73. Kwasi Kwarteng: Boris Johnson, the British Empire, and Rwanda (Part 1)

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1:37Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And we're about to sit down for two episodes now with Kwasi Kwarteng, who was the Chancellor of the United Kingdom who presided over this mini-budget and a pretty catastrophic moment in the British economy. me. It's something that is tribute to Alistair, who managed, as he will explain, to seize him on the tube and get him on. Quasi is somebody I have known for a very, very long time. I first met him when he was 13. We were at school together at Eton, as Alistair will be quick to point out. And I remember him as a really charming, really intelligent 13-year-old who was already, to put it mildly, larger than life.

2:20I remember huge conversations with him about T.S. Eliot and Wordsworth and debating poetry. I also remember him as a pretty ferocious figure on the sports field. He then went on to university. He won University Challenge, which established his reputation as being very smart. He did a PhD in history, went into banking, entered parliament with me in 2020. He was almost the only MP that I actually knew well when we entered parliament together. And then we slightly, I'm afraid, drifted apart because he He became an ever more strident Brexiteer, allied himself with Boris Johnson, who I really thought was a bad person, and then allied himself ever more strongly with Liz Truss, who I thought was even more catastrophic, becoming her chancellor through that catastrophic mini budget.

3:06And now finally is coming full circle and it's standing down from parliament. And as with a few previous interviews, we're going to do this one in two parts, because frankly, it's fascinating. He's very, very frank. I'm not sure he's going to make terribly comfortable listening for Liz Truss. So here we go. Part one, quasi-quartech. I think this is the first episode we've done with two Etonians. So my first question is this. If today is Friday, what is the day that follows the day that comes after the day? I've lost you. I've lost you. Well, you knew, you once knew this. This is for the Eton entrance exam.

3:50Round yourself. So if today is Friday, what is the day that follows the day that comes after the day that precedes the day before yesterday? Is it Friday? That was just a guess, wasn't it? What's your guess, Rory? And I as a guess, too. Yeah. You have a guess? Yeah. I did. Okay. I'll say Saturday. Bad luck's Thursday. How many even numbers are there? I don't know. This is a good one for a chancellor. How many even numbers are there? We both did this exam. What? We both did this exam. I didn't remember those questions. I didn't remember those questions. How many even numbers are there from 100 to 1 ,000 inclusive?

4:24That should be easier. That should be 451. Well done. He battered you there. So well done, Quasi Quarté. Right, well, let's go right back. Just tell us. It's all going to be like this. No, honestly, it will get worse. I believe it will get worse. The questions will get harder. So, by the way, thank you for being here. This interview arose because I bumped into you on the tube. Yeah. and I stood behind you while you were reading the Evening Standard. Yes. And I pretended to be a sort of random Londoner. Yes, you did. Stood above you and I just said, why don't you go to apologise for smashing the economy then?

5:01And what did I say? You said, I've already have. I've already said that. I think I was fruitier in my language. You were a little bit fruitier. Yeah, then you realised it was me. And then we said, why don't you come on the podcast? And you said, yes, that's great. Just let's go right back to tell us a bit about your parents, where they came from, how they ended up in the UK? My parents were born, my dad was born in 1941, my mother was born in 1944. And the relevance of that was that when they were born, the country of Ghana didn't exist. It was called the Gold Coast. And so Ghana became, rather, the Gold Coast became independent as Ghana in 1957.

5:38And so they were already teenagers, essentially when the colonial era ended. And I think that shaped them. Like a lot of people in the colonies and the empire, they were kind of brought up to really look up to Britain and really look up to institutions and what was called the British way of life. So I think by the time the 60s came along, of course, they'd left school, essentially. They were looking to go to university. And they came here, as many people did, to pursue their education. And I think they met in London. They didn't know each other in Ghana. but actually even then in the 60s, you had lots of communities from all over the world in London.

6:16They met here. And he was an economist and she was a bastard. Yeah, that's right. So my dad was, he studied at the LSE in the 1960s. Very radical left. I mean, you know, they were way more left-wing than you are, as you all remember. You might remember. And my mother was always more conservative. I mean, she grew up very much influenced by the Methodist church and she became a barrister. And she was actually, I mean, when I look back, she was called to the bar in 1976. She was one of the first black women to be called to the bar. And that was nearly 50 years ago, 1976. And I was born in 1975. So she was called to the bar when she had a small baby.

6:52That's right. So it was a very unusual setup in those days where she essentially was a mother. She was ethnic minority. She was female. And she got called to the bar then. And that was a big, still is a big source of pride for her. On the politics, your dad was very left with you. He's more left. He's more left. He's not very left. I mean, he hung out with a lot of very left wing. He's left wing, she's right wing. Yeah. So he was much more influenced by the kind of, if you like, intellectual anti-colonial movements, the 60s. So as you say, they grew up, as it were, in a British Empire world with some admiration for the empire.

7:27But I guess there's a different thing going on in their lives because Nkrumura in Ghana becomes one of the great symbols of the kind of anti-colonial movement. And of course, your father was at the LSE. And you wrote actually a really powerful book called Ghosts of Empire, which is a pretty objective, cold-eyed look at many of the problems of empire. So tell us a little bit about that other side, along with being brought up to admire the empire. What did they feel and later you feel about the downsides of empire? I don't know what words I used, but I don't think they admired the empire. They admired British values and they had a sense of the English language, literature, those sorts of things.

8:10But I think that deep down, the whole imperial thing was going to die. I mean, even my father said in the 50s, you could tell, even the British didn't really believe what they were doing. And so when Ghana became independent in 1957, the Brits just left. Unlike the French empire in Africa, if you go to Francophone Africa, there's a big French presence. I remember a friend of mine 20 years ago saying, oh, the croissants in Abidjan are brilliant, that sort of thing. You heard this sort of thing in those days. But in a lot of Anglophone Africa, the Brits just disappeared overnight. They'd fled. And I think that in many instances, people were quite puzzled about that.

8:49They just thought, well, they've just left, they've destroyed a lot of the local infrastructure. They created their own infrastructure. And then they've just buzzed off. And so there was always that tension, really. And in West Africa, you didn't have the kind of egregious sort of color bar apartheid stuff, mainly because there was never any kind of English settlement in West Africa. The English people you saw, the white people you saw were essentially officials. There were no settlers in the way that there were in Southern Africa. So it was just a sort of quite a thin administrative layer that when independence happened, they just disappeared.

9:21That was my understanding. So you often associate with being on the right of the Conservative Party, and there are quite a lot of pro-imperial traditions. A handful. How do you, if you're talking sympathetically to someone on the right of the Conservative Party, how would you articulate in relatively simple terms what was good and what was bad about the British Empire if you're talking to a sort of Nigel Farage figure? Well, I don't know what, I've never discussed this with Nigel Farage. I don't know what he thinks about it. But I think the good thing is, or the good bits were rule of law. So even in those days, the law didn't distinguish between different races.

10:00And that was quite a powerful thing. It sounds bizarre now, but in those days, it was quite a powerful thing. And also, I think one of the best things, and I had this debate in India, I mean, you've been to India many times, I know, but there's a huge debate there about the English language. So the Hindu nationalists are saying, well, we've got to promote Hindi. But actually, a lot of people push back and say, English is a bloody useful thing to know, despite what we think about the empire, despite the debates. So I think there's law, language, very important. On the bad side, clearly, these countries were not independent.

10:34They were run from London in many instances. The French empire was even more centralized, run from Paris. And how competently run were they? Well, this is what I talk about in the book. And the problem is that you've got huge it's like politics you know there's a huge range of competence you said you couldn't remember your words i'll give you some of your words british empire was not merely undemocratic it was anti-democratic much of the instability in the world is a product of the legacy of individualism and haphazard policy making so the truth is we left the world in a mess no there were good bits and there were bad bits that was that was the bit i picked out yeah i mean there are 150 000 words Yeah, yeah, big book.

11:14But that's quite a big statement. It wasn't merely undemocratic, it was anti-democratic. But it was. I mean, you know, we can't pretend that an empire is democratic. I mean, the whole premise of empire is that you've got a power that subjugates other powers. That's the whole point of it. To go back to Roy's point a minute ago, why has the empire taken on such a hold in the kind of the psyche of the right? So that we talk about, and even our ridiculous honor system, still having the empire at the heart of it, And the history curriculum doesn't really give a proper picture of the history of the Empire.

11:47No, so I think you would have been right about 25 years ago, 30 years ago. I think when I go to my local association, we're not sitting around talking about the Empire. I think that kind of empire... Well, you were 25 years ago. I think they were. I wasn't there, but they probably were. They were more... Because you've got to remember that, you know, if you went to a Conservative Association 30 years ago, you'd have had a lot of people who had fought in the Second World War and who'd been stationed in all sorts of far-flung places. I mean, I knew a man who lived in my constituency who died at age 102 about four years ago.

12:18And he talks about signing up in Sheffield Town Hall in 1939. And we were playing games. I love history. And he was saying, well, of course, it was the 4th of September. And I said, well, the war was declared on the 3rd. He said, no, but the 4th was a Monday. So the war was declared on the Sunday. And then on the Monday morning, he turned up. And there were lots of people that I used to talk about these things. And this chap joined the RAF as a cook. He went to Egypt. He spent some time in Iraq. He traveled all over the world. And by 25, when he came back, he was extremely experienced. So we can caricature that experience.

12:54And a lot of them had very pro-imperial attitudes. But a lot of them had a huge amount of experience. And that's something that I know you've talked about in Parliament and in your writing. And it's something that we're losing. Do you not think the sort of slightly distorted view of our own history is one of the things that led to what I still think was a very, very weird debate in this country, which was Brexit. I know you were very, very pro-Brexit. Yeah. And you and I had many arguments at the time. We had debates. But I sort of feel that came through a distorted lens. Yeah, look, I think every country has distorted myths about their past.

13:31And I think that people did tap into a kind of island story. And that's one, I mean, you know the continent very well. one of the frustrations I find with British politics is that we don't look outside the UK. You know, a lot of the problems we face, you know, in terms of growth are European and Western problems. But the whole debate is centered around the UK as, you know, is understandable. But with that, there's a whole lot of myth-making, legends, stories that people construct about their national identity. But that's inevitable. I mean, that happens in every country. It's just that in Britain, we have a very particular focus.

14:06We don't seem to learn from it. Well, I think that we kind of do when we don't. I mean, the British establishment, such as it is, is completely different to the one which I grew up in. I mean, I look at lawyers. A friend of mine said that we're old enough to remember when judges were right wing. You know, Lord Denning and all these people. I mean, it's a totally different world. So I think we have learned something, actually. I think the kind of blatant racism that you saw in the 80s isn't around. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but that kind of open hostility is less than it was. And if you look at my contemporaries in parliament, but particularly in the Conservative Party, there are lots of people from different ethnic backgrounds.

14:43And there's a story, maybe we could discuss this, why a lot of people from ethnic minority backgrounds have gravitated to the Conservative Party. And it's interesting to me that Rishi Sunak, we don't talk about it, but the first non-white prime minister is a conservative of a Hindu background. That's interesting. And that is something that 40 years ago, I don't think it was unthinkable, but it just wasn't something that was like that. I think I'm right in saying that until quite recently, there was nobody from minority ethnic backgrounds in the Conservative Party. In the MP. So when I got onto the list in 2004, there were no ethnic minority Conservative MPs.

15:20And that's not very long ago. Were you in the first cohort? Yeah. So there was Adam Afriere got in in 05. Right. But that's less than 20 years ago. Less than 20 years ago. And we've gone from that to a world now in which we've had... Well, we've got an Indian Prime Minister leading the Conservative government, all of that. And we've had a series of Home Secretaries, Chancellors. So there's been change. And all I would say about that is that when we started off, you know, in the early 2000s, everyone knew the party was, we had 165 MPs. 90 % of them were men and all of them were white. And even at the time, I remember Oliver Letwin saying, this isn't sustainable.

15:55And actually there was change. I think Cameron, David Cameron had a big part to play in that. And it's interesting that, as Roy said, David Cameron did that, wanted to bring in a more representative cohort, and yet didn't really seem to think that you had... No, I mean, I was doing my thing. I wasn't particularly... What was your thing? Well, I was writing that book, I mean, that you've quoted from extensively. Also, I had a sense that, which is dead now, I mean, I wanted to be an MP and I wanted to write, I like writing. and one of my big, he's not a hero because he's a Labour man, but he's someone I respected a lot was Roy Jenkins who used to write as well.

16:31And I was very much of the view that... Why can't you have Labour heroes? Well, I mean, I'm being flippant. Yeah, he's a good... Do you have Tory ones? No, no. Well, Abraham Lincoln. Well, he's not a Tory. I know, he's not a Tory, but he's kind of... He's almost one. And I was very much, you know, I was under contract to write this book. I wrote a book. The other thing you ought to remember was that we were in a coalition period. So, you know, I mean, you didn't become a minister until 2015. Cameron didn't like me either. No, he didn't. I think you're being polite about this, but my memory is you were not one of the Ing gang.

17:06No. And the sort of little Cameron in a circle didn't see you as one of the sort of golden children. But that's what politics is. I mean, too much of politics is like that. I think it's always been like that. But, you know, you and I were probably out. And then, and I've done both. I've been an outsider and then I've been on the in-gang. And we might talk about this, but I remember when Boris stood for leader. I mean, you had your own personal issues in regard to that. But it was clear that he was going to win. And I did say to you, I said, look, you know, you can really influence things if you get on this train.

17:37But, you know, being the man of integrity that you are, and I'm being serious about this, you said no, you didn't want to do that. So you're not a man of integrity. I didn't have a conflict that Rory did in terms of backing Boris, because I'd known him for a long time. And I thought he was, at that time, he was the answer. What happened subsequently, we can debate. But at that particular moment. And also, if we go back to one of the things you're associated with was that Britannia Unchained book. Yeah, yeah. Hugh, Liz Truss, Priti Patel, Chris Skidmore. And Raab. And Dominic Raab. And interesting, just sort of very quickly, because of course, this is all my intake.

18:11These are all the people that have joined in 2010 with me. And of those, it was Liz Truss and Priti Patel that Cameron really liked and Osborne liked and watched promote. Yes, that's right. I mean, Liz more than the others. Because, again, I think Priti only became a minister maybe three or four years in. Liz Truss was a minister within two years. And was the Secretary of State within four. The Secretary of State within four. I mean, that was the remarkable thing. And that was what... And what was it that David Cameron and George Osborne saw in Liz Truss? What made her the person from our entire intake?

18:38So what she was very good at, and she still is very good at, is generating noise and headlines. But that's a feature of modern, we can poo-poo that, but that's a feature of modern politics. You just generate enough noise around you. But don't you think one of the reasons why the conventional wisdom is that Keir Starmer is going to become prime minister is because actually he's doing something very different to that. Maybe. Maybe being more serious, maybe an antidote to the Johnson Trust approach. Yeah, but it's a global thing. I mean, Trump was the same. And they generate a lot of headlines around them.

19:11And then people become drawn and they think that's the shiny thing. And I think there was a bit of that with Liz. But just to go back to the Britannia Unchained thing, and Cameron's view of you, that was quite a right-wing conservative perspective. Yes, it was. It was. And he was trying to sort of project a more centrist. He was and he wasn't. So I remember the one time when I realized that the book had made an impact. The Empire book. not the Empire book, the Unchained book, I think it was the Tory party conference in 2012. And George Osborne started talking about the global race. And everyone was, and even Jeremy Brown, you know, the Lib Dems, they started talking about this global race.

19:50And that was all, the Britannia Unchained was all about this. Now they might say they didn't read the book, but it was clearly something that was in the air. And all of this business of, you know, we've got to compete with China and all of that kind of stuff. The book that was written 12 years ago, 2012, was very much in that vein. And what did Britannia Unchained mean? Is it the sort of Singapore on Thames, sovereign individual? I think it was. I mean, looking back, you know, it was 12 years ago when we knew MPs. You're obviously trying to make an impact and you're trying to say something that's distinctive.

20:22You know, there's no point getting together and coming together with a book saying, the leadership is brilliant. Everything we're doing is great. Yeah, the newspapers can do that. Exactly. So it was, you know, and it created a bit of a splash. There were controversial things in it and it was very much, Are all British people lazy? Well, it said the average. You've got all your favorites, haven't you? Just lobbing them in. But yeah, I mean, it was a kind of quite a bold book. Very much, I think, looking back subsequently, Liz was very much a very bold, dynamic person. And I think that the problem was that you can get all the theory right, and this is a big problem with modern politics.

21:01You can get the positioning and the messaging right. But of course, how you govern. is a totally different set of problems. And it's a different mentality that you need. You know, the person who can make the loudest noise isn't necessarily the person who can go to government. You mentioned there Boris Johnson. You said we can talk about him. Yeah. So you did think he was the right person. I did think. In 2019, he was absolutely the right person. I mean, would you accept that his premiership has been something of a disaster and he's done real damage? So I would go halfway on that. I think that the end of it, he totally lost his way.

21:33He totally lost his way. I think in 2019, because people forget this, 2019, the Tory party got 8 % in the European elections, 8.8%. We were scoring lower than we are now in the national polls. Theresa May hadn't got Brexit through. And we needed someone essentially just to slice the Gordian knot, just to cut through the gridlock. We had two years of that miserable parliament where we couldn't get anything through. And I remember I was a junior minister at the time. And I said, so what are we going to have questions on Tuesday? This is on the Thursday. I said to someone in number 10, what are we going to say?

22:08He said, look, don't worry about Tuesday. We've got to get it through today. That was very much the approach. It was a day by day. And it was miserable for two years. If you could imagine just going every day, day by day, not having any strategy, not having any clear idea of where you were going. And, you know, at that time, Boris and Dominic Cummings had easy answers and they cut through a lot of nonsense. And then I saw you, I remember seeing you again on the tube. I mean, you and I use the tube far too often, probably, immediately after that general election. So it was before the COVID period.

22:39There was that three-month period after the general election in 2019, which took place in December and before the lockdown in March 2020, where it looked as if Boris was going to be there for a very long time. Because he had this enormous majority. We had this enormous majority. Nobody could see the future in terms of COVID. We had a majority of 80. Historically, it had been unprecedented for a majority of that large to essentially be eliminated in one parliament. To be fair to Kier, and I do give him credit for this, he never panicked. At the time, when he took over, he was a dud. He was never going to be prime minister.

23:12He was a caretaker, all of that sort of thing. It's a credit to him that he's just maintained his head consistently through all that period, because people were saying I'd written him off. So Boris, the other thing that I really liked about him, and I've been on the campaign trail with him, he's just the best campaigner I've ever seen. I mean, better than probably Blair and Clinton. You know, when he goes to Billingsgate, he wears the market stall outfit, he's kissing fish, he's doing all sorts of dynamic things on the campaign trail. And people are flocking to him. I mean, I've seen him stand in the middle of the street and people are coming to him.