CONTAIN IRAN

“Because Stammer had already announced that Mandelson was going to be the ambassador before the security vetting was done, he was putting his civil service in a position where if they had refused the security clearance two months in, it would have been a massive humiliation for the prime minister. They basically would have been saying the prime minister is appointed as his ambassador to Washington, somebody who's a security risk and he can't get the job, which is almost certainly why Robbins didn't push harder.”

“Sudan is really what shows what goes wrong in the new Trump world. I mean, 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.”

“Jared Kushner doesn't have a formal job in the government. He's President Trump's son-in-law. He was denied security clearance in 2018 and was then overruled by Trump, who granted him permanent security clearance in Trump 1 As far as we can see in Trump 2, none of this is happening at all. The guy doesn't even have a job in government, and yet he's doing the cashing.”

“The sense that you're getting from what Olly Robbins has been saying to the Foreign Affairs Committee is that it was kind of a done deal. And Keir Starmer yesterday set out his version of the process. Olly Robbins today is setting out his version of the process. And there is without doubt a conflict. I mean, we're almost in Her Majesty's recollections can vary territory.”

“But the point about why he wanted a non-career diplomat, I wonder if we shouldn't go even a step further back. Because what I don't think we've ever quite got to the bottom of, including through Keir Starmer's statement in the House of Commons yesterday and Olly Robbins, the now sacked permanent secretary of the foreign office and his evidence to parliamentary committee, I don't think we've quite got to the actual reason for the appointment.”

“Number one, 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. I can explain that a little bit later. 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.”

“Instead of uranium enrichment, kept at about 3 percent. The really difficult stuff with uranium enrichment, nuclear bombs is getting from 3 percent to 20 percent. The Iranians got up to 60 percent, and getting from 60 percent to 90 percent, which is what you need for your nuclear weapon, is much quicker.”

“I don't want to have a league table of wars, but Sudan is almost uniquely horrific, both the scale and the horror, and we're now into the fourth year. There is so little attention to it. There was a meeting in Berlin last week and quite a lot of the big powers were there, but I felt, I'm not denigrating them at all, and it's right that they should sit and talk and try to work out how to resolve this thing, but it felt like the world's saying, oh God, maybe this is what we're doing in the podcast.”