Rory Stewart

I'm maybe not as senior as Chris Patton, but we're now in a world in which it's almost unimaginable that a former politician could be chair of the BBC.

But you presumably didn't feel as worried as you did when he went in front of Hutton or judge-led or lawyer-led inquiries.

Because what I discovered watching select committees, and the masterclass was always William Hague, is that if you turned up and massively flattered the committee...

They all curled over.

It didn't matter which party they came with and took it.

I think a lot about that.

They've learned that, right?

The only people who get in trouble are the people who try to be antsy and argue back against the committee.

And then the MPs can sort of slightly wake up and start going a bit harder.

But if you spend your whole time being incredibly subservient and polite to them, the MPs are so flattered to have a foreign secretary or a chairman of the BBC be polite to them, which is not their normal experience in their constituencies, that they stop asking hard questions immediately.

Yeah.

So this, of course, is about the West Bank, not Gaza.

In other words, those bits of Palestinian territory in the West, towards Jordan.

So Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, etc.

Fundamentally, the Palestinian economy is an import economy that's completely cut off from the world, and it's controlled by the Israeli state, divided up into areas A, B, and C.

And before October the 7th, it was often in trouble because of security rationales.

So checkpoints go up, difficult to move back and forth.

But since October the 7th, the finance minister, Bezal Smotrich, who is on the very, very far right of Israeli politics, has used his position as finance minister to completely cripple the economy of the West Bank.

It's been very good work done by a man called Jost Hiltemann, who's connected with the International Crisis Group.

We interviewed Comfort Iroh from the ICG a bit earlier.