'Remainers will regret not supporting May's deal' | Rory Stewart interview

rory stewart hello how's it going uh very well and thank you for having me on skype you had to draw attention to it didn't you um there's there's plenty to talk about for us to talk about in the national news but i thought we might as well start with you um what have you been up to where where have you been why don't you tell us that so i'm in the united states i just got back from afghanistan i got back four days ago and i was in kabul and i was in bamiyan in the central mountains and looking at a charity that i set up um 15 years ago and my wife now runs so um you were just saying then before we before we started uh the interview proper that afghanistan has suffered quite badly from the coronavirus is that what you went over there to look into and to deal with or was it something else related to your charity well one of the things we found out is that nearly 70 80 percent of the employees of our charity have had climate and the world health organization estimates that perhaps as many as 10 million people out of sort of 26 million in afghanistan have had covered it's very difficult to know because the data is very difficult many afghans don't want to admit they've had it it's got social stigma attached it gets in the way of people's travel and funerals any other but it seems at least from the people we know in kabul is that the numbers are extraordinary and it has got close to this idea of herd immunity but along the way of course many many many people have died um so from uh from a public health approach from a governance approach what how how has how have tribal leaders how has the government in afghanistan how they tried to remedy this situation well it's very difficult in afghanistan i mean they firstly tried to control the borders and tried to put a lock down in place but of course um this simply is not the health infrastructure in afghanistan to deal with this um so many people would have died without having made it to a clinic or to a hospital at all um and the numbers are very difficult to estimate people are trying to get to estimates either as the who does by doing random surveys or by interviewing gravediggers and talking about the number of people that are being buried in particular places but if it's true that 10 million people have had it we can probably assume that as many as a hundred thousand people would have died that's um that's absolutely tragic um has that i mean how were people trying to mitigate the the virus in their local communities was was there any action that they could take i mean how is it it's very difficult partly because um traditionally it's a very very physical tactile culture so a lot of the afghans that i saw wanted to hug me and kiss me and so it's quite a good keeping keeping that kind of distance it's also a culture where it's very important to turn up for family events like funerals which really increases the chance of contagion and people's houses are small ventilation is not good uh masks and personal protection equipment wasn't available it's one of the big untold stories of chronovirus we don't know across the developing world exactly what's happening some countries have locked down very very aggressively jordan for example seems to have very few cases some states in india have very very few cases other states seem to have a lot uh places like myanmar burma seem to have no cases and now suddenly is spiking in a very extreme way so the region that you were visiting is that the place you've been before obviously you've walked across the country you've seen you've seen a lot of it and your charity operates over there was it was it a region you're familiar with were you were you visiting people that you've met before tell us about it so i i was up in bamiyan in the central mountains which is where famously there were these huge buddhas which were blown up by the taliban leaving these great issues these are buddhists that are well over a thousand years old which were destroyed by the gentleman it's a very beautiful place it's a place which could be an amazing tourism center for afghanistan if security improved but the sad truth is that i walked across the country nearly 20 years ago now and i assumed at the time that things would just get safer but in fact they haven't it's probably more dangerous now than it has been in the past not so much in bamiyan and central afghanistan but certainly in places like kabul not just terrorism now but kidnapping a lot of people being kidnapped for money and it's it's heartbreaking because afghanistan is one of the most beautiful places on earth uh afghans are incredibly um you know wonderful people and i i love being in that country um but it it still probably isn't yet in a position for a full tourism industry what sort of um if there's risk of kidnapping kabul i mean what sort of security precautions do you take when you visit well that's difficult because obviously as an ex-british minister i i don't want to get other people in danger and um and groups could think it's funny to kidnap me so i have to be very careful and that involves my being quite careful not to tell people when i'm coming not to explain to people where i'm coming and not to set any preset patterns so that if you turn up you turn up unexpectedly for a short period and then leave immediately i've got you um and as as you mentioned you're currently talking to me from america um what's going on over there as boris johnson exiled you is that why you're uh stateside well that's that's what my son believes my son i think got got the wrong end of the stick so boris obviously when he came in i lost my job in the cabinet and then i lost my job as a member of parliament which also meant that we lost our house uh in cumbria uh and our whole life there so my son is now thinks that boris is like um sort of henry viii that he's kind of stripped everything from me my job my house my livelihood what are you doing in the u.s are you are you teaching i know something you've done in the past yes i'm i'm teaching at yale university i'm teaching uh seminars students i'm trying to teach about politics i'm trying to teach about trying to make people understand how strange a politician's life is how get into the mindset of a boris or a trump or indeed any politician and make people understand how what seems sensible why it doesn't happen why politicians find it difficult to deal with covert well they find it difficult to to do almost anything and at yale you're probably going to be instructing at least some of the next generation of leaders but um on a on a more topical note let's say obviously one of the things that distinguished you during the tory leadership race was your position on brexit um and really with the negotiations at least if you were paying attention to the public the public rhetoric you'd say that the negotiations are really coming to a crunch now um big talk threats about no deal from johnson and allegations accusations about who's at fault for the stalin talks um what's your read on on recent events the events of the last week well i i think the first thing is it's very important to remember that no deal is not a thing it's not a destination it's not a thing it's an absence of a thing it's just saying there isn't a deal and it leaves all the big questions still to be answered so if you got no deal you failed to make an agreement with the european union you've dropped into wto terms which are literally the worst terms that you can have for trading with anybody and then you've got to pull yourself out of that situation and negotiate a new deal in the future so people who are excited by no deal are missing the point that no deal is just the beginning of a very painful lengthy process of trying to bring another deal together but bringing it together unfortunately from a position of weakness because you're having to start from a situation which you've already disentangled yourself from the eu in which your farming industry your automobile industry will be beginning to suffer because it will be facing european union tariff barriers and potentially also getting cheap imports in from the united states and other countries um and one other area one other area that was actually raised in the commons today by theresa may former prime minister um was that of security cooperation and as michael gove was responding to her um he said that whether there was a deal or in the absence of one security cooperation with the eu would improve and the cameras cut uh uh former problems on the back benches and she was still going what what um which is unusual for when for you know somebody you're used to being so so sort of steely faced and giving away so little it's quite quite compelling to see her displaying that much emotion um i mean i feel like it goes without saying but on this point of security cooperation it it doesn't really stand to reason does it that it's going to improve if we don't negotiate something with the european union i mean that's a bizarre rhetorical move um to to suggest it's going to get better it's extraordinary i mean at the moment we have full access to databases we have arrest warrants that we share in common the challenge about leaving the system is almost certainly that cooperation will get worse be more difficult to track european union citizens in the united kingdom united kingdom citizens european union and indeed non-eu citizens traveling through those two places where we used to share databases and share rules so from a security and justice point of view it is difficult yes and only going to become increasingly difficult if that's the course of action that happens um obviously you know um theresa may quite well um and for me one of the sort of i call it an underrated storyline if you like but it's been sort of how she must feel during this process to see you know sort of what was essentially um she was undermined by boris in relation to her deal comes back with what is virtually a carbon copy of it dresses up as something else i mean what's your read on it how do you how do you think she she feels during all this process watching johnson go about do it setting about doing what she tried and failed to do well i think it's it it must be extraordinary for her so i actually believe that um remainers will look back and conclude that they made a mistake not supporting a soft brexit i can understand many people felt at the time that brexit was such a bad idea that there was going to be a second referendum and there was no need to brexit at all so whenever you talked about a soft brexit whenever i was talking about a soft brexit uh people would say well but that's worse than being in the european union and they wouldn't accept my answer at the time which was yeah but we're leaving the european union because there's been this referendum they thought there could be a second record um the result is i'm afraid that we're going to end up much more likely to end up with the no deal brexit not just because of the hard brexiteers but also because the remainers rubbished theresa may's deal so completely when it came out um and i think it's a very very uh you know it's something that haunts me why were we not able to convince people that if we were going to leave the european union it was better to do so with something like a customs union yeah i remember i remember you making the argument at the time um saying that the deal was there um and that pursuing it and to a certain extent you were viewed as a little bit of a pariah because as you said so many people whether they were remainers or they were on the heart of brexit side of the argument they they viewed it as inadequate and i think it probably speaks to a broader point which is sort of something that you try to channel in your torah leadership campaign and again with your mayoral bid uh compromise consensus and something i know you like the center ground yeah it's a very interesting thing this that the argument that i tried to make which is one of the reasons to go for a soft brexit was to try to heal the country and bring it together i tried to say that one of the reasons why we should have had a soft brexit is not just that i happen to believe that a customs union was better for british farming or british car industry than leaving it was also that i was looking for a way to bring the country together i felt that it had been a 52-48 referendum and we needed a 5248 brexit something that people who voted remain could get a wrong side and people who voted brexit to get alongside because the point was that this deal wasn't just meant to be for the next few months it was meant to be for the next 20 30 years and i completely failed to convince anyone of that we've got a culture where people feel that they're rewarded for being obdurate for just digging their heels in and saying no and then in the end they'll get what they want and i never managed to convince my friends who believed in a second referendum that they were not going to get it and that by pushing for it they were running the risk of a boris johnson government and a harder brexit gosh i think that's probably quite a heavy burden i i don't know who's specifically you're talking about but i imagine the sort of the dominant grieves and such of this world and the soft side of the tory party if they were to carry that on their conscience they might um yeah very we're quite heavy on them are you still in touch with any of your old your old cabinet colleagues you you still do you still reminisce about your fun times around that table um i'm i a little bit i mean i'm very fond of david gork who was uh who was the justice secretary and who i i admire a lot um i don't miss politics to be honest i mean i i found it by the end having been through brexit and the leadership and then the london merrell race so bruising so strange and uh i i'm in a sort of i'm afraid in a sort of recovery where i'm enjoying uh getting back to afghanistan been going teaching i'm enjoying spending time with my family but i'm not really looking for chances to ring my colleagues and reminisce about the good old days you're still teaching about politics though so you can't quite kick the habit um uh the reason i'm asking actually is because i tried to eat his lot the other day and he's sort of one of the he offered his reason why he thinks we're in such a dire situation we are at the moment and he offered that it might be because of the lack of talent around the cabinet table um partially because they were largely chosen chosen on their basis of their allegiance to brexit um but the other thing he also offered was that there's been 10 years virtually 10 years of tory government and that basically anyone who had any talent has basically left got bored been quite bruised perhaps like yourself um and and wanted to leave i mean is that an assessment you'd agree with i think that it's also true that there's not necessarily much um uh belief in talent in our democratic system i think the public at some level or a lot of the public is so disillusioned and angry with politicians imagines that we're all a bunch of liars and criminals earning competence anyway that the question of which one of us is relatively more competent than someone else hardly features and i think that's really important i was very struck actually both during the leadership campaign and during the merrell campaign that no journalist ever really talked about my cv never really talked about whether i was good at running things whether i'd done a good job as a prisons minister because the assumption is that i think that we're the whole system's so broken that we're all so useless anyway that it doesn't really matter who's in the cabinet it doesn't really matter whether you know the idea that i might have more experience running something than somebody else doesn't really seem to be relevant or that i might have done a better job as a minister as someone else doesn't seem to be relevant i think and that is at the core i think of the phenomenon of trump and to some extent boris johnson which is that all the things that 10 15 years ago you would expect would cause problems for them don't cause problems for them because i think expectations are now so low that people almost enjoy the idea of bringing in colorful figures and that's true of the cabinet i mean i think um some of them are smart and hard-working some of them are not and i'm not sure journalists or the public have very clear ideas on which are which i think only very very specialist westminster watchers actually care very much about what yeah about whether that's important or necessary i guess that sort of technocracy versus populism um sorry i mean i think the other thing that's strange is we don't really judge politicians on um sticking to what they've said so uh it's very striking you know you'll find in the cabinet a lot of people who might have been uh might have lost their jobs because they were fired by previous prime ministers over scandals or who have stated in the past that they are completely against the nerdy or brexit and are now supporting it or have stated that they would never work with boris johnson now working with him but this doesn't seem to be remembered this is just taken for granted and and that then means that if you are somebody who is trying to campaign assuming that there are certain kinds of rules rules about certain kinds of expectations of competence or expectations on uh you know following through on what you've said you're going to do these may not be very useful in a world in which those things are not very relevant in which uh people's attention spans very slow that's interesting and and i i wanted to ask you then if you think the bar is so low what what do you think then would constitute a success for the likes of boris johnson let's say what would constitute a success for boris johnson's government government well i think that the prime thing that uh leaders are interested in i think it's inevitable is winning elections often they don't have much idea of what they really want to do with the power when they've got it boris has a general idea that uh britain's um great country and he's going to be a sort of cheerleading he's going to go around saying we're great it's going to be great it's all going to be fine but he doesn't necessarily have a very detailed picture of what exactly he wants to reform day in day out he's chosen though to bring in dominic cummings who with michael gove seems to have his own very clear ideas about two things one of them is about reforming the civil service and the other one is about trying to level up and rebuild the economy of northern england um and i guess uh boris is um supporting that allowing him to get on with that um but those are very interesting projects because they're very long-term projects they're not things where it's likely that even if you were successful you'd see much result within five or ten years they're not really electoral projects so for example leveling up um you know sorting out the economy in northern england is about building roads and rail infrastructure which will take 15-20 years to build very very long time before you have a result let's say you concluded that one of the great advantages of france is that in cities outside paris they have um they have underground systems so that what you wanted to do was build an underground system in birmingham manchester you know that's a project that would take you 20 years to do judging by how long crosstrail takes to do the train line that's meant to connect leads to manchester again is something that people are talking about starting in 15 years time so these are good things to do but they're not things which people are going to see quickly they're not going to have much impact on short-term politics and so are you are you are you advocating then that boris johnson should be pursuing more short-termist um electoral policy is that what you're advocating for no in a way i like the fact that this is a government that's interested in civil service reform i don't agree the type of reform they're bringing but i like the fact they're doing it because when i was in government and i wanted to talk about civil service reform the normal response was over gonna say don't be ridiculous nobody cares about civil service reform you know the germans don't care the public don't care don't waste your time doing it so i i think it's um it's good that they care about it i think they've got a very unrealistic idea about what they're trying to do and i'm worried that dominic cummings has this sort of dr strangelove idea that the ideal civil services some sort of u.s nuclear weapon building program from the late 1940s and the thing that stays in the way of success is too much health and safety and the great thing about the manhattan project is you just put on some sunglasses when you let off the atom bomb and everybody was fine um and then of course um for all for all the goodwill will for all the ambition in the world um this pandemic has happened and one questions how much oxygen there is within the government and civil service to deal with anything other than dealing with the pandemic it's immediate fallout and the long-term consequences which we're going to be feeling for generations a pandemic potentially as the bank of england says is leading to the worst recession in 300 years i mean it's completely off the charts what this means uh in a very small way if you take a small example i was running to be mayor of london in the spring of this year and the three issues that i was campaigning on were knife crime affordable housing and air quality all those political issues suddenly changed overnight with covert you know they came down by 30 in about two months now uh things that nobody was thinking about in january like mass unemployment suddenly matters if i take my old constituency of penrith in the water before covert it had the second highest employment rates in the whole of britain and ninety percent of people were employed in my in fact long-term unemployment in my consideration there were 58 people wow and povid has meant that it is now the second worst effect that anyone in the country 45 of the eligible population has been furloughed so it's i mean everything's changed it's gone from a place where the one thing that nobody was worried about was unemployment literally anybody coming to my constituency surgery if they wanted a job i could basically get them a job to a situation which almost half the eligible population has had to be followed i mean these are things that i don't think any politician has begun to get their head around yeah i remember i think it was the last time you and i spoke was about seven months ago or so and like you said it was a lifetime ago you candidate to be mayor of london that's no longer the case but something that you did in that interview was you called for an earlier lockdown an earlier lockdown than many others um were even suggesting or saying it was an acceptable idea in fact you were denounced as a little bit of a crank i think for for suggesting it and for doing so um and then to a certain extent i mean you've been vindicated in the time since i mean i know it's pretty morbid to say but i mean do you feel vindicated or i mean do you feel do you feel tragic i mean what's your response to seeing that call that you made and how it could potentially have had a really significant impact on what happened after well i think look i i appreciate it was a difficult call i disagree with the government i thought that the advice they were getting was not the right one and they should have been challenging it and it was up for politicians to make the decision and i felt that there they needed to move much more quickly so i've been saying this i guess from the end of february though and i believe very strongly that the answer was to lock down very very quickly and that if we lock down quickly enough we might be able to come out of it more quickly too and i i do believe to some extent that is true i had seen already it was obvious by the time we did that interview that that is what in effect taiwan was doing that's what china was doing and i couldn't see why we shouldn't be trying to do the same thing they didn't do that and i can also understand why because i was a minister sitting around that table why it's sometimes quite difficult to make those kind of arguments because uh it's difficult to be the odd voice out it's difficult to challenge the conventional wisdom it's difficult to say i think we're getting this all wrong and we're going to have to do something very different particularly when it's going to be very costly i mean you know at the time everybody was saying what do you mean you want to stop people traveling on the tubes and it's going to bankrupt the tube system and what's going to happen if we close schools i mean how are people going to be so i can completely understand that um but i do think that generally in any crisis in coronavirus is no exception to it act early no regrets throw the kitchen sink at it straight away and if you're lucky you can come out a bit more quickly often the sort of the charge that's leveled at us at the moment is if you want to make international comparisons that the uk has um suffered the worst in terms of its economy it's one of the worst in terms of its economy and it's also suffered a pretty horrific death toll um do you think there's an argument that that is um exclusively to do with the government or something that you know has been suggested are people often making these international comparisons so as you said taiwan you could look to south korea you could look to new zealand um however those countries they're not really the sort of international hubs in the same way the uk is and particularly the way that london is um i.e you know the the sort of the the gateway to europe for the us and vice versa and all the rest of it do you think regardless of how it was managed that the uk was perhaps always going to suffer worse than other international than our sort of international comparisons because of the nature of our of our standing and our role in the global community so i think we could have done much better but it was always going to be horrifying it was always going to be very difficult partly because we're very dependent on services and face-to-face services in london nearly 85 dependent on services many of which were crippled by rotavirus um i also think that we don't have what germany had which was a very good pre-existing localized test and trace system in place so it was always going to be very difficult i don't see though why the government wouldn't have moved more quickly i don't see why they couldn't have decided for example to shut down uh flights coming in from milan where milan was one of the hot spots it was extraordinary i don't know whether you remember this passengers coming over this off those flights to milan saying nobody tried to stop us at the airport nobody tried to talk to us nobody tried to quarantine us so i i think that had we moved more quickly to shut it down the numbers would have been more controllable i don't know whether they could have managed the test and trace system better i imagine they could it seems to me that that is basically a project management problem that doesn't mean we could have done it as well as germany because we don't have all that infrastructure in place but i still think we could have done it better on the other hand it was always going to be horrifying and i think that to some extent it's not fair comparing somewhere like britain to for example singapore because we're a much much bigger much more open much more complicated society that was always going to face problems that smaller places don't it's it's the it's the track and the uh trace track and trace system rather that sort of sees us now i thought rory rory please don't i'm uh i i wouldn't know the word for it the system by which you contact trace people who have tested positive and their contacts and who they've come into contact with and then informing those people to isolate would be how you would say in a sentence um that system uh because it's not functioning we sort of find ourselves trapped in this sort of cyclical lockdown process i.e the nation grinds to a hold we start to ease off and as a result of that the virus resurfaces it's resurgent and really without that in place you're just you're basically trapped in this endless process of so so you you've got to i think you have to get there i mean i i'm not as gloomy as people who say it's inevitable that we can't do it that somehow germany has such deep inherent advantages that we can never get to a good system i'm sitting here in in new haven in the united states and the system for testing is pretty impressive i i can go in and i'm gonna do this uh in an hour's time i will drive in with my wife and kids into a testing center we will park the car in the car park we will be tested and out the door within about 90 seconds you walk in your hand at a little uh test tube you stick your end thing up your nose five times five times stick it back and test you you've got barcode on the side you get your results uh often uh within certainly within 24 hours and it's um it's really impressive and it can be done now of course a lot of the rest united states is not doing it so the point is that america is quite a good example america like britain is a very very big very complicated very open country but the fact is that if it's being done well in some places there's a clue there that you can scale it up and nothing of what i'm seeing when i'm doing these tests here strikes me as being impossible to replicate across the country i cannot understand why you could not in pretty much any city and town in the united kingdom have similar systems and yes they're costly but anything that you pay for it is worth it because the impact on our economy is so extreme and once you get it right which is what's true here it becomes much much easier for people to confidently do stuff open up for example i'm you know my children are in school all the time and the schools are not being shut down i'm teaching in the classroom when there are other students in the classroom we're confident doing that we've all been tested um so uh yeah and restaurants are operating and people are learning more and more about when to use masks and where to sit and i mean you know you can live yeah it's one of the big things that stands in the way really and why we're still finding ourselves in this process i mean i put forward the argument last week and got um i received a fair amount of flack for doing so i should say that perhaps one way out of it could be that in these areas where we're seeing high rates that we sort of lock down the most at-risk part of the population i.e the elderly and we allow younger people to sort of go out and return to perhaps not life as before but at least be going to work at least be being able to visit local businesses and stimulate them with their cash um i wonder what you make of that argument that perhaps the people there's definitely there's definitely something in that argument because of course the uh this is a very strange disease spanish influenza young people were very vulnerable this is a disease in which basically the older you get the more vulnerable you are except for people with certain specific conditions and the longer this goes on the more pressure there will be to say let's focus on the people who are most vulnerable to this disease and allow others to move around but to two provisors one of those is that if you get it wrong you're going to overwhelm the health system so you have to make sure that you're not going to let it spread so much that you're going to end up with more cases than hospitals can handle that's one of the problems with the traditional herd immunity theory is that you end up with so many cases coming to hospital you basically crash the system the second question is how you support and deal with vulnerable people in that situation and the interaction between younger people and vulnerable people you know what is going to be the relationship between you and i don't know elderly relatives of yours or vulnerable friends of yours what are the rules going to be on how you interact with them how do you arrange that that said i think there's no doubt olly brutally speaking if a vaccine does not come soon we're going to have to look logically at those kinds of things they're going to have big practical problems big moral problems but it's going to be very very difficult ultimately if we're going to live with this not to move into a world in which either you get your tests and trace right which is what we're doing i believe here or if you really have given up on testing trace you may have to go down that route that's the worrying thing about the vaccine is that i've interviewed immunologists who say you know if it was best case scenario beginning of next year that would be a well essentially a world first a marvel of modern medicine and it's very common for a vaccine to take two five maybe even 10 years at a time um i'd like to move on though and and talk a little bit about the national politics of where you find yourself now rory um the presidential election uh i'm assuming you're not an advocate of donald trump but i wondered if you could describe would you describe yourself as pro joe biden well that's a really good challenge i mean i definitely think president biden is huge amount better than uh donald trump uh and um uh we have a my wife is an american citizen and we have a joe biden a sign on our lawn a very small lawn did you did you hammer it in though although your neighbor has got a big trump flag up so this is you know this we're right right in the middle of all of us um and of course as you can imagine a bit like brexit this is completely passionately felt so my wife her friends her parents basically think that anyone who votes for trump uh is is is evil i mean maybe i'm exaggerating that but there is a very very profound culture war going on in the united states and that's very wary because as someone who advocates underground i really want uh to try to help people to feel sympathy for their fellow citizens it's about half the population that's why it feels like brexit of voting they can't all be evil people so that's one problem the second problem is it makes you very uncritical of your insight so i can see a lot of problems with vice president biden i thought his debate performance was lamentable and i think that the problem is that nobody wants to point out what those problems are because nobody wants to give any sort of solace to trump it was very similar when i was international development secretary you weren't allowed to point out any of the problem with our aid programs because people were terrified if you ever admitted that we were making mistakes or aid program it would be used to destroy the aid programs entirely so everybody went round pisces pretending that it was all going very well when obviously it wasn't and one of the things that worries me with biden is that uh he seems anecdotally from the people that i know and dealt with him to be very very anti-british and to talk a lot about being anti-british yeah there's um that the sort of the irish vote connection isn't there for the democrats that sort of perhaps fosters that um you mentioned his his uh his debate performance there as a as a veteran of televised debates yourself i wonder if you had any advice for him i mean perhaps you're not wearing a tie now but perhaps to take it off and you taking off yeah using it using it no using it to choke trump into silence perhaps exactly i think the key dealing with trump is to understand that he's not going to give you your two-minute speech biden had prepared clearly these long two-minute speeches you have to assume the guy's going to keep interrupting you and really depressing though it is it was necessary i felt for biden to show his teeth and push back conditioning some people didn't like the fact that he said this guy's a clown and yada yada i thought that if he hadn't done that it would have been very difficult because trump was trying to bully him trying to dominate him that doesn't look good in a presidential debate so you've got to find a way of pushing back um i think that it would be good though also for biden to find a few positive things to say about his own program it seemed to me that too much of this in the end is just directed against trump now that's kind of working for him but it would be nice for government and politics in general if he told us a little bit about what he was going to do and the problem there is that the democratic party is much more split than i think people in britain acknowledge so it's very difficult for him actually to lay out what his policy is on healthcare because his own party is tearing itself to bits you know the bernie sanders wing wants the sort of nhs system other people don't want to touch that kind of system so he almost can't talk about those things he can't sell out his program yeah and yet it might still be enough for him to beat trump um i mean the polling i mean it looks like it's going to be a massacre at certain points people were saying that about 2016. can i am can i draw you into a prediction rory will you but my prediction will be that biden will win and it's interesting because we live in an age of populism in which we feel that the advantages generally lie with celebrities show showman and that this sort of strong macho not very detail-oriented swagger is what wins so it's reassuring that trump is likely to lose it's very odd that the person that's going to defeat him is somebody who is quite as old and stiff and non-celebrity-like as biden uh and yet and this is my real problem i think in the in general the populists still have the advantage in elections so biden may win this one but i think we need to understand that in the united states in britain and around the world we are moved into a a period partly driven by social media where very very coarse black and white uh statements win and where people are not very focused on details on competence on track records rory stewart thank you very much for your time i appreciate it thank you ollie that's really kind thank you bye you

Channel: PoliticsJOE

Views: 7,275

Keywords: Politics, UK politics, British politics, Parliament, Government, Westminster, rory stewart interview, rory stewart, theresa may, afghanistan, rory stewart afghanistan, brexit, rory stewart brexit, boris johnson, tory leadership debate, rory stewart tie, rory stewart tv debate, rory stewart boris johnson, rory stewart speech, rory stewart debate, news, brexit news, brexit politics, no deal brexit, boris johnson brexit, european union, michel barnier, coronavirus, covid 19

Id: baParvwAVQs

Length: 39min 22sec (2362 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020