TRIGGERnometry - Boris Johnson: "I Talked to Putin..."

Episode Date: March 16, 2025

Boris Johnson is the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the former Mayor of London. SPONSOR. We use Ground News to escape the echo chamber and stay fully informed. Go to https://ground.news/triggernometry to save 40% on the Ground News unlimited access Vantage plan. SPONSOR. In partnership with *Alphacell Labs* visit https://alphacell-labs.com and use code TRIG20 for 20% off. SPONSOR. Venice AI. Go to our sponsor https://venice.ai/triggernometry and use code TRIGGERNOMETRY to enjoy private, uncensored AI. Using code will get you 20% off a pro plan Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Introduction 01:33 Why Were You So Strong In Supporting Ukraine? 13:30 Did Boris Stop The Peace Agreement Being Signed In Istanbul? 28:01 Have You Been Surprised By Trump's Approach? 34:42 Trump's Approach To Not Alienate Russia 42:08 Did We Fail As A Country In Dealing With Russia? 47:21 Changing His Mind On Climate Change 58:43 Brexit And Immigration Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Did you have any one-on-one conversations with Vladimir Putin? I did. I did. I mean, so it was an incredibly depressing conversation. Have you been shocked by Trump's approach to this situation? No. Absolutely. We hadn't got a clear strategy anymore. And so you needed someone to come in and say, right, I'm going to try and make peace, which is what the president is trying to do.

For the first time, let me. Let me ask the question before you'll answer it. But no, no, but there's another part to it, Boris. But wait, but wait. What they wanted was to take back control. In order to do what? To take back? To take back? To take back control.

In order to leave things the same or make the worse? Rishishishu-Soonak just said, stop the boats was a wrong slogan. We went too far. We should, we should have, no, no, the problem was, the problem was that we, they didn't do what I told them to do. No, no, hold on. Hold on. You say, no, Boris, I'm not going to let you get away with this. You say, you must.

No, I'm not. I refuse. It's in the world. You can't get a question in Edwards. Boris. Boris Johnson? Yes, hello. Thank you, Constantine.

Thank you very much having me on the show. Francis. It's great to have you here. Great, great, good. Thanks for joining us. I've got Scott off a plane from Washington, so forgive me if I'm, you know, a bit blur, blur in my. Well, we might forgive you. The audience might not forgive me, but it doesn't matter.

They'll have to lump it. They will. They will, indeed. They will have to lump it. So let's get to the. lumping it apart. You've just come back from Washington, and this is really one of the big things we wanted to talk to you about, which is, of course, Ukraine. The question that I think a lot of people would want to know, and cards on the table, we've always been very pro-Ukraine, we've raised

money for Ukraine, et cetera, is why were you so strong at the beginning of this war to get the Western world to support Ukraine? What is the rationale? Because I don't think that has ever been articulated in a powerful way to people. I think it's very, it's very, it's very, it's. It's very simple. I felt enraged and in a way guilty that this appalling and irrational thing had happened on my watch, as it were. You know, there I was a prime minister of a G7 country, a P5 country, a nuclear power, and we'd been unable to persuade Putin not to do something so completely. self-destructive and clearly destructive of Ukraine. And it was enraging. And I was disgusted at what he was doing.

And I felt that it was, I felt that there were so many lies he was telling about the reasons why he was invading Ukraine. And they were not falling in time. on deaf ears. And people were saying, you know, you hear it, you still hear it. We Pope the bear. It was the fault of the West for encouraging the Ukrainians to pursue NATO membership. We should never have done that. And it's total nonsense. Why is that total nonsense?

It's total nonsense. Why? Because the simple fact is, and Putin knew this very well, there was not the remotest chance. It was not a snowball's chance in hell. hell of Ukraine joining NATO in 2020. As things stood in 2022, when Putin launched his full-scale invasion, there was not a snowball chance in how the Ukraine joining NATO for decades in the foreseeable future. I'll tell you why, because the black balls, the country's voting no, they would have looked like sheep dropping.

I mean, there would have been so many black balls, right? because they're not just the Hungarians, the French, the Germans, the Americans weren't on for extending their nuclear guarantee to a huge country, 45 million people, you know, second biggest country in Europe by land area, you know, colossal country. It was not going to happen. There were very few actual proponents of Ukrainian membership then in 2022. It wasn't going to happen in a, you know, until the hell froze over the Greek calendar. Calends, however you want to put it. And Putin knew that. So what's his motivation? Well, his motivation was very clear.

His motivation was to, after 20 years in power, to galvanize public opinion in Russia behind a nationalist adventure to boost his own standing

and to, sadly, to some extent, he's been success. for me, people have, people do tend to rally behind the leader in time of war. A lot of Russians have instinctively done that. I think he, he hated that as a former KGB man, he hated the collapse of the Soviet empire, and he was on record as saying it was the biggest catastrophe of the 20th century. He wanted to rebuild it. And, you know, it's actually all there in his crazy kind of Nostradamus essay about what Ukraine is.

And he thought it was basically the origins of the spiritual origins of Russian culture and should be reunited with Russia. And that was in complete contradiction, of course, of what the Ukrainians wanted. They voted in 1991 to be a free, sovereign, independent country. And I think that his motives were entirely cynical. He thought, he did it, I think, because he thought that the West would acquiesce, as they had in 2014. And he thought that he would conquer Ukraine very speedily. He thought that it would be over very, very soon.

I think he also probably calculated that the oil price would spike and that that would be good for Russia. And that for a long time, he would be able to finance, you know, for long as it took. And I think he miscalculated how long it would take. but he thought that he would benefit from an oil price spike that would, you know, more than finance the cost of the war. As it happened, the war's been ruinously expensive for him, but he was certainly right in that short-term calculation. So I think it was an entirely cynical thing.

Ukraine was no conceivable threat to Putin at the time. Absolutely no threat. And the whole point about Ukraine is it had been disarmed. we'd done it I mean I think if you asked that your question was you know why was I so worked up about it I mean partly it was you know a feeling of responsibility because

as a UK Prime Minister because after all in 1994 under the Budapest memorandum we had we had told the Ukrainians you've got to give up your 1,700 nuclear warheads

but we will protect you. France, Britain, America and of course, absurdly Russia said that they would protect Ukraine in the event of attack. And actually we didn't do that in 2014. And then again in 2022, we didn't. And the best plan I could see was to when the disaster started to unfold in January

actually before then you could really start to get the evidence that it was going to go wrong. The best plan I could see was to get weapons to the Ukrainians as fast as possible and so from the autumn onwards when did you know he was going to invade? Well I think his essay was in

back in July of the previous year I mean I might be wrong about that but it was back in the previous summer and to his great credit Ben Wallace the defence secretary then the defense secretary said you've got to read this um uh promising is in it's totally bonkers but you know i really think he means it i really think he's going to invade then thought that back in the summer i did read it i thought it was spooky and and and chilling and so one of the things that

we did was to um begin i think from august i can't remember exactly when but we started a process to try to to get the javelin, not the jabblins, the n-laws, which were made in Belfast, to Ukraine. And I got to say that was not easy because there was a lot of anxiety in the system about doing things that would provoke Putin. This became a constant argument as the whole thing developed. You remember, you know, people said, we can't do X, Y, and Z, because it's escalatory. If you give Putin, as you say, if you give the Ukrainians weapons of one particular kind, Putin will be provoked and he'll do something even more aggressive. And this was a continuing theme.

Actually, he'd already decided he was going to try to take over and wipe out Ukraine. So he was the guy who wanted to escalate. Did you have any one-on-one conversations with Vladimir Putin? I did. I did. What was he saying to you? Well, I give an account of it. actually in the book unleashed.

But it was an incredibly depressing conversation because he, you know, he repeated his assertions that Ukraine could be a kind of threat to Russia. And I think he made the point that if, you know, ICBMs were stationed, missiles were stationed in Ukraine, And then there would be a very short distance from travel to Moscow from Ukraine. How could he put up with his security? I said, look, you know, everybody knows there's no plan to put missiles on Ukrainian.

So that's totally not. It's total nonsense. Nor was there. Absolutely not. As I say, there was no plan to get Ukrainian to NATO. They hadn't even got a membership action plan. They'd got nothing. I mean, yes, back in 2008 at the Bucharest summit, George Bush, the US president, had said very strongly, well, look, we've got a problem here with Ukraine.

It doesn't have a security guarantee. Logically, its position is very difficult. We should get them in. They want to be, and we should get them in. And actually, it was then. And it was the Europeans who said no. And the French and the Germans in particular. Looking back, it might have been a good thing

if we had got them in there. But we didn't. And as I say, in 2022, there was no prospect of that of that changing. So Putin focused on all that and he was obsessed with stirring up that issue,

trying to make it look as though NATO was being expansionist. And all I can say is it really wasn't. I was in every important NATO meeting from 2016 to 2020 to either as Foreign Secretary or PM

and the idea that Ukraine was about to be put into NATO is complete nonsense. It just wasn't on the agenda of the alliance then. I mean, it should be now because of what Putin's done. I mean, like, Ukraine has now joined the unhappy ranks of so many other countries in central and eastern Europe that have been invaded by Russia. You know, why is Poland? Why is Hungary? Why is Czechoslovakia? Why is all the Baltic states, why are Finns members of NATO now? Because they've all been invaded by Russia in the last hundred years,

very, very violently. And so is Ukraine. The long-term solution is still to get Ukraine into NATO, in my view. And that's why I think Kirstama is right to say that Ukraine is on an irreversible path to NATO membership. But so that was the sort of conversation. It was a pretty creepy conversation. I remember the interpreter afterwards saying he'd been very familiar with me and sort of used because he spoke in Russian.

He has good English, but he spoke in Russian in that conversation. He said he'd used the more what's the word, the more familiar form of address. Two rather than we. Two rather than voy. I see, yeah. Which would be a sign of disrespect, actually. Exactly. I'm from Russia.

And I thought, huh, what he's really doing is he's not taking this seriously. And, you know, he wasn't really listening. He'd already decided. His mind was made up. He'd already decided. Let me ask you something else. And it's interesting, because I want to put this on the table and I want to get your reaction. I came to this interview, having heard that you went to Kiev and told them not to sign whatever agreement was made in Istanbul.

Oh, thank you. And this is a talking point that's been extensive. This is a Kremlin point talking about. Hold on. Agreed. So, well, not agreed, but I came into this interview, ready to ask you about that. And then I went and looked at where that claim comes from. And it comes from various right-wing publications online.

It's all linked to an interview with David Arachme, who was the Ukraine's chief negotiator in those negotiations. And I went and watched the video, and I speak Russian and I can understand. understand Ukraine. He says no such thing. On the contrary, he says you didn't interfere, and they didn't want to sign because they didn't trust Russia. They didn't want to sign a neutrality agreement because what they thought was, we're going to sign this, they're going to get ready to innovate fully. And then we're going to be caught with our hands down. That's essentially what he said. So is there any truth, though, that, you know, in your moral outrage at what

Putin had done, you didn't consider how realistic it was to get the Ukrainians actually to quote, and quote, win this war. And the victory conditions were never clearly defined. Obviously, it was never going to be the Ukrainian flag flying over the Kremlin. And people will argue, and this is what I want to get your reaction to is, now we are in a position where a better deal might have been available in 2022 without a million people being killed on both sides. Do you think that's a credible argument? Look, you can't be more Ukrainian than the Ukrainians, right? And I passionately support Ukraine, but it's up to people of Ukraine,

government of Ukraine, to decide when they're going to negotiate what their... Yes, but if you said to them, and the US President said to them, we're not giving you any support, they wouldn't afford, because they knew they were not going to stand the chance. Okay, well, so first of all, I think it would have been totally wrong to leave Ukraine to be engulfed by... by the Russians, and that's frankly what would have happened. If we hadn't given them the enlaws and the javelins,

which Donald Trump actually gave them, and if they hadn't started to get quite a big pipeline of Western support, I think it is well possible that Putin could have won that war, you know, quite quickly. But there was no deal to be, that's what I'm getting that. Was there a deal for the Ukrainians? If they knew from day one, we're not going to get Western support, we're going to have to do a deal with this guy? They were not going to do it.

No, because Putin, well, I mean, you know, maybe you disagree. But I think Putin, if you read the essay, if you look at what he was trying to do, his war aims were very simple. The war aims were to reabsorb Ukraine into the Russian Empire. And to make it effectively part of Russia. Make it a vassal state. That was very, very clear. The whole thing, you wanted Kiev, right?

And so, when I went to, you know, back to the Kremlin kind of talking point, you know, Boris Johnson went to Kiev at the behest of Joe Biden to tell the Ukrainians not to do a deal with Putin. That's the Kremlin line. It is a complete lie. First of all, I had no discussions with Joe Biden or indeed with anybody else in America before going to for reasons of operational security at the time

because we didn't know the risks of going to Kiev. Exactly. I went basically because I wanted vividly to show the UK's support and also to demonstrate, you know, to our public and as much to everybody else, that they'd achieved a stunning thing. They kicked the Russians out of Kiev and out of that area. And Kiev was now a safe place to visit. And the only way to make that point was show solidarity and to make that point

was to go in person. And it's true that, you know, we had long, had long conversations with Volodymyazelensky and, you know, I told him how, you know, I said, I said, well, what is obvious? I said on behalf of the British government, huge numbers of British people, how much we admired what he had done.

We couldn't be more Ukrainian than the Ukrainians. Obviously, if they wanted to do a deal, if they found a, if they saw an alternative, that was for them. But all I said was that if they were going to fight on, then clearly they would have our support. And I don't think there was any, any chance that they could have done the deal. If you remember that stage, April 2022, Putin occupied a far more land in Ukraine than he does now. Far more. And, you know, they hadn't yet kicked them out of Kharkib and Khashon and all the other places.

You know, Putin was in a much more dominating position. He was asking for Ukrainian armed forces to be cut to a rump. He was asking for neutrality, for, you know, all sorts of changes to Ukrainian constitution, things that they couldn't accept. He was basically asking things that were totally impossible. Did he want Zelensky gone? Have you ever read a headline or watched a clip and immediately made up your mind about a story? only to later find out there was more to it?

We've all been there. The news isn't always as straightforward as it seems, and that's where Ground News comes in. It helps you compare coverage from across the media spectrum so you can see the full picture for yourself. Ground News is the website and app I use to cut through the noise and actually see the bigger picture. It doesn't just show you the news.

It shows you who's covering it, how they're framing it, and what they're leaving out. A feature that I use a lot is the Blind Spot Feed. For me, this is a game change. It highlights stories that either the left or the right are ignoring, so you can be sure you're not missing crucial details. For example, here's the story I found on ground news that got almost no coverage from the right. Honda to produce Nex Civic in Indiana, not Mexico due to US tariffs. And here's one you'd miss if you only read the left-leaning outlets.

South Africa rejects Musk claim Stalin can't operate there because he's not black. With ground news, you don't just read the headlines. you get insightful data on bias distribution, source reliability and media coverage. No other platform offers this level of analysis. Right now, trigonometry fans can get 40% off the unlimited vantage plan, the same plan that we use. Just click the link in the description or scan the QR code and subscribe at ground.news slash trigonometry. Your subscription doesn't just keep you informed. It helps bring transparency back to the media.

That's something we can all get behind. Did he want Zelensky gone? Of course, of course, he wanted, I mean, I don't, I don't remember the conditions he was, he was setting at the time. But they were, they were not conditions that any, I think, than any, my views, any Ukrainian president could have accepted. And, you know, you can remember that Volodymy Zelensky is not, you know, he's not an unreasonable guy. He got elected, really, as a peace nick. He was out there in 2019, he tried to do a deal with Putin. As far as I can remember, his basic problem was that, you know, Ukrainian nationalists couldn't accept the compromise.

And, you know, you can see why not? I mean, Putin had invaded their country in 2014. He'd taken bits of land already, and people were incredibly angry. And they are still... But look, this is all the sort of long-winded way of saying that, no, I had no... All I was trying to do was show visible support and say, look, you know, and as I said, it can't be more Ukrainian than Ukraine. If you're going to settle, then that's the matter for you.

If you're going to fight on, then you can count on our support. That's what I said. And I think that people can judge whether, I mean, leaving aside my advice to President Zelensky then, people can judge whether or not he did the right thing in fighting on by what happens now. And I think, actually, when you look at it, that there is a very good chance that out of all this, there will come a free, sovereign, secure Ukraine. And that would not have happened if you'd left it, if he'd done a deal in April 2022.

It would not have been a sovereign Ukraine. It would not have been a free Ukraine. And it would have been run by Russia and by Putin. And it would not have had any chance of continuing on its journey towards democracy, free institutions, and engagement with the West. And that's basically what the Ukrainians want. And Putin would have stopped it. And so I think a lot of Ukrainians, I mean, I can't, you know, I think a lot of Ukrainians would say what they did was completely right. I have a lot of friends in Ukraine who would back that up.

And you are very popular in Ukraine because of. the support that you gave on behalf. Well, and I look, I will continue to support it for as long, and, you know, um, clearly, uh, I'm also hopeful that there can be peace, right? You know, I don't want, nobody wants conflict for the sake of, of conflict. And I actually think that what is happening now is, you know, there is the possibility. you can see the germ of a of a solution. So the Ukrainians, under the, under the resources agreement, the minerals agreement with

the United States, they get a partnership with the most powerful country, an economic, long-term economic partnership on the most powerful country on Earth. America commits to a free, sovereign, secure Ukraine. America commits under the minerals deal and other bits of the agreement, which is like a 200-page agreement. but it commits the US to long-term support for the security of Ukraine. I mean, the beginnings of a security guarantee are already in that minerals agreement. Then you've also got the element of the Europeans, you know, led by the Brits and the French

coming in with this, you know, admittedly symbolic but important reassurance force or whatever we're going to call it. boots, you know, European, Western boots on the ground, boots from all over the place, but on the ground in Ukraine, to make visible to Putin the reality of Ukraine's choice that is a free sovereign country. They've chosen to invite France and Britain onto their soul. And that's something at the moment.

Putin says he can't accept, but we'll see, we see where we get to. And then when it, the concession the Ukrainians, I think, have probably made. And, you know, we haven't seen the details, but by talking to people, as I'm sure you have as well, the last few, a few days. I think clearly what the Trump administration wanted from Ukraine was some sort of recognition of the military reality. And that, you know, for the sake of peace, it would be helpful to consider. that they can't immediately reconquer all of their, the land has been lost since 2014. So they can't immediately recapture all of 1991 Ukraine. And, you know, that for many Ukrainians, even that is a horror, is a terrible thing to have to say.

But, you know, I think probably, and it's an awful thing, it's awful to think of Putin retaining possession of this land. It's awful. But for the sake of peace, it looks like they're willing, for the time being, to go along with it. On the understanding, of course, that they don't actually revoke their claim, their legal claim to that land. So those would be the elements of the sort of US-Ukraine position, as it were. so it's the the minerals deal with all its implications for security and economic partnership the the European-led peace force Brit France whoever peacekeeping force whatever we want to call it wouldn't be a peacekeeping force but it'd be there in symbolic logistics training and all

all that and then the temporary acceptance that there can't be a complete complete reversal to the status quo ante 2014. Okay? Now, all that, you know, some bitter pills there for Ukraine to swallow. But now is the time for all that to be put to Putin and some other important things, like return those 20,000 children that he's kidnapped.

And now is the time for Donald Trump, with all this fire and fury to put the heat on Putin. And that is what, obviously, I hope we're going to see in the next few days and weeks. Have you been shocked by Trump's approach to this situation? No. Absolutely.

I mean, bluntly. No, I think, look, I always... What I was trying to argue with People always said, oh, you'd be disaster, Trump, ah, no. You know, he, he, he, but actually there's a, I always said, wait, wait, wait, you know, it's sensible to want this war to end, right? I think, you know, even, even Ukrainians, you know, and I love, love Ukraine. But I think that they want to, they want to pause, a lot of people are dying, you know, they don't want to have to start conscripting the under 25-year-olds, you know, it's a thing. You can see the pain of that country, the country is going through absolute hell.

And, you know, they deserve a break and they deserve to be free. And I think, honestly, what we were doing in the last couple of years, I mean, I left office two and a half years ago, you know, getting off of three, almost three years ago now. But what we've been doing has not been, you know, Constantine, you said, right, we didn't have a plan. What was the, what was the objective that the West was setting out for, for you for him? What was success supposed to look like? We never said. I mean, I said, right at the beginning, Putin must fail, Ukraine must be free and so on.

But we sort of lost the sharp edges. And what we were doing was just saying, we'll support you for the long as it takes. And we were kind of holding the Ukrainians' coats while they were fighting and dying without actually giving them enough to win. Why were we doing that? Because, honestly,

Because it's go back to the same thing that was stopping us giving them, stopping the foreign office, allowing me to send them the, the, the, uh, the, the,

uh, the, uh, the, in the first place. Because there's this sort of superstitious apprehension about what Putin might do. And so,

nuclear weapons. Yeah. People said, which I think is ridiculous and, and I don't believe it's true, but there's a sort of, um, why is that,

Boris? Well, let me, let me just, you, so, so, I think it's,

well, I'll tell you why it's ridiculous, because, first of all, if Putin were to use a tactical nuclear, battlefield nuclear weapon, let alone if you were to, you know, he, he, he won't use a thermonuclear device against the place he calls the cradle of Russian civilization, but suppose he would use battlefield, tactical nuclear weapons to intimidate and deter. Well, it would be the first use of a nuclear weapon by a belligerent as an act of war since 1945. He would immediately lose, crucially, the backing of Xi Jinping. He would lose the backing of all the swing voters in the world. So one of the most frustrating things about backers of Ukraine, for people like me who back Ukraine, is that, you know, the Indians,

the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, our friends, great, great friends of ours in the Gulf, you know, you know, they're kind of a bit ambivalent, right, about Putin and about Ukraine. I mean, and that's been frustrating, but Putin uses a nuke, different story. Totally. He loses all that global support. all that global acquiescence.

He scares the pants off his own people because they don't know what's going to happen. They think he's played the nuclear card. That could be nuclear reprisals against us. And he loses a huge amount of domestic support. He'd terrify people. He does incur reprisals from the West. Obviously, can't talk about what they would be

because the old doctrine of nuclear deterrence relies on a lot of ambiguity, but there would be very, very serious reprisals from NATO countries and from the P5 of a kind that would be... So we gave into his nuclear blackmail? Deeply destructive. And yeah, so, yeah. That's what you're saying. What I'm saying is not, we gave in to the general kind of superstition about Putin,

you know, or about Russia. The Russia is spooky and frightening and is inevitably going to win. and we shouldn't provoke them. You still don't poke the bare thing. And all the evidence of the Ukraine war has been, the stronger we are, the more decisive we are in giving Ukraine what they need, the better.

So look, so back to your question, you know, was I shocked by the Trump approach? No, because I think we needed a new approach, right? We did need to shake the thing up. It wasn't, we hadn't got a clear strategy anymore. it had all gone, you know, for the Ukrainians, it was miserable. And so you needed someone to come in and say, right, I'm going to try and make peace, which is what the president is trying to do.

And as I said just now, I think you can see in that package of proposals that they've reached in Riyadh. You can see the outlines of something, painful though it might be in some ways for Ukraine, still keeps a sovereign free Ukraine, able to apply for EU membership, able to do all sorts of things which Putin finds intolerable. Now, the question is going to be what happened, what Putin does.

And so the challenge now is for Donald Trump to really turn the heat under. And there are things he can do. There's economic sanctions. The oil price, the oil price down below $60 a barrel, which, you know, maybe Trump could help organize. And Putin's in a very different position, because then he can't fund his war machine in the way that he won. Then his economy is really in trouble. And, you know, Trump has a lot of economic leverage over Putin, and we need to see that now.

Do you think part of the reason that Liam Halligan, the economist, made this point literally yesterday when we interviewed him, that part of the reason Trump is approaching the Ukraine situation in this way is because he doesn't want to alienate Russia. Because the US's worst nightmare is Russia being in the arms of China and them having an alliance together? Look, I certainly think it's true that there is a hankering in the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, world for, you know, a renewal of, of, of, of, a festival is called, and people remember a time when, you know, I, you know, I was a mayor of London. You know, you know, I had to make speeches in Russian, uh, about, you know, um, Muslim-a-old or whatever that festival is called and welcoming people to, welcoming Russians to London. And, you know, we had a whole place for us absolutely, you know, bristling with our oligarchs everywhere. And, you know, that's we overdid it. But, you know, it's not a bad thing on the whole to want peace and friendship with other countries, right?

As long as they want peace and friendship. And I think, you know, where the rubber is going to hit the road now is when those guys discover, what Putin actually wants. And, you know, I think I very much fear that it's going to be clear in the next few days he doesn't want peace. And, you know, he's not going to give those kids back.

He's not going to agree to the... He's not going to agree to it. You've heard what Lavrov said already about the European force. It was interesting. He said it would be a catastrophic escalation to have British boots on the ground. It's total nonsense. Well, why a sovereign country should be able to invite whomsoever it chooses? Actually, I thought it was quite interesting that President Trump said that Putin had agreed to that.

You saw, I mean, Trump said he said, I asked him that and he said he didn't have a problem with it. I'm more or less quoting exactly what the president said about his conversation with Putin. So, you know, let's see where we get to because if I were Putin, you know, I don't want to be a spin doctor for Putin, right? But if I were Putin, I think I could try and explain myself, yes, it's been a catastrophe for him. And he's lost 850,000 people killed or seriously injured, soldiers. It's been an economic catastrophe. But Russia's been able to absorb these losses.

The economy actually has, you know, he's converted it into a kind of Keynesian, you know, a war economy and it is actually to some extent worked. I think he could say, look, folks, we're ending the special military operation. It's been a great success. The undertakings I've had from Kiev have reassured me that the Nazis have been removed. Well, no, you laugh, but I mean, this is what Lavrov said. She can sell a win to the Russian people. Lavrov, Lavrov talks about Nazis in Kiev, right?

So they believe that it's full of Nazis. So you can say, we've removed the Nazis. It's like the end of, you know, Raiders of the Lost Dark when the Nazis all melt down. And so he can say, it's been a great success. We're in the name of peace, Russia is, you know, we will of course maintain the bulk of the lands that we've invaded. You know, that's where a serious negotiation will have to take place about what exactly goes back to Ukraine and what doesn't now.

And I think he connects. So to your question about, well, are we provoking Putin? I think he has, you know, are we going to provoke him to do something irrational like nuclear weapons? I think he has a lot of political space he can use before he has to do that. I happen to know what he's very good at is giving the impression to our American friends that he's the reasonable one. And, you know, he's really, he's being wissed, but behind me, I've got these, you know, real psychos who are ultra-nationalists and, you know, they're making him much more difficult for me to concede. I think that's Pollock, by the way, but that's what he's, he's quite, he's quite effective in persuading people of that. So I think he, I think he, he's strong, he has the space to make a concession and get out.

A deal can be done, I hear you. I think so. I mean, do you agree with me? I mean, maybe I just think... We're going to see over the days to come. We will find out. I want to ask you one other question about Ukraine. And I think it was worth pursuing.

So I think, I know that a lot of plaster has come off the ceiling in the chancellories of Europe about the way, you know, President Trump has handled it and the way it went 10 days ago or so in the Oval Office. and everybody's, you know, been freaking out and saying, it's the end of the Atlantic alliance and blah, blah, fishcakes. And I don't think that's true. Understood.

I want to ask you one other question about this Russia thing, and then I want to move on to domestic issues. You know how coffee gets you going in the morning, but a few hours later that caffeine crash hits? What if I told you there's a way to make your coffee work smarter for you? That's where alpha-cells neuromagnosium comes in. It's a game changer because it combines magnesium with el-thianin, an amino acid found in green tea known for its relaxation and cognitive benefits.

When paired with caffeine, L-thianine creates a synergistic effect, releasing allergy slowly over time for sustained focus without the jitters or the crash. Neuromagnetium is tasteless, so you can mix it with coffee or any drink without altering the flavor. Plus it doubles as an electrolyte, making it perfect for hydration during the day or promoting deeper sleep at night. And here's what sets Alpha Cell apart. They're committed to quality. No artificial sweeteners, no plastic packaging,

just glass bottles to keep microplastics out of your body. They even post third-party lab results for total transparency. So whether it's for sharper focus, better hydration or more restful sleep, neuromagnetium is the way to go. Visit AlphaCell-HifenLabs.com or scan the QR code on the screen. Use code trig 20 for 20% off. That's alpha cell dash labs.com

code trig 20 with their 30-day money-back guarantee. You've got nothing to lose except maybe the crash. Right. Now back to the show. You mentioned that in your time. This is something I've always thought about, and I've said publicly quite a bit about this too. You mentioned your time as mayor of London, oligarchs everywhere. In those days, it was not.

I was proud. When I was mayor of London, I said that we had more billionaires in London than any other city in the world. And I was very proud of it. I said that London is to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan. It is their natural habitat. Yes. And people nowadays get very cross and they think it's all the terrible. They should be hung from the landposts.

But actually, they bring, you know, I would go back to them. that. And I think what we've done, by the way, you know, on the... Boris, with all respect, let me ask the question before you you answer it. It's a disaster. I'm kicking these people out. I agree with you. I go around the world now and I meet so many people who say when London is the greatest place in the world.

This is what he's like. You can't get a question in Edwards. Boris, I agree with you about billionaires. I agree that it's bad that we're losing wealthy people. I agree with you about all of that. I was talking specifically about Russia. And the question I want to ask you is, do you think we as a country, fail to understand what Vladimir Putin is or had become when he was murdering British citizens on

our streets with radioactive poisons. Do you think we failed back then? Because frankly, there were too many Russian oligarchs here making a lot of money for people in the city and elsewhere. And because of that, we were far too reluctant to go, oh, this guy is actually a hostile actor. I think when you look at things like the poisoning of Litvinenko and, you know, remember this poor guy who was a KGB guy and then... was poisoned with polonium and in that restaurant in London, tea. You know, that was terrible. And I think when looking back, you can see a certain gingerliness

in the way the British state responded to that initially, as my memory is. We were a little bit sort of, you know, we didn't do total freak out. And I think that probably, I think your point is probably right. I think that we, you know, we thought we had big equities with Russia, you know, maybe there was something, you know, maybe there was more to the Litvinenko thing than met the eye. And I think it is true that politicians from, you know, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton onwards, everybody, you know, David Cameron, all of us, everybody always thought. there should be a reset with Russia at some stage. And everybody who tried it ended up being bitterly disappointed.

And I got to put my hands up. I tried it. I said it in the book. I mean, I had this absolutely appalling. I did a trip to Moscow when I was foreign secretary. And it was absolutely ghastly. And, you know, we sat in the, not Soviet, the Russian. Felt Soviet, could it.

Russian foreign. And I was put in front of this roaring fire. and made to drink lots of, you know, glasses of coloured vodka. And it was like being, it was like a curious torture. It was made to get very, very drunk and very, very hot at the same time. And then have to listen to Lavrov's endless sort of sermonising. And we achieved nothing, absolutely nothing. And then, you know, I wanted to try and to find, you know,

scientific cooperation, artistic collaboration, things are where Britain and Russia could, you know, two great powers that had fought to defeat Nazism and so on, all the usual things. that you... Nothing. You know, nothing. And then a few months later, they, they did the Salisbury Poisonings. Yeah. Which was an absolute sort of two fingers up to the entire British public.

And then they had those guy, those goons, you know, sitting on, being interviewed on TV, saying, you know, we visited. We visited Sorbree. You know, they had the tallest spire anywhere in, you know, in Britain. And, you know, we went back again, the first. following day because it was too slushy the first day. And, you know, it was just... As a Russian, I find a terrible Russian action, deeply offensive, as far as I have to say.

I'm triggered. It was so, but it was painful, right? And they were laughing at us. Yes, they were. I think. And then they made him an MP one of those two guys. It's disgusting. It's disgusting. Anyway, let's mean... It was disgusting.

So, but somehow or other, we lost Russia. I still think that. I still think that there was a, There could have been a time in the 90s, probably quite early on in the 90s, when we could have had a different outcome for this thing, I think, because it is a great country. It is an amazing civilization. Of course. And it's a European civilization. It is.

And it's a tragedy. But right now it's very, very hard to fix. And it can only be fixed through strength. I only for strength. Agree with you. Moving to domestic matters, Boris, you've always been... Francis, yeah. You've always been a huge fan and supporter of net zero.

Why is that, Boris? Depends when net zero is achieved, but yes, I have. Yeah, I mean, I think, well, in the sense, I think... It depends what you mean by always, by the way, because if you look, sadly, if you read my... Oh, yeah, you had a dalliance with Pierce Corbyn. Many millions of...

Yeah. So millions of words I've written on this subject over the years. I've sort of, what happened really was I began as a pretty sort of acid, vinegory climate skeptic. And so I hated the sort of religiosity of the whole thing. And I hated the way you and people who were doing ordinary things, were made to feel bad. And I thought it was very preachy, and it was basically all a socialist plot

to try to stop people living their lives as they wanted and to sort of coerce people into certain patterns of behavior. And I hated that. And I thought it was like an Aztec religion. You know, the sun is cross, sun will fry us. And we must do, if we follow certain patterns, if we recycle, if we do all this.

So what changed in mind. And you will find terrible articles I wrote. saying that, you know, wind power never pull the skin off a rice pudding and all this sort of stuff. And so I started to change my mind basically when I got to City Hall in 2008. When, and for a long period, most of my time of City Hall, Pierce Corbyn was indeed the official City Hall meteorologist. Given his evolution since that is very troubling. I know, he's not sound on other issues. And I now think he's not right.

I now think on balance he's not right about global warming. And so what happened was, you know, I started really asking a lot of scientists. And admittedly, there, you know, there is a, you know, as we've seen in lots of big scientific questions, the scientists tend to coalesce around what is the acceptable position very often. But

here's what I thought. I thought and what really changed my mind. There wasn't a single Damascene moment. It wasn't looking at a hockey stick graph and thinking, my God, we're all going to fry. It was basically intuitive. It was getting up in a plane

the whole time as I did as Mayor of Blackson. I was doing lots of trade trips and then later as Foreign Secretary. Just seeing what You know, when I was born, there were about 3 billion people in the world. They're now getting on for 9 billion. It's a new...

I mean, the change is unbelievable. And you can... When you fly over Latin America, when you fly over Africa at night, and you see the fires burning burn all the way up. If you fly from the Cape to Cairo overnight in Africa, right? Try it. You look down. You see fire after fire after fire, the bush, the scrub, the jungle, burning, burning, burning.

And humanity encroaching everywhere. And you see the destruction that human beings are reeking on the planet, the spread of cities. And I sort of, you look down and just see the huge, huge numbers of people. And intuitively, I sort of think, well, look, we are clearly having. a colossal environmental impact. You know, whichever way you cut it, nature is being interfered with on a massive scale.

Maybe these guys are right when they talk about the atmosphere. And I thought, well, look, you remember Pascal's wager? Yes. Yes. About the existence of God. You should believe in God just in case he's real. Yeah. I thought, what's the downside if we're wrong?

Perfect. Well, let me stop you there. So I thought, I thought, what's the downside if we're wrong? And say, wait, wait, wait, I know what you're going to say. The downside is we impoverish people because we invest in lots of crap technologies than me. We force them to buy electric cars which don't work and blah. But no, no, but there's another part to it, Boris. Can I just make the point? Can I just make the point? That's not the only side. That is one side of it. The other side is we are facing an ever more unstable world where geopolitically things have become, the conflicts are springing up, left, right and centre.

Can we really afford to deindustrialize? Can we really afford to shut down steel power plants? And we really need to become stronger and more powerful in order to face an ever more... And energy prices are four times what they are in the US? I know. And they're crazy. So that's the trade-offs of this thing that you say is Pascal's wage. Well, yes, but... And it costs in this country what $50 billion?

All I'm asking you to believe in is that ultimately all I'm asking, all I was asking myself to believe. Yes. Yes. was that ultimately to bet on a cleaner world and a cleaner technology was long-term the right thing to do. And where I agree with you is that we rushed our fences. And, you know, you look at the, you know, a UK energy policy is, frankly, you know,

it's disastrous how expensive our energy is. And we totally failed to invest enough in nuclear. I mean, Labor was in for 13 years, didn't build a single nuclear power plant or even start plans for a single nuclear power plant. I don't think a single nuclear power plant. The Tories came in and, you know, Lee started things like Hinkley, admittedly at vast expense. When I was running, we set up Great British Nuclear, which had a plan to build, you know, really quite a lot of nuclear power. I think nuclear power has got to be part. But nuclear power is not, as everybody knows,

the sole answer. For the time being, you've got to have more hydrocarbons. And I perfectly accept that. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't... You shouldn't care about the environment, but no one's saying that. Well, then I think we're in hideous risk of agreement. Because... Yes.

So all I'm saying is... You know, it's like St. Augustine. You know, make me pure, but not yet, right? Well, we're in risk of agreement on the rhetoric, but I don't think that your time in government reflects the things that you're saying to us today. Well, I think it did. We've had it a massive drive on.

The energy prices we have now are partly because when you were in power, you either didn't do anything about it or made that more difficult, right? No, we did huge investments in nuclear. So why isn't energy become cheaper? Because we've had a massive spike in the oil price, largely driven by Ukraine. And we haven't done enough. So why don't we produce our own oil instead of shutting down? We should do.

We should do. And we should be using our own hydrocarbons. I agree. And I actually said that, I think, several times in the House of Commerce. But if you remember, sadly, in July 2022, I was no longer able to fulfill my mission. Yes. And so, you know. We'll talk about that in a second.

So I think most people in this country kind of get it. And I think most people are in the... People instinctively don't like pollution. They don't like screwing up the environment. They think the global warming probably is something in it. And on the whole, if they can get access to clean green technology, then they're going to want to go down that route. Yes, but Boris...

So the question is, how can you do that in a way that... Forgive me, but now we're not even remotely at risk of disgusting agreement because I don't agree with you about most people getting it. Most people, if you ask them, what is the downside of net zero and how much is it going to cost? They would say, oh, I didn't know there was a cost. That's the level of brainwashing we've had on this issue. No one talks about the fact that this policy has gigantic tradeoffs for our economy, for our ability to defend our country, for our ability to do things like defending Ukraine. We're basically losing the ability to make military-grade steel in this country. I know.

I remember... And that's because of Net Zero. I think all that's crazy. And by the way, we should be putting in special arrangements for places like Paul Torbott and all these other, the crucial, critical strategic steelmaking plants. They should have their own power-generating capabilities. And I don't know why, you know... All right, there's part that there.

We should... One other topic. We should definitely do it. One other topic before we go. go to our supporters. Thanks to today's sponsor, Venice. Have you ever wondered what chat, GPT and Claude are doing with your conversations? We already know that Alexa listens in and suggests products based on what we say,

and meta retargets us based on everything we click on. But think about what we share with AI, our ideas, business strategies, personal thoughts, sensitive questions and so on. And here's the kicker. This data isn't just stored. It's tied to your identity and passed along to third parties, sometimes even governments. You might have seen in the news that Deepseek, that AI app everyone's downloading, is actually sending unencrypted data straight to Chinese servers.

And here's a thing. It's not just Chinese companies we need to worry about. Chat GPT has close ties to government agencies and big tech firms, raising important questions about how our data is handled. If you've followed trigonometry for long enough, you'll know issues like this are close to our hearts. That's why we started using Venice AI, today's sponsor. Venice AI is a generative AI platform that is private and permissionless. It doesn't track you, doesn't sell your data, and certainly doesn't censor your requests. Unlike other AI platforms, Venice encrypt your messages and stores them only in your browser, not on their servers.

No downloads, no installation. just secure AI straight from your web browser. We use their pro plan, which comes with some serious perks. Safe mode off for unhindered image generation. Upload PDFs for summaries or insights. Modify the system to change how it interacts with you. If you want to use AI with privacy, freedom and without censorship, then right now you can get 20% of a pro plan

by clicking the link in the description of this episode and using R-code trigonomics. That link is venice.a.ai slash trigonometry. And now, back to the show. The one thing that many people feel was a big failure of, and this isn't just you when you were in power, it's the entire conservative government.

You pursued Brexit. You won Brexit, effectively, and ultimately you won the 2019 election on the promise to get Brexit done. Yeah. Brexit, I know it's more complicated and this is a reductive argument slightly. Well, Brexit was basically a referendum and immigration

for a lot of people, right? And like I said, it's a slightly reduced argument from the complexity of it, but it was to many, many people an opportunity to express how they felt about mass immigration, which under the Labor government, the Blair government, more people came into this country under that government than had come into this country between 1066 and 1950. Okay, pretty unprecedented, or extremely unprecedented, unprecedented.

And they expressed their views in the Brexit referendum and with the hope that both mass immigration and illegal immigration in particular, which is inerritant to people all over the political spectrum. What they wanted was to take back control. In order to do what? To take back? In order to do what?

In order to leave things that the same will make the worse? So that the politicians could rightly be held to account for the numbers of people coming in. Okay, so I'm holding you to account right now. I'm holding you to account right now. So let me do it. We had the Brexit referendum. You came in in 2019,

and under your government, we had what is now being described as the Boris wave, in which we had as many, if not more people, come into this country in a similar period of time. That's actually,

if you look at the, if you look at what actually happened, the numbers go down. We have a huge amount of people leave the country. Because of COVID. Because of COVID. Yes.

So the whole thing is complete bollocks. You then have a lot of students coming back to complete their courses. Right. Who push up the numbers in that so-called way. Yeah. You have, of course, because we're talking about 2022, we have a large number of Ukrainians coming in. You have Afghans coming into whom we owed duty.

You also have Hong Kongers. You also have Hong Kongers. What also happened, and this was not, you know, government policy, but it was something that was driven by the Migration Advisory Committee. You had a panic, if you remember, post-COVID, when nobody could get the shell. Do you remember this? There was a thing that would nobody get the shelves stacked?

Do you remember the leading up to the period when nobody was confident that the crops were going to be picked in the fields? And do you remember when the petrol station is going to get, to get fuel because there was a shortage of lorry drivers and all that. What happened was that the Migration Advisory Committee, and we were very worried about social care workers, or the officials were. And so, yes, I think they probably did hand out too many visas

or too many permits for people, plus their dependents to come in under those various schemes. But there were exceptional circumstances caused by COVID. And they were immediately remediable. Why have we got? Because we could have, because we had taken back control. No, no.

You say, no, Boris, I'm not going to let you get away with this. You say, you must. No, I'm not. You must. I refuse. I'm sorry, you might. There's a different point. You say we wanted, people wanted to take back control.

And now, even to this day, we have tens of thousands of people coming to this country illegally on small boats. Okay, good. How was that taken by control? I'm glad you said that. Where's the control? So, Constant, what you've conceded, which is the most important point, is that we have legal control over the people who seek to apply to Canada.

Now, I accept that there were exceptional circumstances after COVID, which led to what looked like some big numbers. But as I say, there were except for reasons for that. Now, because we control the numbers coming in legally, we can offset for that. And so we can get them right, right down, do whatever we want, have zero, right? Actually, under Kirstama,

thanks to his brilliant policy of persecuting anybody who's got an ounce of creativity in this country, people are fleeing Britain for the first time since the 1970s. They are. I mean, it's a miracle.

Both of you are still here, frankly, given your talent an enterprise. He's very good. Very good. It's a miracle. So we have formal control, which is the most important.

And don't forget, what Starmament is, wants and he would do if he could. No one here is a fan of Kirstar. But I think people, you know, there may be some fans of Kirstama watching this and they should know this. I don't think so. What they need to.

Why are there tens of thousands of people coming into this country on small boats? Because, so first of all, Stammer would go back to free movement. So 520 million people. Where's the control? Where's the control? The plan, I hugely admire what... Rishi Sunak just said stop the boats was the wrong slogan. We went too far.

He was, we should have, no, no, the problem was, the problem was that we, they didn't do what I told them to do. The problem was, seriously, that we should have continued with the Rwanda policy, which actually was the only policy that made any sense. And we should not only continue with it, we should have developed and expanded it, we should have found lots of other partners around the world because they're queuing up now. And look at what Trump is doing, putting people on the plane out of, that is what people wanted to see. Yes.

And we would have pulled that off. And as I said in my speech in April 22, I went down to Dover and I explained to everybody, look, you know, you've got to understand that this is going to take time because the legal objections will be enormous and there will be lawfare against me and people will try to screw this thing up. But we would have got it done. People said we couldn't get Brexit done. We got Brexit done. But I'm afraid from April to July 22 wasn't enough to. for me to do it. And then the whole thing lost momentum. You know, we now need, obviously, to come out of the ECHR, the European Convention on Human Rights. We need to, it was clear that the lawyers were going to use everything they could to stop it. But eventually we would have won. And I think the mistake has been to scrap the Rwanda plan and to make us defenseless. And that, you know, I don't know what the numbers are now, but they seem to be bigger than ever,

the people coming across the channel. The Rwanda plan was a great, great plan. And we should, we should, my advice to Kenny would be to come out of the EC, to campaign on coming out of the ECHR and reviving Rwanda. Because I agree with you. I think actually the British people, I mean, I've said what I've said about the numbers in 2020, whatever it was, when we were, 32, they were mainly driven by overrun. reaction to COVID. And actually, it also turned out, by the way, that it was a lot of remain hysteria

about European Union nationals. They said, so everybody, the Remain blob said, Brexit's going to be such a nightmare because all the three million European Union nationals will flee Britain, this leper colony, a horrible, hateful island that's voted for Brexit. and they'll never come back. You know, it'll be a disaster. Actually, what happened, first of all, they grossly underestimated. There were, in fact, six million, not three million.

And a lot of them did come back. So, you know, that certainly helped to, you know, change the numbers there. And they got that totally wrong. But the way to fix the problem is to be absolutely ruthless in stopping people coming here illegally. and in expelling those who do. And honestly, and this is not a popular point of view right now,

I think that some of the things that the Trump administration are doing a right. And I think that, you know, he seems like the Elon Musk cost-cutting stuff. Who doesn't? I like it. And I want you, you will find an unleashed. I told, I kept telling Rishi that I wanted to see this, and I kept telling every government department I wanted to see,

and the slaughtering of the sacred car, as I kept putting into, or Rishi pointed out that this was against Hindu religion. This became, like, I had to try and find another metaphor. But you do need, in government, it's very, very hard to cut. projects because they're all the legacy of some bloody politician or senior civil servants and people have their egos invested in them

and you can see this problem in the United States now and people endlessly produce mutilated stumps to bleeding stamps to show how cruel you're being but you've got to do it and I've got to go and I've got to go in a few minutes

I've got to go and see men about a goal seven minutes seven minutes seven minutes you have military precision for what he wants to see a man in what he concerned a man, seven minutes.

This is what he does. This is villainous stirring in French. I know what's going on. Anyway, our last question. Yeah, last question, and then we're going to ask you some questions from our supporters. All right. I think we might as well go to the supporters.

We've got seven minutes. Fine. Let's go to the supporters. So, we're heading over to subsect where you get to ask your questions to Boris. And he'll answer them in French, probably. Yeah, sure. Why did you think we should do

the Swedish model and then decide it against it. But if you are happy, you're the Prime Minister, why don't you just say, no, guys, we're not doing this? I'm a libertarian, I believe in freedom. I believe people should blah, blah, blah. That's your conviction.