The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 161. Putin, Trump, and 500 Years of Resisting Russia (Radek Sikorski)

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

What was it like for Radek Sikorski to be a refugee in the UK from communist Poland in the 80s? How will the war in Ukraine come to an end? Why is populism on the rise in Europe and how do we fight it? Rory and Alastair are joined by Radek Sikorski, Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, to answer all this and more.  Get more from The Rest Is Politics with TRIP+. Enjoy bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access, live show ticket priority, our members’ newsletter, and private Discord community – plus exclusive mini-series like The Rise and Fall of Rupert Murdoch. Start your 7-day free trial today at ⁠therestispolitics.com For Leading listeners, there’s free access to the Wordsmith Academy - plus their report on the future of legal skills. Visit https://www.wordsmith.ai/politics To save your company time and money, open a Revolut Business account today via https://get.revolut.com/z4lF/leading, and add money to your account by 31st of December 2025 to get a £200 welcome bonus or equivalent in your local currency. Feature availability varies by plan. This offer’s available for New Business customers in the UK, US, Australia and Ireland. Fees and Terms & Conditions apply. For US customers, Revolut is not a bank. Banking services and card issuance are provided by Lead Bank, Member FDIC. Visa® and Mastercard® cards issued under license. Funds are FDIC insured up to $250,000 through Lead Bank, in the event Lead Bank fails. Fees may apply. See full terms in description. For Irish customers, Revolut Bank UAB is authorised and regulated by the Bank of Lithuania in the Republic of Lithuania and by the European Central Bank and is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland for conduct of business rules. For AU customers, consider PDS & TMD at revolut.com/en-AU. Revolut Payments Australia Pty Ltd (AFSL 517589). Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith Producer: Alice Horrell Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Head of Politics: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to the restispolities.com. That's the rest is politics.com. This episode is brought to you by Wordsmith. A. I mean, increasingly, of course, in all the organisations we work in, we can get massively slowed up by the paperwork, the processes, the forms, the legal advice. And that's why in business today, it's all of us. Legal teams, companies are facing a choice, lead the AI shift or risk being left behind. And companies like Trust Pilot, Deliveroo, SkyScanor, are already leading the way with Wordsmith AI alongside them. It's like giving every lawyer an invisible paralegal, somebody who knows their history, drafts the first pass and frees up hours for complex work. Wordsmith handles the routine so that the lawyers can focus on the bigger issue. Crucially, this isn't at the moment something that's replacing lawyers. It's something that's taking out the more boring routine task

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plus their report on the future of legal skills, visit wordsmith.a.i. politics. Welcome to the restless politics leading with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alastaira Campbell. Rory's in London. I'm in Poland, and I'm very happy to be with the Polish foreign minister and Deputy Prime Minister Radek Shikorski. And I was thinking, Rory, that you two have a lot in common.

You both have initials, R.S. You are highly adventurous writers and journalists. written articles and books and made films in war zones, including Afghanistan. You're both Oxford graduates in PPE. You're both passionate about foreign and security policy. You're internationalist, your fellows of top American universities. You're both married to very strong American wives. You both have two sons. You're both conservatives with the experience of government. and I think you've both become a little bit more centrist and sensible over time. And Radek was once actually a British citizen, as we shall hear.

And I first became a member of a government as deputy defence minister as far back as 1992, senior minister 2007, in and out of government, back in 2020, as foreign minister and now deputy prime minister, and a regular voice and face on British media, not just because of his fluency, but also because he's one of the world's leading critics, I would argue, of Russian expansionism and Putin's conduct of the war in Ukraine. So a lot to talk about. Rory, where do you want to start? Firstly, welcome, Deputy Prime Minister, and thank you so much for joining us. Can we start back at the extraordinary transition,

or at least it seems from the outside, that you went through going from communist Poland to Oxford University? And what was Poland like in the 1980s? And what was your vision of Oxford in the 1980s, and what did you take from that contrast? That's right. I was in Britain when martial law was imposed in Poland by General Rearoselsohn and I became an asylum seeker and an asylum beneficiary. And I've gone back to my own country. And there was an extraordinary outpouring of sympathy for Poland at the time of the solidarity resistance against communism. Actually, that was interesting from both the right and the left. From the right, because we We were anti-communist and from the left because solidarity was a trade union.

So it was a cause that resonated everywhere. And yes, I remember studying at Pembroke College, Oxford, with great fondness. How did you get there, though? Because when you went to Britain, presumably you weren't as fluent in English as you are now. I was actually quite good. We have something called National Olympics in various subjects, and I was in the English language Olympics. And then I attended Southwark College to get the proficiency in English certificate. But you go to Oxford, which is, you know, that's quite a journey to have gone.

Sure. And I attended an interview. And I remember being asked, so what do you think about Marxism at the interview? And he said, I come from Communist Poland. I have not yet met a Marxist, but maybe I'll meet one here. I'm sure you did. I'm sure you did. And what was it like going to school? Your parents were both anti-communist.

My father was the head of solidarity in his architectural office. And you inherited that sort of basic view of Polish politics at the time. But just give us a feel for what it was like being educated in a Polish school under the communists. How did that differ from the education? you then had in Britain. The basic and secondary education was actually then and it still is pretty good in Poland. So we give good education for the great majority of people, whereas you have these elite universities and elite schools. So it's the other way around in Poland. So why did you send your own children to one of our elite schools that Rory went to? Well, this is a good school.

Okay. It's a very expensive school as well. So, Deputy Pomeros, give us a sense of what the economic conditions were like in Poland in the 1980s and what they were like in Britain and what contrasts you saw between the two. And then also, what was the contrast in terms of your sense of political freedom? It's difficult, I think, for people to imagine Poland in the 1980s. Of course, it was not Stalin's Russia, but equally it was not contemporary Denmark. What did it feel like? So Poland in the 70, late 70s, early 80s, was communist, but there was no terror. There was, I mean, people were jailed, people were interned, some people were killed during during anti-communist demonstrations, but there wasn't mass terror. There wasn't even the kind of repression you have in Russia today, where, you know, you have three and a half thousand political prisoners. But Poland was impoverished by communism.

We were at the end of the national. 1980s, we were the poorest by comparison with the European average in our thousand-year history. So our GDP per capita was a third of the European average. And going from Communist Poland to Britain was a really big deal. It was really difficult. Not only getting a passport was, you know, not automatic. You had to apply to the communist authorities. I was only 18, so I didn't have a record.

could yet, which is why I could do it. Then you needed a visa, and then you needed a plane ticket to London, which was, you know, this was something you had to plan a year ahead. And the contrast was unbelievable. I mean, the iconic picture from Communist Poland was a food queue, whereas today Poland is a huge exporter of foodstuffs, of agricultural products, including to Britain. Most of your cider is made from Polish airports. Really? Yes. Does me think it was Orcham-Samerset?

Let's just flick back to Oxford. Because you've obviously got something about you that, you know, as I say, to go from Poland and you don't just get to university, you get to Oxford. And then you've fallen with this extraordinary crowd of people who ended up basically running Britain. You were friendly with Boris Johnson. You knew David Cameron, you knew George Osborne, you knew all these people. Were you always...

Well, look, wait a second. Okay. In my job, you know a thing or two. There are state secrets. Oh. There are nature secrets. And there are bullying and some secrets. Okay.

I wasn't even easy. You raised the bully, LaDette. Okay. I wasn't even going to, well, I've actually been going there. But you were clearly a very political animal. Yeah. Even back then. I was a hack at the Oxford Union.

Were you instinctively what I would define as right wing? I was anti-communist. Right. And because Maggie Thatcher was anti-communist and pro-market. and she was, you know, tough on the Soviet Union. I thought I liked that. I now have a somewhat different view, but in those days, that was the most important thing.

So was I right that you've kind of moved a bit from the right into the center? I, you know, Thatcher and Reagan spoke of the state as if it was not quite the enemy, but as if the market could fix everything. And actually, I now know that, I mean, even on purely financial grounds, you know, in most civilized countries, the state accounts for 40, 45% of GDP. So the quality of spending of almost half of your GDP, in other words, the quality of state institutions matters. And it's also the quality of your judiciary, the quality of your administration of public services. actually affects your economic performance a great deal.

Before we bring you back into the core of your political life, one of the way I first knew about you was your travels in Afghanistan, extraordinary travels with the Mujahideen during the 1980s, during the Russian occupation, a very, very courageous journey to Harat, some amazing books and articles. Tell us a little bit about your what that was like and your memories of Afghanistan in that period

and presumably the very considerable risk, that you and your colleagues were taking at that time? Well, the contrast was considerable. So one day we are with friends that, you know, having the last party at Oxford University, and six weeks later, I was in a cave in Afghanistan, a flea-infested cave, if I may say so. And I'd been preparing for that journey with Chris Robson,

a friend from my year. And we made it to the, Kabul Jalalabad Road at a place called Jekdalak, which was actually the place where the last British square was cut down during the first Afghan war in 1830 or 31. You know, we were, he was filming, I was taking photographs. And then I spent six weeks in Tora Bora when it was Arbace. And I brought out the first pictures of Stinger missiles on the battlefield. Which was the big thing at the time.

Which made a dramatic difference on the battlefield. because one day we were bombed and rocketed by Soviet hind helicopters from close quarters, and as soon as the missiles were used, they flew high and couldn't do anything to us. And that meant that the Soviets couldn't reinforce or resupply their garrisons, and so they were faced with a choice, either to double their contingent or leave. Did you go in the same spirit as perhaps people on the left in British politics would go and fight Franco, in Spain? What was your motivation to go? I did read my all well, and I suppose so, but remember that at the time, nobody was giving the Mujah in any chance. Yeah, a bunch of guerrillas facing the

mighty Soviet Union. And my Afghan comrades would be telling me, and I also thought this was unrealistic, you know, we're not just fighting for ourselves, we are fighting to liberate the world from communism. Actually, they were right. They were right. One thing that, of course, changed after your time in Afghanistan is that the Mujahideen then began to seem more complicated. Having been great heroes in the 80s and early 90s, after 9-11, particularly people's perspective on Muslims' fighting became quite different. How's that given you, did that give you when the West was intervening in Iraq and Afghanistan some understanding of who our enemies were? Did it give you a sort of, at least an imaginative understanding of how other people perceive us? Of course, you

know that people confused the Mujahideen with the Taliban. My guerrilla friends were not fanatics in the sense of being anti-Western. Quite the contrary, they were grateful for the assistance that they were getting. But you know, these perceptions have changed even since then. You know, I remember, I don't know about you, but I thought that, you know, the intervention, American intervention in Afghanistan was justified because that's where Osama bin Laden was. The Taliban would refuse to give him up, so the US had to do what it had to do. And Iraq seemed like the war of choice that didn't go well. But now, actually, Iraq is doing well. And Afghanistan is back on the Taliban rule. So, you know, yeah, you're right that what happens in the future determines how we look at the

past. So you go off from Oxford to do that in Afghanistan, and you kind of made a name for yourself in all sorts of ways doing that. The guys you left behind, I mentioned them, Cameron, Johnson, Osborne. Did you see in them at the time the political and personal skills, whatever it was that they had and the personalities? Could you have imagined them then as being chancellors and prime ministers in the British government? Oh, yeah, we do, Boris would be prime minister. Seriously, back then?

Given I still look at him and can't understand how he ever became prime minister, tell me what I was missing. Well, the man had a charisma. You know, when he entered the room, you felt that someone entered. Back in Oxford? Yes. And he was very successful. He became president of the Oxford Union.

And, you know, Oxford Union is a unique institution that, for example, in Poland we don't have, where you learn rhetorical skills and where you learn, you know, after you've done politicking at the Oxford Union, normal politics is a piece of case. And Cameron? He was a year above me. I met him, but I didn't know me. You met him at the Bullyington Club? No, actually later on.

Okay. So who did you meet at the point of the club? Who, which hotels did you, Johnson? I think I've already answered that question. Have you? You're answered that's a state secret. Okay. And then you come back to, I mean, was I right that you were deputy defense minister by 1992?

I was. So you've come back. Are you then trying to push Poland in a certain direction, presumably towards NATO? Obviously, and that was my job. But it was more interesting than that. So this was literally just two years after the fall of communism. So at our military council of the ministry, several members were members of the junta that ran Poland in the 1980s.

It was a meeting of civilizations. Incredible. Incredible. And so tell me how you went from that. How long did it take you to get Poland on the path to NATO? I helped to organize the first visit by Secretary General of NATO, to Manfred Werner to Poland. And it was at that time that we stated for the first time

that that's what we ultimately wanted to join while we were still having Soviet troops in our country who only left in 93. As we move forward, Russia, your relationship with Russia, Poland's relationship with Russia, evolved very significantly over this period. And I think there was a period in the mid-2000s, sort of 2005, 2009, when it felt as though you were trying

to create a warmer relationship with Russia. And this has a parallel actually with Alistair because famously, his great friend Tony Blair said to him after the first meeting with Vladimir Putin, I think this is somebody we can do business with. Tell us a little bit about this period and what people's perceptions of Putin were. Were we naive? Was he always like this? Did he change? Well, Poland's relationship with Russia goes back 500 years, okay? And they colonized us at the end of the 18th century and we were a Russian colony for 123 years. So let's just remember that. They also invaded Poland together with Nazi Germany in 1939 and then subjected us to 45 years of communism. So, you know, it all has – there's a lot of history. Poland produces more history than can be consumed locally. But yes, it was President Obama who first said that the United States wanted a reset.

You know, this was a time when I first – I was first defense minister in 2005 and then a foreign secretary, when the European Union was negotiating an association agreement with Russia. You know, Russia was saying we want economic integration with the West. G7 became G8. Yeah. And, you know, we were discussing the negotiating mandate for the European Commission to make this agreement. And, you know, people still remind me that we tried to normalize our relations with Russia, but I thought it was worth trying.

You actually speculated at one point that you might be able to get Russia one day into NATO. I was saying that it will be in our interest for Russia to fulfill NATO criteria, which is democracy, which is fixing your relationships with your neighbors. You know, if Russia fulfilled those conditions should be a different country. And, you know, Putin came to Godaisek on the 80th anniversary of the Second World War, or thereby acknowledging that that's when the war started, not with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. There was a denial of the Stalinist narrative of history.

Actually, he was the first leader of Russia to come to Khatain, the place of the murder of thousands of Polish POWs. We had a group on difficult issues. Polish and Russian historians established the difficult facts of common history, which is not a small thing, because you can't really reconcile. The patriarch of Russia came, and they, with our church, they issued a statement on reconciliation modeled consciously on the 1960s statement with the German bishops. So it seems to be slowly going maybe in the right direction. And tell me, one guy that you've met, I've met Putin

several times, but I don't think I've ever met Lov. You met Lavrov, the foreign Prime Minister often. What's your sense of him? How has he managed to be such a survivor in a world where very few survive real longevity? And what should we make of him? What will history make of Blah? My feeling that he was a real foreign minister until the unshlus of Crimea. You think he was a real foreign minister? In other words, he had influence over policy. And since then, he's become just a spokesman. But I wouldn't describe him as a survivor. You see, in an autocratic system like that, you can't say, Mr. President, I disagree with the policy, I resign. No, you serve at the dictator's pleasure.

So he literally is just Putin's puppet. He's a spokesman, let's say. Just to develop this idea, then, what happened to Vladimir Putin's view of the world then? If he was sincere, and those moments you're talking about when he's visiting Gadansk, acknowledging the Khatin massacre, the patriarchs visiting. What explains the change? What explains the Putin that we see today? Obviously, not one cause. If you read Putin's plan for Russia as prime minister, it was a plan for modernization and not just military modernization, but a social modernization. And then I think he found that it was too difficult. There were too many oligarchic and bureaucratic interests. And he found corruption was too easy? I'm sure that too. Then things started going wrong.

You know, in this part of the world, we have more sensitive antenna for changes of Russian policy because it's potentially such a threat. So when he started, when he unveiled a plaque to the memory of Andropov, on, you know, his former KGB boss, on Lubyanka. I remember thinking, this is going, this is going in the wrong direction. And then when they change school curricula to teach children a view of Tsarist

and communist, expansionist, history and ideology, I thought, hmm, this is not going to end well. And then I think the final straw was 2011 people forget Arab Spring when he saw Gaddafi emerging from that sewer or Mubarak in an iron cage and he saw huge demos in Moscow and St. Petersburg protesting his return to the Kremlin I think he saw himself in the place of Mubarak and and Gaddafi interesting very interesting listen we'll come back to

Ukraine, but I want to, you served in the government with the Law and Justice Party and then you resigned and you shifted to Donald Tusk and you were his foreign minister almost 20 years ago, you know, back in both of you in the same job. And there was a speech I read that you did, I think back in 2010, 2011, you said this, I fear German power less than I'm beginning to fear German inactivity. He just unpick that one for me. Well, that was at the height of the euro crisis. And Germany, I felt, was being tardy in addressing the Greek financial crisis. That if Germany acted earlier, it could have been resolved with much smaller resources. And I actually repeated this phrase this year in the Polish Parliament over this discussion

of German rearmament. Oh, interesting. And do you have the same instinct now? I said, as long as Germany is in NATO and the EU, I fear German pacifism more than I fear German rearmament. Interesting. Just on that one, because I'm tempted to sort of try to understand this. One of these strange things during the German elections was the site of J.D. Vance, reaching out to the AFD. Elon Musk very much getting behind them. And I thought there was something quite strange about the United States, or these leading figures at least, being very much in favor of increasing defense spending, Europe spending 5% on GDP, but also trying to support nationalist movements across Europe. And I was thinking, you know, what can possibly go wrong?

Let's give them lots of guns and then let's support the nationalist. This doesn't seem like a very good recipe. Well, it's even stranger than that. Our current opposition party in Poland, which is also national. list. Actually, when I was a member of the European Parliament, I saw them collaborating and cheering one another on. I think what unites them is hostility towards the European Union, which, by the way, your nationalist share. I was in the chamber in Strasbourg when Nigel Farage was making his last speech to the European Parliament. I hope he enjoys his European Parliament pension.

I'm sure he's upset to be accepting it in euros. And also and to have his children with German passports as well. I was hoping to get through the whole interview without talking about Nigel Farage, but just briefly, your views on Brexit when you were in the kind of right-wing conservative circles in Britain, your views on Brexit at the time of the referendum and your views on Brexit now? Well, you asked me about Lady Thatcher, and I now think that the seeds of Brexit were planted in the 1990. So on the one hand, it was under Margaret Thatcher that Britain signed the single European Act, which made EU law a primary, and also it was a British invention to set up the single market. But there was an undertone of nationalism of regarding, you know, I now explain it to myself that former empires that have not been defeated in war, find it.

it's psychologically impossible to live under rules that are not made by themselves, that are negotiated. In that sense, you're similar to Turkey, although Turkey is now more integrated with the EU than Britain, which is sad. And at the time, if you were no longer a British citizen when the referendum came, but you'd have voted Remain? Yes, I would. And the other way in which the seeds of Brexit were planted in the 1980s is that the British public was consistently misled by, not just by politicians, but also by the press, about how the EU actually works.

And confession, I was a Eurosceptic at that time because I was reading British, reputable British newspapers and they... Boris Johnson in the Daily Telegraph, for example. But not only. You could not make out how a European directive is actually made by reading the British press. You were left with the impression that it's faceless bureaucrats in Brussels who cook it up

and then impose it on the member states. That is absolutely not how a directive is made. For a directive to come into force, not only do you need an agreement of the member states and on majority of cases unanimously, you need an agreement of the European Parliament. and the commission is not a bunch of faceless bureaucrats, commissioners are appointed by democratic-related governments. Now that I know how it works because I've worked the system, I don't know how you could make it even any more democratic than that. One of the people who was one of the great champions of this vision of the European Union was, of course, Boris Johnson. I mean, he created his career in Brussels, creating these apparently comical stories about straight bananas, about condoms being different sizes, about all these kind of directives.

And I wonder whether now that you're deeper in politics, whether this question about the relationship between, I don't want to sound too pompous, but between truth and political action becomes more important. Well, since I have this experience, I have taken it upon myself to prevent the Polish people having the same trick played on them. The difficulty in Britain was that politicians felt constrained to counter the myths and the lies. And I do it almost every day so that the misrepresentation doesn't get accepted as reality. Because in Poland, we have similar nationalists peddling similar lies. But in Poland, we give counter to them. And in your Brexit referendum, the government's argument was, yeah, well, this EU, you know, it's everything you say. But it's in our economic interest to stay.

That's not a good enough argument. You have to make the case four, and we keep making the case four. Can I just sort of bring you into the bigger conversation around populism? The election of the Law and Justice Party in Poland in 2015 is just before the Brexit referendum. And I guess there's something very interesting about what's happening about 10 years ago in populism throughout Europe. It starts maybe in Hungary. There were earlier Polish versions of this. But what is this phenomenon?

How did it get going? How do you understand its causes? How would you describe it? And how do we stop it? So first of all, remember that in 2015, our populists won by a fluke. They got 38% of the vote, which in a proportional representation system doesn't normally give you an overall majority. Our left-wing party missed the 8% threshold for coalitions by 30,000 votes. And if they'd got the extra 30,000 votes, which was actually literally one television

debate, everything would have been different. But yes, Poland has the same issues of populism as Britain, as France, as Germany, as the United States. And it's, you know, populists are skilled at proposing simple solutions to difficult problems. Also, electorates everywhere have told us fix migration or else, or we will choose people who will. And some cultural issues, I think, also play a role. I mean, this is a big debate, which we are not going to resolve here now. You said there that you're out rebutting and you're out fighting against the lies and so forth. But in the sense, the presidential election, which, you know, your party narrowly lost to a populist,

which was being seen as a bit of a defeat for Donald Tusk and the government, does that show that maybe you didn't successfully rebut the sort of things that you have to do if you're going to fight this stuff? Poland is split down the middle into the nationalist part and the pro-European part. And who wins depends sometimes on technical issues and sometimes on mobilization. Do you feel overall you're winning the big arguments right now? Well, you know, you asked me what it was like to be in Britain, to arrive in Britain in the 1980s. I'll tell you what, if at that time someone told me that there will come a moment when Poland will be in the EU,

and Britain will not be. And that in Britain, there would be having a serious political debate about Poland possibly overtaking Britain economically. I would have said that's pure fantasy. And yet here we are. Okay. Deputy Prime Minister, Alistair, let's have a quick break and then back for more.

Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers. The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, cancer research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lung Vax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer. It builds on TracerX, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs.

Lung Vax is designed to train the immune system to spot these. signs early on, destroying 40 cells before cancer develops. So it's not treatment, but preventative, with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year, focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancer research UK.org forward slash the rest is science. Hi everybody, it's Dominic Samark here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics, when Rory was away

and I was filling in and enjoying Alastair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Restis History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to, to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise. People are arguing about Europe. The government has got a few issues with the trade unions. And we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues. And people are asking if Britain is

governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. And we'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and we'll be talking about one of the grimest moments in Britain's economic history,

the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is brought to you by Revoluted Business, the all-in-one business account to manage your finances. Our world runs on exchange, trade, tax, tariffs, the quiet machinery that keeps everything moving.

And everything is moving faster now. Ideas, goods, people, crossing continents and seconds. But money still takes the scenic route, tripping over red tape and. hidden fees, and that's where Revoluted business comes in. Over 30 currencies sent to more than 150 countries at the same interbank rates that banks use during market hours within plan allowance, no mystery markups. You can hold exchange and pay from one place. Local account details means clients in New York, Sydney or Dublin get paid fast without the waiting or the worry. Business across borders done the way that politics so rarely is efficiently.

Open a Revoluted business account today by scanning the QR code on screen or via the link in description and add money by the 31st to December 2025 to get a £200 welcome bonus or the equivalent in your local currency. Feature availability varies by plan, offerer available for new business customers in the UK, US, Australia and Ireland. Fees and terms and conditions apply. I was going to actually ask you if we could move on to two of the really big issues that have kind of been dominating global debate and politics in recent months. We'll come on to Ukraine. I really want to get your views on how that will resolve itself.

But you're very, very strongly pro-Israel. And I just... No, no, wait a second. Poland is in favor of a two-state solution. Poland has recognized Palestine for decades. There was a fully accredited Palestinian ambassador in Warsaw. And we have repeatedly criticized the overuse of force by Israel, the breaking of international humanitarian law,

and the illegal settlements in the West Bank. So, yes, because of history. Here you are you are in Wich, which once had the largest ghetto, second largest, I think, after Warsaw. And so there is a lot of history. But we see the tragedy of both peoples. How have you found that from,

being somebody who I think instinctively, and I'm not saying this remotely in a critical way, who instinctively feels support for the state of Israel, how have you found that? For the existence of Israel's in insecurity within internationally recognized borders. Okay, but how have you felt over the last couple of years in seeing the sense of that Israel and how it projects itself to the outside world by its conduct inside Gaza? Obviously, there's a wave of criticism. What I don't get is how people can criticize Israel without mentioning what caused this current wave of violence. And it was a heinous terrorist attack by Hamas, which, by the way, destroyed the peace party in Israel and harmed the Palestinian cause.

You've been at this game for a very long time now. One of the things that I think is very difficult to get across to people is what it's like being a minister. How do you explain to people what the difference is between being a minister or being a business person or being a journalist or running an NGO? What is the essence? What is the strangeness of being a minister that people don't understand? I'm sometimes asked what's the difference between foreign minister and defense minister. But yes, it's in, I don't know exactly how it works in Britain, but in the Polish constitutional system, The ministry is just an addition to the person of the minister.

You are responsible for foreign policy and carries a lot of responsibility. I was for four years a deputy, which helps to prepare you. How does the relationship between a government of one party with a president of another who has some influence and involvement in foreign policy, how does that actually work in practice? Lucky you to have a limited constitutional monarchy. Well, tell me, tell me how it works. It's a challenge. I try to explain to myself that it's like the Roman Republic with two consuls simultaneously. Where does actual real power lie? So our constitution makes the prime minister the head of the executive branch, and the president is basically head of state and a representative of the country abroad with a veto power.

So our Charles is Charles the third plus the veto. So how did you feel, all that being said, how did you feel when the president of the United States, I think on two occasions during the campaign, invited your opponent, who is now is the president, to the Oval Office and gave him his political blessing? Well, we used to have this rule among democracies that we don't interfere in each other's party political processes. Most of us still do. But we did interfere in the politics of dictatorships on behalf of democracy. And now it's the other way around.

Hold on. So you kind of have a moving towards my view that the United States under Trump is becoming an autocracy. No. Nice try. But no, I didn't say that. But, you know, it's actually, it is astonishing. I mean, for me, as somebody who used to be a diplomat, then became a politician and now no longer a politician, this change is very dramatic because even in Kenya,

the American government was very scrupulous not to choose sides in an election. And now suddenly we have it being made clear that they want the AFD to win in Germany. You know, there was a moment where there was very fierce criticism against Kirstama, essentially supporting Farage and now supporting a guy called Tommy Robinson, who's beyond Farage. It's a very strange moment. I mean, I wonder whether you can help us understand how this is happening, why this is happening. Well, I'll refuse this invitation to interfere in the politics of our great ally, but as you know, there is a Chinese curse. May your dreams come true.

Let me push one more time. Tell us a little bit. We've interviewed your wife, Ann Applebaum, about populism. I have to say here that she's a separate subject of the international law, okay? She's a separate subject. We're not going to get you to talk about her, but the subject that she discussed with us, of course, was populism. And I wonder whether you could explain what it felt like in Poland. As you pointed out, there are versions in Britain, there are versions in Italy, there are versions in Germany. But in the Polish context, what did it mean in practice? How threatening was it? How dangerous was it to democracy? I can quote you words and populist actions from literally the last 48 hours. So our opposition party has just had a huge

convention at which the leader, the former prime minister, Kaczynski, said that Poland's independence is threatened by this German and French attempt to take away our statehood. This is at a time when there are Russian drones and missiles 250 kilometers from here killing people. So, you know, in the Polish context, we feel that the enemy is in the east. We don't feel culturally or civilizational threatened by the West. This is us, the pro-Euro. European part of the political spectrum. You know, my parents' generation and myself, we dreamt of Poland being normal when we were under communism and normal we defined as just a regular Western European country.

And we've achieved that. And we were at that time assaulted by communist propaganda talking about the rotten West. And now we have, you know, our competitors talking about rotten West. And it's just extraordinary because of cultural issues to do with sexual minorities and the pace of social change. And some people are being hoodwinked by that kind of simplistic propaganda. What do they mean by France and Germany trying to take away his state? Just being members of the European Union. Yeah, that's right.

That's it. Which is absurd because France and Germany on their own don't even have a blocking minority, let alone a majority. One more just on this. The judiciary. Explain what had happened with the judiciary in Poland. And how worried should we have been? I mean, some people said, okay, these guys were in for 10 years roughly in Poland, but they're not such a big deal. I don't know why people call them populists. I don't know why people call them authoritarian. It's not the end of the world. It's the European Union. Everything's fine. Try to explain what it was actually like. Why was it dangerous? Why was it something to be concerned about? You see the conclusion of this already 10 years of experiment. in various countries with populism, it should be, in my view, that institutions are much more fragile than we think, that constitutions are only as good as the sense of probity

and the willingness to stand up by the people who man them, who have the duties to uphold constitutions. I remember even in Britain, do you remember the headline with the portraits of judges? enemies of the people. We just talked to the former Supreme Court judge about that.

Right. So in Poland, until 10 years ago, we had a system basically of judges electing themselves with a minority being elected by parliament. And our nationalist competitors broke, in my view, broke the constitution by electing a much larger number of them by politicians. And so we now have judges elected by a previous system and judges elected under this politicized system. And what I will put to you is that it's all very complicated. But the function of the judiciary is not only to pass judgment, but also to maintain the appearance of impartiality. And whatever you think about the rights and wrong, that has certainly been lost. So before these populist reforms, I never asked myself when going to court, is this judge from

left wing or right wing or, you know, who is he sympathetic to? And I'm afraid these days, most people ask themselves, you know, where this, what kind of judge he is politically. And that's a loss. And is it fixable? Is it reversible? It is very difficult to fix it. Once institutions lose, it takes decades to build up authority.

and only a few months to lose it. And what about you as foreign minister responsible, for example, of the appointment of ambassadors? What happens when a political party appoints ambassadors on a political party basis? Have you had to withdraw lots of them? So, yes, I inherited more than 50% of ambassadors who were not diplomats who were party political ambassadors, and plus some vacancies. So I'm trying to now, make the Foreign Service professional again.

And unfixing media reform as well? Same thing, yeah. I mean, you know, the media, you know, imagine the BBC taken over by Breitbart, literally, to give an example, because people sometimes don't quite believe it. So during the COVID pandemic, Donald Tusk, well, he was at that time president of the EPP,

addressed the congresses of various EPP parties. This is the European conservative groupings. That's right. And among others, CDU. And being a good politician, he would always include a few sentences in the native language of that party. And so he said remotely, because this was during COVID, good luck in your deliberations, but think not only what's good for Germany, Fuert Deutschland, but primarily what's good for Europe. And so what they did, they took these two words, Fuert Deutschland.

And they repeated it on main television news hundreds of times. Now, if you have this kind of bias, you cannot tolerate that. So we had to bring back professionalism to state media. What was going on with ownership of media and how about relationship with universities? I mean, how did that work during this populist period? Well, first of all, again, value what you have, the BBC, where facts are checked. You know, you might complain about slight bias this way or that way. but people don't outright invent stuff and they don't attack politicians in that kind of way, right?

So, yes, universities are also usually the first victim of populists because universities are autonomous and universities should and then do care about truth, about establishing facts, about free inquiry and populists by definition don't like that. So can you give us an example, try to illustrate what was happening in the university so we can understand this. Well, we had an assault on freedom of debate under the heading that there are the, you know, that universities supposedly became, you know, the spiel, you know.

Hotbeds of left-wing activism. Yeah, and my view is, you know, lefties are also allowed to, should be allowed to function at universities, you know. You've got to go, we're at this, this, this conference where the star attractions are you, obviously, me obviously, and later George Clooney, and you have to go and do a paddle in a few minutes. But I just wanted to maybe close by bringing us back to Ukraine. You mentioned the drones recently, the drone attacks. And I quote you,

another quote from a speech of yours, Poland has learnt over 500 years that when the Russians threaten, you take it seriously. How alarmed, how scared are Poles about what's happening over Ukraine. We think that if Putin succeeded in conquering Ukraine, we would be next. And it's happened before, which is why we've been spending a solid 2% of GDP on defense for 20 years, and we are now spending 4.7% of GDP. And the public are fine with that. They understand that and they get that. It's amusing when my colleague, the finance minister, attends his meetings, his equivalence, asking, how do you manage to have such a huge... And he says, well, I'll be eviscerated if I didn't.

You know, we will eat grass rather than become a Russian colony again. Final one for me, Europe. How can we imagine a more ambitious European security infrastructure, sovereignty, the UK, reengaging Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, the Western Balkans? How do we think about Europe taking the lead? Because clearly, there are some challenges from the US, there are challenges from China. But Europe doesn't seem to be stepping up. How do we get Europe to step up? It's a fundamental constitutional issue.

Europe is a confederation. In other words, an organization in which ultimate sovereignty lies with the member states. And all historic confederations either became federations or ceased to exist. And when you look at our competition, they all have unity of command. We don't.

We have a synchronization problem, which is particularly acute, obviously, in the area of defense. because it's the core of sovereignty. This is a crisis in which I believe we should stick together because otherwise we'll be hanged separately, not only in the defence area, but particularly in the trade area.

Do you think we should be moving towards, you know, when we say common defence and security policy, that is absolutely what we mean, common? We have it in theory under the Lisbon Treaty, but what I believe we need is not only a common policy to reinvigorate Europe, defense industries, I'm in favor of the European Union starting to have some defense capability of our own so that we don't have to call on the United States in every emergency.

We should be capable of sorting out some warlord in Libya or the Balkans next time around. My final question, quite a big one, I want to ask you whether in our lifetime, you're a few years younger than I am, but we're sort of both in our 60s, if in our lifetime, Ukraine will be a member of NATO and the European Union, and how does that journey happen, and whether the UK will ever be back in the European Union? That I don't know, but the UK, but I think Ukraine will become a member of the EU at the beginning of next decade. Okay, how? Well, it's already a candidate. We are already negotiating. But enlargement is really hard for those

who are already candidates. It is, but Europe approved Ukraine's status as a candidate and Europe unanimously agreed to start negotiations. And, you know, Hungary is blocking progress, but it'll happen eventually.

And let me say one thing. That if Britain chooses to reapply to the European Union, I can trust you, I can promise you that whoever is in charge in Poland, we will vote in favor. Excellent. Good news. Just on that point a bit. So for Ukraine to get to that, though, Russia cannot be allowed to win. So how does that happen? Are you confident that the Americans

and the other European countries are as committed to Ukraine as you are? Well, Ukraine is planning for a three-year war. And these colonial wars usually take about a decade. And I don't think Putin can sustain it for another three years. And we're about to supply Ukraine the means to resist for another three years out of the frozen Russian assets. Ukraine now makes almost half of its drones and cruise missiles in Ukraine. Putin has out underperformed. We thought he had the World's Second Army and he thought there would be a coup, it would be a cakewalk, three-day operation. And more than ten years, years, he's still fighting in Donbass. I would not call that a victory.

Well, thank you. Thank you for your time. My pleasure. You've got about three minutes to get to the stage and talk to the Polish people. And George Clooney. And I don't think he's coming. I think he's only coming for his own event, I've been told. Anyway, thank you. It's been great. Thank you. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Bye-bye. So, Rory, your fellow Bullington Club member.

He was even dressed like he was off to a bully league club. He had his weekend. Tory jacket on. But I'll tell you away, he's a very, very, very impressive guy, I think. I got the impression you were really, you were really sort of warming to him and won over by him. What was your sense of him? No, well, I've met him quite a few times before. I must admit, the first time I met him, I found him quite overbearing, and he wasn't in politics at the time, but he was so kind of putting the world to rights, and he had the answers to everything. But what I thought about him there was just that he's clearly incredibly experienced now, very thoughtful and very clear.

And I actually did find his, his backstory and his account of his own life. I got the sense of somebody quite special in terms of how his life had progressed and developed. Look, like, I always like these interviews when people are, you know, they don't come in and say, what are you going to ask? And there was none of that. It was like, you know, sit down, ask a question. And he gives you a straight answer.

And I just found some of his historical perspective really, really interesting. Yeah. The only thing I was surprised by, but I shouldn't have been surprised by, is that he wasn't more outspoken. I felt it took a little bit to draw him out, for example, on populism and nationalism and Poland. I think we asked a few questions on that. Judiciary, universities, parties to get there. And I wonder, well, I suppose one thing, of course, that I'm reminded of is that he's a serving politician. And therefore, he is a little bit more cautious than a retired politician.

But you see, I think all of these politicians at the moment, the panel I did this afternoon, you know, I can talk about this stuff much more freely than a serving politician can, because everybody knows that when you're talking about this, you're basically talking about Trump. Yeah. To some extent, you're talking about Trump's style of politics. But what I felt when he was taught, when you were asking about universities and we're talking about the media, I kind of felt a quite visceral contempt in him for the populist politicians in Poland. I felt that quite strongly. So it's interesting.

You picked up the sense that he was actually quite mild. I felt it's interesting that. Maybe that's just by being in the room. I could sort of see the cheek muscles going and I could see him getting quite wound up. Well, I suppose encouraged us to listen to our leading interview with his wife and Applebaum because she is so ferociousness. Oh, yeah. And she will provide, you know, off the top of her head 20 outrageous examples of disgusting, corrupt, horrendous behavior by that Polish government.

And obviously they lived together, they went through this together. So I was expecting that it would be that amped up. And of course, it's much less than Anne producers. The other one, I would have liked if we'd had more time to bring Poland alive more in the 1980s. I wanted a sense of how that government worked. There's something quite interesting, I guess, about the fact that quite a lot of the people supporting the populist nationalist parties in Poland were. Often people who regret the collapse of the old system and maybe a nostalgic for what existed before in the 1980s and how those governments worked. I think he's written a book about all that as well. I mean, maybe he just, I've got a feeling that was one of the books he wrote was kind of addressing exactly that. We should check it out and put it in the notes or send it to you to read. But I'll tell you, the other thing, it was interesting when you asked him at the end sort of what's it like being a minister, just to give you a sense of what his day's been like today. been at this like huge reset. They've actually renamed their party today to take account of some of the changes that have happened. They've had a big kind of policy debate there. And meanwhile, as he

alluded to, the opposition have had this big conference as well. So he sort of arrives here from that. He kind of disappeared into the gents for about two minutes to, you know, do whatever you do in the gents when you've just been stuck in a conference forever. He then came in here for a meeting with the local mayor and had that, then sat down with us for an hour. And then sat down with us for an hour. hour and has literally kind of walked out of this room down the corridor and into a full, you know, he's going to be grilled on stage by God knows who in front of a big live audience. So, and then we'll be, I presume, sort of heading off north to home. So, you know, you always do get so much more if you sort of see, if you're talking to them

in the flesh, because just the way he kind of operated watching him just through a bit of today, I think he's a much more impressive politician than I thought he would have been when I knew him when he wasn't a politician. I felt back then that he was one of those very, very clever commentators who liked to sort of throw stones from the outside. But my sense is actually, and interestingly, talking to people around here today, and this conference is quite a kind of liberal, a journalist who I just did an interview that said, you know, do you spend all your life in liberal bubbles like this? And actually he's, so he's not kind of, you know, not on my side of the political offences, as it were, but I've got the sense that he's actually quite popular and respected as a

political figure. And so whether he eventually wants to go for the top job or have another go at being president, I don't know. But no, I found it. I was, I was impressed. I was impressed. Good. Well, thank you, Alistair, very much. See you soon. Thank you. Bye-bye.