00:00I do want to take you on a little trip back down memory lane to November 2020 because
00:05this is one of my strongest memories of us being in the room together and when we were dealing with
00:10let's call it a Trump-sized problem and this was just after. Oh just after the U.S. elections.
00:17Exactly just after the U.S. elections and he was making some pretty strong statements as he
00:22likes to do. So this is when he had lost to Joe Biden. He lost to Joe Biden he was
00:27saying
00:27you know in normal elections in the U.S. the losing candidate calls and congratulates the winner
00:34and they concede and they go off and build a presidential library. Donald Trump did not do
00:40that. He said I concede nothing. The election was rigged. It was stolen. He had unfinished business
00:47and so we got hustled into then Prime Minister Boris Johnson's office. We sat around that table
00:54and you and I were there. Obviously Boris Johnson was there. We had the National Security Advisor
00:59John Bew who was the Special Advisor on Foreign Affairs and on loudspeaker was Dame Karen Pierce
01:06who was our then ambassador to the U.S. and we were just discussing this completely unprecedented
01:13situation where it looked like the sitting president, the outgoing president was refusing
01:17to do the usual sort of hand over the transfer of power which ended up as people might remember with
01:26the Capitol Hill riots on the 6th of January 2021 and Karen Pierce was you know slightly agog about
01:34what to do. Do we speak to Mike Pence who was the then vice president?
01:37That's what was interesting wasn't it? So I should confess I had forgotten this. I had forgotten.
01:43I forgot. I've forgotten so much and most of that is really helpful for me because I don't have it
01:47worrying mum. And recollections may differ. Recollections may differ but actually no you're
01:50absolutely right and I think that there were two or three things that I think are relevant from
01:54that. First was that absolutely I mean unprecedented is an overused word these days but it really was
02:01unprecedented that he was just behaving in a way that was entirely outside of the rules and norms
02:07and that in from the kind of UK side if you think about the reaction of the diplomatic and security
02:12and foreign office guys were sort of few that guy's gone and normal service will be resumed and the
02:20way to make this okay even if he's still behaving is to go straight for the system and system to
02:25system so you're completely right we're trying to get Mike Pence to make him be sensible all of the kind
02:29of effort to try to kind of put arms around it because you don't want somebody you actually don't want
02:33the biggest democracy in the world for someone to be uh not not abiding by democratic and social
02:39norms. Yes and it was incredibly awkward for Boris Johnson personally because this is someone you've
02:44built up a relationship with now and you've been working with and you're actually going to have to
02:47work with them for another 50 days or so because they're still the sitting precedent but he also needs
02:53to ring Joe Biden and say congratulations and start building bridges with him as well. So it is this
02:58it was it was it was this really fascinating and quite awful situation but mainly because I thought
03:05seeing how our own mandarins and diplomats responded because they are used to people adhering to certain
03:12customs and behaviours and suddenly they had someone who basically said you know in this in this game of
03:19musical chairs I'm refusing to budge. And one of the things that is so striking about what is happening
03:24now is that what we're seeing play out before our eyes is Donald Trump is not a normal US president
03:29I mean nobody really needs to be told by me that I mean we all know that but however his
03:35actions
03:36particularly in this last period it's really clear that he's not just an outsider in terms of the way
03:41he presents himself but he's also being an outsider in his own system right he's he's like really not
03:47just practicing madman it's not madman theory it's kind of madman practice what he's doing in terms of his
03:53I want to say international diplomacy but I'm not sure diplomacy is in fact the right the right word
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