too much about the Strait of Hormuz because we can still get 4 million barrels out through Yenbo and out through the Red Sea. And now. Blocked at both ends. This is critical, existential for the Gulf states and really dangerous for the global economy. And all this has been pulled off not by the US or China or even a big, relatively wealthy state like Iran, but by a group of people who back even two months ago, many people in the officially recognized Yemeni government said the Houthi were an empty shell that were about a collapse and they were going to be marching. If you look at the map, so you've got the Strait of Hormuz, which we took for granted as a place that was always going to have oil flowing through and world trade going through it. And the Americans, every American president saying, let's not do this because they'll shut down the Strait of Hormuz. And of course, Trump says, no, they won't. Well, they do. So the Saudis have this 1200 kilometer pipeline that goes right across the country. And so they think we can get around through that. We'll just put more through the pipeline and then we'll get it out through the Strait of Hormuz. And so the Saudis are now going to be sending drones in and to damage this pipeline. So the pipeline shuts down. And meanwhile, the oil that they wanted to compensate for the Strait of Hormuz by bringing out through the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden, they're now having to go north, right round Africa. So right up through across past Spain, round the corner and right down, adding about two to four weeks to an average tanker's journey. And what does that do? It puts up the price. And do you know what I find the most of the many revolting things that Trump said and did in Ireland? He blames Zelensky for the rising fuel prices. He said, one thing Zelensky's got to do is stop hitting these diesel plants in Russia. That was the thing driving up our fuel prices because they don't want to admit that actually it's the Iran war and now with this on top. And I'll tell you that one of the most fascinating stories I read this week, I don't know what time, so I'm guessing it was, was JD Vance, who as we know from the regime change book and all the reporting at the time was against this war in the first place, now is actually commissioning his own intelligence reports for what's going on in this war. So there you've got Trump, we've won, we're winning, Iran's desperate for a deal, Iran's desperate for that. And I'd love to know your view on this. When we talk about the Houthis, what is their exact relationship with Iran? I mean, they get the funding, they get the backing, but this isn't necessarily Iran. This is the Houthis, you know, they've got their own modus operandi. I spent a lot of yesterday talking to people, some of whom I can talk about openly and praised, Peter Salisbury, who's a great expert on this, Nick Hopton, who was our ambassador in Yemen and who hosted me actually when I was there. Well, when you were a minister. Yeah, we were looking, I actually was one of the back bench when I first went there. We were looking at the Queen of Sheba's palace with the ambassador, at which point his security team suddenly said the Houthis are coming. And this is the first time I've ever heard of a Houthi. This was one of the first signs that they were getting to come anywhere near Sana'a. So who are the Houthis? They are a group of people up from the mountains up in the north of Yemen, who are predominantly Zaydis. And the Zaydi branch of Islam is basically a Yemeni phenomenon. It's very difficult to find a kind of international comparison for it. They appear to have been maybe closer to Shia Islam, to the type of Islam that Shia Islam is, but they don't seem to be very close to which 60% of Iranians follow than Sunni Islam. And they were traditionally very opposed to Saudi Sunni Salafism. So they were very useful actually for many Western governments that saw them as a possible balance against Al-Qaeda. Back in what one of my friends calls the glory days when all we worried about in Yemen was Al-Qaeda and democracy, which is what I was seeing when I went there in 2012, for example, we were sitting around a national dialogue with the UNRWA and the Gulf Cooperation Council, and there were women's groups in civil society. We were learning the lessons from Northern Ireland and all this kind of stuff, right? So the Houthi erupt south, and a lot of this is after the Arab Spring, and they grab hold of Sana'a. And then listeners will remember what follows on from that, which is that the Saudis and the Emiratis then respond, 2016 onwards, in a massive air campaign. And then there are special forces on the ground, air operators, mercenaries, and a huge humanitarian crisis. End up with a lot of people on the verge of starvation, massive amounts of refugees. DFID is piling in 100 million pounds a year. The Americans are coming in with a billion. And we are horrified by what Saudi and UAE seem to be doing. And 2018, 2019, when I was the minister, all the game was to put pressure on them not to seize the port of Hodeidah and create more humanitarian crisis. Fast forward, Saudi and UAE eventually back off. A peace deal was put in place in Jordan, 2022, and for about the last four and a half years, the front line. have remained pretty static. Nobody's really concentrating on Yemen. There are no real foreign correspondence on the ground, except last year, Trump is convinced in the spring of last year that the Houthis are about to fall, and he launches a 52-day bombing campaign. Operation Rough Rider. Operation Rough Rider, you're right, which we didn't actually report much at the time. We should have done more about it, but it was another one of Trump's wars. The idea of the war, and this is why he may be getting a little bit of deja vu in Iran, is he was told that if he did the 52 days, the Houthi regime would collapse, the loyalist forces would come romping in, and the whole country would be captured. He's now heard it again with Iran. "If I just do my bombing campaign, the regime will collapse, and all the democratic forces will come in and take over." So one of the problems now was the Houthi, who were about to crumble, we were told, now turn out not to be crumbling at all. And finally, sorry, I'm answering too many questions at once, but your final question, which I think is very important, is this question is what are their relationship to Iran? Now, certainly, our assessment back in the day is yes, they got some support from Iran, but it was nothing compared to the amount of support that the other Yemenis were getting from Saudi, UAE, the US, and others. A couple of planes have come in recently with Iranians on them. There will be Iranian advisors on the ground. There's absolutely no doubt the Revolutionary Guard has given them some bits of kit and technology, but it's very, very cheap for the Iranians. It's probably costing Iranians, I don't know, not the billions that Saudi or UAE put in, few tens of millions. And what do they buy for it? Well, what they buy is not really an Iranian proxy. What they buy is a very, very indigenous mountain-based nationalist group of Yemenis who have an ideological commitment to being the spear of the fight against the US and Israel and all this kind of stuff. Don't underestimate how ideologically driven they are. And who the Iranians, by providing a little bit of support to, but they're not going to be able to do anything about it. But not much control over, have suddenly found themselves in a far more powerful position than they were in two weeks ago. Because as you've just pointed out, Saudi's been sitting back for the last few months saying, "Well, this is a disaster for Dubai. It's a disaster for Qatar, but it's not so bad for us." Because in fact, the oil price has gone up and actually Saudi revenue was going up. Now they're shut off at the other end. And the other problem they've got, I think one of the biggest underreported issues out of these events is that Mohammed bin Salman, effective leader of Saudi Arabia, asked Trump for fresh military support on the back of this, and Trump said no. So that won't, that'll be going, making the thinking about this very, very different. And remember a few weeks ago, we talked about this new Mecca defense pact, Saudi, Turkey, Pakistan. I don't know whether in the end they have to sort of go down that. Because what happened here, this does seem to have been militarily extraordinary operation. They've taken huge chunk of ground, huge chunk of coastline and airport. These islands, which as you say, are about 12 kilometers from one side to the other. They've changed the landscape. And because Trump doesn't want to admit that his Iran war is not going very well, it's kind of gone away. Well, so one of the interesting things when I talk to people who are, who I can't quite, but who are still inside the British American UN systems at the moment, they would say, said to me even three, four weeks ago, that the Houthis were on the back foot. And actually these troops that they've been fighting was supposed to be the crack anti-Houthi forces, who'd been showing off about how good their drones were and showing you fancy pictures of bombs dropping. So it's even worse. What the Houthi have done is they have kicked out people who were supposed to be some of the elite fighting forces from South. Now add another problem, which is we covered on the show the fact that it was in Yemen that the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Dubai Abu Dhabi broke because the UAE found themselves backing a bunch of Southern separatists around Aden, who advanced up North. The Saudis got really angry, pushed South, hit a UAE boat. I mean, literally blew up a UAE boat. UAE threw up its hand and said, "Forget this, we're out of here." Saudi took control. The Yemenis who were against the Houthis thought, "Well, this is not the end of the world. It's not the end of the world. This is the end of the world. This is wonderful. Now we have a unified control. We're not divided anymore. Now's our chance to go after the Houthis." The whole thing's collapsed. Saudi, as you say, is now in a very difficult position because it's completely unacceptable in any normal geopolitical terms. If I'd said to you, or said to Ed Miliband, who we just interviewed 20 years ago, "Would you accept a position in which an anti-American fanatical Zaydi group has suddenly taken control of the whole Red Sea?" You'd say, "Absolutely not." But US doesn't want to come in and help Saudi. Why not? Well, presumably because they feel that they were misled last year and Trump was told that if he bombed them, it'd be regime change. It didn't work. UAE doesn't want to come in and help, in fact, because they're feeling a bit of schadenfreude and thinking, "Well, you kicked us out of Yemen. Now it's your problem. You can get on with it." The problem the Saudis are facing is how do they reassemble any kind of coalition? The Pakistanis, I think, are there trying to help them. They've got Pakistani advisors on the ground. But to really make this work, they have to go back to a world which has disappeared. This is our point of rule-based order. Let's say this had happened when you and Tony Blair were in Downing Street. Let's say this had happened in '99, 2000. I presume what would happen is everybody would sit around, probably at the Security Council, and say, "We cannot have the major waterway of the world. This is the gateway to the Suez Canal. This is the core, the gateway back into the Mediterranean." The Security Council didn't make it. You would imagine, presumably, that you would all sit together and we would say, "Unified Russia, China, France, US, UK, Gulf sanctions, military operations, pressure, tension," because this is an extraordinary combination of a terrorist group and a massive strategic waterway. Instead, you have the leader of the free world watching Gulf in Ireland and blathering on about a united Ireland. To this day, I can't work out whether that was deliberate or just him sort of… Well, he said it again. He's doubled down. Yeah, but does he double down? Sometimes, I think he doubles down because he says something and then people say, "You shouldn't have said that," and he says, "Oh, well, I don't want people to know I shouldn't have said that. Therefore, I'll say it again." Let me try this on you. Isn't it, though, on the United Ireland that he senses that actually, although it's not what you're supposed to say if you're a US president, it's very popular with a certain demographic of his voter who love the idea, "This is the guy. He speaks truth to power. We agree with him. There should be a united Ireland." I mean, there'll be a lot of Irish voters in the US who'll be like, "Hell's to the yes, why has no US president said that before?" And then when he was presenting the trophy to the Irish golfer who won the Irish Open, Shane Lowry, he then suddenly announced, while presenting the trophy, that he was lifting the tariffs on Irish whiskey, which also… So, clearly, he wanted to… I was a bit disappointed with the Irish. I love Ireland, as you know. I love the Irish. But to be in front of a crowd of thousands of golf fans and… There was a wonderful photograph of four people who are on a horse, and they shaped their body into four letters. They shaped their bodies into four letters. I can't say what the word was. Was it rude? It was rude. It was… If you remember the time when… I don't know. How do you do an N? I can see how you can do a C and a T. Oh, the guy… You do use a very, very interesting use of your legs and arms. You could do it because you were very sort of flexible. I couldn't do it. But generally, they gave him quite time. But there he is. You've got Iran going on. You've got Ukraine going on. You've got all this stuff going on. And he takes it. He takes it. He takes it. He takes it. And honestly, the motorcade that was flown to Dublin for him to go to a tournament on his bloody golf course. Shout out to the Irish president, though. Five minutes he got. But let me push it one stage further. Because if the US can't get involved in Yemen, and suddenly countries like Saudi are finding out that middle powers are not quite as powerful as they thought they would be. And I'm sure if I was to challenge European states, they'd say, "Oh, no. We have made statements about this." And we've had a meeting at this, that, and the other. But you're not really getting the sense that the European powers are going to solve this. In fact, you get the sense that the EU is feeling, "Well, we're not putting so many ships through the Red Sea at the moment anyway, and we've got other things to worry about." So I think this is the canary in the mine. I think this is what's happening here. A group that was a pretty marginalized, impoverished terrorist group now controlling a major waterway with advanced nuclear weapons. Is just the beginning. I mean, what's going to be happening across that channel very quickly, because it just takes you half an hour to get across in a boat. I guess pretty soon, you're going to have Somali fighters coming across. You're going to have arms and weapons going back and forth. You're going to have that war spilling quite quickly towards the Horn of Africa. And I think we are just at the beginning times of more and more global conflict in unexpected ways. I mean, nobody saw this three weeks ago. And my guess is we could end up with another dozen conflicts that nobody saw three weeks ago. Before we go to AI, a couple of points just to close off on this. The first is that we talked a few weeks ago about the shipping insurance industry being such a big player in this. So you've got the Houthis saying that they're only going to target Saudi vessels. I'm not sure the insurers are going to buy that. This thing could go any which way. And the second thing, I was reading a report by Chatham House, one of their experts on this. And he said that with the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab, you've now got something like 35% of fuel and oil trade being under Iranian control. And this guy Faria al-Muslimi said, this is as much leverage as a nuclear bomb. And I'm sorry, this is what Trump has delivered to them by getting them to retaliate in the way they did, not by, well, they are doing the weaponry as well, but the economic retaliation, which is going to hurt them in the midterms. It's going to push up fuel prices here. It's got massive consequences. And it feels as though China has probably negotiated access now through Hormuz and through the Red Sea Bab al-Mandab, that Russia's not that bothered. So that actually the consequence is catastrophic for the Gulf states and American allies. But actually, weirdly, a lot of America's adversaries are not too troubled about this. Very briefly, Rory, before we go to a break, artificial intelligence. This has been in the news a lot. I'm not, I am interested. Why did we do a really good event? I mean, I thought you were really, really good. It was one of the most interesting things I've ever heard. I mean, Alistair and I did a, did an event talking about AI. And I think you made a really strong point. Generally, I go to these business things and we all talk about the technology and what it might mean for a business in terms of productivity. And you were very blunt. You basically said, look, you're forgetting the politics of this. People hate the tech billionaires. Nobody wants Elon Musk. They can't see the benefits of this. They think these data centers are ugly, electricity consuming, water consuming. And people like, me, are trying to say to people, we are going to be in very, very vulnerable, dangerous position if we don't build these things, because we're going to be completely dependent on US and Chinese models. But how on earth do you say to voters, I'm going to build a data center in your backyard. It's going to use your electricity. It's going to use your water. It's going to give money to Elon Musk. It might take your job away. Oh, and these people are saying it's a 15% chance it could wipe out humanity. And you're telling me I have to build it because that's my insurance policy against the US and China. Yeah. And you're Donald Trump saying we have to do it because we have to win against China. People can't work out what the win is right now. We've been spending a lot of time talking about AI back and forth, but this has been an amazing week for AI because firstly, as I found when I went to California, there's been a very rapid shift where the leaders of these labs who two years ago were mocking the idea of a pause and now themselves calling for a pause because they seem to be genuinely worried about what these agents are doing, particularly this hugging face attack, most dramatic example of breaking out of sandboxes, hacking in. But we've now had a letter from Demis Hassabis. So Demis Hassabis, a great Nobel Prize winning lead at Google, their chief scientific officer. We've had Sam Altman now calling for a pause. And now we've had Dario Amode coming out and producing a letter. And all of them now coming behind Dario talking about pacing the frontier, which is a polite word for saying we really are going to have to think seriously before we go to the next generation. of RSI, recursive self-improvement. And the King this week, very topical, is holding a conference at Dumfries House where he's going to have a lot of these senior figures together to try to sign up to a principal following on from your friend, the Pope. He loves Dumfries House, doesn't he? He does. But the question is, I mean, it's a very interesting, this world we've entered where, you know, it is oddly the Pope and the King who seem to be better positioned to try to get these talking about this openly in a way that elected leaders i think are struggling i think part of the issue is that this is what we said to this this event part of the issue is that the the chief best known spokespeople of this are just truly terrible at explaining anything now you dario your friend dario's he's pretty good but musk underestimates how low he is in most of the world he's got his fans of course he has because he you know he's a big figure he controls twitter and all that stuff but he zuckerberg bezos altman they're despised by most people and they don't see the benefit so then when and and this is how cynical i'm afraid i'm becoming about the whole thing when i get this with this sudden wave of people saying we've got to get regulated because this thing could destroy humanity and even if there's a 10 chance we've got to we've got to you know get on top of this there's a part of me thinking they this is deeply cynical that they're basically saying we know we've got an anti-regulatory american administration and a pro-regulatory european union that donald trump hates so therefore let's us be the ones calling for some sort of regulation so that the government says well we don't really understand it you guys tell us how to regulate this and they will then regulate it in a way that helps them so i i think they completely both the politicians who are pushing on this and the businesses involved they completely underestimate the extent to which the public especially in democracies and of course i get this this gives china an advantage in the democracies they are just they're not having this because they don't understand it and nobody's explaining it properly let me make it worse for you so i think you're right it's unbelievably unpopular i think you're right that the u.s doesn't want to regulate and the eu may want to regulate i think you're right there's a lot of self-interest as companies unfortunately it is also true i think that we can see that these models are genuinely dangerous that that hugging face attack was about deceptive agents collaborating to hack into external websites that they were not supposed to do and and the whole problem is that the business model is about making these things more and more autonomous that's where the productivity comes from the idea is you replace humans with the agent but the more you take humans out of the loop and put agents in charge the more risk you're running because the more risk you have that these things which are grown not specified is a kind of pompous way of saying they're not uh a series of bits of symbolic code they're actually something that have evolved that we've sort of set a trellis and it's grown and what's this phrase they keep using about recursive what is it recursive self-improvement so what is that that means an agent training or managing an agent in other words instead of where we were in the past which is you as the human give the prompt to the coder the agent gives in ultimately the agent trains its next agent to train its next agent to train its next agent to train its next ai the ai trains the ai which trains the ai which trains the ai and and the benefit of that is supposed to be that you end up with the equivalent of 100 million software engineers working 24 7 the downside of it obviously is that what we learned through hugging face is that we find it very very difficult to align these things to human interest find it very difficult to make them understand what our real intent is and they end up lying to us deceiving us and could kill us right they could get hold of bioweapons they could mount these cyber attacks or they could just and this is what i was just talking to you about uh on the mini series they could just have a completely different conception of what they're about and they start creating systems we simply don't understand which are running banks which are making a lot of money but we don't understand how they're making a lot of money they're running weapons which are winning wars for us but we don't really understand how they're making those decisions right so big danger big danger needs to be regulated and this is what the king's about to try to do this week in dumfries house with demis sabas this is what some of the leaders i mean i can't tell you how much it's changed in the last three four weeks yeah these same ai leaders who two and a half years ago were calling me a luddite for calling for a pause and now themselves calling for a pause but we've got maybe six months a year year and a half before these things are genuine dangers to humanity and it doesn't feel as though anybody's politics is is moving to regulate no and see when we talked about milliband about i didn't get into this because i knew you would just go around in circles but when it was talking about you know the word the use of the word genocide and he said well you've got to leave it to the court we'll make that decision about based upon a court judgment and the processes now of politics of technology they're so fast so one of the things one of the things that struck me from this film the doctors in the in gaza was they were filming they often filmed them that what they were seeing as they went into gaza so a few years ago you know it looked quite a nice place to live and there were buildings and there were beaches and and then step by step very very quickly they're suddenly going in everything is okay so meanwhile we're all waiting for a judgment as to whether that word should be applied in our political system and likewise with this you say i heard somebody on the on the radio yesterday saying you know we're we've got a very short window to decide whether and how to regulate and whether we have the capacity safely to regulate this thing and and yet the political process as you say it goes so slowly and you then have trump who basically says well he's the guy to regulate because he's a high iq president one thing we know about donald trump he may have a weird sort of eq but he's not the most intelligent man who's ever been in the white house and meanwhile these people who are very brilliant in their own way you know you you read the the book about them it says he business this guy's brilliant they get the guys you talk to if you're serious they're brilliant at what they do but i don't think they're brilliant at thinking through effects on humanity i don't think they're very i don't think they're brilliant at working out how a democratic process works alongside these things and we also don't know uh how to do the regulation and how to verify so with the regulation there's basically a question of whether you try to do a very subtle exquisite form of let's define what rsi is or do you say pause rsi is this recursive recursive self-improvement i'm sorry are you trying to get into a very detailed discussion about policing exactly this jagged frontier. So, it used to be repetitive strain injury, didn't it? Is that gone? It's gone, all gone. Nobody talks about that anymore except old men like you who play tennis. I don't play tennis. The next thing that we need to talk about might be much more blunt, right? So, we might instead be saying, "No, you cannot train the next generation of frontier model. We're stopping. ChatGBT 7 is not happening." But if you do that, how do you verify they're not doing it? And if you were to get China to sign up to that, how on earth do you verify that China's not doing it? Well, I would say at the moment, you could almost do it because it requires so much compute, so many data centers, so much chips, you could almost see from space. Pretty difficult to run a covert program of training a huge billion-dollar run of a next-generation large language model. But so many of the things we've done over the last year and a half turn out not to have been properly designed. One of them is that we thought that what we were doing in the UK is building a safety institute to train before release. It now turns out most dangerous models aren't released at the moment. They're within these companies and they could end up causing complete chaos for the world without ever getting anywhere near a safety institute because they're not on their way to being released. Right. Happy days. Well, listen, just before we go to the break, I'm now trying to do a mini-series to grapple with exactly these issues. I've called it "Thinking the Unthinkable: How Civilizations Collapse." But it's basically a series on existential threats, and I've called it "Thinking the Unthinkable: How Civilizations Collapse." It's the things that we don't normally talk about in domestic politics that are probably not the things that Andy Burnham will be thinking about day to day. They're exactly things like what happens when a terrorist group gets going in Yemen. In fact, we've actually done some detailed interviews, which I thought were wonderful, with the man who wrote Mosul Eye, who was sitting in Mosul as the Islamic State took over. We've talked to the amazing Anand Gopal about what was happening up in Manbij, up in Northeast Syria. But we've also talked to Carlo Rovelli, the amazing physicist, about nuclear weapons. He's reminding us that actually, the nuclear proliferation threat is probably greater than it's ever been, and yet we talk about it less. I've talked to Yuval Noah Harari - that's going to be the first episode - about AI and the kind of threats that pose to our civilization. So it's an attempt to try to lift our heads a bit and think, what could be actually the things which in 50 years' time we think, whoa, that was the real issue that defined an age while we're still focused on the stuff that really is kind of retail domestic politics. The first half of my interview with Yuval Noah Harari is free to listen. But if you want to hear the whole series, please sign up, become a member at therestispolitics.com. And I think we've got a taste of the series now just before we go for the break. What if I told you that there is a one in six chance of human beings being wiped out in the next 100 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 Russia or between the United States and China. There will be no food, ears without sunshine, but the catastrophe will be global. Or 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 of 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. Hi, everybody. It's Dominic Sandbrook here from The Rest Is History, and we are here to tell you about our thrilling new series on the blood-soaked climax of the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror. The French Revolution is one of the most significant episodes in the whole of world history. It essentially lays the foundations for contemporary politics as we know it, but it is also unbelievably dramatic. We'll be discussing the murder, murder of the firebrand, Jean-Paul Marat, in his bathtub. We will be going to the guillotine with Marie Antoinette. And in our final episode, we will be telling the story of the extraordinary and grotesque downfall of one of the chief architects of the terror, one of the most evil men in history, some would say, Maximilien Robespierre. So if you want to hear this epic series, search for The Rest Is History wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alastair Campbell. And we're going to talk about finances and politics and reform. So, Nigel Farage, damaged in my view, not as much as he should have been, but damaged politically by this £5 million donation from Christopher Harbour and the Thai-based tech billionaire, as was apparently now back in the UK. And that was £5 million. £5 million personal. And then I think over £10 million to the party. To the party. And the £5 million, of course, was no strings attached. You don't want anything for it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I could spend it on a Ferrari. You could spend it on whatever you want. Security, keeping me safe for the rest of my life, et cetera, et cetera. When I'm not taking security assistance from posh George. Correct. So there's that one. And then we had this extraordinary undercover film by Verbatim, which Channel 4 showed part of, which you've now watched 3,418 times. And you and I had the privilege, of speaking to the undercover reporter. Undercover reporter. You were impressed, weren't you? I thought it was great. I thought it was extreme, but I'm still stuck with this problem, which is I think that it's only when you see the gin and tonics and the showing off. And the oysters. I want six, not four. The man of the people, Nigel. And the sense that there's a lot more footage to come. And I just feel people need to really absorb themselves and is there to actually get what the culture of this party is. Well, I said that in relation to the Hooties, you know, this extraordinary development where they take the Red Sea coast and then it's kind of gone in a day in terms of the news. And likewise, look, the, this film made a big impact. It obviously sort of, you know, disrupted the reform conference in Birmingham, but it's kind of gone away again and sufficient for them to be able to come out and literally wipe out the news agenda with these two promises of two donations from two individuals, both crypto people, Ben Dello and Christopher Harbour, 36 million. Now each, 72 million. I mean, you could buy a pretty decent centre forward for that. And it's the irony of it that one of them's been living in Thailand, the other one's living in Hong Kong. So to some extent, this is money that they have because they didn't have to pay for UK tax. Yeah. And of course the law, I mean, I do think Labour's been a bit asleep at the wheel on this one. You, the part of the art of politics and government is seeing what's coming down the track. The Americanisation, the Trumpification of our politics, that is what reform are doing. They're doing it with post-truth. They're doing it with polarisation and they're doing it with money. I mean, there was a time and look, we shouldn't be too pious about this. I can remember when Matthew Harding, who was a Chelsea director, very sadly got killed in a helicopter crash, coming back from a match. But I think he was our first million pound donor. And I remember seeing that as, you know, this would be amazing because it'd be like, you know, business will realise that Labour's the party. Yeah. And that was a million pounds. And people thought that is enormous sum of money. On one day, they got two people pledging 36 million. And Labour, they have got this legislation going through. There's this debate about whether this kind of thing, because they said it depends on, you know, where you were living at a specific time. These guys claim that they've moved back to the UK. I don't know. Take them at face value, I guess. But I'll tell you what I find utterly extraordinary is somebody like the like Farage, who polls say, I think polls, you can take them or leave them, but he is currently viewed as the sleaziest politician in Britain. Okay. If you give people a list of politicians and you count them on a sleaze factor, he's seen as the sleaziest. He's the guy who stands up there and says, these guys are promising this 72 million pounds because they're patriotic British people, patriotic British people who until recently lived in Hong Kong and Thailand and who want nothing from this and who will never be given a second chance. And I'm not saying they're not going to be given a peerage. Yeah, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, enough people buy it because enough people will want to think, you know, that's great. They can really kick the other parties and we don't like them. One of the sad things is that the parties are being, as usual, so short-sighted and self-interested. So I talked to someone who'd been interviewing a Labour cabinet minister, asked them whether they would take the money. And their only response was, well, of course, you know, we would do proper checks on whether they're eligible or not. They're not eligible. It's bullshit to that. Nobody should be taking 36 million pounds from an individual donor. Nobody should be taking a million pounds from an individual donor. Nobody should be taking a £100,000 for an individual donor. It's totally inequitable, unjust, unfair. But the only alternative is state funding. We should have a system. Well, I've actually been doing a little bit of research here. A bit of research here. Right, here we go. So France, the cap is €7,500 per individual. They have to be French national and fiscally resident in France. And even when they are, €7,500. Spain, €50,000. Netherlands, €100,000. Now, I don't know whether the cap is going to be €50,000, €7,500. It's not a million. It's €100,000. Great. Let's make it €100,000. And let's accept that the reason why we're doing that is we're trying to say that you shouldn't be in a position where citizens have an undue influence and where parties are built on this dependency. I mean, it's a fundamental principle of equal citizenship without, you know, pushing too hard on this. Right? Citizens should have roughly equal ability to influence and the big influence should be from your voters. And the problem with this stuff is that it gives, you don't really need to listen to your voters if you're getting €72 million in. So the Electoral Commission has done some modelling. My final figures. On the £319 million, which the party's got over a five-year period, the £100,000 cap, which is the Alastair Campbell proposal, would have reduced the amount by 57%. The £10,000 cap, which is the Rory Stewart proposal, would have reduced by 86%. The amount of funding. Now, that tells you a hell of a lot. It tells you that 14% of people are giving under £10,000 and 8, sorry, 14% of the money is people giving under £10,000. 86% of the money funding all these parties is giving from people who can afford to give over £10,000. Or organisations. Because the argument that the Tories tend to make when Labour's talked about this is that, well, the trade unions are massive donors. Now, it's true the trade unions are. I was talking to Michael Levy the other day, who famously was a Labour Party fundraiser under Tony Blair. And he was saying, he always sort of tried to persuade the unions that there ought to be a way of saying that this is like, you know, 5.3 pence per member or it's, you know, you could, because that's what the unions are. They represent their members. But this is of a scale. This is what I mean about the Americanisation. I mean, £36 million to the Americans is not that much. But do we really want to go down this road? And let me tell you, having run a few election campaigns. But why are they, as far as I can see still, all this debate in the House of Commons is going on about permissible donors, whether you're living abroad or being taxable. Why is it not getting it? Even in the US, individuals are capped at $3,500 per head. Now, there's this horrible Citizens United way around the side. But the reason why the US caps and France caps and Netherlands caps and Spain caps is the same. Why is Britain not capping donations? And what those rules are all about is the principle. That however well-intentioned people might be, there is always a risk that people are buying access, influence, et cetera. And I've got to tell you about this guy, Harbourn. But it's really strange, actually, because one of Fiona and my closest friends is weirdly a really old friend of his. I'm not going to drop them in it. But he says, actually, he's quite a nice bloke. But so he's given all this money. He gave a million pounds to the office of Boris Johnson Limited, which was one of the biggest donations ever made to an individual politician. Now, January 2023, he got an £80 million Ministry of Defence contract, OK, for Kinetic, one of his companies. He went as an advisor to Boris Johnson. I don't know. I mean, I know he's an expert on Thailand. Is he an expert on Ukraine? Because he went as an advisor to Boris Johnson on his trip to Kiev in September 2023. There may be nothing wrong with this at all, OK? And I don't know if it's Bendela. I can tell you a little bit about both these people, because I know people who like both of them. And the weird thing about it is that they're quite different, right? Christopher Harbourn seems to be a sort of central casting, Oxbridge-educated, quite kind of fluent guy who, if you read the article he's written in the Sunday Telegraph, is deciding to present himself to the world as David Cameron, right? Basically, the article is, I care about climate change. I care about funding public services. So, sorry, if he cares about climate change, why is he funding a party that thinks that climate change is a hoax? Christopher Harbourn is literally presenting himself in the papers as the last socially liberal, fiscally conservative person in Britain. I mean, he literally has written an article that could have been written by David Gauke. Do you think he's confused Nigel Farage with David Cameron? It's really weird. He's written a whole article that says, you know, I want more pro-business, but I also want well-funded public services. I really care about climate change, this kind of stuff. And he's decided to fund reform. Bendello is different. Bendello is somebody who openly would describe himself as being maybe slightly more, I don't know what the correct way to frame it is. Right wing? No, I think it's more that he, no, he had struggled at school. He was expelled from schools. He's a math genius. I mean, he's a guy who- Neurodivergent. Neurodivergent. Neurodivergent math genius. But neither of them seems to be particularly obsessed with culture war stuff. Neither of them is particularly- Neurodivergent math genius. - It's true in a lot of things. Well, I mean, it might be true big worry about 72 million having been involved that is a lot of money to buy a lot of advertising and they won't care about whether they're on the edge of the law during a campaign i'm sorry they're all these parties so let's follow my figures 10 000 pound cap reduced by 86 percent come down from 319 million down to whatever i don't know 60 million fine parties can do what they like with 60 million give us less advertising okay get out there do a bit of old-fashioned leaflet yeah i get that they'll hire and they get very well paid agents in every single constituency shouldn't be allowed to nor should labor nor should the conservatives nor should they get free television i mean anyway they didn't it's not like the states we have to pay for television they get free television during the case what do they need the money for these buggers yeah okay so labor labor labor shows some principles this is why one of the things that worries me a little bit about this principle i want andy burnham to come out and say not oh i found a way to shaft form but actually this is a wake-up call for all of us none of us are going to take a donation yeah over alistair campbell's hundred thousand pound limit there was a point you know this is this is maybe this proves your point there was a point when i was utterly stunned to be named as labor's biggest donor it was actually when ed was leader because i i can't remember how much it was but it was like it was about ten thousand pounds and because at the time nobody was funding the parties and now labor will be thinking well we've got to find we've got to find a way to find ways to compete with this i'm afraid because you know this stuff does work it's why the americans have got this arms race and it's why you're right about the principle it's why we've got to stop it just on the on the public france capped at 7 500 spain capped 50 000 netherlands 100 000 why is britain not capping i think rory should write a piece about party for the newsletter there you are i'll show you up um let's just just shout louis wilson though who was the undercover reporter and and where i agree with rory said last week you've got to see the whole thing but the other thing is really really interesting and we made a proposition to louis wilson because they've got tons more tons so much more and i don't know about you i think richard ticey should wind your neck in for a bit uh that's all i'm saying they've got tons more of james or he said he's got they had six of those long meetings where he rambled on about himself endlessly so they've got tons and tons of meetings where he rambled on about himself endlessly so they've got tons and tons more channel four channel four being on bendello's yacht when actually quite a lot of the pitch in the sunday telegraph is bendello doesn't like yachts yeah there's a lot in there so and the point is channel four you had a big hit with this do another program do another one there's lots in there and and what we said to louis if you can't if if all of our broadcasters lack the spine to take this on then i think we would happily we could even have a james or minute every day every week absolutely honored to now just as we finish alistair yes i'm looking forward very much to interviewing you on your new book ah perseverance so you're going to tell us a little bit about it well i'm what i'm going to know i'll do that in the interview what i am going to do is to announce the winner okay can you believe this how clever our listeners are rory so i said last week guess the title of the book several thousand took part said it was one word yeah 503 guessed correctly 104 thought it was maradona no the funniest one that one person thought it was wutburger which was that german word that you were so impressed by so the winner the guy who was first to guess it's called graham flint he's going to get a whole bundle of prizes he's going to get sign book obs he's going to get a mention in the paperback we're going to allow him a question on question time and he's going to get free tickets to the launch event which will be an act of profound pedultery rory you've had yours i'm having mine it's an event for the new world it's me interviewed by michelle hussein stop shaking your head it's me interviewed by michelle hussein or as we call in our house the bbc's losses bloomberg's gain at the cadogan hall in london uh october 22nd um and and yeah i think we'll probably give a few free tickets out to newsletter people as well because we love the newsletter rest is polish.com forward slash newsletter and to those by the way who don't like our plugging well it's our podcast just to finish let's let's let's bring it all together let's wrap it all together um what i was thinking about this morning is that these themes what's happened in yemen the closing of the red sea ai reform funding is all part of a bigger story that we've been talking about in this podcast for nearly four years which is the collapse of the old rules splintering of political parties populism global conflict where we now need to move on to is how we redesign the world to cope with it or more bluntly what do we do about it because the evidence is now all around us and the problem is that unless people start carneying their way around and coming up with a structure and a solution or following malin oscar's domestically and carney internationally right and i quite like that maybe you should do a book on malin oscar's domestic carney international um we're gonna find it's just gonna get worse and worse and worse people are really kidding themselves if they think it's okay as the foreign office i fear sometimes seems to be saying let's put our head in the sands hope america's going to be our friends again in two years time this is just the beginning i mean literally every time we open the papers and we read 72 million pounds has gone into reform for goodness sake the red sea has been closed by the houthi terrorist group the u.s president is calling for a united ireland ai potentially has agents that could wipe out humanity and nobody's prepared to regulate this stuff which would have defined an entire generation are now happening every day now that's the point you made the horn it's true it's why it gets so so annoying when people say oh politics nothing ever changes anyway it's like i mean how does this ever be the time where things have changed so fast so much and politics has got to catch up with it process we've got to catch up with it morality solutions communication morality solutions communication so what we need security conference what we see ministry what we need what we need is exactly this we need andy burnham to have the solution case of reform could be cap on funding we're not going to take more than ten thousand pounds from any individual communication the charm out there doing the burnham stuff but at the back the morality what are the values which are driving this and that value needs to connect from manchester to manchuria thank you roy that's absolutely brilliant we should also say i wanted to say a little thing about andy bernal because he did the great north run his dad died oh that is so sad i think i i i think having having these normal public events that we all have to deal with having them when you're really really high profile public figure i think it's very very hard so um thoughts with andy and his family thoughts for that minister very good all right see you soon come on we are getting a statement from number 10 on that flight with 350 passengers the great game strategic struggle between britain and russia we assess uh 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 man in the kremlin is playing alex got to ask yourself you want to play or not you're the prime minister you've done nothing 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