Alistair Campbell

So it's nothing to do with the Houthi.

The southern bit began to split apart.

The UAE massively advanced.

Over months, it looked like they had seized the oil fields in the center of the country.

And then the Saudis turned around and said, we're not having any of this.

Bombed an Emirati vessel coming in with arms into the port.

The UAE withdrew its troops and the Saudi government has now pushed all the way down south to Aden again.

Over to you.

Yeah.

The story...

seems to have been that when Mohammed bin Salman was first established as the crown prince and pushed aside his cousins, and there was this famous, essentially, kind of internal palace coup, he looked to Mohammed bin Zayed, the great figure in UAE, as his mentor.

Yeah, he's an older man, and the two of them were sort of lockstep.

Then some of the problems maybe began to emerge about the fact that

The Saudi plan for development, which was to develop a tourism sector, get hold of quantum computing and AI, bring over finance and banks, began to seem suspiciously similar to the sort of UAE-Jubai development model.

So there was a bit of an economic competition.

Then you say they went into Yemen together.

And of course, in Yemen...

This is the beginning of the relationship between UAE and the Sudanese because it was Hameti and the RSF that were being paid as mercenaries by UAE to fight in Yemen.

That's where that kind of relationship comes from.

UAE then led under the last Trump administration, the Abraham Accords, getting Morocco, Bahrain, and UAE to sign a deal with Israel.