147. I Thought It Was a Prank - Then I Was Chancellor: Jeremy Hunt (Part 2)

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0:20Hello and welcome to the second episode of The Rest Is Politics Leading, where Alistair and I are talking to Jeremy Hunt. and if you listen to episode one you'll know that we talked a bit about Jeremy Hunt's early life and his rise into politics and what he thought of some of the big figures in politics and in particular his time with Cameron Osborne London 2012 Olympics and his time as health secretary but now we're moving into maybe more controversial times foreign secretary and then chancellor under Liz Truss after he picked up the pieces of her mini budget. Jeremy, before we get into what sort of Conservancy, let's actually go straight to the Chancellor thing because that was an unbelievable period in British politics where Liz Truss beats Rishi Sunak for the leadership of the Tory party.

1:09I don't need to ask who you voted for. And it's just mayhem. and we have this she brings in quasi quieting as chancellor uh we've talked to him on the podcast before and even he seemed to think it was all a bit sort of weird and wacky um and then he falls she he becomes the sort of fall guy for the markets going completely crazy on the back of the mini budget that she was so proud of and then you're by now on the back benches and you get a phone call. So just sort of talk us through it. I mean, I still can't really believe what happened, but I was actually on an away weekend with my long-suffering wife, Lucia.

1:54So there I am, a weekend away with Lucia in Brussels of all places. And I get a message on a Friday morning saying, Liz Truss here, please call. It's from an unrecognised number. And I think it's a hoax. I think it's just probably a radio show presenter. There was lots of talk about a cabinet reshuffle happening. And I thought someone is going to imitate Liz Truss and make me make a fool of myself. So I said to Lucia, I'm not going to be fooled by this. I can't believe that they think I would fall for it. So I ignored it. Then I got an unrecognized number calling me, which is actually the Downing Street switchboard, which I zapped because I thought this would be the same thing.

2:32And eventually a friend of mine called me and said, actually, I think number 10 really are trying to get in touch with you. So gingerly, I called the number 10 switchboard and said, I think this is probably a hoax, but I had a message saying that the prime minister wanted to speak to me. Oh, yes, she did. She does. And anyway, they put me through. And so I became chancellor. And then there was a sort of period. Did she acknowledge that there was a bit of a problem that had to be resolved? I mean, what she said was, this situation is not sustainable. And I said, how do you want me to help? and she said Chancellor and I said knowing this is a huge decision and also if I'm honest not expecting it to be for very long I thought probably I'm going to be the shortest serving Chancellor in history I said can I have half an hour to think about it and I thought half an hour was the longest I can reasonably ask for and then I had time to talk to Lucia and my brother and Actually, after 20 minutes, I called her back and said, absolutely, I'll do it.

3:35Did you make conditions? I thought about that too, because as you will know, that is the one moment when you have leverage. But it didn't seem very necessary because the crisis was so obvious that I think it was clear to all of us that I was going to have to do some very big things. And then this is the weird way that British politics works. You know, I've never run an economics ministry. I have a business background, so I had some instincts, but I had never been business secretary or worked in the Treasury. And at five o 'clock, I become chancellor. I work through the evening with Treasury officials.

4:10And then on Saturday morning, I have to do a media round to reassure the markets, including an interview with Laura Koonsberg that we did as a prerecord. And you can imagine how I was feeling at that moment with my general lack of knowledge of how financial markets work. I never worked in the city or anything like that. I look back on that week and the first thing was that there was total unity of purpose with civil servants. I could see that the Treasury civil servants were incredibly nervous. And I thought, how do I reassure them? And I said to them, look, you need to understand that we're going to do the right thing for the country.

4:50and if that means I'm a Ken Clark Chancellor who hands on an economy in great shape to his political opponents so be it, we're going to do the right thing and whether I succeeded in being that Ken Clark Chancellor historians will debate but it created a sense of unity amongst us but actually the biggest thing that I did in that week in a way is something that is much less known which is that when five days later Liz Truss told me that she was planning to resign I realised it would be an absolute catastrophe if the Conservative Party went into another three-month leadership contest which was what was going to happen.

5:37Was it five days? It was five days so she pointed me on a Friday and then the Thursday morning after that But she told me that she was possibly going to announce that she would step down in six months or have a leadership contest. And I said to her, if you're going to do what is in the national interest, you say absolutely nothing until the Conservative Party has agreed. They will do the whole contest done and dusted in a week. and I said and just for the record I won't stand because otherwise that message wouldn't have had any credibility and uh and to her great credit actually she agreed to that I mean you know you can disagree with lots of things she did but that was actually a brave thing to do and uh and that's what happened.

6:26Jeremy can I just come to that because um it must have been unbelievably brutal for her I mean as you say becoming prime minister is absolutely the pinnacle of someone's ambition. It's something that she would have been working for for much of her adult life. And she would have felt this kind of miraculous thing of winning the leadership contest, getting into that position, finally having the chance to do these things that she'd always dreamt of doing, all these big radical changes. And then the whole thing blows up and she's gone in whatever it was, 40, 48 days or something. I mean, there's been nothing like it almost in British political history.

7:10It must be the most unbelievable psychological journey. Yes. And I think you sometimes reinvent history and say, you know, it was inevitable that she was going to go really quickly after the mini budget. I don't think that's actually true. And we've tended to say that now looking back. But when she appointed me as chancellor, Her intention was that I would reverse the measures that she took in the mini budget and she would start again. And that was how she saw it. And it was actually only losing a parliamentary vote on the Wednesday night. So four days after I become chancellor, which has nothing to do with the mini budget at all, but caused her chief whip to resign.

8:00that finally damaged her confidence so much that she decided that she had to go. What I was hearing when you were describing those meetings with the Treasury officials was almost like, now we're going to have to run economic policy without much reference to over the road, because they've been a bit of a problem up to now. Well, let me tell you what I think the biggest problem was, was that the Treasury officials were petrified by the summary dismissal of Tom Scholar, which he was the permanent secretary of the treasury, the most senior civil servant, highly respected figure throughout Whitehall.

8:34Liz Trusson, he had clearly not got on when she was chief secretary to the treasury. And she decided to make this statement by requiring Kwasi Kwarteng to fire him. Which you would think was a mistake? A huge mistake. And the reason it was a huge mistake was not just because he's a very talented person, but because I then ask myself and I've never really had treasury officials confirm this to my face but I ask myself whether when the most senior civil servant's just been fired on the spot if the Chancellor then presents a mini budget that is full of catastrophic ideas how likely is it that civil servants will speak up?

9:16And I think as a cabinet minister I'm sure you think this as well Rory you know we are here by day gone by night generalists who arrive not experts in our brief but there to challenge and what you need more than anyone else is civil servants who are prepared to say that is a crazy idea secretary of state don't do it for these six reasons and you know if you don't have civil servants doing that you're going to end up coming a cropper pretty quickly what did you think of her before you you know when she became prime minister and you were going off to brussels with your wife what What was your sort of sense of Liz Truss?

9:54I remember I wrote a piece when she became leader. I said, Keir Starmer might as well go home now. If she's Prime Minister, Labour are home. I just couldn't see anything other than a disaster for your party. So I was perfectly happy about that. But I just wonder what your sense of her was. I didn't have that sense. I supported Rishi Sunak. And I respected her for being ballsy. And I understood what she was trying to do in the sense that, Funnily enough, as we're still talking about today with Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, that the economy was in a state which needed radical surgery to get us back on our feet after COVID and the energy shock.

10:32So that I understood. But what I thought was a terrible mistake was the unfunded tax cuts in the mini budget, which caused interest rates to rise. because I knew then, and I think this is probably what made you think that Keir Star was home and dry, that ordinary families would then forever blame us for their mortgages going up. And I think that is what happened. Yeah. What did it tell us about the Conservative Party that they voted for Liz Truss over Rishi Sunak? I mean, I was, you know, supporting Rishi Sunak then. So again, I was surprised I wouldn't naturally have voted for Liz Truss, but she actually won quite comfortably.

11:11What did that sense of the sense of the spirit of the party, what was it they saw in her that made them prefer Liz Truss to Rishi Sunak? I think what it said is that still, all these years on, a decade after her death, we are still under the shadow of Margaret Thatcher, because the current generation of people at the top of the Conservative Party grew up when Margaret Thatcher was at the height of her powers. And can you imagine if you are, you know, a right-wing idealistic person at university to have a leader who is so forthright about the ideals you believe in, so unapologetic. In practice, as we know, she was a lot more pragmatic than she let on, But her rhetoric was totally uncompromising and it made everyone high.

12:10You know, it was an incredible thing. I think actually Jeremy Corbyn did the same thing to elements inside the Labour Party. But the difference was that Margaret Thatcher was a very successful prime minister, love her or loathe her, and, you know, won three elections and did extremely well. So I think people saw in Liz Truss some of that Thatcher boldness. What they didn't understand was that when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, she was actually incredibly cautious in her policy decisions and very conscious of the vulnerability of her position, which Liz Truss wasn't. She wouldn't have sat Treasury permanent secretary day one.

12:46Can I develop that once more, Jeremy, because the other leadership contests that I got, I get many leadership contests wrong, but another one which I got dramatically wrong and felt most painfully was you against Boris Johnson. and I hope most people listening to this will understand why I passionately wanted you to be Prime Minister and not Boris Johnson and I actually found it very very difficult to understand that the country would vote for Boris Johnson I thought look on the base of my constituency Cumbria most people seem to say to me yeah okay he's jolly bit of a buffoon but he's not really serious enough or suitable enough to be Prime Minister and I really thought Britain's never going to vote for this guy to be Prime Minister.

13:31And yet they did. I mean, was that not very painful for you to be not just beaten, but beaten by somebody like that? Did that not lead to a moment of sort of self-questioning? It was very painful. And I was very upset that he didn't keep me on as Foreign Secretary, because I felt that I was doing an okay job there. And he asked you to be defence he asked me to be defence secretary but you know in Whitehall terms that was a demotion and even though it's actually a very very important job I felt that it was not the right start to our relationship that he was saying the very first thing I'm going to do to my runner-up who did he make foreign secretary Dominic Raab and so I was you know I was disappointed at that too but in a way Rory I didn't really think in my heart of hearts that I had a good chance of winning because I could see going around the hustings I could see the fact that I'd voted remain and the fact that we just had a remainer prime minister Theresa May who had come a cropper and been unable to get her Brexit deal through parliament meant that I was very unlikely to win So I suppose I was kind of resigned to that happening.

14:46It's interesting, though, because, I mean, Rory, I think, ruled out, said he just would never serve on the Johnson government. But you would have stayed if he asked you to stay on as foreign secretary. Yes. I mean, I remembered Boris. I worked very closely with him when he was mayor of London and I was responsible for the Olympics. And this is going to sound a rather conceited thing to say. But he had this guy called Simon Milton around him who was quiet, gentle, smart and a fixer. And he made the Boris machine work. And I suppose I thought, well, maybe I'll be that kind of person. What I had not understood at all was that far from going for someone sensible and quiet and calm, he went for Dominic Cummings in that same role.

15:33So this was going to be a very different Johnson administration. I just wanted to develop this because that also revealed something about Johnson, which is that a bit like there's a difference between Trump one and Trump two. There's a huge difference between Boris Johnson as mayor and Boris Johnson as prime minister. I mean, Boris Johnson as mayor was quite a kind of liberal, centrist, progressive. Boris Johnson as prime minister was going full out. I mean, you know, to start with, he booted out people like me and Ken Clarke and Nicholas Soames and David Gork out of the party pretty quickly, brought in Dominic Cummings, but then went all in on a very, very radical style of, you know, challenging Parliament, challenging Supreme Court, trying to rewrite the ministerial code so he couldn't be prosecuted.

16:21And you were trying to also watch him handling COVID, which again, it seemed to me that he was sort of unusually poorly suited to because his style of politics isn't really about careful attention to detail, looking at international data or any of this stuff. Was that when you were chairman of the Select Committee? Yeah. I think it was COVID more than Brexit that did for his premiership. And in the case of Brexit, we were in an appalling constitutional crisis. and I think you could make the case that it needed someone who was prepared to duck and weave to get us out of it but there couldn't be someone less suited to being Prime Minister in a pandemic than Boris because, you know, this is a time for explaining to people calmly some very difficult changes.

17:12Calmly, truthfully, some very difficult changes in our daily lives and you know I think that he wasn't the right person in that role. In a way for me personally that was probably a slightly more difficult moment because with my background as health secretary I really did think you know the pandemic would have been a moment which I would have felt more natural doing. There is something I see as a link between the comments you made in our first episode with you when you were talking about the new politics of communication the sort of slightly horrifying vision of Trump spending three hours every morning watching the news and tweeting.

17:47The sense that politics is all about communication, the game, which Boris Johnson was very good at. And the other side of politics, which is running things well, administering things quietly and professionally. And my anxiety is that those things are connected. Oddly, the personality type that does the big, brash, good social media celebrity stuff is very rarely suited towards the business of scrupulous, cautious, thoughtful, truthful administration. It's such an important point, but I am ultimately optimistic. We have had plenty of leaders in history who've managed to combine sensible, rational governing with brilliant communication.

18:32I mean, I would point to Reagan, Thatcher, Clinton, Blair. These are all people. Actually, David Cameron at his better moments, perhaps not quite so consistently as those other ones. But they did combine the two. Now, you need both. And I think my argument to people who want, you know, rational government. What is rational government, by the way? It's such a trite phrase. It's government that actually persuades people to endure short-term pain for long-term gain. persuade a country the value of deferred gratification and taking difficult decisions now because it'll be worth it in five or ten years time that's what you need if you want a country to prosper now pure populists all they care about is getting votes and that's an absolute disaster so the question we have to ask ourselves is how do we learn to marry those two elements of government strong communication and strong government and i think that labor and conservatives both in their own way have been failing to do that how do you think that would have dealt with with trump she didn't like showmen really she didn't really like liars she was although she was a woman she didn't necessarily believe in bringing on women but she wasn't she didn't like misogynists?

19:53Well, I think the interesting thing about her is that I think she would have found a way to make it work. It would have been slightly different to the way Keir Starmer is finding to make it work. But Trump respects strength. And in the end, she never hesitated with Reagan to tell him where she disagreed with him in private, whilst giving him the strongest possible support in public. So I think it would have been a version of that. But I think she would have found it very difficult to support things like the big, beautiful bill with the huge unfunded tax cuts, because she was a housewife who believed that the bills had to add up.

20:36So there would have been some difficulties there, but I think she'd have had his respect because of her basic strength. Jeremy, Alistair, let's take a quick break and back in a moment.

20:51on just your your time as chancellor so when liz trust did go rishi sunak came in and you carried on and that was one of his first decisions but by then did you sort of feel that the tory days were running out and i just wonder what the i'm fascinated by the psychology of that because you could have thought then right i've done my bit i've helped them through and actually i'm now going to go off and do other things but you decided to stay on be chancellor and i just wonder what it's like to do that if you deep down feel you're going to lose so the first thing is that it's an incredible privilege to do that job because it is you know people say uh which is the job that you enjoy the most without a shadow of a doubt foreign secretary you travel around the world red carpets private jets wonderful dinners fascinating people including Trump, by the way, he was a pretty fascinating guy to meet on a number of occasions.

21:47Nothing comes close in terms of enjoyment. But in terms of power, which is the other thing that people care about in politics, apart from Prime Minister, Chancellor is where the power is. And I felt it was an incredible privilege over two years to do all sorts of things that I've been wanting to do for years. For example, the NHS has never trained enough doctors and nurses, and I put in place a long-term workforce plan. I was very worried about defense spending and, you know, I increased that to two and a half percent of GDP, you know, saying that we would honor the recommendations for the infected blood inquiry.

22:25In the grander scheme of things, these are relatively small things, but they actually really matter for individuals involved. And so it was a great privilege to do that so i never worried what am i doing here right but um i did um have a sense that the conservatives were going to lose and i thought the best thing we can do in terms of winning again in the future is to govern the country well in the time that we've got left for us and to take wise and sensible decisions um and maybe this is the moment to say why i think it is actually in everyone's interest, even listeners to this podcast who have never voted Conservative, that the Conservative Party gets back on its feet.

23:09Because I think it's really important, if the country is going to succeed, that we have a pro-business centre-right party, and not a populist right-wing party. And for all the sense that people like you, Alistair, think of the Tories as the old enemies, actually it matters for the British body politic to have a party that is rooted in the business community. And many people in the Conservative Party have come from business like myself. And I think it's really important if we're going to have a successful economy that those instincts are represented in Parliament. I really worry that that voice is lost in America now And that lots of people who understand how business works are not seeing their voices heard in Congress when these crazy tariffs are being introduced.

24:05And so just as I think it's a very good thing for Parliament to have a Labour Party with its roots in the public sector, people who've been in education, the NHS, poverty campaigners, that's very important. I think it's also true. And so why am I committed to the Conservative Party? Why did I stand again? Why will I stand again if the party will have me? You can stand again. As long as Parliament will have me, as long as my voters will have me, I will stand again. It's because I do think it's really important to have a centre-right party that thinks and cares about wealth creation. Do you not worry at the moment that they're sort of swimming around rather naively in the same waters as Nigel Farage and thereby helping him?

24:50It is bloody tough. I mean, when you've had the biggest defeat in your history and people have thrown you out, they're not going to suddenly have buyer's remorse six months later and say, we got that wrong. And so I don't think anyone would have done much better than Kemi Badenock. But what we haven't done yet, we now need to do, is to be an opposition party that's offering solutions. And that's when I think the British political system works, is when you have a government that's being challenged and an opposition that is championing actual solutions. Isn't part of the problem, of course, that Boris Johnson and Liz Truss damaged the brand in a very fundamental way?

25:35When we were in Parliament together, the basic story, I think, was, or the Tories would suggest, that Labour was sort of well-intentioned but not very pragmatic. And the Tories could be accused of being nasty, but at least they were competent and they kind of managed the money well, and they kind of made the tough decisions. And they would portray themselves as kind of serious, practical people. And the problem really with the Boris Johnson-Listras interlude is it kind of took that whole narrative away. The narrative which you sort of had with Thatcher and Major and Cameron and even to some extent Tres May was really, really damaged.

26:20And that's very difficult to rebuild. It's difficult, but it's not impossible. And I think that in some ways our brand was in a very bad way after the back to basics scandals of the 1990s that Alistair will remember very well. and Labour's brand was in a terrible place in the Corbyn years as well. And I think that what we have to remember is that in a general election, people are looking forward and the question is, you know, are you offering solutions to the big problems the country faces? But that isn't enough. You've also got to have mastered communications in a social media age and I will say that I don't think we're there yet in any of the mainstream parties.

27:05Honest Bob's really trying. Rory and I did an event the other day with several hundred business people and we asked them they're all sort of grumbling quite a lot about the government and grumbling a lot about your party and not really that keen on Farage and what have you but we asked them who they thought would win the next election and there was a I'd say the winner was probably a Labour led coalition was their thought but there was zero who thought the Troyes would win the next election. do you think that's realistic well i think you know we've we had to have a a year of penance a year of silence you know it's pretty difficult to get out there in the media and win your argument when every good idea you have people say well you were in power for 14 years why didn't you do it and that is the standard stock response uh that i and my colleagues all get um but things move on really quickly in politics and uh and i think we shouldn't underestimate the capacity of things to change.

28:05And you've mentioned populism a couple of times. What do you think is the best way for A, Labour, and B, the Conservatives under Kemi-Badenhock to deal with the rise of reform? Well, first of all, you've got to be truthful to yourself and your values. So if you try and be something you're not, it's never going to work. But secondly, I'm sorry to be challenging, and I'm sorry to, by the way, to say this, or I'm embarrassed to say this to a comms expert like you but i would say that if keir starmer was watching tv and on social media for a couple of hours a day talking to people uh doing stuff on you know with the regularity that trump does i think nigel farage would say my god he's changed i'll give you one example actually from a few weeks back jumped out at me there was a clip of trump who had his head around the door of Air Force One.

29:02I think it was a clip about Iran. And he was saying something like, you know, I think the time for negotiations is over. I'm fed up with them. And then he got on the plane. And I suddenly thought, I've never seen this before. The choreography of Air Force One has always been so tightly managed. You know, the president shakes hands with a few dignitaries, walks to the top of the steps, waves at the cameras, and then gracefully flies off. And here was a president with his head around the door that was open, just giving the media a clip, inserting himself into every single news package that evening.

29:40And, you know, I think that's what Starmer should be doing. I think it's what Kemi Badenock should be doing. I think we've got to get out there and be talking to people, but with substance. I mean let's be clear this is not about substituting a media strategy for substance you've got to have both. No, because the thing we constantly say about Trump is it's almost like watching a reality TV show. And it's compelling on one level, but it feels like bad governance. Listen, I'm not disagreeing. We talked about this in the first episode. I do think that all politicians can learn from the way Trump communicates, not about the lying.