When Should Politicians Resign? Rory Stewart on Boris Johnson and British Politics (Part 3)

[Music] um i'm just going to say to rowanna you are absolutely right it is certainly not that um just who's made a little quite a very valid comment in the box um and uh i think that people um would be interested she said i shouldn't have said about quite rightly about clipping up your quote because we are not the daily mail we're certainly not and talking about the daily mail and um the news media i mean alistair is the one who is most angry i think about the media when you guys are having your discussions but um you said during one of your discussions that when you were a politician i i didn't hear this but you only read the new york times for global affairs this person asks whether you think the british media has a myopic or even naval gazing vision it's sad that we seem to be less good on foreign fans i mean i'm always a bit depressed when i discover a big story that's broken somewhere in the world and it's barely being covered and i think we are a bit lazy i mean i felt that our coverage on afghanistan even when we had 10 000 soldiers on the ground and lives were being lost was often very very parochial and didn't really understand what's happening in afghanistan really understanding the small part of the coalition of the united states so much of the afghan evacuation a completely shameful portrayal of afghanistan in august got caught up with pen filing and his dogs you know whether or not we should evacuate penn farthings dogs and i think that it is a pity because i think there are some fantastically brilliant british foreign correspondents but the newspapers don't have the money to employ them anymore aboard the foreign stations of all these newspapers have shrunk even in my life incredibly you know most of the middle east now barely has a stringer in place most of africa barely has any correspondence left um so i think there is a sense in which britain is becoming less and less of a global country i was talking to somebody today about yemen for example yemenis probably the biggest global crisis in the world a horrible humanitarian crisis where people are literally starving at the moment uh and now on the fragile edge of peace but does anybody pay any attention really and yet britain claims to be a great global pathway i'm sad about that with the media i do think alice slightly overdoes it i mean alistair was a a real punchy davey mirror tabloid journalist going after the tories um you know i think he's the guy that amid the migrants being unfair from but i you know i think they produce stories on things like john major tucking his shirt into his underwear and now he's uh you know suggesting that the entire problem of the world is tablet newspapers and the way in which they attack politicians so i think i think that needs to be taken potential i think british even the 18th century we were producing these incredibly sort of obscene almost pornographic cartoons attacking politicians it is it's a long long standing part of our tradition um another thing it's really interesting a question here relating to your time as prison's minister i mean i was struck to hear you say on the podcast that you think that there are prisons in britain are the most um i can't remember the words you used but not i think the worst the worst thing we have in britain is our prisons you say something along those lines um but far more articulate somebody asks um you did make changes with prisons how did you do that and why can't others okay so that's that's a very kind question um i mean obviously a lot of what i did in prisons 99 of it is brilliant prison officers brilliant prison governors but i think what i was able to do as a minister and that's probably the only job i was able to do it is to come into a situation where prisons have been getting worse and worse and worse so over five years violence had tripled ten thousand assaults a year to thirty thousand assaults a year and i was going into places where liverpool almost every window and some of the landings were broken prisoners were chuckling rubbish out of the windows so the whole yards were full of trash they were sticking their hands up windows to get drugs off drones nobody was being searched prison officers were having their eye sockets smashed out their chins broken prisons were being decapitated i mean it was a really brutal situation and it was a situation which essentially everybody i asked in those early weeks and months said there was nothing that could be done that it had been getting worse and worse and it would just keep getting worse and worse when i said why they said well it's very complicated minister it goes all the way back to early childhood poverty in this and the other and i think the one thing i was able to do was say no it doesn't have to be like this we can make these places better and we're not going to need enormous more resources to do this because actually i believe the prison officers know how to do this we know how to do this and we just have to get back to basics and for me that was we're going to fix the windows we're going to buy some scanners and we're going to start searching people for drugs at the gate and we're going to focus on this issue of violence and we're going to challenge violence when it happens we're going to set clear rules and we're going to be loving strict with the phrase that we came up in the end show respect and affection for prisoners but also have very very clear boundaries very clear sense of what was acceptable behavior and what wasn't and we would then be able to make prisons that were safe for prisons safe for prison officers safe for families now that's a long answer to a question but what i suppose i'm trying to say is it was the one example i found in political life where i somehow got it right i found an intervention which was relatively simple which would could be communicated and where in that particular case i said i would resign unless i managed to bring violence down within 12 months and we got that violence down within nine months we've reduced it by 17 so it was the the one-time politics where i really did feel okay i've got something here but that was partly because i was dealing with a very very extreme crisis and i was very lucky to have some very exceptional governments that were happy to work with me on it well it's good to hear a story of you know a positive story that things do get done and yes you said it was the most disgraceful part of um british life prisons and and again like with everything it's difficult to move on because we can devote an hour to prisons certainly and reform um but another thing that comes up a great deal someone's asking on the podcast is one thing you certainly disagree with as i said um is alistair campbell's loathing of the school that you went to and one of the person people in that question they ask is the tribalism because of so many people coming from the public school system yeah i think there's a lot of people come to the public school system although of course it's getting less all the time i mean the um i mean the fact that boris johnson is the prime minister that david cameron was promised before makes this very very raw but the conservative party itself has every year fewer and fewer people from private schools it is actually getting more diverse you can see it just visibly if you look at boris johnson's cabinet if you compare it to mr snatcher's cabinet which is basically all white privacy school educated men he has a cabinet which is much more diverse ethnically in gender terms in terms of people's education so it is changing in that sense um i wonder whether the i don't think the place that people went to school contributes to tribalism i think people can find tribalism in different ways you can find tribalism ideologically you can even i sometimes felt when i said in the house of commons that people were channeling football that sometimes the way in which people shouted across the aisles was exactly the same as their the way that they would confront another football team okay i'm gonna try and get through um three more if i can and i've been i've been obviously hinting at this with every single question but i'll ask again from catherine's perspective would you consider returning to uk and taking a public role again either as mayor london meth which you did so much preparation before or in some other way yes i think i would love eventually to do that i think i would have to do it with an enormous amount of thought and caution and work out how i would do it in a way that actually worked how could i be successful in the system how could i do it without completely blowing myself up um how could i actually live out the kind of principles that i'm talking about but yes i'd love to try again sometime you must have i mean so your form like you haven't worked out that way yet i haven't worked out that way because i think the i mean sadly for me they've now changed the electoral system so my london mayoral race was predicated on the fact that a bit like the french presidential system was the way that macron came through that if you came second uh if i'd come second city would then be a second round of voting if he didn't get 50 at which point hopefully the conservative votes would have come to me in addition to the 20 i had and i would then have been able to win in the second round that's the way independents win they've now changed it to a first post system which makes it much much more difficult for an independent to come through um but i think it can be done i think if anybody's listening on the show who wants to run as an independent to be mayor of london i think the answer is you've just got to stick at it for a very very very long time you've just got to keep building your machine you've probably got to lose a couple elections and you'd eventually win on the third but you require some very patient donors you require loss of investment in doing that and you basically have to dedicate 10-15 years of your life to the project so jordan j asks if you were an mp now and received an fpm for a party at downing street would you you feel obliged to resign yes i think so yeah i hope so i mean some people criticize my political careers i'm a little bit too keen to resign i quite like resign but but no i i i i think it's very i think resignation is a really important thing i mean boris johnson we're not asking if necessary to resign as an mp we're asking to resign as a prime minister he can remain on the back benches if he wants but amber rudd for example resigned over windrush and what people maybe don't remember about that is she resigned because she decided she'd inadvertently misled parliament she said something that she believed at the time that she later found out the briefing wasn't true and so she resigned borah johnson is refusing to resign uh on the grounds that he wasn't sure that it was a party at the time that's not the point right as amber shows you resign because even if you inadvertently mislead parliament you resign i think this is a brilliant question from gareth which is based on what we are aware from uh past votes referendums what three-word slogan do you think a party could use that might win the next general election based on bret get brexit done or take borders back um take back control i was never a fan and so sad that this matters in modern democracy i'd go with use common sense but don't think it will take off oh i love it i mean i love honest and open and supporting the charities you do i think common sense is a really powerful concept i'm not sure it's the slogan that wins but i think there's something really powerful i mean i would quite cheatly be tempted to run against boris johnson on take back control at the moment i mean the sense of the government completely out of control completely unaccountable to the people is so strong that i'd be tempted to turn that round on him um you know we've lost control of our parliament we've lost control of our prime minister we've lost control of truth we've lost control of decency we've lost control of common sense so i'd be tempted to do that i mean i also would be tempted to run on less talk more action i but fundamentally i think if you're going to run against boris johnson you've got to make morality and integrity the core of it you've got to say uh yeah i'd run on enough is enough i love that but i think that's what we all got told as children didn't we when we misbehaved i feel like that's definitely um uh someone says doing things together um yeah it's great great great i'm all for that um i just spotted another question i think would be a good one to ask you yes i mean we hinted at this before but how many people in parliament uh somebody who's anonymous says would have their conscience actually step up and comment against um the pm especially considering they'd be ostracized and pushed out of a well-paid civil servant job so and perhaps people just wouldn't do that or although that you know they have recently yeah people have it's very interesting that you see conservative mps occasionally coming up speaking against them then they retract there's these very odd moments charles walker for example who came out and said where i should go about party gates and he changed his mind two days ago and gave an interview saying i don't know what i got into but now i've decided that boyce johnson is like some miraculous cricketer who comes on in the last over and somehow and then takes four wickets or scores i mean he's got this weird idea that somehow he needn't play by the rules for other people so you you can see the pressures going on the boris will use his immense charm he's very very charming i mean he's successfully talked around any number of wives mistresses bosses fellow mps and forgiving him again and again and again he'll be doing that he'll be anyone who's calling him to resign he'll be getting around for drinking down the street saying come on ready you know let's let's get on with this we've got the ukraine water fighters and the other and the whips will be uh juncturing and mps be turning their backs on you and your constituency maybe they're calling out your constituency chair and your local councillors are getting in touch saying ease off on this so i think it's important to understand the number of pressures but still some conservative mps have spoken out against them tobias our word has very clearly tom tukenhart has very clearly greg knight i believe has very clearly so i think you know people are doing it but um but not as many as i'd like so um a relatively easy and light question to finish off but really important i mean i know that you're of course you've written many books you're sorry it's not greg knight it's roger gale who's been speaking out against that's paul gregor that's going to be very cross for me um yes okay we'll get that straight um but it's still a brilliant question and it's really important you obviously um read a lot you you talk about uh books that you've both read a lot on the podcast and you've of course written many and we are a very books central place the how to academy so what book i mean i think it's an impossible question to isolate one but perhaps you can would you recommend to everyone goodness graciously um well i quite like i mean i've been reading nick clegg's book between the extremes i like and i've been taking them i've taken that it's a book by yashka monk which has come out called the great experiment on democracies where he tries to argue what the future of democracy could be i think obviously tim snyder's extraordinary work on populism and fascism is worth reading uh i think that d to helm on climate is always worth reading but really really really really if you want to understand contemporary british politics you have to read war and peace okay um well very sadly um we have to let you go i know that um you've got to i think take an early morning flight somebody says please ask rory to return for another talk but ensure that next time it's a three-hour slot rather than one and a half hours actually just being one and thanks for greatly brilliantly expressed thoughts and experience so i echo that thank you very much we'll do um three hours next time and thank you all very very much for signing in and thank you for a fantastic lot of questions thank you you

Channel: How To Academy Mindset

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Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 10 2022