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We answer your questions about the US-Israel war with Iran.
Adam and Chris are joined in the studio by Panorama film maker Jane Corbin and Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet to answer Newscasters questions.
Have the US underestimated Iran? Will Keir Starmer’s approach work? What role could the Iranian army play?
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Get in touch with Newscast by emailing [email protected] or send us a WhatsApp on +44 0330 123 9480.
New episodes released every day. If you're in the UK, for more News and Current Affairs podcasts from the BBC, listen on BBC Sounds: https://bbc.in/4guXgXd Newscast brings you daily analysis of the latest political news stories from the BBC. The presenter was Adam Fleming. It was made by Jack Maclaren with Jem Westgate. The social producer was Beth Pritchard . The technical producer was Dafydd Evans. The assistant editor is Chris Gray. The senior news editor is Sam Bonham.
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It is Ryan C. Crest here.
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Hello, thank you so much for sending in all your questions
about what on earth is going on in Iran.
All week, I've been asking the BBC's best experts
in the newscast family what they think is going on,
but on this episode,
it's going to be your questions that we're posing to them.
So we can really, really get to the bottom
of this massive global story.
And this is the episode of newscast
that we recorded on Thursday, tea time,
which was broadcast on BBC one after question time,
but it's now in Europe, broadcast feet.
Newscast.
Newscast from the BBC.
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Let's go have a tour.
Blind me.
Hello, it's Adam in the newscast studio.
It's Chris in the newscast studio.
I'm joined by Jane Corbin,
who's in the middle of making a panorama
about what's been happening in Iran.
How's that going?
Yeah, we'll get there.
We'll get there. Thank you, Adam.
We were recording an episode of newscast
the podcast earlier on today,
and you just come from interviewing a couple in Dubai.
And in the middle of the interview,
there was an attack.
Well, the alarms, the sirens,
and I think both Abu Dhabi and Dubai
had more missiles and drones in coming.
And they were obviously really upset and quite panicky.
They were trying to get to the airport, actually.
They thought they're getting a flight out tonight.
We'll see there.
See if they managed to leave in the next few hours.
And also here is Chief International Correspondent,
Least to Set. Hello, Least.
Hello. And of course, I have to say that, Jane,
has a stellar history of always making it to a deadline on time,
even feeding in documentaries live, right?
Do you remember people used to do that before?
Yeah. A and B roles.
So you're feeding the A role while you're editing the B role.
This is when we did things on takes, as opposed to just uploading things.
Don't show my age, Least.
Yes, please.
Right, we're going to focus this episode on events in the Middle East,
the US and Israeli attacks on Iran
and Iran's retaliation against its neighbors.
And what we thought we would do is we would ask newscast listeners
to send in questions because our listeners have a habit of hitting the nail on the head
and helping us all understand what is going on.
So I'm going to go through the questions
and then together we'll sort of brainstorm the answers.
And it's not like an exam. There's no correct answer,
as I've discovered this week for lots of these issues.
So our first question is from Chris in Waterlooville.
He says, or she says,
do you think Trump has underestimated Iran's wide-scale response?
And then Chris has gone for a bonus second question,
saying, what does victory then look and feel like?
So who wants to take that one, please?
It's not even clear whether if President Trump was sitting here,
whether he could give you an answer,
because his answer has changed,
sometimes even from day to day,
if we take what should be the most authoritative account,
which was the New York minute video he put out in the middle of the night
and Florida time,
the attacks had already started, Israel started the attacks
in the early hours of Saturday morning.
And he said, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
Iran cannot have ballistic missiles.
The Iranian armed forces should lay down their arms.
And when the bombing is done,
the Iranian people should take control of their institutions.
So in other words, regime change.
But since then, sometimes he talked about Venezuela
being the perfect scenario.
In other words, you go in with military action,
you remove the president, in this case, the supreme leader,
who was a, Ayatollah Hamaneh,
who was assassinated on Saturday,
and then you work with the new person.
Sometimes he talks about how many leaders have been killed.
And he says, and it's a rather cross thing to say,
but he keeps saying,
well, the people he had in mind are already dead.
And then he says the next day, well,
everyone's dead that we were thinking of.
And then today, just before we started recording,
he said that he wants to be,
he wants to help choose the next leader.
He wants to be involved, too.
So it's not clear, and maybe Jane can say,
it's not clear whether he would be happy with a change
in the regime in Iran,
or it has to be regime change.
And it doesn't help that senior members of administration
give differing views on why the war started
and when it will end.
Well, because Jane, we've had quite a few conversations
in this studio this week about,
well, did the Israelis go for us
and the Americans had to follow them,
or did the Americans and Israelis jump together?
And there's differing accounts of that.
Yeah, and it's least said,
members of President Trump's administration have said,
first of all, rather astoundingly,
we were bounced into it by the Israelis
because we knew that they were going to hit Iran,
and Iran would hit us back, us America,
so we had to hit them.
And then we've heard them quite the opposite.
So it's really been all really all over the place.
But I think the talk of regime change
has really dialed down in the last few days,
although as Lee says tonight,
or today, President Trump has indicated
that he wants control over who comes next,
and he's been quite firm,
it should not be the son of Ayatollah Khaminay.
So he's really put his spoke back in again,
but less about regime change.
And I think that's because the Americans realize
that the people of Iran are not going to rise up
and take to the streets with a risk of terrible bloodshed,
that's not going to happen.
So therefore, regime change is not perhaps going to be
the simple thing that it was that we heard right
at the beginning of this attack.
And also, at least there isn't some new leader
who's ready to go live in Venezuela.
Yeah, there's no Delta Rodriguez
who went from Vice President to President suddenly,
she seems they seem to have decided,
it's better to work with the United States administration
about cooperating with them on oil, on other things.
You know, the political system that you have in Venezuela
is left-wing Chabismo after Hugo Chavez,
but what you have in Iran is something completely different.
To give you just a very short explanation,
it's not as if you can simply take as they did in Venezuela,
with a certain amount of difficulty,
because there are those in the administration
and in the military who are ideologically,
deeply ideologically opposed to the United States.
But the Iranian regime, it's not as if you can take one person
and say who could possibly be more pragmatic,
could be among the reformist camp,
rather than the hardliner principalist camp, as they say.
But that person would not simply change the system.
He has to work within a system,
which is layers and layers and layers,
political, ideological, religious, security,
and the elite revolutionary guard corps
and the Basiti volunteer militia, ideologically hardline,
deeply suspicious of the United States.
And Jane, what about the first half of Chris's question,
which is, do you think Trump has underestimated Iran's
wide-scale response?
Because I'm thinking back to the military action
by the US against Iran last summer,
where Iran fired back, but in a very limited way.
And delay as well, in firing back, it wasn't immediate.
But this time, they fired back immediately.
And in ever-widening circles, I think 10 countries
now have come under attack.
And as far away as Azerbaijan, even at one stage,
we were told a missile was heading for Turkey,
who is a NATO member.
So it's a much wider circle and far more attacks.
So I think that, although Iran made it very clear
before this started, that if there was action, as last June,
they would hit back at American bases,
I think the scale, the number of attacks
and the longevity of them has really surprised the Americans.
And it's certainly surprised the Gulf leaders as well.
And I should just mention, it's just this whole
conflagration underlines, not just the deep distrust
between the two sides, but the deep misunderstandings
that has been part of this relationship,
ever since, of course, the Islamic revolution of 1979,
that Steve Whitkov, President Trump, end voices,
President Trump is surprised that the Iranians haven't
given in after they saw the build-up of U.S. military
might, the biggest build-up, in decades,
to which then Iran's foreign minister posted
on social media platform X. He put an Iranian flag
and said, we are Iranian.
In other words, you misunderstand the nationalism
of the people of Iran and their defiance
and readiness to fight back.
And also, Iran's neighbors, how prepared were they for this?
Because the threat has been there,
but it also seems like they've been quite surprised
at the threat of their materialization.
I didn't expect it.
I was really struck by what happened in Kuwait,
where for reservists in the U.S. military were killed.
They were in a sort of almost like a, not a caravan,
but they weren't even under-hardened shelter.
They were IT specialists.
They were working on a trailer, yeah.
In a trailer, and they were hit and killed in Kuwait,
and you sort of feel, wasn't there any recognition
that they were exposed?
They were American servicemen working
on American base in Kuwait.
And yet, they were not protected.
And yeah, you just think about Dubai Airport,
like so many people I know fly through Dubai
on the way to their holidays.
And that's now sort of, it's not a war zone,
but it's a very vulnerable bit of the world now.
So I'm very senior official, and the Gulf said to me today,
that what are you on in trying to increase the price?
It's gone after sort of the headline buzzwords, like Dubai.
Everyone around the world knows what Dubai means,
go and Dubai as much as possible.
And so Dubai, which as up until now,
been synonymous with stability, safe haven,
place to get rich, place for the rich playground.
Now suddenly, there's images,
and they're just a small ones, but still five star hotels
on fire, debris falling into swimming pools,
and of course, straight of hormones.
And so all these words, buzzwords, if you like,
of what places that matter to the world
are what they're hitting.
Right, Chris, we've got a question.
Which Ron says are legitimate targets, of course.
Yes, and also some people would say Dubai is not a playground
because the human rights for some of the people
that live in Dubai aren't very good.
But that's all other issue.
Chris, question for you from Jimmy.
But the hotels are not deliberately being targeted.
I should just clarify.
It misintercepts themselves.
Oh, yeah, and that's the other thing.
There's sort of the thought, there's a lot of fog of war here.
A lot.
Because you initially see reports and you think,
oh, Iran has struck that building in that country.
No, no.
And it's in Dubai, the Fairmont Hotel,
which has become emblematic because of the palm,
the emblematic of what Lisa's talking about, the playground.
That wasn't hit by a missile.
There was a drone that was intercepted,
and debris came down.
And obviously, a hotel's full of glitzy bits and bobs.
It just went up in flames.
And a lot of people took pictures of that,
and it went wild on social media.
But it wasn't actually hit by a missile.
And it was the very basic observation about wars,
is that they then have consequences,
and it's difficult to predict the consequences,
and it becomes confusing.
And there are spillover effects.
Right, Chris, as promised, a question I have for you
from Jimmy, who says,
is Keir Starmer playing a blinder by showing strength,
which is something Trump actually admires,
which is slightly counter-intuitive question
from Jimmy there, considering lots of the commentary
around Keir Starmer.
Keir Starmer's outlook, and he gave this news conference
on Thursday afternoon.
I think trying to, certainly from a UK perspective,
sees the agenda and look like he's taking a grip
of the UK response, because he's faced pressure
from Donald Trump.
He's faced criticism from some voices in Cyprus,
whether it's the RAF base,
and indeed domestic pressure from various angles
around the UK's response.
I think there is something perhaps,
and this is more recent, James Wheelhouse,
under his mind, in terms of Donald Trump respecting those
who do stand up for themselves.
That said, from the Prime Minister's perspective,
it is also true that he's had, I think, quite a lot of pressure
from Washington.
We've seen it publicly.
I think it's been happening privately as well,
particularly regarding access to runways,
both in Gloucestershire and in Diego, Garcia.
I think the Prime Minister, I certainly got the impression
at the news conference this afternoon,
wanting, what he used to phrase he talked about,
being calm-headed, that sort of sense that this is a conflict
without, I mean, there's so many unanswered questions.
Well, his opening line was,
I'm here to show you how calm I am,
and that's my leadership, and I do just wonder,
if you have to sort of say that explicitly,
it sort of suggests you're maybe feeling a little bit subconscious.
Yes, I mean, I'm just...
Yeah, I think there is a...
That's a fair kind of critique or observation.
I think he was trying to, certainly, to a UK audience,
give across a sense that he sort of knows what he's doing,
and he's approaching, as I say, with that kind of calm-headed sense.
I think there's a sensing government,
they know where public opinion is at the moment,
and certainly the early evidence of public opinion in the UK,
which has long been skeptical about Donald Trump full stop,
but then I think he's about this war as well.
And I think as well, I think as a sense from him,
of almost a sort of new reckoning
around the whole quote-unquote special relationship.
Because, you know, so much,
we talked about this, didn't we, early in the week on newscast.
Obviously, he has invested a huge amount of effort
into building a decent relationship with Donald Trump.
We've seen repeatedly now Donald Trump
in the last couple of days be pretty critical.
Well, yeah, let's remind people about what happened
in the Oval Office at the start of the week
when the German Chancellor was visiting,
Donald Trump was doing one of his Q&As with the press,
and he was asked about the attitude of Britain
to the military action in Iran, and this is what he said.
By the way, I'm not happy with the UK either.
That island that you read about, the lease,
okay, he made it for whatever reason.
He made a lease of the island.
Somebody came and took it away from him,
and it's taken three, four days for us to work out
where we can land.
There would have been much more convenient landing.
There's opposed to flying many extra hours,
so we are very surprised.
This is not Winston Churchill that we're dealing with.
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So that's a reference he's making there
to the Chegos Islands.
And we've talked to everybody on newscasts
about this long-running argument
about the future of the Chegos Islands
and in particular the military based on Diego Garcia
and the argument that you've heard
from the British government,
there's been something of a rower
about the future of the Chegos Islands.
It's the way to secure the long-term future of the base,
even though it comes with a price tag,
is to hand over the sovereignty to Mauritius
but then to lease back the base
and that that offers,
said the British government argues,
is the long-term future of this base,
which is usually important to the UK
and indeed to America.
I think Donald Trump has rather conflated
the arguments around the future of the base
with arguments around the Prime Minister
not giving him permission in the first instance
to use the military base there
to from American bombers targeting Iran.
That permission has now been granted.
We think for both the base there
and indeed RAF-Furford in Gloucestershire
for these defensive strikes on missile sites in Iran
but clearly a frustration there,
you've heard from the President
that not only was this a disagreement
with Keir Starmer but it was a disagreement
from the White House's perspective with consequence
because they couldn't use those runways
and that was inconvenient
because they had to use other runways
with additional flying hours, et cetera, et cetera.
I don't know what newscaster Jimmy's film tastes are
but I wonder if he's getting at the love actually reference
by when he says is Keir Starmer playing a blinder
by showing strength.
In other words, like in the film
when Hugh Grant's the Prime Minister
and Billy Bob Thornton is the President
and Hugh Grant basically says to Billy Bob Thornton
very publicly, you ain't having what you,
I'm not giving you what you want.
I can't remember what the actual policy issue is
in that film but is this an example though
of Keir Starmer's sort of-
Is Keir Starmer like Hugh Grant or is he like that?
I mean.
Well, I think, I thought was an interesting riff
from the Prime Minister's questions this week
where he tried to publicly redefine
or define in his own mind publicly
what he sees the special relationship to be.
So he was saying in terms,
it's not about hanging on every word of President Trump
and that's pretty much what he said, I think.
Not hanging on every word of President Trump
but it is about intelligence showing
and by the way when I speak to Fokar
are in the sort of deeper elements
of the relationship if you like
between London and Washington,
they emphasize that military and intelligence
and security services cooperation
which is really deep-seated
and then the political relationships sort of
have some flows depending on who's in the White House
and who's in Downing Street, et cetera, et cetera.
But talking about intelligence that's sharing,
talking about the military cooperation
going on in terms of protecting allies
and the Gulf, et cetera, et cetera,
as opposed to if you like the more-
if you like rhetorical stuff between the two leaders.
But then I suppose that's what you are going to say
when there's been a bit bumpy-
Yeah, but the relationship hasn't been perfect in the past.
No, sure.
Good relations, I think of George Bush and Tony Blair.
There have been less good relations.
Obviously Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan
also strong, but you don't have to go that far back.
For you now.
Britain refusing to send troops to Vietnam.
And what happened there?
So I think you're right,
it's there's a sort of public level
which is a relationship between usually two men,
maybe a woman occasionally, Mrs. Thatcher.
And then the reality, which is the much deeper
and broader understanding and cooperation
on defense and intelligence.
But one of the interesting things about this conflict
is just how everyone is trying to project
their version of strength and trying to do it very visually.
So for example, Pete Hegseth,
the defense secretary in Washington,
the Secretary of State for War, as he calls himself,
published that video,
which appears to show an American submarine
shooting an Iranian naval vessel
off the coast of Sri Lanka,
just another example of the ripples spreading out very, very wide
from this conflict because Sri Lanka's a very long way away
from Iran.
And then he was sort of going on this whole thing
of quite yeehaw thing.
This is the first time the Americans
have sunk a ship with the torpedoes as World War II.
And then you've got Emmanuel Macron doing that speech
about France's policy on nuclear weapons
in front of a huge nuclear submarine in a dry dock.
And then he's sending the French aircraft carrier
to the Eastern Mediterranean.
Meanwhile, Kirsta, I was talking about sending HMS Dragon
and it's going to take about two weeks for HMS Dragon
to get to Cyprus.
All this sort of supposed strength or whatever,
it being deployed very visually.
Yes.
But then the twist with the whole question around HMS Dragon
with the permanence of getting some criticism
for how long it's going to take to get to the Mediterranean,
probably a couple of weeks,
because it hasn't set off yet.
Is my understanding is it was due to be heading
to the high north.
And of course.
That's month's crisis.
Well, this is the point, isn't it?
What were we talking about just a matter of a couple of weeks ago
in the context of Greenland?
And that last flare up between President Trump
and other Western leaders around all of those questions.
So my goodness.
And then on the question of Donald Trump
and his relationship with others, not least Kirsta.
I'm struck.
And this is intriguing, isn't it, with this president?
And then we were examining what
with the history of the special relationship over decades.
The relationship between Donald Trump and notionly his allies
can ebb and flow in matters of days and weeks constantly.
You just think around the rhetoric around
presidents of landscape, for instance,
and how that's ebb and flowed.
Yeah, he might, tomorrow, call up and say,
how much he loves the king, loves the accent of secure
summer, and just you just don't know.
And by the way, in one way, he is like Churchill,
because Churchill really flattered Roosevelt as well
and tried to send him thousands of messages
and really made it, because Churchill
came up with a phrase, special relation.
Eight years ago this week, he's got the podcast on that.
But you know, just on the line, I find it really
is because you've also had Mark Carney, who has basically
saying, well, OK, we are backing it with regret.
And then hasten to say, but we see this
as a, that it isn't consistent with international law.
So you have secure summer, the barrister,
and Mark Carney, the banker, trying to make sense
of Trump the property dealer.
And it's like, you know, what if a banker,
a barrister, and a property dealer walked into a bar,
what kind of war would they have?
But they're really, and I will say this in
in secure summer's defense, the legality of it
mattered, because what does the UN charters say
that you can only take this kind of action,
invade another country, attack another country,
is if you have a UN Security Council resolution,
or if there is an imminent threat, and there is neither
still in this war, and it's about to enter it second week.
And obviously, everyone will remember what happened
with Iran.
Yes, Shadda was there.
Shadda was there.
Here's to express it.
Yes, and of course, you know, the efforts that were gone to
to ensure a UN Security Council resolution.
And the questions over the legality,
and would the advice be made public?
And it was all very, very difficult.
And nobody is forgetting that.
And as you say, especially Kyrgyzstan,
and they shouldn't, no.
Right, well, we've done a sterling job
of getting through a whole two questions.
A lot of brainstorming going on here.
Right, the question from Simon and Aberdeenshire.
Oh, this is a good one, because this goes,
gets deep into actually how Iran works as a country.
And Simon says, what is the status of the regular Iranian army,
not the IRGC, not the Revolutionary Guards Corps,
and is the domestic Iranian army enough to depose
the weakened regime or protect citizens from a clamped down?
In other words, quite often if you had a coup,
it would be driven by the army,
they'd be replacing their leaders,
and they'd step into sort of look after the people.
But of course, in Iran, you've also got the Revolutionary Guards, as well.
Ideological.
Yeah.
Well, the regular army is actually big.
It's about 400,000 strong, but it is a regular army,
and its task is to secure the territorial integrity of Iran,
both internally and externally.
And if there's an external threat, but that's a big army.
And the IRGC, which is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,
is exactly what it says.
It was created in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution in 1979,
specifically to guard the tenets or the beliefs of the Islamic Revolution
and to guard the Supreme Leader.
And it's a much smaller force.
It's about 125,000.
So it's a third to a quarter of the size of the regular army.
But it has the power, because not only is it the power together
with the besiege militia that Lee's mentioned,
the paramilitaries that it essentially go with it,
it controls the sort of sharp end of the defense system, the Navy,
the missile brigades, the whole nuclear program.
These all come under the IRGC.
It has the real strength, and it also has tentacles deep into the country,
into its economy, into its industry, into its politics.
So it is the real force in Iran, and not the conventional army.
And Jane and I had a great conversation on when's these episodes of newscasts,
where we were quizzing our colleague, C. Avash Ardalan, from BBC Persian.
And he was talking about how there's a theory and some evidence
that the, how many regime told the IRGC to be quite decentralized
and sort of just gave them some broad instructions about
if there was an attack from the Americans,
here's what you should do in principle.
But it's up to you individual units, individual regions of the country
to fight back in the way that works for you,
which kind of makes it harder for the, for the US to dismantle.
But also the Foreign Minister Abbas Adakchi admitted this
because he was interviewed and was made a kind of an apology to Oman,
which had come under attack, but Oman has been the main mediator
between Iran and the United States for decades.
You could see his expression.
He said, well, it's decentralized now.
In effect, he was hinting that someone took the decision
to hit Oman, not realizing how crucial
Oman was to the, to the Islamic Republic.
Does Iran have any friends now?
Because a lot of those countries that it's been attacking
were sort of getting into the friend zone
in the last few years, weren't they?
There was a, there was a huge rapprochement
that these, you know, major Sunni Arabs,
this is including the wealthy Gulf monarchies
and the Islamic Republic of Iran had come
to a kind of a rapprochement realizing that
if you use a phrase that sometimes use regional solutions,
regional problems need regional solutions.
And during, for example, the, the 12-day war last year,
it was absolutely crucial that Abbas Adakchi,
the Foreign Minister, could pick up the telephone
and talk to countries and Arab capitals.
And in the run-up to this war,
they were on the phone constantly to President Trump
or racing to Washington to tell him, don't go to war
because it will have huge consequences.
But again, today, a very senior Gulf official said to me,
it will take decades to repair this lack of trust.
And in fact, they said to me that when,
if and when the negotiations every resume,
Iran had been refusing to put ballistic missiles on it.
There's no way now that the United States, Israel,
or these Gulf states, Arab states who've come under attack
are going to allow Iran not to include ballistic missiles.
They now see it as a threat.
How much of a risk is there now of total chaos in Iran?
Very high, I think, very high.
Because, as Lee said, it's decentralized.
The order went out.
You control your own regions.
There's some 30 provinces.
There's some 12 ethnic groups.
And a huge country?
A huge country.
So the possibility of a fracture
and the possibility of a failed state
is, I think, growing potentially more risky.
And, of course, a failed state means
what the Americans have been talking about in the last few days,
which is the threat of terror.
And what will come out of Iran, what might crop up
in other countries, obviously also criminal elements
and the outflow of refugees.
And when you think about a huge country like Iran,
how many thousands of refugees could flow out and into Europe
and create a crisis, the stakes are really, really high
that Iran disintegrates in some way.
Oh, la, la.
No, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But this is what's causing such an unease
and torment for Iranists, even those who want to change.
Iran is a very proud people, very nationalistic.
And the integrity of Iran really matters.
We don't have time to go into this.
But the reports, conflicting reports
about either United States or Israel
arming the Kurds is sending shockwaves among Iranians
who don't want it to break up on ethnic alliances,
you, as you said.
But it all depends, Chris, on how long it goes on.
So far, the center is holding so far.
Was that a bit of the French-Canadian popping out there?
What?
When you said Ula-la, did I say Ula-la?
Yeah, yeah.
And you said it in a very French way,
but it's a little bit Canadian, right?
What if I, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But just to end on a serious note though,
and actually, Jane, I was just thinking that when you said,
oh, there could be a huge refugee crisis.
I hadn't, I hadn't even thought about that.
And I think it's because we've got colleagues
who are on Iran's border as looking to see
for people crossing, and they've all been reporting
that it's a trickle of people crossing.
Yeah, because the center is holding,
and I really think that the moment it's holding,
and so psychologically, it feels like,
oh, there isn't a huge wave of refugees fleeing.
Yeah, it's only day, well, exactly.
It's only week one, and then we're back
to what is the time frame for this?
And I don't think we, well, we obviously heard President Trump
saying four to five weeks at one point,
and then he said, we're ahead of schedule.
So what does that mean?
Does that mean a few more days?
But, you know, wars, I mean, Putin was going to take
him in a week.
Yeah.
The, obviously, it was all going to be over,
and it's months later.
And they're years later in the UK, and they're not.
Oh, years later.
And, you know, just think, people start out
with these time frames.
God help, God help all of us if it's still going on.
Doesn't bear thinking about.
And then this is going to sign up a bit parochial now
considering the issues we've been looking at.
We're forgetting our listeners' questions.
Well, we're going to have time now.
We managed three whole questions, but they were a very good
high quality questions.
But I was just going to make the point, Chris,
and it's about the energy price cap, which might sound a bit
ridiculous in this context of what we've just been talking about.
We've just had the new energy price cap put in place
for the next three months, and it had come down
because the government had taken lots of the so-called policy
costs of energy bills, so the things that are mandated
by the government.
The next energy price cap will have to take into account
the international price of gas, which this week went through
the roof.
If it goes back down through the roof in the other direction,
back to the floor in the next couple of days,
the price cap in the summer might be fine.
But if it stays at this elevated level,
then everyone's energy bills will go up a lot
just when the government was trying to tell the story
about the energy bills going down.
Yes.
And so, I mean, this is another longer term consequence.
Completely.
And so to be very kind of parochial, very domestic,
I'm conscious looking at it through the prison that I do,
at the moment, of course, you've got the geopolitical,
the military, the reality of this ongoing war,
which is obviously huge and hugely significant.
You've then got, if you like, practical and consular,
what the UK is doing, they allowed us in in this attempt
to talk up what they're doing in terms of trying
to grip this domestically.
They allowed our cameras into their crisis centre,
as they call it, in the foreign office today,
showing us what they're doing,
trying to pull together, bringing Brits back
from the region, et cetera, et cetera.
And then there is the economic and the kind of practical
consequences for millions of newscasters and others
worrying about petrol prices,
worrying about inflation, worrying about interest rates,
worrying about energy bills.
And those in government beginning to think,
how is that managed?
And then that's back to the big and vulnerable
about how long this lasts and with what consequence
and who assumes the leadership ever ran in there,
in the short, medium and long term, et cetera, et cetera.
Those are just all, at the moment,
impossible questions to answer aren't they?
But profound, big questions that can have huge consequence,
domestically, it's a European level, it's a global level.
And can me and Chris do a bit of a humble brag,
was talking about how the government manages these crises,
where the only journalists have been in the Cobra briefing room
under the cabinet office and like that.
That was for newscast, wasn't it?
Was that a seven or eight months ago?
Touch you.
Please, I think you've achieved a lot of more
journalistically than I have.
I've been to one interesting room.
Well, that's been in play again this week.
Yeah.
But the thing about Cobra is,
the thing about Cobra that I take away from that is,
I mean, let's be honest,
it is just a room with lots of screens and chairs.
The artwork, so the artwork has been chosen
from the government art collection to remind ministers
when they're making life and death decisions
about life and death.
Mm-hmm.
Oh no.
Chris said, oh, it's just some pictures of flowers.
Oh no.
It's flowers.
It's flowers to remind everyone.
It's a church.
It's a church hill down there.
Yeah.
I didn't see it in church.
No, don't think so.
So the Prime Minister chaired his second Cobra
of this war on Thursday,
having done the first one on Saturday.
And there's been, I think they call it Cobra O,
which is Cobra official level meetings
that have been happening in the other days in between.
Right, that's all for what should we call this?
What did I come up with?
The acronym to the cast stands
for a current assessment of the situation today,
because we were doing a program earlier on
in Jane, but with lots of military acronyms.
So I came up with my own acronym, which is current assessment
of the situation today.
News, news.
All in only call news.
Yeah.
You can call it that.
Yeah, news.
It's that's what we're doing.
Let's stick with the old name, the news.
Right, Jane, thank you very much.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Please, thank you.
Always a pleasure.
And Chris, good to catch up.
Thank you, Adam.
Newscast.
Newscast from the BBC.
From one newscaster to another,
thank you so much for making it to the end of this episode.
You clearly do, in the words of Chris Mason,
ooze stamina.
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