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The Monocle Daily
Starmer stays resolute amid leadership challenge rumours and Trump returns to Beijing
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You're listening to the Monocle Daily, first broadcast on 13 May 2026 on Monocle Radio.
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UK Prime Minister Sakiya Starmer repels borders. For now at least. Can US President Donald Trump stay awake during his Beijing visit? And is Estonia's military reserve an example to us all? I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily starts. Hello, and welcome to the Monocle Daily, coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London. I'm Andrew Muller. My guests Rachel Cunliffe and Bill Hayton will discuss the day's big stories. And we'll hear from Katja Hoyer about her new book, recalling the Weimar Republic and where it all went wrong. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle Daily. This is the Monocle Daily. I'm Andrew Muller and I am joined today by Rachel Cunliffe, Senior Associate Editor at the New Statesman and Bill Hayton, Associate Fellow for the Asia Pacific Program at Chatham House. Hello to you both.
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C
Hello.
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B
Hello, Bill. First of all, as regular listeners, like we have any other kind will be aware, you are basically dropping in every so often, passing the time until you become the 21st century Dennis Thatcher, which is to say that your wife is a Labour MP and perhaps, who knows, Prime Minister, are you keeping your phone with you? But you have, for reasons pertaining to that, recently been out knocking on doors, doubtless on behalf of the Labour Party, unless you are indeed a split household ahead of those recent local elections, which, judging by the results where you're from, Bill, clearly you were unpersuasive.
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C
I did not persuade that many people, it has to be said. But what's really interesting is, I mean, where I live in Essex, Reform UK was extremely successful. But from what I can look at the numbers, it was people who just don't normally vote in local elections all suddenly turned out. I mean, local elections in the UK have a very low participation rate, a quarter, a third of voters.
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B
Well, where I live, turnout in my ward was 24%.
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C
Well, that's pretty normal. But where I live, it leapt from 27%, which was the last elections two years ago, in the local elections, up to 38%. So 11 percentage point leap in turnout, which was. That's what delivered the vote for reform
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B
and that was the reform vote.
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C
People who don't normally vote, who came out to vote.
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B
That is interesting. And relatedly, Rachel, I understand that you are researching the merits of compulsory voting, which until about 20 seconds ago, before I spoke to Bill just now, I was heartily in Favour of. And now I'm not so sure. Maybe instead we should talk about restricting the franchise to property owning males in their 50s.
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A
I do have a friend who is sort of indirectly linked to politics who believes that we should return to the pre1832 reform act.
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C
Bottom boroughs, that's the way to go.
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But take out the gender element so women can vote too, as long as they own property.
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B
Sure.
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A
I will be suggesting that he puts this front and center of his campaign if he ever does try to run to be an mp.
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B
Actually, you can have for free another one of my suggested voting reforms and I'm actually serious about this because I would be riveted to know how it turns. By way of vengeance for centuries of historical wrongs, et cetera, males are deprived of the vote for a period of bill. What do you reckon? We give it 20 years, see how
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it goes, Just see what happens?
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Yeah, I'd be genuinely curious. I would be absolutely up for that.
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A
I think what you'd probably find is that women can be as vicious, power hungry and backstabbing as their male counterparts.
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B
I don't doubt that. But I would be interested to know who actually gets elected if only women are voting.
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A
Well, when women first got the vote and when sort of female politicians first started to become a thing, often their harshest critics were other women who didn't believe that women should be in politics. This is not what I thought we would be discussing. I thought when you mentioned compulsory voting, but in the context of how do we fix a voting system where you say 10 out in your ward was 24%. Right.
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B
Which basically means I voted and that
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split across into depending on where you are in the country. You know, five or six parts parties all now getting above 15% of the vote. Which means that whoever gets voted in, in our voting system got one vote, potentially one vote in every five of the one vote in every four people who voted. So that's less than 10% of people living there who like them. Yeah, let's have that person represent us. Do you call that a mandate? Can democracy survive when that's the voting system? So compulsory voting kind of comes up in the context of other reforms to our electoral system, like should we have a more proportional system where your vote is perhaps going to be linked in some way to the level of representation that you get, which we increasingly don't have at the moment.
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C
Well, of course we're going to have votes for 16 and 17 year olds, possibly this parliament, so there'll be a lot more people who won't be able to vote? Who will choose not to vote.
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B
Yeah, I remain an enthusiast of the Australian system. All jokes aside, compulsory voting with a barbecue. But we will start here in the United Kingdom and the uncertainty regarding who is running it. If you're listening to this live, the Prime Minister as of right now is Sir Keir Starmer. If you've downloaded this post broadcast from wherever you get your podcasts, you're on your own. On the day the King's speech laid out the legislative program for the next Parliament, the situation appears to be broadly that while there is no great appetite for Sakhir to stay, none of the putative options have their acts sufficiently together to make him go. Rachel, is that broadly fair or have I missed something?
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A
No, that is completely fair. And that was also the case on Tuesday and on Monday when we were having this conversation about, you know, what's going to move. What's going to move. And it was also the case last week before the local elections. We've been in this period of stasis where there is rising frustration with the Prime Minister and that is not corresponding to a clear direction as to what should happen next. And so we're just in this sort of doom loop of, oh, they really want him to go, there's more pressure on him to go. Have they decided who they want instead yet? No. Ad infant. He might still be Prime Minister in, you know, two years. At this rate, we'll be having a conversation in two years time.
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Bill, his numbers are and have always been dreadful. That is the problem here. I mean, even when he was elected with a landslide majority, he had a personal approval rating of maybe 35%. It's now around 19% with a 61% disapproval. According to you Gov. I mean, these numbers are disastrous. But is there a way you can explain to a possibly somewhat baffled international audience why this is the case?
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C
Well, I think he comes across, as I once heard someone say, as a clever lawyer. And who likes a clever lawyer? True enough. And I guess it's, you know, a lifetime of caution. You know, Director of Public Prosecutions, you know, he had to sort out the police service in Northern Ireland. I mean, you don't go sort of like slapping people on the back and, you know, making jokes in pubs, you know, if you want to, you know, kind of be a success sorting out the Northern Ireland Police Service, you know, so I think, you know, that whole thing about keeping everything closed is part of him and, you know, compare, you know, you compare him to some, you know, back slapper like Boris Johnson, of course, and he's not. That doesn't come across as the kind of person you want to be with. But, you know, kind of the, you know, what has he actually done wrong? You know, it is the sort of the refrain and, you know, people will say, well, they'll point to the decision to appoint Peter Mendelssohn, you know, as ambassador. But do you think, is that the best you've got? You know, kind of, you know, you
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know, I mean, it wasn't good.
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C
It wasn't good. But, you know, compared to, you know, the things that political leaders have done, you know, since time immemorial, I mean, he's as straight as a die. And maybe that's what people don't like about him.
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I mean, do they get any different results or any different public regard? Rachel, if it's Andy Burnham or Wes Streeting or Angela Rayner, isn't the problem that as soon as you become Prime Minister, everybody hates you?
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So I think there is a key problem which is we are essentially ungovernable and we have decided that we want quick answers, answers to problems that were decades in the making. And we don't like trade offs as a country. And we've also had a decade or a half or more of politicians telling us we don't need to make trade offs. So I think a lot of it comes down to the manifesto, which was the Labour Party going, everything that you don't like will change. We won't tell you exactly how it will get better, we promise. And then finding out it was a bit more difficult once they got in. But I. I do take the view that whoever takes over, even if they seem more popular now, is very quickly going to see that popular plummet once they are faced with the impossible choices that any Prime Minister is going to have to face. And I think that is doubly true of Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, who has approval ratings that are much, much higher than any Westminster politician, partly because he is, he isn't a
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Westminster politician, he isn't a Westminster politician.
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And it's much easier to say this government has got everything wrong when you're not in that government. So I am finding the daily, sometimes hourly stories about, he's going to get a seat, here's a seat he's going to get, and then you see the MP in that seat going, no, I am finding that amusing. But I think the consensus as we have this discussion on Wednesday afternoon is it is going to be really tricky for him to find a seat in time to challenge for the leadership this time around. So they're now casting around for kind of Burnham Caretaker candidates and Ed Miliband is back in the mix. So it's all starting to feel very, you know, 2015 era.
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B
Well, I was going to say, Rachel, you used the word plummet and one thing that has plummeted in the last 24 hours are the odds on Ed Miller band rather enragingly I noticed cause my eyebrow did arch yesterday and I did not act. You could have got north of 20 to 1 on him. He's now bookies favourite at fours.
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Well, I was suggesting that Ed Miller Barn was the most likely candidate back in February, but I'm not, I'm not. I'm not a political betting person, so I didn't.
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You could be a rich woman.
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It could have been my retirement fund.
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Well, it really could have. I mean, is there anything to be said, Bill, for the dramatic skip of a generation to a Shabana Mahmoud, the Home Secretary or as some are suggesting, Al Khan guns Armed Forces Minister.
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You know, I was door knocking with Al just the other day.
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How does he go over on the doorstep? Because to bring our listeners in, he is a highly decorated former.
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I mean he's got DSO and a Military Cross which is, you know, pretty.
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He doesn't wear those door knocking though, does he?
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Bet he does.
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He doesn't.
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That would be ostentatious.
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He doesn't. He comes across very well and it's a bit hard to sort of say that, you know, he doesn't know anything about the world but he's, I guess he's, you know, he's someone who came in at quite a high level. He hasn't worked his way up through the party. You know, I'm not sure he's got the kind of the roots in the party.
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Well, people suggest that that is the one of the problems that Starmer is having because though it's a weird thing to say about a man in his early 60s, he is actually as a politician, quite inexperienced. The first big proper cabinet level job he's had in politics is being Prime Minister.
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C
It's kind of ironic to say that a politician isn't very good at politics, isn't it? Yeah, I mean I. So I imagine if it, you know, if it comes down to a vote among the members of the actual parliamentary Labour Party, they will be wanting, you know, one of their own who's steeped in it and that isn't necessarily what the public wants. So that I think is another conundrum
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B
well, we doubtless have the delightful prospect of days, weeks, months, possibly years more of this ahead of us. So we go now to Beijing, where a president of China is hosting a president of the United States for the first time in nearly a decade. And the fact that it's the same two presidents as last time seems somehow a testament to the stability, if not ossification, of one country and the volatility, if not implosion, of the other. When this Xi Trump summit was mooted back in February, it was pitched as a showdown over the on rumbling US China trade war, since when, of course, the United States has, in cahoots with Israel, embarked on an actual war in Iran, which has worked out other than anticipated to the detriment of China, for one, whose export heavy economy will take something of a beating if nobody can actually buy anything. Bill, how do we expect this one to go?
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C
Well, I mean, either there's been an awful lot of very clever preparation that we know nothing about and they're going to come up, or it's the usual sort of Donald Trump, let's roll up and see what happens. In which case, I think the Chinese are kind of just going to kind of sit there and twiddle their thumbs and think that they've done very well out of it. I mean, the big deciding question is what they say about Taiwan. And of course, they may decide to say nothing at all about Taiwan. But of course, I don't think Donald Trump, Trump thinks strategically in this sense. I think he doesn't really quite get the importance of Taiwan. But if he could get some kind of victory, whatever that would be, on trade, would he be willing to make the compromises on Taiwan that would alarm the people there? Quite possibly. But I kind of think that the Chinese think, well, we prepared for this. We've got our oil stocks, we've got our mineral stocks, we're doing quite well on rare earths, all the rest of it. What do you got, America? We'd like some chips, please. But that's kind of the limit of their demands.
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But just to pick that up, Bill, on the subject of Taiwan, because obviously Taiwanese people will be paying very close attention to this summit. The worries about Taiwan are always the worries that China might have a sort of sudden seizure of if not now, when, and then make a lunge for it, because they may calculate that Donald Trump will do nothing to stop them. But China does tend to take things slowly and carefully. And might they? Now, they've already had one illustration, that is in Ukraine of what happens when A superpower makes a lunge to seize what it believes is a temporary rogue province. And that was supposed to take 72 hours, and we're now at 51 months. And they now have a second illustration of how difficult it is even for a superpower to project that power by air and by sea.
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C
Yeah, and I don't think that they have any plans, plans to do anything like that, seriously. Well, they could. They could easily squeeze. They can, you know, put a blockade. They can pressure. But I think the fundamental worldview underlying Chinese policy is that the east is rising and the west is falling. And so therefore, it's just going to be a question of, you know, watching. The Americans must make mistake after mistake and, you know, to the point that things fall into place for them. You know, 25 million people in Taiwan will have a different point of view, but, you know, can they be coerced without necessarily being invaded or, you know, will something. I mean, my guess is that she would like to have something settled by the time he finishes his, you know, his term in office. So, you know, which would be the next sort of five, six years or thereabouts.
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Rachel, on that thought, east rising, west falling and so forth, will China be approaching this? And especially the discussions around the Strait of Hormuz, of which there will hopefully be many feeling that this is kind of all right either way. On the one hand, it's not good for China if international trade is gummed up and energy supplies are gummed up by the Strait of Hormuz. On the other hand, the longer the Strait of Hormuz is gummed up, that's the longer China can enjoy watching the United States twist.
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Yeah, I think the whole straight of Hormuz question is about which country or which power is prepared to take the most economic pain for the longest. And partly that is a question of preparedness. So China has its resources sort of stacked up, as it were. And so, yes, it is painful for China, but less painful than it is for other parts of the, of the world. At the same time, though, you have got Donald Trump saying, and this is, this is supposed to be the most, the most honest Donald Trump has ever been. And he was asked about what he thought about the economic pain being suffered by Americans. And he said, I don't think about the economic pain of Americans at all at the moment, or something, something like that. It's not on my mind at all. What's on my mind is a nuclear weapon. I just think as a side note, if you are working in strategic political comms for the Democratic Party. Just clip that up as your next ad. But you do have a situation where America thinks it can exert economic pressure on Iran and on China by essentially going, look, we all want more free trade. Here are our red lines for how to get it. Iran has dug in its heels and proved that it is actually more than capable of holding out. And this is obviously a regime that effectively went to war against its own people. And so the level of which civic unrest is playing on their minds is limited. And China has the cards in terms of preparedness and also in terms of the influence that this prolonged conflict gives it as a regional power. So I don't really see a way that this summit plays out with America getting the upper hand.
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B
I mean, can China actually, even if it wants to bill about the Strait of Hormuz, do anything about it? Obviously. Iran's Foreign Minister, Abbas Arakchee, was in Beijing last week meeting his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi. China, I think we can probably safely rule out the People's Liberation Army Navy being sent up the Strait. That's very much not China's style. But is there anything they can either a carrot or a stick they can brandish at Tehran?
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C
Well, they could, but they have refused to. I mean, there was a report from a few weeks ago when the United Arab Emirates went to China and asked them to sort of rein in the Iranians, and they were basically sent away with a flea in their ear according to unconformed Internet rumors. So I kind of think that the Chinese do not wish to get involved in this. And actually they would see Iran as being being a state that they wish to prop up. So I don't think they're going to kind of force the Iranians to back down for the time being. They're okay for oil stocks. I mean, one thing that is a worry is fertilizer, frankly, around the world, this is the growing season for rice, and if there is not enough fertilizer to put on the rice field, there isn't going to be enough rice next year for people to eat. So kind of in the long term, this really is a crisis that has to be sort of.
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B
Well, to Estonia, where this past Sunday was Mother's Day. Happy Mother's Day to all our Estonian mother listeners. Not least because at least some Estonian mothers spent Mother's Day decked out in uniform and face paint, clutching a rifle and undertaking training with the Estonian Defence League, a volunteer reserve military force. Estonia, for reasons which may be understood by glancing at a map, takes defence seriously by percentage of gdp it is Europe's biggest military spender. The Estonian Defence league currently boasts 30,000 members out of a country of about 1.3 million people. That's like London having a city militia, some 200,000 strong. Bill, would you join that?
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C
I think I'm probably a bit old. I'd probably be maybe a stretcher bearer or something like that. It's funny, you know, in my idealistic youth, I would have, you know, run a mile. But I guess as I get older, I think, well, you know, possibly, you know, civic responsibility and these kind of things, you know, we ought to do better.
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B
I mean, it's much, much more easy to be enthusiastic about civic responsibility when no one's going to ask you uphold it. But, Rachel, not a luxury you have yet as the designated youth representative at this table.
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I don't think they would want me, but the one time I went clay pigeon shooting, I was quite good at it.
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B
Okay, so if we ever get invaded by clay pigeons, I'm a bit like drone shooting.
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A
What I found fascinating about this report is just the difference in mentality, which is obviously very understandable, as you say, by looking at a map. But here, less than half of young people say they would take our pubs in defense of their own country, you know, to fight a foreign war somewhere. And in estonia, it's over 62% and over 70% when you exclude the Russian minority. So they are. They are well aware of what it is they are fighting for, potentially.
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On. On those numbers, I was actually surprised, given my own encounters with Estonians, that it was only 62%. I actually assumed it would be much higher.
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70 if you'd.
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B
The Russians, indeed. But that said, I've also met members of the Russian minority who live in those cities alongside Russia's borders. And I did ask them if it came to it. They just looked at me like it was the dumbest question they'd ever heard make would I fight for Russia? Do I look like an idiot? Or words to that effect? But on that poll in this country that says half of British people aged 16 to 29 would, quote, never fight for their country. I mean, part of me thinks it's a dumb question because I think it's a fundamental rule of life that no one knows how they will react to any given situation. Until then, they're in it. And people might surprise themselves if Britain was actually imperiled. But does it surprise you that. That many people just say, absolutely not under any circumstances?
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So, like you, I don't think it's a fair question because I think whenever this is brought up by politicians, it's inevitably brought up by politicians or people in the media who themselves have never been asked to defend their country, who kind of have this perceived reflected glory from their parents or grandparents who did and are now telling the younger generation, you know, pull your socks up and step up and make sacrifices that they were never asked to do.
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B
I watched A Bridge Too Far three times.
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A
Yeah. So I think any conversation about National Service in this country has to be tied to wider debates about intergenerational fairness, about the interrogational sort of social contract, about wealth, about life chances, about the fact that you've got young people today who are looking at the reality and going, I will not be able to achieve the standard of living that my parents had, no matter how hard I work in that context, saying, by the way, would you like to be cannon fodder? Obviously, you're going to get a slightly skewed set of results if you put it in the context of, we need to rethink the way our society works and what we ask of people at all ages. And, hey, maybe if you sign up for National Service, we could reform pensions or reform how we tax property wealth in a way to pass some of that wealth on to younger generations. The conversation might be different, but it's never discussed in those terms.
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B
So is the question, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country not landing with the youth of today.
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A
Did it land with, you know, previous generations?
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C
I think John F Kennedy did quite well with it, didn't he?
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B
Well, exactly.
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A
He's American, though.
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B
There is that bill. But is. Is there something, or is this something government should think about more especially? It's not something, I think, in my experience, you need to sell people who live next to Russia on there. They are well aware of the dangers and the stakes in play. But does more effort need to be made elsewhere? Because I looked up some numbers earlier. The. The UK does have an army reserve. It used to be called the. It is now called the Army Reserve. In the last couple of years, they have rejected 60,000 applicants on medical grounds. Apparently, only 4 to 7% of applicants turned out to be actually fit to wear a uniform. The current strength of the UK's Army Reserve is about 3/4 the size of Estonia's. Wow.
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C
I mean, I think that tells a lot. It's like going back to the Boer War, you know, the early 20th century, when it was discovered that basically that, you know, the poor were so badly fed that they couldn't hold a rifle and are we getting, are we now back in that level of sort of obesity and malnutrition that we can't, we're just not fit enough to manage? I mean, I guess in terms of the sort of the wider question about whether people will fight, I mean, you know, to misquote Mike Tyson, I mean, everyone can be a pacifist until they get punched in the mouth. And I guess people will fight for their friends if they're not for an abstract concept. But I guess that figure just tells you something maybe about a lack of confidence, a lack of, of belief in the country. And where has that come from? A sense of shame about. Are you fighting for Britain's past or are you fighting for an ideal future that you could imagine? And if you can't imagine an ideal future in a better place, go back and read George Orwell, kind of the lion and the Unicorn, but it's quite lengthy, so I imagine people won't read it.
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A
Get chatgpt to some, yeah, yeah, it's true.
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C
But yeah, I mean, the richer the country is, I mean the Gallup poll across the world, the richer the country is, the fewer people want to fight for it. People kind of just take their privilege for granted.
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B
Well, on that sobering note to Australia and suggestions, can we shock you that just the faintest patina of tarnish might have attached itself to the Trump brand? Plans to adorn the Gold coast, that is basically Australia's Florida, with a Trump Tower of its own, have been ditched because, in the words of the property developer, Trump had become toxic. To recap, that's a Queensland property developer suggesting that something had become irrecoverably perceived as tacky, unreliable and second rate. An astonishing comedown for a name once associated with such irreproachably high end produce as Trump Magazine, Trump the board game, Trump phones, Trump vodka, Trump steaks and Eric Rachel, are we actually surprised that it got this? I mean, I am knowing my people as I do though Gold coasters are a very specific subset of my people. I'm amazed at the idea of a Trump Tower, which would have been the tallest building in Australia, got as far as it has before. A plurality of people just went, mate, what are we doing?
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A
It was over 20 years in the making and planning to get to this point and it was, they wanted to open it by 2032. So that suggests that this project was going to be like four decades from conception to completion. What fascinates me about this, I don't think this is a political Story, I think this is a story about capitalism. So you've got. But because the idea of these resorts is fundamentally, you want it to make money, you want people to pay lots of money to stay there. And reading the story, the Trump Organization brand, they weren't going to put any of their own money in. They were just going to charge the Australian developers for use of the Trump brand. Therefore, the implication is people will pay more money to stay in a luxury tower. The tower is still going to get built, by the way. It's just not going be branded as Trump. So they'll spend more money to stay with somewhere that has the Trump branding, that somewhere that isn't. If capitalism, market forces dictate that people go, yeah, actually that brand's putting me off, I'd rather spend my luxury hotel, Australian dollars somewhere else. That's not about politics. That's not, you know, about, you know, Australia shunning Trump. That's about, you know, cold, hard market forces. And you would expect a real estate tycoon like Trump to appreciate and respect.
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B
You would. But Bill, the developer in question seems to think that the Iran war was the final straw here. Does that surprise you?
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C
Of all the reasons to not like staying in a Donald Trump branded hotel. I guess that's just the latest, but yeah, I mean, I think I counted like 14 other Trump buildings around the world. So it'll be interesting to see whether any of the other others kind of think that it would be a good marketing move to take the Trump off their tower and that they would get more revenue as a result. But I mean, you know, I think Australians, I mean, you will know this better than me, you know, have, you know, become increasingly ambivalent about their country's alliance with the U.S. there's a lot of that about. Yeah. So, yeah, I guess it's not surprising. But I mean, it's an odd that there are kind of, there's a, you know, Trump building, I think there's one in Istanbul and various places. And if they can, you know, are people still attracted, connected to the Trump brand in Turkey?
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A
So who should they name it after if they're still going to build it, but they're not going to call it Trump Tower. As, as our Australian representative, what do they think?
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B
Well, yeah, I mean, obviously I. Modesty forbids. No, I would, I would. Serious, serious, spontaneous suggestion. They should name it the Bobcatter Tower. He is a Queensland politician who listeners may be familiar with as he still turns up on the Internet Internet doing his somewhat anguished pivot from his views on gay marriage to crocodiles, to his concerns about crocodile attacks, which was, in its way, just about the most Queensland footage ever captured on film. Bobcat. A tower. And you could put a big hat on top of it like Bob often wears.
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A
That would make me want to go there.
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B
It would make me want to stay there twice or just once. They could employ Bob as a greeter. I'm not sure how busy he otherwise is.
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A
And they're gonna serve crocodile on the right restaurant.
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B
Look, it's all. What are we doing, Rachel? We are wasted in this occupation. We should be building hotels on the Gold Coast. But have either of you, I'm curious because I never have. Have either of you stayed in a Trump property ever? Or do you own any? I will confess to owning some items of Trump merchandise because I do have American friends with somewhat defective senses of humor.
- [29:45]
A
We have a Wear a Hat day in the New Statesman office on a Friday, and I'm pretty sure one of my colleagues has brought in a Make America Great again.
- [29:53]
B
I've got one you can borrow should you ever.
- [29:55]
A
For the next.
- [29:56]
B
Yeah, should you ever wish to.
- [29:57]
A
But I think it's just one.
- [29:59]
C
Is it? Employee of the Month gets to wear it.
- [30:01]
A
Everyone has to wear it.
- [30:02]
C
Everyone has to wear it.
- [30:03]
A
Yeah, yeah, we rotate.
- [30:05]
B
Just as a final thought, Bill, I'm asking you to rank from a scale of 0 to 10, your scale of astonishment. And this is reported this week in American media that slightly less than a year after the Trump phone was announced, the Trump mobile phone, gold plated, so sort of American made with a sort of exciting, brand new all American network.
- [30:28]
C
It hasn't happened.
- [30:29]
B
Well, $600,100 deposits have been secured, apparently, which is $60 million. It's a fair old, fair old sock asking you to go back to the original question. Rank your scale of astonishment from 0 to 10, that not a single one has yet been shipped.
- [30:48]
C
0.5.
- [30:52]
B
And yet, Rachel, is there any imaginable, any imaginable point at which people just stop falling for this?
- [30:58]
A
No, no, actually. And I think that the more ludicrous it is, the more committed the people who are still involved in it become.
- [31:05]
B
We will talk more about that hotel afterwards. Rachel Cunliffe and Bill Hayton, thanks both for joining us. Finally, on today's show, anybody who has ever read anything about Nazi Germany has or should have ended up asking two questions. Why and how? Specifically, why and how did a modern, educated, technologically advanced nation built atop a richly cultured civilisation, descend so completely and swiftly into mania and Barbarism and in due course, total ruin. The search for answers has often focused on Nazi Germany's predecessor regime, the Weimar Republic, the flawed, unruly democracy whose assembly gathered, gathered in the Thuringian town of that name. Katja Hoya's new book, Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, tells the story of Weimar with the stories of the people who lived in this crucial place at this extraordinary time. I spoke to Katya at Midori House earlier and began by asking where you even begin looking for a way into this subject that hasn't been explored before.
- [32:04]
D
Well, for me it was about finding a specific place and specific people to follow. Because I think when we talk about this time period, it tends to be quite abstract. People look at economics, politics, big concepts, and I think that sometimes makes it quite difficult to try and conceptualize for one's own life. What does this actually mean, especially as we try and draw lessons from this time period more than we do, perhaps from other parts of history. So yeah, I was trying to find a different approach into it, finding one particular place and a set of very specific particular people to follow.
- [32:36]
B
Weimar has the obvious resonances. It is the one name that people associate with that pre Nazi period of German history. But what was behind the decision to pivot away from the, I guess the bigger names you might have focused on and tell the story through the lives of people who just happened to be living there at the time?
- [32:55]
D
Well, Weimar is central to, as a town is central to that inter war story. So the whole republic was founded there, hence why it's still called after this. You got the Bauhaus movement as a modernist art movement settling down there as well in 1919. So it sort of encapsulates that ambition of that time period, the idea to start something new after the First World War. But equally it becomes an early launch pad for the Nazi movement. So to me it seemed that the people who live in that town have got a frontline seat almost to that history. They're not representatives. So people often ask, you know, is it, are you doing kind of a town in Nazi Germany or in the Weimar Republic? And I'm saying it's quite the opposite. It's a special place. It's not representative in many ways, ways. But because a lot of this history actually happens in Weimar in a small town, people have a very immediate experience of the big patterns that we see unfolding. And I think that makes it quite an interesting place to go to, to look for a more concrete, specific way into that.
- [33:54]
B
Is there a thing of people I Guess becoming compromised almost without them really noticing, I. E. They join the Nazi Party for professional reasons, or so they tell themselves that kind of thing.
- [34:07]
D
Yeah, there are lots of small sort of decisions that people make. And that's why I wanted to open this whole sort of human tableau up for people to watch that. Because it's not one big decision that happens and then people have to kind of live with it or reject it or whatever. It's lots of small things. And that's why also I take the book up to 1939 rather than finishing in 1933, because even then, and 33, the Nazis couldn't have just said, let's go to war or let's build Auschwitz. That that just doesn't work. They try and they break one boundary after another, one taboo after another, and people always find ways of either supporting it. There are plenty of people who think what. What happens after 1933 is good, or tolerating it, or looking the other way, or finding psychological ways out. And all those small little decisions which are completely different, whether you're a worker or a teacher or politician or. Or Friedrich Nietzsche's sister who lives in Weimar, all of those small decisions in the end add up to a kind of political climate that the Nazis can work with. And that's why I'm saying there isn't really a straightforward answer where the tipping point is, because it's a collective thing, that kind of society, the majority of society, find ways of living with the situation or even outright supporting it.
- [35:20]
B
Was there much in the way of organized resistance to any of this from people who did see where this was coming, or was there a thing? And I guess this goes to what you were saying earlier, that there was such a lack of conviction in the permanence of any sort of German state that nobody really knew what they were supposed to be holding on to by way of resisting what was coming.
- [35:45]
D
There were people who resisted in Weimar. That's fewer people than elsewhere. It's already a few, even when you look at the whole of German society. But Weimar has got very few workers, and that's where most of the resistance comes from. A socialist and communist workers to start with. So I do follow amongst my kind of cast, if you want to call it that, I do follow a man called Courtney Erling, who's in the spd, in the Social Democratic Party, and he fights all the way, even though he's got two small children and a wife to worry about. He's really not in good health. He picks up tuberculosis at the end of The First World War. He has got plenty of reasons to say, I'm just going to keep my head down and enjoy the benefits that the Nazis are trying to offer workers like him, like housing and subsidized holidays. But he doesn't. So these people do exist. And there's this kind of almost glimpse of, you know, it was possible, but nonetheless it also at the same time feels very high risk and also quite futile. He doesn't get very far with his resistance. And you sort of think it must have been extra, extremely tempting for plenty of other people to just say, I may not like what they're doing, but I'm just gonna try and live with it somehow.
- [36:49]
B
I mean, obviously, to research and write a book of this depth and this length, you are spending a lot of time with the material, which means you're spending a lot of time with the thoughts of the people who become your characters. Did you find yourself developing any kind of particular relationships with them as you went along? Did you get upset or annoyed by any of them? For example?
- [37:11]
D
A lot of the stories are very upsetting, particularly towards the end, as the Second World War brings misery upon almost everybody, including the perpetrators. It's quite a stark ending if you go all the way to 1945, I would say. I mean, my main character in the book, my protagonist, if you will, is a man called Karl Weyrich, who was a bookbinder and he's got a stationery shop right in the middle of town.
- [37:35]
B
And he's the one whose archive became available to you?
- [37:38]
D
Yes. So he kept a diary throughout his very long life. He was born in 1885. That resonated with me. I was born in 1985. So you think, you know, you're exactly the same age, 100 years removed from this person. And he's your everyday German in a way, in that he's. He's Protestant, as most people were. He's sort of a lower middle class guy, sets up his little shop and keeps his diary. And for that reason it's quite difficult. Even as a historian, when you read it and you go through it and you kind of see him developing, founding a family, that kind of thing, setting up shop, and then he sits there in 1933 and writes in his diary. And now we're putting all of our hopes in this new young chancellor called a Hitler. And you think, no, Carl, no. You know, but it's. Yeah. And then, I mean, he becomes disillusioned with it fairly quickly again in the 1930s. But like most people, finds ways of living with that permanent unease and with that feeling that it's not right. He sends his own son into war when he gets drafted when he's 18, you know, know, and sort of gives us some goodbye as he goes off to the Eastern Front. And you think you can kind of. There's a very fine line between understanding that and finding a way, a human way, of understanding why somebody does something without then justifying it. Because obviously what he did is what lots of people did, is what enabled Nazism to work. But at the same time, I think we have to understand why people did it in the first place for us then, to perhaps draw some lessons from it before we start condemning.
- [39:05]
B
Right, well, inevitable concluding question then, because you do write in the book rather dispiritingly for all that we were talking about the impermanent and rickety nature of the Weimar edifice. But you say that no amount of history, tradition and culture is sufficient to safeguard against the takeover of a ruthless totalitarian ideology. Obviously, in the context of our current times. Have to ask the question then, what is indeed nothing?
- [39:32]
D
That's exactly the point. I mean, people went to Weimar in 1919, not Berlin. Berlin, in part because this is a. Is a city of culture, a town of culture. So the idea that you found a new Germany, a brand new thing, and give it this glow of Weimar, you know, because you want to safeguard it, you want to make sure that it's got all the legacy of German intellectualism and culture behind it, and still that's not enough, because it isn't. It isn't ever enough. And I think today we sometimes have a tendency, particularly when you live in the Anglosphere and some of these oldest democracies in the world, to just think it's always going to be this way because there is a legacy of democratic culture and thought behind what we currently have. And I guess the lesson is to. To be and remain vigilant even in your everyday life, in whatever means you've got and whatever room to maneuver you've got.
- [40:21]
B
That was Katja Hoya speaking to me earlier. Her new book, Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, is available now and very much recommended. That is all for this edition of the Monocle Daily. A big thanks to our. Our panelists today, Rachel Cunliffe and Bill Hayton. Today's show was produced by Christy o' Grady and researched by Josefina Gomez. Our sound engineer was also Christy o'. Grady. Is there nothing she can't do, including writing closing credits, apparently. I'm Andrew Muller here in London. The daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks for listening,
- [40:58]
C
Sam.