The Rest Is Politics - 524. Starmer’s Mandelson Mess and the Iranian Nuclear Threat

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

Did Starmer show a fatal lack of judgement and curiosity about Peter Mandelson’s suitability for public office? How and why did Trump destroy years of successful Iranian nuclear ‘containment’ policy? Four years into the Sudan war, what does the failure of peace efforts reveal about the unravelling of the world order? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. __________ Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [e-mail] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, Bruno Di Castri Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Chris Sawyer General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com. That's the rest is politics.com. Appointing Peter Manelson in the first place was a massive lapse of judgment. Look, it's a mess. There's no getting out of it. This is a mess. The reason why Stama's finished is that this demonstrates above all that he lacks the two things that he claimed to possess, which is judgment and seriousness. He's in this mess at this particular time. because he made a bad decision.

At what point did Stama try to find out the truth? Did he actually care at all? This was one of the biggest scandals at the heart of his government, something that almost brought him down. The minimal expectation would have been a bit of curiosity. This episode is brought you by Fuse Energy. Energy policy rarely stays in Westminster for long, usually arise for the bill. And from the 1st of April, 75% of renewables' obligation costs will come

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Nah, it's a new trend. Rinkled chic. Feel the arrow bubbles melt. It's mind bubbling. Welcome to the rest of the politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. So Rory, we're going to talk about Kier Starrma's continuing political difficulties over his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson to the ambassadorship in Washington.

We're going to update people as best we can on what's going on in Iran and what's going on inside Donald Trump's mind in relation to Iran. and we're also going to talk about the wretched war in Sudan. Where do you want to start on the Stama vetting row? Let's take it back to the first question, which is why on earth did Stama find it necessary to try to put a political appointee into Washington? So he had in Karen Pierce a ambassador in Washington

who had a good relationship with Trump, who was very experienced, pretty straightforward, actually quite colorful, charismatic British ambassador. He's now got, in Christian Turner, again, a career diplomat doing the job. Instead of which he decided to make the ambassador in Washington a political appointee. So that's the first question. And you know, you, I think, were interested in David Miliband, who I would have been supportive of. George Osborne's been briefing ferociously to the newspapers that he was the other candidate that was being considered.

It's really interesting how absolutely solemnly so many of the British newspapers keep saying, George Osborne was the other candidate was being considered. Can I just pause for that for a second? I mean, that seems incredible, isn't it? Or am I misreading the relationship between Kirstehmann and someone like George Osborne? Was he really thinking of making the former conservative chancellor, the architect of austerity, the ambassador to Washington? Well, if he was, I think he would have created probably not as many political difficulties from himself as this has created because of the various directions it's got in through Jeffrey Epstein and the current row about developed vetting that we'll get on to. I would hope not. I would hope not. But the point about why he wanted a non-career

diplomat, I wonder if we shouldn't go even a step further back. Because what I don't think we've ever quite got to the bottom of, including through Kier Stahmer's statement in the House of Commons yesterday and Olly Robbins, the now sacked permanent secretary of the foreign office and his evidence to a parliamentary committee, I don't think we've quite got to the actual reason for the appointment. So the line is, the argument is that with a very unconventional presidency, Trump 2, maybe it was time to have an unconventional ambassador. I think that's overstated. I can remember Tony Blair often saying, look, frankly, leaders don't really care much who

ambassadors are, as long as they know they're speaking to somebody who's giving the government lie, okay? Put pause on that because I think that's really important. I mean, I think that's critical, isn't it? Knowing that they're giving the government line, I mean, in a sense, the reason why a career diplomat is a more reliable appointment is that the Trump administration, like them or loathe them, at least has a sense that this is a mouthpiece for the official government line. If you start appointing very, very colorful wheeler-dealer, George Osborne, Peter Mandelson types, there is a risk that Tony Blair might say, well, you know, is this guy actually giving me the government line? Is this a foreign office line or is this some weird improvisation? That I think, though, is part of the thinking.

But I think the thing we keep coming back to, because I don't, look, Kirstehm had no sort of real relationship with Peter Mandelson. He didn't really know him. And I do think this was much more, Morgan McSweeney, who was quite close to Peter, and who maybe felt that with the support that Peter had given him, that, you know, Peter would hopefully do the job well, to perhaps, you know, would be a kind of political signal, getting one of the new labour people into this sort of Kirstama tent.

But, look, is, you know, and I don't want to jump all over people, but I think it was a bad judgment from the word go. Support he'd given him. I mean, the support is that Madelson seems to have developed a close relationship with Morgan Mitsweene, advising him on tactics and strategy. The suggestions also that he may have been quite helpful in introducing him to potential funders. So there was the sense in which McSweeney owed Madelson.

And I suppose Mandelson presumably was lobbying hard for the job, just as he was lobbying hard to be Chancellor of Oxford and various other things. And at one point, if you remembered, felt that he might be able to do two at the same time, which I think would have been really stretching it. The sense that you're getting from what Olly Robbins has been saying to the Foreign Affairs Committee is that it was kind of a done deal. You know, and Kirste Armey is that he set out his version of the process. Ollie Robbins today is setting out his version of the process.

And there is, without doubt, a conflict. I mean, we're almost in Her Majesty's recollections can vary. Territory. But if I can sort of try and unpick it all, my senses that the Foreign Office thought that, well, Peter Mandelso is not a ridiculous, incredible thought, because he's been a senior politician, he's been a, he's worked in the European Commission, he's been a cabinet minister. Now, what we also know is he'd been fired twice, which should have rung a few alarm bells. We also know, and knew at the time, that he'd been building up, and nothing wrong with

building up a business, we'd be building up a business, which was in part reliant upon contracts with quite controversial Russian and Chinese and other firms. So there was, the reason why they would have been the requirement for pretty heavy vetting would have been to be assured that there was nothing there that was going to cause the government difficulty or embarrassment or whatever. And what appears to have happened, as we said the other day, that the Cabinet office process led to a suggestion being made to the Foreign Office, that there were warning signs that they needed to be worried about, and that Olly Robbins took the judgment that with mitigation, which was put in place,

it was manageable and he could go ahead. What he has also been saying to the Foreign Affairs Committee is that he, yeah, he did feel under pressure. I think the one big new thing that came out of the committee hearing was this idea, he told the committee that number 10 had also asked him to find an ambassadorial position for Matthew Doyle and not tell the foreign secretary about it. Remind us who Matthew Doyle was and why there's been scandals around Matthew Doyle? Well, Matthew Doyle, long-term Labor Party employee and official,

in and out of government, working for the party, working for government, worked for me for quite a long time, and then worked for Kyr Starma, as one of the communications director who has since left. And he then was this story about him in relation to a candidate that he was supporting who had sexual allegations against him. So he's now been put in the House of Lords. But what Olly Robin seems to be saying is there was an attempt to get him an ambassadorship. Now, Matthew has got a lot of qualities, but I think the diplomatic service would have gone a bit nuts. Now, it's not unique. I mean, for example, Ed Llewellyn, he was an advisor to David Cameron. More than the advisor, he was the chief of staff, right at the centre thing. He's now actually

back in the Foreign Office of London. I mean, he's become a proper professional diplomat. It's quite interesting. Exactly. But he's slightly different. I mean, so Ed was a sort of acts as a civil servant, both in Brussels and for Chris Patton in Bosnia. He was then a very non-political chief of staff. Yeah, no, I'm not saying the equivalent. I'm saying sometimes. No, you're right, sometimes, but just to develop, it's a very interesting case. I mean, he was made ambassador in Paris, then ambassador in room. He's now back as the Director General on the Foreign Office, so he's basically devoted the last sort of 10 years of his career and probably the rest of his career to becoming a professional civil servant. Listen, can I just sort of push on this strange question of what's going on in Starmus head when he is thinking, oh, will I appoint Peter Manelson, even though I don't really know him, or potentially, even if the newspapers have believed, I will consider appointing George Osborne, even though he's doesn't really know him either. Is there a sort of naivety going on? Is he sort of intimidated by these sort of worldly figures? I mean, what do we know about these figures? We know that both of

them are, to put it mildly, on the very colorful end of politics and very much on the kind of business commercial end of politics. I mean, famously, they had this big standoff because they were both on a yacht with a Russian oligarch called Deripashka back in the day. It's very interesting that rather than these figures being treated with a little bit of sort of distance. And it's odd in terms of Stama's kind of brand. I mean, I thought the brand was meant to be, this sort of careful, loyally, this isn't going to be the Boris Johnson world anymore. If that was your brand, why would you flirt with these very larger than life, colorful, super wealthy, business-connected politicians?

I think it goes back to the points I made when you recorded the episode was it last Friday. that he doesn't take a close enough interest in personnel. Now, actually, as it happens, I have a lot of sympathy with what you said, that actually, would it have been that crazy to have kept Karen Pierce? Would it have been that crazy to have gone out and said, get me the best person inside the foreign office? That would, I think, have been a sensible way to go. I think it would have been, if he was determined to say, I want somebody a bit different,

then I think David Miliband might have been a better option. Though then again, I think David Miliband would have found it very, very difficult to be UK ambassador with the Trump administration because David is somebody who's got very, very strong views and very strong values and maybe wouldn't feel that comfortable. That's such an interesting point, though, because you've put your feeling right, part of the reason presumably that he's flirting with George Osborne and Peter Mandelson is because he believes they lack exactly those qualities that you've just described to David Miliband. I don't want to make David out to be a saint or them to be sort of great sinners, although since they may have done. But no, I just think that David, especially having been a foreign secretary, I think he'd, in a funny sort of way, I think he'd find it harder than, say, of Peter Mandelson or George Osborne, to finesse his own views about things.

And as, back to my Tony Blair point, ultimately, an ambassador, whatever their views, they're there to represent the government, and that means the government policy and the government line and the leadership of that government. And I think what I think this maybe goes down to because one of the things you hear about Gier Starrer from a lot of his colleagues is that although I think he's trying to improve at this,

is that he doesn't invest that much time in relationships. And you have to do that, because you have to know what is going to work best for. for you. Now, I don't think anybody would be able to say that this has been the most functional Downing Street in the history of Downing Streets, because it's just been too many people leaving, too much about the rouse between the people if you go back to the Sue Gray, Morgan McSweeney, seeming battle that went on. And I think ultimately, here you are, Rory. This is where I'm going to try and get to what I think is the big point here. I want to test your memory of previous discussions

that we've had when Kirste has been under the Koch. When I've said, what I think are the two most important currencies in politics. I've always felt that the two most important currencies in political life are reputation and goodwill. And you have to think of them the same as you think of bank accounts. Money goes in, money goes out, reputational currency goes up, sometimes it goes down. Goodwill currency reserves grow or they shrink. Okay. Now, in politics and political campaigning, there are not many bigger single boosts to your reputation and goodwill currency, particularly with your own colleagues, than winning a general election, okay, and winning it big. And Kier Starver did that in 2024. Less than two years on, and there's lots they can point

to that says, well, that helps with the reputation. People say he's done pretty well dealing with Iran War. We've just regained our place as the fifth biggest economy in the world. Unemployment figures today seem to be quite good. There's lots of things you could point to. But there has been a lot of draining of the reserves. And the biggest one, I think, even though they part fixed, it wasn't afraid well are the early ones, the removal of the winter fuel payments for pensioners. Then you get certain lobby groups offside, farmers over inheritance tax, business over national insurance rises, people like you and me over, for example, overseas aid cuts. These are survivable in the account. If the account is constantly being topped up on other issues and maybe

more than anything by the steady, clear, compelling story about where the country is going. And that's the bit that I think has been missing. I mean, I think the reason why Stama's finished and why personally I think he should go is that this demonstrates above all that he lacks the two things that he claimed to possess, which is judgment and seriousness. So appointing Peter Manelson in the first place was a massive lapse of judgment. We now know that even the Trump transition team, was warning him against appointing Mandelson, which is very, very odd, given that they thought

Manelson was their Trump card with Trump. He knew about Epstein, he knew about the financial links, and he pushed ahead. What's the story about Olly Robbins? The story is essentially, but because Stammer had already announced that Madelson was going to be the ambassador before the security vetting was done, he was putting his civil service in a position where if they had refused the security clearance, two months in, it would have been a massive humiliation for the Prime Minister. they basically would have been saying the prime minister's appointed as his ambassador to Washington, somebody who's a security risk and he can't get the job, which is almost certainly why Robbins didn't push harder. But on top of that is the seriousness.

At what point did Stama try to find out the truth? Did he actually care at all? Did he try to look into this? He was up there in September defending him, saying in January that all the vetting had been done properly. This was one of the biggest scandals at the heart of his government, right? Something that almost brought him down six months ago. The minimal expectation would have been a bit of curiosity, a bit of getting people into the room and trying to get to the bottom of this. It turns out his permanent secretary, Antonio Romero, knew about this a month ago.

Stama doesn't know. So he's standing up in the House of Commons and he's blaming everybody except himself, saying how disappointed he is, how angry he is, etc., this kind of. total lack of judgment appointing the man in the first place and total lack of seriousness into not digging into the process after the scandal had been exposed. I mean, it's possible that it is true both that he has been let down by some of his officials and that he has lacked his own curiosity about what's going on inside his own government. Now, and the thing about being government, this goes back to the importance of the team, is that if you're the prime minister, particularly at a time with so many challenges,

Iran, Ukraine, the economy, public services, so, I've sometimes defined sort of being prime minister. It's like, you know, you're like a batsman at a cricket match and you're being, you're facing the 20 best fast bowlers in the world at the same time, okay? You're having so many things coming at you. That is why you have to be able to focus it away that all the ones that maybe you're just going to let go outside and you're not even going to play a shot because somebody else is dealing with them. You can't deal with everything all the time. So you've therefore got to have a network of people who you trust absolutely to think like you, to share your vision of what you're trying to do, and thereby

be able, frankly, to make a lot of the decisions that don't then have to come to you so as you can focus on the big stuff. He's in this mess at this particular time. One, as he admitted himself in the Commons yesterday, because he made a bad decision about the appointment in the first place and that nobody it seems to me at any stage of the process before or thereafter was across all the detail in a way that they could make a judgment about when this had to go to him. Now that's a systemic failure, but the system has to be set by the people and the best people have to be appointed by the guy at the top. You know, I thought in terms of what a terrible wicket he was on yesterday, you know, he probably survived. He probably survived. I thought,

Kemi Bade knock, and it's interesting, I keep hearing that David Cameron's kind of back. It used to be Michael Gove that she was relying on. I think we've seen a slight improvement in her game, and I had to take the hand of David Cameron in that. I thought on what was a very good wicket for her, she did pretty well. So if you're thinking about the reserves, his have taken a big withdrawal, and hers have increased a little bit. And I was talking to, you know, because what happens in these big dramas is that people just phoning each other the whole time and what's up and why have you. I was talking to an MP the other day who came in at the last election,

who said the whole thing has been traumatic. And he didn't just mean this. He meant from the word go. And he actually mentioned the winter fuel thing as like, you know, ooh, I came in, felt really great. We've got in, we've got a government, we can start to change the world. And it's just been trauma after trauma. Your friend Tom Baldwin, who wrote the biography of Stama,

used to have a line that Stama has been consistently underestimated all through his life. I'm beginning to think this is a guy who's been consistently overestimated right through his life. This is somebody who is demonstrating at the moment that he didn't really have the loyalty of the civil servants, let alone of his members of parliament. It makes me question actually how good was he as the Director of Public Prosecutions. He certainly, I didn't feel, was very good as the Brexit minister under Corbyn. You know, people kept saying, you know, what an amazing forensic man he was in the House of Commons. I found he was dull, uninspiring, and he actually missed the big imaginative opportunities

for the customs union, the single market, and the different deals that were being offered by Jerusalem. I think he's been a very, very disappointing Prime Minister, and it makes one wonder, actually, what was this Morgan McSweeney, Mandelson Machine, that managed to drive this guy into a position of office where he's demonstrated an inability to generate real loyalty? So Helen McNamara, who was the deputy, the permanent section in the cabinet office, has pointed out that what's really weird about this, and I'm sure I feel this as a former minister, you must feel this as somebody who was right at the harder number 10, is why were the civil servants not checking and rechecking this question on his behalf? I hope, as a minister or prime minister, I would have seen, okay, this Mandelson is one of the biggest single scandals that could topple my government. I'm going to dig right down into the depths of this and understand what the hell's going on.

But even if I wasn't doing it, I would hope that I had permanent secretaries, directs generals, who had my back and who were thinking, bugger, bugger, bugger, prime minister's in trouble. We really need to get to the bottom of this and work out what the hell's going on. It feels as though Ollie Robbins didn't get to the bottom of this. His bosses didn't get to the bottom of this. Nobody went through the process of double and triple checking. What was the security? This is after the event, after Madelson's fired.

What was the nature of his developed vetting? What was the process that was followed? And the fact that nobody did that for Starma reflects a guy who's running a number 10, where he's humiliating the civil service, telling them that they're in the tepid bath of managed decline, firing permanent secretaries, firing cabinet secretaries, showing no loyalty towards his own people. So, Olly Robbins, I mean, because you and I are about to travel to Belgrade, interview President Vuchich, which is why we're trying to record and follow the latter part of Olly Robbins' evidence of the select committee is record this. What I'm picking up from what he's

saying is his defence in a way is there are processes and I followed them. And he's adding that he's thrown in this revelation about number 10, wanted an ambassadorship of Matthew Doyle, which I think won't help Keir Stahmer's case. And also he's gone through. some of the cases where he has actually had to let people go because of vetting or, you know, take people's security status away from them because of issues that have arisen. And how he basically said that was part of his job. So I think he's defending himself on the process. And of course, what happens when we go back to my point about, you know, the reputational bank,

part of Kirstarmer's reputation was being, as you said earlier, much more serious than Boris Johnson, which he is, but absolutely the guy who's going to be focused on process. And where I thought Kemi Baderlok has been quite strong in recent days, I think she went way over the top on day one, but I think actually in the common she was quite effective. But one of the point she's making is that this is the guy who also said, you know, any organisation I lead, the buck stops with me. That is exactly as it has to be. I think Olly Robbins, I don't think anybody who's ever work with O'I Robbins, as thinks he's anything other than what you kind of want in, civil servant. He's a very, very effective civil servant. And there will be some repair work now

to be done between the government, ministers of the government, and the civil service. And this also sends out a message to people who might think about coming civil servants. I still think it's a very good thing to do. But you've got to feel that your work is going to be valued and you're not going to get chucked under the bus when stuff gets tough. And I think if you feel, as Stama clearly does, that there's something that needs to be improved in the way the civil service functions, where's the reform package? I mean, you know, he insults the civil service, says they're on the warm bath of tepid decline. He keeps firing senior civil servants, but where is the systematic thought about training, recruitment, promotion, culture, which would actually end up with a much

better civil service in 20 years of time? If you do talk, as I do, to him and to ministers and to others, there are quite a lot, there is quite a lot of complaining goes on about the civil service in terms of, you know, we want to change this and then they come back with 25 reasons why they can't change it or whatever. But I think this goes back to my point. This is why I think sometimes people, when I go about narrative and storytelling, they think it's all this sort of spin stuff. The civil service need to know what the story is too. They need to know what your big picture is. They need to know what your priorities are. They need to know what your character is. They need to know where you are trying to take the country. That is where they take their direction.

So I would, I suspect, and I don't know whether Raleigh Robbins might would say anything like this, But I suspect in part he will have been driven in the managing of this process by thinking, well, Keir Stalmers' character, as I know it, I've got to be absolutely rigorous about following the process, which is what he seems to have done. And so, look, it's a mess. There's no getting out of it. This is a mess. This is also, I think, where Stammer's got himself in a muddle.

My final point is Stalmers sometimes suggesting that the law meant, it seems bizarre, but he's claiming the law meant that the civil servants were not allowed to tell politicians about the developed vetting process. If that's true, then he has no reason to fire Ollie Robbins. Which is one of the points that Kemi Bade not made yesterday. Anyway, listen, I think that Kirstan was getting to a place around the new year where the economy did look like I was picking up a bit. The rumblings had sort of, you know, died down a little bit. But there was, I think it's fair to say, there was a lot of rumbling going on over the weekend. And I think yesterday he got through it. it. I think Olly Robbins has been very

Ollie Robbins-ish in being very calm and thorough and methodical, but I think he's said two or three things today that make life even more difficult for Keir Starler. Okay, well, Alasda, thank you, and let's take a quick break, and when we come back from the break, let's get on

to the subject of Iran and Sudan. This episode is sponsored by Starling, the bank that helps you organize your money, build great habits, and stay in control of your spending. Plenty of us have strong opinions on how to run the country, but knowing how to manage your own day to day can be more of a challenge, especially when it comes to being good with money. That kind of self-assured self-governance could start with just checking your balance daily.

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and this is bad news for all of us. With less local news, Noise, rumors, and misinformation fill the void. And it gets harder to separate truth from fiction. That's why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us. Because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise.

CBC News. Sorry, investing, trading. That isn't a personality. You don't need the voice. You don't need the jargon. You don't need the podcast. You already know how to trade. You've done it your whole life. And TD Easy Trade taps into that instinct so you can build something real. No minimums, no monthly fees, 24-hour support, no investor personality required. Because you are made to trade. And TD Easy Trade is made to help. Download it now. Welcome back to the Restis Politics. I'm Alice Campbell. Stuart. So let's move from the UK to the rest of the world. Let's talk about Iran. I am confused. Is J.D. Vance going to be in Islamabad? Are there going to be more talks? What do we know? Well, what we know at the moment we're recording is that J.D. Vance is intending to go, and the Iranians are making noises, but it's not clear whether they will attend. And Trump,

of course, is going back and forth between saying he's on the cusp of a deal to then boarding vessels. One thing I've got from listeners, which I think is probably worth doing a little bit on. It's a lot of people saying we often refer to the JCPOA without explaining what it was. Yeah. So this is the joint comprehensive plan of action, and it's the deal which Obama, but not just Obama, actually, France, Britain, Germany, China, Russia, all brought together with Iran in order to deal with the Iranian nuclear program. And the reason why it's maybe worth doing a short explainer on it is that in the end, the nuclear thing is the big existential question with Iran. There's the horrifying behavior of this loathsome regime and the way

that it treats its own people. But I don't think anyone believes that's the reason why United States or Israel attacked. There's the question of proxies and missiles. But the real existential threat that has been pushed by Netanyahu and others since the early 1990s is Iran's nuclear program. And the JCPOA is an amazing example of a world in which we actually seem to really solve it and maybe three things to get across. Number one, it worked. This was an amazing deal, which until Trump came along and wrecked it, managed to get a massive reduction in the amount of stockpiles that Iran had, uranium stockpiles, a reduction in the enrichment down to a very low degree, I can explain that a little bit later, and an inspection regime which allowed

inspectors in very, very regularly to make sure that Iran was not enriching and a limit on the number of centrifuges. And in return, sanctions relief. And it's a really great example of the way we used to do business in the world before Trump. It was very complicated. It took two and a half years to negotiate. There was a 180-page document. It was very, very technical. There was ambiguity, which is why the Republican right and Israel could attack it, because of course, what it really did is meant that Iran was always kept about 12 months away from being able to have enough of the uranium stockpile to have the fissile material for a warhead. But it worked. Trump comes along, throws it out of the window in 2018, and we end up in a much, much worse situation. So instead

of uranium enrichment kept at about 3%, and the really difficult stuff with uranium enrichment nuclear bombs is getting from 3% to 20%. The Iranians got up to 60%. And getting from 60% to 90%, which is what you need for your nuclear weapon, is much quicker. So by the time Trump was launching with Netanyahu this 12-day war last year, Iran was in a situation when it was potentially only about 28 days away from being able to create enough enriched uranium. Now, that isn't everything because they were still a very, very long way, away from being able to fit it into a well-functioning warhead, let alone getting anywhere near the kind of missiles that the US or the Soviet Union had or Russia has today.

But just to keep coming back, JCPOA, well negotiated, very, very detailed. And the final point, of course, is what's mad about what Trump and Vance is doing? Well, what's mad is that they're basically trying to do some new version of the JCPOA. But as you pointed out in our last podcast, instead of spending two and a half, half years negotiating it, they think they can get it down on a single night in Islamabad. And, yeah, so the JCPO took about, roughly about a decade. The piece I quoted from Foreign Affairs magazine, co-authored by Federica Mogherini, who was the Italian negotiator who worked on the whole thing, and who made the point

that the lesson that is being taken out of this by the Iranians is thought, oh yeah, we better listen to the Americans now and give it all up, is they're going to think, no, my God, my God, if they can attack us like this, then we're going to need a, we go to the ultimate deterrent, as it were. Now, they've discovered, and they're now using another deterrent in the form of the Australian Hormuz, but I was talking this week to somebody who has been, who works in the region, who has been in the region quite a lot, who was British tearing his hair out, saying the Americans have got no idea what they're dealing with.

The idea that the Iranians are going to, on the back of this campaign, in the way that it's been done, with the damage it's been done and the people they've killed, the Americans keep saying how great it is they've taken out all the top levels. Okay. He was saying, that is what is making them even more determined on the nuclear front. You know, when we talk about red lines in these situations, and there's Vance going to Islamabad, if he is going and with Kushner and Wickoff, these hapless negotiators that Trump still seems to believe in, even though, you know, for the, you know, for the. the 10 wars that he claims is solved, I can't really point to any of that you could actually say they've done a good job. But this guy was saying that the red line has got a lot redder in the Iranian mindset. The Americans still think that they're winning.

And partly, I think what your friend is picking up on is that since the senior leadership was killed, you've removed the only people who really remember the normal world of Iran or the more normal world of Iran before the revolution. Yeah. So all the new generation are people who've grown up in the Islamic Republic, in this paranoid, theocratic, the world is trying to destroy a state.

And you've got a big split between people like the foreign minister Arachi who put out this tweet saying they were going to open the straits for moves, and the Revolutionary Guard call, this kind of heavily militarized, theocratic organization, which is very suspicious of him and has always been much, much more hardline and never liked the JCPOA in the first place. So a real question of who are you negotiating with, who can really deliver. And then stepping out to the next stage, how do you get a negotiation together where one side is a bunch of paranoid, theocratic, militarized Iranians who are fighting for their existential survival, and they're trying to sweat every sentence around exactly how uranium enrichment works and where the monitoring is on the one hand and on the other hand. An American regime, which seems completely careless, feckless, incapable of defining what its real objectives are, hardly paying any attention, largely interested in generating social media stories,

making strange comments about Jesus, showing films of Marines repelling onto boats. What is that negotiation? How do you have a negotiation between this kind of grimly serious paranoid regime on the one hand and Trump, who can't quite decide whether he cares about what's happening on the stock markets, oil markets or not. Yeah. Well, and on that, by the way, why is there such little coverage? Every time, I mentioned Kushner there. Even I've fallen into this where we described as a negotiator.

I mean, the level of corruption related to just his existence there. This is a guy who became a billionaire during the first term on the back of his dealings, partly on the back of his dealings with the Saudis. And he's now just sort of given within the American system at this. guy is the negotiator. And you said earlier or about Trump sort of moving one way and the other. Somebody said we'd know, right? So on Friday, Trump said the situation with the straight is over. Okay? Well, it's not. On the same day, he said Iran had agreed never to close the straight again. The next day, they closed the straight. On Sunday, he said Vance isn't going to Pakistan for talks. And the White House press release at the same time said that he was.

said he said, Vance had left to go to his Lababad and the White House said he was going the next day, i.e. today, yesterday. He says Iran have got no military anymore, but then complained about these gunboats that were attacking tankers in the strait. He said the Pope had said Iran can have a nuclear weapon. He never said any such thing. He said the gulping attack was a surprise, years of evidence, that that's what Iran said they would do if this happened. And then he said that the US only lost planes to friendly fire in Iran, which he said at an event where he'd just been speaking about Iran shooting down an American plane. This is not clear. It's not clear. And it means that if you're negotiating with Kushner and Wickhoff, you have one set of problems, which is that they're not

on top of the technical details. So as you can imagine, the Iranians are obsessed with how you do verification, what the difference between 3.7% enrichment is, 20% enrichment, exactly what type of devices you use to do your enrichment, whether you can move from gas to solid state, all these technical questions, right? And they can't do that. Second problem you've raised. Jared Kushner is a massive example of what we're going, we covered in the first half, which is this question of security clearance, right? Jerry Kushner doesn't have a formal job in the government. He's President Trump's son-in-law. He was denied security clearance. He was denied security clearance in 2018 and was then overruled by Trump, who granted him permanent security clearance

in Trump 1. As far as we can see in Trump 2, none of this is happening at all. The guy doesn't even have a job in government, right? And yet he's doing negotiation. But the third problem is, even if you get a deal with Vance or Kushal-Wittkov, and of them, and it's six of my gullet to say, Vance seems to be the most serious. And Vance's aid seems to have some idea about how to deal with Iran and some knowledge of how to deal with Iran. As soon as they get on a plane back, to Washington, you have no guarantee that Trump isn't going to say, while they're on the plane, by the way, I reject everything my negotiators have negotiated. Yeah, absolutely. It's an utterly dysfunctional system. Shall we talk about Sudan? I mean,

I don't think there's much that we can say that we haven't said before, but I think it's worth recognizing that it's probably the worst war in the world right now. I'm not saying, I don't want to have a league table of wars, but Sudan is kind of almost uniquely horrific, both the scale and the horror. And we're now into the fourth year. And there is so little attention to it. There was a meeting in Berlin last week,

and quite a lot of the big powers were there. But I kind of felt, I'm not denigrating them at all, and it's right that they should sit and talk and try to work out how to resolve this thing. But it sort of felt like the world's saying, oh, God, maybe this is what we're doing in the podcast. We'd better do something about Sudan because we're coming up to the third anniversary.

But you don't have a sense of the international community really with its eye on this in a way that you can see any way forward. In a way, Sudan is the canary in the mines. Sudan is really what shows what goes wrong in the new Trump world. I mean, this is a conflict where, as you've pointed out, hundreds of thousands have been killed, millions have been displaced, tens of millions are now facing food insecurity. where there is credible reports of genocide, rape, and it's being driven as a proxy war.

This is a war basically driven by the United Arab Emirates funding. And there's so many credible reports on their bases in Chad and their relation with Hometti, the RSF. And on the other hand, support coming in for the Sudanese armed forces, which are retaking Khartoum, from Egypt, Turkey, and the use of Iranian drones. Now, this is exactly the kind of situation that the interoperative. international, much lamented, hypocritical global world order was set up to try to deal with. If you cannot deal with a situation in Sudan, of course you can't deal with Iran. Of course

you can't deal with Ukraine. Go back 10 years, 15 years, the response would have been pretty straightforward. The United States would have deployed a really big, serious super envoy. The European Union, Britain, Britain, of course, has historical connections to Sudan, would have got involved. The African Union would have got involved. Pressure would have been put on UAE, Egypt, Turkey, and there would be a real attempt, you know, in Jeddah with Saudi or in Geneva to try to work out a peace deal to stop something which is now obliterating tens of millions of lives. Instead of which, all the instruments, I mean, almost everything I've mentioned, people just groan. If I mentioned the African Union, the United Nations, UN special envoys, US special envoys, pressure on UAE, everyone's like, forget it.

Even a relatively, in global terms, relative and medium-sized power like United Arab Emirates, appears now to be able to operate or Israel with complete impunity. There don't seem to be any leverage or control at all over what these people can do, and in the case of UAE, what they might be doing, the Horn of Africa. But you could extend it. You know, you can talk about what's happening in Libya. You can talk about what's happening in Sahel. And I just think we need to keep coming back to Sudan for the sake of the horror of Sudan, but also because it tells us so much about a world which is unraveling. I mean, this is the really clearest example of that unraveling. Yeah. And it's unraveling at a pace and amid a geopolitical and media climate of alongside the impunity of those who are carrying out these atrocities, a kind of indifference. You know, there's been such little media coverage of the war in Sudan. If Trump, and this is the, this is the Trump genius and it's the Trump, it's what gives us Trump derangement syndrome, if Trump were suddenly to say on true social, we mustn't forget about Sudan. and start to have an opinion and voice of view, we'd sort of think, oh, well, something would happen. Something's happening.

But then, you know, it would just be for the sake of the true social pose, not because he wanted actually to do something about Sudan. So it is, it is, I was reading their Spiegel at the weekend, they call it the, you know, they've done quite a lot in Sudan, but they call it the Forgotten War. And it has, I think, become that. And on the point about sexual violence, Rory, I was at an event yesterday with Carrie Mulligan,

the actress who's a ambassador for war child. And she's been to Sudan in the near past. And some of the stories she was telling about the scale of. And of course, we can have the stats. You know, Medicine and Saint-Franterre, they said there had been 4,000 cases of sexual violences at facilities that it was working in. 97% of the victims were women or girls in South Darfur, 20% under 18, including 41 children under five.

and their report said sexual violence is now part of everyday life of these people in most parts of Sudan. And Kerry was sort of talking about, she was making the point that, you know, you hear the statistics, but then you hear the stories of these children just saying what happened to them. And the trauma they're then living with without any kind of support to deal with that trauma. In fact, the trauma then increased by the fact that they've been displaced, there's food, there's food insecurity. and what have you. And I just think we've lost, there's something gone badly wrong with the world's moral compass, that we know that's going on. We can read the stats, but actually there's not much that we feel we can do about it because we think the people in power aren't up for taking

it on. It's horrible. Question just to finish maybe this episode, and maybe brings us back to Iran. And I was trying to get my head around this in terms of Trump and what you think about Trump and its motivations. I keep being stuck in the slightly lame position of saying it's impossible really to predict what Trump's going to do next. And I can't quite work out whether that's a piece of immense wisdom or just a total cop-out. But let's just take the Iran thing. So there are three broad possibilities. Number one, he ends the war, you know, ends the blockade, announces his victory done.

Number two, he just keeps the blockade running indefinitely while these talks. gone. Number three, he actually starts deploying Marines and ups the ante and goes back to violent conflict again. And if he did number one, we might say, okay, he's ending the war because he's bored of it, or maybe he's actually worried about the midterms and Republicans and others are putting pressure on him about gas prices in the US, and he's worried about the stock market and the euro price. Number two, he keeps going. Well, he keeps going with a blockade, because it turns out he doesn't actually care that much about the gas price. And most of the constant, are being felt by Europe, by the Middle East, by Asia, whose economies are being wrecked by this.

But the consequences for Europe, the Middle East and Asia are much more profound than they are for Trump. He doesn't care. Number three, he puts in the Marines and ups the ante because somehow his pride is offended. And he wants to do something sort of spectacular in order to demonstrate that he's the tough guy. How do you think about this? How can one work out which of those three is most likely? I honestly don't think we can because it goes back to a point we've made right from the start of this war is that it's never been clear what his big strategic purpose is. And unless you have that, if you're dealing with somebody who's volatile, unpredictable, driven by spasm, tweeting through the night, making policy, as you say, regardless of what the facts are with the people who are actually on the ground, then it's impossible to work it out.

There's no doubt he wants the war to end. There's no doubt that whatever the circumstances in which the war end, he will claim with the backing of the sort of MAGA machine, although I think the MAGA machine is getting a bit afraid by this. I don't know if you saw the interview with Tucker Carlson recently where he's basically saying, you know, he's kind of ashamed to have backed Trump to the extent that he did. And he feels he's misled people by, you know,

we always knew there was a character issue, but maybe it's a lot worse than we thought. I mean, you know, you've got to be pretty blind not to do. see that one. So I don't think you can predict. And I think that's what does actually give us the Trump Duranagement syndrome, because with most leaders, with Putin, you can kind of, you work out where he's coming from. With Xi Jinping, you work out where he's coming from. By the way, on China, Roy, did you see that graph that I sent you about China's export of solar and EV and batteries? It's gone, the graph goes like that. And then suddenly Trump goes to war in Iran and people start to think,

oh shit, another oil price shop coming, and bang, it goes like that. So, look, I don't know. I think we could all go mad predicting what Donald Trump might do next. One sort of thing that I have noticed talking to a few Americans is how much they're saying, we've kind of stopped listening as much as we did. Now, you and I are finding that impossible, partly because we have to talk about it, but also because he's so kind of high volume. But now, of those three, I think this is going to be, I said this right at the start.

I think this is going to be a longer war than people imagine, because I think the Iranians, are prepared to endure more than the Americans think. And the Iranians, I think, have a couple of pretty big cards that they're not going to play anytime soon. Okay, well, on that slightly depressing note, and the big theme that will keep returning to, I fear, for many months to come, which is how on earth one makes sense of what the US is doing

and his incredible carelessness, fecklessness, lack of focus. Thank you very much. See you soon. Bye-bye. Hi, it's Dominic here from The Rest is History and here is that clip that I mentioned earlier. The other thing is something else she gets from Grantham and that's the Methodism. And actually this to me, I think this is one of the absolute defining things of Thatcherism. It's the tone, the moralistic, evangelical tone.

Yeah, and the low church tone rather than the high church tone. Completely. Margaret, as a girl, had to say grace before every meal. She had to go to chapel three or four times on Sundays. Her father, as a lay preacher, went on and on and on about hard work, individualism, thrift, clean living, all of this. And this is what I think makes her politics different. There is a moralism to it, a low church moralism, that is totally unlike anything that any other Tory leader says before. So in 1984, an interview with the Times, I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end, good will triumph.

I mean, Ted Heath could have lived to the age of 10,000, and he would never have said anything like that. It's unthinkable. Also, I mean, what's interesting is that it's giving to the left what the left often give to the right. It's casting the left as evil and the right as virtuous. And usually it's the other way around. Completely it is. I mean, you see this reflected in her archives, which are online at the Thatcher Foundation website, which is brilliant, by the way. This amazing digital archive.

you can see all the notes that she would handwrite for her conference speeches. And they'd be full of all the stuff about the evils of socialism, good versus evil, what the great religions of the past teach us, what life is struggle. Her speechwriters would cut all this. They'd say, God, this is bonkers. But it would find its way in one way or another. And I think you're absolutely right.

She thinks socialism is not just wrong. she thinks it's morally it's evil, it's corrupting. And people in 70s Britain, you know, they're used to thinking, socialists are well-meaning and idealistic, maybe they're a bit deluded, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, she doesn't think that. She doesn't think they are well-meaning and idealistic. She thinks that they're doing the devil's work.

Yeah. And that's what makes for her admirers, it's so invigorating. And for her critics, I mean, if you're on the left, right, and you're used to thinking yourself of yourself as the goodies. To be told, actually, you're not, you're the bad people. It's insulting. And it's why I think one reason why people take it so personally when she sort of wades into battle. If you want to hear more, search for the rest is history wherever you get your podcasts.