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Podcast Summary: The Rest Is Politics - Episode 128: Whips, Chaos, and Secrets from Westminster
Overview In this episode of *The Rest Is Politics*, hosts Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart engage with Simon Hart, the former Chief Whip of the Conservative Party. The discussion revolves around Hart's experiences in politics, reflections on leadership, and insights from his new book titled *Ungovernable*. Key themes include the challenges faced in Westminster, the nature of political representation, and the need for reform in the political system.
Key Themes & Discussions
Background and Introduction
- Simon Hart's Political Journey:
- Hart began his political career as a Conservative MP in 2010 and has held various positions, including Chief Whip and Secretary of State for Wales.
- Noted for his background with the Countryside Alliance, which shaped his political views.
Key Topics Discussed
- Political Representation:
- Discussion on why "the wrong people" often become MPs and the need for a more modern and effective political workplace.
- Hart reflects on the disconnect between Westminster politics and public priorities, such as hereditary peers and hunting bans.
- The Role of the Chief Whip:
- Hart explains the mundane and operational aspects of the Chief Whip's role, including legislative management and party discipline.
- Emphasizes the importance of a supportive work environment in Parliament, especially for new MPs.
- Brexit and Its Implications:
- Hart shares his view on Brexit, stressing the necessity of respecting the democratic decision despite potential negative outcomes.
- He highlights the long-term complexities of unpicking the relationship with the EU.
- Challenges Within the Conservative Party:
- A candid examination of the internal dynamics of the Conservative Party, particularly during turbulent leadership transitions.
- Discussion on the pressures faced by MPs and the lack of support structures, contributing to the perception of Parliament as "ungovernable".
- Future of Politics:
- Addressing the perception that politics is attracting the "wrong sorts of people," Hart expresses concerns about the profession's image and the need for improvement in support systems.
- The conversation touches on the public's disillusionment with politicians and the honor system associated with political roles.
Reflections on Hart’s Book - *Ungovernable*
- Provocative Title: The title is meant to challenge perceptions of Parliament, not just the Tory party.
- Insights from the Diaries: Hart's diaries reveal candid reflections on political events and interactions, including the challenges of leadership and management in a politically charged environment.
Key Takeaways
- Importance of Support Structures: Effective mentoring and support are necessary for MPs to navigate the pressures of political life.
- Perception of Politics: There is a need to restore respect and pride in political careers to attract diverse and capable individuals.
- Evolution of Political Dynamics: Hart underscores the complexity of political change, which often requires more than just immediate reforms; it is a gradual process.
Conclusion The episode provides a revealing glimpse into the inner workings of Westminster through the eyes of someone who has been at its core. Simon Hart’s experiences as Chief Whip illuminate the challenges faced by politicians today, and his reflections serve as a call to re-evaluate the political landscape in the UK.
Listening Information
- Podcast: The Rest Is Politics
- Hosts: Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart
- Guest: Simon Hart
- Episode: 128
- Available at: [The Rest Is Politics website](https://therestispolitics.com) and various podcast platforms.
For more insights and exclusive content, listeners can become members through the podcast's website.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:28Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. Sign up to The Rest is Politics. is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations.
1:02Welcome to The Restless Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell. And with us very patiently sitting in the studio as we struggle with amazing technical problems are Alistair and Simon in person and me down the line. And Simon Hart has just published a book, which I think is probably the first book ever written by a chief whip, giving us the real inside line and the diaries of somebody who was right at the front line. Quick introduction to Simon. Simon is somebody who joined parliament with me in 2010. He's a conservative MP. He came from the background of being the chief executive of the Countryside Alliance.
1:43And he was somebody who was, I think, generally very, very much liked, trusted. but it wasn't, I think, and you can correct me on this, until 2019 that he became a minister under Boris Johnson, at which point he rose very, very rapidly, Secretary of State for Wales, and then the centre of the book, which was as chief whip under Rishi Sunak at this amazing moment when the Conservative Party went into one of its periodical periods of total implosion leading up to the disastrous defeat in the election. So, Simon, thank you. Thank you for being our first chief whip on the show thank you well roy's triggered me in his introduction to maybe kick off with your some of your past occupations so and i wonder what was it like for you when we were in power under tony blair when it strikes me that two of the things that we were doing were probably driving you to absolute distraction one was banning fox hunting and the other was trying to get rid of the wretched hereditary peers you're still in favor of killing live animals for fun and you're also still in favor of keeping these wretched hereditaries well 20 something years on Alistair and the debate is still raging so I don't know whether that speaks volumes for my effectiveness or your ineffectiveness at the time but yeah it is weird isn't it and when you look at what else is going on in the world I have to ask myself why are these things even still really on the political radar I mean, I remember thinking back in 97 or 98, whatever it was, surely this new, vibrant, lively Labour government, that's how it was described to us by you, I think, had a greater set of priorities.
3:27So I thought it was a bit of a waste. I thought it was a bit of a distraction then. And I think it's a bit of a distraction now. Including the peers? You still think there's a place for the peerage peers? It's a difficult argument, and don't get me wrong, but I think of all of the things that the current government and your government should have been doing, actually, is it the thing which people – when I – you know, the classic cliche here, when I was knocking on doors of five general elections, the number of people who said, you know what, the thing which is really troubling me the most about my future and my life, my income, my standard of living is the existence of 92 hereditary peers, was never once ever raised.
4:01What about the state of democracy, though? Whether it was in that description or mine, it didn't actually ever come up. Nobody said, I'm worried about the state of democracy. That was never an issue. I think I'm worried about it for lots of reasons. That's probably not one of them. Yeah, but hold on a minute. The title of your book is Ungovernable. Yeah, that's a state of politics, a democracy. But it does not refer either to the House of Lords, by the way, who've risen above all of that, or whether the hunting ban 2003, whatever it was, was effective at all. But the one thing I suppose I should say is that you've kept me occupied for 20 years plus, so I suppose I should be grateful for that.
4:37So this has been a sort of wonderful introduction to a sort of micro bit of British politics for everybody. I've never seen Alistair so animated. Four times he pointed to me to ask the right next question, and four times he couldn't resist coming in again. And we realized in the end that somehow, you know, these two people I'm looking at who, broadly speaking, share the same politics in a huge number of things. You voted Renane. You know, Simon comes from the left of the Conservative Party. You come from the right of the Labour Party. And so the thing that really divides you in the end is basically culture, isn't it?
5:11No. It's that you don't like relatory peers. You don't like private schools and you don't like fox hunting. And it's all about class, isn't it, Alistair? No, but you see, Simon was the boss of the Countryside Alliance. And you do this, Rory, let me say. You go on about, I'm a Conservative because I believe in the beautiful landscapes. I love the countryside. my dad was a farmer my whole family is from an agricultural background i just don't like people dressing up in silly clothes going around blowing it is it tally ho hordes and killing animals absolutely triggers alice it triggered him back in 1997 has such extraordinary effects like sort of electrodes being attached to it there are lots of things we should get excited and agitated about and feel strongly about.
5:54But it's always been a sort of weirdly totemic issue for Labour. It was never a totemic. I wish the whole thing had never happened. I'd never tried to conceal that. But for Alison, I think John Prescott was in your gang at the time. Tony, though, you're much more... Tony was much more sanguine about the whole thing. And I think when he wrote his diary, he said it was one of the biggest mistakes he ever made. So I suspect one of those things in another 10 years will still be having the same argument. And 99.9 % of the population who might be listening will be saying, what on earth are you going on about?
6:30Can I sort of move it on from fox hunting to another thing, which is dear to your heart, Simon? And that is rural areas, farmers, upland farmers, small farms. And my sense that Britain is moving away from them, that politics is moving away from them. the NFU is moving away from the National Farmers Union, the environmental movement's moving away from them, the government's moving away from them. Can you try to explain what that issue is, what you think is happening in the world? And the Tory party moved away from that. That's another thing. Sorry, I'm not trying to land this on Alistair. Even when I was the Defra Minister, I could feel that the Tory party was moving away from the views of people like you or me or Richard Bennion about the importance of small farms and upland farming?
7:20What do you think is going on in the world? I think one of the things which has been at the heart of this is that it has been tempting for politicians to try and sort of subdivide rural Britain into, you know, you're either a farmer or you're a rural business or you're somebody who supports hunting, whatever it might be. In each of these categories, they've tried to separate. And I think they've made a fundamental mistake in this. And the fundamental mistake is that actually all of these things are deeply intertwined and they are very much part of a sort of DNA makeup and not necessarily of people who just live in the country.
7:58I think, again, that the idea that these passionately held beliefs about farming or country sports, whatever it might be, only exist in rural areas. There are people who identify with and sympathize with dotted around every conurbation, every city, every village, every town in the UK. So it's a much more fluid population than we think. And I just think it's a mistake. You know, people talk about farming as if farming is the only thing or they talk about landscape management as if that's the only thing. All of these things are deeply intertwined. What's the big difference, do you think, between the US and Britain?
8:32I mean, it would be completely unimaginable, I guess, in most of the mid-Republican states to think about banning, shooting, hunting. I mean, these things are very, very central to American rural identity. And yet they're less so in Britain. What's the big difference there? I think there might be a really simple geographical explanation of that, which is simply one of scale. Britain is a very, very dense, compared to the areas that you're talking about, is very densely populated. I sometimes used to ask myself, is there such a thing really as rural Britain in terms of population anymore? And the answer is less and less because as every village, every town is within an hour or two of a major city or conurbation.
9:16So COVID probably accelerated the pace at which people were moving about, working from home, living in rural areas. First generation rural residents is something which I think has been transformed recently. And I just think, whether it's Australia, whether it's America, I just think scale makes a big difference to that because there is less interaction between rural and urban in some of those larger countries than there is in ours. Now, I'm just recovering from the fact that Rory thinks that's the first time I've ever been animated. So I wonder if I can go to another subject that was in his introduction.
9:52about you, which is Brexit. So you were, like me and Rory, voted remain, but then you went down a very different path, sort of to both of us, but I think especially to me, who felt that this was going to be such a disaster that we had to do what we could democratically to reverse it. But why were you so convinced that this had to happen, even at the cost of it doing fundamental damage to the country? I think going back to 2016, when all of the, and this had been brewing for some time clearly. And I think it was entirely legitimate that the question of the membership of the European Union should be put to a public vote.
10:30And I can completely understand why David Cameron was persuaded of that argument. For me at the time, and I remember without any great sort of sense of genius foresight, I remember thinking, if this is going to be a referendum, there's a big question whether that was right or not, but we'd gone into it on the back of a referendum, so I suppose that was logical. I remember thinking that the one thing we have to do in a democratic society is observe the democratic will of the people to sound rather pompous. We can have an argument about whether the people got it right or not. I used to find that deeply condescending.
11:05I think the idea that there was a section of society represented by some which was of a higher intellectual plane who knew what was happening and therefore or could speak on behalf of the 55 % as it turned out who actually wanted to leave the EU because they'd missed it. They'd been conned. They'd been led down the garden path by Boris Johnson or whoever it might have been. I thought that was a very condescending argument. So I said right at the outset, if this happens, we have to go with it. Now, my voting position, it wasn't really based on a very deep knowledge of what the economic consequences might be, but it was based on the fact that I knew that almost every single thing we did in our lives, every single day of every week of every year, was deeply intertwined with Europe, either legally, socially, economically, or politically.
11:53And therefore, unpicking that was probably going to be, to the Conservative Party's, very great discomfort for a very long time. So let's just come back for a second, and then we'll whip forward to you as chief whip and into the horrors of parliamentary management. But tell us a little bit about your childhood. How did you come to be who you are. You look like, for those who aren't viewing you, a sort of bucolic conservative member of parliament from central casting. Thank you, Rory. Very much. But was that your childhood? Was that how you grew up? Before I answer that, I should say I was Alistair's intro, you know, portrays me as this sort of right-wing, head-banging, fox-hunting Tory.
12:33And yet, within a few short years, I was then described by the Express as the wokest chief whip ever. So I don't know whether I've made the transition or the rest of the world did. But anyway, thank you for painting that picture. I've definitely backed my accuracy against the Express any day of the week. Thank you for painting the picture. I'll be like that, Rory. I mean, almost everything that happened in my life happened by accident. I ended up in the Countryside Alliance job, you know, love it though I did, completely by accident. I was covering for somebody's maternity leave up in the Midlands for a bit.
13:05And then I took over as the chief press officer because the one before me had got sacked for some reason. And they suddenly said, are you busy? So I said, well, not particularly. They said, right, you know, do this job for six weeks. And I ended up, I think, seven years into it. And then I got to the end of that in 2007, 2008. It was literally a case of where the hell do I go from here? Nobody in my family had never been into politics or sort of followed the sort of party route. What did they do, Simon? What did your parents do? Yet more common ground between Alistair and me, actually, because my mother's side of the family were, my mother was born in India.
13:39She was a daughter of a brigadier, a royal engineer based in India. So that was her background. But my father came from a farming family based in Wiltshire. So I, you know, farming was never very far away from the horizon. We very much saw ourselves as, you know, rural people. And politics wasn't really, you know, it wasn't something we ever talked about. I mean, I don't think I joined a political party until I was in my 30s. When did you know you were basically a Tory? Later than you might think. Had you ever voted anything else? I think probably quite early on, I didn't vote much at all. I think I'd probably thought of myself as Tory.
14:15I think I was one of those people I'd sort of hold my hands up in, you know, in shame now who thought that, I can't remember who said this, but it definitely wasn't me that, you You know, I tried socialism and I tried capitalism, but capitalism was more fun. And I think I was sort of in that category. I just thought that, you know, to be a Labour member of Parliament required you to be almost permanently angry about everything all the time. And to be a Conservative member of Parliament meant actually you could have a sense of humour and, you know, you could go to the bar at half past six at night and nobody would have a go at you.
14:45So I think my judgment was probably a very, very cheap one. People just deal in caricatures which suit your narrative, don't you? I mean, isn't that the problem facing all of us? I mean, I think we could say that other political parties meet that challenge equally. And comedy writers over the years have always depicted, and it's always been quite annoying, Labour MPs and Labour politicians and Conservative politicians and now probably Reform and Lib Dems. There's a sort of certain character when you see them appear on screen. You think, ah, that's the Lib Dem. you know and uh and it's easy and cheap and lazy and it's not always accurate actually i don't know we whether it's right that no chief weapon has ever written a book i'm sure bob mellish wrote a book but just we talk a lot on our podcast about whips and we took a lot of questions from people saying you know what is a whip what do they do so just for our listeners who aren't necessarily deep into westminster in the way that we three What does the chief whip do?
15:48I think a lot of it is quite mundane. I mean, it is, you know, the single sentence that encapsulates the role of the whip's office is to get the business of the government done. So it is our job to make sure that legislation gets from, you know, the starting point to the finishing point in both the Commons and the Lords. That's really what we're about. Delivering them, you know, the manifesto commitment, plus, plus, plus. There's a whole load of other stuff, and some of it's HR, more of which are non-brain. That's quite a minefield these days. It's also unbelievably mundane stuff. The WIPPS office is responsible for allocating offices around the parliamentary estate.
16:24It's responsible for providing advice to people who might be on a particular select committee or something like that. It does leave of absence. So if somebody wants to, they need a hospital appointment or they need to go to their kid's school play or whatever it might be, You know, that application for absence, if you like, goes through the Whip's Office. And then there's the most sort of publicly visible bit of whippery was sort of courtesy of Michael Dobbs and House of Cards and, you know, that sort of application of discipline. I think that's changed. I mean, obviously there was a role where the Whip's Office was always charged with getting as many people as possible to vote in support of the government and to try to use mainly legitimate means of ensuring that that was the case.
17:10Well, I felt, and it was actually a reflection, I'd be deferential for reasons I entirely believe in about Rishi here. Rishi was very keen when he and I started on the same day. He wanted the Whip's Office to reflect a modern workplace as far as it was possible to do in somewhere like the Palace of Westminster. But he wanted us to be a modern and welcoming and empathetic workplace. And so the idea of sort of, you know, dangling people over the Thames and Forth and the Lake, you know, that wasn't our style. Yeah. So, I mean, let's just get to that. So just to, again, explain the complaint that often came from colleagues when I was in Parliament is that there was no proper HR or personnel function.
17:54there was nobody really if you were if you were sort of super confident kind of boris johnson type you didn't presume you didn't worry about this stuff but if you were slightly shyer you were new to parliament there was nobody really to give you career advice to give you support very little support on mental health very little support on where things go wrong and i i remember particularly a couple of the more senior women really saying this is a massive problem in parliament. A lot of these people are very, very damaged, strange, under a huge amount of pressure. And the problem, I think, is the obvious people to turn to was the whip's office, which is what you're saying.
18:37And that's what Rishi Sunak obviously wanted you to be. But part of the problem is there's a little bit of a conflict of interest. I mean, in a normal business, you separate the HR department from the kind of performance management driving bit. In your case, you're both trying to get loyalty, drive people in to vote, which might make it quite difficult for someone to come in to see you and say, I've got a drink problem. I had a nervous breakdown. I can't bear this party anymore. I think this is a huge problem. And it used to worry me daily that we were being asked to opine on HR matters for which we were willing and we wanted to do what we could do to help.
19:17But we weren't necessarily, you know, we were a bunch of MPs. We weren't necessarily HR experts or financial advisors or drug counsellors or all of the various other things which came our way. And you're right that what used to trouble me was that, you know, people might be elected and particularly in the landslide election where people get in who really weren't expecting to sort of paper candidate type things. And they come in and instantly, often quite young, often then suddenly given quite a lot of money by way of a budget to hire staff to run an office in the constituency and in parliament.
19:50And they're basically told, right, you're on your own, pal. Get on with it. Don't screw up because if you do, we'll be all over you like a rash. and then oh by the way in a couple of years the prime minister might give you a ring and offer you a job in a department multi-million pound budget a whole array of civil servants at your disposal and oh you're doing the media round tomorrow morning so you'd better be in halstery road at 5 30 and again you know somebody will tell you what to say but don't screw up i think that that put an extraordinary amount of pressure on some really good people and i think a lot of of the stuff I talk about in the book where the wheels fell off are not because people were malevolent or trying to get one over on the voter.
20:30It's because there wasn't sufficient backup and support to help them. I mean, most people who go into a ministry job, in a job as a minister, as you recall, Rory, don't have a day's training, not even an hour. You're just expected to pick it up. And then we have the nerve to complain, oh, well, you know, the civil service rule the roost. Well, I'm sort of not surprised by putting people into these roles. And then what is the civil service expected to do other than to try and make sure that, you know, the difficulties that come with that are compensated for? And I just feel that we probably didn't quite provide the support and the mentoring and the training after people had been appointed.
21:11And I think that contributed to some of the, you know, the more colourful crashes that people were involved with. further along the way. So the title of it is Ungovernable. And I get the feeling, both reading it and listening and talking to you earlier when we were trying to sort out the tech, that you have a worry that politics is kind of attracting the wrong sorts of people, a bit of a mess. And I think that's possibly one of the motivations for you doing the book. And yet I wonder if somebody who reads it, who doesn't know about politics, reads it and thinks, Jesus, I don't have anything to do with that.
21:48I think that is a risk. That is a risk. It is a legitimate... I mean, there's not many workplaces where people crap on other people's heads. No, that's right. But don't forget, I mean, it must be so difficult here, but... It wasn't an MP. It's a small comfort, I suppose, in the overall sense of things. But ungovernable was deliberately provocative because I think a lot of people thought, well, I must be talking about the Tory party. Actually, I was talking about Parliament. I was talking about... Look at, you know, Keir Starmer comes in last year on the back of a huge majority. And already, and I have such so much sympathy for his chief whip, Alan Campbell, there are scandals and he's had to suspend the whip from people.
22:28And then, you know, Mike Amesbridge triggered a by-election. These things are not unique to one party or another. And I think there are some. That is about the people. But it is. And so, you know, by shining a light on it, which I've done, knowing that it'll be uncomfortable reading for some, I think in some ways, unless we do that, we're never going to correct these things. We're just going to continue to bury them. And I think that if we are to make Parliament an attractive place where anybody can think, do you know what? You know, I've just retired from my business. So I've just done 30 years in the NHS or in the army, whatever it is.
23:01I'd love to go and do that. I think there's a lot of disincentives for people who are looking. And people have been saying to me for years, God, I wouldn't do that job for all the time. So unless we address this, unless we give people confidence, actually it is a good place to work. It is an honourable profession. And by the way, there is support. So if things do get difficult, there's somebody to turn to. And it might not be a whip. I personally think it probably shouldn't be a whip. I think that's parliamentary authorities are miles better than they used to be. And unless we do that, that is a very real problem.
23:30So I know on the one hand, people will be thinking, bloody hell, this is worse than I thought. But actually, I think that if this even turns the dial a little bit in favour of a more contemporary workplace, that'll be a good thing. I mean, I fear that the likelihood is it's not going to shift. And I just wanted to sort of understand why. I mean, because to some extent, I was trying to do the same thing as you. I was trying to also describe how many of the things in Parliament were just far worse than I ever could have imagined. And I sort of hoped that this would help get a movement going to try to improve these things.
24:05Just putting on a slightly cynical hat for a moment, how would you explain to someone why change is difficult and what sort of things are likely to mean that even in 10, 15 years' time, many of the fundamental things haven't been fixed? I used to think sometimes with the changes that we occasionally talked about in Parliament, whether it was sitting hours or the way in which the workload is set out by the party managers and by the web's office, was not very conducive to progress. And I think we all thought there was some magic pill, there was some magic reform that we could instigate at any one thing, which would transform everything.
24:45It's much more evolutionary than that. If you actually look at the changes which have been made over 10 years, say, if we take the period of time, Rory, that you and I were involved, there are numerous small changes which have actually made things better. Whether they've kept up with the pace of change in the rest of the workplaces of the UK, complicated by COVID is a different point. I still think there's a long way to go. I would add to that, I mean, for example, the current government, the last time that Labour was in office, social media did not exist. It was not something that anybody had to contend with.
25:23Now it is. And I think that that has made some of these changes all the more urgent because some of the pressures which are being imposed on MPs are a result of a very different media focus and relentless media focus than there was, you know, even when we started. just to go back to the role of chief whip and the kind of personal management stuff so if you take something like rory who as you said came in with you now most people would look at rory and think well he's quite a talented guy and he's very bright and he's a good speaker and he writes well and he he's a co-presenter of the most successful podcast in the uk he's obviously got enormous talent so why did it take somebody like rory so long to get his foot on the ministerial ladder Is that about who you know and what you know?
26:08I think the reasons that you read out were probably better. Or too clever. Those are good enough. Too clever by half. Yeah, exactly. One of the most fascinating things about the last few years for me was seeing how reshuffles work or don't work. Oh, no, no, no. And the multiple. Well, you've been there a million times. I mean, and because they're not very simple. It's like having a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces. And you always ended up with more pieces than you had spaces for on the table. and you had all sorts of other considerations other than talent, geographical spread, diversity. There were people who were perfectly qualified but didn't want to do a job, who were not perfectly qualified, who did want to do a job.
26:49Nothing was simple about a reshuffling. There's a consequence of which you always ended up in a suboptimal position. And there were some brilliant people who didn't get on the ladder and there were some less brilliant people who did. I suspect that's possibly the same in other workplaces. two, I think it's more visible than ours. Is it quite the same though? I mean, would you have ended up with Liz Truss as the CEO of a major company? Absolutely. Would you end it up as Suella Bravman as the sort of number two on the top board? I think that there is a missing group of the various rather, you know, probably ill-thought out solutions that I've come up with.
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27:27I do think that the way in which we select, or parties this is by the way the candidate selection could be i suspect improved in that i think we should spend more time going out looking for people and less time relying on people coming to knock on our door and saying by the way please might join your party and become an mp commendable though that is we get some brilliant people um but i do think we're probably not maximizing the gene pool as much as we should we're not going out and saying you would be a brilliant member of parliament have you even thought about it i don't think we do that at all Although Simon, it's a bit more complicated, isn't it?
28:02Because Liz Truss was famously on the A-list. She was sort of targeted by David Cameron to be part of the new talent. She was the first person from your or my, you know, you didn't get in, become minister for nine years. She was in the cabinet within, I think, four and a minister within two. What do you think is going on in David Cameron's head, the chief whip's head, when he's massively accelerating somebody like Liz Truss up to the ranks, who, in my experience, frankly, was totally unsuited to be any form of cabinet minister? Looking back at it, I've said this to a few people who came my way and said, you know, why'd they been overlooked?
28:37And I remember saying, you know, my phone didn't ring for nine years. You know, count yourself lucky. Because maybe politics is unique in this regard, that you have got multiple considerations when you are forming a government. And I remember when we did ours, when Rishi was elected in the November of 22, I think it was, that I thought he was correct at the time. Don't forget, we were just coming off the back of that difficult 49 days with Liz. and Rishi did want to make sure that the government that he put together consisted of a broad range of people, some who'd supported Boris, some who'd supported Liz, some who'd supported other leadership candidates, as well as all of the other criteria that you're trying to include when you form any government.
29:25Can you jump in there? On your jigsaw, when you were doing that particular jigsaw, surely some of you must have said to him listen rishi sohanna braverman is bad news added to which she's just been done for breach of the ministerial code are you really going to put her back in a position of power that was crazy okay so default to a sort of very defensive position here um but there were always extensive going in fact they seem to go on forever sometimes with the advisory team around Rishi. He didn't get involved, as I suspect in your day. Tony probably didn't either until quite a long time down the line.
30:03Tony always took an interest. We were always on the second or third incarnation by the time we got to dragging Rishi upstairs into the Roman Empire. What would have been the thinking behind putting her into such a big job? There were numerous considerations around how the government should look overall. And we were very keen i can't remember the precise deal but we were very keen to make sure that nobody could say at the time that particular sections of the party you know had been cast aside you know even if people might have raised an eyebrow we need to be able to say no we we were above that kind of thing we have this is the broadest possible church we can put together you know sometimes those things work really well um sometimes sometimes they don't so you're going to have to tell me the truth here assignment three women were promoted wait a minute three women were promoted in a particular reshuffle michelle donilon lucy fraser and kemi badenock one of them rishi sunak who appointed them to the cabinet one of them he described as fucking useless now which one was it well i'm gonna have to give you i'm gonna have to currently the leader of the party i'm gonna have to give you the same answers i've given everybody else my big regrets on this is by trying to be clever by anonymising the story and just making it all a bit opaque.
31:19All I've done is excite people like you into speculation. I say literally what I've said in about 10 previous occasions. If you think I want it to be Kemi, you're wrong. It definitely wasn't. Could I have worded it more carefully? I think you're barking up the wrong tree with such a limited number of suggestions anyway, but it's not who you would love me to say that it is. I might even believe you. OK, quick break and then back for more.
32:13but younger listeners may not know anything about it. And it's the time when there was division along religious and political lines. Neighbours turned against each other. Residential city streets became battlegrounds. Thousands were killed. And the IRA bombed London. It seemed as if an end was out of reach. But in 1998, a peace process finally brought those 30 years of violence to an end. But the memory of the Troubles is still present. not only within Northern Irish communities who experienced it, but in international relations and political approaches to peace. And new audiences are starting to understand this national trauma through films like Belfast and kneecap and TV shows like Derry Girls.
32:58In fact, our guest on the miniseries is Patrick Radden-Keefe. Now, he's the author of the nonfiction book that inspired the hit TV drama, Say Nothing. It's one of my favourite books. It's, I think, the kind of in cold blood for our generation, extraordinary work of nonfiction. To hear the full series, just search Empire wherever you get your podcasts. Just for listeners, one of the lovely things about the diary is that Simon's now adopting a sort of frightfully discreet position. But actually, the diary is frequently much more outspoken. Onsuella, for example, which he was sort of working around gently.
33:36You describe her as overpromoted. you say, I really need to see the PM to explain, and let's just take this as an example of part of the job of the chief whip, why Suella is not his friend. The problem we have is that the whip's office is seeing the real Suella, but number 10 sees the more house-trained version. We see the leaks, the tea room briefings, and the general lack of solidarity. Troublesome MPs think we don't know, but fail to understand that almost everyone is talkative. They all tell a friend who tell a who tells a journalist or even a web. Okay, so help us understand that moment. What's going on there when you're saying Suella isn't his friend and you need to tell him?
34:14And what was she doing that wasn't friendly? There are two things, Rory, one of which is my attempt to be faithful to the concept of a diary, by the way, which is how I felt on a certain day, not with the benefit of hindsight. And when I look back at stuff, I think, God, did I really think that? Or did I really say that? But I was putting pressure on myself to be, no, this was, if it looked like it was written at half past 11 on a Wednesday night after a particularly punishing day, it probably was. But to your main point, I think at around that time, I can't remember the date exactly when it was, at around that time, it was becoming more and more obvious that there were not particularly subtle attempts to undermine the regime.
34:54There was lots of talks of leadership bids, letters into Graham Brady. There was lots of talk in some quarters about defections. We got to defections later in the process. Simon, I'm going to interrupt for listeners. Explain letters into Graham Brady so they can understand what this stuff is. In order to trigger a vote of no confidence in the prime minister and leader of the party, there had to be, I think the number was 53 letters into Graham Brady. Who was the chairman of the 1922 committee who would commence the process to have a confidence motion in the leader. And there was every weekend, there was another sort or Sunday newspaper speculation about how many letters Brady may have received.
35:33Brady was famously discreet about that. As it happened, when he wrote his memoir, I think he fessed up to the fact that I think there were about 13 or 14 letters in. Our assessment was nearer 20, but he was the one keeping the numbers. So, we weren't a million miles apart. And this is intended to be, again, complimentary about Rishi's attitude to these things, which was to rise above the tittle-tattle to keep our focus on the things that really mattered, not to get dragged off course by people who were just sort of making noises off. And he used to quite frequently sort of take me to task on that and tell me to basically wind my neck in.
36:11And I think that I felt that it was particularly over Rwanda, actually, not everybody's sort of favourite piece of legislation. But nonetheless, we were doing our very best to get it on the statute book. And we were frustrated that we thought that there were forces at work who were trying to make that as difficult as possible. And I think, you know, number 10 probably were taking a rather more sort of objective view about what was going on than I was. I was obsessing about the noise and they were quite rightly focused on the outcome. And that's what that diary entry referred to. You're obviously very complimentary about Rishi Sunak.
36:50You're also, I think, one of the few who kind of survived most of the time in the same job under Johnson when you were Welsh secretary. And I just wondered what that was like working with him. And also, you were one of the first ministers to resign towards the end. But I always felt when there was that sort of avalanche of resignations over the Pinscher scandal, which is a kind of sexual harassment thing that Johnson seemed not to take very seriously. that actually you'd seen far worse than that in Johnson through that whole period, but you felt that wasn't worth resigning over. Everybody you'll talk to about Boris will say the same thing, that he does have a sort of hypnotizing effect on people.
37:35He has a magnetic personality. He can use humor in the darkest of moments in an incredibly effective way. So he never worked on me, I must say. Well, I think it did work on me. Because during COVID, actually, I think when it was pretty bleak out there for everybody, and I think in leadership positions, I think trying to maintain that sort of careful balance between public realism and optimism at the same time. You know, Boris was pretty well equipped for that. Come back to the reasons for his demise in a moment. I think in the end, there wasn't a single point. It was accumulation of things which led to the sort of resignations that there were, including mine.
38:16And I remember, I think I did about six media rounds in the last few weeks of Boris's regime. And at every single one, I didn't mention government policy at all. I was literally defending one party allegation after another. And it just got to a stage and you said, bloody hell, this can't go on. And by then, I think it was pretty obvious that Boris was going to get done over. He was either going to get done over by the 1922 committee and the no confidence thing, or he was going to get done over by the standards committee. So one way or another, he was going to get done over. And I think by that stage, we were saying, come on, Boris, the writing really is on the wall now.
38:51So it was kind of drip, drip, drip, drip. It was a bit. For me, it was a cumulative. There was a tipping point and I reached it. One of the strange things that we both went through, so we came in in 2010, David Cameron, through to 2016. and it seemed as though the conservative party on the surface at least was being run in a slightly more center-right direction almost all the ministers were remainers most the mps were remainers the party was committed to international development 0.7 percent it was committed to doing stuff on climate fast forward and once you come through 2019 the wheels start coming off in the most unbelievable way.
39:37Boris Johnson selects it as Prime Minister. This amazing figure, Dominic Cummings, emerges and sort of starts spewing out extraordinary stuff and then blows himself up. Liz Truss comes in and then she's in for whatever it is, 44 days, blows up the British economy. Rory always gets Brian Clough and Liz Truss mixed up. I know it's an easy thing to do. 49, I think it was, was it? I'm the one who normally gets confused with Brian Clough, by the way. They're broke up on Liz Truss. They're very similar figures. And then we have Lee Anderson, this figure that may be fading from people's memories, going off to reform, and Suella Brabham, and all the rest of it.
40:14And this amazing story that you're telling is that even after all of that, they were trying to topple Rishi Sunak, which would have been completely unimaginable. I mean, just to remind people, Boris Johnson had been elected. Liz Truss wasn't elected. Rishi Sunak wasn't elected by the general public. The idea of getting rid of him as well was kind of complete madness. So looking back at this, what on earth was going on with the party? Because presumably you guys thought that you were bringing sanity back. It only goes to show in a way that politics goes in cycles. And I think that when I look back, there was no single moment.
40:44I think we'd slipped to about seven or eight or nine points behind the opinion polls towards the end of Boris. And then by the end of Liz, it'd gone to 20. And then the next two years, it never budged. It didn't matter what we did what we said good or bad it never budge and i think that just showed that we'd reached the limited public patience you sort of don't know you're there till you till you reach it and anybody who was involved in the 2024 election will tell you that actually it wasn't the choice of date or the you know speech in the rain or anything like that it was just generally somebody else's turn now you know sort of you've been there a long time you know i know you you know individually they were saying nice things to us as candidates saying like you know i know you've done it best, but actually we think it's somebody else's turn on the carousel.
41:27So it wasn't a particularly complicated. And I think because a lot of colleagues realised, you know, we'd been in office for 15 years nearly, they knew that this was the last chance to learn for a lot of them. Their parliamentary careers were coming to an end. You know, they might have missed out on a ministerial role or whatever it was. So people were sort of going their own way a bit and plotting their course for the future. Some of that they thought might be more advantageous to them if they were with a different leader. It was becoming a bit of a free-for-all. I don't blame anybody necessarily.
42:00I think that's what happens when you get to the end of a long term in government. I wish it didn't happen. I wish there was a better way of concluding your time in office, but it did get ragged. Rory and I bumped into your nephew, George, in Damascus, where he's a war artist. But your son, Adam, oh yeah is he's on record as as sort of saying that he could never admit to people that his dad was a Tory MP there's that how does that make you feel you're referring to a piece he wrote in the Times a while ago and it caught a huge reaction from all sorts of different you know political colors and I didn't know what he was going to write all I knew he was going to write it and he was quite sort of shy about it and said like you know I just feel a few things need saying And so when I read that piece and I realized that actually throughout his sort of university time and less so at school, but university time that, you know, being the son of a conservative minister wasn't a badge of honor anymore.
42:57It was a badge of shame. Maybe it's always been like that. But I do think that we should all be sad by that. You know, we all want to do jobs that make our families proud of us. And the idea that a particular career choice could be so shameful that our children can't tell their friends what we do. and judging by the number of people, a lot of Labour MPs said the same thing to me at the time. I think we need to reflect on that. No, my kids all got grief for me when they were at school. And I think some people deal with that better than others, but I don't think people should have to deal with that.
43:29I think if we talked earlier on about the appeal of politics as a career choice that you can be really proud of and really aspire to, that's the sort of thing which will put people off. And then all you're left with is ideologues and, you know, PPE students or whatever it is, you know, and people who just think that politics is a game. Politics isn't a game. It's something which affects everything we all do. And we should have the best possible people for it. So, yeah, he sort of stepped out of the shadows. And I don't know whether I was more embarrassed or he was. How did you handle that, though?
44:02Because that's quite a big thing for you. For him. I mean, it was. How did you handle that together? You know, we're close. You know, our family's close, which is great. So we do laugh about it. But one of the things he said, which is quite, I thought, quite telling after that, was that the people he shared a house with at university in Cardiff had sort of universally got in touch with him and said, oh, Christ, I'm really sorry. We didn't realize. We didn't think. I thought that was quite telling. Because he was worried that they might be frustrated. Actually, they were quite apologetic. They just said, we didn't think.
44:34It never crossed our mind that there was anything wrong with slagging off the torch. He would. Yeah, no, and he was doing the journalism course in Cardiff at the time. And of course, I was Secretary of State for Wales at the time. So, you know, the big telly in the comm room, whenever they looked up, I was on it. And he was thinking, oh, God, can we flip over to S4C or something? You call your book ungovernable. And it strikes me that one of the ways in which Britain sometimes feels ungovernable is it feels like it's very, very difficult to get stuff done. And many of the things that Labour's talking about is stuff that we talked about for 14 years.
45:14Surprise, surprise, Keir Starmer's talking about growth. It's not as if we didn't think we were doing growth. He's talking about trying to sort out AI. He's talking about trying to make the government more efficient, etc., etc. Trying to build houses. We spent a lot of time talking about how can we build more houses, run enough houses. So why did we fail? And do you think Kirsten was going to be more successful than we were? It depends on what your measurement of failure is. I think the trouble is we were committing to doing this stuff, which in anybody's estimation was going to take years. And I thought actually Michael Gove caught on to this quite early on.
45:49by doing the leveling up program, which was much smaller infrastructure projects of five to 10 million quid in many, many more places. So people could actually see that if the government said on the 1st of January 2019, it was going to do something and the ribbon was cut two years later, that was progress. It was tangible progress. Whereas things like HS2, or you could argue the sort of third runway at Heathrow, nobody gets any electoral benefit from that until the first plane takes off or the first train gets going. For the first 20 years, all you're talking about is running over budget and demolishing sites of special scientific interest.
46:24So it's negative for years, followed by a fleeting moment of success in 20 years' time. So I think relying on the big infrastructure project was a mistake. Sorry, Robbie, but the point is that we were, I think, partly guilty of setting unrealistic expectations ourselves and partly the victims of the media saying, right, okay, you need to resolve in a hospital waiting list in six months, otherwise you're as bad as the last guys will go for another one. Those oil tankers are impossible to turn around in that time. And yet it's right at the heart, isn't it, of Trump and of populist politics all over the world is people just feel government's too slow, too inefficient, too many reasons why things can't be done.
47:04And the reason for the enthusiasm for the kind of Elon Musk's is this idea there's going to be vigor, there's going to be action, people are going to get on with things. I have a, needless to say, a bit of a theory on this, which is that almost everything I think in government is down to political will. If you really want to do it, or you really have to do it, you can do it. I mean, look at Nightingale Hospitals. Who would have thought you could build a hospital in three weeks at Excel or wherever it was? When there's a desperate need or desperate urgency, these things can be done. And it goes back to what we were saying, I think, about plunging people into departments, taking relatively junior MP, sticking a label on them saying, you know, minister of state for such and such, and then expecting them to deliver on major change in a very short space of time, often when up against a, you know, slightly resistant treasury.
47:54And actually, by having ministers who are better trained and better supported, who have got the ability to say, no, this is how it's going to be, you know, as Churchill once said, you know, action this day or whatever it is, then we will improve that. And for a very fleeting moment, I was Minister for Implementation, which when Boris and I both worked out what that meant, it was meant to be something which was, you know, designed to help deliver government projects with greater ease and speed. But it was given to me as a equivalent of a parliamentary undersecretary, the lowest in the food chain.
48:34I know it's the least qualified person to deliver on that as you could possibly imagine. My last question relates to the title that your book almost had, as I understand it, which was About My Knighthood. Now, I can see why in the end you didn't call it About My Knighthood. But what is it about Tory MPs that they're so desperate for this bloody knighthood? What is it? I blame my fantastic special advisor for coming up with that story. Again, I don't think that it's unique to Tories, by the way. So before you completely... No, there are some, there are some of the Labour, it's true, it's true. But I think in general...
49:13And explain the joke, Simon. The joke was that in the Chief Whip's Office, you always got a steady stream of people coming in to tell you stuff, normally how you could do better, which is all par for the course. But we had a bit of a running gag that nine times, a tense, an exaggeration. But as they left the office, just closing the door behind them, they'd lean back and say, oh, by the way, that's my knighthood. And sometimes they were very legitimate bidders. But sometimes I used to think it was a bit cheeky because Rishi's view about those things were as a right. They were those kind of honours should always be for people who'd gone over and above that which they were being paid anyway.
49:55And so they had to have a sort of very special achievement and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so we nearly called the book that, but then we sort of resisted. I think that would be a very bad title. But I don't think our people were any more guilty than anybody else's people, to be honest with you. Speaking of somebody who'd rather die than be called Sir Alistair. They all say that till they're off it, Alistair. Well, I've often said no source, all she thinks. I just don't understand what it's about. What does it speak to in them that they think that's so important? Is it being part of something bigger?
50:25Do they see it as a... You know, I've never really asked myself that question. I think for a lot of people, there is a degree of sort of family. People often used to say to me, and not being facetious or anything, they used to say to me that this is about my mum, it's about my dad, it's about my family, it's about something which they can be proud of other than having shepherded the, you know, digital inclusion bill through Parliament or something like that. Maybe that was all just flannel for something else. But I think overall, the idea that the honour system brings, you know, joy and pleasure and pride to people who have gone, you know, without being asked to, over and above what life normally expects of them.
51:09I think... Johnson's hairdresser thoroughly deserved, thoroughly deserved his honour. I think... You don't need to answer that. Well, I think from somebody who used to work for Tony Blair, I think you're in a very... Why? You're in a very... You're in a very... You didn't do any resignation honours. You're in a very delicate position. You didn't do any resignation honours. And if you're talking about cash for honours, it was bullshit from start to finish. Rory, have the last question. And part of the problem is that all these honours are only exciting for people until the currency devalues. Which it has.
51:40Exactly. So the reason people want to be called Sir is that Sir Winston Churchill was called Sir. So put Sir in front of your name, someone might think you're Winston Churchill. The reason people want to be lords is someone might think you're the Duke of Devonshire. But the problem is if you get rid of the - No, we don't want to be the Duke of Devonshire. I have to do Hunter with Simon Hart. You don't want to be any of these things, but you asked us why people want them. The reason they used to want them is that it used to be a mark of being kind of posh, But they still do, even though it has been devalued.
52:08It's all been devalued now because who wants to be a knight when literally almost every single member of parliament, I think, who'd been in before 2010 got a knight with the exception of one by the time that parliament came to an end on the Tory side? Who missed out? Was it Paul Crispin Blunt? Could it have been Crispin Blunt? I don't know. Anyway, Rory, have the last question, Rory. Let's finish then with thinking back on your 14 years as a member of parliament and what made you sad about it. And I think we've got a sense of what made you proud about it. But what made you sad and what do you think should be improved?
52:49And what do you think the public doesn't really understand about what's going wrong, about why parliament is ungovernable or becoming ungovernable? I don't think it's beyond recovery, by the way. This was not a speech at a funeral. I still think Parliament is made up largely by very good people who've got the very best of intentions, but who occasionally get it wrong. My fundamental starting point is that what makes me sad is I think sometimes we probably didn't give the level of support to people that we should have done in order to maximize their chances of success in whatever role they were putting in government or whatever the role they chose as backbenchers.
53:33I'm very saddened by the fact, and Alistair touched on it just now, talking about my son's observations, I'm very sad about the fact that politics is not deemed to be as honourable professionally as it could be. And maybe people will say, well, it's not helped much by what you've said. And I would hold my hands up to that, Judge. But on the other hand, I do think we have to look in the mirror. We do have to. We can't just say pretend this isn't a problem. It is a problem. But I think there are ways of getting around it or improving. It would probably take 10 years. Like we're saying, it's not something that could be cured overnight.
54:06You know, I often ask myself, you know, if I live my life again, would you do it in? Yeah, in a flash. I think it's a fantastically rewarding, occasionally deeply frustrating way of life. And it is a way of life. It's not a profession or anything like that. You know, did I love every minute of it? No. I mean, sometimes as the diary will impart, sometimes I just, you know, chewed away at you. I don't think I made the right calls on numerous occasions and I wish I could relive those bits a bit. There is hope. And I think sometimes there are people emerging, you think, actually, do you know what?
54:41They are really, really good. And just let's hope we don't sort of suck the life out of them before they've managed to maximize their potential. But it's the system we have. And politics is meant to be passionate. It's meant to be argumentative. We're meant to have these, you know, very, very sort of hotly held opinions. We're meant to, you know, the rough and tumble of politics, the way in which Parliament is constructed is by and large all good stuff. I just think there's bits around the edges where we could do better. Well, thank you for your time. And as a fellow diarist, thank you for your diary.
55:18Well, thank you. And good luck with the rest of your life. Thanks a lot, Alistair. Thank you, Simon, very much for coming. Thank you. See you soon. Bye bye.
55:30Okay, Roy. So there's Simon Hart, our first chief whip on the podcast. What do you make of that? Well, I think the first thing that really struck me, and I don't know whether it struck you, is he's very, very courteous and polite, much more so than, in fact, he is in the diaries. The diaries are pretty brutal, sort of brutal about people. But when you actually pin him on the spot, the old sort of emollient chief whip comes through and he becomes very sort of charming. I suspect his views on Kemmy Baden-Ock and Sweller-Braveman are much more unprintable. In fact, they are pretty unprintable in the diaries.
56:01What was your sense of him? Yeah, I think he was trying to be very, very nice. I think he was trying to fit him with the tone of the podcast and disagree agreeably. He was trying to be a little less tribal than he probably is, trying to be quite thoughtful and reflective about his past. I had not realized until I actually looked a bit, read the diary and also looked a bit deeper into him, I'd completely forgotten that he was this big figure during the Countryside Alliance. I mean, he made our life a bit of a misery, to be absolutely frank. People talk about the Iraq War March. The Countryside Alliance marches were right up there.
56:34And he was the chief executive, wasn't he? He was leading that march against you, yeah. His barber jacket and his flat cap became a, you know, regularly on our television, saying how sort of, you know, we were this terrible, out-of-touch metropolitan elite who didn't understand the countryside. So he didn't want to revisit that. I thought he was interesting on politics generally. I think he is somebody who seems to have a genuine belief that politics is a force for good and that it's going through this very, very bad phase. But I think you're right. There was a difference in tone between what is written and the way he was projecting himself to us.
57:08I think the final thing to say is that Ken Clark once said to me that the big change in government between when he came into the House in the 1970s and when I came in in 2010, was that when he came in the 1970s, there were lots of kind of solid shire Tories who were very, very happy to spend their whole career on the back benches. And there were many Labour members who were the same, very proud to be in the House of Commons, didn't want to be ministers. And that was maybe 70, 80 % of the House. And that provided a much more stable environment. so that you had people who wanted to be ministers, and then you have many people who were very proud of what they did in their constituency, who they were, and honestly slightly looked down on ministers.
57:47The problem by 2010, Ken Clarke pointed out, is that because everybody wanted to be a minister, it was a completely horrible sort of maelstrom of everybody stabbing each other in the back, trying to prove their loyalty, and it gave much more control to the whips. Anyway, I wondered whether Simon Hart, who very patiently spent nine years on the back benches, when the party was in government, not getting a job. Being patient and charming and good-humoured wasn't a kind of glimpse of an older world and where the parliament wouldn't be a slightly more stable place if there were more people like Simon and maybe fewer people like me and Liz Truss.
58:21Well, were you just sort of graspingly ambitious and feeling very, very frustrated and angry that Cameron and Osborne couldn't see your talents as clearly as you saw them in the mirror? And not just me. I remember a friend of mine saying to me, I reckon 10 % of our colleagues think they should be prime minister. And he said to me, no, no, no, Rory, 95 % of your colleagues think they should be prime minister. Yeah, I think more people think they should be prime minister than think they should be chancellor. I think you have to say you want to be chancellor, but I think most people are quite scared of being chancellor.
58:53Whereas prime minister, you've got a bit more freedom to sort of, you know, to skim over the surface a little bit. Anyway, I thought he was very likable. His book is a pretty rollicking read. It obviously doesn't compare with the great diaries of politics, Alastair Campbell and Alastair Clarke and Alastair Campbell and those sorts of people. But no, it's definitely worth a read. And of course, the other thing that's really interesting is to see so many of these people that were such a part of our life, including this podcast when we first started, who have just sort of now vanished and evaporated.
59:25You know, Jonathan Gullis, where are you now? These figures who people thought would be prime minister, Penny Morden, Grant Shapps, all of whom lost their seats yeah yeah so there we are okay well listen we'll uh we'll see you soon for the next one see you soon thank you bye
From the publisher
Why do the wrong people become MPs? How can we transform Westminster into a modern day workplace? How did Simon Hart’s time at The Countryside Alliance inform his politics?
Rory and Alastair are joined by the ex-Tory Chief Whip, Simon Hart, to discuss all this and more.
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