The Rest Is Politics

“This is a deliberate thing of constantly wrapping up what they're doing in religious rhetoric. And if you are somebody like Poglio, who clearly can't stand what these people are doing to America and to the world, then you can see why he would get very, very offended.”

“The reality is that Vance and the administration are wrong. I mean, they're theologically illiterate. They are consistently portraying a worldview, which is, well, in a lot of their actions, almost seems to be completely unbound by any kind of ethical principles.”

“One of the reasons that Victor Orban is such a big global figure is because he was the first, I think, fully to understand that if you were going to change minds on big cultural issues, then you had to internationalize campaigns. He understood the importance of propaganda; he understood the need for networks and the need for money to fund it all.”

“What definitely we underestimated was the extent to which the devolution debate would politically benefit the SNP to make it more about that this is a sort of step towards nationalism. But also when Tom says, was devolution always going to lead to nationalism, it hasn't led to the breakup of the UK.”

“I think less than 50 percent, but I think we're in very, very, very volatile times. And don't forget, we've got these elections on May 7th, and if the polls are right, we're going to end up with, essentially, we will have three parts of the United Kingdom led in part by governments which want to break up the United Kingdom.”

“I think it's the most exciting potential really in British politics. Clearly, so much isn't working and a lot of it is to do with a very overly centralized state with still one of the most centralized countries on Earth.”

“Traditionally, we've always imagined that civil wars are often the products of human culture—the idea of a nation, the idea of a flag, the idea of us and them. But the odd thing is the chimpanzees, who don't seem to have those kinds of mental models, appear to be engaging in murderous internecine warfare.”

“Appointing Peter Mandelson in the first place was a massive lapse of judgment. We now know that even the Trump transition team was warning him against appointing Mandelson, which is very, very odd given that they thought Mandelson was their Trump card with Trump. He knew about Epstein. He knew about the financial links and he pushed ahead.”

“What appears to have happened, as we said the other day, that the cabinet office process led to a suggestion being made to the foreign office, that there were warning signs that they needed to be worried about, and that Olly Robbins took the judgment that with mitigation, which was put in place, it was manageable and he could go ahead. What he has also been saying to the Foreign Affairs Committee is that he did feel under pressure.”

“It worked. This was an amazing deal which until Trump came along and wrecked it, managed to get a massive reduction in the amount of stockpiles that Iran had, uranium stockpiles, a reduction in the enrichment down to a very low degree. And an inspection regime which allowed inspectors in very, very regularly to make sure that Iran was not enriching and a limit on the number of centrifuges. And in return, sanctions relief.”

“I honestly don't think we can because it goes back to a point we made right from the start of this war is that it's never been clear what his big strategic purpose is. Unless you have that, if you're dealing with somebody who's volatile, unpredictable, driven by spasm, tweeting through the night, making policy as you say, regardless of what the facts are with the people who are actually on the ground, then it's impossible to work it out.”

“Sudan is really what shows what goes wrong in the new Trump world. This is a conflict where, as you've pointed out, hundreds of thousands have been killed, millions have been displaced, tens of millions are now facing food insecurity, where there is credible reports of genocide, rape, and it's being driven as a proxy war. This is exactly the kind of situation that the international, much lamented, hypocritical global world order was set up to try to deal with.”

“Médecins Sans Frontières, they said there had been 4,000 cases of sexual violences at facilities that it was working in. 97% of the victims were men or girls. In South Darfur, 20% under 18, including 41 children under five. And their report said sexual violence is now part of everyday life of these people in most parts of Sudan.”

“One, your borders have got to be strong. So, if you think about what we had to do, we had to go to the UK border agency, put people in uniform, create these kind of offshore checks before people got anywhere near the border. You've got to have strong borders, and that is why you have to fix the boats crisis.”

“The thing that struck me is that actually people are perfectly reasonable. They say, look, do you know what? It comes down to three things. It comes down to learning to speak English, obeying the law, and working hard on paying tax. Beyond that, we should be living let live.”

“We have got to be punchier in taking on the selfish minority who don't play by the rules. And on the Business and Trade Committee, we see them week in, week out. Why has Fujitsu not contributed a bean to the two billion pound bill for restoring justice to the post-Obvious Horizon victims? Not a penny have they paid.”

“The idea here is that you restore savings matches, tax breaks and incentives for people to build up assets, to put down a deposit on a home to call their own, to retrain, restock their human capital and to save more into a pension. Singapore is probably the best example. And the way you pay for it is actually by building a sovereign wealth fund.”

“If you begin restoring a bit of fairness to the tax system, actually like that old socialist Nigel Lawson did, equalizing capital gains tax rates and income tax rates, you would begin to raise the money over the course of five to six years to build the kind of sovereign wealth fund that could help you finance those kinds of tax breaks.”

“This kind of reinvention of social capital and civic connectedness is what we need to glue communities back together again. And this is where the government has actually got its plan bang on. So this big multi-billion pound Pride in Place fund that it has launched... is actually one of its biggest and boldest and best ideas.”

“Then we've got to have the courage to take on some of the forces that are deepening divisions. One, American Big Tech. Two, kleptocrats trying to surge dark money into British politics. So there's a fight there as well. It's not just about, let's just refresh fraternity and build a more united kingdom from this diverse nations that we've got.”

“What's beginning to happen here is an America which doesn't even pay lip service to global norms. In fact, celebrates outrageously chaotically defying them. The US isn't Israel; it's not a small state with no peer competitors in the Middle East. It is the architect of the entire global order and it faces with China a peer competitor.”

“This is classic Trump. I've got to ceasefire, I'm going to send JD Vance, and it's all going to be done. And they give up because Iran didn't fold on day one. They started a process, they decided it's not gone exactly according to plan on day one, therefore we blow up the process.”

“Global oil prices are now rising. Global economies are already feeling the shock because, in effect, what this means is that vessels that were not favoured by Iran, previously were very reluctant to go through the Straits, but vessels with an Iranian stamp could go through. Most of them were going through freely. The US has now stopped that second category of vessels.”

“As well I suggested that the UK should join the European Union on the same day as Ukraine. You take UK, Norway, Turkey, and Ukraine, you're adding an awful lot of heft to any military alliance at a time when the Americans do appear to be leaving us to it. It adds an awful lot of heft to any military alliance.”

“This morning, Zelenskyy, there's a post that we read, Zelenskyy, for the first time in the war, an enemy position was captured entirely by ground robotic systems and drones without any infantry. A robot entered the most dangerous zones instead of a soldier and took the positions.”

“12:43 AM, most Americans are asleep now. He announces the blockade of Hormuz. 2:35 AM, he's maybe just had a little doze or he's had a hamburger or something. 2:35 AM, he posts an article about Joe Biden. He is not sleeping, he is pretending to be Jesus, he is posting all night, he is not well.”

“President Xi Jinping's four propositions on safeguarding and promoting peace and stability in the Middle East... is underlining to the rest of the world that at a time when America appears to be so unreliable and unpredictable, China is operating according to what he's setting out as a group of principles that they stick to.”

“I was looking at a recent model. Capital economics predicts that Qatar's economy will contract by 13% this year, that UAE's may contract by 8%. To put that in context, under normal growth conditions, that would be seven years it would need to get back the growth.”

“He had become a symbol of far-right, kleptocratic authoritarian nationalism, which, because Donald Trump is back in the White House pursuing much the same agenda and often citing Orbán as an inspiration, many had assumed it was the winning formula for modern politics and modern campaigns. Orbán has lost, and he's lost big. So big that he had no option but to throw in the towel long before all the votes were even counted.”

“And guess what? The Hungarians' queue from dawn voted in record numbers, 80% turnout, to say, no thank you, Trump, no thank you, Musk, no thank you, Mr Vance. Take your interference elsewhere. What was it President Zelensky said in our interview that was out earlier this week? I'm not sure sending JD is a good idea for Orbán. Well, how right he was. As for Putin, he sent in Money to Burn and Agents Galore.”

“Fidesz, for example, thought that they had a monopoly on Hungarian nationalism. Magyar developed a language and a style that spoke to a more inclusive version of it. Like Trump, Orbán portrayed his own politics and his own supporters as the country, casting all critics as outsiders. Magyar sought to appeal to Fidesz voters as part of a shared political and national community. And it worked.”

“I talked to Dominic Sandbrook about this on the podcast last week when he stood in Ferrari, pointed out that if you win power by posing as a man of the people fighting a corrupt elite, and you become the corrupt elite yourself, don't be too shocked if the people turn against you. Now Putin could get round that by going full on dictator. Orbán, not least because Hungary is in the European Union, was more constrained.”

“Orbán has been doing Putin's bidding for too long. The leaked conversations recently between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his Hungarian counterpart expose that for all to see. Orbán has sought to block and undermine EU support for President Zelensky at every turn. It's now likely, definitely possible, probably probable, that the long-promised 90 billion euros of support will begin to flow.”

“But the more EU resources seem to be landing in the hands of his inner circle, his best friend, a former gas fitter, becomes the richest man in Hungary, the more Magyar was able to relate the industrial scale corruption to people's everyday lives. A part of Orbán's hubris was that because he developed a near Putin-like grip on the media, he assumed that their 24-7 propaganda on his behalf would work.”