Beer and Brexit with Rory Stewart MP

I've learned about politics comes down in the end to a sort of tribal feeling so I'm standing there at the door to the lobby thinking outside are David [ __ ] and I'm a Rudd David's my boss amber who I like very much and they're not in here right and then I'm looking at the other people of the lobby and I'm thinking you know when it comes to the question time who do I want to be with yeah so yeah all right well I guess there's politics but it's it's not it's not a very pleasant professional man I notice yep let's circle back it might end up back where we started but let's say I want to make this conversation a little bit broader and sort of not too detailed on tonight I suppose the first question is why what particular misfortune did you end up being the chief spokesperson for the prime ministers deal well I suppose from the the misfortune begins with this the misfortune begins with my belief that trying to stay in the European Union would be much much more difficult and damaging if you follow through three four steps what it would feel like for Britain to try to remain in the European Union given all that happen with a river and therefore I felt that brexit was in the end in everything and that the best way of dealing with it was through a deal and this also comes down to my admiration in a way for the civil servants who negotiated the deal and my belief that actually Europe was quite generous that it wasn't a deal where Europe was setting out to punish Britain there wasn't some sort of evil plot and withdrawal agreement seem to be from the moment had arrived to be absolutely right and then it struck me at the time that there might be an extreme of hard brexit ears who would want no deal there might be an extreme of people who voted remain who couldn't contemplate any kind of Brac said but if you wanted a brexit deal this was about as good as you were going to get so I went out on the first morning defending this deal and then discovered it was nobody else really following me since then I've been kind of defending the deal I mean last night for example I got home to my kids and sure enough I was called out to do you know the ten o'clock thing and then today I have to do politics live and then I had to do the world at one and it's an odd feeling because on Twitter the ideal the idea that I think this is a good deal is is treated with such complete contempt and rage by everybody because they and it's even true for interviewers and then I I did the victoria derbyshire show recently and I said why and I think it's a good deal and she said it's not a good deal and I thought what do we do why do you not think it's a good deal Victoria and she quickly then backed off but no no I mean I'm a coffee I don't have a view on the deal but do you think the government's done enough to sell it I mean it strikes me that actually the Prime Minister in particular has not gone out and said a lot of things that she quite obviously couldn't should have done not least I want quite a load of concessions from bu they said they never give me yeah I mean I think maybe I mean I think that there is something more fundamental which is that we tend to focus on the individual but the structural problems here are very very deep so you know forty years and being tied into Europe and the difficulty of disentangling a country that is split almost exactly 50/50 straight down the middle brexit are in a parliament without a majority where there are at least eight different views or bracing and a constitutional system where the way that we proceed as a parliament in is we propose a piece of legislation and traditionally if Parliament doesn't vote for it we give up we don't do it but in this case we propose piece third session Parliament doesn't vote for it but we're not allowed to give up because we've been instructed by a referendum to get on deliver exit so we have to keep coming back in that slightly murdered world I think we can have a discussion about whether me or Anand or someone else could have sold it more charmingly but I think we probably still would have been whoever was doing it would have been the laughingstock of Britain it's an almost impossible task to pull off whoever you are could you enumerate for us what you think the differences are between what between the brexit that mr. Corben seems to want and this deal okay so this was something that I'm really interested in because these two things are very very very close to each other and it would not take a huge act of compromise to get them into exactly the same place you know I sometimes fantasize about some UN mediator coming in and so sitting these two parties together and getting us to lay out what's happening the story ups we're trying to do that today after whispering statements yeah I guess I guess some the Chancellor is trying to do that I guess in a very very small budget way I'm trying to do it every time I go on television or radio with any Labour MP or in fact person-to-person I mean Ken Clark sort of got it right with both Corbin and and with Kirsten yesterday when he said look you you you agree with the withdrawal agreement you want to protect our island you want to deal with citizens rights you want to deal with money you like alert all agreement right so why won't you vote for it and the answer seems to be the political declaration but of course at the same time they're saying the political declaration isn't legally binding anyway and they're conceding that the European Union isn't prepared to negotiate with the Member State in that way to let out that kind of certainty so I suppose if you were being fair to labour what they want is not a backstop which Kearse Thomas says is a de facto permanent customs union they want an explicit statement of a permanent customs union but he did just spend the whole of yesterday saying that nothing the Attorney General had said gave any legal route for Britain to leave the backstop right so he is arguing that Britain could be in the customs union firmly he just wants the Prime Minister to say that and he wants the Prime Minister to say that because he wants to be able to say you crossed your red line so it's really I feel that they if they genuinely are interested in compromise at all which I don't know because more cynical people might say that even if you move towards them it's not really in jeremy corbyn's interest to reach an agreement with the conservative party anyway he wants to general elections so another objection might well emerge which is what i feel with the ERG that in a sense the brady mm was very misleading because it suggested that if you changed the backstop they'd all vote for it i guess is that everybody here is not prepared to budge an inch they're awarded by their constituents for intransigence so the problem for somebody like me or even the Chancellor today is that we might think that we're sort of trading and we're getting little changes and can bring people on board but I suspect they're just gonna pull further away as soon as you try to come to meet them so I mean thinking back to 6:45 yesterday evening when the world looked relatively rosy what did you expect to happen with that vote yesterday I mean a did you expected to win and B if you expected it to lose what did you expect it to lose by so what we're all going as politicians very very stir-crazy in this little place and losing perspective I think I saw it more clearly six months ago so six months ago I was saying to colleagues and I was betting them that there was no way of getting the ERG to vote for the Prime Minister's deal so I kept saying it's not gonna work you know what possible reason would Boris Johnson ever have to support the Prime Minister why would John Rev Little Bear Cash ever do that so I was arguing the only option if you wanted to get a majority was to track towards trying to build a majority potentially around a custom team right with me to which my cynical colleagues said yeah but everything you just said about the idea applies to labor - it's not going to work on that side so on the basis of that I concluded that there was no way that we could ever really get a majority behind the deal short of coming up with some other measurement or some other way of doing the voting you know which is where my fantasy of locking everybody up in the House of Commons and not allowing them to leave until they've until they've actually come up with a compromise comes from because you need a different mechanism if again and again you ask people question and allow them the ability to just say nah now I really like it I've got my principles I'm not prepared to compromise and we're never gonna get there I mean this could keep going for you know sometimes feels like you go for 200 years I mean it doesn't matter that things just twelve days away people are still not prepared to shift a quarter of an inch did you not detect a sense among some MPs even last night even with 1213 days to go that they knew that this wasn't the last chance saloon because everyone's pretty confident there's gonna be a delay I yep so I think there's that I think the extension of article 50 allows everyone to continue the belief that they'll eventually get what they want despite the fact that they all want something different so they can't all be right but that that is the basic view right the ERG somehow thinks that at the end of the process they're going to get may deal and customs union people feel in the end they're gonna get a customs union if that's what they mean if they don't mean a general action other people believe that eventually get a second referendum so nobody's that she ever forced to really make their mind up knows being a bit unfair because some people came into the lobby with us yesterday some unusual people David Davis for the davis nadine doris people that she wouldn't have expected to be in their lobbies so it's not quite true that nobody shifted as we get closer but still for the majority they seem to be prepared to risk getting exactly the opposite of what they want rather than compromise do you remain confident that well firstly do you think a delay is now inevitable an extension of the article 50 period yeah yeah I think it's no no and how long do you think that might end I mean I don't wanna preamp the votes more but let's just say we get a short delay are you confident that some version of this deal might yet stand a chance of getting through the comments well this is to do with that this is to do with my heart and my head right so I mean logically speaking it feels inevitable that eventually some version of the steel has to get through the house cons because logically if we're going to do brexit in a responsible way we've got to do some version of this deal and in certainly I don't think a second referendum really solves anything I think it will probably end up back here again a general election doesn't solve anything we end up back here again I mean it it it's some but then I've got to balance that with this sort of strange structural analysis I've just produced where somehow it seems as though something to do with the very nature of Parliament with the nature of constituencies whether the way that people seem to be able to keep pushing things down the line means that it doesn't get through which is what right in brief moments of clarity I begin to think the answer has to be procedural right I mean it if the answer is some version of breaks our deal is logical and inevitable but that the problem is something to do with the way that voting is organized so sequenced that you can never take anything off the table then the answer has to be for some brilliant person to design a mechanism of putting people in the room and saying okay we're going to keep taking options off the table through some system until we end up in a version of the indicative votes yeah but who happy more than indicative I mean I think indicative would just tell you this no majority for anything again right good so we have that sort of indicative bits it would have to be something more like a single transferable vote or any or dropping the least popular option each time until eventually you ended up and do you think under those circumstances this deal might still end up coming out on top yeah I think if you did that the matter with the deal because we know that there were yesterday approximately 70 people in favor of a No Deal there are 100 hundred and 20 in favor of second referendum which means that the others theoretically are in favor of some kind of break City and then of those the majority are in favor of this deal so you did it that way you end up at this deal but I there is no precedent in British parliamentary history for Parliament voting in anything other than a binary yes or no way just just to go back to something you said can you just explain why you don't think a referendum would solve anything yeah so why do I think a referendum wouldn't so I mean I think the first thing is the legitimacy of the result so I clearly if it was another vote for brexit it wouldn't solve anything right but let's imagine that it was a vote for referendum that's imagine it's and here I'm stealing the anons argument here right but if the numbers were even slightly greater in favor of remaining the brexit so that's about from 53 47 or 5446 but the turnout was different or you changed the nature of the electorate you know if you've done what is being suggested by people who want 16 year-olds to vote or European citizens to vote then you've got right okay and narrow a victory in the other direction but suddenly the whole rules the game have been changed and at that point the movement for the third referendum starts immediately and you rejoin the European Union but you're rejoining the European Union like somebody who's just announced you're getting divorced spent two years rubbishing your partner and then you're turning out back in the house again being like mmm you know what it turned out to be a little bit more expensive and I thought and can we just comment click clen we back into the bed and and then you know day two you're like okay you know I've got really strong views about what we have for dinner so I want it on the record we're never ever having sweet potato again right now what do I mean by that what I mean is that you're sitting down with Germany in France and you're saying as you know you know in Britain we're really ambivalent about the European projects so being away for a couple of years but come back and I noticed you're doing this stuff about the European army no they really like that stuff and all this have a closer staff i mean--is talk from macron forget it forget it forget it forget it and you know you've got views on Turkey but we got pretty strong views on Turkey and we're gonna start blocking what you're doing right and some point the French and Germans turn around and say enough already right you just try to leave you've been rubbishing our projects you get our bit about it for 40 years and now you're so what kind of soft power if you got left what I mean is that most things that happen in Europe are not happening through a British veto they're happening through some form of majority right so when I was a minister at the Council of Ministers negotiating on merchandise ID targets on motor cars I'm trying to build a coalition of other countries I'm not doing it by saying but that coalition becomes very very difficult particularly when they can see on the streets of Britain the third referendum we've been already starting and they're thinking okay you're back now but how long are you going to stay so I don't think the answer can be to rejoin the European Union now the answer might be in 20 30 years if macron pulls off in a circles and outer circles to re-engage and think about how Britain could reengagement out a circle but at the moment return a European Union I think would be much more difficult than people have have realised I mean given what you've just said are you surprised that the Member States still seem quite keen on a state I think that maybe shifting a little bit but yes you're right I mean people are keen on us saying but why are they keen understand so if you're Martin summer I'm not quite sure how keen you really are on our staying I think if you're Martin somewhere you may be thinking look enough of them we've got a lot of other things for getting on with so quite a lot of people keen on a stake in this thing because we're one of the largest economies in Europe and because they're worried about what it suggests about the clubs that a major member would leave but I think we're hearing Lupo call and we pay quite a lot but we're hearing much less of what we heard two years ago which is oh my goodness you know you are the center of Europe your vision your free market economics your pragmatic approach British empiricism you know that stuff we're not hearing so much anymore perhaps that's cuz we've changed I mean do you think though that the European Union let's just say we end up with a short extension let's just say it we get an extension in the first instance to the European Parliament elections do you think that the EU can help you get the deal over the line by saying the right things and closing off the right options but Europe can certainly help and it can certainly harm so clearly every time European leaders try to present deal as a massive victory for Europe and humiliation for Britain and every time that macron says we're going to get them with a fish or someone suggests we're gonna get your boat or it doesn't really help and I do think that there is a perfectly reasonable discussion to be had with Europe I'm Fred and I think you and I probably disagree with us on the question of the Irish border on the back stop I do think that in the end Barney is position and the position of a lot of German politicians on this is making that assumed more binary than it needs to be and there probably is a world in which and Bonnie did it in his speech today he said you know we are keeping peace in Ireland and this is very important to clear German politicians and for European politicians they see the project of peace but there might be a reasonable discussion if you're saying this is part of a common travel area free mover of people if you're saying that this is really about checks on certain kinds of goods to argue that in five years time there are no alternative arrangements and remember these guys are saying that the backstop is supposed to be temporary and a lot of what they're saying at the moment it seems to be undermining that I mean if they're literally saying there is no conceivable alternative arrangement then it's not a backstop is it it's a permanent ratio but is that what they're saying are they saying look in five years time if there are alternative arrangements that's fine we don't need the backstop but until there are those arrangements isn't that I don't think that's quite I don't think they're saying that I think they are saying sort of Hoshea we don't believe in any of these alternate arrangements we haven't seen anything that resembles some alternate version and that's why we can't imagine setting a ton of it even in five years time or ten years time or 15 years time because they simply don't believe there could be an alternative arrangement because for them the only arrangement that could possibly keep peace in Ireland and achieve their objectives for a cheesier chips Republic is to have no border at all if I flip that on its head it's always struck me that one of the strange paradoxes of the brexit position or the ERG position was if they're really so confident that the technology does or will exist and that actually we don't need to have infrastructure to do that border why don't they just accept the backstop yeah so I agree with you on that and I agree that there's a more powerful argument actually which I'm surprised hasn't been made right and I'm not gonna make it as a government minister but hypothetically right you get a different voice in a different voice than in a comical different voice if you were an ERG er I would be tempted to say look and you know Jeff recalc seem to be hinting at this from Steve Berkeley almost seem to be handing this yesterday if you have spent produce your alternative arrangements to technology you've spent 5 years making good-faith efforts on these alternative arrangements communicating them to Europe communicating to Britain preparing you go to the independent arbiter because for some reason Europe when etc turned in regiments and the independent arbiter also for some reason totally rejects everything that you've been doing at that stage the political calculus has changed and then at that stage you might be tempted to say ok in the end we've made a really good effort for five years with all the stuff we've got decent stuff in place if you really in the end won't let us have an independent trade policy I'm afraid we're leaving right now the problem with that is that you're breaking international law the problem for Europe on that is that they can't do anything about it they're not going to invade you right so that's why Europe wouldn't push it to that and that scenario by the time you've got up the obviously it's inevitable that you would be able to leave the backstop because nobody's going to push you over the edge in that way because they know that they have no recourse how am i detecting sort of implicit in what you said that you think those three documents the prime minister brought back on when they didn't really change much of substance i believe the three documents clarified why people shouldn't be frightened to the backstop and I think Europe did the right thing which is to get out of the story oh well it's just a letter make it legally binding and be explicit about providing the procedure to do exactly what I've just explained but I think it was a helpful clarification and do you think from what you've gleaned from inside government that there is any prospect that the European Union will make any more concessions to us if we try to go back and renegotiate for a meaningful vote three I believe the only way and it's gonna be a very very very small chance but the only way of getting small chance of Europe shifting in any way at all this time would be to have an explicit majority in the House of Commons written in blood name by name by name by name of what we would vote for and if at that stage you went back with a very modest achievable request saying if you change this sentence here are four hundred people and the deal is done yeah then I think you've got a chance not a big chance but you got a chance and can you can you think of something so presumably I would be a time probably an explicit time yeah I mean just a final thing on I wanna talk about politics more generally which is a lot more interesting but just a final thing on the agreement itself you've you're on record as saying that you think the deal is the path to reconciliation for the country mmm I just want to sort of wonder aloud it seems to me that what MPs have done even if eventually somehow this thing squeaks over the line by one or two votes just before the end of May or whatever that all the MPs have done is given themselves a large dollop of plausible deniability that's to say that the day after this is all done they'll turn around and say I always hated that deal I voted against it two or three times already I was bullied for scared cajoled bribed into supporting it but I never really liked it and the whole thing kicks off again on brakes today plus one yeah that is quite possible I think the fundamental question is what's happened to Britain right and then we were meant to be a country that was sort of all meant to be about sort of funny little compromises right we don't have really a Catholic Church we don't really have a Protestant Church we have this weird thing called the Church of England right we don't really have a republic we don't really have a monarchy we have this thing called a constitutional monarchy I mean we tend to fudge we tend to overcome our problems in the middle right suddenly I'm looking at a country which has become completely polarized and it's all about I will not compromise I found myself on Friday night up against Nigel Faraj and Andrew a Dennis was a very strange experience right so I'm at this debate and the two of them are against me and I suddenly realized they were actually the same person I thought they were different people because they both speak the language of no compromise right I so I just heard him look out which one of them it was that first said that Theresa May was engaged in an act of equipments of appeasing the Nazis where the answer of course was Andrew Dennis but then it's Faraj who calls her Teresa the apisa right it's you Kip who first says you know she's Neville Chamberlain but it's a doughnut Susan this week it's now calling a Neville Chamberlain it's Faraj who calls it the brussels Broadcasting Corporation but it's a donis who calls it the brexit Broadcasting Corporation right I mean they've all got the same worldview right the worldview is that there is a conspiracy of the kind of mainstream media and the elites and the cowardly politicians who are trying to force them into this horrible world and they all see compromise as the worst of all worlds right whereas we used to in this country see it as the kind of best of all worlds and I don't quite understand how we reframe this and get back to understanding we got to live with each other understand that we're divided North against South we're divided young against all we're divided within our own families we've got to find a way of living together we cannot just keep coming back to saying as remain as do namely one advantage from leaving European Union right or the brexit is saying we voted for brexit I mean nice or not it doesn't get you anywhere when you'll split 50/50 down the middle would you acknowledge that a lot of this is because of the fact that your party inflicted its own personal pain on the rest of us it's a popular line that yeah one thing one thing we can all agree on I'm not gonna write that down it's a good good line um well I guess for somebody like me who represents a I represent for Cumbrian constituency and I remember in 2010 taking a Guardian journalist up with me to for four days and I did hustings every day none of this number of people in a room and they were not conservative voters they were just random people in different pubs and market towns around comer every single time I said to them how many of you want a referendum on the European Union 90% of the hands would go right and every time I said how many of you would vote to leave the European Union 60% on house we go right and this Guardian journalist in 2010 said to me what's wrong with these people well what is this place right I mean this is crazy land what is going on right and I said no no this is this is normal rights what people think in other words what I'm telling you is that yes the politicians have unveiled something I don't think they've unleashed something I think they've revealed something right they've revealed something that we sort of knew all along that Britain's relationship with Europe from the beginning was ambivalent right it wasn't a comfortable relationship but not an entirely comfortable relationship from the beginning and the push for that referendum has been pretty constant for a pretty long time know whether Cameron was gonna be fine of the person to fold or Nick Clegg who put it in his manifesto or Jeremy Corbyn who put it in his manifesto in the end there was an ineluctable Lodge driving politicians because what they were facing was people saying we want to leave even you guys are not giving us a chance to leave right and we want to say and we've been in 42 years we want to say we want to say it want to say it right and at some point it felt almost inevitable that you were going to be like all right this is a big constitutionalists here's the biggest you have national identity we cannot continue with this narrative that the elite is somehow trapping the British nation against its will and of course then this is the added problem most of us thought that people would vote for remain so the miscalculation and from all the party leaders I'm sure this was true of Nick Clegg I'm sure it was it's certainly true of those people who led the party put it in their manifest his death Nitra David Cameron is they thought we're gonna call their bluff right we've heard this for 40 years and now we're going to show them that these people who want to vote for exit David Cameron thinks he's a minority and when we hold a referendum it will be revealed that this country is basically pro-european yeah I'm gonna pull you up on this a little breath I can't even might be a little bit disingenuous because I mean to me do you wanna learn it's disingenuous I think yes and I'd say yes couldn't we bother to go to the lessons and do all the work absolutely not you know in the sense yes maybe people wanted a referendum but it was never I mean what what the polling shows quite clearly it was never there in their top 10 lists of concerns up until we actually had the referendum lasted say yeah they'd have taken a referendum but it wasn't the thing that was most preying on their minds there wasn't their political priority in any way shape or form until we had the referendum and now it's all they can think about so okay so there could be different hypotheses then on why David Cameron brought that forward well why Nick Clegg put it in his Memphis where do you think the Lib Dems put it in their manifesto yeah I try not to talk about the Lib Dems in public so I mean I think signatures brush because the the focus tends to be on the Conservatives why did the other parties put it in their manifestos if it was something that didn't matter to people yeah that's fair enough I mean it's a it was populist in the sense that promising referenda is something that sounds good I mean I remember when Blair was talking about putting a Lisbon Treaty to a referendum it was something it was very very hard to argue against because you're immediately accused of being a latest you don't trust the people and that kind of thing it it's cheap politics but that's not to say that there's an overwhelming groundswell of opinion among the public that this is something we absolutely must have yeah we would take it it's very very different to look will you look just sort this out and I didn't detect prior to 2016 that absolute obsession on the part of the public about having a referendum on the earth anew so I think there may be a number of different things going on I mean one of them is the ways in which politicians from all parties Botts themselves in over the lisbon and the Maastricht votes whether were demands for referendums on those and people box themselves in and said okay you don't get a referendum on that but any future changes you'll get a referendum so that as soon as that language began you were beginning to produce said you'd had the Scottish referendum you probably would have had some element of responding to party members which is where you would say in it's a national axis self harm done with money but there would have been a lot of people I'm afraid in all those parties calculating that it would get in votes hmm there would help them win an election and so to say that the three major parties in United Kingdom on the basis of their polling and research had calculated that this was a popular policy that would might even give them a marginal advantage is just telling you a kind of fundamental facts about democracy I mean which is that it isn't always the most doesn't need to be top out of the ten of the things that you offer for you to put in your manifesto I mean you you know at that same period a laurel order might have been number seven right and the NHS might have been number one but you might still have been sticking law and order right up there and your manifesto to get those votes no the question then is this is this thing that you are proposing so fundamentally evil that you must never do it right and that that's that's the fundamental questions if you are a very very strong remainin the mere idea of leaving the European Union is so awful that to offer a referendum on it to even produce the possibility of leaving European Union would be like offering a referendum on an immoral issue right for example in a most business room would not want to offer a referendum on capital punishment right regardless of how people voted woman do it because we might feel morally so strongly that even if the majority of the population voted for capital punishment we still couldn't morally accept it we think a government was wrong to do that was a brexit referendum of that nature in other words is it something that it was legitimate for a party to say well there's quite a lot of demand for this we think it'll get us some votes quite a lot of people want it so we're off from a referendum or was it something as you say it's so extreme and the option for voting for exits so catastrophic that it's completely responsible yeah a little bit left field whereas leave that I want to ask you a few questions about your boss if I may I suppose the first question is what's the difference between working for Theresa May and working for David Cameron or other major major differences how that works I think the first thing is that as a junior minister you see very little of these people so we spent a lot of time pretending that we are endlessly talking to the Prime Minister the answer is unless you're in the cabinet you don't see very much if either David Cameron tourism and David Cameron exchanged about have four words with me in my whole sort of seven years in Parliament with him with a nice words yeah I think I mean I think he kind of knew who I was so I mean I don't get to get to the bottom of fun that um I think um oh that's right oh no I remember what happened David Cameron I want to see him and he he offered me a job as as I am as a minister in Defra which is pretty surprising because I was in chair of the Defence Committee and I'd spent 20 years of my life doing Foreign Affairs stuff but the first job he offered me was was was to be the Environment Minister and I thought okay maybe you know he realized this I'm very interesting environment so I'm very honored and I went back to my wife and it and then he came up to me about a week later and he said are you enjoying doing farming right but he hadn't given me farming he'd give me the environment again the other guy farming right so III I realized that he didn't have a very clear clear view on who exactly I was um Teresa may again is not somebody I know she's not a boss and the way that anyone in this room would have a boss I mean she's I she gave me this job in the way that David Cameron gave me a job and I see her in the lobbies the House of Commons but I do have an admiration for her because I think um well first because I really agree with her violently about this withdrawal agreement I mean that's work there's the fundamental my fundamental relationship with her is that like her I think this is the right thing to do and the fact that somehow she is continuing even agreeing violently now he has happened to Britain that's it exactly even if I even agreement is no fun well I think I disagreed with David Cameron on quite a lot of things yeah so a hand on heart yep did you think when it was cool that the 2017 election was a good idea ah very interesting right so I sat the George Osborne just for the 2017 election right and in the end of the last year he'd said to me never hold another election the absolutely idiotic to hold another election the one thing you know about elections they're very SEDOL there and then about two months before the election so about two weeks for she announced he said to me as far as I remember you may contradict me on this I don't understand why she's not holding election completely idiotic look how far ahead we are at the polls this is the obvious time to punch him and take it fold and I oppose you when she came back from Wales and announced the selection which all of us know of course deeply regrets and when Terry Ron everybody in the house Commons and the Conservative Party was walking around going my goodness this is a move of genius I see it now this is political courage this is ready right so ya know I mean we all know with the benefit of hindsight I really think that was the dumb idea but I didn't meet anyone six weeks before who seem to say that but if it makes you feel any better when when you vote when the vote took place in the House of Commons when the Division Bell was I was in a room with five or six yeah brain peas yeah and when the bell went one of them turned to me said we've got to go turkeys voting for Christmas so right the view we shared on the other side of the house as well this was quite a bright thing yeah I understand you might not want to answer this but if we were to have a sweepstake on how long the Prime Minister is going to be Prime Minister for did you put your money on yeah I don't want to what's that okay that's right I love the charming way he's like around us now and that's the video I'm not racist what I mean is I'm I really so so I've got you here one of things I'm obsessed with is this question of what people think when they say politicians are dishonest right so the basic stick seems to be anything they lie yes so the bishop stick has politicians are liars they never answer a question straight but what people don't understand or don't think through is the kind of questions that we get asked to answer in public right so if I'm them if I'm put on people expects me to sort of talk you know with this camera game right as though I'm sort of having a dinner party with a couple of friends so you know anions like so go on tell us you know what do you really think of that you know name some incredibly unpopular cabinet colleagues right right and then when I say rather sort of pervasively you know well you know I've got a lot of respect for my colleague everyone's like politicians liars rubbish boo right but if you spell out your own lives right if you were managing a company or you were a teacher in a school and you were asked to comment on another teacher on public television even if you thought they were a pretty dodgy and horrific fellow right you you'd have to say no but Gerald Ratner don't you I didn't know what happened that was a guy who owned the jeweler's yes I was he said that we sell crap yeah yeah yeah yeah why are you a conservative now why I can save it for the moment well I sewed it because although I have a lot of views in common with the Labour Party right so I if I think about some electricity amount it's a friend of mine right we have similar what is left they have to Connie left right all right okay we have similar views on Europe we probably have some of the views on how you balance the state against the private sector I have an enormous eye I mean I was a civil servant so I have unlike some of my colleagues who were very skeptical about this ourselves and governor I have a lot of affection for government so they won't invest more in the government's own sense but I guess I'm a conservative because I have eccentric views which are not shared by my labour colleagues and some of those are sort of views which aren't really completely rational they're they're emotional right so I I am romantic about the monarchy about the British Army about small upland farmers and Cumbria I mean you know these are not things that I can give your conservative colleagues who aren't that romantic about upland farmers at the moment know that drive them out of business that's only true so there are two traditions instead of it's like a wig tradition and there's a Tory tradition and I'm a sort of Tory right i mean i i i want to subsidize small farmers to the hilt right i love them i think the small sheep farmers are our culture there are history there we would miss them terribly if they weren't from the lake district i I support the French Common Agricultural Policy because it subsidizes small farmers so you say you're a conservative because you're Pro Common Agricultural Policy that's a very bad you know you know I think if you were ready to get into the depths of why you would not be a conservative and I would write I guess I'm probably more starry-eyed about the malarkey about the brigade of guards about weird bits of 19th century history and I'm more um I'm at a romantic I mean I love I love all that stuff and my neighbor colleagues who I agree with on most sort of logical rational public policy issues none of that really resonates with them they don't really enjoy it they don't really you know I yeah let me create a specific terms who you are geologically closer to mm-hmm Tristram hunt yeah well Jacob Riis milk so I'm not close to Jacob I mean I think Jacob is you know Jacob and I mean we did an entire debate in the House of Commons where I supported the European Court of Human Rights against it sorry open convention Human Rights against him for a 90 minute debate just the two of us so I believe in human rights he doesn't is that is the bottom it's the bottom line yeah I can save you 19 minutes of watching it right we figure out a clip videos will do that yeah yeah yeah buts I believe deeply in history I believe deeply in tradition I believe deeply in the countryside I believe deeply in were there I mean and yes there are labor colleagues who sort of think this is but not in the same way right I mean they they're relate you know what do I feel when I'm walking at the Remembrance Day Parade and penrith behind all these soldiers you know connects me my father my father was born in 1922 and I spent my childhood standing with him remembering his brother who died in war and he'd fought in the d-day beaches and so I'm not starting like Marc Francois says all go terribly wrong but the think that there is a there's an element here where in order to explain why I'm suggesting that Jeremy Corbyn wouldn't feel exactly the same way exactly yeah I mean hypothetically speaking other members of your parliamentary party who if they became leader of your party you might have to consider your allegiance to it yes okay I do you think having conservative party members ultimately in charge of choosing conservative leaders is a good idea I don't know how else you do it to be honest I mean I think there's a problem which is that the Conservative Party is now small compared to where it was historically hmm and that gives a lot of power to a few people but I don't think a party can operate except by giving votes to its members I don't understand how you would have a a modern political party that didn't do that hmm do you think I'm conscious that you have plans afterwards we're running out of time but also your questions are getting too good if I said here till I lose - you should have dropped your wine nervous - are you concerned that there are people who think the Conservative Party's institutionally racists and do you see why they might think that I didn't think the third party's institution racist um but maybe I haven't thought about it enough I mean it's it's um yeah I mean I guess maybe I've missed something I mean III it doesn't feel like that I don't feel that it's um but then you know you can make the obvious counter point which is that I guess if I was a Corbin loyalist I might say the same about the Labour Party for similar sort of criticism on a certain thing and I you know are you worried about the impact that the brexit process is having on attitudes towards politicians amongst the public because I mean there's been a slew of polls over the last few months that shows that whilst the British people is profoundly profoundly divided over all sorts of things that one thing they agree on is that politicians are letting them down are you concerned about that do you think that back yeah well it's a big it is a big problem because in the end if politicians matter at all and that's a you know up for debate right I mean they may not matter as much as certainly the politicians thing but they may not even matter as much as the public thick right but but we we have this illusion that politicians matter and that politics matters although I think the average person in Britain spends about seven minutes a week actually thinking about politics so there is a sort of slight disconnect between this so there and obviously most of what we see around us doesn't really depend on politicians except in a very indirect sense I mean there's a it's an illusion that somehow London works because there is you know a mayor or a prime minister who somehow micromanaging it whereas obviously it works because ten million people are spontaneously organically working with each other and and countries that have and of course there a number of European countries Adamas who have ended up with no government for some years don't seem to suffer quite as much as you would expect if politicians mattered as much as as people suggest but even politicians don't agency matter in some sense then it is important that people kind of get what a politician is and it's important for democracy I mean if you and one of the reasons for that is the worse your view of politician the worst we get because you are our boss right so if you you vote for us we report to you so if you spend your whole time saying you are a bunch of incompetent corrupt second-rate Idol whatever that's right it's not very motivating if your employee right in fact your employee might begin to think oh well not in our office it's a if that's what you think of me well then you know really your million feel me right in fact you might end up with the politicians getting even idler and more corrupt the more you tell them they're lazy and corrupt rather than achieving what you want right and it's also important to have some empathy it's important to understand that in the end these politicians are kind of basically you I mean the House of Commons if I suddenly made you all into the House of Commons one look very different well the house comes looks like I mean it's you right and I probably the average IQ of people in the House of Commons and the average experience being like who is it pretty similar to the average IQ and experience in this room maybe maybe we're slightly lower in the house comes I don't whatever I don't want I don't want insult King's College London here but the the the the deal is not that politicians are this sort of unusually weird people they are basically pretty normal people I mean and and also the public doesn't really want them to be extraordinary people I mean it the public actually wants politicians to reflect the public and and and Parliament reflects the public more now today than it ever has in the past I mean in the 19th century you know Pilate really prided itself on being very different to the public you know more educated wealthier more travels bigger conceptual world now the idea is that politicians supposed to be you and to a pretty large extent if Parliament is not representing the country as a whole my goodness it's representative of the kind of people I'm looking at in this room it doesn't look very different from what I look at when I look across the chamber the house comes your helpers alright I'm cold sorry I said if there's one thing I really want I mean you first came to my attention sort of consciously back in 2007 because you wrote a piece in The New York Times and I don't expect you to remember but you said in that piece that Churchill has been replaced by Bertie Wooster as the result of the blur if ocation of politics and actually at the time I remember thinking what does he mean so now I can ask you would it well I guess I feel that there is a deep lack of seriousness in British politics that conviction is the wrong word right it it's it's a lack of seriousness it's that I felt as soon as I saw us debate Afghanistan that we were not a serious country right the people debating it we're not asking serious questions that there is a lot of pantomime on every side it's not a it's not only conservatives in labor - right when I was the Africa Minister I was at the despatch-box and people would pop up what is the Minister going to do to stop the terrible civil war in Burundi sit down what is the Minister gonna do to deal with the human rights abuses and Western Cameron sit down what is the Minister gonna do to deal with a situation in Togo right and somebody needs to say to them we do not have an embassy of Burundi we do not have an embassy in Togo we're not going to do anything about any of these issues and what fantasy world do you live in right to think that we're gonna be able to do anything about these issues right it's difficult enough trying to sort out HS - right so we need to become serious again are becoming serious as a country means becoming more rooted it means getting away from these very abstract concepts our entire politics now is taken over by sort of talking Sonisphere about equality or sustainability right but we've got to get down to individuals places people problems solve them I mean completely enraging that we seem to have lost our practical edge and and the key thing and politics has to be to focus on I mean I felt this in I'll finish on this I mean it ate when I took over is the prison's Minister all they got was policy with a capital P right everybody turning up and say we need to reinvent the purpose of a prison what are the prison for or you know at the same time all the windows are broken there are huge piles of garbage the drugs are coming over the walls violence is spiking it I think what do you really need to do well in the short term you need to start searching people at the gates you need to be cleaning up the rubbish you need to be painting the walls you need to be fixing the windows and nobody wants to have that discussion I have a very very elevated abstract kind of thing God have become more operational we got to become more serious we're having you back to talk about policy but how as a final question before our quickfire round you'll be delighted to know that Betfair puts you on the same odds to be the next prime minister as penny Morton's and better odds as in shorter odds than Matt Hancock you should be pleased about that do you reckon it's worth a bet at 50 to 150 to 150 right and finally beer or burgundy or burgundy deer Beatles or the stones stains okay cheddar or camembert Oh cheddar Oasis or blur neither see you are quite similar to Jacob Riis more beef bourguignon or steak and ale pie what's taken out by you can a changing Europe or any other think tank you can think of you can a change your very good answer and that's final answer I have to say thank you so much for coming tonight because we've got other things done but you can say special oh we're embracing what a beautiful mug glory thank you so very much indeed [Applause]

Channel: UK in a Changing Europe

Views: 48,284

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Id: G0Grig4T7Bo

Length: 55min 30sec (3330 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2019