Rory Stewart on the pain of losing to Boris, and near-death experiences in Afghanistan | Unfiltered

I walked across Afghanistan this was just after 9/11 I'd been going a few miles where I suddenly saw something that I could see ahead of me on this huge open snow plane almost like Crossing glassier I suddenly realized it was a it was a corpse and his face had been eaten by birds and I I'd never seen anything like that and I realized at that point that this Crossing was tougher than I was quite ready for there is no way that somebody like me should have been in charge of a province of one million people and then two million people it's it's mad I had an experience that changed really my whole perspective on politics for the next 10 years or more hello and welcome to unfiltered my name's olle dugmore and my guest today was a politician his CV reads like the Diary of an eccentric Colonial administrator tutor to princes William and Harry governor of a province in Iraq during the war he walked across Ross Asia specifically Afghanistan delivering viral speeches about hedgehogs in the House of Commons and Once Upon a Time Brad Pitt owned the rights to his life story but after being purged from the conservative party by Boris Johnson he had no political home and instead returned back to charity work and podcasting granting him more influence and wealth than ever before my guest today is Rory Stewart Rory how are you very well thank you for thank you for coming that's okay it's a pleasure it's nice to talk to you good to see you again what have you been up to we're back in London well so the last time we met was almost my last day in this house so it was just on the on the beginning of Co and then this is almost my first day back in the house so I've been um in the states teaching at at Yale University and I've been living in Jordan mhm and working as well with the charity gift director exactly which mostly Works mostly in Africa not only in Africa we also work a little bit in the Middle East and Asia and it's quite a radical idea we give direct unconditional cash support to the extreme poor so instead of traditional charity work which focuses on capacity building training people basically telling people what they need which I find a bit kind of patronizing and a little bit inefficient this says people living on less than $2 a day have a much better idea of what their needs are than you or I do and that actually it's better to just get out of the way and concentrate almost all the money on giving them the cash to buy what they need and in your work at give directly your giving cash straight to these people it's a very radical departure from what you were doing as Secretary of State for International Development we have all of these incredibly expensive programs billions of billions of pounds what made you think that what you were doing previously was the wrong approach yeah it was a huge change for me I found it very difficult because initially when I was uh the minister and then the sex State PR naal development I put so much energy into thinking maybe the reason our programs aren't working is that we're not putting enough we don't know enough about local languages we don't know enough about local culture maybe what we need to do is put British civil servants right out there in villages spending 10 years absorbed to really study these communities and understand what they need and then I went a couple years ago on a trip to Rwanda with give directly to a very remote rural area where all they had done is turn up and transfer $700 to each household on their phones because mobile money in Africa now allows you to give money directly to people and I found that within about 3 months the whole village had been transformed there were new roofs people had cows small businesses were being set up there were more kids of school nutrition was improving there more electricity everybody had a a toilet and I suddenly thought my goodness you know we couldn't begin to achieve this with 10 times the amount of money with the traditional development program you mentioned in the book as well uh a program toilet building program in a school um that you saw that's probably relevant to this what we're talking about now yeah well those was a classic example so I was uh went out to Zambia when I was working for British government to see a program which was supposed to be uh installing toilets and wash facilities for children in schools and I turned up and there was a huge line of white uh Jeeps Land Cruisers and a lot of Engineers and un officials and then I went to see what had actually been achieved and it was 40, 000 per school and what had been achieved were two holes in the ground costing at best a few hundred and five red plastic buckets and I said what's the idea of this and they said well you know the the girls take the plastic buckets to the well which is a few hundred meters away and they fill up with plastic buckets and bring it back I said well I get that but why did this cost $40,000 and the answer was they'd spent it all on needs assessments consultations engineering designs and finally come up with this so I said why don't we just give 2 ,000 to head teacher and let him get on with it and they said well you know he might steal the money and I'm trying to restrain myself from saying wait a sec basically we've St on the money Yeah you mentioned there as well very rural areas your former constituency of penth and the Border equally rural I'm not saying that the you know the level of deprivation there is the same as in subsaharan Africa but the ideas that you're talking about the methods that you're talking about would they apply in a place like your former constituency as much as they do in areas that we're doing Outreach 100% so for example I suddenly realized that we were doing these big development programs in penrith you know we'd spend 7 million pounds of government money on a single project which was supposed to be regenerating the area what would have happened if we'd given £1,000 to 700 small businesses and just let them decide what they wanted to do you know paint up their front bring in some more staff invest in a new coffee machine honestly doesn't matter right their choice no paperwork nothing I bet we would have had more economic return probably 10 times more economic return than the government spending millions of pounds designing a 7 million pound project which probably wouldn't begin to bring in the number of visitors that people were hoping for it's pretty radical concept and I one of the big lessons from the book certainly for me anyway was the way that the British State actually operates and I think later on we'll get ways we can change that ways we can improve it but just briefly I mean why can't we do that like what's stopping us from doing that now so so one of the things I I'm writing about in in this new book Politics on the edge is the way in which doesn't matter whether it's conservatives or labor who empower the system doesn't work the the central government Parliament whiteall is very very badly designed for the modern world it's basically a kind of Victorian an system which was designed for a much simpler government back in the 18th 19th century when this thing was at its height the government had a tiny budget and it didn't touch most areas of people's lives most bits of people lives were run by local government it's a sort of village town city level and from the 1940s onwards we've centralized so much power but the people exercising that power simply don't have the skills or the knowledge to do it effectively so this book in a sense is a plea for trusting local communities decentralization I most exciting meeting I had last week was with Andy Burnham the mayor of great of Manchester and Andy Street who's the mayor of the West midlets and they're from different political parties but you get a sense that doing things on the basis of place is the way to transform and improve things you walked across Asia I mentioned in the intro um and the places in between your book focuses on Afghanistan so can you tell me why I I walked across Afghanistan this was just after 9/11 uh just after the fall of the Taliban um I was young it seemed like an adventure I'd been walking for 18 months across Iran Pakistan India and Nepal walking 20 25 miles a day staying in a different village house every night and I've been a British Diplomat and I believed strongly that rural areas off the beacon track would tell you much more about a country than you ever saw sitting in the city behind an office desk so along with all the romantic things of being out in landscape and nature and this great adventure and walking my dog I had an experience that changed really my whole perspective on politics for the next 10 years or more because I saw how radically different the lives of an Afghan Community were I mean many of these communities women had not been more than 2 hours W from their Village in their lives only one person in a village could read or write there was no electricity for 400 miles and then I turned up back in the capital city and I heard all my old colleagues diplomats un people saying every Afghan is committed to a gender sensitive multiethnic centralized state may some democracy human rights and rule of law and we're going to do a Facebook Revolution actually it wasn't quite Facebook we're going to do an internet Revolution and I was trying to say wait wait wait there's no internet Revolution there's there's no electricity people can't read and write and as for this idea of a gender sensitive multiethnic centralized State based democracy human rights law I can't even translate that into a local Afghan language I don't know how I'd say that to someone with this journey as well in Afghanistan how much of it connects to this lost city the turquoise Mountain were you going looking for it and actually as well could you explain to viewers what the turquoise mountain is um I was aware that it was there and I'd always since i' had been a child I mean I loved things like Indiana Jones I loved that whole thing um but I didn't think that I was going to find much I mean it was it was a complete miracle I came to a narrow deserted gorge in the very center of Afghanistan saw this incredible minet which in the classic kind of colonial fantasies was first discovered in a verdic com was in the 1950s but of course the villagers would have been aware it was there for 800 Years cuz they've been living about a couple miles to the base of it and firstly it is a stunning thing in the middle of nowhere tall of the Nelson's column turquoise blue tiles around the neck and then I saw around the base of this thing which archaeologists have believed was a lonely Victory Tower villagers beginning in the week weeks before I arrived to dig out of the ground Ivory chest pieces carve wood and doors fragments of Chinese porcelain and I realized that the villagers had uncovered a city that had been destroyed by genas Khan 800 years earlier and that once ruled an Empire that stretched from Delhi in India to Baghdad in Iraq could you talk a little bit more about these in well incredible places um their place in history and global history you know the minet of jam um the Buddhas of Bayan where do these artifacts monuments fit into our broader conversations about history and the world we live in so Afghanistan is absolutely unique it's it was the sort of Ring Road of the ancient world because all the trade between the great civilizations of China and India and Greece and Rome and the near East moved around Afghanistan and on the edge of an American Airbase called buam they uncovered a horde of trading Goods couple of thousand years old and amongst them are pieces of uh glass from Egypt ivory from India uh fragments of Chinese silk Roman coins you get the sense that in the world before globalization Afghanistan was the kind of first really globalized trading Community but because it's very poor because it's very mountainous this stuff is been preserved in Afghanistan in a way that it hasn't anywhere else and Afghanistan was one of the great centers of World Civilization it was the place where the west and the East met with these explosions of art the first time the Buddha was ever portrayed as a human as opposed to as an abstract object was in Afghanistan so Central religion Central art and of course in the last 1502 200 years the center tragedy because that geographical position then put it between uh the British Empire Russia and then between Russia and the United States during the 1980s and the Cold War and then put it again at the front line of the war on terror because bad located himself there so it's country of Staggering Beauty Afghans are very very unique people I mean I've never it's difficult to describe a whole country without s like you're being weird and making generalizations but I can honestly say there's nowhere I have been sort of so happy to live so proud of the friendships I made um and now of course it's it's laps back into Taliban rule it's a bit of a sliding doors moment really isn't it you know looking back at when you were there the fall of the Taliban early ughs compared to where we are now that moment when the Taliban Falls you decide you're going to walk across Afghanistan could you tell me a little bit about your sort of thought your decision- making process there because you know regardless it's an incredibly dangerous thing to do right you're going to be walking across mountains the conditions are poor but you know there's people running around with kalashnikovs you're talking about local Warlords there still the Taliban are still there were you concerned about your safety when you were there it's been I think it's been it's it's a question that I've been avoiding for um sort of almost more than 20 years because that's when I when I did the journey and I think I was avoiding the question and I I'd make jokes I say you know I was doing it to to impress women be like did it work i' be like no um but I think I'm now I've just become 50 and I think I've got enough distance from myself now to see that a lot of this are the kind of um are the ways in which someone in their 20s projects these heroic fantasies on the world I think I was almost feeling that I was living a life out of a kind of cartoon um and that I would have these moments and I don't know whether other people in the 20s some feel this but when you're doing something that really connects with your dreams you can sort of suddenly feel oh my goodness you know this is so exciting I'm on my own in the Afghan snow with my dog and hear somebody riding towards me with a horse and a gun and I I often try to make it seem more kind of serious and meaningful because of course I was aware at the time that of course I'm risking my life of course you know these are very very poor communities and I'm very lucky to be able to travel amongst them I'm a very privileged person so I feel sort of slightly guilty and I have to apologize for it but the truth is that it probably isn't very different from any young woman or man uh going off to Thailand on holiday and thinking this is really cool it's a pretty strong Gap here isn't it um we're talking about your personal safety I'd like to talk about that a little bit more because yes there were you know guys with kalashnikovs on horses but actually it turns out the thing that was most dangerous to you um were the conditions there's a moment right when you're in the snow with babo your dog you talk a little bit about that yeah so I wasn't conscious I think completely how tired I was getting so walking 25 30 miles a day through snow and villagers in central Afghanistan in the winter basically only eat bread there's no meat there's no vegetables no fruit and I had been walking across this snow plane and in this case the gap between Villages was about probably 20 mi which you know you walk about 3 miles a day so that's most of the day's walk and it was a blazing h hot day and I'd been going a few miles where I suddenly saw something that I could see ahead of me on this huge open snow plane almost like cross your glassier and when I got close to it I suddenly realized it was a it was a corpse it was a guy who'd been trying to walk the other way I could see his Footprints it's so half melted in the snow and he' covered his hands in plastic bags I guess to keep them warm and he just laid down on the snow and died obviously maybe I I don't know maybe 12 24 hours before I got there and his face had been eaten by birds and I I'd never seen anything like that before and I realized at that point that this Crossing um was tougher than I was quite ready for anyway I walked on and after another I guess couple of hours I began to feel very very very very tired and I the Sun was shining and I lay down in the snow and I felt two things I felt I've done all I can be asked to do nobody can criticize me at this point for for lying down it's fine I don't need to keep going and this is quite nice and then my dog uh came back and started sort of sniffing around me like it was a kind of joke what are you doing Lon said and then walked on and then turned around and came back and then barked at me and then walked on and I remember feeling you know what a brave dog right this dog doesn't seem to be having this kind of existential crisis I guess if this dog can keep going I could you know probably triy to walk a few more steps so I kind of I feel I kind of followed my dog and and the dog you know saved my life in the very matter of fact engaged partnership that a dog can have with a person and could you tell us then um what happened later to your dog yeah so it was most extraordinary privilege because uh in many ways b i b obviously I ow my life to to to to to Bubble who was this enormous great Afghan Hound who um who walked with me and we made it to cabal together where I was able to you know feed him well rest him and then we were going to come back to Scotland together and I arranged it all with the airline and we moved on to Pakistan and I'll taxi this enormous animal with its kind of Paws resting on it um but he'd never been out of the Central African mountains and I could see that he was getting very hot and something went wrong with moving him and there was just sort of back and forth and back and forth and in the end a very uh a a very kind journalist War reporter who' been working in Afghanistan for many years said don't worry Ry you get on the plane I'll look after him and we'll put him on the plane the next day and you can meet him in scond big box and something happened what seems to have happened is that he was fed um a lamb ribs and I think the lamb ribs broke and uh must have uh cut his stomach he was taken my friend took him straight to a vet in Pakistan um but but he died and I mean I felt very very bad not to be within um yeah I can tell it's still super emotional for you so uh we'll move things on I mentioned in the intro about your CV reading sort of like an eccentric Colonial administrator working in Iraq literally administering a province um your work in Afghanistan walking across Afghanistan I mean is it an unfair criticism to to say that your life is fairly analgous to one of those sort of Victorian Imperial characters so I think it's sort of fair and unfair at the same time go on so I think there's there's no doubt that I uh grew up with a real respect for um sort of Victor Valley I mean my grandfather was literally a Victorian I I I come from a family where there's this huge age gets my father was 50 when I was born my grandfather was 50 when my father was born my grandfather was born you know in the 1880s he was um he was in he he lived in India for nearly 50 years um you know he was in India for the the great you know correlation ceremony of Edward I 7 still the early uh 20th century um it OB served in the first were already quite old um so that's part of me and I loved my father and he had that kind of worldview and he'd been a British colonial officer and he was very proud of it and it's a difficult thing to talk about now but he'd been a district officer in in what was then Mala British Mala in the' 40s um and 50s before that servant war and he I I loved my father and he was very proud of the schools that he' built and the things that he' done and you know he still we grew up in Malaysia after Independence and he went back for the Independence Day Celebrations so there that that's part of me but I was also very very aware when I hit the ground in Iraq how much the world had changed and that actually this did not make sense anymore I was I think given that the job was mad reasonably good at my job I was I loved working with local communities I put a lot of energy into trying to build up the Poli Force open schools get electricity sorted try to stop small conflicts but the truth is there is no way that somebody like me uh in his whatever I was I guess yeah early 30s should have been in charge of a province of 1 million people and then 2 million people it's it's mad um and the fundamental truth was and this is at the bottom some of the problems these ridiculous Messes in Iraq and Afghanistan is that Iraqis and Afghans quite understandbly did not want us they really did not want us I mean they it wasn't enough to say yeah but you know you got rid of Saddam Hussein so surely things are better yeah okay we got rid of Saddam Hussein and he was a horrible dictator and Afghanistan got rid of the tan but truth is nobody wants to be administered by somebody from a completely different country at totally different religion and actually I think I knew I didn't want to extend it to Britain I mean I I don't push it too far but it's a little bit of an echo with the problems of you know British government somebody sent me a tweet yesterday saying you know how can you be a you know what do you how can you be a poan you've never lived on benefits what do you know about benefits and I thought that's absolutely right and listen let me add to that that's only the beginning of the problem what the FY know about transport Foreign Affairs defense health education right the the whole idea that sort of reasonably bright hardworking amateurs can somehow run a whole society is mad and and I think in the modern world I don't want to sound too kind of radical about this but there is a problem of what we call representation right there's a problem of my representing Ira but there's also a problem of my representing a c and and I I that's not just that I'm a privileged old eonian there is a fundamental problem with anyone claiming to represent 70,000 people or a country of 70 million people doesn't matter who you are doesn't matter whether the working class Apple class you do not begin to understand the full dimension of people's lives and the complexity of our society so what are we talking about then Rory hyper localized democracy are we talking about um hundreds more elected representatives devolved power I mean what are you what are you getting at yeah so hyper localized uh to start with I really think we could begin by getting power much closer to people through really giving the M great Manchester or West Midlands proper budgetary power proper Authority I think they can come up with a much smarter strategy for jobs and businesses than London can because they understand their context but I take it right the way down I wouldn't want the whole of Cambria run from kala I'd really want to give a bit like in France local mayor's real power I'd also want to use citizens assemblies which is the idea of getting 300 literally randomly selected citizens like a jury to talk and think seriously about um policy and I'd want to say we got to get beyond the I or You are representing people speaking for them and giving more and more space for people to actually speak for themselves and represent themselves I mean this connects a little bit to what I was talking about with the charity in Africa that it's not an international NGO speaking on behalf of these communities it's the international NGO getting out of the way and letting these communities actually Define their own lives how on Earth are you or for that matter anyone going to change these things you're talking about you know in the in the British political system that are entrenched because the the people who have the capacity to change them you know are politicians they have a vested interest making sure that it doesn't happen right they have a vested interest in staying in power well it's it's it's it's it's I mean on the surface it it seems obviously like many of these things it seems impossible until you do it but the truth is that New Zealand managed to change their electoral system and uh other countries have created much more devolved systems I mean France changes its Constitution quite a lot um so I think one of the points that I'm trying to make in politics on the edge is to make make people understand just how broken it is and I think if people can try to sometimes through you know I hope I reasonably funny and reasonbly accessible but a lot of the purpose of these stories is to get people to really feel what's role how how how mad the system is and then I think once you've felt that and understood it we can then work together more confidently to fix it we may have done this in a fairly roundabout kind of way talking about your conclusions from your time in politics without actually the things that led you there so let's talk about your first meeting with David Cameron you go to him and you say you know do you want me um which is a pretty bold thing to do um tell me about your first meeting with the then conservative leader and eventually prime minister yeah so I had I was then a professor at Harvard University and there had been this expensive Scandal and David Cameron said he wanted people who'd never been involved in politics before to enter politics and I think I read this in the New York Times and I was thought ah okay in May this is a child ter well then part of the reason I wanted to do it is that I'd felt that in Iraq and Afghanistan we often felt we were in these messes because the politician so if I could become a politician I could kind of fix this stuff that it was all very well my writing books or being a civil servant or teaching but I was always on the fringes things I need to get to the center of things in order to really change the world so I went to David Cameron and said um look I'm you know thank you I'm very interested in this um but obviously if I'm going to move back from the United States leave my job and things I really want to know whether you really think that I can change world can I you know am I going to be able to be a minister do you want people like me and your your setup and it became immediately obvious that he did not want me at all uh he said um you know remaining as a backbencher is one of the great privileges of your life and all this sort of stuff but somehow instead of listening to that and thinking whoa whoa whoa whoa this is a bit of an indication this guy doesn't want me the system doesn't want me if I try to force myself into a conservative party that's not interested in someone like me under a leader that's not interested someone like me I'm very unlikely to make much progress I'd sort of caught the bug and slightly thought well screw him I'll I'll I'll do it anyway we'll come to how that worked out in the end but before you got into Westminster do you think you were naive I naive about so much about British politics I mean I mean one of the truths must be that I guess everybody's a little bit naive because until you've been in it it's so bizarre so difficult to imagine how it works partly because politics is based on lies it's based on pretending to the public that's different from what it really is even in schools so we're taught that Parliament that kind of scrutinizes and votes carefully on legisl it doesn't most of the time the MPS have not read the legislation in fact they often often I would go into votes and my colleagues would not even know what we were voting on we just go and follow the whips and vote so that's number one Parliament is not really a legislative body number two we imagine that um MPS can simultaneously be in their constituencies all the time and in Parliament all the time and working full-time on their jobs as ministers because mad right certainly we pretend that MPS have real power over what happens their constitues if you read the literature you get through your door they're like I'm campaigning to duel the a66 or I'm going to do it's all local council stuff the MP doesn't have any power over any of this but it's all pretense right so because of all these lies which are basically that it suits the politicians and it often suits the media to pretend the politicians have this kind of clear decisive power and authority and they know what they're doing it's very very unsettling to turn up in the House of Commons and realize that actually most of this is a sort of theatrical performance that there is very little power anywhere that you are largely powerless and you know these words that you sort of heard in the back of your mind you know Lobby fodder kind of the whips suddenly you're like whoa this is very very much more extreme than I had begun to imagine where is Power then well in modern Britain power is everywhere and nowhere and it's very interesting you know the journalists think that the power lies with the Prime Minister the prime ministers say you know I pull on a lever it's not connected to I can't get anything done it's kind of civil servants but the civil servants think no we're not making decisions we're being bullied and pushed around by ignorant ministers maybe the journalists have the power and then you know and around it goes in a circle or maybe the bankers have the power except the bankers feel the politicians are screwing everything El so the it's very very diffused and some things happen of course but when they happen ABS no idea let me give you an example last time I saw you the day that I saw you last four years ago I wasn't quite four years AG I saw you last but last time we were here yeah um I sent out a tweet saying I'm really disgusted that there are no trees on Regent Street four years later there are some trees and boxes on region street now they're not actually planted on the ground they're boxes die but something's happened I the mayor of London's done something or Westminster council's done something or some bus was that me did I help to make that happen through my tweet don't know is this thing ever going to be in the ground we don't know and it's taken four years seeing as you're talking about it you know that day here I remember you were getting it we finished our interview you were getting it in the neck from Downing Street calling for these more sort of uh decisive lockdowns to take action sooner you know they clearly thought that you had some power at that moment in time yeah yeah exactly so that was a classic example so I felt that what we needed to do is lock down immediately much more quickly once the problem had started in Italy and then we could lift the lockdown more quickly um instead of which initially Boris Johnson was I think confused he had instincts to was just letting it rip through heard immunity not taking it too seriously and then he had other advisor saying you need to do something they didn't know whether masks were going to work and all this kind of stuff as soon as I took a clear line I suddenly found the most senior people in government calling me and you know the chief scientific officer spent like an hour with me on the phone and I was like this is mad right you need something more important to do than to talk to me cabinet secretary is calling me the health secretary is getting in touch me because of course they find it very uncomfortable seeing somebody who then left the conservative part is independent going into the media challenging what they were doing saying they didn't know what they were doing um so you're right the the thing is very very weird and complicated and again one of the things I think that Politics on the edge is trying to explain is that the public shouldn't take the attitude towards politicians that a child might take towards an adult they shouldn't somehow think these are people with immense sort of heroic power who if things are not happening it's because they're kind of evil or trying to get people it's actually that the system is dysfunctional in the way that most of our jobs are dysfunctional I I this this book for me is a bit like um you know maybe if you brought up been brought up on a diet of James Bond novels try to say you know actually this is the crap that goes on in the middle of an intelligence service the bureaucracy the paperwork the silly Ambitions or somebody who thinks that I don't know being a doctor is always a kind of heroic life-saving stuff and actually I'm going to try to write from the inside of the NHS and make you understand why half my time is spent doing nonsense it it's that kind of book and and I'm hoping that through it it allows us to have a more mature understanding of what's going on after reading this you know I was left wondering whether you actually have any remaining political friends because you're pretty uncompromising talking about you know uh David Cameron who is sort of unthinking wispy headed and red-faced Liz trust comes across as completely unhinged we know what you think it's well documented what you think about Boris Johnson and yet you know as a part of their government as a backbench MP you weren't just sort of allowing these people to exist to govern to be put upon the British people you're actively supporting them you know and whilst your assessments about them now are Frank would they have been better at the time when these people were actually governing the country yeah so I was ad Minister out of David Cameron's government strongly supported Teresa may and then I resigned from the cabinet when bis Johnson came in and left the conservative party and I guess looking at my own conscience I drew the line of Boris Johnson and the list trust and what's followed because I felt that yes there were many things that frustrated me about David Cameron but I still felt that there was a hope for a more liberal center-right conservatism on him he was doing you know I voted with him on introducing gay marriage on increasing International Development spend quite sub at GDP on pushing Heaven Net Zero Targets on localism so I think it's important for me to sort of understand that I'd been very put off the labor party under Tedy Blair I mean I'd been a labor party member but I hadn't liked it and that's partly because my experience in Iraq and Afghanistan I thought it was very very technocratic and and that's actually Iraq think Afghanistan revealed a lot I felt about the labor party that they sort of thought that some smart people in London could come up with a map for nation building and then go to somebody else's country and kind of do it so it was I think I guess a belief in the wisdom of local communities that brought me I was the only person who believed in this uh thing that everyone would have forgotten about called David Cam's big Society right I kind of thought this was a real thing get I did um so there's no doubt I was a conservative there's no doubt that I voted with the whips for a lot of conservative measures I became a member of these governments I bear absolute responsibility for what happened between 2010 and 2018 I guess and then I tried to fight to stop things getting worse I tried to you know fed main I tried to fight for a compromise a soft brexit Customs Union brexit is what I was pushing for and I was totally defeated I lost the Customs union vote I stood to be prime minister Boris Johnson defeated me the party set off on this right with Lurch got into culture wars starts wanting to ship migrants to Rwanda and all this kind of stuff and I left the conservative party because I no longer recognize it when you joined the conservatives they were a center right party under David Cameron I don't think you can say that's the case anymore you know rishy sunak for my money is the most right-wing prime minister since Margaret Thatcher and actually now I think it's possible to describe the labor party under K starma as possibly a party of the center right um and I'd also actually be particularly interested in your assessment of starmer's relationship with Blair because they're talking to each other a little bit more now what do you see as the center in British politics well I think that the problem for the center and and basically the fight is between the liberal Center ground and populism right-wing populism because this new iteration conservative party is not really conservative it's populist so how does the liberal s ground respond to that and the biggest mistake that the liberal s ground always makes is to think that it can somehow return to the world of the 1990s the world of t b the truth is that that world collapsed and for a good reason the economic policy of that world was shattered by the 2008 financial crisis political Visions democracy visions of that world was pretty Shattered by the rise of China the visions of liberal World Order collapsed in the humiliations of Iraq and Afghanistan social media has created a new polarized environment you can't go back to that world and one of the mistakes we make is we often sound like we're a sort of tribute act and that we're trying to stand up for that so you have to begin by saying we got a lot wrong actually a lot of the results of that were shameful the economic policy of Thatcher John ma Tony Blair Gordon Brown and then austerity under David Cameron has led to stagnant incomes really to put it very politely massively underwhelming productivity in this country um uh our debt has been stretched to a position where it's very difficult for the government to borrow anymore our Public Services Under invested and the division between London Southeast and the outlying areas is really uh it's unacceptable so all of that gave the fuel for firing up populism the problem is the populist solutions that are childish and often offensive the the challenge of the liberal C ground is not just how do we communicate again with a bit of moral Authority and emotion but where are the new ideas coming from when you talked about the fact that kiaa hasn't got a Manifesto out that's the key if the liberal Center GRS to have any real credibility it can't just say spend its whole time being like Boris Johnson's a a liar and a charlatan he is he's a massive liar he's a massive charlatan he's a terrible human being but he's gone and we need something more you know I think you can view fism the ukic of Britain call it what you want as a reaction right to that censis of new labor and Tony Blair for listeners you know who are looking for a more recent example you can look at France and macron you know he smashes the traditional parties but then also emboldens the far right with Marine Le Pen you know um front National how can you say or suggest or argue that the answer to this populism is liberal s cism if the PO if populism as a result in a consequence of the sensis that came before it well you you've put your finger on the problem right so so uh you can't defeat the revolution which is the populist Revolution by trying to recreate the old regime which they're fighting against you've got to find something else and that's partly and I this why I think politics is always about these Dynamic tensions so just as a Center is really about the tension between the left and the right the new center has to be about the tension between the old Center and the populist challenge it has to accept that the populists have got a point about a lot of the problems it's just they haven't got the solutions to them do you see that happening in Britain best best stab at it to be fair is probably in Joe Biden's Administration the US now there's a lot of problems with Joe Biden I mean I'm very very worried about next because I think he's looking very frail and I think that's not going to help him against Trump but I do think that they are the one example I can see no maybe maon two of people who are able to communicate and deliver what seem to be clear new ideas out of the old liberal Center and how do you see yourself fitting into that I think the challenge is where does this come from for someone like me and I think what Joe Biden suggests is that the energy for that is now more likely to come from the left than the right because the right has so much abandoned a lot of the things that kept the liberal setor going that it that it's it's Progressive moderate figures on the left that may that may take that forward you know we've been talking um about your book but there's another side to you as well as well as your charity obviously and you know you're a former politician but most people probably know you as a result of your podcast the rest is politics um one of the most successful the most successful podcasts in the country millions of downloads every week and I'm thinking about you know um other politicians who K they can't sell out the Royal alcohol in less than 10 minutes they can't pay someone to listen to them speak for half an hour 45 minutes at a time and let and yet you're getting people do this millions of people do this on a weekly basis that can be an incredibly powerful tool for a politician can't it to be able to speak and have people listen to you um yeah it's it's it's a very valuable asset isn't it for someone who's thinking about possibly returning to politics well you I think first thing to understand is that um being a successful podcaster is of course helpful in all the ways you say but it's not enough to being a politician it's a very different thing and yeah of course you know uh people who become well known and probably the most depressing examples of this of people like Trump Johnson bone can harness that kind of public awareness to to launch political careers again I think that at the moment what I really need to do is get the idea is clear that this time if I go back into politics I need to have a very very clear diagnosis of problem and a very clear Vision going forward that I don't want to go back into it and it's just kind a lesson of the book Politics on the edge is that politics is more than just Public Service it has to be also about New Visions I went into politics thinking it was a bit like being in the Civil Service that I just you know i' get my department I'd work hard I'd try to understand the brief I'd try to do a good job and you can't really do politics like that you can't really change a country like that if it was only when I was able to realize that the way that I could bring a bit of change in prisons reduce violence in prisons is by saying I will resign in 12 months unless violence comes down suddenly then things began to happen or when I was in uh sex State cabinet would I say I'm going to double our spend all climate and the environment suddenly things happen that you're not looking to politicians really to be administrators the system is have set up like that hopefully they have some understanding administration because their ideas have got to reflect practical reality but what I want to do is not get involved in this thing again until I can give you a very very clear description of what our economic policy is going to be how local government's going to work how we reform our constitution how our foreign policy is going to work and be able to express it in clear sentences I know you know I often Grumble about three-word slogans because get brexit done Take Back Control did a lot of damage but there's a wisdom there if you can't reduce something to a single sentence you probably don't fully understand it yourself compared to the last time we spoke you know there's a direction of travel there isn't there because before you were saying oh you know I don't don't want to do this or you know I I can't do that again but you're talking now about ideas you're talking about policy you're talking about ways to make it happen well I was very broken I mean this book is about failure I mean you know being being rejected by colleagues and voters to run for the leadership is pretty bad but being rejected for Boris Johnson right is is is extreme pain but I could sort of understand that people would be like you know we would prefer Jeremy Hunt he's a more experienced um politician and all people prefer s ja it who I liked but to be like we are literally going to choose this inm clown in preference to you is a very very strange thing it would be like your partner leaving you for someone you utterly despised tell me a little bit more about that that the sort of the pain that followed Boris Johnson kicking you out of the party oh it feels like the most extreme failure because the stakes were so high I mean I went in very idealistic and then I convinced myself particularly in the last year or so that I spent a politics that we were facing a the most fundamental existential challenge that our country was brutally divided between brexiters and remainers half of brexiters saying they wouldn't speak to a remainer and your quarter of remainers prepare to allow their child to marry someone from the other side I mean this was horrible I felt brexit a hard brexit would be catastrophically damaging not just to our economy but to Security in Long iseland and more important than that I felt we were fighting for decency and our Constitution and a particular way of doing politics against what Boris Johnson represented so this felt to me like the biggest fight of my life suddenly politics made sense to me I wanted slogans I wanted the kind of fight I wanted to go to people but if you invest that much in a dream and it becomes that important to you and you really convinced himself as I did that Boris Johnson was a shame but also a real corroding poisonous and danger to our whole constitutional system and that he was going to polarize the country destroy most of the things that people took he was going to destroy trust in institutions he and you leg it's just horrible because you spend your whole time thinking what could I have done done you know what did I fail to do how did I and if this is the only thing that gives your life meaning which it felt like in the last year and a half my life and you've totally failed to do it um yeah it's it's it's it's horrible yeah I'm uh I'm sorry to have to leave it on that relatively uh sour note but we've run out of time Roy Stuart thank you so much for taking the T thank you lovely to see you thank you thank w

Channel: PoliticsJOE

Views: 437,684

Keywords: Politics, UK politics, British politics, Parliament, Government, Westminster, news, breaking news, conversation, politics news, politicsjoe, joe songs, boris johnson song, boris johnson speech, keir starmer song, keir starmer speech, new media, novara, rishi sunak, labour party, conservative, tory party, conservatism, brexit, rory stewart, rory stewart israel palestine, rory stewart interview, rory stewart the rest is politics, rory stewart on israel, the rest is politics

Id: 9Glq3YLPQH0

Length: 52min 0sec (3120 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2023