Hello and welcome to another episode of the rest of this politics with me, Alistair Campbell,

and Miori Stewart.

Miori is a lot to get through. I think we should talk about America China and the significance

of this odd balloon that's been floating across Canada and the States. Impossible, I think,

to avoid the horrible, horrible, horrible tragedy of the earthquake in Turkey, and particularly

actually probably Syria, where I suspect it's even worse because of the lack of infrastructure

there and all the geopolitics that are playing out there. Sadly, I think we have to talk

about Elizabeth Truss and Alexander Borers to Pfeffel Johnson, and the difficulties that

they're giving their successor, Mr. Sunak, and I'm fascinated by what's happening in your

old constituency, so we can come into that as well. But let's just kick off with this balloon

story, which is, yes, it's sort of, there's a comic element to it, but it's also very,

very serious. So where do you want to start with that?

So I think the first thing is that we need to see it in two dimensions. Firstly, what

is this object that was floating around? And I think we've seen quite a lot of serious

intelligence, and let's come forward. So the basic story about this enormous balloon

is that balloons travel more slowly and are closer to Earth than satellites, so you can

get higher resolution images. The second question is how useful is this balloon to China?

And the answer seems to be quite useful, but not incredibly useful. They could get quite

a lot of that information already from Google Earth and from satellites. So what were

they doing floating it over? Was it, as they claimed, a weather balloon that went off course?

That seems to be being challenged because US points out that it had a guidance system

on it, it had propellers on it that could steer it around. And they also claim to be tracking

...