00:01:01.000That was the first point, by the way, in this whole process where I saw a French Nobel Prize winner effectively banned from talking about his expert subjects, you know?
00:01:10.000And I thought, you know, this is wrong.
00:59:06.000You know, I'm afraid that is the nature of Western politics.
00:59:09.000It is quite, I mean, democracies are quite weak a lot of the time.
00:59:12.000I mean, this struck me most starkly when, after the Litvinenko killings, a few years later, David Cameron was taking Putin to the Judo Olympics.
00:59:29.000What signal do we think we're giving us?
00:59:31.000You know, for a trivial diplomatic advantage, we were telegraphing that we'd sort of forgiven them for murdering people in our territory.
00:59:39.000You know, we have to, you know, there are lessons we have to relearn in this world.
00:59:45.000And Cold War 2 or 3, whatever it is, is not a bad description, I'm afraid.
00:59:51.000We've got to learn to manage relations with not necessarily actively hostile states, but potentially hostile states in such a way that they know there's a price for breaking our rules.
01:00:06.000David, we're going to move on to a subject very quickly.
01:00:08.000That's even more toxic than the Ukraine war, which is obviously Brexit.
01:00:13.000What's going on with Brexit at the moment?
01:00:15.000Just sum it up for people who aren't au fait with Northern Ireland discussions, the protocol, etc.
01:00:21.000Well, we got to a problematic position after Theresa May, many years ago, when I was Brexit Secretary, without talking to me, agreed with the European Union, full alignment between the North and South of Ireland.
01:00:37.000That created intrinsic problems for us.
01:00:39.000Either a barrier within Britain, or we'd all have to follow, you know, Brexit becoming useless because it wouldn't allow us to deviate from European standards and so on.
01:00:49.000And from that, there's been a cascade of problems, which has been handled not terribly well necessarily by successive governments.
01:00:56.000We got to a point really where we were heading towards a number of things.
01:01:03.000One, a barrier in the North Sea, which meant selling goods from Great Britain into Northern Ireland and vice versa was just as bad as selling them across an international border.
01:01:19.000And also, not making it difficult for the North to deal with the South as well.
01:01:26.000What's happened in the last week or so, effectively the last few months, but it's come to the surface the last week, is that Rishi has found a way, Rishi Sunak, and I think it's him personally, has found a way of eradicating most of the problems.
01:01:45.000But, you know, if you are selling goods, most goods to and from, not all goods, most goods to and from Northern Ireland, you could do so without a barrier.
01:01:54.000So we're back to being a single nation.
01:02:24.000And secondly, if new ones come along, we've got, or at least the Northern Ireland Assembly, 30 out of 90 of them, for more than one party, are able to trigger a veto with the help, with the support of the British government.
01:02:37.000Now, when people say, oh, well, how will this work and so on?
01:02:53.000I've got nothing, I've got no problem with that.
01:02:55.000So we've got, at long last, and it's several years later than it should have happened, and it took so long because we were too soft in the first instance in our negotiating strategies.
01:03:07.000But we've, at long last, got to the point where Brexit is now looking like it's working, as it broadly should.
01:03:13.000I mean, I would have preferred not to have to do the deals in Northern Ireland, but that pass was sold by a long time ago, which led to my resignation.