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A (2:59)

The rest is politics.

B (3:00)

With me, Alistair Campbell, and with me, Rory Stewart.

A (3:04)

Now, Rory, there is a lot happening in the world. Every day, there's a lot happening in the world, but I think we're going to focus pretty much on Russia and Ukraine today, and from two angles, really. One is the fact that the war is still going on and we are still hearing of Donald Trump saying that it's about to end and we're closer than ever. And we've heard that so many, many times, and I suspect it's not true. But then I think Closer to Home, we should start maybe Closer to home with a couple of really interesting developments. The first is that finally there is going be an inquiry into Russian interference in our democracy. And this is partly on the back of the recent imprisonment of Nathan Gill, the Brexit Party member of the European Parliament. And then secondly, there have been this sort of plethora of speeches and interventions from heads of our military. Yesterday, the head of MI6 essentially warning that we are, maybe we the people, are not really up to speed with everything that's happening in relation to Russia. Not just Russia, Ukraine, but Russia more generally, and in particular, the impact upon us here in the uk. So there's a lot to get through. I just wonder where you wanted, where you wanted to kick off.

B (4:14)

Let's frame it by stepping back and say, what is Russia doing in the world? What's Russia's vision of the world? And it's a really dramatic story. So going back 20 years to the time when you were just finishing in office, as you remind us, Vladimir Putin was initially seen as somebody who could do business with the west. And indeed, Russia was brought into the G8. Your famous moment where Tony Blair said to you, he could be okay, or whatever the phrase was, Right?

A (4:43)

Yeah.

B (4:43)

And then things began to change very, very rapidly. And from about 2008 onwards, he began to make these very dramatic speeches. And increasingly, it became clear that Russia perceived the West, America, Europe, as an existential threat to Russia. So Putin and the key people around him, who are mostly people from intelligence backgrounds, but some from communications backgrounds, began to believe that there was a plot essentially from the west to either destroy or at least subjugate Russia and Therefore, since then, they have seen themselves in a massive fight. And some of the signs of this were 2014, Russian invasion of Crimea, from the mid 2000s onwards, cyberattacks and other attacks against the Baltics, increasing interference in elections and referendas. So we had all the talk around what was happening in the Brexit referendum, but perhaps more dramatically, the enormous Russian activity around Trump's election in 2016. And then a final inflection point I'm going to hand back to you at this, which was the moment in 2022 when Putin became a third version of Putin. So if version one was somebody who looked like he could work with the west, version two was somebody who was doing hybrid warfare and trying to destabilize the West. Version 3 from 2022 is the full out neo imperialist, because even a lot of Russian watchers who knew him well, and to be fair, our intelligence agency and the CIA had a lot of information on Russian armor, Russian troops moving up to the border, and therefore was sounding alarm calls. But even the Ukrainian Central Command didn't believe Russia was quite going to do what it was going to do in 2022, that this was the moment at which Russia went well beyond little green men hybrid warfare into a full on explicit invasion of a neighboring country. Back to you.

A (6:40)

It's interesting when you go through the stages of Putin, how I see it is that so he emerges as a KGB guy, he gets himself into pole position to take over from Yeltsin. He does so. And at the start, and I think when you say about when Tony Blair said to me, this guy's going to be okay, I think because at that point we felt Putin was trying to point Russia in a much more kind of Western friendly sort of direction. That was the impression he was giving. And when we interviewed the widows of both Alexei Navalny and Alexander Litvinenko, they both essentially said that we were being naive. Okay, let's take that as red. He then, I think, goes into this sort of oligarchical period where he's trying to modernize the economy, but then I think realizes maybe this is going to be harder than he thinks, reform is going to be harder than he thinks, and that's when he goes down the corruption route. And the corruption route then is what leads to this sort of sense of vast wealth, vast power. And I think this sense of that he really can become this enormous figure within Russian history because he's always seen himself in that sort of sense of, you know, Peter the Great, and he's going to be Vladimir the Great. And then I think deep down within him, as he was trying to do this, getting on better with the west, he had a sense that the west actually had contempt for him and for Russia and for the old Soviet Union. So when he talked about the breakup of the Soviet Union being the worst thing that ever happened, he genuinely feels that and felt there wasn't enough understanding. And, you know, probably the most dramatic meeting I was ever at was, I've talked to you about this before, when he really went for Tony Blair over Iraq. And it was with a visceral contempt. And what it was really about was he felt the west did not take him seriously now. The west totally takes him seriously now. And indeed, Sikorsky, who we've talked about a lot since we interviewed him on leading Radek Sikorsky, the Polish Deputy Prime Minister, you know, he said in that interview, you know, we have a lot of experience of Russia. When they make warnings, you take them seriously. Now, I think what's happening with this extraordinary, it's clearly organized. This. The fact you've had the head of the Navy, the new chief of staff of the armed forces, the head of MI6, Yvette Cooper, the Foreign Secretary last week, all essentially saying the same thing, Russia is a real threat to the United Kingdom. Blaise Metroele, the new head of the Mi6, she had one sentence on China in an otherwise very wide ranging speech. It was basically about Russia.

B (9:12)

Just before we get onto that, because I think that's really interesting, I'd love you to take us through Blaise's speech, the sea speech, the new head of MI6's speech. But just finally to just finish off this question of how Putin feels and how he views the world, part of the story, and it's told very powerfully by an academic who's now a colleague of mine at Yale called Mary Cerrotti, who wrote a book called Not One Inch America, Russia and the Making of the Post War Settlement, which is all about the fact that through the 90s into the 2000s, East European states were very, very keen to join NATO. And the Clinton administration, under a lot of pressure from people like Richard Holbrooke, who were very keen to do this, accepted NATO expansion, which increasingly was perceived in Russia as a direct, aggressive threat to Russia. Now there's a lot of back and forth on whether there were really any choices there, whether America was reckless and pushed too far, whether they had any choice because East Europeans wanted voluntarily to join this organization. That. And then what happened in Ukraine and Georgia, where it was felt from the Russian point of view, as though NATO was now pushing right into the heart of the USSR and beginning to try to pull these liberal democratic revolutions off. Now, again, debate. Some people say that the US should have pushed further to get Georgia and Ukraine more decisively into the Western orbit, and that actually we blinked in 2008, but from then onwards, the whole system is set up to create what Putin talks about as a multipolar world. And in the multipolar world, America is going to have its own hemisphere. And we'll come to that maybe in tomorrow's Question Time when we look at Trump and Latin America, China has its own hemisphere and Russia dominates, in his mind, at least, Europe. And lots of things flow from that, and we'll get on to what flows from that. But when he's directing his intelligence agencies, when he's thinking about how to fund Nathan Gill, this Brexit MP who's taking bribes to ask questions in Parliament, this is all about this existential fight between what he sees as globalized Western liberal democracy, Europe, and in the past, the US and Russia on the defensive.

A (11:22)

One of the things that came out of the Trump national security strategy that we talked about last week was this line. It didn't actually get that much attention because there was so much else in it, but essentially the Americans saying that it was a mistake to give the impression that NATO was just going to keep growing. And that was music to the ears of anybody inside the Kremlin. And of course, what they do. It's really interesting watching these speeches from our military and intelligence people, because they're essentially saying, we are under threat, this is an attack upon us. But I was reading this speech by a Russian Navy commander in chief, a guy called Moussaev, and it's so interesting because it's almost like a mirror version. He was actually. He was talking about this speech. He was talking about the Arctic. He said the Arctic is becoming an emerging hotspot between Russia and NATO. This is him now. The regional situation is worsening, with Western rhetoric increasingly framing the Arctic as a potential conflict zone. NATO is obstructing Russia's activities, militarizing the region, preparing for offensive operations. And the end went on to say that Finland and Sweden coming into NATO was all about expanding the US military footprint near Russia's borders, and that there have been alliance drills, reconnaissance flights, troop deployments. Now, the truth is that Finland and Sweden, NATO accession was a direct response to the invasion of Ukraine. Added to which, all the things that he's there accusing NATO of doing is exactly what Russia is doing. But when you watch it, I actually went to. I actually watched him making this speech. I don't speak Russian, but I'd read it. And then I thought, this is interesting. And he's got this kind of hang dog expression, and it's almost like, you know, poor us, we're being attacked the whole time. And I think what Putin does incredibly well, and he clearly is very clever. When you see him with Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Trump's negotiators on Ukraine, he's very much. He's not aggressive. He doesn't project himself as an aggressor. So I think what has happened and the reason for these speeches from our guys is that they are genuinely worried that we, the British state, has sought to downplay what is a genuine threat, which we don't yet fully understand. When we talk about hybrid warfare, what do we actually mean? And there's something for you in this, Roy. I'd be really interested in you because Blaise Metruelli's speech, a lot of it, I hadn't realized that, actually. She's a sort of early student of AI. It may be one of the reasons why she got the job in the first place. But what is really interesting about her speech is the extent to which it's actually as much a speech about technology as it is about the conventional sort of situations that the Security Service would normally be telling us to deal with. So I'd be interested in your take on how much AI is now framing what these guys are having to think about as they plan for the next stages of what they basically clearly see as a sort of. She uses the phrase we're between peace and war. Sikorsky said, as far as the Poles are concerned, Russia is already at war with us.

B (14:35)

Yeah. So Blaise Mantruelli was a Q. In fact, it was the job my father did, too. She was head of all the technical stuff in MI6, which people remember from the James Bond movies as that slightly doddering old man saying, oh, grow up, James. That guy. Right. But of course, by the time Blaise was doing the job, it's not just about gadgets. It's about fully thinking about our integration into technology. And she's also balancing that, of course, in that speech by putting more and more focus on the human good opportunity here, of course, to plug if people haven't had a chance yet to listen to it. We've done a miniseries on the podcast on AI, and the second episode is about to come out and we look at all the dimensions of AI, which Matt Clifford and I, who are doing this series, argue may actually prove to be more important even than Russia, China, Trump over the next five, 10 years, that the next episode is looking at how it's transforming our economy. Just head to theresispolitics.com to sign up to hear this miniseries. But to bring it back to the chief's point, she is looking at Russia or which is endlessly improvising. It uses any latest form of technology, so it leant very, very hard between 2014, 2016 into the existing platforms. Then Facebook was a really good example. Facebook, according to Timothy Snyder, in the lead up to Trump's 2016 election, had to disable up to 50 million separate accounts, had to deal with the fact that Russia was creating bot farms and accounts and likes and algorithms like you couldn't believe. Fast forward. There's now increasing focus, of course, on the way that far right propaganda is spread through TikTok. And then as we move into the world of AI, what we'll basically find. I think I was talking to Peter Pomerantsev, who, you remember yesterday, who's done some amazing work on this, and I think without over quoting Peter, who knows much more about them than I do, but he would say there's a continuity that essentially the different technology platforms just provide an opportunity to do very similar things. And those things are firstly, polarization, driving people apart, secondly, using fake accounts to play both sides against each other, using them as propaganda measures. And above all, it's this phrase, which is a very old phrase going right the way back to the early formation of the Soviet Union. Active measures, which is turning a society against itself, turning the strengths of Britain against its own weaknesses, and then doing the same in Germany, France, Hungary, the United States, et cetera. Remember, there's other things happening too. Russia is also engaged in a lot of sabotage activity. So there have been fires in warehouses, there have been an assassination, a contempt against the head of Rheinmetall, which is a Russian assassination attempt. The biggest armaments manufacturer in Germany. There are the increasing use of the shadow fleet, which are these non registered Russian vessels which are smuggling and carrying sanctions through the Baltic. Those vessels are now used by the Russians to fly drones. Those same vessels are used to cut undersea cables. And in the Baltic they can be fixed relatively easy because the Baltic is quite shallow. But the Russians have the technology to do this in the Atlantic. If they drop Atlantic cables, it's much, much longer, months, even years to get those cables fixed. Then there's assassinations we talked about, of course, Skripko, which was the big wake up call for us here in Britain. But then there's the pressure on expatriate Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian communities. Right the way through Europe and the United States, both intimidating critics. So there's this amazing ladder. I was talking to Anton Shakhovtsov about this, who really is the big expert on the far right. But he was explaining how essentially there's a whole language here. Initially you're described as a foreign agent, which is not too bad. Then you're described as an extremist. Then you're described as a terrorist, which is a big problem because then your own banks in Europe start shutting down your bank accounts. And finally you're described as a traitor. And by the time you're a traitor, they're literally coming to assassinate you.

A (18:40)

Yeah. Or drop you out your windows or whatever it might be. The thing about this as well is, you see, you mentioned Skripal as a wake up call, but actually we'd had plenty of wake up calls before that. And I think where Putin comes at this. And since you need to talk about active measures, I would argue that the information operations that they ran in relation to Brexit and the Trump election 2016, they are what you would call active measures. That is where they are deliberately and strategically interfering in the activities of another country. And just to go back to Blaise Mattrelli's speech, so she says this, and this relates to what you were saying about your series on AI. There is incredible promise in all of this. This is technology for all of us, from green technologies to hyper personalized medicine. But there is also peril. AI powered robots and drones are brilliant for scaled manufacturing, but devastating on the battlefield. Now just think about that. Just in this last couple of years, within the war in Ukraine, the nature of warfare has changed. She goes on to say, discoveries that cure disease can also create new weapons. And as states. Just get this. As states race for tech supremacy, or as some algorithms become as powerful as states, these hyper personalized tools can become a new vector for conflict and control. At the same time, the foundations of trust in societies are eroding information. Once a unifying force is increasingly weaponized, falsehoods spread faster than fact, dividing communities and distorting reality. We live in an age of hyperconnection, yet profound isolation. The algorithms flatter our biases and fracture our public squares. And as trust collapses, so does our shared sense of truth. One of the greatest losses a society can suffer. And when you talk about Peter Pomerantsev, he, of course wrote that brilliant book about Russia, and he was one of the first people to call out what Putin was doing in completely changing the way that information is disseminated, understood and weaponized. And that was what was. That was over a decade ago now. And so this is all just a continuum of that. But we have sort of allowed it to develop and we've not really pushed back.

B (20:48)

Because I think the big question for Britain, and indeed probably everybody else, is what happens? What do we actually do? What resources do we actually put by? How do we actually change our practice as opposed to sounding alarm calls? So I was the chairman of the Defence select committee in 2015, and we wrote a report warning about Russia and hybrid warfare and threats against the Baltic. And in our report, we pointed out that basically Britain had destroyed an enormous amount of its Russian expertise. We didn't even have a desk officer in Defence Intelligence working on Crimea at that point. They had to be moved across from the Caucasus. And now, 10 years later, has it got better? No, it's got much worse. It's got much worse because in 2015, as we were destroying essentially the Foreign Office and much of our overseas infrastructure, I mean, it was pathetic even then. Even 10 years ago, Britain's position was pathetic. The Foreign Office was half the size of the French equivalent. We spend much more on Kent County Council than we do on our foreign policy. But the excuse in 2015 was, well, we can rely on the EU and the US to fill in the gaps. So the story was, well, okay, we're shutting embassies all over the world. We went from 12ambassadors out of 15 speaking Arabic in the Middle east to three. We created an entire promotion prospect that destroyed area expertise. But the story was, well, there's the European External Action Service. Britain doesn't act alone. We're part of these big coalitions. We dismantled an enormous amount of our national intelligence infrastructure in other people's countries. So these are stations in other people's countries, networks of agents, officers. And again, we did so saying, well, we can rely on the CIA, rely on this Five Eyes operations. In fact, we can even hand agents over to them and they'll provide us with the reporting. We don't need it. And that, of course, was resources. It was always also that after 9, 11, we were increasingly focused on terrorism. So 95% of the operations of Blase's agency began to be directed towards terrorism, away from traditional political reporting on places like Russia. But 2016 then happens and we leave the European Union and then Trump is elected for the first time and suddenly Britain can no longer say, well, we don't really need to invest in all this stuff because we've got Europe and America. So the idea was supposed to be then global Britain. We were supposed to then really lean into the Foreign Service and invest. So we produce an Africa strategy, which I authored, I wrote for the national security strategy in 2017, which said, okay, now we've left the European Union, we're going to have to lean into Africa, we're going to have to open the Sahel. We were relying on this enormous development budget. We began working out how to spend four or five billion pounds within the region. Fast forward to today. Well, the Foreign Office is now going through the most brutal cuts it's ever seen. So just as Blaise is making this speech, 40% of the UK employees, UK based employees, the Foreign Office, are about to lose their jobs. About 10% of the people overseas have lost their jobs. Our international development budget has gone down from 0.7% of GDP to 0.3%. So it's more than halved. And of course, we're spending quite a lot of that on hotels in Britain, looking after asylum seekers. The BBC World Service has been hacked to pieces and you're talking about disinformation and Blaze is talking about disinformation, but we have closed the loss of the Foreign Languages Service, the BBC. We're destroying the British Council, which is basically bankrupt, and the government seems to be reluctant to bail it out. All the money that we're spending in defence is basically going on buying new nuclear weapons and we're creating a mad world in which we've dismantled our software power and we somehow believe that we're going to be able to operate with a couple of aircraft carriers with nothing to protect them and some big nuclear weapons and nothing surrounding them.

A (24:39)

That was a very, very, very gloomy assessment. But I think, you know, I think what you're saying, and maybe this is why there has been this concerted. I mean, it's quite rare that you get the head of MI6, the head of the armed forces and the head of the navy all coming out broadly saying the same thing. We are in this high, this sort of space between peace and war, and we're not remotely ready either. In terms of the public mindset. We all just turn on the telly. There's Ukraine. Oh, well, that's really sad. We support Zelensky. We don't like what Putin's doing, but it's not got that much to do with us, which is a kind of, you know, a way of thinking about it. And meanwhile, they're saying this is coming closer to us. And they're also saying, and they're definitely saying this privately when they're talking to ministers. We don't really have the resources to deliver on the things that we say we need to do. Well, listen, Rory, that's quite gloomy. Why don't we take a break and then when we come back, talk about this inquiry that's being announced today into Russian interference in our democracy? I would argue it might already be too late, but at least it's a welcome sign that it is finally being taken seriously by the government and hopefully from today by parliament as well.

B (25:50)

Brilliant. Look forward to it. Speak after the break. This is a paid advertisement by BetterHelp. December, I guess, is a real month of contradictions. It's all about publicly celebrating peace, but it often doesn't really feel very peaceful. It brings people together, but that can just bring unresolved contradictions out. And there's something in the discipline of a chosen ritual, something small, steadying, deliberate, not inherited, not performative. Just a moment, maybe, to take stock before the year resets. That could be going for a long walk, but it could actually be the habit of talking through therapy, one quiet hour each week with someone to help you untangle what the year has left behind. Not just what happened, but how it shaped you and what you want to carry forward. And that's what BetterHelp offers. And for many, that rhythm becomes a new kind of tradition. Calm, considered, and entirely your own. This December, start a new tradition by taking care of you. Our listeners get 10% off at betterhelp.com RestPolitics that's better. H-E-L-P.com RestPolitics.

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B (28:20)

As the year draws to a close, it's time for our annual reminder that even in an age of political noise and Division one, national consensus still stands firm. Roast potatoes.

A (28:32)

Oh God, all this British stuff. If you're wondering, however, what to buy the politically obsessed person in your life this Christmas, might I gently suggest a year's membership to the rest is Politics.

B (28:48)

Plus, it's the thoughtful kind of present ad, free listening, bonus episodes, early access to Q&As, book discounts and perhaps I think most interesting, it's our miniseries, available only to members, focusing on the world's most complex characters and topics. We've already explored Rupert Murdoch and J.D. vance, and we're doing many more subjects to come.

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B (29:39)

Welcome back to the Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

A (29:42)

And me, Alistair Campbell. And Rory, Today in Parliament, Steve Reid, Secretary of State for Housing Communities and Local Government, announcing an inquiry into Russian interference in our democracy. And I was very excited when I heard about this. I thought, oh, this is going to we're going to do Brexit. Finally, we're going to get the Russia reports, we can get all the intelligence and we're going to get musk. And it's going to be massive. And Farage will be compelled to give evidence under oath. It's not quite that. It's not quite that. But what it is is an independent inquiry, as I understand it, headed by a former senior civil servant who can ask for witnesses, can't compel them. That could be a bit of a problem. But it is going to look at on the back of the Nathan Gill imprisonment just how deep a problem we have got with our politics, political financing, political donation, and the seeming ease with which it appears to be possible for people who are Not British, to interfere in our democracy. So I'm glad that it's happening. I wish it had happened sooner. I wish that it was actually an inquiry that compelled people to give evidence under oath, but. So let's just see who agrees to turn up and who doesn't.

B (31:02)

Yeah. My instinct, I think, which is shared with you, is that actually, if we want to resolve this issue properly, we need to limit the amount of money that can be given. And I would actually like to see us follow the South Australia model of public financing for campaigns instead of private financing, so we're not in hock to businesses, trade unions and, as you say, foreign interests, and then deal with the problem of what MPs do after they leave Parliament and the kind of jobs they can take and the kind of people they can work for, because that's another way that the influence works. And then I think we've also got to look at the bigger picture of what Russia's trying to do in our democracy, in the democracies of Europe and the us. Let's maybe take a step back, because we can only really understand what they're doing when they're giving money to Nathan Gill. If we look at the broader picture of the. What they think they're doing in general. And what do we mean by them? We really mean the svr, the FSB and the gru, which are the key Mexican foreign intelligence agencies. GRU being the military lot, their big idea is basically this, that they need to fragment and weaken Europe and the United States. And the best ways to do that are to destroy institutions like NATO and the European Union, or at very least to make them very, very weak and ineffective, because a lot of them operate through consensus, so that if they can create breaks, that's a really good thing. And one of the ways to do that, it's not the only way they pursue, but one of the ways to do that is to back nationalists, far right nationalists. And this is something that Anton Shakhostov is just so, so good at in this wonderful book on Russia and the Western far right. And there the story basically is that these far right nationalists, and we could be talking here about Tommy Robinson, could be talking about Marine Le Pen in France, we could be talking about the AfD. What they appeal to is that those groups agree ideologically with Russia on certain things. They basically agree with Russia that there is a big fight for traditional Christian values in inverted commas against kind of woke modern ideology. They basically have the same imperial nostalgia. And then I think, also a sort of genuine Favor for traditional authoritarian rule against what the far right see as liberal democracy, globalization. I mean, a lot of the times when you look, when we're being attacked on Twitter from people from the right, they will often refer to us as globalists. So a lot of this stuff is part of the general Russian Russia. I think investigating this is great. I think there's a big question about how on earth reform are going to find 650 candidates for the next election, given that they're leading in the polls and vet them properly and make sure people don't have links into this. The only saving grace, I think in Britain is that there's not much electoral support for being pro Russian. By and large, Britain, unlike big sections in Germany, is on the Ukrainian side in the war. And one of the things that I think will have surprised Russia is they really felt that they'd sort of bought Britain. There was a lot of Russian dirty money flowing into London. There was an enormous amount of Russian funding, particularly of the Conservative Party. My colleagues, they may well have thought that Boris Johnson would be somebody who'd be sympathetic towards him. In fact, when push came to the shove and the Ukraine war happened, that all fell to pieces immediately. Johnson came out very, very quickly and powerfully in favor of Ukraine. And probably since Skripol, Britain has been more hawkish than France or Germany, much more determined in terms of sanctions, in terms of weapons.

A (34:39)

Yeah, but I guess what we were talking about in the first half, I think, yes, you're right, that if you get asked people in the opinion poll, are you on Ukraine's side or Russia's side, people are going to see Ukraine. Whether we would actually then follow through to the ultimate degree as to what that means. I don't know what I think is really interesting about this though. So if you just think about it, you know, you and I have said till we're blue in the face, how come it is that Nathan Gill, who's gone to jail for 10 and a half years for taking bribes from an adversary to spout their propaganda in the European Parliament, and he is still virtually unknown by the British public. His jailing was like a one day wonder and then it went away. I just don't know what's happened to our political and media psychology that that is not a huge, huge story. You said that Skripal was a wake up call. I'm not sure it was a big enough wake up call. I hope this inquiry can be a wake up call because I do not believe that Putin, we said this before Putin was personally briefed on this guy, Nathan Gill. That means the idea that that's the summit of their intelligence operations and their bribery strategy inside Europe is a nonsense. They put billions into this stuff, into the sort of espionage and the sabotage and all the rest of it. So. So I hope this inquiry wakes us up to something, that we've been asleep at the wheel for too long.

B (36:12)

And also I hope that at some point we're gonna realize that we're not dealing with a black and white world. I mean, they're deliberately using lots and lots of tactics, many of which are quite difficult to pin down. This was the problem. Everybody, I think, in the entire world has heard Trump talk about the Russia hoax.

A (36:29)

Yeah, Right.

B (36:30)

But the fact is that Russia did an incredible amount during the 2016 election to try to help the election of Donald Trump. Gru, the Russian military intelligence, stole documents from Democratic candidates. Tens of millions of Americans encountered Twitter posts which were put out by Russian agents. There was a huge amount, of course, as people know, and Timothy Snyder's written about this, of support for Trump businesses that came from Russian individuals and Russian businesses. Trump was paid $20 million to go and do Miss World in Moscow. A lot of the apartments bought in Trump buildings were bought by Russians, by Russian shadow companies. So altogether we have a world in which all of that exists. Russian money going into Trump businesses. Russia really trying to make sure that Trump is elected in 2016. They made no secret about that at all. Why? Well, they all explain that in detail because they think that Trump being elected is likely to weaken NATO and the EU and put Russia in a strong position.

A (37:34)

On which they've been proven right?

B (37:36)

Absolutely. But the problem was that Robert Mueller couldn't prosecute it because he had to prove something more difficult. He had to prove collusion. He had to prove that Trump had deliberately coordinated all of this with Russia, rather than simply that Russia was trying to do it. Let's take another example, which would be difficult for your inquiry. How do we deal with someone like Tommy Robinson, who's not an mp, and have the press reported enough on Tommy Robinson's Russian links, what would be involved in it? So when he was sent to jail, people remember for defying a court order. As soon as that happens, Russian tabloid journalists start promoting him. The Russian Ministry of Foreign affairs, this is back 2018, 19, starts putting out messages saying Tommy Robinson is being persecuted for his beliefs. Robinson is then invited to Russia where far right ultra nationalists platform him, where the major website that did the Trump interference with backing from Prigozhin, the guy from the Wagner group who was killed, profiles Tommy Robinson. Robinson gives interviews with Russian talking points, basically saying, EU's evil Merkel is undermining Western security, America is supporting Islamist terrorists, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. He actually says that he thinks there's not much likelihood that Russia did the Skripal thing. And eventually, in 2022, Tommy Robinson is to be found mounting a pathetic demonstration outside the Ukrainian embassy, effectively taking the Russian side on the Ukraine war. And one of the guys that's trying to give him political asylum is a man from the German AfD. And this guy from the German AFD has now been exposed as taking money from the Russians to ask questions in the European Parliament and in the Bundestag. Now, all of this is documented by Anton Shakhovtsov, but none of it quite amounts to something you could necessarily put Tommy Robinson in jail for. And, of course, everybody is very worried about legal challenge, very worried about being sued. Very difficult to prove the money. I mean, when the Russian intelligence agencies are clever, which they weren't with Nathan Gill, they would be finding ways of moving money or promising future money to people that would be much, much more difficult to track down. Tommy Robinson, I'm sure, will push back hard on this. The sourcing for this has come from very detailed work done by Anton Tchakostov, who is an extremely diligent academic working in Vienna. But of course, there will be two sides to all these stories. But what I suppose I'm trying to get across is, is that in all these cases, it's a very, very complicated story. And where the line is between visiting Russia, doing things with particular Russians, appearing on particular Russian medias, the Ministry of Foreign affairs tweeting in your defence and your policy positions is one that you can litigate back and forth.

A (40:31)

So I mentioned to you recently the Carol Cadwallader, Peter Dukes podcast series, Sergey and the Westman's Despiring. So you mentioned Boris Johnson saying, when Ukraine happened, Boris Johnson was out there, very, very strong, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Fine. Prior to that, the extent to which the Conservative Party allowed London to become this place where Russian oligarchs could sort of, you know, do whatever they wanted, and were literally queuing up at Conservative Party fundraising dinners to pay huge sums of money to play tennis with with Boris Johnson, to go and hang out with whoever the senior politicians were at the time, and it was like it didn't matter. I don't think we've ever got to the bottom of how we allowed Lebedev not just to end up owning serious parts of our media landscape, but then getting us seated in the House of Lords and go back to Johnson as Foreign Secretary, going off to that bunga bunga party, getting rid of his security detail and ending up having lunch or dinner with Lebedev Sr. Who has a sort of work for the KGB for years. So all of this, I think, tells a story that we didn't want to hear. And Trump was talking, by the way, about the Russia hoax even yesterday, in the context of Rob Reiner, famous director, actor, horrible, horrible, horrible murder. He's murdered alongside his wife. It's a horrific story. And what does Donald Trump do? Suggest that he had Trump derangement syndrome, because he was one of the guys who went on about the Russia hoax. Not a single ounce of empathy for a truly horrific murder. This, by the way, the guy who, you know, from the MAGA crowd who wanted to lock up anybody who said that Charlie Kirk was anything other than a kind of, you know, hero of the American people. And so I think what you have here is Trump, who doesn't want to accept or believe that Russia might have been involved in getting him elected because he wants to believe it was all down to his genius and Johnson and anybody who backed Brexit, not wanting to believe that Russia might have had a role in that. So whenever I raise this with these guys, oh, you telling me my granny voted Brexit because of some Russian, Russian bore. No, I'm not. But I am saying that Russia played a role in creating the landscape that led to the Brexit referendum and the outcome. And why did. It's not for nothing the Russian ambassador at the time came out and said, we've basically now got them where we want them for at least a generation and they're not coming back. And that's the point you made earlier about we used to have America and Europe and now we don't.

B (43:19)

So let's take this wider so that we can see the British strategy as part of a broader strategy. So remember Marine Le Pen in France? Her party took a 6 million euro loan directly from a Russian bank, which they only paid back two years ago. We've talked about the AfD in Germany. They're probably the most interesting. I mean, Anton Shakostov points out that one of the interesting things there is that their pro Russian connections are also to do with voter bases, to do with the fact that there are enormous number of Russian speakers in Germany, that a lot of East Germans have these sort of patriotic sentiments that chime with quite a lot of what Russia is saying. Hungary, which is probably the greatest Russian ally in the whole of the European setup. We've talked about what's happening in Slovakia and in the Czech Republic and the directions in which things seem to be moving there. We've talked about what's happening, I suppose, throughout Europe. But the final thing, just to complicate this even further, who in fact is it that absolutely agrees on the destruction of the European Union is undermining NATO and echoes an enormous amount of Russian talking points from Transgender all the way through. It is, of course, the United States. So now we have a much more complicated problem, which of course the head of MI6 does not talk about, which is if you're really worried about state operations to undermine our democracy, promote far right parties, disintegrate the European Union, weaken NATO. The drivers there now are coming from JD Vance's Munich speech, Musk platforming and supporting openly Tommy Robinson and telling people to vote for the AfD. And that brings us to the final thing, which is actually, in a way, 2016, given it was only won by a small margin, Russia may have had a very significant influence on that election. You'd have to do very complicated randomized control trials. But it's quite possible that Trump wouldn't have won the 2016 election without Russia's help, regardless of collusion. By the time you get to Trump, too, he barely needs Russia because social media on its own weaponizes anger, creates the support for the far right that Russia can basically sit back and watch us trash ourselves on social media.

A (45:38)

Well, you mentioned Musk there, Rory. I think at some point, whether we like it or not, we have to face up to the fact that Musk has a power within our democracy that I don't that I think we're very loath to admit. And very interesting line in that Blaise Metrobelli speech where she talked about algorithms, not just the social media companies themselves, not just Elon Musk, but an algorithm having as much power as a state. Now, I don't know whether that's something you're going to look at in your series, but that sounds to me like a quite terrifying concept when you think that Trump has recently said the nation state is the most powerful and most important unit of the way that the world works. Well, is that still true? It might be true for the United States, it might be true for China, but is it really true? So we're interviewing the president of Moldova early in the new year, Maya Sandhu. I mean, is it true for A country like Moldova that, yes, survived the Russian bombardment in her election, but how long can you survive that sort of onslaught on your democracy, on your public square, on the sense of having a set of facts around which your public debate can be held. So I hope this inquiry is just the start of something, not the end of it. And I don't think we've got to the bottom of Russia in relation to, to the hard right parties. You mentioned the AfD. There was a piece in one of the German newspapers this week about the number of times that the AfD have sought, under the guise of transparency, to extract from the government operational details about the way that the German military is operating in relation to Ukraine. Why is that an obsession? Why do they keep putting down demanding inquiries into where troops are going and where weapons are being placed and so forth? So I think, think we're in a very, very, very fragile and dangerous place right now. And I think that this, I hope this inquiry is taken seriously. I hope that people, if they don't cooperate with it, then it's strengthened and they're forced to cooperate with it. And, you know, because I think this is something that we've turned a blind eye to for far too long. The other thing that's been happening on the Ukrainian front, well, a lot's been happening on the Ukrainian front. Fighting is still going on. Trump saying that we're nearly there with the peace. Believe it when I see it. Big dinner in Berlin last night, Zelenskyy Berlin, with the coalition of the willing European leaders. But there does seem to be this really significant problem related to Russian assets tied up in Europe, which clearly the Europeans want to be able to use to help Ukraine through the next phase of this war. But it's getting bogged down in legalities, propaganda wars and so forth. How do you see this Euroclear issue?

B (48:34)

So, yes, Alistair, this is an issue which you've been following very closely. It's about €210 billion of Russian assets. And this has been discussed for a long time. The idea is that basically this Russian money could be used to support Ukraine. To put it in context, 50 billion a year is about what the Americans were spending. So there's been four times the four years of American investment would go in. And it's one of these things which people often say, if you're really serious about supporting Ukraine against Russia, why don't you go after the shadow fleet? Why don't you stop all Russian oil exports to anyone, India, China, Hungary, and why don't you seize these assets? And this has been sparked partly by the fact that it actually appeared in the Russian plan that this money was going to be given, given partly to the United States and Russia for investment projects around Ukraine and eastern Ukraine. But you know more about it than I do over you.

A (49:25)

Well, I don't know if I know more, but because it's very, very. It's complicated. You and I have been raging for months saying why can't they just sort this out? The reason is it is genuinely complicated. So you've got politics at the heart of it. Our friends from Hungary and Slovakia are making clear that they think this is a very, very, very bad thing. Orban has said that any potential agreement on the loan is, is, quote, systematically raping European law. Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, he is leading the charge on this and he's basically trying to get the others to see that without this, Ukraine faces serious financial and therefore military challenges. Coming up now, where the problem lies is that the majority of the seized assets sit in Belgium, Belgium in this thing called Euroclear, which is a Belgium financial clearinghouse. And it's somewhere between 60 and 80% of the whole overall number. So the Russians have been taking lawsuits out against Euroclear for the last three or four years. And what the Belgian Prime Minister, Bart Nova is saying is that if this loan goes through as a loan and the Russians are then successful in a legal appeal, Belgium, not the European Union or the European Commission, would be on the hook for it. And as the debate develops, you've got other countries now, Hungary and Slovakia, obviously, Italy, Malta, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, all saying they've got doubts about whether this can be done. So you're in now to a situation where Merz is trying to drive something against a sense of opposition in some of the other countries that, that Orban and Slovakia are exploiting.

B (51:09)

Let's now move on to the horror of what happened at Bondi beach, which is an attack on Jewish community that was celebrating hanukkah that killed 15 people, including one 10 year old. Looks at the moment as though the attackers were two people armed with hunting rifles. There's many people, I think most people now will have seen the horrifying footage. They also will have seen the very brave action by a man called Ahmed Abu Albert, who, it's extraordinary, literally creeps behind a car, comes up pretty quickly behind a man with a gun and unarmed himself, puts him in a bear hug, rips the gun out of his hand. And of course, this is very much touching every kind of nerve because many Australians, particularly Obviously, my friends in Australia who are Jewish or who are connected to the Jewish community feel that not enough has been done by the Albanese government to tackle antisemitism. I experienced this personally because the Chief Rabbi of Sydney accused me of antisemitism a few months ago because he said I was holding Israel to higher standards than European powers in Gaza. And this whole question of genuinely massive rise in anti Semitic attacks. There have been arson attacks against synagogues. The Jewish community is increasingly frightened. But this is tangled up in the question around hate speech and the question around whether large demonstrations protesting Israel's actions in Gaza are encouraging people in this direction. And so we're now right back in the heart of this question. Is it possible to try to do what Albanese is doing, which is clearly condemning this, speaking out against antisemitism, in fact, even taking action in universities to stop it, which isn't enough for many Jewish people in Australia who feel he hasn't been on their side enough, but is beginning to very much worry people who feel that some of his stuff in universities is going to stop a free discussion about Israel's crimes in Gaza.

A (53:23)

Yeah, I mean, look, this goes to the heart of a debate that you and I have been having ever since October 7th. And as we've said many, many times, any attempt that you do to try to, as it were, put both sides, you get sort of hit by both sides at the same time. And I think there were people who were trying immediately to exploit this politically. I thought the initial comments of the Israeli Foreign Minister were inappropriate. He essentially came straight out making this political attack on. On the Australian government. I mean, I think when these things happen, I think everybody should find it within them to say that this is just to be condemned, to get, to have. There is no possible justification for it. Somebody in Australia sent me the leaflet, you know, when they were advertising. I don't know if you can see that, Roy, but it sort of just sums up the whole thing. It's a. It's a sort of beautiful picture of the sea and the beach and then it just. Hanukkah with candles on top of all the letters. Come celebrate the light of Hanukkah together with the community. Bring your friends, bring the family. Let's fill Bondi with joy and light. And you sort of think, well, that is probably how these guys knew this was happening. It's an open event and, you know, it ends in the most unspeakable horror. But I just think the way that these things happen and then everybody wants to Fit it. Not everybody, but a lot of far too many people want to fit it to the. To the worldview and the outlook they have on Israel, Gaza. And I think we can do without that. And I thought that Albanese, I actually thought he spoke well. I thought my friend Chris Minns, who's the premier of New South Wales, I thought he's been shown real, kind of real empathetic leadership in the wake of what's gone on. And that's what leaders should do. And I think what they should, shouldn't do is try to exploit it to their own ends. And there's too many who, to my mind, have been doing that.

B (55:21)

I was trying to process this over the last couple of days, both because I'm very, very close to a Jewish family in Australia that almost every day for the last two and a half years have been contacting me, talking about the rise of antisemitism in Australia, but also because we were celebrating Hanukkah with Shoshana and the kids yesterday. And I think it's important to try to communicate to people as often as possible what happened there. It would be like somebody choosing, if you were talking about a Christian community to target children and grandparents celebrating Christmas, or if you were a Muslim community, everybody getting together for Eid and you choosing to break into a community place or a mosque at Eid to kill children and parents celebrating their most holy religious festival. I mean, it's utterly, utterly unspeakable.

A (56:21)

But the fact that it's unspeakable is also what should give us pause to think that this is when something like this happens. We think, well, that is the entirety of that side of the debate, actually. You could come in. I mean, I just thought you mentioned the guy Ahmed Al Ahmed. I mean, what a name to have for a hero in this context. He's called Ahmed Al Ahmed. And he emerges out of nowhere and disarms this guy and gets shot twice. And the whole world recognizes him as being a hero. And, you know, I just think we should maybe just think about what that means as well. What that means is that there is somebody who has been assimilated into Australian life who sees something bad happening and whose instinct is to do something of the utmost bravery that probably saved, almost certainly saved a lot of lives.

B (57:17)

It was absolutely unbelievable that. And I just sort of keep replaying that shot, trying to work out, you know, whether I would have been able to pull it off. I think I probably wouldn't. I mean, it's, it's. And to do it so quickly he's not doing what a lot of us would do, which is hover behind that car thinking, oh, no.

A (57:36)

That was instinct. That was pure instinct. You know, one of the great, one of the many great things about Australia is the, you know, when New Year comes and there's always fireworks going off on the, on the bridge and I get, you know, that's going to be heavily influenced. The whole, the feeling around Christmas and New Year is going to be heavily influenced, heavily influenced by this.

B (57:54)

And maybe to bring this all together, we're talking about a world of accelerating threats. We finished with terrorism, Islamist terrorism directed against the Jewish community in Australia. But we began with Russia, a national state actor using every different form of hybrid warfare. We talked about sabotage, we talked about assassinations of Russian nationals abroad. We talked about propaganda, we talked about artificial intelligence. We talked about social media, we talked about interference in the American elections, the AfD in Germany, Le Pen in France, and of course, we brought it all back home to Britain. How do we defend ourselves? How do we think about not just tracking down, giving cash to a man like Nathan Gill, but all the other ways. I tried to use the Tommy Robinson example to illustrate the ways in which Russia can actually support people without doing anything that actually allows us to prosecute. And finally, are any of us, Britain, France, Germany, United States doing remotely enough to counter this? Where are the resources? Where are the people? Where's the spend? What I fear we have is very good people like Blaise Metro at the top, your friend Jonathan Powell, very impressive in our security Advisor book beneath. Where are the people? Where are the resources? Where's the real investment in this? And remember too, before we get too much focus just on the far right, how much the Russians proved with Gerhard Schroeder that they can corrupt social democrats. That whole Schroder network, he was given an extraordinary, hugely high paid job, Russian state owned company. And that's one of the reasons that that entire network was reluctant to impose sanctions, was weak on Ukraine, et cetera. So these threats can come from every form of unexpected direction. And in order to deal with this, we need to step up.

A (59:41)

Yeah, okay. Well, I suspect that is why all these speeches are being made, but because the civil servants is where they can't say it quite as volubly as you have, Rory. But I, I think that's part of the point they've been making. See you tomorrow. We're going to talk about Latin America. We're going to talk about House of Laws and whether it's sort of overstepping the mark in the way it's dealing with a couple of issues right now. See that.

B (60:06)

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A (60:19)

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A (61:28)

Oh God, all this British stuff. If you're wondering, however, what to buy the politically obsessed person in your life this Christmas, might I gently suggest a year's membership to the Rest is Politics.

B (61:44)

Plus, it's the thoughtful kind of present ad free listening, bonus episodes, early access to Q&As, book discounts, and perhaps I think most interesting, it's our miniseries, available only to members, focusing on the world's most complex characters and topics. We've already explored Rupert Murdoch and J.D. vance, and we're doing many more subjects to come.

A (62:04)

So think of this as a civilized gift to allow families to disagree agreeably over Christmas. What could be nicer?

B (62:13)

And if you've left it until Christmas Eve, as I fear I often do, the great thing is it's digital. No cues, rapping or panic. The membership lands neatly in their inbox on Christmas Day.

A (62:22)

So spread, get a little political peace and goodwill, head to therestispolitics.com and click Gifts.