Greenland tariff threat tests Europe and UK diplomacy (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hello, it's Adam in the Newscast Studio. And it's Chris at Westminster.

[00:00:03] Speaker 2: And it's Kat here in Brussels. And hi, it's Katrina in Washington.

[00:00:07] Speaker 1: A very international, transatlantic, trans-English channel episode of Newscast, which we're recording on Monday at 6.30 in the evening. So this will be the picture as we know it now and as it has evolved throughout the day. Before we dive into the news though, Katja, you've been to Greenland recently. What is it like as a place? Paint a bit of a picture for us.

[00:00:29] Speaker 3: So it is stunning and I didn't even see the best bits. I think, you know, the juxtapositions there are really what hit you because it's an island of ice. So as you fly over it, you just see this sort of endless snow and ice scape. It's the biggest island in the world and 80% of it is ice. So, you know, compared to that vastness, you only have 57,000 people who live there, mainly along the coast, and there are no roads connecting them. So when we're talking about security and defence, so the Danes are responsible for, you know, inland security and they have to use dog sleds. I mean, Donald Trump made light of this, but it's literally you have Danish soldiers who, four months at a time, go off with tents and dogs and sleds and, you know, have to sort of go right across this incredible island. So it's an island that's sort of a sleeping giant of an icy island that is now being, you know, thrust into this geopolitical storm and doesn't want it. Really resentful against Donald Trump. Really resentful against us journalists who are there. I think, you know, people are scared. They're scared for their families. They're scared for their future. They're petrified about this idea that Donald Trump might take Greenland by military means. I mean, he hasn't said he will, but he hasn't said he won't. So just asking people about that with every day that I was there, you had more and more pushback, like, I don't want to talk about it. Go away.

[00:01:58] Speaker 1: Well, in terms of the pushback politically and diplomatically from other countries today, there's been quite a lot. Chris, you got a ringside seat for one part of it, which was Keir Starmer, who did this news conference in Downing Street this morning on Monday. He was actually meant to be off travelling somewhere else in the UK, wasn't he, to do a speech about the cost of living. That got pulled so that he could respond to the events over the weekend and in particular Donald Trump's threat of tariffs on the countries that had sent personnel to Greenland last week.

[00:02:26] Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's the second, what is it, the third Monday of 2026 and the second time that the prime minister had hoped to be out and about away from London and talking about the cost of living and the second time where that hasn't happened. So a couple of weeks ago, he did manage to get away from London to Reading and to talk about the cost of living and then we asked him about Venezuela. And here he was due to be out and about and that was binned and he suddenly does the news conference because obviously the focus was all on Greenland. You know, the thing is, sitting there, Adam, this morning in that news conference, I was just really struck by the tone and the language of the prime minister, the gravity of the moment. You know, he has had disagreements with President Trump before. They disagreed over the UK recognising a Palestinian state, for instance, around the time of the state visit of Donald Trump to the UK back in the autumn of last year. But this felt on a different level, you know, where the prime minister was grounding his view in a kind of sacrosanct UK position going back a long time around the sovereignty of states and the capacity of a people to decide their own future. That line that we've heard from the prime minister about Greenland's future being for the Greenlandic people and for the Kingdom of Denmark. So it felt like a, you know, quite a moment. But the rest of the tone and tenor and language and positioning of the prime minister was one of saying, look, we still want to stay close to Washington, that the ties between the UK and America on security, on economics are huge. And he absolutely was seeking to sort of dial down, beyond having set out his position, dial down the kind of disagreement with Washington or at least any willingness to sort of retaliate unless it's absolutely essential, in the hope, as he sees it, that calm discussion can find a way through. But quite what that way through looks like is, well, frankly, at the moment, anyone's guess.

[00:04:23] Speaker 1: And Catcher, that was interesting because that was Keir Starmer dialing down the rhetoric, saying he wouldn't be putting retaliatory tariffs of his own on American imports into the UK, which to my ears sounds a little bit different from what some other European leaders have been saying about how they might respond to this. Yeah.

[00:04:41] Speaker 3: And also, frankly, it would be a lot less effective because if you have a look at the EU, as you know, Adam, the EU made up of 27 often bickering countries fails, even though it always wants to be a big political presence on the world stage. But where it is a really big presence is in terms of economics and trade, is a massive trading power. And so what you see after sort of a day of really sort of frantic behind the scenes, phone calls and face to face meetings between European politicians is a kind of a coalescing around a sort of a good cop, bad cop routine, really. So where on the one hand, Europeans are saying to Donald Trump, look, you're worried about Arctic security. That's fine. We'll prioritise it as well. There's no need for you to go it alone over Greenland. That's the good cop. The bad cop is being prepared by the European Union, which is preparing all sorts of economic measures that it will impose and that can cause pain, definite pain to American consumers, American businesses. If Donald Trump goes ahead with what are being dubbed his Greenland tariff. So, you know, as you said, on countries that are supporting Denmark and Greenland, and they're hoping that that threat will be a form of leverage because you've got the World Economic Forum in Switzerland this week and Davos. And the hope is to meet Donald Trump and say, here's the carrot, here's the stick. Let's come up with some kind of compromise solution. Now, there are a lot of nervous voices inside Europe as well. People who worry this more confrontational approach with Donald Trump could backfire and alienate him even further. But then again, and, you know, everyone's been going round and round today. There are those who say, OK, well, the reason that up until now we've been taking a softly, softly approach with Donald Trump is because we still need the U.S. We need the U.S. to guarantee Ukraine's security and a workable peace deal for Ukraine. We also need the United States for our own security. And Sir Keir Starmer was very clear about that, needing America on side for security and defence. So this sort of fear of alienating the United States. But then there are those who say today, well, what is it worth? If Europe, though, is going to cut through with Donald Trump with this sort of dual approach, it will, Adam, have to stick together. This isn't just about the EU or just about NATO. It's about EU countries and NATO countries together. And the United Kingdom is absolutely, fundamentally important in this. But, you know, with all of those actors together and, you know, leaders pulled between wanting to do the right thing internationally, but also by their domestic concerns, whether it's the UK, France, Germany, worried about its cars, you know, not wanting retaliation on its own country. It is going to be really hard to keep them all singing from the same hymn sheet on approach to the United States and Greenland.

[00:07:35] Speaker 1: And Chris, did you come away from that news conference with Keir Starmer thinking, actually, he's taking a much calmer, less antagonistic approach than some people in the EU? Because I think it was interpreted that way, at least initially this morning.

[00:07:47] Speaker 4: Yeah, I did come away with that impression. It was interesting, though, that afterwards Downing Street sought to clarify that the prime minister hadn't ruled out the use of retaliatory tariffs, the idea that the UK would impose import taxes on products bought by the UK from America, were America to levy, as is expected, these tariffs a week on Sunday, unless there is some sort of compromise or climb down in that window. The clear implication from the prime minister's language this morning was that he is not remotely keen on the idea of retaliatory tariffs.

[00:08:23] Speaker 5: What I'm going to do now is to focus on our national interest and be absolutely clear that that requires us to be clear about the principles that we apply to a situation like this, in particular, that the future of Greenland is for Greenland and the Denmark kingdom, and that tariffs should not be used against allies in this way. In relation to the escalation, look, a tariff war is in nobody's interests. And we have not got to that stage. And my focus, therefore, is making sure we don't get to that stage. And that's what I'm doing at the moment.

[00:08:59] Speaker 4: There's a logic, I think, in the argument you're hearing from the UK, which is that if you believe that imposing tariffs on your allies over geopolitical concerns is sort of wrongheaded, then to retaliate is to indulge in the very thing that you're accusing your opponent, in this case, of doing. But he didn't explicitly say in front of the cameras, we will not do this. And then afterwards, they got round to saying that they weren't quite ruling it out. So I'm intrigued, actually, Katja, to tap into what you're hearing on this, because the implication from some this side of the channel is that, yes, we've seen and heard what President Macron of France has said, but perhaps the views of others elsewhere in the European Union are potentially less instinctively aggressive, because obviously there's some pondering over here in London as to whether or not down the track the UK and the EU could find themselves in different positions on this.

[00:09:59] Speaker 3: So I think the hope here is that this is not going to be imposed. I mean, we heard from the European Commission today that they're not looking to escalate, they're looking to negotiate. So the idea is to have this sort of stick. Wasn't it Theodore Roosevelt, the former US president, who, you know, big stick diplomacy. So speak softly and carry a big stick. So approach the United States and say, as I said, you know, we'll work with you on the Arctic. But if you don't work with us, this is what we can do to you. There are US consumers who are not happy. And despite his insistence, are not seeing the cost of living going down. Now, if the EU were to impose massive retaliatory measures, which, as you say, there is a lot of nervousness about, by the way, but if it were to do so, then that would in the end very probably have a knock on effect on US consumers. We already know that 85% of Americans say they don't want Donald Trump to invade Greenland. So the hope is also that US businesses will be going to the White House and saying, look, please, we really don't need this right now. And that will force some kind of compromise. Now, there's a package of retaliatory measures frozen and ready to go that were ready before the EU and the US agreed their sort of limited trade deal last year. That freezing runs out on the 6th of February. So they could just let it unfreeze. So there's all this sort of talk. But I think it is talking with bared teeth. But whether they're really ready to go with it, I'm not sure about that. I think when you listen to Kaia Kalas, she's the top diplomat in the EU. She's a former Estonian prime minister. She's sounding gung-ho. But why? She's worried about Russia. She is worried that if the EU continues to just sort of bend over, literally, because as I've said, you know, it is a big power on the trade stage. And yet when Donald Trump said in the summer, OK, I'm going to impose 15% tariffs on your goods, the EU said, OK, and we won't respond. Which came as a shock to many. If they continue to just keep accepting, there are worries that Russia and China will be watching. Kaia Kalas worries particularly over an expansionist Russia. Her country, Estonia, you know, it's got the shadow of Russia looming large over it. And she does not want that message to be spread. So, you know, there's all sorts of geopolitical considerations here.

[00:12:23] Speaker 1: Katrina, tell us a bit more about what's going on inside the Trump administration. And I was going to say, actually, half of them aren't even in Washington, D.C., because they're either in Switzerland for the World Economic Forum in Davos or on their way to Switzerland.

[00:12:34] Speaker 2: Or a few are still down in Florida, where the president is as well, because it's a public holiday. It's federal holiday today, MLK Day. So there's an eerie air of quiet and calm around Washington. The president himself did a very brief telephone interview with NBC News earlier, and he was asked, did he really intend to take Greenland by force? He said no comment to that, but that he was 100% committed that he would follow through on his threat over tariffs. That's really all we've heard from him on this today. So no change to his position there. But, you know, we've had this extraordinary exchange as well over the Nobel Peace Prize, which is just a kind of remarkable thing to see these letters going between prime ministers and presidents about, you know, as President Trump said to the Norwegian president, considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped eight wars, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace, which, you know, again is quite remarkable for a guy who considers himself to be the president of peace. But, you know, sorry guys, we're in the middle of a podcast here.

[00:13:43] Speaker 1: Oh, great. Let's leave this in. This is great.

[00:13:47] Speaker 4: Is it a rival BBC podcast?

[00:13:52] Speaker 2: Well, I couldn't possibly comment. We're all friends. There's no rivals in the BBC podcast world.

[00:13:58] Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, there is. The news agents are in Washington, D.C. this week, I hear. But Katrina, you know what? I've been on a bit of a psychological journey with that missive from Donald Trump because in the first initial reports where it was a letter, but then later it emerged it was a text exchange. And then when you're like, oh, well, it was just a couple of texts. That makes it less dramatic. I'm not sure that's actually true, though.

[00:14:20] Speaker 2: But isn't it quite extraordinary to think of prime ministers and presidents texting each other and kind of like slightly angry texts as well, like the rest of us Miramore kids do? And then maybe you go, hmm, delete, delete, delete. I won't actually send that. Whereas in this case, these leaders are sending messages to each other.

[00:14:36] Speaker 1: And of course, Katja, I know you've got to go very quickly, but the Norwegian government is like, hang on, the Nobel Peace Prize might be based in Norway, but it's nothing to do with us. It's a completely independent organization that makes its own decisions. Don't wrap us up in all this.

[00:14:50] Speaker 3: I mean, absolutely. You can just imagine that when a text like that appears, you know, on the one hand, the jaws drop and you just with incredulity. But I mean, let's just cast our minds back to Donald Trump's first term in the White House when he first floated the idea of wanting to buy Greenland and behind closed doors. There was so much sniggering across Europe. You know, what a ridiculous idea. But after his military intervention in Venezuela, nobody, nobody is laughing anymore. And if you think about the international shock at Venezuela, this is the United States, the biggest, most powerful ally in NATO, the defence alliance that Western Europe has relied on since the end of the Second World War, turning on its ally, Denmark, trying to turn on the other allies in NATO and threatening them with tariffs if they support their ally, Denmark. I mean, this in itself is absolutely extraordinary. So compared to that, I mean, you know, sort of the sort of hurt pride over the Nobel Peace Prize to boot. It's like literally in Europe, you just hear diplomats and people just saying, what next, what next, what next?

[00:16:03] Speaker 1: And it's worth repeating how extraordinary those exchanges are. Katja, thank you very much. I know you've got lots to do, so I'll let you go off and do that. Thank you. Good to talk to you all. Thank you. Also, Katrina, just a little sidebar, like the co-texter with the Norwegians was Alexander Stubbe, the president of Finland, who had earned a reputation as another person who sort of had got to know Trump quite well. And this just shows that actually you might be a Trump whisperer one day, but that's no guarantee that you'll have the access or the understanding or the friendship the next.

[00:16:34] Speaker 2: No, I mean, ultimately, President Trump, and he is quite explicit about this, he cares about what President Trump wants and what America wants and that's it. So he will be friendly and jovial with people to a point to get what he wants and what's in his interest. But as soon as you stop agreeing with him, then you move into the disagreeable camp and on he moves from there. And, you know, he is used to getting his way. We've seen that over the past year. He's threatened legal action against law firms, against universities, against media organizations. Many of them have settled and capitulated. He's got his way. We've seen Congress bow down to him. We've seen previous opponents within the Republican Party bow down to him as well. So he is used to applying this pressure, you know, again, with the tariffs on how many countries around the world had big tariffs. They made deals with him to get their tariffs reduced. So he sees this as an effective model for getting what he wants to get. And, you know, it has largely proven to be the case so far.

[00:17:37] Speaker 1: And Chris, going back to the Q&A with the prime minister earlier in the day, for me, there were sort of two sort of memes kind of emerged in the questions. The first one was logistics. And is Keir Starmer going to go to Davos, to the World Economic Forum, to see Donald Trump? Or is there like a quick dash to Washington on the cards?

[00:17:56] Speaker 4: So I asked him explicitly about whether or not he would be going to Davos because the president will be there in a couple of days time on Wednesday. So it's logistically, everything else being equal, a little bit easier than crossing the Atlantic. He hadn't been planning to go. The latest steer I had was that it was unlikely, but it was an option. It did make me wonder if there might be a desire from European leaders, perhaps Keir Starmer among them, to do something of a sort of delegation of a few of them or a trio of them or whatever into the same room as Donald Trump to see if a face-to-face conversation might make any difference. It might not, by the way. But I think that's clearly an option that is being discussed. There's also a European summit, isn't there, gathering on Thursday. Does President Trump have some involvement there? I mean, that would involve another stop for him and he's no great fan of the EU, so that outwardly seems unlikely. But you wonder if the next couple of days offer some opportunity for that kind of face-to-face contact. Nigel Farage of Reform was saying he'd certainly be at Davos trying to make the arguments to the Trump administration, whether or not it's to President Trump himself, who knows, around his view, which isn't a million miles away from the prime minister's. Actually, there's this close on a kind of political agreement at Westminster that what President Trump is suggesting is wrong. And broadly speaking, the prime minister's position is right. There is a little bit of a disagreement. Liberal Democrats think he could be a bit more aggressive about the potential use of retaliatory tariffs. But there is pretty much a political, broadly speaking, close on consensus around all this. So, yeah, what he does next, we're not sure. And it gives you some sense of the last few days, Adam, that when I suggested to someone, albeit this morning, what the prime minister might be doing on Wednesday, it was as if I'd said, what's he doing on October the 26th? That sort of sense that went far in the distance. Sort of absurdly long way away. Yeah.

[00:19:59] Speaker 1: And just as we're recording this episode, Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, has started updating MPs in the House of Commons about the government's position. And we will keep an eye on that as we wrap up our conversation here, in case she says anything substantially different from what the prime minister said earlier in the day, although I suspect she will probably be reading a very similar script. Chris, the second thing that emerged in the questions to the PM this morning was this idea of the king's visit. Yes. To the US because, of course, it's the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in July. And there's a royal visit before that. Any hints that that might get yanked?

[00:20:35] Speaker 4: Well, he swerved. Nice question. He swerved the question at least once. And then he did address it at some point, saying that he wasn't really going to answer the question, basically. I mean, clearly, as we saw with the state visit of a few months ago, the whole role of the king and the monarchy, particularly for this president, with his affinity to the UK and affinity with the royal family, is a big card. Clearly, I think, you know, it would have been quite a thing at this point in the arc of this story, wherever it goes, to sort of say explicitly, tell you what, the king's not coming at this point, not least because of that strategy from the prime minister to try and dial things down and take some of the heat out of this rather than being seen to sort of pour kerosene on the bonfire. So it's clearly an option. You know, these visits by the monarch are a political decision in the end. My instinct would be, I might be wrong and who knows what's coming, etc. My instinct would be, the gut feeling of the government would be, you keep things like that going ahead because they build bridges. They maintain a warmth in the relationship, even when there's disagreements. And then you use that bridge, if you like, to try and have the difficult conversations when you've got to have them.

[00:21:50] Speaker 1: And also this royal visit is another example of commentators, pundits, journalists, think tanks, looking for pressure points that the UK could push if things get really bad. So, for example, people saying, oh, the F-35 fighter jets got British software in it. Oh, there's loads of actual American military personnel based in the UK. In extreme circumstances, you could chuck them out. Things that all seem incredibly, incredibly dramatic at the moment, but are evidence that people are just looking for things other than tariffs, that what you could do if things escalate, even though the prime minister is not in the escalation business.

[00:22:25] Speaker 4: He isn't. And also the thing he will go out of his way to say publicly and privately, and sometimes the limits of what he can say about this publicly, and other British prime ministers of recent years have said this, which is that you only realise, they argue, once you're in power as prime minister or foreign secretary or whatever it might be, just how extensive the military and in particular intelligence and security, sort of deep seated connections between London and Washington are that have gone on for decades that transcend. I know this sounds like a cliche because it kind of is. And prime ministers always say it when they have a bumpy relationship with the occupier of the White House, but which do genuinely transcends the transient occupiers of both number 10 and the White House. And that sort of underbelly, if you like, of a bilateral relationship that is so, so significant is something that I think always makes a British prime minister stop and think, and think twice about any sort of flare up with any president, because obviously that would be a big deal regardless of the occupiers of the two buildings, but particularly with one who is more than happy to go completely publicly tonto if they think you've kind of crossed a line, a line that frankly can be invisible to people until they've crossed it.

[00:23:45] Speaker 1: Now, Katrina, on a different note, in this studio over the weekend, while I was away having some R&R, Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, was sat in the seat directly opposite mine being interviewed by the Today programme. But what is interesting about that is this this board of peace that Donald Trump has been talking about, which initially was meant to be overseeing the ceasefire in Gaza and the redevelopment of Gaza. Once that situation had calmed down, now seems to be turning out to be like a sort of like Trump version alternative United Nations.

[00:24:16] Speaker 2: That seems to be it. Indeed. I mean, as you say, this was part of that Gaza plan that we saw unveiled all the leaders signing up to in Sharm el-Sheikh. But in this plan, this charter, as has been seen by a few journalists, there's no mention of Gaza in there. There's also this kind of notion that if member countries want to be part of it more than three years, they can contribute a billion dollars. Many questions about where does that money go to? What is it exactly for? And yeah, Antonio Guterres expressing a lot of concern about the control that the US has now. And as he said in that interview, whether it has any commitment remaining at all to international law, because President Trump just seems to be smashing those norms and having very little regard for how a sort of rules-based world order has operated since World War II. And, you know, we have the evidence for that, right, don't we, in terms of Venezuela? So many questions about the legality of what happened there. So many other points that, you know, the points Antonio Guterres was making was like, where does the US go to from here? And kind of what is the validity of the United Nations? And the rumor is also, as said by the Russian state media, we don't have this from the White House, but that President Putin has also been invited to join this Board of Peace, which Donald Trump is the chairman. And again, in those documents, it names Donald Trump as the chairman, not the President of the United States. So sort of indicating there would be a role for him after his term in office as president of this country.

[00:25:55] Speaker 1: Right. And also, Chris, it's very confusing about who from the UK is going to be involved in this. Is it going to be Tony Blair? Is it not? Is Keir Starmer involved? Is he not?

[00:26:03] Speaker 4: Completely. There's not much more I can say in answer to this, other than to acknowledge the premise of your question. And exactly that. A couple of people at the news conference this morning had a bit of a cracker asking about this. By the way, it was one of those news conferences where it did actually feel sort of vaguely inappropriate to ask about anything else. And normally I'm the first, alongside plenty of others, to be more than happy to ask on any topic under the sun, which is obviously our prerogative. There was a couple of attempts, as I say, to ask around it and the prime minister sort of tried to brush it aside, really. A, because it wasn't the big topic of the day, but B, because clearly there's quite a lot going on and a curiosity about how exactly this is going to take shape.

[00:26:44] Speaker 1: And Katrina, in terms of other things going on, just bring us up to date about the legal position of Donald Trump's other tariffs that he's levied at various points and the fact that that's gone to the Supreme Court.

[00:26:56] Speaker 2: Yeah, we've had a few sort of false dawns on that a few mornings in the last couple of weeks where we've thought that ruling was coming from the Supreme Court. There's another one of those potentially tomorrow or Wednesday that the Supreme Court may rule on the legality of those tariffs, which we've heard President Trump talk about a lot recently because it would make it very difficult for him to proceed, not with all of the tariffs without getting too technical about it, but the vast bulk of them would be outlawed. So that would be a very dark day for him in terms of his economic policy. And also we've heard him talk about trade deals in general. Perhaps this is the end of the era of the trade deal, the US-Mexico-Canada trade deal as well. He just said a few days ago, I don't really care about that. I don't care whether it's extended or not. I'll do my own thing anyway, which has caused some to raise the question of even if the Supreme Court says that the way he is levying these tariffs is unconstitutional or illegal outside his powers, will he just plough on with them anyway? Will he find some other kind of workaround? Will he put pressure on Congress to somehow come up with the workaround? Because if there's anything we can say about this first year of the second Trump presidency, is that he makes anything and everything possible and he just goes ahead with what he wants to do anyway.

[00:28:19] Speaker 1: And it just means that his speech in Davos or whatever event he ends up doing there, whether it's a speech or a Q&A or whatever, is going to be eagerly anticipated on many, many, many fronts.

[00:28:31] Speaker 2: Indeed it will. I mean last year he joined via video link, if you remember, it's just a couple of days after he'd been inaugurated and there were a lot of people watching that with bated breath. Now he'll be there in person and I've heard from some of those who are already gathered there. It's changed the dynamic completely in Davos, not least from a security perspective because when any president of the United States is there, it changes things dramatically. But in particular, this president and with those threats over the last few days that, you know, whether he follows through with the tariffs or not, it's a big question mark over whether Transatlantic trust is completely smashed and broken now. Can you get those relationships back?

[00:29:16] Speaker 1: And Chris, you alluded to it when you were discussing earlier on about logistics, the fact that Nigel Farage is going to Davos in another universe where none of this international geopolitical explosions are happening. Actually, Nigel Farage being there would be quite intriguing.

[00:29:35] Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean you could say I suppose the same about Donald Trump in this sense, which is that here you have, you know, two party leaders, to briefly put a opposition party leader in the UK and the president of the United States on the same billing, which seems a bit odd.

[00:29:52] Speaker 1: Well, they do that themselves though.

[00:29:53] Speaker 4: Well, they do indeed. But here you have two party leaders whose voter base, if you like, is often motivated by those very party leaders against perhaps a caricature maybe, but against a sense of what gatherings like the World Economic Forum stand for with all sorts of swanky businessmen and women and senior politicians milling around in the snow.

[00:30:17] Speaker 1: Laura Lanyards.

[00:30:18] Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. All that kind of stuff. And yet both of them as individuals are very comfortable in that environment and often quite effective. So, you know, Donald Trump there, as we were saying in a couple of days, Nigel Farage in the mix too. And, you know, look, plenty of political leaders go there because it's a very efficient way of meeting lots of significant and important people economically and politically all in one place. But it comes with a certain amount of baggage, doesn't it? Davos and the World Economic Forum. Some of it, some might regard as fair and others might regard as some distance from fair. But yeah, it's quite something, isn't it, that he's going to be there. And, you know, he's got arguments to make and alliances to build and all the rest of it. Nigel Farage is part of this unprecedented project he is attempting, you know, going from a tiny number of MPs, albeit one that's risen quite a bit in the last couple of days, an additional two MPs for reform with Andrew Rosindell, the former Conservative, joining on Sunday evening, to being a governing party in one giant leap. And that's massive and requires, they have concluded, all sorts of, if you like, building projects to try and assemble a alternative government that looks plausible to enough people to try and win an election.

[00:31:41] Speaker 1: And on the reform headcount, next time we speak, we'll probably know who the Labour defector is because they're being unfailed on Tuesday, aren't they?

[00:31:49] Speaker 4: They are indeed. And it's going to be intriguing. I think Robert Jenrick, the last but one defector from the Conservatives, the former Shadow Justice Secretary, said it would be a former MP. So, yeah, we shall see. You know, reform are really aware of that kind of label around being the Conservatives 2.0, in inverted commas. They're really aware of that. And that label will still have, I think, some validity as a sting from their opponents, even with a smattering of people from other parties, because broadly speaking, the vast majority of those, kind of every rank of the political hierarchy, if you like, have come disproportionately from the Conservatives. But clearly they can make something of a virtue when they can point to people from other political traditions joining them to try and, if you like, dilute that perception and give the impression of a broader political project. So, yeah, it'd be intriguing. And a master, Nigel Farage, is of the tease, the trail, the, you know, if you like, grabbing the camera light and pointing it towards him type thing. Big rally as we record in Newark in Nottinghamshire tonight, by the way, for Reform, the constituency home of Robert Jenrick, to tease ahead last week to this Labour switcher, which means there's been quite a chat about this Labour switcher and who it might be, et cetera, et cetera, before we've actually heard who they are.

[00:33:14] Speaker 1: Well, we shall see. Right, Chris, thank you very much. Ta-ra. And Katrina, thanks to you too.

[00:33:18] Speaker 2: Thank you. Bye.