53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport

27:59But, yeah, it was an interesting experience. I mean, the whole process of politics is completely bizarre. Tell us about it. So presumably you arrived thinking, OK, I've made pretty big success. Well, no, I mean, the more interesting side of this is I went to see the candidates. It was Cecil Parkinson, who was chair of the candidates. And he had an old Rolodex on his deck. He pulled out and he said, you can try this one. I just got on the candidates list. You know, you probably did the same thing, the weekend in Slough. Can you write and pick up a knife and fork? It's that sort of thing. And I went to see Cecil and I'd known Cecil for a long time.

28:30Cecil's actually a good, talented athlete. And he said, look, look at this one. It's Falmouth and Campbell. And he said, they'll never. He said, don't worry. He said, you won't get elected. They've never, they won't vote for anybody out of the county. But it's, it'll, you can cut your teeth on this. And so I applied. I got a letter back inviting me to an interview on a Sunday morning in September. And I had to pick up the phone to the chair of the association. So I'm really sorry, but I can't make that. And she said, well, what would be so important that you can't make that? I said, well, I'm running in the World Cup final in Barcelona.

29:07And she sort of, you could hear a sort of groaning on the phone. And she gave me an interview the following weekend at nine o 'clock in the morning. on a Sunday in the Falmouth Hotel. I didn't actually make, as my agent subsequently told me, I didn't actually make the long list of 36. And it was only apparently two grandmothers in the constituency party that said, look, bring him down because we'd quite like to get autographs for our kids. So that was a moment of candor from my agent who we both had a few pints in the middle of the 92 election campaign. So it was an odd. I mean, I loved being in Cornwall.

29:43It was independent. It was a great good streak of Yorkshire down there as well, where I sort of don't much like being told what to do. And it was a fascinating period. But, you know, you guys were untouchable in 97. So you came in. You had this big name. Yeah. Done some pretty interesting things. It's a disadvantage. Yeah. Yes, I do. And actually, interestingly, if I'd been a little harder, nosed about it, I probably, because I wasn't an insider and because of that particular thought that, well, you know, he's only doing this because, you know, he wants to maintain a high profile and politics as a sort of secondary thought.

30:25It wasn't. It was the first thing I wanted to do. And I probably, if I'd been a bit cynical about it, would have gone for a safe seat. But I didn't want anybody to, I wanted a marginal seat that if I won, I won off my own back, not because I'd been parachuted into Kensington. Give us your favourite stat about 1997. Yes, at the end of a pretty traumatic night. I had the smallest swing against me in my constituency than any conservative constituency on the night. Well done, sir. Little consolation. Well, it was you, Guy. You put Emily's list together. I mean, I get back to your loss. You concentrate on your time in Parliament for it.

31:10So you're right. Presumably, I'm still dealing with my loss. I'm trying not to take it personally. In the land of Arthurian legend, I honestly thought, like most people in politics, you know, at some point your time's going to be up. I didn't think I'd be taken out by a woman from Islington called Candy. Thank you, Alistair, for putting her in there. So just to continue, you must have thought, I'm bringing a certain amount of experience. I've seen quite a lot of the world. I'm older than many MPs coming in. Presumably, you would have liked to be a minister quite quickly. And in the modern world, you would have been.

31:42I mean, Rishi Sunak was a minister within a year. He's prime minister within five years. So were you sitting there thinking, when are they actually going to give me something to get my teeth into? Not really. And actually, the one thing I recognised, and it was probably from the athletic background, and you entered politics. it was an outlier time. The 97 election defeat had a massive impact, not just on a change of government. It took out one, even two generations. So people got advanced far quicker. So when I went into parliament in 92, you did not expect to, you know, if you were making sort of semi-decent progress, you were probably a PPS after a year and a half, which I was.

32:24I then did a year doing that, there was a resignation or a sacking, I can't remember. There was a shuffle. I ended up in the whip's office. And then for a period, ended up also as Michael Heseltine's PPS when he became deputy PM. So that was actually at that stage, that was seen as reasonable progress. And then probably if I'd stayed, you know, if I'd survived and the next five years, you'd have probably made it to junior or you know if you were doing okay probably shadow mo well shadow no well i wasn't i i didn't want to stay no no i i'm not very good in the rearview mirror so i'd made a judgment that night when i lost the seat that i really couldn't bring myself to give a dying love to serve it you liked it enough to i did i really go back and work for william haig yeah and that That was slightly circuitous as well because it was Alan Duncan that came to me and said, who do you think should be the next party leader?

33:28You're expecting me to say you, Alan. Yeah, probably. Yes, actually. Yes, that did bypass me at the time. And I said to him, well, I think there are two very different questions here. Who should it be and who probably will get it? And he said, well, who do you think it should be? I said, well, if you're thinking long term, and I would, I'd go for somebody like William Hague. And I knew William a little bit. He was a Rotherham boy of Sheffield. Our paths crossed, not politically, but, you know, because we were often on the same programs and the same, you know, calendar and Yorkshire television.

34:02And so I ended up, I actually got asked to introduce him at a, one of the election rallies. I think they were holding it up in Coventry. And then I did a little bit more and went in there into the campaign team because of my background as a whip with James Arbuth, not actually, who went on to become William's chief whip. And you know what an election is like? Everybody lies. And we looked at the numbers and everybody was thinking that, you know, they got so many votes. And James and I looked at it and went, oh, they're saying, well, so-and-so is going to support him. We're going, not in a million years.

34:39It doesn't matter what they've said. I remember him in the Wooks office. He used to lie then. I ended up doing that. And then at the end of it, I said, right, I'm going off to do what I was happily going back to do. And I ended up as William's deputy chief of staff. And William said, look, could you do a few days? Because when you leave government after 18 years, there is no structure for opposition. We went into your old offices only to realize you'd never been in there because you ran the whole thing out of Milbank Towers. No. Well, there was a clapped out fax machine, telephones that led nowhere.

35:15Yeah, we do the telephone. An inch of dust on everything. We do the lines out. It was pretty clear that you had never been in there. So my first role there was just to sort of connect things. And then I agreed to do two days and then, of course, classically compromised on seven days a week for the next four years. And just give Rory and all Tories a sense of what it's like being up against a formidable Labour government, Seb. It's not whether it's a formidable Labour government. And at that point it was. I absolutely concede that, you know, you were all absolutely at the top of your game. Your chancellor was untouchable.

35:51Tony was Teflon. You know, you'd got good people coming through. And look, the British electorate rarely make bad judgments. Brexit. Well, a general election and a referendum are two entirely different things. I thoroughly disapprove of referendum. I really do. That's not, that's the abrogation of political responsibility doing that. But it was pretty clear to me that, you know, we were not, John Major was a thoroughly decent and a good guy. And actually, as the weeks pass, you realise actually how good he was. But we weren't a good government. And the electorate got it right. It was time for a job.

36:28And where do you think the electorate is right now? I think they've made the same judgment. You think the joys are done? I do, yes. And so when you, Kevin, you look at people like Imran Khan, did you think I'm going to be Prime Minister? No. That's where I'm going. That was never your... No, it really wasn't. And I know there's, you know, Michael Heseltine famously, you know, on the napkin, 25, 30, 40, 48 prime minister. He'd have made a good prime minister. And no, I really didn't. Genuinely, I didn't. I mean, I was ambitious. I didn't want to be a PPS. I thought I could make a contribution. But I think if you come from a background and sport is very objective, there's no subjectivity about it.

37:11In my sport, it was the stopwatch. It was a photo finish. It was, you know, you win or you lose. I think the thing that frustrates people that come into politics from different backgrounds, particularly if they come from very objective backgrounds, is just the ad hoc nature of preferment and the Whip's office making judgments about abilities and talents. You mentioned Roy's book. Do you think it's become more or less dysfunctional or do you think it's just always been like that? I always felt politics was functional and I always think it's because this particular government has been terrible. If I'm being blunt here, I think political discourse in the last few years has reached an all-time low.

37:50And I don't think that is just... The politicians. No, no, it's certainly not just the politicians and it's certainly not just UK. I mean, I really enjoyed your book and I enjoyed it on very many different levels and all the things that you've done. If I was able to trim in any particular direction, I think it is... I genuinely think politics is in large part an honourable profession. And I think it is in large part undertaken by people who genuinely do have an ethos of service and wanting to contribute. It's the different direction that you all take to probably come to pretty much the same landscape.

38:30I just, I sensed that your book was a little pessimistic. I mean, when I think about people like Liz Truss or Boris Johnson, I think they're sort of, do we have to? Well, they're sort of shock jocks. I don't think they're there for this sort of grand, honourable vision of public service. I think they're generating soundbites. They're brilliant at getting the media's attention. They're good at putting out stuff that grows it. I don't know. I don't know. I've never really met Liz Truss. I would slightly trim the Boris view. I did see Boris in the Olympic years. I saw him as... He was awful then.

39:01He wasn't a bad mayor. He was very good at taking credit for other people's work. Look, he wasn't a bad mayor, and he did actually have some quite good people around him. And Neil Coleman, who was Ken's MNOSCRE, actually persuaded Boris not to be tribal, not to get rid of people he thought were just sort of Labour stooges. And Neil stayed on, and actually Boris and Neil worked incredibly well. I'm not, look, this is not an apologia for Boris Johnson, but I did see probably some of the better angels that were masked from others. But you also surely saw that if that guy becomes prime minister of this country, this country is in a bit of trouble.

39:43I sensed that he was probably mildly unsuited to becoming the prime minister. Talking of the Olympics, is that when you felt most round peg in round hole? Because you seem to be. You seem to be absolutely loving it at the peak of your game. I don't know. I don't think I probably think like that. Was it something that I thought could really make a difference? Yes. Well, did I wake up every morning thinking, actually, I have a purpose here? The first purpose was to get the games. Actually, interestingly, when your boss asked me to take on the chair, if I'm being honest, The reason I took it on was I thought I didn't think we would win at that point.

40:25No, nobody did at that time. I just didn't want London to be embarrassed because we'd had three previous bids, and I'm a great believer in regional cities, and I was brought up in one. But we'd had two bids from Manchester that had really barely got double digits in terms of votes. We'd had one from Birmingham, perfectly good bids. But I just sensed that I'd always said if we throw London into the mix, then people will take it seriously. But we had had such an inauspicious start that I thought the most I'd be able to do was to make sure that the defeat wasn't an embarrassing one. It was only when we started to get into it that I realized that we'd got some momentum.

41:09And Paris, towards the end, just stopped making... They thought it was theirs to lose, which was fatal. And it allowed us to be very active right up to the last minute, including obviously the PM. And yeah, we just snuck across the line. One of the things you reflect on a lot is kind of language and politics in the media. And I wondered how that affects sport. How have things changed since the 70s to today in terms of celebrity sport, what it means to be an athlete and how being an athlete compares to being a footballer or a boxer or other kind of high celebrity sportsman in terms of public attention, wealth, celebrity and what that does to people's personality?

41:48Well, let me throw this one to you. Could your mum today name any British athlete? No. So this isn't... Which she would have done. Yeah, she would have been able to do. So that's something I've always been very interested in. Maybe it's my generation. But obviously, I felt I knew who Muhammad Ali was. Yes. I knew who you were. Yeah. I struggle more with contemporary boxers and contemporary runners. So what's happened? Well, free-to-air television, of course. So, you know, you have only a handful of people relatively in relative terms are watching big title fights. They're watching it on pay-per-view.

42:22They're watching it on, you know, on cable. It's not what it was. And this is this is one of the things that I've been really wrestling with and hopefully shifting a bit in terms of how athletics is seen. Free-to-air television is really important for that. And everybody, you know, we talk a big game about all sorts of things. Television is still a very important medium for sport. And athletics, we were lucky for one interesting set of circumstances. In the 70s, English football was not what it is now. We were banned from Europe. We had hooliganism and, you know, it was not a savoury place to be.

43:00I mean, football fans still went, but you weren't that mad about your kids going. Our staple sports were really underperforming. we didn't have an Andy Murray in tennis. You know, cricket was sort of in and out. Rugby, we were, you know, getting hammered pretty much. And then suddenly, off the back of the 76 games was a disaster. Brendan Foster was the only medalist in the British team on the track. He got a bronze in the 10 ,000 metres. And, you know, we went back. And interestingly, Australia at that time had an equally disastrous 76. They didn't get really any virtually. I don't think they got a single gold medal in swimming, which demanded almost a national autopsy there.

43:40And they responded in a very different way. They created the Institute of Sport in Canberra, and it took 10, 12 years before it started to pay off. But Australian sport really did. We sort of thought, well, just one last heave will do it, and a few athletes will come along. Mercifully, they did. And in that period, I sort of came into view. Steve Ovette did, a young Steve Cram, Daley Thompson. Tessa Sanderson. And suddenly you had not just British athletes winning things domestically or even in Europe, you had them winning world titles, which outside of boxing, we weren't doing in any other sport.

44:22And suddenly these were the athletics was the back page lead. Brendan always tells me an interesting story. I mean, he imagined putting this into today's setting. Newcastle United would ring him up when he was organising the Gateshead international meeting and they'd say, Bren, are you going on Friday night or Saturday afternoon? And he'd say, well, why? He said, well, if you're going Saturday afternoon, we'll move our match to the Friday night. So the world has moved on and it's not that athletics is really any less popular. It's just that you're in a very much more competitive landscape and football is just, it controls everything.

45:00On your current role, just very briefly, take us through three of the big things on your plate. Doping, Russia and trans. Yes. Quite a lot to be getting on with, really, isn't it? It's quite a lot, but so doping. Yeah. Sorted out or not sorted out? Will you ever sort it out? Is it sorted out? Probably not. So I inherited a sport that I remember arriving, having won the right to become president of the sport. I'd been campaigning for two years for it and it wasn't a huge majority. But two weeks into the job, somebody appeared. My receptionist came, knocked on my office door. I'd only been in the building a couple of days.

45:42And he said, there are some people to come and see you. And I thought it was a nice local custom. There'll be a glass of champagne, a piece of cake. There were 17 French policemen, three from Interpol and a mustachio guy who introduced himself as Judge Renaud van Renbeck. Great name. Who was the senior prosecuting judge for cross border corruption. And five hours later in a police station locally, I was advised that my predecessor had been arrested in Paris that morning. His son was on the run. The head of anti-doping had been arrested. The legal counsel had been arrested. And the CEO a couple of days earlier had advised everybody was going backpacking in Australia.

46:25Give us this bit of background. At that stage, the French believed what had happened. What was the allegations? They believed that, well, as it was subsequently proven in the French courts two years later, that there had been corruption on a fairly grand scale. And one element of it was that Russian athletes had been approached to have their tests either slow down or disappear for extortion. And this had been taking place for some time. Then the circus starts, select committees, are you corrupt? Were you asleep? I was one of five vice presidents. It's not like a FTSE 100. You meet three or four times a year, but it doesn't matter.

47:09So I - You must have. Did you suspect? No, really not. Subsequently, it was pretty clear to me that there were just too much power in the hands of too few people. So I really then took a flamethrower to the sport. We rewrote the constitution and we created something called the Athletic Integrity Unit. So we took the doping control out of the federation, away from politics, where it is entirely independent and anonymously. You guys can tell me this, but why do we have these big corruption scandals? I have a sense that we have terrible complaints about football governing bodies. We have terrible complaints about the Olympics.

47:44What's going on? I'm not defending sport, although I probably, by even starting off on that, I'm probably about to do that. I don't think they're any more livid than most areas. Politics and British politics? Well, I'm not saying British politics. I think British politics is in large part incredibly clean. Has been. Well, okay. But, you know, you compare it with models around the world, Alastair. So you know what I'm saying. But sports, let's be honest, sports had a reputation for a long, long time. Well, yeah, but any more than the city, any more than being inside a trading case, any more than…

48:23What is money and power? No, it's interesting. Three paragraphs into some big investigative piece on corporate greed, most people are switching off. But if you've got names and you've got a sport and you've got football or you've got athletics and high profile names like mine or whoever come up, Of course, they're the£50 notes of journalistic currency. I'm not saying we haven't had those, but of course we have. I know it from my own experience. You've only got to look at football. But yes, we have those problems. And one of the challenges is that most sports have been, until relatively recently, very badly governed.

49:02No checks and balances. I remember as a sort of backbencher in the sport, daring to suggest in one council meeting we might have an audit committee. You'd have thought I'd have announced the culling of the firstborn in every family. Obviously, given the context of what they were all up to. So going back to your initial question about doping, yeah, I mean, Russia were at it, state-sponsored, I mean, industrial scale. And it was a monstrous incursion into the integrity of the sport. And it was on my watch and I had to do something about it. And as far as you're concerned, they've shown nothing that would allow them back in.

49:37It's very interesting. So we created a task force. Of course, I appointed a guy called Runa Anderson, who probably knows more about this subject than anybody. And slowly but surely, we did get them back to a position where, had it not been for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they had made the journey. So the Athletic Integrity Unit do the testing. We have two or three independents inserted into their federation, the member federation for Russia, the Athletics Federation. and we felt that by process and by being tough and not by keeling over like other sports did and say, well, it's too big to deal with, we suspended them.

50:18And so for seven years, we wrestled with this, but we did get it back to a position. Of course, the next box set appears and that's the decision that the council took around not accepting them into international sport after the invasion of... So they run in a neutral vest? Not in my sport, they don't. So the International Federation has primacy in deciding the eligibility of competitors. So we have said they will not be in Paris. Now, your son once said to you, stop calling it my sport. And he's right. So why do you keep calling it my sport, Seb? Yes. Slap on the wrist. The sport. The sport. Trans.

51:03Yes. Yes. Difficult. Yes and no. And I'm trying not to oversimplify this or sound too brutal about it. My mandate gives me one very, very clear responsibility. Well, lots of clear responsibilities, but one overarching one, and that is protecting the female category. You have two categories in sport. You have gender and you have age. Age because you assume it's better that you haven't got Olympic champions competing against 16 year olds in the Grasmere sports and gender, because if you don't protect the female category, then no woman will ever win another event. So we have two issues that are quite complicated and complex.

51:53One is something called DSD, which is differences of sexual development. And that is one element. Trans Trans is different and should not be confused with that. And the council made a judgment that the science around being able to have transgender athletes in that transitional phase reducing their testosterone, the science was not clear whether that would have any impact on the residual effect of going from male biology and physiology to female biology and physiology. And at this point, we've said we're not prepared to take that risk. And it's for only the elite sports. So I will die in a ditch over the ability of transgender competitors to be involved in participatory sport.

52:46We're talking about a very, very few at the elite level. And I have to protect the female category. My final question. I mean, it's an extraordinary career. I mean, absolutely unbelievable all the different things you've done. Will you leave listeners with some experience or insight on leadership? You've been in many, many different types of leadership position. If you were counselling somebody on leadership, what would be a tip? Do what I've consistently done. And actually, interestingly, going back to my athletics career, the one thing I did learn, my father was my coach, but he brought probably the smartest brains of their generation into a backroom team.

53:23They tended to be American because at that point in Europe, work, sport physiology was a very dry academic subject. The Americans turned that dry academic subject into something that was of practical application. How do you make the boat go quicker? How do you get people to cycle? How do you improve the cadence in competitive and athletics? And so from that funny little group that worked with me, I learned two or three things which I just applied. I'm not an MBA Harvard grad. The first was do what he did, although he was probably one of the most intelligent people I know, but do surround yourself with people that are far smarter than you.

54:05And when you find them, trust them to get on with the job. Don't sit on their shoulders, which is exactly what I did in London. I did bring to the table the smartest people I could find. You know, Paul Dighton, who was my CEO, obviously politically people like Tessa. But, you know, if you look at that team that created and drove the London Games, I was very privileged to be sort of chairing it. But they were the most extraordinary people. The second thing is just remove all the inhibitors you possibly can in a leadership role from preventing the people that you have trusted to get on with the job from derailing what they need to do.

54:48And that sometimes means taking one for the team. So, you know, in the Olympic years, it meant going on Radio 5 on a four o 'clock on a Friday afternoon and getting beaten up by taxi drivers because you weren't going to be able to access the Olympic lane along the embankment for two weeks. why would your highly intelligent CEO spend his time rehearsing for select committees or doing those sorts of things? So I think find the people, if they're world-class, trust them to get on with it and remove all the inhibitors from their day that would stop them from doing that. And just find really, really smart people, because if you do, then it's probably self-preserving as well.

55:32Now, my final question relates to something you said earlier which Rory very rapidly moved on from before I could develop the theme which is when you said that you thought the Tories were done. I thought you were I thought I thought it was a rather benign response to that. Obviously music to my ears but so you're a member of the House of Lords, Lord Coe, Companion of Honour. If you did still have a vote would you vote for this lot to come back? Look of course I would vote Conservative. I am a Conservative and that's not going to ever vary. I know what kind of conservative I am and I don't witness maybe as many of them around at the moment as I would.

56:11It's a different party from the one that I joined, but the Conservative Party has to remember that it has been at its most successful when it's been operating at the centre, as most political parties do. There are elements of the party that I don't find particularly edifying at the moment. And you think they're done? You think Labour are going to win? I think the electorate do make a decision and whether they've actually articulated it, whether they've even come to. But there is a moment and I think this may be it. Well, thank you very, very much indeed. It's been a great, great pleasure. Thank you.

56:45I've enjoyed it. Seb, love to see you.

56:51So, Rory, Lord Coe, Companion of Honour. Yes, Lord Coe, Sir Seb Coe, lots of all these different things. He's at every honour going. And you kind of seem to know him quite well. And I've seen you interviewed him at GQ, didn't you? I was fascinated by that interview, which we'll include maybe in the newsletter, because he gives these very kind of monosyllabic answers to you in the GQ interview. So I thought maybe he was being a bit grumpy there. No, I'll tell you what that is. That's because this one, because it was our actual voices, whereas GQ, we tended to kind of edit them quite a lot. I see.

57:21But no, I don't think, Seb is very rarely monosyllabic. Right. Seb does good talk. Seb does good talking. But he has had, when you go through it, I could have gone on talking all day because he has had a ridiculously varied life. And was he a kind of hero of yours in the 70s? Yeah, he was. I mean, I actually loved them both. I loved Coando of it and Steve Cram and Peter Elliott's the other one. He doesn't overly praise Ovet, does he? No, actually, if we'd got onto that, I happen to know that they've got a much better relationship now. Right, but it's odd. Given an opportunity, he didn't immediately say, he's an amazing guy.

57:48No, well, they were unbelievably competitive. No, he was a hero. Because honestly, if you look at his running style, He's just a beautiful runner. And it's interesting how our lives are sort of interwoven. So when I was working for Tony and he was working for Haig when he was an MP, but then through the Olympic period. So I'd say he's a good friend. And he's one of the people who persuade me not to be an MP, partly because he actually shares your view of a lot of what Parliament is like. Yeah, he said something like he was going to lie down on the street to prevent you or something. He said you'll absolutely hate it.

58:19The place is filled with wankers. The processes are absolutely balls aching. And if you ever get the temptation again, phone me and I will come and lie outside your front door and prevent you from leaving the house, is what he said. Oh, that's very good. So one thing, given we talk a lot about multicultural Britain, were people very conscious of his Indian heritage in the 70s? No. I think even some of our listeners might be a little bit surprised by that. I would say that if anything, even though he was from a working class background in Sheffield, he was kind of seen as the middle class guy. Right.

58:51Compared to Steve Ovette. Compared to Steve Avert, who was the kind of, you know, the warrior. But I think that was partly the way he ran as well. He just ran so beautifully. But no, so back then, they were front and back page in a way that today footballers would be. And so I think then to go on and do all the different things, business, it's pretty successful business. And have the other guys done that? Well, Steve Cram is a very, very good commentator. I think Steve Avert lives in Canada now. I'm not sure what he does. But they haven't gone on to be members of parliament and run big Olympic committees and run athletic federations.

59:19We didn't get onto the fact that he probably would have given us a stone-warning answer, but the word is he's trying to get into the IOC to run that as well. It's fascinating. And do you think those, and we should have maybe got into that, but do you think those are actually genuinely satisfying or fulfilling jobs? From a distance, they seem like nightmare jobs, running the International Olympic Committee. It seems like a horrifying job. Would you want to do that? Yeah, yeah. You don't think it's all bureaucracy? No, well, it's politics. A lot of it's politics. It's international. It's stuff you like.

59:48It's geopolitics. It's building relations with every country in the world. It seems pretty kind of thankless. You always end up in a French jail, whatever you do. I think quite a bit. You only end up there if you're corrupt. And actually quite a lot of the people who are corrupt don't end up in jail. They seem to have sailed through pretty well. But I think Seb's a very, very talented guy. He's also kept that kind of calm manner you see. Most of the time, that's what he's like. And do you think he could have been a prime minister? Oh, God. He'd be better than what we've got. He'd be better than the last few.

1:00:15I've never really thought of that because, of course, he was only there for one term. And as you said, it was a period where you had to hang around a fair bit before you became a minister. But certainly what I saw of him running the things that I've seen him run, be it a company, be it a campaign, be it an organized, pretty big, complicated, multifaceted organization, you can certainly do that. Well, thank you for getting him along. No problem.

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