Is this the beginning of the end for Vladimir Putin? Did Boris Johnson overrule MI6 during his time as Prime Minister? Will Sunak be able to control inflation?
Rory and Alastair answer these questions, plus look at the situation in Cambodia, political activism in Guatemala, Rory's time in the Foreign Office, and much more.
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Welcome to The Rest Is politics with me, Rory Stewart,

And Alistair, a lot to get through today.

We're going to begin, of course, with Russia, Ukraine, because we're right in the aftermath of this mutiny by the Wagner or the Wagner group.

Then we're going to talk about Boris Johnson's relationship with Russia and in particular with a man called Lord Lebedev.

Then we're going to talk about interest rates and what's happening in the British economy and then we're going to talk a little bit about Southeast Asia and what's happening in Southeast Asia, a region we haven't haven't studied much but where would you like to begin?

Well let's let's start with you're a Wagner man and I'm a Wagner man.

Yes it's a funny 1 that I mean obviously the German composers called Wagner but for some reason a lot of the Russian analysts that I talked to call it Wagner.

So I'll need to get to the bottom of this.

Well, it's probably because they've named it.

So neither its founder nor its owner is prepared to say what it's named after or why it's called that.

It might just be a set of letters if I have nothing to do with the great somewhat right-wing musician.

Now, yeah, well, you said when we did the emergency podcast at the weekend, you said something quite interesting.

You said this could turn out to be sort of fizzle out in no time.

I think we were talking days or it could become a major turning point in the whole conflict.

I mean, at the moment, it looks like fizzle out.

But at the same time, listening to people like Alex Younger, the head of former head of MI6 and listening to Secretary of State Tony Blinken yesterday and other analysts, they seem to be thinking it's like, if not a turning point, quite a big moment in the decline of Putin.

So just to remind listeners very quickly what happened since our emergency podcast.

So, Prigoshin got quite a long way, or at least his people got a surprisingly long way up the road towards Moscow.

Looked as though the National Guard, which was this, these interior ministry troops that were meant to be defending Putin, were not really intervening, they were falling back.

There was footage of Moscow apparently being prepared for defense against their attack.

And then suddenly, that evening, an announcement came that the president of Belarus had negotiated with Prygorzhin, negotiated with a man that runs the Wagner-Wagner group, and that Prygorzhin had decided that in the interests of peace and stability, he was going to turn his troops around.

He was going to go into what seems to be exile, probably in Belarus, And the whole thing was over.

There's been some great descriptions by Steve Rosenberg, who's been going through Steve Rosenberg is Alistair's hero, who's a great musician, but also the long term BBC correspondent, Moscow, who's been going through the Russian newspapers.

And there's been some extraordinary reporting there because as you can imagine, they are basically saying, this is insane.

This is the most terrible humiliation to the state, except for the most loyal Kremlin newspaper, which of course saying, this shows the incredible genius of Vladimir Putin, his stock will rise in the world because he alone managed to bring this thing to an end.

Anyway, what's your sense about how Putin comes out of this?

I don't think anybody comes out of it terribly well, neither Pugosian who did his sort of Bonnie Prince Charlie up as far as Derby and then turned around.

And, but also I think it does weaken Putin.

I, as you know, am in pretty regular contact with the opposition or the exiled opposition in Belarus.

And I was talking to them yesterday and again today.

And they actually think that, because Lukashenko, you have to remember, is pretty much the only 1 left.

He's the only 1 left over whom, if you like, Putin has complete control.

So Lukashenko is trying to sort of present himself as the sort of, you know, the mediator in this.

But actually what his opposition is saying is that this was Putin basically ordering him to be the person that they could say was doing this so that Putin didn't have to look like he was operating on a par with somebody like Pugosian.

They believe that Pugosian will not be able to stay in Belarus, that Lukashenko doesn't want him there, that he could cause just as much trouble for him as he's been doing for Putin.

Thinks that he'll do some kind of deal with him, probably financial, to get him out of the country and get him to to Africa.

And also that they do think that this has weakened both Putin and Lukashenko.

Their big thing now is they've still been trying to get Lukashenko indicted by the International Criminal Court and partly over some of the sort of, you know, using, getting children in there and all that stuff.

So the truth is I don't think any of us know, including Steve Rosenberg.

I think a hero overstates it, but he's a very, very good journalist.

And I'll tell you the thing that I would I would strongly recommend if you don't already people should follow Garry Kasparov.

Garry Kasparov the former great chess grandmaster who I know quite well I interviewed him for my winner's book and I've interviewed him a couple of times since for different places.

And he's the guy who coined the phrase mafia state.

And he is basically saying anything that comes out of the Kremlin now is almost certainly untrue.

And he also says that it's interesting, he basically says that there's nothing that can emerge in the immediate aftermath of Putin that actually the West can or should treat with.

In a sense, I guess, suggesting there has to be collapse before people can actually start to rebuild.

And you've talked, you've raised this issue of Belarus, which we should maybe talk about at more length on another occasion, because it's fascinating.

And it is the last great autocracy on the edge of democratic Europe in this bizarre union with Russia.

Lukashenko looked as though he was in trouble a few months ago, but actually clamped down.

He has been involved in these extraordinary moves of trying to shove refugees across the border to disrupt the Polish border.

And my connection with it, I was briefly up to be the British ambassador to Belarus.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would have been 1 of your ambassadors.

Yes, exactly, that's right, exactly, it's 2005.

So I was, um, I'm very excited by the idea because at that time people were very optimistic and people thought it could be an incredible job.

You'd go into Belarus since 2005 and you'd be part of the movement to get the last dictatorship on the edge of Europe, you know, moving towards democracy, potentially even joining the European Union and all this kind of thing.

And here we are, of course, almost 20 years later.

And what's more, do you remember when we've talked about this before, we talked about the guy, I can't remember his name now, but the guy who was where the Belarusians essentially hijacked a plane and got that guy who'd been a kind of, you know, big critic of the regime.

He's now out there on social media the whole time, basically as a spokesman for the regime.

So, no, Lukashenko is a, he's a strong man on 1 level, but what these guys are saying, he's utterly dependent on Putin, therefore will do whatever Putin tells him, whether that is providing Belarus's military infrastructure to help with the bombing campaign, the illegal deportation of the Ukrainian children, or being the middleman in these talks with with Pugosian.

Just out of interest, Roy, why didn't you go to Belarus?

In the end, I was persuaded to go to Afghanistan instead.

went off to set up the charity in Afghanistan.

I think your book, Walking Across Belarus, would have been less of an international bestseller.

I think maybe 1 conclusion we can take from this is a reminder of the fact that the Russian state is still stronger than some people believe.

That ultimately, Prygosian must have calculated a bit like your friend Bonnie Prince Charlie on Derby, that actually there was no way of making it to the capital city.

But was that not obvious to him from the word go?

Which should have been 25, 000 soldiers marching up against half a million interior ministry.

Apparently only 5 that were actually there at the time of the turnaround.

That's like a Burnley away turnout, you know, when we're playing Preston North End, but it's not exactly...

I mean, it's a big size growing of people, but you're not going to take on the Russian army.

So this is also a reminder of the challenge that the Ukrainians are going to face in their counteroffensive.

So this has been much, much talked about for many months now.

And what we've seen is Zelensky traveling around the world, acquiring aircraft and tanks and many other things.

And the whole idea and this is something we'll be talking to General David Petraeus about on leading very soon, is to put together this huge all-arms offensive to try to drive through.

1 is that the breaking of the dam by the Russians has meant that they don't need to worry so much about a lot of their flank, which is now flooded with water, so they can concentrate up on the northern edge of their flank.

The second thing is that there isn't still much air power on the side of the Ukrainians.

And it's very difficult to think of a historical example of a nation being able to advance against a very, very well prepared defensive line like this.

This is not like the Germans turning against the Russians in the early 1940s.

The Russians have been hunkering down, there's going to be layer after layer of defence, minefield after minefield.

It's going to feel, I'm afraid, much more like trying to advance on the First World War.

You know, when you said earlier that maybe we've underestimated the strength and power of the Russian state.

Just as a counterpoint to that, do you get Foreign Affairs magazine or do you see Foreign Affairs magazine?

I've even written for Foreign Affairs magazine.

Well, I like Foreign Affairs magazine and they have this thing called, I think it's from the archive, and they posted this weekend a piece that came out right in the aftermath of the invasion.

And it was by a guy called Boris Bondarev, who was a...

He'd been a diplomat in the Russian foreign ministry for 20 years.

He was stationed in Geneva at the time of the invasion and he resigned.

And he wrote this piece and he's essentially defected.

He tells the story of how his wife came to visit him then had to go back and get their cat and it involved an extraordinary sort of, you know, a trip to get back safely.

1 of the things, the really sort of big points that he made, he said that, if I'll just read you a very short section from his piece, for me, 1 of the invasion central lessons had to do with something I'd witnessed over the preceding 2 decades.

What happens when a government is slowly warped by its own propaganda?

For years, Russian diplomats were made to confront Washington and defend the countries meddling abroad with lies and non sequiturs.

We were taught to embrace bombastic rhetoric, to uncritically parrot to other states what the Kremlin said to us.

But eventually, this is the key point, the target audience for this propaganda was not just foreign countries, it was our own leadership.

In cables and statements we were made to tell the Kremlin that we had sold the world on Russian greatness, we had demolished the West's arguments, We had to withhold any criticism about the President's dangerous plans.

This performance took place even at the ministry's highest levels.

And he talked about how disappointed the Foreign Service was that Lavrov, Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister who they respected at 1 point, just became the ultimate total yes man.

So I'm going to get myself in huge trouble doing this because I'm aware by doing this, I seem again to be comparing Boris Johnson to Vladimir Putin.

I do not think Boris Johnson is Vladimir Putin.

But there is something serious about this question about speaking truth to power and letting diplomats do it.

This was something that I felt Boris Johnson was beginning to do to the Foreign Office.

I came in as the Minister of State, so I was number 2 beneath Boris Johnson when he was Foreign Secretary.

That must be a horrible thing, Brodie, to consider yourself to be beneath Boris Johnson.

And it involves wandering down a corridor once a week to this enormous office, which could have accommodated about 150 people looking out over St.

And Boris Johnson's sitting at 1 end of the table with a little sort of note of the things he's trying to do this week.

But 1 of the things that was so disturbing was that we were beginning to get reporting from our diplomats on the ground, which was saying every week, another win for global Britain.

And I eventually called in all the ambassadors from my region of the world and said, please stop doing this.

Why don't you talk about some of our weaknesses, some of our failures, talk about what the US is doing, what China's doing.

Don't give the impression that Britain's running the whole continent.

And this got back to Boris Johnson and he called me in And it was the 1 time I'd actually seen him genuinely angry.

And he said to me, Rory, I hear you're contradicting the instructions I'm giving to the ambassadors.

So I said, look, I think it's very important that we have honest reporting.

And the way you win a rugby match is by telling the team that they're the best.

You've got to boost them, get the morale going.

And I said, this isn't a 75 minute rugby match.

Incidentally, having been teased about my complete lack of understanding of the length of a rugby match, I just want to point out to the audience for a second that Alistair showed us his dog who was making extraordinary noise in the back of the screen.

And I can reveal for those of you who believe that his dog is a Rottweiler, it is not.

The Civil War, It was always the standoff between the cavaliers had those spaniels and the other lot had the pugs.

So I think that there is something serious here, which is that you have to allow your civil servants to dissent.

And the creation of echo chambers is at the heart of everything that goes wrong in government because the general tendency of government is optimism bias, you know, confirmation bias, everybody getting around a table blowing smoke up the arse of the boss.

And Boris Johnson was actually making this much, much, much worse.

Well, this other Boris, Boris Benderoff, he actually makes that very point.

He said it was like living in an echo chamber.

And he said it was particularly bad after the attempted assassination of Skripal in Salisbury, where if you remember a British woman ended up being killed just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And he said that they were all basically the telegrams are all coming in from embassies around the world saying, you know, that we've persuaded the foreign ministry that the British have just this is just a conspiracy theory it's part of Russia phobia and so forth.

He said I saw data reports for example that mentioned Ukraine's non-existent biological weapons.

I walked around our building, effectively a long corridor with private offices for each diplomat, and noticed that even my smart colleagues had Russian propaganda playing on their TVs all day.

It was as if they were trying to indoctrinate themselves.

And that is when the state, in a sense, the function of the state collapses if you don't have the ability, because how protected is Putin?

I know how well protected he is, but it will be on a different level at the moment.

The fact that he now has 2 planes flying out whenever he moves, one's the decoy and one's him on it.

The fact that he is, I would suspect, and we mentioned on Saturday, a lot of people have pointed out now that he looked genuinely quite, not scared, but he looked very, very tense at the weekend.

And trying to tell the Russian people that this has been an act of strength to send Prigozhin back with a tail between their legs, I think is nonsense.

And I don't think the Ukrainians will be sort of feeling as chipper as they were when they first heard it because it looked like it was going to be a big moment, but at the same time it suggests that he's been very fundamentally weakened.

Well, should we talk about your former boss then?

The man, I can't believe that you actually had to work beneath Boris Johnson.

Anyway, Roy, that must be very hard to deal with.

So last night, did you watch the link I sent you?

And we can get into the details of what it shows, but maybe tell listeners a little bit about what it was that you sent me and when they can actually see it because I thought it was incredible watching.

We're recording this on Monday and the program goes out on channel 4 tomorrow night Tuesday but because I was aware of that I asked them if they could send it to us so that we could talk about it.

So it's the story of the way that the Lebedevs, this is Alexander Lebedev, former KGB scuppi, and his son Evgeny, who owns newspapers in the UK and is sort of part of the London Glitterati, how they cemented their positions in British political life, including when we were in power, I'd completely forgotten that it was Peter Mandelson who was in charge of, I think under Gordon Brown, when the standard went through for Lebedeff and his line was, well, who else is going to take it over?

But then when it gets really interesting is when you get to Boris Johnson being Foreign Secretary and then Boris Johnson being Prime Minister and the utter obsession he has with getting Lebedev Jr.

So Alexander Lebedev is a Russian who is the child of kind of intelligentsia parents in the Soviet Union, becomes a KGB officer, ends up as a lieutenant colonel in the embassy in London for 4 years.

So, senior person running Russian intelligence operations in London against the British, the late 80s, when he's really trying to get his head around who is the sort of people you should be recruiting and targeting in Britain, returns after the fall of the Soviet Union and becomes in sequence a successful banker.

So it takes over the National Reserve Bank, ends up taking a big state in Gazprom, big Russian gas company, which incidentally puts Schroeder, the German chancellor, onto its board.

And then ends up with a third stake in Aeroflot.

And of course, he and Putin were contemporaries in the KGB.

And there are very, very deep, strong links between the former senior or not senior, even some mid-level and junior KGB officers, and the current ruling elites in Russia.

Because as we discussed yesterday, it's not really all about the oligarchs.

In a sense, Putin got on top of the oligarchs in a way that Boris Yeltsin didn't and replaced them with this security apparatus, including people with private armies.

Isn't it more accurate to say that he allowed the oligarchs to continue enjoying their oligarchism, but with the security structure making clear that he was in charge and they had to kind of...

And those that didn't play ball, like Khodorkovsky, were sent off to Siberia, or Berezovsky was actually killed.

So there's a very, very strong sense in this.

You talked about the Skripal poisonings where Sergei Skripal, who was, I think, a GIU officer was attacked with chemical weapons in Salisbury.

And then, of course, you interviewed the widow of another Russian agent killed in a London hotel.

These, and just a little plug there, you can listen to that on the rest of this politics leading.

But these are signals from Putin that people who were KGB officers and who have made a lot of money in Russia must toe the line when it matters.

And this film is very, very strong on showing that when the rubber hit the road on Crimea, for example, in 2014.

So when Putin invades Crimea, this family, the Lebedevs come out and basically defend what Russia is doing in Crimea, at a time when the British government, the US government, the European Union, and everybody is saying, this is unbelievably dangerous.

This is the first breaking of international borders since the Second World War.

And if this is allowed to happen, who knows what else might happen.

And of course, we know what else happens.

It directly led to the invasions of Ukraine.

They're doing that partly because they've got business interests in Crimea.

But also, I suspect, because he can only go so far in challenging Putin and the strategy of Putin.

And then, as you say, I'm going to hand back to you here, but the moment where it becomes very weird is the moment at which he decides to buy 2 of the leading newspapers in Britain, the Evening Standard and the Independent, and begins to sink incredible money, you know, more than £100 million into loss-making ventures in order to control these newspapers and write op-eds in these newspapers defending Putin's position in Crimea.

And in The Standard, in particular, relentlessly propagandizing on behalf of Boris Johnson when London Mayor and in subsequent stages of his career.

But the story of Johnson's visit post the Skripal poisoning, do you remember he was at a NATO summit, NATO had been sort of trying to agree a response as to how to react to this.

You know, let's just declare what it was.

It was the use of chemical weapons on British soil to kill a Russian citizen, which they failed to do, but they killed a British citizen.

And Johnson goes from that meeting to a party hosted by the Lebedevs, described in considerable detail on this program being tracked by intelligence services of Italy, because they were worried about what was happening this thing.

Johnson having got rid of his special branch protection, which I've never heard of done before.

I've never heard of a minister who is protected because they have to be protected because that is the system under which they operate.

Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary, 1 or 2 others are permanently protected round the clock.

He ditches them, He goes off to this party, we still don't know what happened.

His statement, I mean, we're used to Johnson's mealy mouth statements, but my God, the mealy mouth statement that he gives to this program.

His statement is something like he doesn't he's not aware

of doesn't recall, He doesn't recall of any government issues being discussed at the time.

So just quickly on that 1, you remember that the year before

I'd been invited to go along with Boris Johnson to stay with Yevgeny Lebedev in this villa.

I had literally just been appointed as the Minister of State in the Foreign Office.

And 1 of the people who worked with Yevgeny Lebedev came up to me and said, Mr.

Lebedev would like you to come to this lovely party in Italy.

And this party was, I believe, a party that Piers Morgan has subsequently revealed, Katie Price, famously with Boris Johnson there at the table, took a top off at the table.

It was a pretty unsuitable form of party.

Inappropriate for a British foreign secretary, 1 would think.

So I said to the person who approached me, I laughed.

I can't go to a party hosted by the son of a former KGB agent.

And the response was, oh, don't worry, Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary is going to be there.

So at the very, very least, there is something really weird.

I mean, the deputy chair of the Italian foreign relations committee on this documentary says, listen, doesn't this guy get enough invitations to parties?

She said there are lots of ways to have fun.

Yeah, well if it's really necessary, it's the foreign secretary to go to this castle with the son of a KGB agent.

I don't even remember the photograph of him at the airport.

Some tourist took a picture of him at the airport looking absolutely wrecked.

I mean, like you guys used to look after 1 of your bullying events.

I think a lot of that story has already been told by much of the media where I think this thing got really interesting was that you had 2 former MI6 agents on screen, on camera, just, they could barely contain their sense of shock, exasperation, that they, the security services, having warned Johnson to first of all 2 MI6 guys went to see him to tell him face to face we strongly recommend you do not try to put Lebedev into the House of Lords because of the family's continuing connections with the top levels of the Putin regime.

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Putin vs. Prigozhin, the power of Lebedev, and the battle for Southeast Asia