Rory Stewart | The Truth About British Politics

[Applause] [Music] a pile of books on the floor hello everyone good evening thank you very much for coming I'm delighted to see so many of you here so many of you making I think the wisest possible choice are what to do with your Wednesday evening well done for getting your hands on such a coveted ticket and for getting past the tribes of protesters or whatever madness you might have encountered on the Westminster streets this evening I want to keep all that chaos out there or over in a certain building a few streets away and for you to think of the Emanuel Center is a sort of bastion of peace and calm and serenity for the next hour or so and I hope we're going to dissect a bit of the madness and I can't think of anyone better to do that with of course than Rory someone who's been right at the swirling center of it all for the past few years as a front bench and a back bedroom P as a prominent candidate in a rather dramatic leadership race as I'm sure many of you know earlier this year and now as an aspiring London mayor and as an independent but though he is very much the man of the moment this evening is not just about this moment or about Rory in his political guys he's in fact a very hard person to introduce not just because and there is an uncanny amount to fit in but also I think the last time he was in front of a big live audience he chose that moment to announce a pretty decisive career move so if you have anything you want to tell us this evening it's always subject to change and do you have anything you want to say okay good before he became a politician he had an equally varied and lively career he was a diplomat and serving in jakarta and montenegro and iraq he ran an NGO in kabul lectured at harvard and also a small matter of walking 6,000 miles over the course of two years across asia and they're all experiences that he's written about in his brilliant books which you can buy this evening and experiences that caught the eye of a certain Brad Pitt who has brought the film rights to his life if I understand rightly but I need to stop talking because I slightly fear he's just made it here and I'm sort of worried that you might get whisked away to vote on another amendment so I'm gonna get on you've just have literally just arrived what have you been doing this evening this this is the first vote on the Queen's Speech which is quite important because the Queen's Speech lets lays out all the government's programs normally it's laying out the government's programs for years to come but given that an election might be just around the corner it's it's it's perhaps less clear what exactly is happening um but what happened in this case rather unusually for the government is that they they want to vote for one of the second time though this week I said we're not going to talk just about the moment but we are in obviously an extraordinary moment and it feels that it's quite an emotional moment they've been reports this week of MPs sort of breaking down in tears in the lobby how are you feeling at the end of it and do you have any sense of optimism well well it is a very strange moment because of course in a way that is sort of hidden under the surface of party politics we are accustomed to and maybe this is just us as humans we're quite sort of tribals social animals so the people that although I'm now an independent MP my conservative colleagues are people that I've spent 10 years working with campaigning alongside sometimes sitting around cabinet tables with and certainly trooping in and out of a voting Lobby with sometimes three four times in a day and one of the things that I found interesting yesterday so yesterday I I'm afraid I agreed with people who said that there hadn't been enough time to scrutinize the legislation so the legislation really was very very large and normally if you look at Maastricht I think they went on for months and the idea that we couldn't two and a half days take through the huge constitutional change seemed to me to be something that wasn't really defensible and more than that seemed to be something that that she wouldn't be good even for the hard brexit ears if they took through their brexit in a hurry rammed through the House of Commons without proper scrutiny it would be a bad foundation from which to base their project so I vote sit against my party and against the government it was a very interesting experience because essentially the pressure that was being put on me and I had probably 35 different colleagues to pusat to try to speak to me including tourism a being sent to try to convince me to change my mind well maybe she wasn't sent maybe she spontaneously decided to come over to our city change her mind maybe that's a more gracious way of putting it but I got a nice text from her saying please please don't don't vote against the government and what you really feel is however much I'm confident on my arguments and I kept patiently explaining why I thought two and a half days wasn't a serious amount of time to scrutinize you get that sense of the personal loyalty and the sense of guilt and weight so I wasn't quite weeping in the lobby but it is difficult and back in Parliament today of course when you meet people's eye you can see them looking at you in a slight and confused way you know did he let us down and of course that was a very big big vote I mean this was the Prime Minister's biggest faith this was his promise to deliver by the 31st of October so I know III can understand why calm colleagues feel and a huge emotional stress if you add to that the fact that at the same time as you imagine you are getting quite literally hundreds of emails and thousands of tweets putting pressure on you to vote in one direction or another and regardless of how you vote you can absolutely guarantee that there will be a hundred people on Twitter who you will call you a coward immediately doesn't doesn't matter whether you vote one way or the other you can see why MPs began to feel a bit bit exhausted by the whole thing yep obviously voted against them for the program motion but you voted essentially you voted for his deal do you think it's a good deal well this is some I mean no I mean not not if they not a feat I mean I I obviously i-i've oted remain I believed very strongly that we were we were well off in Europe I felt that this city had benefited enormously from Europe I also felt that as security in Europe was helped by Britain being part of it I think European Union made a lot of sense I was the environment minister at the time in the campaign and I felt in so many ways the ways in which the environment is actually not just a national issue but a much broader issue at the same time unlike anyone in this room and this is the I think one of the things that isn't talked about as much unlike anyone in this room I I personally promised repeatedly that whatever the result of that referendum was I would respect it and one of the things underneath the surface of what's going on in Parliament is that every single member of parliament was asked all the way through that campaign again again because journalists on radio and television it was a very obvious question you know if people vote to leave will you respect the results and we all again and again in public promised to respect their results so what I've been trying to do is to work out how that result could be respected in the least damaging most moderate most pragmatic ways so I pushed very hard for customs union I worked with Ken Clark to work for that I failed in that I tried to advocate for Therese Mays deal I failed in that and I've been working to try to see what we can do to try to amend the current deal because I feel that the alternatives are going to be very very divisive and it's that divisive 'no saul most more than the referendum that i'm i'm so worried about that there has to be a way of trying to compromise and I think compromise feels like a very very difficult word at the moment in fact it's almost a banned word people seek compromise a week thing when I think it could be quite a strong thing I want to talk a little bit more or a lot more about compromising at the divisive place that we're at but just quickly in terms of what you think is going to happen now I mean we're not gonna have the 31st do or die die in a ditch dates are we know so 31st of October is not happening and and of course one of the things I've been saying for a long time is that the 31st of October I believed was always impossible I didn't believe that the Prime Minister could ever get a deal through by the 31st of October which is why all the way during the leadership election when he was challenging me for example the BBC debate saying why would she promise to leave on the 31st of October my answer was we can't leave on the 31st of October I mean if this were to be Donald to be done properly it would have to take more time than that so what do you think will happen you you said I think earlier this week that we were in a sort of a purgatory and then Jacob Riis MOG said the same yesterday said we're in purgatory where it is suffering the pains of purgatory so you saying the same thing which doesn't happen that often these days no no and of course Jacob unlike me is a very very serious Catholic so when he uses that word it has much more technical theological significance are we stuck what do you think how do we get out of this place now well I hoped that the way through this rather romantically was something called a citizen's assembly I got very excited by citizens assemblies so let me just take a second on a citizen's or something citizens assembly is what they did in Ireland to try to overcome the arguments around abortion abortion in Ireland of course as you can imagine felt like Brett said I mean it was something which was deeply cultural people who were deeply deeply embedded it seemed almost impossible to imagine that any compromise could come out of it and what they did is they selected essentially a jury of citizens but absolutely selected in the most pure way possible to be entirely representative at random of the population and then put these people in a room so in the cases of brexit you'd aim to get people from north south from every nation united kingdom arranged according to their proportion maybe 300 people but what she would do with them is something quite different to Parliament you would put them somewhere for four or five weeks and they would sit and take expert evidence together they would select who they wanted to take test me from they could take it from Michel Barnier they could take it from trade experts they can take from where they want and at the end of it they make a recommendation and what you're gonna say to me is what on earth is the point of that we can't agree even in this room and so obviously they're all gonna go in with 52% Breck's at 48% remain and they're gonna leave 52% breaks at 48% remain that is not what happened in Ireland that is not what happens when these things happen because actually if you put humans citizens together and they listen to the same information and get into the details of tariffs quotas all the stuff that actually very very few people even in the House of Commons know it is remarkable how much agreement begins to emerge and that's in fact what happened in Ireland and that's what I believe would be the way through on this brexit situation do you realistically think you can do that now and especially given what you've decided to do running for mayor well I lost obviously my leadership race so this was a cornerstone of what I was hoping to do if I became leader of the Conservative Party I don't think that the current Prime Minister has any I know the current promise sir has no interest in this whatsoever so one of the one of the questions for us is to try to think if we can 5 or 10 years into the future and that's very difficult to do we don't even know now what would happen if the Prime Minister held an election let me actually take a straw poll runs wrong right I'm going to look into you how many of you think if the Primus they held an election let's say in early December that he would win a large majority for the Conservative Party okay how many think that he would fail to win a majority okay very good how many people think that Jeremy Corbyn can win a majority I mean that's fascinating so essentially as as you picked up nobody thinks Jeremy Corbyn can win a majority which is actually very interesting because the loss of the Conservative Party campaign at the moment is predicated on saying you have to vote for us otherwise you get Jeremy Corbyn but nobody actually thinks jeremy corbyn's gonna win a majority but the on the other issue you were split I thought almost 50/50 on whether he can win a majority or can't win a majority and that is gonna make an enormous difference to this question that you're posting about what kind of breaks did you get so you were talking about compromise and almost it's a sort of dirty word I've heard you speak a lot about the fact that we are in a very straight we're in strange times everybody says it but do you think we're witnessing a sort of irrevocable breakdown of our institution you've spoken about people taking a chisel to the Constitution are you really worried yes I am very worried I am very worried because a curious team mrs. Thatcher made a very powerful speech in the early 1970s against holding a referendum on Europe and it's very revealing what she says is I don't believe in referendum because what would happen if the referendum wants her to do something that Parliament didn't want to do that was mrs. Thatcher's question right at the time a referendum is of course a decision to go with direct democracy and it's a decision to give the public as a whole the ability to make a binary choice a binary choice in this case about leaving the European Union all the other institutions in our country are related to an indirect democracy I mean Parliament itself of course operates in its votes indirectly the government is even more indirect remember we're not like the United States for the directly elected president that the government itself is only formed these funny members of parliament so even the prime minister in the cabinet are just a bunch of people generates it out of members of parliament once that direct democracy has voted the danger is that in the rush to implement the will of the people almost all these other bits of our constitution get driven out of the way so Parliament gets railroaded and potentially the Supreme Court's get challenged the monarchy gets dragged into it and so on and so forth and you begin seeing things in in British parliamentary life which have never been seen I was just reading a speech by Walpole who was our prime minister in these 1700s saying to the House of Commons it has never yet been heard that a single member of parliament has been thrown out of their seat or their party for voting against the government right so I mean the principle there was that we had a separation of powers between theoretically at least say Montesquieu believes between the government and the legislature between the executive and legislature and the theory then would have been that of course you couldn't purge members of parliament for voting against the government otherwise what would be the point of Parliament right I mean you might as well get rid of Parliament just that the Prime Minister run the whole thing if members upon would convert against an estate but of course what is giving the ability for this to happen is that direct democratic referendum which has issued an instruction that the whole of the rest of the Constitution is struggling to come to terms with and one of the strongest reasons I was trying to make yesterday for why Parliament needed to be given the time to scrutinize the legislation was that we have to treat our Constitution quite carefully it's getting quite delicate now I mean in the end this Parliament that we are increasingly fed up with and treating with contempt I had a lot of colleagues in Parliament yesterday saying to me ah come off it Rory honestly what's the point of having a few more days to discuss it in Parliament nobody reads the stuff anybody away we've heard all their speeches anyway cares about the amendments right and of course they do have a point right I mean you know it is some Robert Louis Stevenson said we all know what Parliament is and we're all ashamed of it right that's in there that the late 1800s I mean it's true a lot of these critics but you can't act as though that's true if you start really just assuming that the whole thing is a total waste of time and there's no point in parliamentary scrutiny or parliamentary debates or parliamentary amendments then you have lost actually the whole soul of our democracy I mean that that is the ministers supreme court says in the end our democracy just comes down to Parliament that's what it is so if you are and this is my final point that if you are a brexit voter in the audience who voted to take back sovereignty you wanted to take power from a European Parliament to a British Parliament from a European Court of British Court then you must treat that British Parliament and a British Court with respect that's the whole point of this whole bid for sovereignty and that's that's that was one of the strongest reasons why I voted against the government yesterday what or who do you essentially blame for this sort of eroding of respect and is it I mean you've spoken a lot about Boris as being Trump here do you think it's him and how do you combat this sort of language three words slogans that don't really mean anything and in the end turn out to be lies well two to several questions and two very good questions so so one of them about you know how do we get into the situation the other these three word slogans firstly on how do we get in the situation I think we basically gave up taking our Constitution seriously some time ago I mean in a sense because we're able to change our constitutions through simple majorities in Parliament we never really had a Constitution in the same way that every other country in the world has a constitution I mean understand that in every other country in the world constitutional law is different from normal law in the sense that if you want to change constitutional law you can't just have a simple majority empowerment you've got to have a referendum or two-thirds majority in parliament you know some procedure right you can't change the US Constitution just by Congress suddenly deciding in a simple vote in the lobbies that it's gonna change the Constitution but in 2011 David Cameron tried to abolish the House of Lords in a change it from a an appointed chamber to an elected chairman on the basis simply of driving through people through division Lobby and trying to get a simple majority in the House of Commons on these referendum we changed the rules all the time in the 1970s that had to be a supermajority had to be the majority of people of the electorate now we're doing it on a simple majority basis and there's no real decision I mean it was clearly daft and fat obviously this referendum should have been done on a supermajority trying to do it on a fifty plus one basis is ridiculous but because we have no Constitution we don't treat our Constitution for me and this just goes on and on and on and on you know we everything we're doing at the at the moment is of this nature and you know unless we begin reinvesting in the idea of a constitution I'd it doesn't necessarily have to be a written constitution but we have to hold it in our souls what we're actually engaged in as an acts of immense hypocrisy so you know the man you were quoting Jacob Riis Smaug and and the speaker John Bercow if he went back to their exchanges when Jacob was a language lounging back bencher six seven years ago they spend their whole time endlessly talking about the Constitution they kept making grand speeches work on it and they kept complimenting each other on their understanding of parliamentary procedure and asked in May and you can imagine right the conversation between John Bercow and Jacob Riis mark writes but since then they have completely broken up right there's been this this this glorious marriage is completely broken up with both of them accusing the other of trying to flout the Constitution right and of course they both have a point both of them are doing very very odd things in relation to the way in which you know Jacob supported the pierogi of parliament Jacob supported the idea that be any two and a half days debate on the largest constitutional decision of the last century really and the speaker of course introduced these funny I said 24 motions and tried changes so hey we're all to blame but so is David Cameron so it's your jaw's bond I mean when I tried to I'm a sort of constitutional fundamentalist so I refused to participate in the idea of abolishing the house Lords on the basis of a simple event Parliament also because actually it it there was something even worse about it if they were doing it because they were trying to cut a deal with their coalition partners who were then the Lib Dems to agree to reduce the number of members of parliament which they thought were going to help them in an election if they could get from 650 down to 600 they were more likely to win the 2015 election and the whole thing was very very odd right so I refuse to to vote with the government on that occasion and was told on the door of the lobby by George Osborne that unless I walked into the lobby I wasn't going to be promoted for the next four years so the whole thing I mean the whole thing is very weird I mean it's Tresa dinner away now let's jump to the three words Reagan the three words slogan of course of which we are talking is the slogan take back control and this of course is a slogan brought up by Dominic Cummings who is the great great master of the three words slogan and if you any of you seen that documentary this is beautifully dramatized by him endlessly staring at a whiteboard trying to get his three word slogan it's powerful because he's saying a lot of things at once he's making a comment about people's anxieties about the funding for the NHS he's making a comment about immigration he's making a comment about sovereignty and he's found three words that can bring it all together he did the same in the leadership campaign I am I had um I had a Chinese meal with him in their dim sum with him in Leicester Square and who said to me Rory if you were to win the selection you need to say that if you become Prime Minister you're gonna say you're gonna do three things but you're gonna deliver brexit beat Jeremy Corbyn and reunify the country and I thought brilliant these three words right and then sure enough the next day I saw sergeant Javed saying we only have to do three things and then Boris Johnson and then the rest are so so he's he's an extraordinary kind of an advertising copywriter Manisa that's a brilliant story and you've spoken about purging that didn't used to happen you obviously were purged can you tell us that story it happened by a text message yep I saw I just I heard him I just been made GQ politician of the year right now I didn't really know what this meant right so I had turned up and I just got a failure I just got off the train from Cumbria so I was in my sort of I felt kind of weird I don't quite work work oh yeah that's right I was in a pair of tartan trousers and I was dragging a wee bag that I'd that I brought and I just got out of a vote in the House of Commons was put outside my uber at this some at a Tate Modern and saw stretching ahead of me this incredible red carpet with photographers on every side so here are my tartan trousers dragging my wienie bag like a flight attendant right the way down the red carpet and all these things hanging off and arrived in this extraordinary room and I began to realize I was slightly out of my depth because you know there was Nicole Kidman there was Kylie Minogue there was storm Z and there was me with my weenie back now eventually I I followed I think Phoebe who does flee back could just think given an award on to onto the stage to get pie award and I noticed that there was a buzzing in my pocket text so I put my phone down I usually I put my phone down listen I think and it was a text from the chief whip right so I was standing up to make my speech to accept the position of politician in the year at the point at which I got a text telling me that I wasn't allowed to be a politician anymore sorry the last thing of course that I realized is that not a single person there's like a thousand people had any idea who I was so I said we wouldn't we wouldn't only took right now and I want to let someone who writes about a lot who you've obviously and you think and guides a lot of what you do and you're it's your father your late father Brian although you said you said here's someone who thought that an MP was somewhere between a disappointment and an outrage do you think what he would have made of all of this yes so my father's big thing for me was soon as I became an MP he said don't don't go to Westminster just stay in your constituency be a sort of district officer run it get the broadband in yeah are the roads sort of everything and I had to explain to him sort of painfully that very sadly that is not the power of a constituency MP that's the power of the local council and if energy was the most frustrating thing about being an OPI loved my consistency and everything that everybody wanted to talk to me about in my consider she was local they wanted to talk about broadband they weren't talk about housing they weren't talk about policing and all I could ever do was write a letter to the local council to try to get it sorted out and then turn up in Westminster and make these speeches which of course nobody listened to except my mother my father I think pretended to listen to them but he was really deaf so he would have just seen me standing up and sort of him generally sounding off and he had been in he'd been um in the Army during the war in a d-day veteran but then he had joined the Malayan Civil Service so he'd been when when Malaya was a colony British colony from 1945 to 1957 he was the district officer in Penang and Malacca running things building schools getting things done and then in 1957 Malaya got independence and he became a civil servant they became very odd kind of cell phones he became a spy became an intelligence officer but he found even being a sort of mini James Bond an incredibly frustrating bureaucratic experience he thought that he saw himself from then onwards as a civil servant and he thought civil servants did nothing except sit in committees and write minutes and it was generally a sort of talking shop and his whole life was about trying to get back to that stage where he was actually able to do something and I saw a little glimpse this because I was lucky enough in Iraq and again in Afghanistan to be able to actually run things you know in Iraq I was the acting governor of a province in Afghanistan I was running a charity that was rebuilding the centre of the old city of Kabul and I was responsible for the sort of Covent Garden of Kabul I was clearing garbage putting in water supply putting an electricity getting a clinic in getting a primary school in was soaring 160 buildings running a labor force deeply deeply fulfilling satisfying thing to do and the problem with being an MP is that it's that you're sort of have a fake accountability and a responsibility but you can't actually do anything you don't have a budget you don't have any legal powers you can't can't make anybody's life better all you can do is try to troop in and out of a division Lobby passing laws and I think that's a very very honorable worthy thing to do I think it's important in our democracy that people do that but it is also a deeply deeply frustrating strange thing to be doing with your life little bit about Iraq because you felt those frustrations there didn't you as well this was a slight lack of control and a little bit out of your depth it comes across and occupational hazards the book but there is a moment where you call your father for his advice and he tells you something you've not quite sure you couldn't do yes so this was I mean soon generally what I did in Iraq I I really enjoyed so I set up a police force I restore the restoration of a number of schools and clinics in the hospital and got an Employment Program going and all schooling but things began to go to put it mildly a little bit wrong in Iraq as some of you might have noticed so I haven't she ended up with a large crowd outside my building of thousands of people chucking Molotov cocktails and trying to storm our compound and between me and the crowd which was growing all the time was a very small company of British soldiers with a couple of armored vehicles who were trying to hold the crowd back and I was standing there trying to work out what we were supposed to do which one I got a telephone call from my father and at this point there are bullets going off and things so it's a quite noisy so I'm trying to have a conversation with him but it's quite noisy and I've got a one of these very very stiff vests on bulletproof vests on and I've got a sort of funny little helmet and I've got a telephone up by my ear and stick under my helmet and my father says what's going on and I say well unfortunately we slightly lost control of the city and this crowd is trying to storm our compound and he said very very straightforward darling all you have to do is shoot the ringleader and declare a 24-hour curfew you didn't know I I mean I went to see the I want to see the the kernel of the light infantry who was I was a civilian bit he was a military vet and I said to him for what it's worth you know my father says what we should be doing is there but but neither he nor I we thought anyone gonna shoot the ringleader and we weren't really sure how we were going to impose the 24-hour curfew either the book is called and occupational hazards here but I think think it's in the States that it's the Prince of the marshes and that's the character this extraordinary character tell us a little about that who the Prince of the marshes and your interactions with him perhaps with a good impression cuz I've been listening to the audiobook and enjoying your though so the Prince the marshes was a extraordinary figure he was a tribal figure who had been a sort of Robin Hood he had taken to the marshes fighting against Saddam Hussein from the early 1990s onwards and he was most famous for an incident where he'd become a great wanted man and there was a huge price on his head but he had come into the main kebab shop basically in the center of al Amara and was having a kebab when half-a-dozen of Saddam's intelligence people walked into the kebab shop and tried to arrest him and he famously took out a hand grenade and put it on the table in front of him and stuck his finger under the thing and they backed off right allowing him to escape now by the time I turned up he had very charmed various of my predecessors and had stolen as far as I could see about 1,200 cars from ministry buildings and was cutting down all the copper wire of all the electric pylons and had set up his own police force and had got his brother in as the governor of the province and was very much of the view that he and I together should be running the province to go and I you know had you know my normal sort of slightly anxious and unrealistic ideas about constitutions democracy human rights as they which made him very very angry and eventually the whole thing sort of completely blew up I ended up with them you know tribal militias on one side iranian-backed militias on another indigenous satirist Shia militias on another the compound on the siege heavy machine guns on the roof and the whole thing but at the center of all this was this man that prints the marshes that would flip in an instant from inviting me to go out in a helicopter with him and shoot pig in the marshes from from the helicopter to shouting at me and telling me that I was worse than Saddam Hussein and I was destroying destroying the province and eventually he accused us of mutilating corpses he actually started an entire legal case against British soldiers and Alamar accusing the chopping the ears of corpses that was eventually taken taken up in the in the British courts and caused a huge fiasco which was you know eventually proved to be a complete sort of figment of his own imagination I mean there was some so Princeton marshes but I I don't I mean he sit around I mean oh when I was in Iraq I I saw his brother is he hey let me finish on this though I mean that my relationship with these people was very complicated so in a Syria I had lunched with another character of this sort from another tribe could assad el Ghazi and Assad was a very very charming man gave me a good lunch not a fish lover lamb and two days later suddenly there were these rocket-propelled grenades and mortars raining into my compound an asset calls me and he says we're attacking you you need to leave the compound or we're gonna kill you all right so again you know I get pompous and I said I'm you know I'm running this province we're not going anywhere what do you mean note said show so we then settled down for three days siege and my bodyguards are on the roof of the heavy machine guns they have a hundred and forty rocket-propelled grenades and mortars our entire computer systems blown up people are being wounded Arlington eventually oh I call in a thing called an ac-130 Spectre gunship that turns up and starts killing all assets guys around the compound and the siege ends and about two weeks later I see asset and he comes up to me and he hugs me and he kisses me on both cheeks and I say I said what are you doing right to him and you were trying to kill me and he said are Rory that that was nothing personal and I sort of get what he was talking about but I was so pretty Christ I said at the beginning of very very does there's so many things we could talk about but I do want to talk about the walk because I think having heard you speak about it before perhaps this this the Asia walk because you've done many do you feel like that changed you more than almost anything else before then and since why did you decide to do that yes I mean the walk completely changed me so I set off I suppose aged try to work out how old I was anyway 20 27 28 something like that and I then spent 21 months walking almost entirely alone 2530 miles a day oh you actually use you 2025 miles a day across from the Turkish border across Iran Afghanistan Pakistan India Nepal and I stayed in something like 550 different village houses along that that Ridge and of course most of the time I wasn't talking to anyone I was alone during the day just walking and walking and walking and in the evening I was sitting in people's houses and trying to speak in Farsi diary or to do Nepali but not awfully well I can I mean really not awfully well so these conversations were a little bit limited and it did it completely changed me I mean it completely change me in one smaller sense it changed me because obviously if you spend nearly two years of your life alone just walking every day you become or well you become temporarily a slightly different person my friend wills observational nurses he says that I I came back to London and for about two weeks I was like some sort of mini Buddha and then at the end of two and a half weeks I'd completely reverted with a normal gibbering person I had been before I set off on the walk so it I I gained about two and a half weeks of enlightenment out of 21 months of walking but more seriously what it it gave me is a completely different insight into government because I had been a diplomat and I walked across Afghanistan and of course I'm staying in these villages where people have not been more than two hours walk from evolution their life I'm seeing these incredible warlords I'm big shot at I'm seeing drugs being produced I'm a and I arrived in Kabul and I get to a meeting and everybody says back in the embassy environment I'm in a meeting with the President of Afghanistan and for some reason at that stage Bianca Jagger who was the UN representative and and they all say there is a consensus in Afghan society everybody is committed to a gender sensitive multi-ethnic centralized state based on democracy human rights the rule of law right and I realized that I can't translate that into language that any Afghan village know that I've met would be able to understand and that was a very important relations for me and really since then when that was 2002 really everything since in my life has been driven by the belief that the jargon of government a way that governments talk about people and that's as true in Britain and in London as it is in Afghanistan has very very very little relationship to what happens on the ground so that's what the walk did it showed me that gap and everything I've done since is about trying to understand and explore that gap between rhetoric and reality walking and talking and listening is obviously still as you say hugely important it's been a massive part of it was part of the campaign leadership it's part of your mayoral campaign now you've said losing the ability to listen and the skills to change the world is what being an MP has felt like is that right and is that the main driver behind your reason to become an independent and stand for mayor I I definitely feel that unless you're a very special person being an MP is is incredibly bad for you I mean it's it's it's bad for your mind it's bad for your body it's bad if your soul middle-aged men in general are not very good at listening to people MPs are generally really really bad at letting people there are some exceptions I mean there are some wonderful and peace right who somehow have the strength of character that comes through that generally I think women MPs are better than men and pees in that regard but maybe that's maybe that's that's um a huge generalization because I can think of some women MPs who aren't awfully good at listening 21 either so but it's not good for you because there is a a general hypocrisy in the whole enterprise you know you're you're asking questions in Parliament which are not really inquiries you're having debates which are not really exchanges of views you are voting but these aren't really voluntary choices you are legislating but you're not really most of the time if you're following your party actually anything ready to do with the details of legislation and you are pontificating about things you know nothing nothing nothing about right so when I was the Africa Minister to just try to illustrate when I realized the whole thing had gone mad right I had to stand up and do foreign office questions again and again at the despatch-box and the MPs would say will my right honourable friend well right on remember tell me you know what he is going to do about the shocking situation in Togo right I stand up in answering what is my right honourable friend going to do to stop the civil war in Cameroon an afternoon what is my right honourable friend going to do to make sure that the atrocities cease in Burundi right and and of course what happens is I stand up and I say I call on both sides in Burundi to uphold the Arusha Accords and work with the ex Tanzanian Prime Minister and I think the house should agree with me that ultimately the only end to the civil war will come from a political solution I never I was like Here I am right but at no point right at no point do I say to them wait I say we didn't have an embassy in Burundi right and I never seen Togo in our lives what are you talking about really what am I gonna do about Burundi or Tokai don't do anything so how long have you felt like this have you ever believed have you ever believed in it I mean it's an extraordinary thing I mean it is the maddest most peculiar way of running anything um and yet somehow miraculously this Parliament has been the guarantee of our liberties for about 700 years so there's something about this odd thing that sort of works but that's the mystery of the British constitution it was very difficult to explain to anyone how this thing Parliament or or maybe even how a hereditary constitutional monarchy works I mean it's sort of works but it works in a in an odd decorative sense I mean it's not really doing what it's pretending to do all the time I mean it's you know I was very lucky to have jobs and government which were generally thinks I knew a little bit about and I have a sexual State for international development i sat on the National Security Council so I certain discussions on countries like Iran and at least I speak Farsi I've spent quite a lot of my life writing about Iran thinking about her own work Marin but it's complete coincidence right the the your appointed to these jobs like a monkey throwing darts at a dartboard everybody I remember when I first got my first job I I was the Environment Minister and I went up to to David Cameron you know to thank him thinking you know he'd been reflecting hard on my interest in water quality and forestry and this and the other and he he slapped me on the back and he said so then how are you enjoying farming and I realized of course the man had no idea really what I was doing when I am my passing of the ways with with our dear Prime Minister I think began at the moment at which tribe that's appointed a foreign office Minister I was the first foreign office Minister appointed by Teresa Maher under the foreign secretary and I went in to see him and I said look you know you will have views on which um which portfolio you want me to do but the only thing I would say is please whatever you do do not make me the Africa Minister because I've spent you know nearly 20 years of my life working on the Middle East and Asia I I speak some European languages some Middle Eastern languages summation languages I've been a different man astronomer listen Asia I've written three books about the Middle East in Asia but I know absolutely nothing about Africa to which Boris Johnson said oh come on Rory what's the capital of Uganda so I left the room really kind of shaken by this and III I am I began ringing number 10 begging pleading you know it's consumer a please please bring some sense to this I mean what earth is the point I've spent 20 years of my life studying these countries why are you putting me in Africa but of course I I lost and of course from the point of view house the Commons because these things are so rough and ready they all sort of most brilliant appointment for the next sort of two weeks all my friends would come up to me in love and Pat me on the back and say at long last a minister in a portfolio he really understands a round peg in a round hole thank you very much you you wanted to be the prime minister right you're so um do you still do you still want that no really not that's that's absolutely not where you want to end up after that if I want to be promised I would be trying to stay in the House of Commons it is not sensible if you are trying to be Prime Minister to leave the house a comments the because the Prime Minister comes out of the House of Commons you don't you'll go back it's not easy to go back either I mean it it is true Boris went back because somebody's pointed out that but I know really what is driving me as I want to do things which are operational and local I do not want to stand out of this matchbox pontificating about Togo I want to be able to turn up I mean I don't fridge it up I was in Brixton last week I'm walking down the street a man walks out of his shop he's an Afghan I can talk to him in dari but what he is talking to me about is the fact that his seventeen year old son has been selling cannabis and he has taken his son to the police station and the police have not responded in the way that he wants if I were lucky enough to be mayor of London I could help him the mayor of London is the police and crime Commissioner the mayor of Amman is actually in charge in the Metropolitan Police it's a totally different type of relationship and I think it's a much healthier type of Democratic relationship the kind of things that people want you to do you know I I want if I'm lucky enough to become her I want to be able to say to people at the end of four years so imagine that I was Sadiq Khan now and I won't sit here on stage and say okay if you want to judge me as Marilyn here are three questions for you do you feel safer than you did four years ago right is your housing more affordable than it was four years ago is your commute better than it was four years ago and if the answer is yes I wanted to elect me again and if the answer is no I want them to boot me out I want that kind of job right I want I want to be able to help people in a way that that that is tangible and real that doesn't involve spouting nonsense do you think you're going to have to brush up on your own pubs I already brush on my pups this was a great this was a lovely moment so I was I was being so I'm I'm being interviewed by channel 4 and they say to me so then Rory what is your favorite Boozer in London right and the truth the matter is I have a two-year-old in the four-year-old son right so I don't actually spend any time in a pub right so I said rather sort of one li well I suppose I'm kind of more of a sort of pressure more a person they didn't see it this is this is really not a very good answer to that question if any of you are thinking of running for elected office I'd like to recommend not to do that and I immediately got all these sort of angry texts from political consultants saying you amateur you know the answer is this right with a little photograph of some pub carefully chosen for the exact swing Ward and exactly that part of you know that part of newer that you really need you know right and then I know if it's attacked by there's an amazing figure called Aaron Bustani who's this extraordinary sort of amazing Labour momentum social media guru who took this clip of me saying that I'm somebody who likes going to promotion and said you know what an absolute fraud no all right now whatever I was saying it's not a fraud spend a lot a lot of time in pyramid shape I [Laughter] must and come to the question I'm sure you've got many but just before I do let me just ask you said you won't you won't go back into comments but a lot of people were hoping or or hope that there might be some chance versus enter grounds awareness of age of the extremes do you think that those hopes and people in central centrists where do they fit is there a place for them now yeah well there has to be I mean there is a huge huge gaping hole than the central British politics what's happening is that these parties are being captured by unfortunetely by their certain proportion of their members that are dragging them more the Conservative Party more to the right the Labour Party more to the left I mean it's it it's patently obvious and their electoral strategies involve doubling down on that so the Conservative Party is obviously rebranding itself as a sort of a party that's largely arranging itself around brexit and if it goes into a campaign it will go around brexit and maybe even potentially about threatening a No Deal or exit and the Labour Party of course you know we can see with Jeremy Corbyn that it's a particular bit of the Labour Party that was quite a fringe party until quite recently as no seems to have the whip hand so there is this gaping hole in the central British politics and it is I believe where people are now that's not what the polls say the polls say that I'm completely wrong the polls say that public opinion used to be a sort of bell jar with all the votes in the middle and now it's collapsed it's a sort of u-shape with the votes on two extremes and and me sitting in the middle all on my own right nobody nobody in the center but I don't think that can possibly be true particularly if we actually listen to each other work with each other and that's because politics in a positive sense isn't just about ideological positions on economics it's about what it means to be when a local sense of community what it means to work together with different people what it means to to be a nation what it means to not just be about narrow interests but about a collective endeavor and a collective endeavor has to involve the center but and this is this is my big insight on this that Center must not be a sort of gray neutral fudge it can't be a sort of it can't be a sort of here's a line and we're just going to choose the middle we'll split the difference between left and right right no the center has to be something more like a string attached to those two edges or a string attached to one end and one extreme and the other and pulling back on that like a bow so the center point is the maximum point of force that maximum point of force that draws the energy from the two extremes takes you know the compassion and love of social justice from the left takes the sense of Liberty and energy and patriotic pride from the right and draws on both of those harnesses on base so that the arrow at this point draws on that energy rather than rejects it it has to embrace it it's about harnessing the energy of difference it's about harmony but harmony of course right it's not about one fudge note how many is about how you juxtapose different notes and that's what the center ground has to be I'm sure you've got lots of questions I'm sure they'll be fast and too many for me to fit in but if you have a question can you yeah can you put your hand up and we've got some roving mics this lady here at the in the front row second second row hi and Rory I've written a song and you speak about the hip hop hypocrisy posturing and ceremony in Parliament which inevitably leads to a disconnect with the people that Parliament serves do you think there's a genuine understanding in Parliament of quite how little faith people have left and what do you think can be done about it I think I mean I think members of parliament of what one of the reasons why I think people are under enormous strain is of course people are aware of that people you know sense disappointment they sense anger in some cases of course MPs a subject to serious abuse and threats and of course as individuals members of parliament are often deeply deeply hard-working committed people I mean many people's views of their own constituency MPs is very positive their interaction at a nymphet oddly if you ask people what do you think about Parliament's terrible if you ask them what they think about their own individual constituency MP has seen the surgery they often have a much more positive view I mean I I hate the whole tone of it so I I hate the Yabu sucks of Prime Minister's Questions I hate the sort of here here on the shouting and the applause I I hate the fact that people are making speeches when they don't often know very much about the subject they're talking about I hate the fact that we all sit there looking at our mobile phones I hate the fact that chambers half empty half the time I hate the fact that people vote on legislation they don't understand I hate the way that we pretend that these are independent MPs expressing their own judgement but actually all of us who are members of political parties vote ninety-nine percent of our time with our political party women that we stand on a political manifesto we vote in that way and it's not good enough I mean it's not good enough it's not what you want it's not what you deserve and the system is wrong I mean we have to be more serious we have to be more serious about sitting hours I mean it can't make sense to have a weird world in which you are sitting till 10 o'clock at night or sometimes two or three in the morning what why it can't make sense to but it's also there's so many tensions which make it difficult to reform so on the one hand you want MPs understandably to be representative of ordinary people on the other hand you want MPs to be able to make very very informed comments about highly specialist this year so you know I was on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and of course I think I was the only member of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee who had ever worked outside the United Kingdom right now that's not a surprise though because of course you know amongst my friends on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee was a guy who had been for 16 years a steel worker at the DS L an iminium plants in Motherwell had been a trade union organizer had spent his entire life representing that community I mean he knew far more about that than I was ever gonna know and you want him in Parliament but you probably don't want him focusing on whether I don't know whether the Shia militia in Najaf are or are not going to be in the ascendant in relation to the iranian-backed militias or I mean it's not his specialty or anything guy so I we have to work our way through these things and the u.s. system is to have effectively in the Senate only a hundred people and to be pretty honest about the fact that they are there to deal with very very big national international issues we can't quite decide whether we're a local council or a Senate so a lot of the questions and Prime Minister's Questions veer from you know will you condemn the Saudi bombing in Yemen to will you congratulate you know the Penrith Football Club on their latest victory over whoever so we're gonna have to work through all this stuff if we're to have anything sensible like around this lady here on the yes here given the events of the last three years in Parliament has the mother of Parliament's become a figure a global figure of fun well it's certainly true that unfortunately in many many countries people look at Parliament and think it's comical yeah I mean I used to I mean it's not unique to the British Parliament when when we were all through the Arab world if you're looking for a good time you used to watch the Yemeni Parliament that was always sir that was a good good way of amusing yourself at late in the afternoon but the British Parliament has become like that people are you know glued to c-span in the United States and the rigmarole of the whole thing hasn't really helped I mean it's difficult in the brexit negotiations it's difficult in dealing with Europe for them really to get their head around the tone in which this whole thing is conducted so yes I agree I think it it's a difficult thing I think this Parliament which was a you know real source of wonderful people in the 18th and 19th centuries now seems to other countries deeply anachronistic yep this gentleman at the end yeah thank you very much quick question so you've got four years how will you make us feel safer in London okay very good question how women have back here in four years for us yeah they'll come back and for you some and see what I've managed it well my experience working most directly on this was when I was the prison's minister and I discovered as the presence Minister that an enormous amount of what needed to happen to reduce violence and presence and obviously valence in presence is not exactly the same as balancing duties but it has some things in common right it has in common the fact that a lot of the people committing the violence are also themselves victims in a prison scenario violence had tripled in the five years before I took over and those were if you look at prisoners 38 percent of prisoners have been in care about 42 percent have been excluded from school compared to about 2% of the general population about 50 percent have a reading age under 11 and that's before you get into addiction issues mental health issues etcetera so the way to deal with it in a prison context is to realise that you mustn't ever get into the either-or feeling of politics which basically in crude terms is a standoff between a sort of liberal view which is it's all about relationships and love and a conservative view which is it's all about being tough right the truth of the matter is that actually it's much more like the way that you'd have to think about being a teacher in a difficult school in other words of course it's about love of course it's about understanding but of course it's also about really knowing what you're doing and having very clear expectations and very clear boundaries and a very clear sense of what's acceptable and isn't so let's fast-forward to poplar and I've seen popular where a guy had been snapped and he bled to death under a police 10 while I was standing there what were the two things that you pick up about that firstly of course it's true we have been terrible about youth clubs we're terrible about youth workers were terrible but support for these younger people right at the same time there were no neighbourhood police of any sort visible and everybody in this state felt that very very strongly we could see a whole group of young men on bicycles who were carrying knives and the general feeling in the community quite rowdy and nobody was going to do anything and that means that you have to get into the operational details the Metropolitan Police I'm afraid right again as the prison's Minister often people would say to me your job is just to be a sort of non-executive chair don't get too operational there is a chief executive the prison services governor's as present officers it's not your job to get into what's happening on the ground nonsense nonsense nonsense right the only way you can turn the institution around is by really getting into the question of why on earth have we gone from 320 officers in southern to 120 right now that may be partly about funding cuts a number of police but why are people spending only a year as the neighborhood policeman when they used to spend eight years so you've got to do that and you've got to push it hard and it's difficult and institutions like the Metropolitan Police are very difficult and you've got to balance showing real respect for uniformed officers in a very difficult situation right they are genuinely getting attacked abused they're getting killed it's a very very difficult job they have to be part police officer part social worker part mental health worker part teacher and actually part online specialists but also there needs to be a very very clear set of expectations about what they're supposed to do and at the core of that has to be neighbourhood policing has to be has to be relationships has to be what I saw and erm which is a very deliberate decision by the Durham police to have people spending 1012 years focused on an estate so that you walk around that State with those officers and people know them it is amazing how much that diffuses violence it's amazing how much that can prevent so you've got to do those two things at the same time okay just sneak time for one question boys a bit late you had a good excuse but so we've got two more minutes left there's someone there at the back the lady with the red top yeah you yeah there's a mic just coming away if you could keep it quite concise and Rory might have to I Rory I was interested in your views on humanitarian intervention especially with the war on terror which is sort of tarnished humanitarian intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan which were quite preemptive would you say humanitarian intervention is dead as it is now I mean we haven't seen any intervention in Turkey recently and it wasn't much of an intervention in Syria either so would you say it's dead yeah okay so I think that's true I think the age of intervention has come to an end I think what I my whole career really before again Parliament was these interventions I worked on Bosnia Kosovo Iraq Afghanistan and for nearly 20 years that kind of thing nation-building a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers on the ground at the heights in Iraq and Afghanistan another hundred and fifty thousand international civilians the US government's spending a hundred billion dollars a year a hundred billion dollars a year in Afghanistan Iraq huge you know a massive enterprise of all these universities anthropologists foreign services development agencies trying to fix other people's states I think that's ended and I don't think it's coming back again in my lifetime and I think that's because we learnt that except in very very rare and special situations we didn't know what we were doing we set ourselves up to do things that didn't make sense I mean this is the gap between rhetoric and reality played at its most dramatic level right it's the level at which you say that you're going to be able to and this genuinely is what people were saying people were saying 2001 they were gonna be able to turn Afghanistan into Dubai right I really actually we've hardly managed to turn Afghanistan into Afghanistan and a take of Hilson right that has been the expenditure of 500 billion dollars nearly half a million troops have cycled through untold numbers of Afghans and foreigners have lost their lives and today almost half the country today is under control of the Taliban all these areas that we were fighting over in Helmand are now back under Taliban control so now I think this is is coming to an end and I think it's very very difficult to convince ourselves that we now have the skills the will the capacity the credibility the legitimacy to go in and pretend that we can fix the lake Chad basin Northeast Nigeria Somalia South Sudan the Central African Republic the Democratic Republic of the Congo Yemen Syria and so on and so forth thank you I know we could all talk about so many more things and hear from you all evening but we have we have to call it a day let me think your lossing when the third last thing okay well listening um think to go with um I think the key thing if politics is to be reborn and to live is that we must get out of the idea of the politician doing what I'm doing right this is very uncomfortable I'm sitting here I'm telling the Lana Coates I'm pontificating about police the truth of the matter is that all of you in this room know far more than I do right now right in Omni you know 500 you write you know 500 times as much as I do and far more about into each individual part of London you live in and the person that asked me the question about policing almost certainly knows far more about policing than I do and this is what has to happen right we have to somehow if we're actually to become a grown-up country if we're to grasp the opportunity of London in the 21st century we've got to somehow use you right this model some funny middle-aged white man sitting on a stage pontificating it's no good really can't work like that so please please please maybe not in my generation you know maybe long after I'm dead but the only way we're going to do this is if we become more than the sum of our parts or unless and that means somehow finding ways in the most positive sense to put you in charge to let you drive these communities you drive these areas around the me thank you very much goodbye thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: How To Academy Mindset

Views: 194,979

Keywords: Rory Stewart, Politics, How To Academy, How to: Academy, London, Emmanuel Centre, Mayor of London, Mayoral candidate, Conservative, British politician, Member of Parliament, Penrith, Penrith and The Border, Secretary of State for International Development, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Brexit, Brixton, Minister of State for Africa, Leader of the Conservative Party, 2020 London mayoral election, Afghanistan, Iraq, Tories

Id: S9GpEvkXH18

Length: 73min 55sec (4435 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ActualStreet]

I don't really like Rory's politics, but this was a pretty awesome speech. The final part, which is what I've marked in the video, is decidedly Hayekian even if he doesn't realise it.

[u/mrlj1]

It's a pity with Rory. He's clearly quite bright, eloquent, and well-informed. But a big shame that he didn't extend what he said here to his position on the EU.

[u/MarshallFoxey]

I actually really like Rory, he has some interesting ideas. Though, I do think his decision to die on the hill of Brexit and the EU was shortsighted and rather foolish.