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For me, it's not about D-Day in particular, which of course is insulting and was a mistake. What is concerning is the lack of judgement, political instinct and empathy that led to it. It demonstrates an appalling lack of ability to read the room, and an over-reliance on inexperienced advisors that is entirely incompatible with national leadership in general.

Demanding that young people do national service while skipping out of D day yourself, isn’t a good look.

Macron calling elections in France has the same vibe as David Cameron calling the Brexit referendum with the same potential for it to backfire.

Sunak lacks gravitas. He’s a nannied schoolboy that knows he’s totally out of his league. He literally fled.

D-DAY has been on the calendar for 80 years!!!!!!!!!!! There is no excuse!!!! He could have chosen a different date. TV stations will clamour to interview a PM and they certainly would have set the calendar to suit you, Rishi, not the other way round!!!! World leaders have to attend all sorts of conferences and they stay there all day for many days!!!!! Rishi has shown his total incompetence and his incompetence showed long before this event!

Sunak does not understand what many in the people would think about his actions on D-Day and nobody around him bothered to tell him.

The votes leaking away from from Labour to Greens are more likely to be people who want the Greens to win, but in the past have always felt they had to vote tactically to try and stop the Tories. This is why we need proportional representation - so we can all vote positively for what we really believe in, rather than negatively to thwart the really bad outcome.

Sunak said his itinerary had been set before the election had been called, so he never intended to stay .No one has asked him why.

His schedule?? The entire day should have been cleared ten-years ago for any UK PM!

Alistair mentioned the two words ‘political judgement’ and that (the extraordinary lack of), ultimately, is what this was about.

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

Sunak has no EQ. He's also got no real depth of feeling for British history. He's the perfect consultant / technical geek, but a useless leader. He's so competitive that he wants to win/be the best at everything that he thinks is important, but has no empathy and doesn't know when to switch that personal competitiveness off

This is what happens when your national leader only wanted the job so he could put 'Prime Minister' on his CV.

I don’t think Macron is “ panicked” at all. He knows very well that many people who voted RN in the European elections (protest vote, doesn’t affect who runs France) won’t vote for them in a French election so they will do “better” but possibly not enough to win a majority without coalition with the Republicans (which is a big risk for both of them). So it’s a challenge to the electorate - are you serious about this, is this really what you want? He can easily argue that as president that’s his duty - if the country seems to be undergoing a political paradigm shift, he cannot ignore that; he’s head of state, not PM. And if Le Pen forms a government with a narrow coalition majority, what is she actually going to be able to get done? And don’t forget that Macron remains president for another three years - so it becomes “cohabitation”, with Macron having every opportunity to demonstrate how vacuous the RN manifesto is in practice. Macron may be imperious in his manner and grandiose in his vision, but he certainly isn’t stupid.

80 yrs since D-Day and the none British PM decides to give it a miss, so for him an interview was more important than the last living veterans who saved Europe. The mind boggles, this is an insult to the country and all those who were slaughtered for our freedom.

These guys are such a good duo, one of my fave podcasts.

It's funny that Brexit was meant to kill off UKIP/Brexit Party but it's had no effect, still the same problem with Reform. Let this be a lesson to the Conservative Party.

The danger of poor voter turnout wouldn't be a problem if voting was mandated. It's never made sense to me how people can be so apathetic that they cant be bothered to get off their arse and vote. Were only talking once every 5 years for God's sake!

Sunak's schedule is more important than the most important day in Europe history!!!He doesn't understand that thanks to D-Day he is free today !!!

The PM leaving Normandy will be remembered long after the election. It was a very important move for patriotic British people

Why the bleep did Sunak’s diary managers agree to book the itv interview for D-Day? It’s absolutely his responsibility that he went along with their plan, but where on earth were their heads?

Anybody else think Sunak has been blagging it the whole time and actually behind it all, he is not very bright?

Disappointed that Rory and Alistair failed to mention the fact that the hostages were being held in a REFUGEE CAMP!

Only a FOOL would ever regard Schedules as being God-given Law instead of as flexible Blueprints.

You Are forgetting that Sunak is a cooperate first executive and no senior executive would ever want to spend a few hours with other CEO's and executive leaders when they know that they are on the way out!.. No one wants to be seen with you, no one has anything to say to you and no one has any time to hear what you think or are planning! (if you are about to be fired by the board the last thing you want to be doing is spending the day with other senior executives talking about the future of the company / country / Globe)

It seems to me (a psychiatrist) that Sunak’s bizarre departure from Normandy could only be about one of 2 things: either he’s so driven by electoral ambition that he just cared less about the commemoration, or that he’s driven by a sort of mechanical adherence to plans and utterly blind to the deep emotional meaning of the ceremony for the people he wants to keep leading. The two aren’t mutually exclusive 🤔

I could listen to you two conversing/ discussing/debating the current world of of politics all day long. Not just for the content, but just listening to your voices.....your tone, clarity of speech and timbre are just wonderful.

Re Brexit, we always needed two things: The ability to make our own national decisions and a decent government. We currently only have one, so that's why there is a failure.

PM Rushi Homey, to a D-Day Veteran "You think you had it bad, when I was at Winchester School, I didn't have Premiere Cable !!!" 0:47

Comment of support. Love the channel.

Agree about Brexit. But Starmer is frightened about angering the red-wall voters

'It ran over.'

Even Liz Truss would have understood the optics of D-Day.

What angers me is that many many Indian soldiers as well as a lot of nationalities, fought against Hitler. Sunak is abandoning his own origins. For what?

Sunak is definitely a blagger. The other day he was trying to make out in an interview that he had it tough growing up, and had to "go without" things (although he couldn't seem to remember what "things.") It was an attempt to make him seem like "one of us." But all it takes is a couple of clicks to discover that his father was actually a GP and his mother owned her own pharmacy in Southampton. He says they emigrated from East Africa to make it sound like they were having hard times, but didn't bother to mention that the Asian community in East Africa is actually a very affluent section of society, leading players in the region's economy and dominant in the business sector. Sunak is a bullshitter, but unlike Johnson he isn't even very good at it, and he leaves himself wide open to being exposed as a fraud.

Alistair so close to the point and missing it entirely with the greens voters. People who are voting green instead of Labour this time would vote for the greens if they could, the reason they were voting for Labour before was because of FPTP forcing them to vote for labour hoping they might beat the Tories, not because they WANT to vote for Labour. If you had preferential voting they would likely be voting 1 for greens and then just putting Labour above the Tories so their vote would eventually go to them if it came to it.. It continues to baffle me why Labour are trying so hard to win conservatives over and risk losing the whole left side of the party. Most of the people still voting conservative would never vote Labour and will only go further right if they don't vote conservative. Labour are never going to convince the Reform voters unless they turned into an actual facist party even then they're probably not going to get them if they're still called Labour. If this election goes so badly for the Tories that the Lib-Dems become the 2nd largest party, Labour could well find that the Lib-Dem's decide they're going to attack from the left and scoop up a lot of votes if they become seen as the major alternative to an increasingly right moving Labour party.

Sunak is simply making the effort to try an fight an election campaign; by calling the GE for July, he will lose, resign as an MP and move to California in time to get his girls into school there for September. One thing about Rishi is that he is (usually) calculated and looks at the outcomes first. He knew he would never ever win a GE, so this was the desired outcome all along; make an effort so he can't be accused of jumping ship, but also knowing he is the Captain who is absolutely sinking with it.

It’s because the reverence for those who died in the war is not engrained in him and his genes …simple ..he didn’t grow up knowing people who suffered and gave it all for his freedom …

Did Alistair Campbell just say that ‘he’s got political judgement’ 😂😂😂

Just when you think politicians can’t get any more lightweight, focusing on small insignificant details and not seeing the big picture they go and do it again.

Rishi as a swimmingly naff numpty is doing superbly well for swimmingly naff numpties.

I am surprised no one asked why Rishi was not attending the international D-Day event before it happened. I mean if he was not going to be there to meet the President of the USA at an event like this that is a big deal that someone much have noticed in advance.

Theyre not coming after Sunak nearly as much as theyd have come after Corbyn

Why can't we have quick elections like the French?

Sunak has no common sense whatever. And now he wants teenagers to do national service in one form or another!

D-Day was not important to Sunak, especially non-British veterans. He had planned months earlier not to attend the international commemoration ceremony as he thought that D-Day was an all British affair, not an Allied affair.

No only did Sunak insult the veterans, the fallen and the country but he also avoided an opportunity to network with some of the West's most important leaders.

Good episode as usual. Only thing to ask is why the word 'released' in regard to the hostages? - They weren't released, implying they were given willingly?

Could it be that everybody around Sunak are so disillusioned with him they cannot be bothered to stop him doing stupid things.

I very much agree with Alistair about the narrative playing a part in the general view of gaffes. I doubt Milliband eating a sandwich exists in a vacuum, it was a general media narrative and view of the public that was mirrored in a singular picture.

He lost the plot, indeed

When Sunak legacy will be written he will be remembered for disrespect ing the D Day

Thank you.

Hi there from a French in (voluntary) exile. We are heading for very troubled times in Europe. My analysis is the following and hopefully you will comment on it. Immigration and security are false issues that fuel the rise of extreme right movements. The real problem is the erosion of the middle-class, especially the lowest segments who slide slowly but surely into poverty. On the political scene, it is therefore no longer viable to govern in the center with "reasonable" policies, meaning liberalism with a variable dose of social reforms unless you tackle this main issue. Those "traditional" centrist governments - and the EU Commission - are perceived as technocratic without grasp of realities. To change this perception they would have to take bold measures that deviate significantly from liberalism, which they are incapable of. In France, with the semi-presidential regime, Macron incarnates this technocratic centrist approach that has failed for 7 years and he is now just plainly rejected, even hated! There is no way he can build a new coalition around him. I think both in the UK and in France, with very different political settings, in the short-term we will witness apparition of governments leaning to the extreme left (tax the wealthy, guaranteed revenues, etc). In France I bet the next government will be with Melenchon as prime minister. Despite the fact they are perceived as anti-semitic and pro-Hamas they are the most likely to attract voters from Macron's party and form a (very tumultuous and unstable) coalition to bar the extreme right. Whether those far-left leaning governments will succeed is another story and we might witness at some point some far-right government, which in turn will be unwilling to tackle the main issue of inequalities despite their populist promises and will have to resort to authoritarian and anti-democratic measures. Troubled times indeed.

If the 7-way debate was for people other than the party leaders, why was Farage there?

Regarding D-Day; Anyone with any sense of national pride would never have left those commemorations. Never. I doubt Sunak could name any of the five beaches or any of the units involved - except maybe ‘Easy Company from that TV show’.

Editors / Producers - PLEASE stop doing these long, drawn-out "Coming up" segment at the beginning and let us see the video!

Agree biggest own goal ever. Excuse - not related to election makes it even worse

Sunak thinks that most people are like him and only care about money. But even young people know that young people of the past like died so that the young of the future have the life and freedom they enjoy.

I honestly think Sunak wants to lose. There's no way anyone would willingly leave such an important event with high esteemed dignitaries and eyes of the world all around for a tv interview. I think it was a calculated move on his part that he knew it would get him out with ease.

Rishi might be better understood if we consider him as possibly being more suited to a role in 'The Big Bang Theory' than No 10. What made him an effective banker makes him a troubled PM.

Terrific chat as ever..

The Tory Party has a new version of Mornington Crescent or Ecclestone Pie - it's Emily Thornberry.

Rishi-Washout is basically tanking his second job to be able to spend more time with his money. Good riddance.

I think the fact that Ed Davey isn't the sort of person you'd expect to be having fun has made his falling in the water election campaign the only one to stand out. It has got him headlines that nothing else would.

Don’t you think for Sunak, it was a personal humiliation? Like when you go to a party, stand awkwardly waiting for a gap in conversation, or for someone - anyone to meet your eye. Instead conversation stops as you sidle up.

Alistair is downplaying the far right rise in Europe too much. The biggest issue is that these kind of right wing populist movements are being normalised. Imagine even 10 years ago these parties coming second or third. It’s an increasing worrying trend that Europe is going in.

Politicians try to manipulate what the majority want and they often do it on behalf of rich men who pay them off to do so

This has been blown out of proportion

I wish ALL politicians would stop turning up at these military remembrance events. I'm sick to death of these things having a political bent to them

Sunak thought he would look TINY next to the other world leaders in the group photo so he fled. 😂😂😂

In Finland the far-right lost seats and the chairwoman of the far left party got a massive win. She got by far the most votes in EU election history even though the general turnout was a bit low. She got more votes PERSONALLY than any other PARTY except the center-right party and center-left party!

My beloved mother died in that period at least partly perhaps wholly because of the war when I was two years ten months. My father fired the Steam Engines through the Blitz once running over three bombs sabotaged by the workers in Germany, then the side driving rod came off when passing over a bridge, luckily the trailing one, then missed being fire bombed because his Engine was 'thirsty' etc. My Uncle on my mother's side shot down 13 aircraft before he was shot down. My Uncle on my father's side lost his leg fighting in Italy. First Uncle on my step-mother's side was tail gunner on a Lancaster Second Uncle fought through Burma behind the lines--a Chindet. My Engine Driver Ron was in the rear guard at Dunkirk to escape with his mate Big Sam to walk across France to get out & fight in the Eighth Army. Big Sam also became an engine driver. Other Drivers I had fought at Dunkirk across Europe into Germany. Sunak's apology is a non-apology. God's sake people do not vote for this clown or his Party the CONS who have destroyed this UK of ours so many fought & gave their lives for & to remove the Monsters from the Continent with many from the Commonwealth, America & elsewhere

Members of my family were D-Day veterans. Vote lost.

I think its a real shame that Rory left mainstream politics. The decent people are hounded out by the dogs in the pit of Westminster

There's nothing going on behind Sunak's dead eyes.

Have you noticed that the German electoral map for the EU elections is now an exact map of pre-unification Germany. West Germany chose the CDU everywhere, and East Germany chose the AfD everywhere. Even Berlin shows as the sole island of West Germany in the middle of East Germany, as it was pre-unification. As my (West German) wife says - you can take the people out of the dictatorship but you can’t take the dictatorship out of the people. Sounds like Germany may soon declare the AfD an illegal organization due to it being financed by the Russian state. That will be interesting.

Rory is said to be proficient in 11 languages, though he claims to be 'mediocre' in several of them. Rory is a multi talented person, look at his Wikipedia page, it makes fascinating reading. He has helped so may people around the world, a hugely accomplished modest person.

My take is that Sunak thinks he can afford to ignore anything European after Brexit.

But at Remembrance Sunday, when Corbyn was damned for not bowing correctly, it was the Tory leaders who went off for cheese and wine while Corbyn chatted with veterans.

As always excellent discussion. Point about Brexit is because polititions will make it about not respecting the poll rather than allow the debait to focus on the blames including how badly it was handled, how, upon knowing how bad, there was no right to vote again and of course the continued reference to doing the will of the people.

Macron’s election call seemed bizarre to me at first, but now I think it makes sense. Galvanise those against the far right. Le Pen, et al, fared very well, not just in polling, in reality. Vote to counterbalance their influence. I remember the weeks after Brexit, imagine if Cameron had called an election rather than resign?

Alastair Campbell cannot hide his happiness at the prospect of a historic defeat for the Tory party,😂😁

I would love to see these two host a joint interview with Sunak and Starmer. Would be political gold!

I wonder what the King, bearing in mind the D-Day fiasco, will say to Sunak when Sunak drives to the Palace to advise HRH to send for Sir Keir Starmer. Remember His Majesty's "Back again? Dearie me" to Liz Truss.

Regardless of what political views these two have, I am mightily impressed by their knowledge of British and European politics. It’s far easier to listen to this sort of discussion than the stupid slagging / bad mouthing that passes for a ‘political debate’ on the BBC or SKY. One question about Sunak and D-Day, is it not true to say that four weeks ago, Sunak was considering not going at all?

Disgusted with Sinak after this D Day gaff. I can't see him remaining as a rural MP here in the dales once he's kicked out and wonder if he called the election simply so he could exit politics - not a conviction politician and I wish I'd never voted for him.

Rory, if the Tories move further to the right, would you consider joining the Liberal Democrats full time?

Maybe nobody told him because he never listens.

i love Rory Stewart.

While I hate conservative ideology in general and have been a Labour supporter my whole life, I do love listening to you guys talking politics, If only all conservatives had Rory's sense of honour, decency and kindness.

Loved Alistair’s Vase metaphor.

The one who looked like the PM of the UK at the D-Day commemoration was Mr Starmer.

D-Day wasn't in his schedule at all. That's come out.

Sunak had received a tip from an insider about a very hot stock and had to meet Blackrock to sign the papers😂

Rory, dont forget the strong swing to the left in the Nordic counties. For example, the Swedish Democrats doing worse in their first ever election and the surge of the greens and left party.

37:20 ok I think we've taken this metaphor too far at this point lol

You chaps are on fire atm.

The torries throw arround with allot of dirt...emily thornberry was mentioned..I recall BoJo was confronted by her....and Emily is married to Sir Christopher George Nugee... Nugee later became Queen's Counsel, then a High Court Judge, when he was knighted, at which point Thornberry became entitled to be styled Lady Nugee, but does not use the title....and BoJo, called her Baroness Something, meaning he threw dirt at her.....and Speaker Bercow got up and said; we do not name call People and dont call her by their spouses Names and went on to say, the Rt Hon Member has a Name and we know what her Name is and its not Lady Something....