Are Voters Stupid? | Rory Stewart on Boris Johnson and British Politics (Part 2)

[Music] i was just going to say that exactly that was my question to you i mean partygate of course i mentioned at the beginning and it's at the back of a background of everything we're thinking and talking about at the moment so this storm will go on won't it i mean with these things they fly up and then they disappear would a prime minister boris johnson ever resign over lying i don't think he it's impossible to imagine him resigning ever anything ever i mean he's never really done that i mean he's spent his whole life just sort of getting away with things i hugo rivkin wrote this fascinating piece in the times yesterday where he said that and i really felt the stephen parker started an analogy that really appealed to me he said that it's like being married to a husband who turns up we're all married to boris johnson now and he turns up and he sits at the breakfast table with a smirk on his face telling a whole series of horrible lies and either you ignore him in which case he's one or you screech at him in which case he's also one because then all his mates say yeah but no wonder he behaves like that because he's married to such a screecher [Music] in other words what he does and i felt this when i would go and sort of storm into his office in the fire office to complain about the latest catastrophe but the reason it works is that what he i think the reason why it's just sort of this type of weird the abuse of marital relationship is that he he makes you feel that what he's done that you're overreacting that what he did was quite trivial and he does it because he's only thinking about what he's just done what he refuses to acknowledge is all the things that he's done in the past and what you're screeching out about the breakfast table is you lied again right you went to another party look and his response is it's just a party i mean come on leaving party dream come on over you know so you're always being made to oddly feel when you're criticizing him as though you're exaggerating as though we're kind of obsessed and weird so we end up wasting three four days saying did sue gray book the meeting with you or not and when the finally after all the lies and nonsense they finally admit that actually he requested the meeting we just sound mad why have we spent four days talking about who booked the meeting i think um you said okay despite all of this well because of all of this as you said you you are not gonna you're not gonna work with him because you clearly don't like the man very much at all also because as you said you physically cannot you were thrown out of the party but i mean you've sort of dabbled in talking about new parties you and alistair um and i know that one of the questions you know it's not original for me to ask you because one of the questions that comes up lots from people who are listening to the podcast is you know if if you if there's a new party why isn't it the liberal democrats why why aren't they the place where people like because both you and alistair i know you said other podcasts to disagree but you are essentially singing from the same hymn sheet on so much apart from schools where you went to school and other things so but why are why isn't all of that filtering into the liberal democrat person it's a mystery isn't it because i think that it's extraordinary i think british politics has always had a huge energy or momentum towards the center ground british politics has always been about moderation and parties have fought in the center ground the only reason that tony blair won that amazing landslide in 97 is that he moved into the center and david cameron took it back in 2010 we said so there is this gaping hole in the centre of british politics and there's this party called the ladens and occasionally they have these very sort of quite charismatic intelligent charming leaders like nick clegg i thought it was all those things certainly in 2010 and yet they somehow don't really win now that isn't just about the electoral system there's something about the party which is odd they haven't managed to seize that center ground and i don't know why it is i when i was running to be mayor of london there was a moment when there was a conversation about whether i should try to merge with the lib dems my campaign they're running as an independent the polling suggested that i was on close to 20 percent as an independent but that if i merged with lib dems my polling would go down to five percent you know i'd lose three quarters of my support i'd gained ten thousand street volunteers i'd gain now i don't know why that was i mean maybe that was just a particular moment beginning in 2020 when they were at a low point but it is a continual mystery i don't know enough about that party to understand what's going on um and whether there is a hope for it whether there is a possibility for it because it seems like such a good idea yeah i mean it's it's so it's not to do with leadership i mean just as when you describe it as this gaping hole there are all it it you just think there are all these people like yourselves who are why you know how why they don't feel it just doesn't make any sense really well it may be that the public is less uh interested in that center ground than we pretend so maybe that um there are a lot of people like me pontificating on about center ground and how we want to to work in the center ground and maybe actually the public in the end is quite tribal and quite likes the clarity of left against right yeah and that when you're voting in an election you want to know what you're getting and the problem with somebody like me saying well i'm going to fix your broadband or i'm going to sort out the left independent station or what i'm going to sort out out on social care is that that's not really what voters want they just want to know you know are you in favor of immigration rights you are you going to be tough on crime or not are you pro-european or are you anti-european are you gonna cut taxes are you gonna raise taxes are you gonna invest in public services or is it all about business and in a sense the political parties provide a shortcut for people where they they sort of get what they're getting they don't need to read the manifesto they don't really need to worry too much about exactly who they are they sort of have a sense of what they're going to get if forrest johnson or kirsten gets in where somebody say they're going to get but what they actually get is very different well one actually is very different i think that's fascinating one of the things i noticed there that's fascinating is that of course many many people who voted for brexit voted for brexit because they were concerned about immigration many of them actually were concerned about immigration not from europe but immigration coming from other parts of the world boris johnson has now come in and over the last year the statistics suggest that the immigration from nigeria pakistan india has gone through the roof it's quadrupled replacing uh labor that had come in from europe so it's a very very interesting question if you were to ask voters in northern england who are anxious about those issues whether they feel they've got what they were expecting with brexit whether that's what they thought would happen as a result i mean that feeds into one of the things slightly that you you know talking about what actual practical things can be done to change a system that you don't you know think works and one of the things we talked about last time actually a few people who've written very good books about ways to change society for the better one of whom is ed miliband matt dancona there's mention of citizens assemblies and i know that you were very passionate about that people people talk about that and it sounds like a really good idea so you know why isn't that happening well so just to explain to people on the call who don't know what a citizen's assembly is citizen's assembly is a jury it's selected like a jury randomly from citizens and you gather let's say 100 people together but randomly selected so it would be from all parts united kingdom all different ages genders you make it as diverse as you possibly can but random and you then present them with a problem and you sit them down with experts for many many days to work through the problem a classic example in the republican island was the issue of abortion and the amazing thing that happened is that you took a very polarized issue which you know like in the united states anti-abortion pro-abortion very polarized in public but you sat the citizens assembly down and you get into the concrete details how many days what's our views and what happens if somebody's raped and at the end they produced a proposal serious proposals which actually then would put into law but when i suggested this in britain the contempt from my colleagues was extraordinary and indeed from many voters i was accused of coming trying to take turn britain into venezuela i was told we already had a citizens assembly it was called the house of commons and the idea that there could be anything so wrong with the way in which our parties work that a random collection of citizens could work things out was very offensive to people because i think people are actually very elitist you know i had a good friend john who kept saying to me your citizens assembly idea is associated with you don't know how stupid normal people are right i mean i know what i can say is that's so weird because actually the kind of issues you're debating in politics are not i mean hey i disagree that normal people's human but b that they're not primarily issues which require advanced degrees they're issues like the kind of relationship you want with europe or the kind of social care system you want which connect people's lived experience where people bring immense years of thought and experience and reflection to bear and where the process is sitting down in a room with experts gives them a chance to really think and talk these things through there are so many brilliant questions coming in each thing i ask you i want to go off and talk about for another half hour but i can't so i'm gonna before i i mean brilliant questions we've had questions online there's questions coming from the audience and and we only have 25 minutes left but i do really want to and there's so much we could talk about i just i want to ask about ukraine because there are a couple of things i'd love to hear your thoughts on and i mean you of all people know you've worked in sort of all over as i mentioned at the beginning and intervention is such a messy issue which you've seen you know you've seen how it pans out but do you think we're doing the right thing with regards to ukraine would you advocate doing more you know is the fear of putin and repercussions justified i i think to be prudent and thoughtful that putin is completely just and russia is at the end of the day an enormous country with enormous resources and it's a highly nationalistic country and it's one of the most heavily armed nations on earth and of course it has a big nuclear arsenal you need to be very very cautious now what have we learned from ukraine we've learned that russia is much less competent militarily than people thought their attack on kiev was an embarrassing disaster that special forces were much less effective than people believed and the ukrainians put up an extraordinary fight their morale is amazing they made very very good use of their equipment but the tipping point in that fight was the united states which has produced something like 20 times more supplies than a country like britain and twice as much as all the other countries combined and that has totally transformed the financial and military position of ukraine in that fight against against russia the question now is what now happens you've got an angry putin sitting in eastern ukraine and donbass and for very understandable reasons we want to say they must leave every last square inch of ukrainian territory they must leave crimea as well but how because it is going to be very very difficult now to dislodge russia and so long as russia remains antagonistic aggressive and sitting on the eastern border of ukraine they will be able to totally disrupt any potential future for ukraine it needs internal excellent security in order to get its economy going again get its trade going again and get its prosperity again again and that in the end can only come out of some kind of peace settlement with russia so do you think um you've probably seen henry kissinger's comments today making the news have you seen his card he said that the wise thing um would be for ukraine to come to some sort of agreement and relinquish territory to russia um do you think that that is is that right i think it's i think um [Music] there has been agreement between ukraine and russia i'm not sure it would have to include them formally relinquishing territory there are peace agreements which are perfectly possible between countries where you say your occupation my territory is entirely illegal i completely refuse to recognize it but hostility cease and there are many examples of that around the world i think formally seeding territory to russia would uh yeah would be too much to ask i'm going to bring in some questions and then if i can sneak some of my own back in if there's time but as i say i feel like i must do this i mean coming back to something that um i was asking you before it's the same sort of question but i i i want to ask it in this in this articulated the way this person has which is the question of whether politics is so vitriolic it just isn't going to ever encourage fresh faces to enter i think people will always want to enter and i mean i'm i'm obviously contacted all the time by very idealistic young people who want to go into politics um i just caution anyone on the show who's about to go into politics to be serious about the kind of organization it is and how difficult it is to change and what it would feel like to work in it if you can imagine the very very worst company or institution the very worst boss you've ever had a completely toxic atmosphere that has developed over hundreds of years and imagine you coming to me and saying if you were unlucky enough to work in that kind of organization and i said to you but you've got a moral responsibility to stay in it and change it you might be tempted to say you haven't really worked in this you don't understand quite how bad it is it's a very very very weird way of running things and i so i don't know what we do i think we have to stop voting for monsters would be a beginning gosh it's quite extreme um you mean it makes but yes okay i'm gonna move on to the next question um but note to producer to me to uh clip that one up um it's a similar question i suppose whether moving abroad has changed your idea of politics here in the uk of uk politics yeah i mean i think certainly living abroad gives me an incredible sense of how lucky we are in britain and you know i'm living in countries where things don't work where countries are on the verge of conflict where there is immense corruption where basic things like planning simply don't operate um and and of course in many of the countries that is it like rwanda i was with a woman who was living on six dollars a month looking after three grandchildren who were literally starving um so we are incredibly lucky and incredibly lucky to live in a peaceful largely healthy society that doesn't find itself in conflict whose institutions remain steady where our economy continues to grow more slowly than i'd like but continues to grow i just think that we shouldn't take it for granted and if i'm being particularly critical at the moment it's that i feel how precious britain is and how worried i am about the ways in which bad performance in politics can erode all those things because i have worked a lot of my life in countries where eventually people give up on their governments and they just don't believe a word they say and they become utterly cynical and they think they're totally corrupt and when that happens you're in real trouble it's very very difficult to rebuild the functioning country if people completely give up on the idea of their politics um i know i think this is a brilliant question do you think it's wrong that we expect politicians to be relatable like know about wagatha christie and wear genes should politicians represent the people or should they be experts who cares if they watch love island well it's a really interesting question and of course in the end the only way of answering that is what people want to vote for and the truth is that being relatable does matter has always mattered people want somebody who it's not just about love island or wagons and christie it's about being able to show empathy being able to show emotion seeming to understand i mean i made the mistake in my early career when i was trying to stand for penrith in the border for my constituency of trying to emphasize that i thought i had you know as i was an interview with my skills for being a minister the languages that i spoke skills that i had as though what they were doing was sort of employing somebody in the way that they would employ someone to run a business but that isn't really what people want from a politician people often want something which is sometimes a listener sometimes a mascot sometimes a symbol sometimes a campaigner the actual business of running a government department which is what i care most about you know am i running things especially am i making things better is only one and perhaps quite a small part of what people look for in their politicians you

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Length: 19min 57sec (1197 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2022