Rory Stewart

He's been very patient with me as always.

He's in a better place than he was.

Just to remind people, he was in real trouble three years ago.

He's been politically dead so many times.

Really, the assumption was before October 7th that he was finished, right?

And his opinion polling was terrible.

I think public opinion is sort of nearly 80% of Israeli opinion is behind this Iran thing.

I mean, it's a sign in a sense that Israel is now operating in a completely different media space from the rest of the world.

I've never seen such a dramatic difference between what Israelis assume, which is they just take it for granted that what they're doing in Iran is completely justified, makes perfect sense,

while actually the vast majority of the American population is horrified.

Just quickly on this.

I mean, we don't know because this is something Rob Malley said that we would not be at all surprised that if before this podcast went out, Trump announced a massive new phase or if he suddenly announced the war was over.

But one thing I think that we can be pretty confident of

is that even if Trump stops his military operations, in a sense, the war will not be over because the way in which senior Israeli figures are talking is that they will go back and back and back into Iran whenever they want.

They can go back in three months' time, six months' time, nine months' time.

Because what they're going to do is attempt to perpetually degrade the military infrastructure and probably degrade the entire state structures and government structures around.

They would much rather have a failed, weak state that's not a threat to Israel than have a coherent nationalistic state.

I'm going to add in Boris Johnson.

Absolutely extraordinary.

I mean, Boris Johnson absolutely just out there again and again saying anybody who remotely questions what the US is doing in Venezuela or Iran...