The Rest Is Politics - 572. Trump’s Next Middle East Crisis and Reform’s £72m Megadonation

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

Is the Houthi’s seizure of one of the world's most critical waterways the clearest proof yet that Trump's Iran war has become a catastrophe? With the very people building AI now calling for a pause, is real regulation finally coming, or will tech billionaires keep writing the rules themselves? And with Reform banking £72 million from two crypto billionaires, why is Britain one of the only democracies with no cap on political donations? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more __________ Enjoy Rory and Alastair’s interview with Sanna Marin, Former Prime Minister of Finland, by searching ‘Leading’ on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. 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. 🌏 Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! Get an exclusive NordVPN deal + 4 months extra here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee! __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [e-mail] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Lead Video Editor: Josh Smith Video Editor: James Clayden, Adam Thorton, Oli Ortega Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Bella Soames Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the past week, Donald Trump has backed to United Ireland, whilst also publicly blaming President Zelensky for rising fuel prices. Now, there was a time when an American president doing this would have triggered two separate diplomatic earthquakes. But we're now so used to Donald Trump's verbal diarrhea that both passed almost as soon as they arrived. Meanwhile, the story that actually deserved his attention kept getting worse. The Hooties now have missiles that can reach Israel, and this week they seize the narrow gap. at the mouth of the Red Sea. So now, with Iran controlling the Strait of Hormuz and their friends of the Hoot is in charge of this one, it is another huge setback to Trump's objectives and to the price of oil. Saudi Arabia asked Washington for military help. Trump said no. Instead, the leader of

the free world spent the weekend watching golf. So does anyone, Trump included, actually understand the significance of what's just happened. This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. 100 pounds. That is what one message to a friend could earn for you. Fuse Energy has one aim, keeping energy prices down for everyone, not just for those who ring up and threaten to leave. Their tariffs are already among the lowest on the market, and now they're doubling their referral offer. Refer one friend and you will get £100 off your bills. And that's each of you, £100 off your bills. So the maths does itself. You save on the tariff, and then you both benefit from the referral on top.

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fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions. This episode is brought to you by NordVPN. And I must thank NordVPN because on my grand European tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorne's for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go. I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Kreef, and of course the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network.

And I was able to go to my VPN. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks. Well, I think you're not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this or should I say Fiona managed to do this? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount of your NordVPN plan, go to NordvPn.com slash Restless Politics. That's NordvPN.com slash Restis Politics. And the link is in the episode description. Welcome to Restis Politics, me, Esther Campbell.

And with me, Rory Stewart. So, hooties in Yemen, AI, Nigel Farage, getting loads and loads and loads of money. Let's start with the hooties, because I think you said at the end of question time with their Miliband, this has been underreported. It's like everything that's big news these days, it sort of gets talked about for half a day. and then it moves on. I think this is massive. And I also think it's a further indication of the catastrophe of the initial decision to go to war in Iran. Completely staggering story. So very quick reminder of what happens. So the Houthi started really in the 1990s as an obscure cult in the mountains of Yemen. And if you'd been covering the story back

in the 90s, you would have thought these are people in sandals with Kalashikovs who don't really matter in world events. Fast forward to today, this is a group in Yemen with ballistic missiles which can strike Israel and Dubai, which have been accessing the latest AI models, the US companies are reporting on this, and which now have expanded forward and seized the key gap to the entrance to the Red Sea. And this really matters. And the coastline down towards it. The whole coastline down.

And this is a very narrow gap. If you were going at 20 knots, you could get across it in about half an hour. And what does that mean? Well, it suddenly means that Saudi Arabia and others who thought, well, we don't need to worry too much about the Strait of Hormuz, because we can still get 4 million barrels out through Yembo and out through the Red Sea are now blocked at both ends. This is critical, existential for the Gulf states and really dangerous for the global economy. And all this has been pulled off not by the US or China or even a big relatively wealthy state like Iran, but by a group of people who back even two months ago, many people in the officially recognized Yemeni government said the Houthi were an empty shell that were about a collapse and they were going to be marching on Sinar. If you look at the map, so you've got the Strait of Hormuz, which we took for granted as a place that was always going to have oil flowing through and world trade going to. through it and the Americans, every American president saying, let's not do this because they'll shut

down the Strait of Hormuz. And of course, Trump says, no, they won't. Well, they do. So the Saudis have this 1,200 kilometre pipeline that goes right across the country. And so they think, well, can get around through that. We'll just put more through the pipeline and then we'll get it out through the Red Sea. Another Iranian proxy inside Iraq is then starting to send drones in and to damage this pipeline. So the pipeline shuts down. And meanwhile, the oil that they want to, to compensate for the straight of almost by bringing out through the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden. They're now having to go north, right round Africa. So right up through, across, past Spain, round the corner and right down, adding about two to four

weeks to an average tanker's journey. And what does that do? It puts up the price. So, and do you know what I find the most of the many revolting things that Trump said and did in Ireland? He blamed Zelensky for the rising fuel price. He said, if Zelensky's, one thing Zelensky's got to do is stop hitting these diesel plants in Russia. Like that was the thing driving up our fuel prices because they don't want to admit that actually it's the Iran war and now with this on top.

And I'll tell you that one of the most fascinating stories I read this week, I don't know if it's true, but it was the New York Times. So I'm guessing it was. Was J.D. Vance, who as we know from the regime change book and all the reporting at the time was against this war in the first place, now is actually commissioning his own intelligence reports for what's going on in this war. So there you've got Trump. We've won. We're winning. Iran's desperate for a deal. Iran's desperate for that. And I'd love to know your view on this. When we talk about the Houthis, what is the exact relationship with Iran? I mean, they get the funding, they get the backing. But this isn't necessarily Iran. This is the Houthis of, you know, they've got their own modus operandi.

I spent a lot of yesterday talking to people, some of whom I can talk about. openly and praised, Peter Salisbury, who's a great expert on this. Nick Hopton, who was our ambassador in Yemen, and who hosted me actually. When you were a minister? Yeah, we would look, actually, as one of the backbench when I first went there. We were looking at the Queen of Sheba's Palace with the ambassador, at which point his security team suddenly said the Houthis are coming. And this was one of the first signs that they were getting to come anywhere near Sinai. So who are the Houthis? They are a group of people up from the mountains, up in the north of Yemen, who are predominantly Zadis, and the Zadi branch of Islam is basically a Yemeni phenomenon.

It's very difficult to find a kind of international comparison for it. They appear to have been maybe closer to Shia Islam, so the type of Islam that you have, which 60% of Iranians follow, than Sunni Islam, and they were traditionally very opposed to Saudi Sunni Salafism. So they were very useful actually for many Western governments that saw them as a possible balance against Al-Qaeda. Back in what one of my friends calls the glory days when all we worried about in Yemen was Al-Qaeda and democracy, right, which is what I was seeing when I went there in 2012, for example, we were sitting around a national dialogue with the UN bin Uy Kumar and the Gulf Cooperation Council. There were women's groups in civil society. We were learning the lessons from Northern Ireland and all this kind of stuff, right?

So the Houthi erupt south, and a lot of this is after the Arab Spring, and they grab hold of Sinar. And then listeners will remember what follows on from that, which is that the Saudis and the Emirates then respond, 2016 onwards, in a massive air campaign. And then there are special forces on the ground, air operators, mercenaries, and a huge humanitarian crisis. You know, end up with a lot of people on the verge of starvation, massive amounts of refugees. Diffitt is piling in 100 million pounds a year. The Americans are coming in with a billion. And we are horrified by what Saudi and UAE seem to be doing. In 2018, 2019, when I was the minister, all the games to put pressure on them not to seize the port of Houdada and create a more humanitarian crisis. Fast forward, Saudi and UAE eventually back off. A peace deal is put in place when I was in Jordan, 2022, and for about the last four and a half years, the front lines have remained pretty static. And so nobody's really concentrating on Yemen.

There are no real foreign correspondence on the ground, except last year, Trump is convinced in the spring of last year that the Houthi are about a fall and he launches a 52-day bombing campaign. Operation Rough Rider. You're right. Which we didn't actually report much the time. We should have done more about it, but it was another one of Trump's wars. And the idea of the war, and this is why he may be getting a little bit of deja vu in Iran,

is he was told that if he did the 52 days, the Houthi regime would collapse. the loyalist forces would come romping in, and the whole country would be captured. He's now heard it again with Iran. If I just do my bombing campaign, the regime will collapse, and all the democratic forces are coming and take over. So one of the problems now was the Houthi, who were about to crumble, we were told, now turn out not to be crumbling at all. And finally, sorry, I'm answering too many questions at once. But your final question, which I think is very important, is this question is, what of their relationship to Iran? Now, certainly our assessment back in the day is, yes, they got some support from Iran.

but it was nothing compared to the amount of support that the other Yemenis were getting from Saudi, UAE, the US and others. A couple of planes have come in recently with Iranians on them. There will be Iranian advisors on the ground. There's absolutely no doubt the Revolutionary Guard has given them some bits of kit and technology. But it's very, very cheap for the Iranians. It's probably costing the Iranians, I don't know, not the billions that Saudi or UAE put in, a few tens of millions.

And what do they buy for it? Well, what they buy is not really an Iranian proxy. What they buy is a very, very indigenous, mountain-based nationalist group of Yemenis who have an ideological commitment to being the spear of the fight against the US and Israel and all this kind of stuff around. Don't underestimate how ideologically driven they are. And who the Iranians, by providing a little bit of support to, but not much control over, have suddenly found themselves in a far more powerful position.

and they were in two weeks ago, because as you've just pointed out, Saudi's been sitting back for the last few months saying, well, this is a disaster for Dubai. It's a disaster for Qatar. It's not so bad for us. But it's not so bad for us. Because in fact, the oil prices gone up and actually Saudi revenue was going up. Yeah. Now they're shut off at the other end. And the other problem they've got, I think one of the biggest underreported issues out of these events is that Mohammed bin Salman, effective leader of Saudi Arabia, asked Trump for fresh military support on the back of this. And Trump said no.

So that would be going, making the thinking about this very, very different. And remember a few weeks ago, we talked about this new Mecca Defense Pact, Saudi, Turkey, Pakistan. I don't know whether in the end they have to sort of go down that. Because what happened here,

this does seem to have been militarily, extraordinary operation. They've taken huge chunk of ground, huge chunk of coastline, an airport, these islands, which, as you say, are about 12 kilometres from one side to the other, they've changed the landscape. And because Trump doesn't want to admit that his Iran war is not going very well, it's kind of gone away. Well, so one of the interesting things, when I talk to people who I can't quote, but who are still inside the British American UN systems at the moment, they would say, said to me even three, four weeks ago, that the Houthis were on the back foot.

And actually these troops that they've been fighting was supposed to be the crack anti-Houthi forces who'd been showing off about how good their drones were and showing you fancy pictures of bombs dropping. So it's even worse. What the Houthi have done is they have kicked out people who were supposed to be some of the elite fighting forces from South. Now add another problem, which is we covered on the show the fact that it was in Yemen that the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Dubai Abu Dhabi broke because the UAE found themselves backing a bunch of southern separatists around Aden who advanced up north. The Saudis got really angry, pushed south, hit a UAE boat. I mean, she blew up a UAE boat. UA.E. BATUA.S. threw up its hand and said,

forget this. We're out of here. Saudi took control. The Yemenis who were against the Houthis thought, well, this is wonderful. Now we have a unified control. We're not divided anymore. Now's our chance to go after the Houthis, the whole thing's collapsed. And Saudi, as you say, is now in a very difficult position because it's completely unacceptable in any normal geopolitical terms. If I'd said to you, you know, said to Ed Miliband, who we just interviewed 20 years ago, would you accept a position in which a anti-American fanatical Zadi group has suddenly taken control of the whole Red Sea? You'd say absolutely not. But US doesn't want to come in and help Saudi. Why not? Well, presumably because they feel that they were misled.

led last year and Trump was told that if he bombed them to be regime change, it didn't work. UAE doesn't want to come in and help, in fact, because they're feeling a bit of Shadenfreude and thinking, well, you kicked us out of Yemen. Now it's your problem. You can get on with it. And the problem the Saudis are facing is how do they reassemble any kind of coalition? The Pakistanis, I think, are there trying to help them. They've got Pakistani advisors on the ground. But to really make this work, they have to go back to a world which has disappeared. I mean, this is our point about, you know, rules-based order. Let's say this had happened when And you and Tony Blair in Downing Street.

So let's say this had happened in 1999-2000. I presume what would happen is everybody would sit around probably at the Security Council and say we cannot have the major waterway of the world. This is the gateway to the Suez Canal. This is the core, the gateway back into the Mediterranean. The Security Council did make. And you would imagine, presumably, that you would all sit together and we would say unified Russia, China, France, US, UK, Gulf sanctions, military operations, pressure, tension,

because this is an extraordinary combination of a terrorist group and a massive strategic waterway. And instead, you have the leader of the free world watching golf in Ireland and blathering on about United Ireland. To this day, I can't work out whether that was deliberate or just him sort of... Well, he's said it again, isn't he? He's doubled down. Yeah, but does that, is he double down because he, sometimes I think he doubles down because he says something, and then people say you shouldn't have said that and he says, oh, well, I don't want people to know I shouldn't have said that, therefore I'll say it again.

Let me try this on you. Isn't it, though, on the United Ireland, that he senses that actually, although it's not what you're supposed to say if you're a US president, it's very popular with a certain demographic of his voter who love the idea, this is the guy, he speaks to truth to power, we agree with him, there should be a United Ireland. I mean, there'll be a lot of Irish voters in the US. He'll be like, hells to the yes. Why has no US president said that before? And then when he was presenting the trophy to the Irish golfer who won the Irish Open, Shane Lowry, he then suddenly announced while presenting the trophy that he was lifting the tariffs on Irish whiskey, which also so clearly he wanted to. I was a bit disappointed with the Irish. I love Ireland, as you know, I love the Irish, but to be in front of a crowd of thousands of golf fans.

and there was a wonderful photograph of four people who wrote the course and they shaped their body into four letters. They shaped their bodies into four letters. I can't say what the word was. Was it rude? It was rude. If you remember the time when... I don't know.

How do you do an N? I can see how you can do a C and a T. Oh, the guy, you do, use a very, very interesting use of your legs and arms. You could do it because you were very sort of flexible. I couldn't do it. But generally, they gave him quite quiet time. But there he is, you've got Iran going on, you've got Ukraine going on, you've got all this stuff going on. And honestly, the motorcade that was flown to Dublin for him to go to a tournament on a bloody golf course.

Shout out to the Irish president, though. Kasrin Collins, five minutes he got. But Alasana, let me push it one stage further, because if the US can't get involved in Yemen, and suddenly countries like Saudi are finding out that middle powers are not quite as powerful as they thought. it would be. And I'm sure if I was to challenge, you know, European states, they'd say, oh, no, we have made statements about it and we've had a meeting at the set and the other. But you're not really getting the sense that the European powers are going to solve this. In fact, you get the sense that the EU is feeling, well, we're not putting so many ships through the Red Sea at the

moment anyway, and we've got other things to worry about. So I think this is the canary in the mine. I think this is what's happening here, a group. that was a pretty marginalized impoverished terrorist group now controlling a major waterway with advanced weaponry is just the beginning. I mean, what's going to be happening across that channel very quickly because it just takes you half an hour to get across in a boat? I guess pretty soon you're going to have Somali fighters coming across. You're going to have arms and weapons going back and forth.

You're going to have that war spilling quite quickly towards the Horn of Africa. And I think we are just at the beginning times of more and more global conflict in unexpected ways. I mean, nobody saw this three weeks ago. And my guess is we could end up with another dozen conflicts that nobody saw three weeks ago. Before we go to AI, a couple of points just close off on this. The first is that we talked a few weeks ago about the shipping insurance industry being such a big player in this. So you've got the hooties saying that they're only going to target Saudi vessels. I'm not sure the insurers are going to buy that. This thing could go any which way. And the second thing, there was reading a report by Chatham House, one of their experts.

on this and he said that with the straight of Hormuz and Babelmandab, you've now got something like 35% of fuel and oil trade being under Iranian control. And this guy, Faria al-Muslimy, said this is as much leverage as a nuclear bomb. And I'm sorry, this is what Trump has delivered to them by getting them to retaliate in the way they did, not by, well, they are doing the weaponry as well, but the economic retaliation, which is going to hurt him in the midterms, is going to push up fuel prices here, it's got massive consequences. And it feels as though China has probably negotiated access now through Hormuz and through the Red Sea Babel Mandab, that Russia's not that bothered.

So that actually the consequence is catastrophic for the Gulf states and American allies. But actually, weirdly, a lot of America's adversaries are not too troubled about this. Very briefly, Rory, before we go to a break, artificial intelligence. It's been in the news a lot. I am interested. What did we do? We did a really good event. I thought you were really, really good.

It was one of the most interesting events. You know, Alastair and I did an event talking about AI. And I think you made a really strong point. Generally, I go to these business things. We all talk about the technology and what it might mean for a business in terms of productivity. And you were very blunt. You basically said, look, you're forgetting the politics of this. People hate the tech billionaires.

Nobody wants, you know, ask. They can't see the benefits of this. They think these data centers are ugly, electricity consuming, water consuming. And people like me are trying to say to people, we are going to be in very, very vulnerable, dangerous position if we don't build these things because we're going to completely dependent on U.S. and Chinese models. But how on earth do you say to voters, I'm going to build a data center in your backyard. It's going to use your electricity. It's going to use your water.

It's going to give money to Elon Musk. You might take your job away. Oh, and these people are saying it's a 15% chance it could wipe out humanity. And you're telling me I have to build it because that's my insurance policy against the US and China. Yeah, and you have Donald Trump saying we have to do it because we have to win against China. But people can't work out what the win is right now. We've been spent a lot of time talking about AI back and forth. But this has been an amazing week for AI because, firstly, as I found when I went to California,

there's been a very rapid shift where the leaders of these labs who two years ago were mocking the idea of a pause and now themselves calling for a pause because they seem to be genuinely worried about what these Asians are doing, particularly this hugging face attack, most dramatic example of breaking out of sandboxes, hacking in. But we've now had a letter from Demis Sassabis. Sir Demis is a great Nobel Prize winning lead at Google, their chief scientific officer. We've had Sam Altman now calling for a pause and now we've had Dario Amode coming out and producing a letter, yep. And all of them now coming behind. behind Dario talking about pacing the frontier, which is a polite word for saying we really

are going to have to think seriously before we go to the next generation of RSI, recursive self-improvement. And the King, this week, very topical, is holding a conference at Dunfrey's House where he's going to have a lot of these senior figures together to try to sign up to a principal following on from your friend, the Pope. He loves Dumfrey's House, doesn't he? He does, but the question is, I mean, it's a very interesting, this world we've entered where, you know, it is oddly the Pope and the King who seem to be better position to try to get these guys together and get them signing up for principles and talking about this opening in a way that elected leaders, I think, are struggling.

I think part of the issue is that this is what we said to this event. Part of the issue is that the chief best-known spokespeople of this are just truly terrible at explaining anything. Now, Dario, your friend Dario, he's pretty good, but Musk underestimates how low he is in most of the world. He's got his fans, of course he has, because he's a big figure, he controls Twitter and all that stuff. But he, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Altman, they're despised by most people, and they don't see the benefit. So then when, and this is how cynical, I'm afraid I'd be coming about the whole thing, when I get this with a sudden wave of people saying, we've got to get regulated because, this thing could destroy humanity, and even if there's a 10% chance, we've got to, we've got to, you know, get on top of this. There's a part of me thinking, they, this is deeply cynical,

that they're basically saying, we know we've got an anti-regulatory American administration and a pro-regulatory European Union that Donald Trump hates. So therefore, let's us be the ones calling for some sort of regulation so that the government says, well, we don't really understand it. You guys tell us how to regulate this and they will then regulate it in a way that helps them. So I think they completely, both the politicians who are pushing on this and the businesses involved, they completely underestimate the extent to which the public, especially in democracies, and of course I get this, this gives China an advantage. In the democracies, they are just, they're not having this because they don't understand it and nobody's explaining it properly.

Let me make it worse for you. So I think you're right. It's unbelievably unpopular. I think you're right that the US doesn't want to regulate and the EU may want to regulate. I think you're right. There's a lot of self-interest as companies. Unfortunately, it is also true. I think that we can see that these models are genuinely dangerous.

That hugging face attack was about deceptive agents collaborating to hack into external websites that they were not supposed to do. And the whole problem is that the business business. model is about making these things more and more autonomous. That's where the productivity comes from. The idea is you replace humans with the agent. But the more you take humans out of the loop and put agents in charge, the more risk you're running, because the more risk you have, that these things which are grown, not specified, is a kind of pompous way of saying they're not a series of bits of symbolic code. They're actually something that have evolved. We've sort

of set a trellis and it's grown like a part. And what's this phrase they keep using about recursive? What is it? recurs to self-improvement. So what is that? That means an agent training or managing an agent. In other words, instead of where we were in the past, which is you as the human, give the prompt to the coder, the agent gives, ultimately, the agent trains its next AI. The AI trains the AI, which trains the AI, which trains the AI.

And the benefit of that is supposed to be that you end up with the equivalent of 100 million software engineers working 24-7. The downside of it, obviously, is that. What we learned through Hugging Face is that we find it very, very difficult to align these things to human interests, find it very difficult to make them understand what our real intent is, and they end up lying to us, deceiving us, and could ultimately kill us, right? They could get hold of bioweapons. They could mount these cyber attacks, or they could just, and this is what I was just talking to Yuval about on the miniseries,

they could just have a completely different conception of what they're about, and they start creating systems we simply don't understand. which are running banks, which are making a lot of money, but we don't understand how they're making a lot of money. They're running weapons, which are winning wars for us, but we don't really understand how they're making those decisions. So big danger, big danger, needs to be regulated, and this is what the King's about to try to do this week

in Duffrey's House with Demis and Sabres. This is what some of the leaders, I mean, I can't tell you how much it's changed in the last three, four weeks from them. The same AI leaders who two and a half years ago were calling me a Luddite for calling for a pause and now themselves calling for a pause. But we've got maybe six months a year, year and a half before these things are genuine dangers to humanity and it doesn't feel as though anybody's politics is moving to regulate.

No, and so when we talked to Med Miliband about, I didn't get into this because I knew we'd just go around in circles, but when it was talking about, you know, the use of the word genocide and he said, well, you've got to leave it to the court. We'll make that decision about based upon a court judgment. And the process now of politics, of technology, they're so fast. So one of the things that struck me from this film, the doctors in Gaza, was they were filming, they often filmed them, what they were seeing as they went into Gaza. So a few years ago, you know, it looked quite a nice place to live and there were buildings

and there were beaches and then step by step very, very quickly, they're suddenly going in, everything is robble. Okay. So meanwhile, we're all waiting for a judgment as to whether that word should be applied in our political system. And likewise with this, you say, I heard somebody on the on the radio yesterday saying, you know, we've got a very short window to decide whether and how to regulate and whether we have the capacity safely to regulate this thing. And yet the political process, as you say, it goes so slowly. And you're just, you know, it's, you know, it's, then have Trump who basically says, well, he's the guy to regulate because he's a high IQ president. One thing we know about Donald Trump, he may have a weird sort of EQ, but he's not the most

intelligent man who's ever been in the White House. And meanwhile, these people who are very brilliant in their own way, you know, you read the book about Dennis has he-bis and this guy's brilliant. The guys you talk to if you're serious, they're brilliant at what they do. But I don't think they're brilliant at thinking through effects on humanity? I don't think they're brilliant at working out how a democratic process works alongside these things. And we also don't know how to do the regulation and how to verify. So with the regulation, there's basically a question of whether you try to do a very subtle, exquisite form of let's define what RSI is, or do you say, pause? RSI is this recursive. Yeah, recursive self-improvement, I'm sorry. Are you trying to get into a very

detailed discussion about policing exactly this jagged frontier. So it used to be a repetitive strain injury, didn't it? Is that gone? It's gone, all gone. Nobody talks about that anymore. It's that old men like you who play tennis. I don't play tennis. The next thing that we need to talk about might be much more blunt, right? So we might instead be saying, no, you cannot train the next generation of frontier model. We're stopping, you know, chat GBT 7 is not happening.

But if you do that, how do you verify? they're not doing it. And if you were to get China to sign up to that, how on earth do you verify that China's not doing it? Well, I would say at the moment you could almost do it because it requires so much compute, so many data centers, so much chips, you could almost see from space. Pretty difficult to run a covert program of training a huge billion dollar run of a next generation large language model. But so many of the things we've done over the last year and a half turn out not to have been properly designed. One of them is that we thought that what we were doing in the is building a safety institute to train before release.

It now turns out most dangerous models aren't released at the moment. They're within these companies, and they could end up causing complete chaos for the world without ever getting anywhere near a safety institute because they're not on their way to being released. Right, happy days. Well, listen, just before we go to the break, I'm now trying to do a mini-series to grapple with exactly these issues. I've called it Thinking the Unthinkable, how civilisations collapse. But it's basically a series on existential threats. It's the things that we don't normally talk about in domestic politics that are probably not the things that Andy Burnham will be thinking about day to day.

They're exactly things like what happens when a terrorist group gets going in Yemen. In fact, we've actually done some detailed interviews, which I thought were wonderful with the man who wrote Mosul, who was sitting in Mosul as the Islamic State took over. We've talked to the amazing Annan Gopal about what was happening up in Manbidge up in northeast Syria. But we've also talked to Carlo Rovelli, the amazing physicist, about nuclear weapons. He's reminding us that actually the nuclear proliferation threat is probably greater than it's ever been, and yet we talk about it less. I've talked to Yuval No Harari, that's going to be the first episode, about AI and the kind of threats that pose to our civilization.

So it's an attempt to try to lift our heads a bit and think, what could be actually the things, which in 50 years' time, we think, whoa, that was the real issue that defined an age while we're still focused on the stuff that really is kind of retail domestic politics. The first half of my interview with Yuval No Harari is free to listen. But if you want to hear the whole series, please sign up become a member at the restis politics.com. And I think we've got a taste of the series now just before we go for the break. What if I told you that there is a one in six chance of human beings being wiped out in the next hundred years? One in six. We're facing a crunch point in human history. A handful of threats could end life as we know it.

It might be nuclear war. There is high risk in a confrontation between Europe and Russia or between the United States and China. There will be no food, years without sunshine, but the catastrophe will be global for artificial intelligence. At the highest level, there are risks of AI takeover. Even Hitler had to sleep because he was an organic entity. AI doesn't sleep. This is the moment that we completely lose control. It could be engineered pandemics. every five days, I infect 10, and then 10 infect 10. It would take about 39 days to get to 70 million people, which is about the population of Britain. The jump from 70 million to 8 billion is just another 10 days. Or is the greatest threat we face actually less tangible? Could it be economic

warfare or the collapse of our political systems? You know, the choke point of all choke points in the global economy is the US dollar. All it takes is Donald Trump taking out his Sharpie in the Oval Office and signing a document. And that's it. You could send another country into a recession if you wanted to. Or perhaps are we the real existential threat? The strange ways in which humans convince themselves to do very, very awful things. Question is very simple. How do we continue to deal together?

To hear my new series on Thinking the Unthinkable, sign up at the rest is politics.com. Great game. Strategic struggle between Britain and Russia. We assess a prime minister. With high confidence, it was Russian. Holding the Russians accountable is World War III. They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people. Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex.

Got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing! We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today. And disseminated into an operation order, or Fraggo. A fraga that says to kill the president of Russia Yes

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We have two times friendly key where Britain plays its strongest hand He's the best. Against its strongest foe. Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the rest of politics with me, Roy Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell, and we're going to talk about finances and politics and reform. So, Nalje Farage, damaged, in my view, not as much as he should have been, but damaged politically by this $5 million donation from Christopher Harbourn, the Thai-based tech billionaire, as was, apparently now back in the UK.

And that was five million pounds personal, and then I think over 10 million to the party from Christopher Harbor. And the five million of course was no strings attached. You don't want anything for it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I can spend it on a Ferrari. You could spend it on what do you want. Security, keeping me safe for the rest of my life, et cetera, et cetera. When I'm not taking security assistance from Posh George. Correct.

So there's that one. And then we had this extraordinary undercover film by verbatim, which Channel 4 showed part of, which you've now watched 3,418 times. And you and I had the privilege of speaking to the undercover reporter. You're impressed, aren't you? I thought it was great. I thought it was extreme. But I'm still stuck with this problem, which is I think that it's only when you see the gin and tonics and the showing off.

And the oysters. I want six, not four. Yeah. Man of the people, Nigel. And the sense that there's a lot more footage to come. And I just feel people need to really absorb themselves and is there to actually get what the culture is. there to actually get what the culture of this party is? Well, I said that in relation to the Houthis, you know, this extraordinary development where they take the Red Sea coast and then it's kind of

gone in a day in terms of the news. And likewise, look, this film made a big impact. It obviously sort of, you know, disrupted the reform conference in Birmingham. But it's kind of gone away again. And sufficient for them to be able to come out and literally wipe out the news agenda with these two promises of two donations from two individuals, both crypto people, Bendello and Christopher Harbourn, 36 million. Now, I've each, each, 72 million. I mean, you could buy a pretty decent centre forward for that. And is the irony of it that one of them's been living in Thailand, the other ones living in Hong Kong? So to some extent, this is money that they have because they didn't have to pay for UK tax. Yeah. And, and of course, the law, I mean, I do think Labor's

been a bit asleep at the wheel on this one. The part of the art of politics and government is seeing what's coming down the track. The Americanisation, the trumpification of our politics, that is what reform are doing. They're doing it with post-truth. They're doing it with polarisation, and they're doing with money. I mean, there was a time, and look, we shouldn't be too pious about this. I can remember when Matthew Harding, who was a Chelsea director, very sadly, got killed in a helicopter crash coming back from a match. But I think he was our first military. pound donor. And I remember seeing that as, you know, this would be amazing because business will realize that Labor's the party of business. And that was a million pounds.

And people thought that is an enormous sum of money. On one day, they've got two people pledging 36 million. And Labor, they have got this legislation going through. There's this debate about whether this kind of thing, because they said it depends on, you know, where you were living at a specific time. These guys claim that they've moved back to the UK. I don't know. Take them at face value, I guess. But I tell you what I find utterly extraordinary is somebody like Farage, who polls say, I think polls, you can take them or leave them, but he is currently viewed as the sleazyest politician in Britain. Okay. If you give people a list of politicians and you count them on a sleaze factor, he's seen as the sleesiest. He's the guy

who stands up there and says, these guys are promising the 72 million pounds because they're patriotic British people, patriotic British people who until recently lived in Hong Kong and Thailand and who want nothing from this and who will never be given a peerage, yeah, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And, you know, enough people buy it because enough people will want to think, you know, that's great, they can really kick the other parties and we don't like that. One of the sad things is that the parties are being, as usual, so short-sighted and self-interested.

So I talked to someone who'd been interviewing a Labor cabinet minister, asked them whether they would take the money. And their only response was, well, of course, you know, we would do proper checks on whether they're eligible donors. Bullshit to that. Nobody should be taking 36 million pounds from an individual donor. Nobody should be taking a million pounds from an individual donor. No, should be taking 100,000 pounds to individual donor. It's totally inequitable, unjust, unfair. But we should have... But the only alternative estate fundee.

We should have a system. I've actually been doing a little bit of research here. But a research here. Right. Here we go. So France, the cap is 7,500 euro per individual. And they have to be French national and fiscally resident in France. And even when they are, 7,500.

Spain, 50,000 euros. Netherlands, 100,000 euros. Now, I don't know whether the cap is going to be 50,000, 7,500. It's not a million. So 100,000. Great. Let's make it 100,000. And let's accept that the reason why we're doing that is we're trying to say that you shouldn't be in a position where citizens have an undue influence and where parties are built on this dependency.

I mean, it's a fundamental principle of equal citizenship without pushing too hard on this, right? Citizens should have roughly equal ability to influence and the big influence should be from your voters. And the problem with this stuff is that you don't really need to listen to your voters if you're getting 7.000. So the Electoral Commission's done some modelling, my final figures. On the 319 million pounds, which the party's got over a five-year period, the 100,000 pound cap, which is the Alastair Campbell proposal, would have reduced the amount by 57%. The 10,000 pound cap, which is the Rory Stewart proposal, would have reduced by 86% the amount of funding.

Now that tells you a hell of a lot. It tells you that 14% of people are giving under 10,000, and 14% of the money, is people giving under 10,000. Eighty-six percent of the money funding all these parties is giving from people who can afford to give over 10,000 pounds. Or organisations, because the argument that the Tories tend to make when Labor has talked about this is that, well, the trade unions are massive donors. Now, it's true the trade unions are. I was talking to Michael Levy the other day, who famously was the Labor Party fundraiser under Tony Blair. And he was saying, he always sort of tried to persuade the unions, that there ought to be a way of saying that this is like, you know,

5.3 pence per member or it's, you know, you could, because that's what the unions are. They represent their members. But this is of a scale. This is what I mean about the Americanization. I mean, 36 million to the Americans is not that much. But do we really want to go down this road? And let me tell you, having run a few election campaigns. Why are they, as far as I can see still, all this debate in the House of Commons is going on about

permissible donors, whether you're living abroad or being taxable. Why is it not getting it? Even in the US, individuals are capped at $3,500 per head. Now, there's this horrible Citizens United way around the side. But the reason why the US caps and France caps and Netherlands caps and Spain caps is the same. Why is Britain not capping donations? And what those rules are all about is the principle that however well-intentioned people might be, there is always a risk that people are buying access, influence, etc.

And I've got to tell you about this guy Harbourn. really strange, actually, because one of our, one of Fiona and my closest friends is, is weirdly a really old friend of his. I'm not going to drop the minute, but, and says, actually, he's going to want to be a nice bloke, but, so he's given all this money. He gave a million pounds to the Office of Boris Johnson Limited, okay, which was one of the biggest donations ever made to an individual politician. Now, January 2023, he got an 80 million pound Ministry of Defense contract, okay, for Kinetic, one of his companies. He went as an advisor to Boris Johnson. I don't know, I mean, I know he's an expert on Thailand. Is he an expert on Ukraine? Because he went as an advisor to Boris Johnson on his trip to Kiev in September 2023. There may be nothing wrong with this at all. Okay. And Ben, I don't

know this Bendello guy. I can tell you a little bit about both of these people, because I know people, both them. And the weird thing about it is that they are, they're quite different, right? Christopher Harbourn is a seems to be a sort of central casting, Oxbridge-educated, quite kind of fluent guy who, if you read the article he's written in the Sunday Telegraph, who's deciding to present himself to the world as David Cameron, right? Basically, the article is, I care about climate change, I care about funding public services properly.

So sorry, if he cares about climate change, why is he funding a party that thinks that climate change is a hoax? Christopher Harbourn is literally presenting himself in the papers. as the last socially liberal, fiscally conservative person in Britain. He literally has written an article could have been written by David Gorg. Do you think he's a article that... Do you think he's confused in a garage with David Cameron? It's a really weird.

He's written an whole article that says, you know, I want more pro-business, but I also want well-funded public services. I really care about climate change, this kind of stuff, and he's decided to fund reform. Bendello is different. Bendello is somebody who openly would describe himself as being maybe slightly more, I don't know what the correct way to frame it is. Right wing? No, I think it's more that he, no, he had struggled at school, he was expelled from schools.

He's a math genius. I mean, he's a guy who... Neurodiversion. Neurodiversion, math genius. But neither of them seems to be particularly obsessed with culture war stuff. Neither of them is particularly personally lavish. The problem, though, is that I want to move the argument on to, not so much who these guys are as a principle that no party should ever be doing this.

Because it doesn't, I mean, you make this point about there could be conflicts of interest, there could be policy things. It's more fundamental. I mean, they will represent for reform, 95% of all the money that reform has. Yeah. Reform will put out, you know, 300 constituency managers, all their office space, all their rent. They could buy virtually every billboard in the country. But also, if these guys turn around and say, to reform in a year's time. I don't really like what you're doing there.

I'll take my support out. The whole thing collapses like a pack of cuts. Or if there is a reform government, I don't think it will be, but let's say there were, and you've got the first budget coming up, are you seriously telling me, Nigel, Richard, Zia, Robert, etc. That when you get a phone call from Christopher Harbourn, who's given you 36 million and got help to put you in there, that you're not going to take that call ahead of CBI. ahead of some guy who's worked in this industry their whole life.

And I think, again, back to our point about, you know, people not understand the AI. Crypto. We don't know the half of what crypto in, you know. Remember Trump said that this whole thing basically was a scam for organised crime. Well, I've never seen that much to say that it's not. So, and by the way, I'm not saying Mr. Delo

and Mr. Harborder involved in organized crime, but Mr. Delo, you know, I think anybody who has a Trump pardon on their record for offences related to money laundering should not be a permissible donor in the United Kingdom. I'm sorry. Yes, you can have a pardon. But we know there's a lobbying,

there's a program on 60 minutes this week, which we should advertise widely, where they've exposed these lawyers who are basically saying, for $300,000, I can get you a pardon. So this, and let me tell you the other thing about it. Tell me about that. Look, you went to a public school, right?

And this is my theory about Delo. Because as you say, he's a math geek. Okay. And apparently is an amazing... From a relatively modest background. Yeah, and he's an amazing math geek. And was picked up by an amazing tutor at Worcester College, Oxford, who's spotted his talent for...

Right. And he's now... He's now given a massive donation to them as well. He's obviously, you know, made a lot of money. But don't you get the feeling that maybe Nigel Farage and Richard Tice are like the sort of school bullies who've picked on the neurodivergent math geek? And this is his way of kind of getting him with them a bit. I don't know.

No, no. That feels to me. Who would want to hang out with Farage? Entice, exactly. But maybe he does. Well, there is a weird... Ben, you can come on the podcast and review all this. Weird little circle around this guy, Jukes, who was part of the scandal.

It's one of this sort of coterie of young men who seem to adore Farage and be with him all the time and following around all the time and think he's incredibly... Post-George as well. Yeah, funny and charismatic. To come back to my beating my big drum, if one... The film. No, if one had a cap on donations, actually one wouldn't need to get into the micro details so much of whether somebody who's been pardoned in the US or, you know, fiscal thing. If you capped at £10,000, none of these people could have disproportionate influence. The great thing, because I did this when I was running to be Maryland.

I really saw this one. I was running to be the leadership, right? What I realize is if you cap at £10,000, any politician really can tell someone to F off. Okay, you take your £10,000. Well, I'm not the £10,000, right. Even nicer would be, though, if we follow Peter Malinowski, your hero who you introduce this to, I think it's extraordinary. He's designed a whole system of public funding in Australia,

which has tried to balance the fact. He says it's got to be fair, rational, reflective of community support, and not impossible for new entrants. And it's a lovely set of things. Here's another idea that I have. You can match small donations. So let's say the government...

With the state? Yeah, let's say the government said, for every pound you give up to 250 pounds will triple it. For all parties? Any citizen that gives a pound up to 250 pounds, the government will triple it. Above 250 pounds, nothing. Give much more weight to the small donor and much less to the big donor. I mean, right now, arguing is very hard to argue for state funding with all the other pressures on the public first, isn't it?

All right, well, then let's just stop the value funding. What do they need the money for anyway? What are they doing with the stupid money? They're doing a lot of things. I mean, my big worry about $72 million, having been involved, that is a lot of money to buy a lot of advertising. And they won't care about whether they're on the edge of the law during a campaign. I'm sorry, they won't. All these parties.

So let's follow my figures. 10,000 pound cap, reduced by 86%. Come down from 319 million down to whatever, I don't know, 60 million. Fine. Parties can do what they like with 60 million. Give us less advertising. Get out there. Do a bit of old-fashioned leafleting.

I get on that, but what about it? They'll hire very well-paid agents in every single constituency. Well, they shouldn't be allowed to, nor should Labour, nor should the Conservatives, nor should the Conservatives, nor should the defence. They get free television. They get free television during the the country. What do they need the money for, these buggers? Yeah, okay. So, Labour, Labour, Labour, show some principles. This is why things that worries me a little bit about this government. You want more principle. I want Andy Burnham to come out and say, not, oh, I found a way to shaft reform, Actually, this is a wake-up call for all of us. None of us are going to take a donation over Alastair Campbell's £100,000 limit.

There was a point, you know, this is, maybe this proves your point. There was a point when I was utterly stunned to be named as Labor's biggest donor. It was actually when Edward's leader, because I can't remember about it was, but it was like, it was about £10,000. And because at the time, nobody was funding the parties. And now, Labour will be thinking, well, we've got to find, we've got to find ways. to compete with this, I'm afraid. Because, you know, this stuff does work. It's why the Americans have got this arms race.

And it's why you're right about the principle. It's why we've got to stop it. Just on the Louis... Dear public, France capped at 7,500, Spain capsed, 50,000, Netherlands capsed at 100,000. Why is Britain not capping? I think Rory should write a piece about a party from the news letter. There you are. That'll show you up.

Let's just shout. Louis Wilson, though, who was the undercover reporter. And where I agree with Rory, he said last week, You've got to see the whole thing. But the other thing is really, really interesting. And we made a proposition to Louis Wilson because they've got tons more, tons, so much more. And I don't know about you.

I think Richard Tyson you should wind your neck in for a bit. That's all I'm saying. So they've got tons more of James Orr. He said they had six of those long meetings where he rambled on about himself endlessly. So they've got tons and tons more. Channel 4, Channel 4. On being on Bend Delo's Yaw.

when actually quite a lot of the pitch in the Sunday Telegraph is Bendello doesn't like yachts. Yeah, there you go. There's a lot in there. So, and the point is, Channel 4, you had a big hit with this. Do another program. Do another one. There's lots in there. And what we said to Louis, if all of our broadcasters lack the spine to take this on,

then I think we would happily. We could even have a James or minute every day, every week for a year. Absolutely honored to. Now, just as we finish, I'm looking forward very much to interviewing you on your new book, Percivilience. So you're going to tell us a little bit about it. Well, I'm going to know. I'll do that in the interview.

Why I am going to do is to announce the winner. Okay. Can you believe this how clever our listeners are, Rory? So I said last week, guessed the title of the book. Several thousand took part, said it was one word. Yeah. Five hundred and three guessed correctly. Five hundred and three guests perciviline.

Yeah. 104 thought it was Maradonna. No, the funniest one. that one person thought it was Wutbuerger, which was that German word that you were so impressed by. So the winner, the guy who was first to guess it's called Graham Flint, he's going to get a whole bundle of prize. He's going to get a sign book obbs.

He's going to get a mention in the paperback. We're going to allow him a question on question time, and he's going to get free tickets to the launch event, which will be an act of profound pedultery, Rory. You've had yours. I'm having mine. It's an event for the new world. It's me interviewed by Michelle Hussein. Stop shaking you, Adam.

It's me interviewed by Michelle Hussein, or as we call in her house, the BBC's losses, Bloomberg's gain, at the Cadogan Hall in London, October 22nd. And yeah, I think we'll probably give a few free tickets out to newsletter people as well, because we love the newsletter. Restispolyce.com forward slash newsletter. And to those, by the way, who don't like our plugging, well, it's our podcast. Just to finish, let's bring it all together. Let's wrap it all together.

What I was thinking about this morning is that these themes, what's happened in Yemen, the closing of the Red Sea, AI reform funding, is all part of a bigger story that we've been talking about in this podcast for nearly four years, which is the collapse of the old rules. Splintering of political parties, populism, global conflict. Where we now need to move on to is how we redesign the world to cope with it, or more bluntly, what do we do? about it because the evidence is now all around us. And the problem is that unless people start carnying their way around and coming up with a structure and a solution or following Malinorskas domestically and Kani internationally, right? And I quite like that. Maybe you should do a book on Malanorskis domestic, Kani International. We're going to find it's just going to get worse and worse and worse. People are really kidding themselves if they think it's okay. As the Foreign Office I fear, sometimes seems to be saying, let's put our head in the sands, hope America's going to be our friends

again in two years' time. This is just the beginning. I mean, literally every time we open the papers and we read, 72 million pounds has gone into reform. For good of sake, the Red Sea has been closed by the Houthi terrorist group. The US president is calling for a United Ireland. AI potentially has agents that could wipe out humanity and nobody's prepared to regulate this. Stuff which would have defined an entire generation are now happening every day. Now that's the point you made at the Festival Hall and it's true. It's why it gets so, so annoying when people say, oh, politics, nothing ever changes anyway. It's like, I mean, how don't this ever be the time where things have changed so fast, so much?

And politics has got to catch up with it. Process has got to catch up with it. Morality, solutions, communication. So what we need... MSC, Munich Security Conference, MSC, Ministry of Science. What we need is exactly this. We need Andy Burnham to have the solution. case of reform could be cap on funding. We're not going to take more than 10,000 pounds

from any individual. Communication. The charm out there doing the Burnham stuff, but at the back, the morality. What are the values which are driving this? And that value needs to connect from Manchester to Manchuria. Thank you, Roy. That's absolutely brilliant. We should also say, I want to just say a little thing about Andy Bernal, because he did the Great North run. His dad died. That is so sad. I think having these normal public events that we all have to deal with, having them when you're really, really high profile public figure, I think it's very, very hard.

So thoughts with Andy and his family. Thoughts for Andy and his family. Very good. All right. See you soon. Bye-bye.