Katie Lam MP

30:19And it was not dismantled when the pandemic ended. And so the list of things that the government was then expected to get involved with, and also the whole kind of infrastructure that was built to pressure the government to do so, would never have been created without it. And it is hard. I mean, I think it's fundamentally important to do it, but it is hard to wind all of that back. Yeah, completely. There'll be sort of a trade body, wedding venues, UK or whatever now. Sure. That's kind of set up and so on. Yeah, I think that's interesting. I just think it just needs to be a cultural shift at some point about conversations about what we actually want government to do.

31:00Because you can't do all these things, right? No. It's impossible. No organization, definitely not the state, but no organization, no private organization could do to any degree of quality the range of things that the government is attempting to do. and that is basically what we observe and until i think until the core functions of government like keeping people safe from criminals and uh maintaining the border are going well we just don't have the time the focus the capacity the money to do all of these other things we just don't and so i'm interested in that and then because you had what i consider like the best job in government right i did it for three years in terms of sort of leading business relations for the pm or certainly one of the most interesting you then didn't make the switch to go and do sort of home office stuff so what was the sort of path for that ah so i uh i left government for a while yeah i had to uh because of the rules i had to spend a chunk of time not working so that all of the things that i had seen whilst i was in government i couldn't even you know subconsciously use in whatever job I went on to.

32:16Because you were a faculty... Yeah, so I did a bit of consulting, and then I went to go and work for an AI company for a bit. And then I worked on Richie Cynat's leadership campaign. And then when he went into number 10, there was a question about... They were looking for somebody to go to the Home Office to do national security, basically. so counter-terrorism, MI5 oversight, serious organized crime, which necessitates a certain degree of security clearance, which I got when I was at Number 10, and also when I'd been at Number 10, they were working on the National Security and Investment Bill that became ACT, which was about the degree to which we allow foreign companies and foreign governments to purchase British businesses and infrastructure.

33:11And so I had a bit of a background in some of that. And so, yes, I went to the Home Office to do national security, which was, again, in a different way, sometimes terrifying and fascinating and very worthwhile. That must have been interesting, particularly on the companies bit and deciding what to do. Yeah. Because that is definitely in the sort of like post-globalization era that we're now in, has definitely been, has become a bigger and bigger thing, right? Partly post-pandemic as well, right? Yeah. And I think we were a bit naive about it. I think that there was a period of time where, broadly, the West essentially thought the closer you trade with somebody, the closer your economic relationship becomes, basically, the more they will become like you.

34:01And in some cases, that worked out. And in some cases, that has proven not to be true. And so we do have to be careful, especially in a sort of, uh, Internet of Things connected world, where I think it was the Swedish were saying recently, uh, that's definitely one of the Scandinavian countries, I think the Swedish, that their Chinese-built electric buses have kill switches in China. Yeah. So, you know, their whole, uh, electric bus based public transport system is vulnerable to Beijing essentially just allowing them to continue to operate it and whilst there are lots of countries around the world who might not share all of our views on everything they're still great trading partners but we have to still be realistic about our own interests and where those interests don't align Yeah.

35:01Can you give examples of what you sort of worked on there that sort of particularly demonstrate that? Well, when I was working on the investments bill, there was sort of two parallel tracks, basically. There was companies that would kind of critical infrastructure, essentially, in deciding what that would be. And, of course, in a technology and AI world, that definition changes. So I think there was a sense that it would have been better never to allow Google to buy DeepMind, for example, so that the UK could have its own AI champion. We're lucky, in a sense, that DeepMind has effectively insisted on staying in London, but it might not have done.

35:53You know, we could have, and I suppose we could still lose that company to the States, which would be a real shame given how far ahead of a lot of that revolution we were and could have been. and so some of it is about you know regardless of who the buyer is redefining what we see as critical infrastructure and building up some national champions or at least making sure that those national champions stay here and then some of it was more the sort of thing that I'm talking about of states that we might consider to be hostile actors or in some contexts, hostile actors, either not owning or either not owning the actual infrastructure or not owning the data, which is also important.

36:45Because if you, if, which is broadly the situation that we find ourselves in or are coming to find ourselves in, if all of your renewable energy infrastructure is built by the Chinese and they own all of the data on where it's being collected and where it's being used, that is a national security vulnerability. Do you think there is an argument that, take the case of DeepMind or something similar to that taking place today, that governments should take more ownership in companies like that? Direct ownership? It's so difficult because it is... Broadly, my instinct is, uh, no, because I don't think that government ownership improves companies.

37:35And there's pretty good evidence that it does the opposite. At the same time, if you are going to say certain companies can't be bought, then you are changing the incentives for founding companies here. and so you have to make sure that the conclusion isn't okay well you know if i can't build and sell a company in britain i'll build and sell it in france or i'll build and sell it in germany or in or i'll just go straight to the states and sort of cut out the middleman um so it there's no one clean answer it's quite a delicate one um if the government were to do that i think it would be really important to do it in a very hands-off way yeah because the one thing that i think is unquestionably true is that the government is not very good at managing these investments or indeed anything.

38:25So you could imagine a world where the government did that but we don't have much of an instinct or I think a natural tolerance in this country for picking winners because you have to have quite a high risk tolerance to do that. You have to accept that you're going to lose a lot So the Chinese do a vast amount of direct investment, but they accept that loads of those investments will fail, which any portfolio manager will tell you is always an option. But when that money is taxpayers' money, it hurts a lot more. Yeah. And it's difficult for politicians to defend. Generates a lot more newspaper headlines as well.

39:06Yeah. So, fast forward, you then become Member of Parliament. Why did you decide to do it? Why would I do this to myself? No. So many people ask me that. It's obviously, in some ways, it's funny, but it's also kind of sad how many people are, particularly when I was a candidate, I think, when I'd say to people, oh, I'm standing for Parliament. And you could just see them and think, why? Why? But the family that I grew up in, my grandmother was German. She came to the UK when she was 13. Her grandfather was a politician. He was a state senator in Saxony. And he was very left-wing guy, trade union guy.

39:50And he was fiercely anti-Nazi, very vocal critic of the Nazi party and of Hitler. And so when the Third Reich came to power in 33, All of the family was stripped of their citizenship. My grandmother and her parents escaped over the border to Czechoslovakia. Her grandparents were arrested and sort of held at various different points. He eventually jumped out of the window of his second floor prison cell, which I've been to see, it is very high off the ground, made it to Czechoslovakia with a broken ankle. They had a resistance radio station there broadcasting back over the border. They were raided by the SS in 1937.

40:29one of the operators was shot dead and then they came here. And then my grandfather's family, on the same side, so these are my father's parents, they were all... So my grandfather was Jewish, and his Dutch-Jewish family were all from Amsterdam, and barring a very small number, they were all murdered in Sobiboran and Auschwitz. So when I was a child, we were not cynical about politics. It was a very high, very fulfilling and also kind of exciting. There was this chase across the continent and there were good guys and there were bad guys. There was a fight for truth and light and freedom and goodness.

41:16And I just always found that very captivating. and so I had always been a bit interested in the idea of going into politics and then I think, and you will have your own view on this, I think being an advisor can make you go one of two ways. I think you either think, I am never doing that, that looks terrible or you think, I don't want to just offer advice and rightly so because advisors are not elected. People can think that advisors are very powerful, but all of the decisions are made by the principal, which is how it should be in a democracy. And so you can get to the point where you think, well, actually, I feel I've got something to offer in my own name, standing for my own constituents, rather than, you know, just notes on the papers that go into the box.

42:09It's very valuable work, but it's just a different type of thing. And so, having been an advisor for a while, I thought, no, I do, I do really want to do this. Yeah. No, I think that probably is very true, actually. Like, it does make people go one of two ways. And how did you find it? Because I definitely found a period of like... This is probably when we first met as well, really. Like, three or four months after leaving government, of where I was like, I got so used to kind of trying to, you know, sort of batter through the PM's agenda that I'd almost sort of forgotten what I thought about it and what I really cared about, right?

42:40And it was like, okay, blank sheet of paper now, time to sort of, like, work out what I kind of think again, as it were. um but how have you sort of found that transition from being advisor to now I mean I know you're not an executive but to sort of yeah stepping out to the front right well it was particularly difficult when I was at the same time an advisor and a candidate because as a candidate you're obviously speaking in your own name and as an advisor it's totally inappropriate to do that you know the yes Um, uh, the department, if that's, you know, number 10 or the Home Office and the civil service, should never know what your views are.

43:20They should just know what the views of the principal are that you are expressing. Um, so, uh, that was a slightly, um, strange period of time where I would have to kind of shut off and open different parts of my brain. And...

43:43I think because I had been an advisor for a while by then, it felt relatively natural to do. But, you know, particularly when I was standing to be selected, the whole purpose of that is to explain what you think, right? Because you're basically saying to these people, please trust my judgment to stand in your stead and make decisions on your behalf. And it is obviously impossible to run through every single scenario that you might ever face. So you have to just tell them what you think about things in general, and then they can decide whether that is the sort of person that they would want to represent them.

44:18And so you have to just get into that mindset of telling people what you really think. But I actually think that's difficult for almost everyone because it's quite unusual in lots of professions, not all, but in most professional contexts, what you tend to want to offer is a kind of, you know, a balance. Like all of the, these are all the arguments and this is my conclusion. Yeah. Rather than, well, I think this. Some people think that and that's, you know, that's a fair read, but that's not what I think. Uh, and so... Because I find that with people that I talk to who want to become candidates, is, uh, for all good reasons, you know, their natural instinct, if you say to them, well, what do you think about, uh...

45:11I don't know, net zero. Uh, they'll give a really balanced argument, and then, at the end, they might say, uh, you know, overall, I favor this side or that side. And in some respect, politicians are like professional opinion havers, so you can't really do that. You have to lead with what you think. Of course you can and you should know what the other views are on the debate and you can acknowledge those and you might talk about where you have some commonalities and where you disagree, but you have to have a perspective. Yes, completely. I think that's... It's interesting in how politics has changed, even in the kind of, like, 18 months that you've been elected, right?

45:53Like, it's... Well, A, I want to know how you found the job so far, but I would also be interested in how, you know, the world has shifted quite a bit in that 18 months, it feels as well. Yes, it's how I found the job so far. I mean, it is very intense. I was saying earlier how intense it was to work in number 10, particularly during the pandemic. It's more intense than anything that I've ever done because it's you, right? So it's very difficult. Sorry, go on. Well, more intense than sort of Goldman Sachs number 10 of the pandemic. Yes, because it's so much more personal. And it's also... The management and delegation style is very different.

46:32So if you're running a team in a business, part of becoming a good manager is understanding that the people who work for you might do things in a different way from you. And as long as the result for the team is the right result, then that doesn't matter. Running your parliamentary team, if you're an MP, is different because everybody is an extension of you. And so, you know, without being a sort of terrible micro manager, you have to explain to people your style because everybody who interacts with the team, particularly my constituents, you need to feel like they've interacted with, well, in lots of cases they have interacted with me, but where they've interacted with the team, where they've still interacted with kind of my energy, if you like, or atmosphere.

47:19And so it's a very different way of managing. And it's much more personally tiring, not least because you have to decide what that style is. You have to be much more self-conscious than you would be just like managing a team in a big corporate. How have you found recruiting as an MP for that? It's challenging, not least because I think members of parliament are really babied when it comes to the decisions that they can make. So the budget for the office of a member of parliament, who each MP, particularly in our modern digital information sharing world, needs to have quite a few members of staff to speak in parliament, to manage their work in the constituency, to stay on top of campaigns, to pick up the phone to constituents because obviously you're almost never able to do that yourself in the moment.

48:19Yeah. And the rules around whom you can hire are incredibly restrictive. So the whole budget is in the order of magnitude of about£250 ,000. Yeah. But I'm not allowed to say, okay, I'm going to hire two people and I'm going to work them to the bone and pay them£100 ,000 a piece. have to hire within very strict pay bands and very specific job descriptions. So if I wanted somebody half to do sort of local media management, so like sending out press releases to my local papers and talking to my local radio stations and things like that, and half to do casework, picking up the phone to constituents, and at least in theory, I would have to offer them two different part-time contracts, uh, on different salary levels.

49:10I mean, it's all incredibly bureaucratic, uh, which makes, to your question, which makes the recruitment process quite difficult. Yeah. Because you're not really in charge of your own incentives. And what, what's the ceiling for what you can pay somebody now? I'm... Uh, I think, God, you're testing me. I think the highest salary for an out of London MP, which I am, is it's the level three pay band for uh i think it's either your office manager or your like most senior researcher and it's about 60 000 pounds yeah okay so it's i mean it's it's it's definitely not nothing uh at all these are these are very reasonable salaries um there's just no um there's no leeway you know if you wanted to if if you found somebody who was perfect for the job who was currently on 65 you cannot offer them 70 so incentivize them to come to you you can't do it even if they're really experienced or it doesn't matter that's interesting so what rules do you have people doing because that's interesting you're talking when you were like oh i've got liaising with local press etc because surely now the digital side is almost as big if not Yes, it's massive.

50:24Bigger than that. Yeah. So, um, there's all the classic roles that you would find everywhere. So HR and finance, uh, managing the budget and costs. Uh, I have somebody who my constituency team is half in the constituency and, uh, half in Westminster because I need my direct casework. So if you write to me with a personal issue, so say your child hasn't got into their first choice of school and you think that in this case it would be the county council hasn't processed that properly, members of parliament have effectively become the kind of public sector ombudsman. So if something goes wrong with the public sector, you know, your final port of call, if you've been through all of the classic complaints channels, all of which tend to be incredibly slow, is your MP.

51:24And so I have a lovely woman who works for me, who works in Kent, doing that side of things directly with constituents. And then I have a lovely guy who works for me in London, doing the sort of Westminster advocacy side of that, because it's both trying to resolve the issue locally and then where this is relevant and it often is trying to explain to the government what the problem might be centrally that they might need to solve. So I think it's interesting that because that is as always you have a much better way of putting it the public sector on this button because I have often talked about MP being basically a router for around government for people including local different levels local government as well right like people don't necessarily realize who's responsible for that and actually the MP just ends up being the okay well this is what you know the kind of like explainer of it all and I did wonder how AI might change that over the next sort of 10 to 15 years or so because already he's quite good at that stuff actually yeah and it's particularly which again one might hope technology could help with it's particularly where cases fall between the So, um, it's fairly rare in what I do that you would get a proper emergency, not least because, uh, it really should, something urgent really should be dealt with by somebody else, you know, there should be a frontline service.

52:52But sometimes it happens that, I don't know, somebody is in, uh, supported housing for, uh, because they have been, recovering from a severe mental health episode. And they're due to be discharged from that housing, which is run by the NHS, into general social housing, which is run by their local authority. But the general social housing is infested with rats, so that place isn't available. But their place, the place that they're currently living, has already been given to somebody else. and they've sort of fallen between the different authorities that are supposed to be handing this person between them to take care of them.

53:40And so you would hope that as our technology gets better and better, and particularly, I think, where I hope and believe that AI will be really valuable is in connecting systems together. You know, one of the problems, and this is not an exclusively government thing. you see this in all sorts of businesses, particularly big businesses, where they have a bunch of internal systems, all of which were built at different times by different people. And then they've had add-ons added by different people. And, you know, there's a there's huge value in stitching those things together. And I think AI will be able to do that in a sophisticated way that is very hard to build through conventional software.

54:24Completely. Yeah, I think that's really it's interesting. And how have you found it being an MP in such a small kind of intake as well? What's that been like? Because already you're on the front bench, etc. There's already quite a lot of pressure to do stuff and just fill various things. There's a huge amount of work involved in opposition, which I hadn't fully appreciated before. so I had worked in government but I'd never worked in Parliament and there's lots of bill committees things called statutory instruments which are pieces of legislation that need to be passed that don't rise to the level of primary legislation which is what we debate in the chamber of the House of Commons and the House of Lords they can just be sort of individual committees every major bill that is passed has a bill committee so there'll be several hours of debate multiple times a day on a tuesday and a thursday usually and there's also westminster hall which is a second chamber in in the house of commons where members of parliament can bring debates on topics of their choice and it's also where petitions debates are responded to by the government and by the opposition.

55:46So there's just a lot to do in any given day. And there's 119 Conservative MPs, which is sort of historically small. And so there's just a lot of work to go around, not a particularly long list of people. And in lots of ways, there's opportunity in that. And it's exciting. And you get to have a go at doing things probably earlier in your career that would have been unimaginable to the 2019 Conservative MP intake or the 2015 or 2010 intake.

56:22But it's just a lot. It's just a lot to do, a lot to get your head around. And it is quite nice that we all know one another. I think that's quite a nice side to it being a relatively small parliamentary party. It's quite a sort of close-knit one in that sense. And how do you sort of pick what you're wanting to focus on? Because I've been struck by you've been kind of popping up in sort of similar areas to where I've got interest in whatever, right? So that's why you end up being kind of on my radar. But you did like the Smart Thinking Awards. Yeah. You were a judge on that. You're doing lots of stuff with the Looking for Growth guys.

56:56Like, how do you decide, like, you know, you've already talked about the amount of work you've got constituency-wise, bill committees, etc. But how do you decide, okay, well, this is what sort of I'm interested in and this is what I want to pursue? it's a really good question I don't know that I have yet necessarily kind of got to the bottom of got to the bottom of that not least because there's a lot which which I am also interested in that I have to do in my shadow home office brief you know that has to be covered and as I say I'm very happy to cover but there are again I think by virtue of it being such a small group of people um you get asked to do quite a lot of things you know you can fill your day three or four or five times over and i try to within that choose the things to do where i think i have a perspective or i have something to offer uh that somebody else might not and And because there are lots of incredibly worthwhile causes and campaigns and areas that people are interested in.

58:08I mean, the challenge of what I do is not finding something worthwhile. It's choosing between lots of really worthwhile things. And I read an article once about time management that said it's really easy when it comes to time management to think that it's just about saying no to things that you don't want to do. It's actually about saying no to things that you do want to do. and deciding what those things are. I think there's a, I want to say it's a Warren Buffett anecdote, although that feels like a bit of a cliche, but he got somebody that he was mentoring to write down, I think it was the five things that he was really, really interested in, and then the next 15 things that he was also interested in.

58:48And he said the danger comes from those 15 things, because those are the things that are going to catch your eye, and you're going to want to get involved with. but if you're ever going to do these five, you've got to say no to these 15. And it's really hard. There are lots of areas that I would like to get more involved with that I haven't been able to. But I try to, when things cross my desk, like Looking for Growth, who I think are a really, really great group and are making, it's a combination of do I think that this is making a point that isn't being made somewhere else that needs to be made where I have something personally to contribute and I just do my best to apply that test but it's not perfect that's quite a good way of doing it though right because it is you know to take the example of wedding venues UK or whatever right like yeah they'll come say you know we'd love you to be our champion and whatever and you know your instincts is yeah these people are quite entrepreneurial sort of doing it and so on but like you say like what's the the sort of need for it and so on and I think it is difficult But what are those sort of five things then?

59:55Well, I have a very agricultural, rural constituency. And I think, which I say is a politically neutral point. It's just an observation. We have a very urban government, a very urban cabinet. And I think that the countryside needs a champion and it needs a voice. And so I try and do that. And that's in all sorts of areas. Farming is one and is an obvious one. but it's also things like the rural economy is much more flexible and part-time so if you take something like the national insurance changes employers national insurance contributions the rate going up is bad but the threshold being lowered is killer because i have loads of businesses if you take something like a nursery in one of the villages in my constituency lots of the people who work there mostly they're not exclusively women work part-time either also around their family commitments or it might be around another job they might also work a shift at the post office or at the pub or whatever it might be and so i have people managing nurseries whose national insurance contributions bill because this threshold has been lowered everybody who used to work for them basically wasn't caught by national insurance employer contributions at all because they just weren't earning enough money but once the threshold was put down almost all of them are so their bills have gone from essentially nothing to thousands of pounds a month that they basically don't have.

1:01:19They just don't have that margin to spare. So it's things like that in terms of advocating for and championing the countryside that I think are really important. I am really focused on growth is sort of, kind of everybody says that now, but I think that there is a you know if if for a person like me in their mid-30s the british economy has effectively stalled for all of your adult life right like on a on a gdp per person basis and if you look at average rate average wages adjusted for inflation we are no wealthier than we were in 2007 i don't think that that can go on i don't think that that's sustainable and for for 200 years in this country basically since the industrial revolution every generation had come to see economic growth basically as a birthright and that growth is still unknown to our generation and if we carry on like this it will remain unknown to the next generation too so I think that there is I was reading something recently that put it very well that the world in some ways is split into people who got their lives and finances and particularly house purchases in order by 2007, 2008, and those of us who came later and weren't able to do that.

1:02:48And I think that our generation needs to be heard on these things. There has to be, and for me, that is an obviously conservative offering about aspiration and hope and the idea that the future is better than the present. And then there are obviously all my home office brief and several other things. I mean, we should get you back at some point and do the whole thing on growth because it's just such a sort of prominent thing. But how much of it do you think is to do with sort of quantitative easing that took place on the back of the financial crash and the pandemic, right? Because I feel that has inflated asset prices to such a degree now that the generation coming through just do not sort of aspire to that because it's just so far out of reach.

1:03:37It's definitely a factor and it exacerbates that split, right? Yes. In terms of the people who have assets and people who don't. And of course, there are lots of nuances and subtleties within this. and you can be asset rich and not have a lot of cash flow. And there are, I'm not for a moment suggesting that if you are in the generation above us, then definitely your life will be happy and rosy and everything will be fine. But there's no question that the programme of quantitative easing, which because of how the Bank of England is structured, has no democratic mandate. really I mean nobody ever voted for quantitative easing and certainly nobody ever voted for it to go on that long and and and it produced that combined with uh such low interest rates I mean basically free money for such a long period of time produced quite perverse results you know for a period this this is over now or finishing as people's mortgages um uh come to an end people's mortgage rates come to an end.

1:04:51But for a period of time, it was so much cheaper to pay a mortgage than to rent. And people felt instinctively, and obviously this has a generational element, that that was really unfair. And you can see why. If you could put together a deposit, you could basically cut your housing expenditure in half. That's not true now, because of where interest rates are now, but quantitative easing produced a lot of, like lots of things, you can see why they did it maybe to begin with or for a while, but a lot of its results have damaged the economy. Yeah, yeah. And have damaged the sense of, have damaged our sense of aspiration.

1:05:38Yeah, and that's what I feel is that people can't they can't see a way forward and the sort of social contract has been somewhat broken with that in terms of like you know work hard get a good job you know also what's been is party degrees and whether they have been as worthwhile in the last 15 years in certain subjects as well and obviously people have loaded up on debt for a lot of them as well and I just think you know I do look at some people and think yeah like I can see why you think the system does work for you yeah it's I mean you there's also all sorts of small subtle things so because of how our planning system works and because we have built and I mean particularly in the last decade or so decade and a half decade and a bit so few houses in London it's also now very difficult to live near where you work now that sounds like a sort of normal thing that we've now all come to accept but it really chips away at the fabric of how you exist because if you work in one place and you live in another place and those two places are an hour apart and of course this has accelerated with working from home because people have thought you know what i can accept a long commute three days a week in a way that i would not have been able to accept it five days a week how can you be in a choir that rehearses on a thursday and performs at the weekend how can you be in a five-a-side football team that does training on a wednesday but plays on a saturday you know all of these little bits of life become a lot more difficult and that mutual society that was was and is such a big part of how britain thrives is really challenged by the planning system, which sounds kind of mad, but it's true.

1:07:39And so if you can't see a world in which you can buy a home in which you could have children and raise a family that is close enough to your work that you can also be a kind of full participant in your community, that's really sad. It's really depressing. completely um completely agree on that in terms of last sort of thing on being an mp and the last 18 months and so on you have become somewhat of a leading light and people are talking about you a lot i know i knew you were going to flinch when i sort of brought this up but like how how does that sort of how does that add to the pressure and you may say oh well that's not true and whatever but i can say that you know you've sort of been quoted by both dominic cummings and george osborne as a leading light and I think the Venn diagram of people that those two rates together is like quite a thin one.

1:08:33It goes back in lots of ways to the question that you were asking about how few of us there are I mean the and and I suppose to some of what you was what we were saying about the media news the clue is in the name likes novelty and so I think it is the media like to kind of alight on something or somebody that is new that they can talk about and because there's such a small group of us and because there's therefore lots of work to do and there are fewer people to send out onto the media or to send out to do this or do that I have been able to do which is in lots of ways great like I was saying earlier you know a lot more than in any other intake I might have done at this point in my career.

1:09:26But it's all... None of it really means anything. It's all just kind of chat. And so the best that you can, you basically have to ignore it. But it does sort of matter in Westminster as well, right? Like, I agree with you. And I think we're quite similar in terms of like thinking about what actually sort of like matters. Right. And Westminster does get way over kind of indexed on who's up, who's down, the narrative, etc. And I think it's a good point that you make that they're a bit sort of bored of. Well, the government has done so badly in its first 18 months and they're a bit bored of the kind of reform rise potentially and so on.

1:10:12So they're kind of like trying to find a new part. but this sort of narrative stuff does matter a bit. It does, but I think it's also...

1:10:27You can't be... What's the word? You can't be naive of it or naive about it or completely ignorant of it, but you also can't control it and can't put too much thought by it. So, you know, the best that I can, I basically just try and do my job. very good answer right well we've got we've got some more sort of fun uh sort of kind of quick fires levity questions to finish with right okay so this is when you ask me what my favorite book is and i forget the title of every single book that's ever yeah yeah exactly we can we can edit

1:11:05um what was what was the first thing you did for money i had a paper round oh did you i've had a job at the earliest legal opportunity to have a job throughout my entire life. So when I was 13, I had a paper round. I delivered a local paper in Guildford, where I grew up, that doesn't exist anymore. And some weeks there were leaflets, which was great because you got a bonus, which was between like one and two pounds. You had to put all of the leaflets inside the papers before you delivered them. And I did that from 13 to 16. And then I worked in a shop. I worked in, there was a big dual branch of monsoon accessorize in Guildford and I went there.

1:11:45That's quite cool. Oh, it was great. I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And I did it every Saturday. I had the 10 till 7 shift. Yeah. Shop closed at 6 and then you did clear up which was my favourite bit and like detangling all the necklaces and stuff. Very satisfying. So yes, the very first thing that I did for money was I had a paper round. That's interesting because I often think that's a Gen X thing right? So like Gen X did newspaper rounds. Millennials like us did hospitality yeah generally yeah is often the first thing and gen z now what i think is one of the interesting sort of generational shifts is they earn money online probably yeah um doing something which hopefully leads them being more entrepreneurial um what was who's impressed you from the opposition in the new intake like who's kind of caught your eye uh well i've i've got um There's a few people that I have met.

1:12:39There's a lovely MP in Northampton called Mike who does a lot of advocating around infrastructure, which I think is very important. Chris Curtis also does some of the Looking for Growth stuff that I do, which I think is great, and the Labour Growth Group, I think not always, but I support some of the stuff that they advocate for. there is what can be really nice about parliament particularly across the aisle is you get to know people who have similar issues or challenges so there's a new MP called Josh Simons who has had in his constituency a massive kind of industrial waste organised crime dumping which I've also had in my constituency it's terrible you know you're talking tens of thousands of tonnes of semi-processed rubbish basically and just like leeches into the soil, it's awful so he and I have been working on that together So who's doing that?

1:13:38What is that? It is serious organised crime being paid in theory to take your rubbish away, so they might run like a dodgy skip company or something and then rather than take that money to pay for it to be disposed of in the way that all of the rest of us would have to. They, in my constituency, it's a semi-agent bluebell wood near a gorgeous village called Bethesden. They have felled a load of trees and just dumped 30 ,000 tonnes of waste. In some places, it's like four metres high. And it's all semi-processed, so it's not like you could pick up a plastic bottle. It's all like tiny cut-up bits of plastic.

1:14:24Oh, right. It's a nightmare. Gosh. Yeah. Terrible. Yeah. Okay, that's interesting. We didn't know that was going on. What was your first car? I learned to drive on my parents bought, my dad bought under the scrappage scheme the only new car that he's ever bought and ever will buy, which was a Hyundai i30. I don't know a lot about cars. which so my mum wanted an automatic and they bought a manual car explicitly for me to learn to drive because at the time they were buying it I was 17 and I didn't bother to learn to drive until I was 25 so sorry to my mum but that was the first car that I rode What car do you have now?

1:15:18I drive a Mini Mini Cooper Not the electric one? No, it's a bit older than that it's an internal combustion mini favourite biscuit? the one that trips all politicians up? I actually love making biscuits I've got a big thing about biscuits ice biscuits do you? yeah I do I'll show you some pictures I love a bourbon but I also just love a nice biscuit and a sort of rich tea I'm quite a biscuit purist I think yeah yeah the traditional sort of yeah yeah yeah if it doesn't come in a multi-pack from M &S then I'm not interested We also haven't actually talked about it, which I did mean to do, but you're sort of sidelining theatre production as well.

1:16:02Yes. How did that... Yeah, we can do that another time. Like, I'm fascinated, but you've clearly got a creative outlet. Yeah. Which cabinet minister would you most like to cook you dinner? Ooh.

1:16:21Just I think, which of them might be a good cook? Exactly. who do you think I feel like Wes Streets he might have some skills in the kitchen yeah yeah he could do sort of curry or something I don't know why I particularly think he'd do a curry I feel like he'd do like a nice like a sea bass fillet or something with like a nice like gingery sauce that's what that's what I'm picturing it's amazing how specific the wine gets isn't it yeah which shadow cabinet minister would get furthest on Bake Off do you think Andrew Griffith is very driven and very detail orientated. I think that he'd be very...

1:17:00You could imagine him being very calm under pressure. I think he'd be very good. Classic CFO. Yeah, absolutely. The bakes would be executed to technical perfection. To cram. Yeah, he'd do very well in that middle challenge where you have to do the technical thing that none of them have heard of before. Yeah, I think that's a good one. Which member of the cabinet would get first on The Apprentice? God, I mean, maybe none of them. I mean, I'm not super party tribal. I'm obviously not a member of the Labour Party, but I do want the government to succeed because I live here. But I don't think that entrepreneurialism is their strong point.

1:17:46No. Well, I asked Keir Starmer that when he did the show, and he was like, oh, well, the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds. And I was like, okay, fine. Then six weeks later, we made him chief whip. yeah yeah he's really good at that that's really his thing yeah um fantastic what would you like if we sat here in 20 years time what would you sort of like to have done what would you like to have been known for in your parliamentary career my hope for the country in general in 20 years time is that it feels like a place where the future is going to be better than the present and the past and I'm not sure that that's where we are now and I think for for a country for a group of people for a society to succeed that's what you have to believe in it's a very interesting answer we will definitely get you back to talk about that in the intervening 20 years thank you very much it's been brilliant I've loved having you on I knew it'd be oh my pleasure it's been great thank you so much

1:18:56What is that? Oh, yeah, it's a World Cup holder. Like the soccer tournament World Cup holder for the world. Fits every car, holds every cup. It has a Carvana logo. Carvana made it. They buy and sell cars, so they made a car cup holder. So, uh, got any good cups lately? I used to. I just couldn't figure out where in the world to put them. The World Cup holder. Brought to you by Carvana. Proud sponsors of the World Cup. Cup Holder. Sign up today to win yours at cup-holder2026.com. Not authorized or endorsed by FIFA. Not a real product. For parody and fair use purposes only.