The New Statesman

All I've done all my life as deals.

The greatest deals just sort of happen.

President Trump announced at a celebratory peace deal signing

attended by dozens of nations in Charmel Sheik earlier this week.

But who were the powers behind Trump?

Behind this deal. I'm Anoushekelian and this is the New Statesman podcast. I'm joined now down the line by Freddie Hayward, who's written this week's cover story, The Emperor, how Trump and his British courtiers secured the Gaza deal. Hello, Freddie. Hello, how you doing? Yeah, all right, thank you. How are you? Good, good.

Excellent cover story this week.

It taught me so much about the way foreign affairs has done now,

especially about what's going on in British politics,

which I think our listeners will be particularly interested in.

You open your story with this extraordinary image of Tony Blair and Jared Kushner

walking into the

West Wing, trying to convince Donald Trump that a peace plan for Gaza was possible. Can you start

by painting that scene for us? What did you hear about how they were trying to persuade him?

Who was in that room? And what were they trying to achieve? So this is late August. Blair and

Kushner have been working together for eight months already at this

point on a plan to end the war in Gaza. Trump, we know, was flirting with ethnic cleansing. He was

speaking about clearing Gazans out and he had this vision for a riviera waterfront on the coast.

This was a proposal to not do that.

And one way in which Blair and Kushner wanted to convince him to do something else was through

a poll that the TBI had done.

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