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- [00:02]
A
Every day, the world presents you with hundreds of headlines. What do you believe? Who do you trust? The Financial Times cuts through complexity with clarity, accuracy and global perspective. Its journalism is guided by independence, not agendas. That's why leaders in business, policy and culture turn to one trusted source for facts, for insight, for what matters next. Source FT Read more and subscribe@ft.com you're listening to the Monocle Daily, first broadcast on 13 November 2025 on Monocle Radio.
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B
Russia's reluctant foreign legion recruits in Africa. Maga World tries not to believe what it is reading. And the Pope reveals his four favorite films. Put the champagne on ice. Lars von Trier, I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily starts now.
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C
Foreign.
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B
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 Conliff and Ash Bhardwaj will discuss the day's big stories. And we'll hear from the Tourize Summit in Riyadh, where efforts are ongoing to persuade holidaymakers to visit Saudi Arabia. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle Daily. Hello and welcome to the Monocle Daily. Coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London, I'm Andrew Muller and I am joined today by Rachel Cunliffe, associate political editor of the New Statesman, and Ash Bhardwaj, journalist and author of why We Travel. Hello to you both.
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D
Good evening.
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C
Hello.
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B
On that note, first of all, Ash, where have you been traveling to?
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D
Most recently, I have been to Oregon in the United States and to Norway, specifically to Bergen and Stavanger, and love them both. What's great about both of those places is the landscape and the natural beauty. They're both easy places to travel, good food, good access. Love them.
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B
Lots of pine trees in both.
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D
There are lots of pine trees in both. And also at the very southern tip of Oregon, there are coastal redwoods, the tallest trees in the world, which I didn't know until I planned this particular trip.
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B
Did you get any sense that the hugely amusing secessionist movement in Oregon is gathering any steam at all?
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D
I mean, they're definitely, I think, going to the centre of Portland, which has obviously been in the news recently because of the protests and the federal government of the United States sending in the National Guard or trying to. But there is definitely a sense of it being very different to other parts of the United States that I've been to. There's a very strong sense of Oregonian ness.
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B
There is indeed, Rachel you have been working on a story, which I could cheerfully talk about all night, but which we must not, which is to bring in overseas listeners about a scandal which is gripping the United Kingdom at the moment, which is releasing people from prison who are not supposed to be released. This is the very definition of you had one job. And there's been some high profile occasions of this in recent weeks, but it turns out that this happens almost literally every day and has done for some time.
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C
Indeed, yeah. I think when people heard that one prisoner who was at the heart of some protests around an asylum hotel over the summer, who was convicted of sexual offences, had been mistakenly released from prison, they thought that was a one off. A scandalous thing, but a one off. But actually it happened again a couple of weeks later. And indeed, as you say, it happens all the time, not necessarily with high profile individuals who have been at the heart of scandals, but just every day. And by the way, it happens the other way too, which is that people who have come to the end of serving their sentences and should be let out aren't let out on time. So I have been looking into, firstly, some numbers and why. So there were 860 mistaken prisoner releases over the course of the Conservative government. The numbers have been going up while Labour's been in power because they have got an early release scheme which has just added extra complexity to the system. But I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, how does this happen?
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B
You read my mind. And that, as I'm sure of literally everybody listening to us.
- [04:26]
C
Yeah. How hard can it be to make sure that somebody serves the correct amount of time in prison? And the answer to that question is the prison system is based on paperwork. They don't have a digital system, they don't have spreadsheets. Quite often mistakes are because somebody has read handwriting wrong, they've actually read the sentence wrong, or they have calculated the length of time someone should spend in prison wrong because they haven't used a calculator. Or sometimes they've got the wrong prisoner because it's quite difficult to keep track of who's who because they don't have a digital system. There have been instances where prisoners have said, are you sure I should be released? I'm pretty sure I've got more time on my sentence, but no, out you go. And there have also, as I said, been cases where people desperately try and say, this is the end of my sentence, and the system and the computer has got them mixed up with someone else or they haven't recorded their sentence. Properly. And so they're stuck inside. So it's an absolute scandal. We've had both the Prisons Minister in the House of Lords this week and the Justice Secretary in the House of Commons this week answer questions on it. They both say that they're going to bring in AI chatbots which are hopefully going to help solve the problem.
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B
Me personally, that would be a first.
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C
I would start with the spreadsheet.
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B
Well, I look forward to reading the hell out of that. But we will start tonight in Ukraine via Russia and Kenya, which is to say that Kenyan authorities estimate that at least 200 of their citizens are currently serving in Russia's military As Vladimir Putin's 72 hour lightning conquest of Ukraine enters its 33rd month. They are part of what is believed to be an African legion of some 1400 troops in total who appear to have been recruited via a mix of financial blandishments and or a certain amount of sleight of hand as to their ultimate destination. There appear to be a good few who thought they would be working construction as opposed to participating in a giant vainglorious mishap. Ash, does this suggest that Russia is rather struggling for volunteers at home if they're having to sort of lure or bewilder African soldiers to fight their war for them?
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D
Russia's certainly been struggling for numbers for troops for quite some time and Vladimir Putin is afraid of trying to initiate any sort of wider conscription because it would threaten his power within Russia. We know that they had that massive number of troops coming over from North Korea. I think it was 90,000 North Korean troops focused primarily on the Kursk Salient. But they've also had reports of people fighting from India. And again, it's the same question of had they actually been recruited knowing that that's what they were going to do, or had they gone to go and do another job and then they ended up on the front line and particularly through the, what was the Wagner mercenary group. Russia have been operating in Africa for some time, but they haven't really been reported to be doing a lot in Kenya up until this point. Kenya is former British Imperial colony and also a place where the British army has a base. So any interference there is going to be of concern to the Brits and wider security in Africa, Kenya being a comparatively stable country.
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B
Rachel, possibly this is reading too much into Russia's motivations, whether they're trying at some level to internationalize the conflict to co opt African countries into being on their side or I mean, and if that is the case, it has to be stressed, it doesn't appear to be working because the Kenyan authorities appear completely unimpressed by this. Or is it that they are just desperate for literally anybody they can stuff into a uniform and direct at the Ukrainians?
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C
Yeah, I think in essence, it's a numbers game. If you look at the losses that the Russian military are taking, I think losing a thousand men a day and the snail's pace of their advancement, and I say snail's pace. There was some analysis done that showed that the amount of territory that Russia had been able to take, if you divide that by the length of the war, it is faster than a snail, but not all that much. So it really is very, very slow gain at huge cost. And it's essentially a meat grinder.
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B
Right.
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C
And so the efforts to conscript from abroad, you know, they make sense. Russia doesn't want to go down the road of mandatory conscription, not at least because the impact that would have on popularity. And they. I think they tried that, or they suggested that at one point, and tens of thousands of Russians immediately tried to leave the country. So they do have a. An issue with just maintaining their forces. And I think it's interesting that the ways to lure conscripts from various countries, India, African nations, Pakistan abroad, they mirror pretty much exactly other trafficking operations. So things like sex trafficking operations, where somebody is lured with a promise of a job in construction, in warehouse work, their passport gets taken away, they've got fees to wherever, and then suddenly they find themselves in a really dangerous, precarious situation that they can't get out of.
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B
Ash. It's maybe an obvious point to make, but let's make it anyway. It's fair to observe, I think, that there are sort of divergent motivations between what we know of Russia's foreign legion and what we know of Ukraine's foreign legion, which is considerable. I've met a couple of them myself, and we had in here recently Colin Freeman talking about his excellent new book, the Mad and the Brave, about his experience of Ukraine's foreign legion, many of whom do seem. Well, they say it explicitly. For them, this is their chance at a Spanish Civil War variety thing. They have saddled up and gone off to fight the good fight on someone else's behalf.
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D
And I think it depends on which side of the narrative you perceive, because the Russians believe that they're on the good side of the fight.
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B
Well, everybody always does.
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D
And one of the things I noticed when I was in Ukraine in 2018 was this real use back then of imagery from Lord of the Rings about The Russians being the orcs and the Ukrainians being the sort of last stand of the good people holding back the evil. And for those who go and fight in a conflict, there will be differing intentions. Some people may just want to get engaged in violence, but for many of these people going to volunteer in the Ukrainian Foreign Legion, it is because they believe that they're doing a good thing to defend that country. And it's very referencing back to these fighters that we see appearing from places like Kenya and India. If they have been trafficked, as it seems, and they don't expect to end up there, obviously they're not going to be particularly committed to the fight. But that indicates the way Russia is fighting. They don't need people with good skills who are good fighters. They need mass who they can throw at the Ukrainian defenses in order to detect the Ukrainian defenses and to use.
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C
Up resources, especially cannon fodder, which is really tragic.
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B
It certainly does seem, Rachel, if you read interviews with a couple of Kenyans that have been captured by the Ukrainians, that I think it's fair to say their hearts weren't really in it.
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C
No, and you can totally imagine why. And actually Russia had this issue as well with some of its own conscripts. I remember a couple of months ago there were stories of sort of Russian teenage boys essentially who thought they were signing up for auxiliary or support roles and immediately found themselves on the front line. I think that is a key difference, that in the Ukrainian side they are obviously have conscription as well, but they are fighting for the very essence of their country, for their country to still exist. And it's a different sense of prioritization and incentives that doesn't take away from the fact that Russia does seem to have almost an exhaustible supply of people that it can throw at this. And that tells you something about the direction that the war has been going in.
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B
Well, to the United States and to what has been a pretty discombobulating 24 hours for those MAGA voting queue nonsters, still morbidly convinced that any day now their hero, President Donald Trump, is going to round up the sinister cabal of child trafficking deviants who have for many years furtively manipulated the destiny of the Republic to their own nefarious ends. A new dump of emails to and from the late and widely unlamented Jeffrey Epstein very strongly suggests that if there was a sinister cabal of child trafficking deviants, etc. President Trump may not be the person best placed to bring it to justice unless he turns state's witness. Though good Luck getting him to stick to his new cover identity. Rachel, what have we learnt from all of this? I mean, it is, and I'm sure most listeners by now are already aware of this, it is pretty gruesome reading, very gruesome reading.
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C
So what we've learned from the documents that were released from the Congressional committee is that there are clear links, we knew this anyway, between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. And it's quite interesting what the documents seem to show that they had a friendship and then at some point they fell out. And the reason for that falling out, I think, is quite fascinating. There's a suggestion that Donald Trump was angry at Epstein for poaching workers from his hotels in Mar a Lago and hospitality businesses. And the reason I find that intriguing is last month I read the memoir published after her death of Virginia Giuffre, the very high profile Epstein victim, the one who is connected, possibly, although he says not with the man we used to call Prince Andrew. And she talks about being recruited as a teenager while working as a spa attendant at Mar a Lago and how that was a kind of ground from, from which Ghislaine Maxwell kept an eye out for young girls who could be entreated into this really toxic, horrendous world of sexual trafficking. So that's one element of the emails and everything that have been released. I do think, just to go back to your intro, it is baffling to me that you have a conspiracy theory in America all about how there is a deep state covering up a ring of high profile, high status paedophiles and sex traffickers. And then you have evidence that this actually a version of this, did exist. And the person who they elected to the White House, who was meant to, you know, drain the swamp and expose it all, seems highly reluctant to do so. And I think there are real splits underway in the MAGA movement as a result of that, and real disappointment the way that Trump is responding to all of this, even though to the rest of us it's not very surprising.
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B
Ash, we are seeing some of those splits on the surface, we are seeing a few kind of certainly Republican Congress folk, hitherto extremely loyal, declining to go along with this phrase I thought I'd never utter. But credit where it's due to Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, does that perhaps signify that this might be something of a point of no return, that for at least a fraction of Trump's fan club, this might prove a bridge too far?
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D
I can't remember during the political campaign for the last presidential election. Whether Trump himself actually spoke about trying to release the Epstein files or he simply let other people do it.
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C
I think one point he said he thought it would be a good idea, but he didn't lean into it as much as the people around him did.
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D
He certainly leverage that caucus.
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B
And Vice President J.D. vance has been very, very keen about releasing the. Well, actually he's been noticeably quiet these last 24 to 48 hours, but certainly early on he was very much in favor.
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D
And aside from that, Trump was certainly someone who always talked about making sure all of the documents got out there. He did speak about the deep state and he talked about revealing what the Clintons had been up to and the Bidens had been up to. So to an extent he has made this bed for himself about wanting to release documents. And yes, there is this caucus for whom was a derivative of QAnon and then the Epstein files, as you say, really ensured that this felt like it was a true thing. And it does seem to be something that is literally splitting the party because four of those Republican Congress people have voted to release these documents. I was a little confused with the techniques that were going on in the American Congress. There was one that was being done through the members of Congress, the representatives, and then there was another side that was being done through this Oversight committee. But yes, it does seem that this is a split because Trump is not going to be happy and he doesn't seem to like the idea that anyone in the Republican Party would ever vote against him. One of his powers over the last few years of turning the Republican Party into the MAGA party has been absolute loyalty to him. And beyond that loyalty, there doesn't really seem to be much holding them together.
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B
To sound a note of caution though, Rachel, because I know that we have this extraordinary dump of raw emails which is inviting the whole world to play detective and indeed the whole world appears to be and drawing various inferences from it. One inference that has been semi plausibly drawn from a few of them is that after the falling out that you referenced, they had a falling back in and may actually still have been in contact after Trump was was president the first time. But that being said, do we have to be a bit careful about what we are relying upon here as primary source material, I. E. The word for anything of Jeffrey Epstein?
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C
Yes, definitely. And it's just a huge volume of documents as well. So trying to draw a clear picture from it's almost too much information out there. And that's the information we have. There's even more information in testimonies and depositions that we don't have. There is a question, though, about the fact that, you know, Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide or died in prison. We didn't get to have that trial. We didn't get to have the exposing of any of the other individuals who were part of his circle, for want of a better word. And even that. Even, even, even Epstein being arrested in 2019, you know, that came, I think, 15 years after he was first reported to police. There have been so many legal efforts of various types at a state level, at a federal level, at a civil level to try and get to the bottom of this. And they've all been obstructed in various ways. And that suggests, all of it suggests, and I know I sound like a conspiracy here, but there are other individuals, maybe Donald Trump, maybe others who are out there right now living their lives perfectly happily, who would be exposed were there to be a proper, in depth public investigation and inquiry into it. That just doesn't seem to be happening.
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B
Ash, we do have to assume that there is plenty more where this came from. And I think we probably do have to assume that none of that's going to make Donald Trump look particularly good either. One of the many difficulties he is now faced with is that it has been widely assumed that a few recent manoeuvres have been rolling the pitch to either commute the sentence of or outright pardon Ghislaine Maxwell, who has been convicted of being Jeffrey Epstein's long standing accomplice. Even by Trump's standards, he can't possibly do that now, can he?
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D
I mean, I don't really understand why he started to do that in the first place because there doesn't seem to yet be any evidence that Trump has actually done some of the things that Epstein did or that others did in terms of abusing these victims.
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B
Nothing absolute, no absolute smoking gun. But he is certainly mentioned in Jeffrey Epstein's correspondence more often and in different tones than I think most of us would want to be ourselves.
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D
Absolutely. And given that much of that had already come out before this current release of documents, there was awareness of this relationship already existing between them. It did seem like a very odd thing to do to make it look like he was creating some kind of opportunity for Ghislaine Maxwell, some kind of bargaining. And she came out and said this very odd thing where she only ever saw Trump behave gentlemanly around the women that had been trafficked.
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B
Cause clearly, Rachel, just finding on this right there, we can see at the risk of Again, turning us all into seething foil hatters. But some sort of bargain was struck between Ghislaine Maxwell and Trump's representative. There is no other possible inferen you can draw from it? No.
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C
And if you look at what she is convicted of doing and the conditions under which she's currently being held, she's being held in a minimum security prison. Like, I don't think any US prison is particularly nice, but she's being held in one of the nicest ones with the highest level of privileges. Some conversations have gone on and her commentary on any of this, her willingness to cooperate with enforcement agencies, have been close to zero. So you have to imagine that some kind of deal was struck with someone at some point.
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B
Well, we will doubtless hear more about this over coming days. But now to Portugal, a country which hardly struggles for tourists and nor should it, but whose ambitions in this regard are apparently unsated. Vexed by its placing just outside the top 10 of the world Economic Forum's Travel and Tourism Development Index, Portugal is spending big in a bid to claw its way past, at the very least, Switzerland for 10th place. Among the big ideas are an expansion of flight, capacity and connectivity, going big on Portuguese food and culture and trying to spread the business around so the big cities don't get all the tourists, and so citizens of the big cities don't complain too much about all the tourists. Ash is the resident travel writer at the Table. Portugal for or against? For.
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D
It's a great place, particularly if you get out of the big cities. The landscape is amazing. There's lots you can do there. The small areas, there's just beautiful rivers, beautiful hills, the coastline. I was down in a place called Esserexia last year, which is this beautiful lagoon. It's amazing for bird watching. I'm surprised there aren't more Brits going down there to do bird watching. The Brits love it. But there has been some concern in the big cities, Porto and Lis, Lisbon in particular, about the number of visitors. Portugal introduced a sort of digital nomad visa, and that has seen a lot of people going and living there, at least temporarily, because the quality of life is so good and the cost of living is so low. So if you've got some kind of remote work, it's a great place to be. But this is starting to have the impact that we've seen in a lot of places like. Like Barcelona in particular, where people coming into an area with more money push the costs of living up for everybody. But part of this initiative that Portugal is talking about is about making tourism and travel more sustainable. And they don't just mean carbon footprint sustainable, but they really do want to make it socially sustainable so that the people that live in a place are not only seeing the negative impacts of tourism, because, yes, there might be more money flowing into the economy to a few businesses and higher tax revenues, but for the people in places that become highly trafficked through tourists, then they only tend to see the negative. So it's good that they are thinking about this from the outset.
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B
See, I remain surprised, Rachel, that the market in that respect doesn't correct itself, because the last thing, well, among the last things, possibly above food poisoning, that any tourist wants when they go to a tourist destination is other bloody tourists. Like, nobody's happy to see lots of other tourists when they go somewhere on holiday, and yet everybody keeps going back to the same places that everybody else is going to.
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C
Yeah. What's the one thing that people who are not travel and tourism experts, you know, search for when they're looking for a holiday? It's hidden gem. Right. Everyone's looking for the hidden gem. Everyone's looking for the unspoiled beach. Everyone's looking for the off the beaten trail. It's interesting you mentioned Portugal, wanting to overtake Switzerland. My family's been going to the same village in Switzerland since I was three, so that's over 30 years now. And it's got a very beautiful lake. And a couple of years ago, lake went viral on Instagram or Tik Tok. I don't even know.
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B
Wasn't you.
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C
Was definitely wasn't me. Because now when you go, you can't hike the path because there are too many people on the path. And it's a proper mountain track. It's quite a. It's not dangerous path, but you have to be. You have to have proper shoes, you have to be careful, you have to look at the weather. And these people are not doing any of that. They're in trainers and they're on their phones the whole time and it's dangerous. And it's really caused controversy in the village because obviously it's bringing lots of money to the village, but it's also destroying one of the most beautiful natural landmarks that they have. And I can totally see how a similar thing would be going on in Portugal.
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D
Yeah. So you have this effect when you start to see different forms of tourism is that you start to develop effectively a bodied politic in the destination who now benefit from it. So whereas before, there may not have been a want for that type of tourism. Now you have people who start to have new incomes, they've entered a new, new realm of wealth because of this money coming and therefore they are. You start to get conflict within the community. In the Galapagos during COVID when obviously international tourists were unable to go there, the Ecuadorian government started to make it much more affordable for Ecuadorians to go. And it basically developed this new form of tourism. So the Galapagos tourism model was based on international tourists really high end, really high end coming to the Galapagos. And they had a. They really control the boats moving around the cruisers in terms of the size of the boats, the numbers and their movement. So you, whenever you're out beyond, well, even if you're on the main islands, you don't see that many tourists. And certainly when you're out in the national park, which is the outer lying islands, you might see one other boat that you pass on the way through. And what started to happen is people stay in the towns and they take these effectively rehabilitated fishing boats and go out and they are not subject to the same, same licenses and rules as cruise. Now many people in the island don't. They want to get rid of that lower end form of tourism because it doesn't bring as much money in. There's environmental and social issues as a product of it. But now there's plenty of people in the islands who are making money from that form of tourism. So once it's been introduced, it's very hard to unwind it.
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B
Just finally on this one, I want to ask you each quickly in turn for a hot travel tip of any sort. Obviously, Rachel, yours is going to be very much not your lake in Switzerland, but is there anywhere else you would like to direct those people? People too?
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C
Oh, I'm gonna go to the travel expert first so I have a chance to think about this.
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B
I've got a couple.
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D
Thank you.
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C
Give me time to think.
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D
Palermo in Sicily, I think.
- [26:52]
B
Lovely city.
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D
It's a great city. It feels like Barcelona would have been 10, 15 years ago. Sarajevo in Bosnia Herzegovina.
- [27:00]
B
So a great city.
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D
The center of Sarajevo is what you would imagine Istanbul to be like. These beautiful old caravanserais, they're now like piazzas. And then you've got the old Ottoman buildings butting up against the Austro Hungarian in buildings. Love it.
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C
I'm gonna go for Vancouver island, which is if you want natural forests and wildlife. And I was thinking about places where I didn't see any other people. And Vancouver island, it does get, it does get Tourists, but they're very spread out and it's very beautiful. And we woke up and we saw bears outside our window.
- [27:33]
B
You can't argue with that. Well, now to the Vatican, where the recently installed Pope Leo XIV has wound himself up to imminently host a bevy of Hollywood A listers by submitting, committing to the request the current, rather a letterboxd inspired craze for naming one's four favourite films in the hope that this will reflect positively upon one. Despite being thus presented with an opportunity for mischief possibly unequalled in all of human history, His Holiness has declined to list anything of the Ilk of the Omen or Life of Brian or Last Tango In Paris, and has instead played it relatively wholesome, naming It's A Wonderful Life, the Sound Of Music, Ordinary People and Life Is Beautiful. Rachel, anything controversial here? I'm with him on It's A Wonderful Life, Ordinary People. I don't think I've ever got to the end of and the Sound Of Music and Life Is Beautiful. I would need some sort of weapon pointed at me to sit through again.
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C
It's interesting because my stepdaughters, they're twins and they're eight and they've just got really into the Sound Of Music. And I love this story because now I can tell them they have something in common with the Pope, which I just think is great. I was surprised that Conclave wasn't on there, given that it's about the unexpected underdog candidate. I've spot the ending. Now it's about the unexpected underdog candidate.
- [28:53]
B
Apologies to everybody whose experience of Conclave has just been ruined by Rachel Cunliffe.
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C
I haven't said which one it is.
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B
That's true. He might have thought that was a.
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C
Bit on the nose, but I think he obviously knows what he's doing here. They're very uncontroversial films. They're all about the warm, fuzzy power of human spirit and all of that. It's a very kind of soft, cuddly Pope entertainment vibe, isn't it?
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D
I wonder how many people this had to go through. Did he. Did he get checked off by. By a papal committee?
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B
I mean, I. I think that goes on a lot with high profile people submitting to this challenge. And yes, you can both start thinking right now about your four favorites, because you know you're going to get asked. But if you look at the Pope's four favorites, Ash, what does he. What does he want us to think about here? Him as a person who watches It's A Wonderful Life The Sound of Music, Ordinary People and Life is Beautiful.
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D
I think the Sound of the. The Sound of Music. I think it's. That's. That's the one I know best of these films. It's the one that I've seen more than once, and therefore I can remember the story quite clearly. It's about the defeat fascism. It's about family values, it's about coming together, it's about singing, it's about beautiful mountains. It's about preservation of landscape and heritage. So I think with that, that's fairly clear. The others I'm not quite familiar enough with to be able to give you.
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C
I haven't seen any of the others either.
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D
Angle. Andrew, I feel you're best placed for this.
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B
I mean, I infer from this, given that in two of them, Rachel, that the Nazis, you know, come off pretty badly.
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C
Nazis bad. I'm cool with the Pope who thinks Nazis are bad.
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B
Yeah, that's. Yeah. Well, maybe he's having a bit of a dig at one of his predecessors, but, yeah, it is a predictable slate he's gone with there, I think.
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C
You don't want to be controversial in this, do you? I'm still on the fact that you hate the Sound of Music. I was at a bar last week where you sit around a piano and play songs from musicals until 2 in the morning, and they did doe a deer from the Sound of Music. And I have never seen so many people so full of joy at one in the morning.
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D
It is a journey so joyous.
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B
There would have been a dissenting presence had I been there. But the chances of me being.
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C
You should go with me. We'll make it happen.
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B
A bar full of people literally voluntarily singing show tunes.
- [31:13]
C
Yeah, badly.
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B
This is. Well, to bring it back to the realm of the theocratic. That is literally my idea of what hell will be like. But come on, let's have four favorites from each of you. Ash, you are writing things down.
- [31:25]
D
Yeah, and I was. My favorite film is Lord of the Rings. The landscape, the story, it's. It's brilliant. I used to live down in the south island of New Zealand and used to ride horses around pretending I was a rider of Rohan. It was excellent. And another couple of favorites are from my childhood, Trading Places with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. Very good film.
- [31:46]
B
Solid.
- [31:47]
D
Coming to America, also Eddie Murphy. But I have recently started to really like molecules.
- [31:53]
C
Ah, so good, because my. My daughter, they sing that at this bar too.
- [31:58]
D
I'm there. I'm there.
- [32:00]
B
Rachel, do you have four?
- [32:01]
C
I was gonna go for the three Lord of the Rings films and Pirates of the Caribbean, but three of those have been taken. So I will. I will second Lord of the Rings and go for 10 things I hate about yout, which is just a triumph of the genre.
- [32:16]
E
The.
- [32:16]
B
The. The high school marching band scene I genuinely laughed out loud at. And I don't often laugh out loud at the cinema, but I did not see that punchline coming.
- [32:25]
C
No, it's wonderful. It's wonderful. And also I've rewatched recently, there was a film, I think, from 2004 called Stage Beauty, which is. Have you seen Shakespeare in Love? Everyone knows Shakespeare in Love.
- [32:36]
E
Yeah.
- [32:36]
C
Yeah. So it's like six years. Six years after that. And it's about Jacobean theatre and men playing women. And it's a bit like Shakespeare in Love, only instead of a love story, it's about gender roles and sexuality and what it means to perform as an actor. And instead of Romeo and Juliet, they do Othello. And it's brilliant. And it's got all of. I'm not gonna name them. It's got all of your favorite national treasure actors in it, and it's wonderful.
- [33:01]
B
Is that. Does that take you to four?
- [33:02]
C
That takes me to four.
- [33:03]
B
Okay. Well, I'm going with both airplane films and the two Indiana Jones ones which don't suck. Rachel Cunliffe and Ashbardwaj, thank you both for joining us. Finally, on today's show, we head to Riyadh, which is hosting a Global Tourism Summit, 2RISE, that aims, it says here, to rewrite the rules of global travel. Saudi Arabia has been looking to open itself up to tourism in a manner that would have been unimaginable. Just a few back. Our golf correspondent Inzamam Rashid, attended rather for Monocle Radio and spoke with Sebastian Bazin, chairman and chief executive officer of Accor Hotels. Insi began by asking if this event is home to any unique elements. Compared to others he's been to this.
- [33:44]
E
Year, Tour Rice feels very different. You know, when I opened my room last night, it's. I had a lot of gifts, but one of them was a video from two Rice. And I was telling the minister Al Khatib, I was extremely important press. The way they described Tourise was all about the intersection between the real economy, between education, between mobility, between transport, between gdp, AI technology. And even though I've been the chairman of a Confederate trial, I said, wow, tourism is really the connecting glue between all those different verticals. So it's very real and you feel it when you come here. You meet a lot of people actually don't happen to be in hospitality alone. They happen to be in the real economy. And I need that them for me to succeed. So it's deeper, more profound, broader than travel and tourism only.
- [34:33]
F
Why is Accor expanding so much out here in the Middle East? What is it about the Middle east and the Gulf in particular that impresses.
- [34:42]
E
You to have what I've been dreaming of, the five things in the same hand. And it happens to be true also in Qatar and UAE is strongly the leadership, very strong vision capacity, financial capacity to execute geography who needs to shine and be discovered and local population who dreaming to be an actor and participant and to be trained. So it happened that I guess you have all the ingredients for me to succeed. And ACCO is very much at ease here because we've been here for the last 35 years. So we need to think globally. But Arco locally. No, I feel very strongly. I feel good here.
- [35:20]
F
Is it a sense of they just kind of get stuck done here?
- [35:23]
E
Yeah, problem fixing. They know what they want and they know how to talk about it and they know how to get it done. Thank God. They need me as a curator, as a guide. So I'm probably as a devil advocate because I'm actually pretty vocal. So I speak my mind. But no, they. And they accept they cannot do it on their own. So it's this notion of being a foreigner and acting together is super precious. The one thing which you have to understand, understand if you want to act. They're going so fast. They have. They are so much demanding, they're so rigorous. It's not a question of not feeling, it's a question of you need to be physically present. You need to come every six weeks, every two months, because the plan has changed and which is normal in life. Nothing is linear and you need to be there to fix it in real time. So my physical presence every two months here, I think it is indispensable and in comparison person.
- [36:13]
D
Yoruk.
- [36:14]
E
Yes.
- [36:15]
F
Up on the stage today, you said that Europe is in a mess.
- [36:18]
E
Yes. I probably shouldn't have said that, but I did.
- [36:20]
F
But you said it. They were your words. And yes, because it needs capital. Another thing that. That you said, it desperately needs capital. But what is it about Europe that's in a mess when it comes to the tourism and hospitality industry right now?
- [36:33]
E
Well, let's. Okay, I don't want to rephrase it because what I said is. What I meant is we also have to be cognizant that Europe Hospitality infrastructure has been built for the last couple hundred years. So hotel exists, transportation exists, airport exists. I mean you have two, you have rails. So we're not late in the game. What's messy about Europe today is planification, leadership, capacity to act, financial means and of course very fragile economies. But we've been there in 2008, 2009, we rebounded since. So I'm Europe. I don't want to do any European bashing because I feel exactly the opposite. It's actually time to invest in Europe. But it's true that I guess we have lesser clarity on the next five years to come in Europe that you have when you come to the Middle East. But when it comes to travel and tourism, France is still the largest destination in the world. So I'm actually very proud.
- [37:22]
F
Are you hurt by how Europe is currently in terms of, you know, its current situation, as you put it, a.
- [37:29]
E
Bit of a mess. I'm hurt, but I, but I accept. Accepted one is I'm never going to be critiquing politicians because it's the toughest job on the planet. You sacrifice your family, your life for actually helping a leading country and it's a very difficult. Everybody's critiquing. So I am hurt because I would love those people to succeed irrespective of which parties they belong to. And I know we can do it. We share the same diagnostic too much debt in too many nosome. But we need to take measure in terms of being restrictive on different job allocation, different public officers, different agencies. It's doable, it's a bit self inflicted, but it's tough. So it's easy for me in my seat to actually critique and that's exactly what I don't want to do. And we're going to get our back together. But it's a difficult environment to actually be a leader today.
- [38:19]
F
Are you walking the walk? And you've said that Europe needs investment right now, but what's a core doing, doing to make that happen? Are you investing into Europe?
- [38:27]
E
No, our core is not investing any really places. We're investing our time. We're spending our expertise with investing with our brand. But in terms of capital allocation, thank God for me, Acco network is already $200 billion worth of real estate, which is not mine. Thought I went on how to lose the plumbing and electricity. It would cost me a bundle. So Accor decided some years ago to be asset light, to be only an operator, but to do a lot of, a lot of things with human capital capital.
- [38:51]
F
But investment during in, in time as well. Yeah. And effort into the region.
- [38:55]
E
But I would encourage people to reinvest in Europe in hospitality. If you take it actually very simply, 80% of what acco is doing today in terms of development is in Asia, India and the Middle East. This is where the growth is in terms of lacking hospitality infrastructure. And those geographies run three times faster than Europe. But 20 years ago, Europa was running 20 times, three times faster than the Middle East. So it's just a question of cycle. But it's. I enjoy being here because you have the emerging middle classes big, you have a higher demography, you have clearly transportation being put back together. You have the financial system, existing airline system is existing in certainly in the Middle east and Saudi Arabia. You guys are starting Riyadh Air, which is going to be interesting to watch because I was here a couple of weeks ago. You claim to basically put together the best airline on the planet. And you know what, you have actually pretty good competitors coming out of Qatar or actually America or India for that matter. And you might succeed. And I wish you all the success.
- [39:58]
F
So is that interesting though, that you're, you know, a big player now in a region which is so competitive, even when it comes to, you know, the hotel options that are available out here. Does that spark the great growth as well within your position?
- [40:13]
E
Yes, it does. Of course it does. It actually pushes Myanmar Corps to be stronger, to be better, to be more adaptable, to be more agile. I think the one thing I would say about us is we're not better than anybody else. I never claimed that and I'm 100% sure that is the case.
- [40:27]
B
That was Monocle's golf correspondent in Zamam Rashid speaking to Sebastian Bazin, chairman and chief executive officer of Accor Hotels at the Tourai Summit in Riyadh. And that is all for this edition of the Daily. Thanks to our panelists today, Rachel Cunliffe and Ash Bhardwaj. Today's show was produced by Tom Webb and researched by Joanna Moser. Our sound engineer was Steph Chongu. I'm Andrew Muller here in London. The Daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks for listening.
- [41:08]
C
Sam.