Harry and Meghan - why can't the media leave them alone? | The News Agents

I have grave reservations about the Daily Mail, but you cannot look at that court judgment and think that it was anything other than a slam dunk for the Daily Mail and a humiliation, and a very expensive humiliation, for Prince Harry. In which case, it doesn't quite add up about why they're coming back. This is a guy who did fight for his country. He clearly likes Britain. He loves Britain. He's been part of the British firmament, the British state all his life, literally since he was born. He's a great loss to the royal family, not being part of it. 100%, and I think we shouldn't lose sight of that. I mean, the fact is, for all of the joy and schadenfreude that the press have about these two being estranged, I don't think anyone can doubt that their estrangement was a catastrophic loss for them as an institution that was seeking to renew itself. And we're told in this reporting I saw today, basically saying that the relevant committee that's responsible for deciding whether political figures get security is backed up. That reporting is correct, would be the British state at its very worst. I mean, you know, I'm sorry, we can't make a decision on this until nine months, because the committee won't meet before then. I mean, that is just nonsense. The News Agents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. This is a global production. When I first met my now husband, my friends were really happy because I was so happy. But my British friend said to me, I'm sure he's great. But you shouldn't do it because the British tabloids will destroy your life. That was Meghan Markle back in 2019, justifying, explaining why she and the Duke of Sussex and her, the Duchess of Sussex, had moved to the United States of America. They're now coming back. But it comes as Prince Harry has lost a major court case against the Daily Mail. So the tabloids will be as red in tooth and claw as ever. And he's not going to get a security detail provided by the state. So what has changed and what will be different if they do come back? Welcome to The News Agents. It's John. It's Lewis. And this story about Harry and Meghan, which I think even for royal reporters took them by surprise that there would be a reverse Megxit, as it was called at the time. After, of course, back in 2020, Harry and Meghan decided to step back from royal duties and they wanted a sort of half in, half out situation. That was something that was not apparently available for the royal household and the late Ever since then, of course, they've been living in a rather luxurious retreat in a $15 million home in Montecito, in California. And at the end of last week, we learned that both of them actually wish to return to the UK, apparently for just in time for the new school year to begin. And this has taken everyone by surprise because, of course, there has been such a, let's put it this way, I think it's fair to say a freeze in relations in the subarctic kind of territory between certainly William and Harry. And then we learned 24 hours later, or at least it was rumoured, that one of the reasons that Harry might be returning to the UK or be in a position to be able to do so is that Meghan may be returning to her former life, the Duchess of Sussex, as an actress with a potential role in a Netflix series, The Gentleman, which is subsequently, there's been some confusion about whether that is actually going to happen or not. Nonetheless, it is something that for the royal world and actually for reasons we'll get into, the British political world has come as a bit of a bombshell. Look, when they left, there were two things that kind of were the barriers, it seemed, to their return. One of them, and these have been publicly ventilated, was their resentment at the tabloid press. And we played that clip of Meghan Markle at the top of the podcast back in 2019, talking about how ghastly they are. On Friday, the day after they announced their coming back, Harry goes down in flames against the Daily Mail. The most excoriating judgment, he lost on all counts, damages are being awarded to the Mail, with Harry is going to have to cough up to pay an awful lot of the Daily Mail's legal expenses that will run potentially into millions of pounds because the insurance policy that the claimants took out doesn't cover all of the Mail's legal costs. So that's one area where you think, well, that doesn't make sense and that doesn't add up as a reason for coming back. And the other is that Harry said that he wanted to have security provided by the state because he is a public figure and the pair of them have faced threats and therefore he would need the British state to provide security. And Andy Burnham was asked about this and skirted around it quite elegantly, but essentially said, Harry, mate, you're on your own. Is the government going to establish their security and pay for it? Well, this is a private matter. It's a matter for Harry and for Meghan and we wish them well in the moves that they're making. Yeah, I think we should talk about the security element because I have to say, I don't know about you, John, I find the security angle and the fact that security hasn't been provided to them and to Harry as really quite perplexing. But before we get onto that, I mean, I just want to say something and I think this is in a way why this is worth talking about this story, about the press reaction to the fact of their return. And I have to say, I mean, as you know, the listeners and viewers know, I don't take a huge interest in what is going on in the royal family and with the Windsors, God bless them. And in many ways, there is very little about them or about their life that I have a great deal of sympathy for. Nonetheless, I think the reaction to this story has shown the British press and our media culture at its most ungenerous, most unforgiving, most unpleasant. Ironically enough, everything actually, in so many ways, the actual spirit of the average British person is not. And I would bet anything that the reaction to the idea of these two people coming back to Britain is at least to some extent quite significantly at variance to that. What do I mean by that? The whole tone, so sneering, so unpleasant, basically like, oh, now you're coming back, are you? Oh, now you wanted to come back, as opposed to what should just basically be a story about which on paper, right, should be quite pleasant thing. I mean, this is a guy who presumably pleasant thing out when unpleasant thing. This is a guy presumably wants to spend time with his father, who apparently we're told, although we're not told very much about it, continues to be quite ill, potentially quite gravely ill. These are two people who are coming back to the UK to a reaction which, among other things, I mean, The Sun, for example, published a piece, no sooner has the news dropped virtually, framed around Harry and Meghan's seven biggest hypocrisies, contrasting his return with Harry's previous security concerns, Meghan's reservations about raising children here and their description of royal life. Telegraph readers were treated to articles including, God help us all. God help us all. I mean, this is someone who at one point was, what, second, third, whatever it was, in line to the throne, simply coming back to the country of his homeland. It is bizarre and a sort of part of our media and political life that I just do not and cannot get my head around. I suppose that, okay, we know where you come from on the royal family. I suppose that if you are in the royal family and you are meant to keep the dignity of life in the royal family upheld and then you do a book-like spare and you do TV interviews with Oprah where you hang out the dirty laundry, it's not surprising that people might be askance at, hang on, what's changed? And the other thing about it is, okay, if it is about the king and his failing health, it certainly seems to have blindsided him that he was coming back. I mean, given the sensitivities involved, given the amount of Colin Minches it is going to generate, given the manner in which they left and the manner in which they've lived their lives in California and the illness that has kind of beset the royal family since then, you'd have thought there would have been a bit more planning, unrolling of the statement, and it just seemed to have caught everybody by surprise, as if it was the latest kind of Harry and Meghan manoeuvre. And I'm sorry to be cynical about it, but you have seen a lot of that, and I know people who worked for them before they moved back to California, and they're not the easiest, and you can just see the number of comms directors they've got through and all the rest of it. I'm sure Camilla's an absolute walk in the park by comparison. Well, I've no idea, but you don't hear the same number of resignations from the royal household as you do from those that are working for Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. The fact that they hadn't discussed it with the King, it seems, and that nothing had been sorted out. And then you get the sort of idea, not denied, that it's all about because she's got some acting role, which it seems she hasn't, because this play, this show that she was going to be in, The Gentleman, hadn't been commissioned. But this is what I mean, John, I saw all pieces criticising that, saying that she, even if she's a non-working member of the royal family, that she shouldn't be going back into acting. Good for her. No, I agree with that. If she wants to go back into acting, good. They can't win these people. And what I'm sort of trying to get at is this, he's right, is that you can look at it a different way, and I'm sure they're not easy people. I'm sure none of them are easy people to deal with. They are brought up in this institution which is deeply weird and encourages them to have a kind of weird dependency, well, not just encourages them, forces them to have a dependency on the British state and all the flunkies and all the courts. I get all of that. I'm sure it's not easy, they're not easy to deal with. And anyone who's read Spare can clearly see a pretty complicated man, an emotionally complicated man, not least for some very understandable and obvious reasons. But it's like, the whole reaction precisely encapsulates the reason they left the bloody country in the first place. I mean, you know, the British, I remember when they first left, I remember doing a piece about it on Newsnight in 2020, just before COVID. It was my first week back at Newsnight, and I was told, Lewis, I want you to do a piece on this. They said, well, I'm not really the royal editor. They said, yeah, but you are the policy editor, right? So, I mean, this is royal policy, right? I came to see just how much that yarn could be expanded over the course of the next year. But anyway, like, and I remember, like, explicitly, so much of the press at the time being like, they've had a brilliant press. How dare they complain about the press they've received here? How could they possibly say that? Well, let's just, like, look at the press they've received since the announcement that they're reversing that, right? As I say, like, the nastiness itself is part of the story. They left complaining about the extraordinary hostility of the press, and within hours of announcing they were coming back, sections of that same ecosystem responded by going, you failure, you hypocrite, you failed in California, you didn't do Netflix well, your podcast was ----, you're opportunist, God help us all. I mean, you know, the press couldn't have made the successes point better for them, in my view. Whatever their personal demerits and personal failings, which, about which we hear much, and about which is basically consistent, of course, we rarely see the press turn that lens upon themselves and maybe think about how they've, their part in the whole affair. No, I don't disagree with you on that. I think that, you know, some of the press coverage of Meghan Markle compared to, you know, Kate Middleton, it was, you know... They've had a worse press than Andrew at times, John, I would say. I mean, see, I'm not even joking. I've seen some people defend Andrew who've attacked Meghan. Yes, look, there is an absolute nastiness, I think, to a lot of the coverage. But I still think then that raises the question of, so why are they coming back, particularly given the scale of the defeat that Prince Harry had at the hands of the Daily Mail, where Judge Nicklin couldn't have been more explicit about the vexatious nature and the kind of jumped-up nature of the complaints that were made, and the fact that there was precious little evidence of anything that was alleged against the Daily Mail. I mean, you know, I have grave reservations about the Daily Mail, but you cannot look at that court judgment and think that it was anything other than a slam-dunk for the Daily Mail and a humiliation, and a very expensive humiliation, for Prince Harry, in which case it doesn't quite add up about why they're coming back. And I think that to raise the question and to speculate about it, or to just try and find a rational explanation, which I think we're trying to do here on the podcast, is not an unreasonable thing to do. No, I agree, of course. But I suppose the truth is, I mean, as ever with this press coverage, it's so binary. I mean, the truth is, there's probably all sorts of stuff going on, right, some of which none of us, neither of us know, and they won't know, and I'm sure some of it, I mean, look, some of it, doubtless, will be about the facts. And this is, again, I think, like, encapsulates for me the sort of sadness of his position and their position in so many ways. Look, doubtless, they did go to California, hoping to do well in all these sort of media businesses, and it hasn't really worked. When it worked, because they try and come up with podcast series that don't really work, or interview series that don't really work, because it's not really them, right? I mean, like, Harry, by all accounts, you know, at one point, was, you know, brainstorming with various podcasting companies, and one of the better ideas he could come up with is he would travel around the United States, sort of testing hot chocolate at different places, and then reviewing it. That's according to the New York Times. You know, we're not dealing with a media genius here. I think we can, I think we can all agree with that. The sad thing is, is where they're most marketable, and where they're most vital is when they're talking about themselves. Harry's book, what became the best non-selling fiction book, I think, of all time, because it was about himself, it was about his... But there's a law of diminishing returns on that, because once you've done it, you know, once you've said what life is like inside the royal tent, the second, third, fourth, fifth time you say it, it diminishes. Sure, indeed, but I suppose what I'm saying is that this is the sad thing about the story for me, in a way, if that is part of it, which I'm sure it is, which is like, here is two people, or Harry, you know, to some extent, he was forced out, to some extent, he tried to make his own way. As ever with the royals, they can't. Even when they've left the gilded cage, they're still part of another gilded cage, right? They're still at their most lucrative, their most vital, they're still in the column inches, they're still at their most relevant, basically when they're royal. And it seems to me that this return potentially is about that more than anything else. It's about the inescapable reality dawning on him, that basically, being royal is what he is. And even if he wanted to escape it, the tragedy is, he cannot. Do you think that? I mean, I just think that if they wanted, I mean, there was the story of Meghan Markle ringing up a couple of Republican and Democrat senators to lobby them. She's an American citizen. And she rings up and leaves a message as the Duchess of Sussex. And you think, hang on, so you're ringing up a US senator, which is a republic, because I think they got rid of the British royal family, if memory serves me correctly. They love a title more than we do. But what is she doing then, as a US citizen saying, could I have a conversation with you? I'm the Duchess of Sussex. So there are things that they have done. I mean, there's another theory about why they're coming back now, which sounds outlandish, but I'll run it past you anyway. Which is that once you have been out of the country for five years, you're non-domiciled for tax purposes. Which means that if you've got money in a business account, which has been I'm just guessing, if you've got 10 million quid in this account, a business account, and you wanted to take it out, well, if you're a UK taxpayer, you would pay tax on all of that. If they go off just before they come back from America and, I don't know, go to the Bahamas for a couple of weeks, then they could take it all out and none of it would be subject to tax. And so there's someone who they're saying there is a very neat tax explanation for why and why now. Well, who knows? Perhaps. I mean, you know, as I say, all of these things could have a confluence, couldn't they? It is also, I mean, we're never told about the King's health, which I, as we've discussed before, I find pretty extraordinary that we've got a head of state about whom we don't know the true condition of his health. We don't even know what type of cancer he's got, right? But apparently that's okay. That's just rude to ask, so fine. But we are, we do know he's ill. I mean, presumably it is not inconceivable that he wants to be near his father in what are almost certainly one way or the other, the twilight years. He's got two grandkids, the King, right? As far as I know, he has seldom seen also part of that. And also like, I'm sure some of these cynical reasons they're there. It's also true, I suppose, that, you know, this is a guy who did fight for his country. He clearly likes Britain. He loves Britain. He's been part of the British firmament, the British state all his life, literally. He's a great, he's a great loss to the royal family, not being part of it. A hundred percent. And I think, you know, we shouldn't lose sight of that. I mean, the fact is for all of the joy and schadenfreude that the press have about these two being estranged, I don't think anyone can doubt that their estrangement was a catastrophic loss for them as an institution that was seeking to renew itself, right? However difficult they were and are, and I'm sure all of that is true, just like many other members of the family, but nonetheless, however difficult they were and are, they did look different for obvious reasons. She was unbelievably glamorous, unbelievably... And that was initially the tone of all the coverage. Yeah, yes. But as you know, they build it up and they knock it down, right? And look, all I'm saying is whatever the rights and wrongs of the coverage and whatever, you know, the message that went out to some people, particularly younger people, who naturally would have gravitated to them and to her in particular, and the potential for renewal of that, it was a failing on the part of them as an institution not to find a way through that. Surely there could have been a way to keep them in the tent, right, pissing out rather than outside the tent pissing in. And then I just think that, you know, in terms of kind of, not least because, I mean, like the message this stuff sends out by having them estranged in this weird status. I mean, now there is genuine political discussion going on about whether he should have security, right? It should be paid. Now, it seems to me, I mean, I'm no... Again, I believe in a slimmed down royal family, but he is, insofar as I believe in it at all, but he's still a pretty senior member of the royal family. I do find it quite extraordinary that if he were to return to the country, I find it pretty extraordinary the British state doesn't pay for his security already. I mean, you know, I'm no fan of the registry principle, but if you've got it, the guy cannot help but be indelibly attached to the British state. He rather stupidly talked about the number of Taliban that he'd killed in Afghanistan, that made him a bigger target. And we're told, I mean, there's reporting I saw today, basically saying that the relevant committee that's responsible for deciding whether political figures get security is backed up and won't be able to review the case for some time, despite the fact that Harry has apparently been ringing up the Home Secretary in a state of some despair, trying to get an answer on it. I mean, what a shocking indictment of the British state, right? That if this fusty old committee just can't meet a few more times to kind of get through the backlog a little bit, that someone who is the king's son, who clearly would potentially be a security threat, as Lord Bungalunka is talked about today, is not able to be conferred security for him and his family. It seems pretty extraordinary to me. That would be, if that reporting is correct, would be the British state at its very worst. I mean, you know, I'm sorry, we can't make a decision on this until nine months because the committee won't meet before then. I mean, that is just nonsense. And so, of course, yeah, I think the security should be the least of it. And I think that, you know, if the Metropolitan Police or whoever are the people that do this, make a judgment. I mean, I do feel sorry. RAVEC, it's called. RAVEC. The Royal and VIP Executive Committee, RAVEC. Yeah. Are you sitting on that committee? Oh, believe me, it'll be a very short meeting. So I think that, you know, I do think that the protection, the role of the police offering protection to sort of significant people in this country, they are probably massively overstretched right now, given the threats that there are to MPs, given that you're widening the number of cabinet ministers who have security, given the fact that we have 10 former prime ministers who all, you know, need protection 24-7. You know, the diplomatic protection squad needs expanding, seriously. But the idea that Harry wouldn't get any security at all does seem nonsensical when, you know, if he was to walk kind of into Leicester Square now, he's going to be mobbed. There's going to be a crowd around him. And just to navigate some of that doesn't seem unreasonable. I mean, I have got a potential solution, John. I'm willing to offer it to the public if... Let's hear it. Well, in terms of paying for it. Now, I'll say, preface this by saying I think the British state should pay because it's not his fault he was born where he was, and I think he and his family clearly deserve it. But if, for whatever reason, RAVEC isn't going to meet until October 2029 or whatever, then, of course, there is an interim solution, which is his extremely loaded dad, the King, could put his hand in his pocket, just a thought, to provide security for his second son and his two grandchildren and his daughter-in-law. Not least, as we learned last month, that King Charles is for the third year in a row due to receive a bumper settlement from the British taxpayer as a result of a boom of one billion in profits for the Crown Estate via the offshore wind sector. Because for some bizarre reason, the Crown literally owns the seabed around this country, there is an offshore boom in wind going on, for which the Crown receives a fee, obviously, and then quite a bit of that goes back to the taxpayer, but quite a bit goes back to His Majesty. So, just a thought, Chuck, you could put your hand in your pocket. Did you just call him Chuck? His Majesty Chuck. HMC. But I suppose, look, that would still be taxpayers' money. I mean, I suppose there is kind of an element in this in which we are saying that the Royal Family is more accountable in all of this about who receives security and not, and that there is more transparency about some of these issues. I mean, I know, it's still an absurdly opaque institution, and I kind of, I think it's either got to be totally secret or completely open, because I think a halfway house in our media age is just, you know, the figures that you've just given just beg too many questions about, you know, why it's a British state. If Princess Anne gets it. Of course, well, I was thinking that earlier, but then I remembered that she did get, someone did try and kidnap her in them. She did, yeah. I did. Yeah. I was reading about that today. I didn't know much about it. It turns out, I didn't realise that she was saved by a boxer who just happened to be walking past Buckingham Palace. Yeah. Punched the assailant, who now claims that he was put up to it in a self-published memoir. I wonder why he couldn't get a publisher. Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so they can own us, and I promised that that will never, ever happen. We are keeping that promise. Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America. We are already giving ourselves more than they can take away, and we are just getting started. That is Mark Carney in an address to the nation following the breakdown of trade talks between Canada and the US, and the war of words at the moment between those two nations has really intensified, and if you think that they are the closest of neighbours, that Canadians have always fought alongside Americans in endless wars over the past century, that they have been the most loyal dependable of allies, and Trump is absolutely seething and thinks that Canada is ripping America off. Indeed, posted in the last half hour, Canada will be treated like a state no longer on trade and in other ways. Also, they are among the worst nations in the world to deal with. They feel entitled and yet... Among the worst? The Canadians? Yeah, and they feel entitled and yet, block capitals now, we don't need Canada, they need us. They do 95% of their business with the US, with us the exact opposite. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J Trump. So that is his riposte to the fact that I think, you know, there are differing accounts of why the talks broke down. Are you going to believe Donald Trump, or are you going to believe the Canadians? I'll just put that out there, but apparently the Americans completely moved the goalposts at the last minute and the Canadians said enough. I'm just loving the idea that Canada, a nation of Ned Flanders, could possibly be considered among the most difficult countries in the world to deal with. Famously the most polite, lovely, gentle... North Korea? China? Russia? No, no, no, no, the Canadians, they're bastards, honestly, they're impossible. But the interesting thing about it is that Trump has made this calculation that, look, we don't need Canadian oil, we don't need Canadian lumber to build all our houses, and the fact of the matter is that Americans do. I mean, it's absolutely true that America is a net exporter of oil, but American oil refineries need the sort of type of heavy crude that comes from Canada. There are no pipelines going from Texas up to the upper Midwest of America. So if the Midwest, which is the industrial heartland of America, is to continue to function, it needs Canadian oil. And yeah, it's true that there is American lumber as well, it's just that Canadian wood is better for building houses. So it's going to affect everything in America too. And the Wall Street Journal, which is not normally the most sympathetic of voices to the liberal views of America, has gone on the absolute warpath about how stupid this is on the part of America and said, you know, this is one of the dumbest things ever, it can't be justified politically or economically. So, you know, but Donald Trump is absolutely doubling down, as he always does. Indeed, and I think actually, obviously, this is part of an ongoing long-term saga about, you know, US-Canadian relations and, you know, viewers and listeners will remember different moments when, you know, Trump slapped tariffs on and then taken them away and put them back on again. But I think this is a particularly kind of meaningful moment precisely because of where and about what the talks seem to break down, or at least a sort of big component of it, which is, this wasn't just about, you know, particular tariff rates on particular products in either direction, which I think, you know, the Canadians could live with, you know, they were willing to give more on that. People or Canadian, people close to Carney, sort of briefing the Canadian press and others, basically say that, you know, what this was about and the reason they had to walk away, which is very revealing of Trump's mindset, is that what Trump really wanted to do was place a permanent limit on Canada's ability to conduct trade deals. In this, you might argue there's some sort of glimmers of some of the Brexit negotiations when we're talking about, we'll be part of the custom union and people said, no, we couldn't do that because, you know, we couldn't do our own trade deals. Basically, cut a long story short, one of the big demands which apparently came out of relatively nowhere is that the US government wanted to basically reduce or take away entirely a key lever of economic policy decision making for Canada in terms of, as I say, making other trade deals with other countries, which would further pull it in to the American economic orbit, which is, of course, all part of the wider design about which Canadians now are deeply, deeply sceptical of America, which has been under the Trump administration, basically making Canada not just into the closest American allies, not just close within the American economic orbit, which it's always been, but actually a 51st state and clearly in terms of that degradation of sovereignty, Carney wasn't willing to wear it. The thing about a trade war is that you've got to be able to withstand suffering on both, you know, if America is to win the trade war, and it's absolutely true that, you know, America as an is probably seven or eight times the size of Canada's. Canada is still a G7 economy in the world, so it's one of the biggest economies in the world, but has nothing compared to the US, so the US should be able to withstand much more pain. What you've got at the moment is that approval ratings for Carney are mid-60s, disapproval mid-30s, and for Trump it's the other way around. You know, Trump's approval ratings are low 30s. So if it comes to a trade war, who is going to be most motivated to win and see this through? I think it's going to be the Canadians. They feel that this is an absolute affront, and I don't know how much support Trump enjoys with declaring war on Canada and painting them, ludicrously as you say, Lewis, as these terrible, difficult, appalling people, you know, when the North Koreans, the Russians, and the Chinese are just such pussycats. Well, David Frum, the former Bush-era administration official, but himself Canadian, wrote a very good piece in the Atlantic today, John, exploring exactly some of those points, which he makes a point, which is exactly right, which is that Trump always comes at these things thinking that we're the biggest, we've got the biggest economy by far, we can call all the shots, we have complete leverage, you have no leverage. It's that language to which we become very familiar, you know, most famously exemplified with Vladimir Zelensky, of course, you know, you've got no cards, with us you've got cards, you've got no cards. That's how he thinks. It's zero-sum game in every direction, military policymaking, economic policymaking, doesn't really matter, that's how he thinks. But of course, as ever, the world, although it might have a kernel of truth, the world's way more complicated, right? So if we look at already what's happened with tariffs at the moment, yes, the Canadian economy has suffered as a result of the tariffs already there, but actually, why has the Canadian economy kept growing when a lot of people thought that it would slow down or maybe even fall into recession as a result of Trump's tariffs? Well, actually, it's because of Trump's war. The Iran war, which has led to booming demand for Canadian oil, for Canadian gas, for Canadian minerals, for Canadian food products, Canadian economies kept on growing precisely because Trump's policy in one direction is going in that, in one place, and in another direction he's going to another, and the president has no real conception of the fact that these variables move in different directions. And then you think about, just generally speaking, we're coming up to the midterms, for example, at the moment. What's one effect of all of this? America is a massive exporter of alcohol to Canada. Alcohol sales have collapsed. And yet, if you look at some of the big swing states for different races in these midterms, whether it might be even Ohio, Michigan, even Minnesota, all places bordering the Canadian border, or close to, they're currently, what are big midterm issues? These tariffs, which are now going to become even more intense and the Republican Party is going to put more pressure on Trump to unwind. And this just happens again and again and again. So the true picture of American versus Canadian political power and who can withstand this for the longest is more complicated than it might otherwise appear. Look, remember, you know, I was out in Canada for the elections last year. And the fact of the matter was that the reason that Mark Carney is the prime minister now is because Donald Trump is the president of the United States of America. They couldn't stomach the Canadians having a conservative who was going to be closely allied to Donald Trump. They want someone who's going to fight their corner. And you'd go into a kind of an off-license, a wine merchants in, you know, any state in Canada and any province in Canada, and you're going to find that the shelves where once they were stocked with Californian or Oregon Pinot Noirs or Cabernet Sauvignons, there's nothing there because Canadians do not want to buy American goods. The number of tourists going from Canada to America has fallen off a cliff. No one wants to go there. You know, so the Canadians are the ones who are digging in and saying, **** you, Donald. We don't want a part of any of this. Meanwhile, as you said, you know, Carney and his government's policy is enjoying 60% approval rating, which is pretty unusual in a multi-party democracy, right? Like 60%. Meanwhile, Trump's is at 33% and falling. And I know that you keep a close eye on these things, John, particularly kind of international metals prices and so on. Do you happen to know if we in Europe, if you and I were to put in an order tonight, not sure exactly how you do that, but if we, and I were to put in an order tonight for a ton of aluminium, how much would it cost us? Three and sixpence. A couple of farthings. All right. No, it's $3,000 a ton for aluminium, but Americans are currently paying more than $5,000 a ton precisely because, precisely because of the tariffs that Trump has imposed. And that affects absolutely so many, because aluminium is such a key commodity, is affecting construction, food, everything you can imagine in America that's driving up inflation. And that is just one commodity. And it's actually been estimated that the average American family is now facing $1,100 a year of extra cost just as a result of the Canadian tariffs. Because, precisely because, for all intents and purposes, for many years, the United States and Canada, to a lesser extent, Mexico, have been becoming part of one economic block and their economies, as ours was with the EU, increasingly interwoven. And you are an idiot, a fool, if you think that you can unpick that and unwind that without some of it affecting you. So you may have seen or heard the Prime Minister, Sandy Burnham, is making his first foreign visits today, and perhaps unsurprisingly is to Kyiv. He took the train overnight, turning up in Kyiv this morning. He's making, he's with the so-called Coalition of the Willing, other leaders, and making or unveiling a series of announcements on sharing of defence technology with Ukrainians, UK, French technology. But inevitably, the outrage machine this morning wound up, it's always wound up, the outrage machine, that is its permanent state of being. But no sooner had he got off the train, Andy Burnham, that he was pictured not wearing a suit, not wearing, fortunately enough, military fatigues, but wearing sort of a t-shirt, sort of looked like a sort of M&S kind of like style, you know, stylish stuff, but it was a sort of t-shirt, sort of thing we've expected to see from Burnham, with a little zip and trousers. And he was accused online, almost instantly, of letting the country down by not wearing appropriate attire for going to see a foreign leader. I just marvel at the inconsequential nonsense that people can get vexed about. Because for God's sake, you know, once he had got off the train and was doing, partaking in official functions, and you know, the 35th anniversary of Ukrainian independence and all the rest of it, he's in a suit and tie. Do you reckon they're bothered in Kyiv? What do you reckon they're more bothered about? Exactly. They're more bothered about getting access to the materials that you need to make storm shadow missiles to defend themselves against Russian attacks and be able to strike deep into Russia, to make Russia think again about the costs of this war. I do not think they give a flying **** about Andy Burnham and whether he's got a suit and tie on. As it happens... What do they not mean, John? I don't know. As it happens, he does get changed into a suit and tie. He was on, I think it's an 11-hour train journey, that takes you to Kyiv. I mean, bloody hell. I mean, who cares what he's wearing on the frigging train and being photographed getting off it? Well, look, I am generally of the view, as you know, I worry about the decline in our sortatorial standards, generally in politics. I do think... I hated it. I did hate it when, I mean, you know, Boris used to look an absolute scruff. I hated the way he looked. And he only got away with it because he was a Conservative. If a Labour Prime Minister dressed like that, they would have been slapped. Well, Michael Foote. Exactly so. But Johnson wore a suit and still looked a scruff. I would say, in fairness to Burnham, that actually he always... Yeah, he doesn't wear a shirt and tie all the time, but he always looks smart. He always looks well turned out. And it is possible and actually desirable to have, and he did in the past, to have like more variety in male clothing in politics than we have in recent years. So I think as long as you're looking smart, why not? It's absolutely fine. Honestly, there are things I will lose sleep over tonight. What Andy Burnham wore on the train going to Kiev will not be... Can you imagine if Zelensky brought it up? You've been disrespected. You've got no cards to play. You've got no cards, Andy. You've got no cards. You look scruff. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. The News Agents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. 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