Rory Stewart | Ranking Tory Prime Ministers

let's get on to the fun bit and and look at the the four Prime Ministers um that uh you you write about in your book um you served under three but but one of the four then went on to become prime minister so if I was asked on the basis of your book to rank them in terms of um who you least despised up to who you most despised I'm guessing that that the one you least despises Theresa May who you seem to to quite admire oh I like Theresa May yeah no no I think least SP is is cruel I I I I I really did like Teresa may yeah because you were going out to bat for her solution to brexit weren you this is a famously a very great batsman so I'm I'm very flattered when he talks about batting yes uh no I I I really like Teresa may she she I thought was genuinely dignified genuinely honorable she was somebody who unusually in a politician had a private side a lot of other politi it's a great great line of wh Orton he says um a private face in a public space is better than a public face in a private space and politicians there's a lot of public face in a private space and Theresa May was a real person and she was serious and she worked unbelievably hard and I think she genuinely towards the end was really trying to reach a compromise trying to get soft brexit through a lot of things went wrong in the early days I think she said things that she shouldn't have said but I think she was trying genuinely to reach out to Labour reach out to Jeremy Corbin she could see that if she didn't get a soft brexit through Boris Johnson would produce a much worse harder brexit and she needed to prevent that and I I I do of all those Prime Ministers she's the one that I liked most and admire most to this day I mean relatively admire I I guess um and then uh Cameron David Cameron um your your portrait of him is is quite a feline one um and also of George Osborne whom you you very memorably describe as being like a an 18th century French Cardinal but Cameron you you um I mean he he's an aonian and you're an aonian so is is he a type that you recognize from from Eaton or I I found David Cameron difficult um it it was strange I mean I I got the distinct impression he didn't want me to be an MP in fact I was told by um uh a member of the party that he'd said Rory Stuart is the last person that we want in the House of Commons was so why was this you'd had some bust up in the wall game or what had happened uh I think it's partly because he'd come to Afghanistan and he when I was still living in Afghanistan and I had been very very critical of what we were doing in Afghanistan and I'd been quite aggressive iive with him when he was trying to talk up what the British troops were doing in Helman I said look he he said uh I think everybody here can agree that at least you know the British troops are doing a great job in Helmand and I said uh you're not listening to us we are telling you that the Taliban control helmet that nothing that they're doing is going to make any sustainable difference that we've lost control of the borders that the Afghan government's lost credibility that you should not be putting 10,000 troops into that Province and I don't know whether it was my tone or my attitude but something really I think I think angered him I don't know he probably if you probably if you would have ask him he'd probably say actually I barely remember Rory Stewart and I don't know why he's I think I think he'll be well aware of you now Rory I mean I guess you're you're fouling his his um his his catchphrases and his his kind of P punch lines that he's he's delivering which it also seems to be the case with Liz truss who you work with you know obviously she wasn't prime minister when you were an MP but um she was head of Department she was my boss yeah she was your boss and I was very lucky I had Liz truss pretty Patel and Boris Johnson as my boss right so so so so so Liz truss memorably says to you never be interesting which is obviously a bit late in your case isn't it what does she mean by that so she she believes that politics is about having a line which you've prepared and repeating it so she was famous for being able to say the long-term economic plan is working 50 or 60 times a day and she felt that my great flaw as a politician was that I tried to answer questions and that I would be perpetually getting myself in trouble but she was also uh a really remarkable person I mean I saw when she was the sexual State a lot of what she was going to do as prime minister because she had this incredibly erratic um way of jumping on an idea very very quickly and then abandoning it equally quickly so I I remember going to see her one day it's in the book and she says um I was the minister in charge of national parks and she said thank you for coming to see me I would like you to cut the budgets of the national parks by 20% so I said SE State um I you know that their budgets are very small that's going to do a lot of damage I really don't think that's a good idea she said okay for you Rory 5% so so I said SEC state if you're only going to cut them by 5% I mean it's hardly worth having the fight with a public at all it suggest you don't cut them at all so she said okay Rory for you we won't cut them at all and I literally left there thinking what was this conversation I don't so she she'd be she'd be number two meaning that the the the the political figure who becomes prime minister who you you regard as I I think this LZ truss is um I mean she is as I've just described her B Boris Johnson though I think is is is at a different level I mean I think he's genuinely uh a really he was a bad person I mean I think he he eroded a lot of things that were quite precious about Britain and the British constitution one of the things that strange about uh the new right is that it's not really conservative anymore I mean in in my sense of it I I became a conservative because I thought the point about conservatives they were meant to be standing up for traditions standing up for the Constitution respecting the past believing in slow change being prudent being cautious standing up for small farmers in cumber these are the kind of things that I I thought it was about and not just in Britain but all the way around the world the new right has given up on being conservative they've become radicals they take incredible risks they're ripping up International treaties and they are challenging the Constitution I mean this guy lied to the queen pered Parliament threw people out of his own party broke the ministerial code and then tried to change the ministerial code so he wouldn't have to resign for breaking the ministerial code attacked the Supreme Court slandered parliamentary committees showed such total disrespect for the rule of law for the civil service for decency for any of the things that hold us together and he dared to sort of present himself as though he were a conservative I wonder whether you feel there might be any truth to the idea that you describing him is a bit like um Dr Jackal describing Mr Hyde that there are elements in which your antipathy is heightened by the sense that there are certain commonalities there so you both went to Eaton it's my hairstyle that's right um you know you're both very very to a degree that's unusual you're both very inspired by classical exemplars so Boris famously by Pericles You by Alexander the Great and Kato the younger um and you both actually have an incredible ability to reach the parts that other politicians can't so the question I asked you right at the beginning I mean I'm guessing that the only other Tory cabinet minister and politician who would be able to fill up a space as large as this would be B Johnson um do you see him kind of as your bad Shadow or am I over psychologizing there um no I I think there's something in that I think there is something in that I I I think I feel the anger against him very very intimately because I feel he is betraying a lot of the things that I care about I mean he is a complete he's a complete the baracan hangs the bar h i mean he he's a disgrace to everything that that I care about but I mean if we just take so so Tom is a a a distinguished classical historian he knows much more about this stuff than Boris Johnson or I know about the classical world but I one of the things that really annoys me is that he presents himself as somehow you know venerating the Romans I think the Romans would have completely despised him right totally lacking in dignity gravity seriousness their sense of patriotism I mean if he'd been a Roman he would have been I don't know some sort of strange stage actor or Naro Nero or catalis I don't know what he was but whatever he was you know he's not Caesar is he no he's not Caesar but he he might he might be Nero nor is he you know one of my colleagues was like um one of my colleagues trying to defend him was like yes it's such you know Boris Johnson he he retired like Achilles to brood in his tent it's such a tragedy he's not Achilles right so no no he's really not so so Rory you you were a a a Tory MP um you served under these men and women um you a a decade of service would you see that decade um as as a time of of Triumph or do you think that um actually uh would Britain have been better off electing labor in 2010 do you think I mean I I think it was very very um was very bad um I'm not sure what was bad that whole whole period in office um I think part of problem was that David Cameron was part of a sort of blairite consensus in a way he was he was a politician who presented himself as the heir to Tony Blair he wanted to do politics in the center and I think he didn't see how much the world was changing he didn't see how the 2008 financial crisis had destroyed the kind of economic policies that he was pursuing he was still talking about Iraq and Afghanistan as though it was Bosnia and Kosovo in the late 90s so that was one type of problem and I'm not sure that actually Ed millerand or Ed Balls would have been very different I think they also were very much still trying to replay the '90s I think where things got very very bad uh is post brexit I mean I think that's when things got out of control in a way that's unimaginable I I have some sympathies for the way in which people tried to deal with a financial crisis I think there were things that were very wrong about austerity but I also think it's true that there was a financial crisis I mean it's it's not I don't buy into the narrative that my friend aliser sometimes produces that the whole thing was fine that there was no reason to cut government spending I think that labor would have done a similar thing and what really went wrong was that the country was not prepared politics was not prepared for 20156 wasn't prepared for populism wasn't prepared for social media wasn't pre prepared for farage wasn't prepared for Dominic Cummings ultimately wasn't prepared for the for the monstrosity of that prancing elephant Boris Johnson but but but as far as I can tell from the book and also from from um listening to you on the rest of his politics um you yourself would identify to a degree with the Centrist Traditions that David Cameron and and maybe even Ed Bulls were identifying with in in 2010 so where does Britain go because if the if the if the extremes of of left and right are false turnings isn't the Centrist tradition also yeah complicit in the mess yeah yeah absolutely so this this is the this is the billion dollar question it's very tempting to think that the answer to Boris Johnson and that style of politics is to go back to the 90s it isn't it isn't because there was a lot wrong with that and you can see you can see that with Iraq the Iraq War was an example of not just an illegal Invasion but a whole way of thinking about the world that was insane and and brutal and ignorant I think that our economic policy IES leading up to the financial crisis were far too narrow excluded far too many things so the only real way now of creating a new future has to be to have new ideas to acknowledge that we failed in the past that people like me were complicit in that failure that I from 2010 to 2016 as much as David Cameron did not see how much the world was changing and our Mission now has to be to lay out what those things are what those better things are and economic policy Central to that and we can talk a bit about that maybe when we come back from the break the way that we think about democracy has to change the way we think about international relations has to change and the challenge for politicians the center and politicians like Kama who gravitate towards that is to stop being in a defensive Crouch and get out there and produce some new ideas that acknowledge how we failed in the past

Channel: Fane Productions

Views: 213,120

Keywords:

Id: UiBKPxj1L-Y

Length: 15min 44sec (944 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 14 2023