86. Nick Clegg: Coalition, Cameron, and Chaos (Part 1)

23:46And I, for once, somewhat uncharacteristically, I was completely lost for words because at that point... You hadn't thought of it? Well, I'd never come across, other than him, I'd never come across politicians. MPs to me were an alien species like they are to most people. I saw them on the telly and I suddenly thought, oh, wow, I can be that? There's all those people yelling at each other in the House of Commons. So that really did get me then thinking. And then I don't know how soon afterwards. I remember we were in Strasbourg at the European Parliament and Paddy Ashdown had asked to see Leon Britton.

24:13I said to Leon, Leon, if you don't mind, could you say to Paddy Ashdown, you've got someone in your team who's an ardent liberal and liberal Democrat. When I first told Leon Britton that I was a liberal Democrat, he said, oh, for heaven's sake, that's like being in an NGO. He was full of derision about it. Anyway, and very kindly, he did exactly that. And he said to Paddy, I've got this young, young, enthusiastic guy on my team. He's desperate to meet you. Then Paddy, I remember marched out and I was terribly intimidated out from the office. I hear you want to be in the Liberal Democrats. And I said, yes, like that sort of military poster, you know, the person pointing to you.

24:46Anyway, and then he very kindly suggested I sort of seek him out in London. And I did. But from quite an early stage, Paddy certainly was very, well, he just sort of, yeah. And he sort of said so publicly. But it certainly didn't go to my head. He urged me to think of standing for the leadership. Now, when was this? This was after Charles stood down. So this was just after, literally just after becoming MP. And I remember ringing me. I said, you've got to be crazy. I can't even find my office in the House of Commons. And so, yeah, he'd always urged me very early on and then Ming became leader and then that didn't last very long.

25:22So by the time Ming stood down, which is what, only 18 months or two years later, I was starting to run out of excuses to say to Paddy why I wouldn't throw my hat in the ring. So where did he go? Did he go Paddy Ashton, Charles Kennedy, Ming Campbell, then you? That's right. And it was very striking. And so very early. You'd barely been in parliament for two years when you became leader of your party. I mean, we're surprised by how quickly Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer did it, but you did it even faster. What do you think are the tensions and the strains of doing it so quickly? And is that a way of trying to understand part of Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer's challenges of taking over a party when you haven't been in parliament very long?

25:59It's a difficult one. Clearly, it comes with disadvantages. You just, you know, you've made fewer mistakes in that shorter period of time. You're just less battle hardened. And on the other hand, the plus side is you can be just a bit sort of naive and fresh and you try stuff that others who are a bit more jaded by the process wouldn't. So it's definitely a bit of a pros and cons. I mean, again, I didn't spend too much time thinking about that. I thought, well, you don't choose your moment. The moment slightly chooses you. And it was very obvious that if I ducked the challenge of trying to enter into the leadership race at that point, then I wouldn't, in a sense, then I would be ducking it for good.

26:30But I think it's an interesting question. How much does experience of parliament help or hinder? I think it does a little bit of both, oddly enough. You had this speech about how, despite your upper middle class background, you found parliament pretty appalling. I found parliament completely appalling. I don't think this tells us anything about Nick and his amazing Dutch-Russian ancestry. I think it's a totally appalling institution. It is. It really is. But develop that a bit. I mean, give us a sense of what it is that's so rebarbative and repellent about it. Oh, I don't know where to start. I mean, I've now worked for, actually, I feel very lucky.

27:02I've worked in three what I call bubbles. I worked for 10 years in a Brussels bubble, an EU bubble. I was 12 years in Parliament before the voters of Sheffield Hallam had enough of me and slung me out. And I've now done six years in Silicon Valley. And what's interesting when I reflect on it is all those bubbles have something very common, is that they're completely self-obsessed. They think they're the most important place in the world. And they think that everybody else is thinking about them. but of those three bubbles the worst by a long way is Westminster really yeah because because the mismatch between the pomposity and the self-regard and and actually the irrelevance of what happens there is just so much greater I mean no doubt I'll talk about it later but you know the sort of hubris of Silicon Valley they are kind of inventing pretty consequential things Brussels certainly when I was there was going through it's just this mismatch between this kind of this sort of stuck in this 19th century view of Britain.

28:01And the whole place is redolent of it. You can't even name people. So you have to call people the right honourable gallant that learned this. The way the place is architecturally designed is designed for conflict rather than conversation. It's all about these informal kind of mannerisms that you're supposed to sort of know. And that's what then people then deem you as an accomplished parliamentarian. It's like a weird It's like a weird sect. As I say, it's odd. I went, for heaven's sake, to a boarding school. It's like a pastiche of some sort of Harry Potter boarding school. It's just like, what relevance does that have to the 21st century?

28:32But it's also not just its old-fashionedness. It's the incredible poor quality of so much of it. I mean, what struck me being on, you know, I went in and I was on the Foreign Affairs Committee and I chaired the Defense Committee. And journalists, you know, incredibly sort of deferential towards these things and saying, you know, it's marvelous, you know, holding the government to account and all these kind of things. I discovered that we knew almost nothing about the world, that we were pontificating on foreign affairs, having traveled very little. We didn't really hold ministers to account, I'm afraid.

29:00Anyone with any degree of charm could completely sidestep the process. speeches in parliament were of such pathetically low quality everybody looking at their phones nobody paying slightest attention and of course it wasn't helped by the fact that parliament feels like an elective dictatorship i mean it was very clear that tony blair or gordon brown or david cameron essentially don't really care very much about what's happening in speeches in the house of commons yeah no completely and and you don't need to invite me as a liberal democrat to froth the mouth about the injustice of the electoral system but you've got to remember i was leader in 2010, where we ran a campaign which resulted in by far the largest number of actual human beings, voters, voting for us than ever before or since.

29:42We got 23 % of the vote. Almost 7 million people voted for us. Almost as many as voted for the Tories this time. How many people voted for the Tories this time? I'll get the full number, but it's not much. It's not much different, exactly. And yet we got, what is it, 8 % of the seats. So I went into parliament and indeed into government thinking this is crazy. I've kind of tried my best to make my appeal on behalf of what I believe in in my party that I was leading to the country. And yet I'm supposed to do that with not only one, but almost two hands tied behind my back in the mechanisms by which power is distributed.

30:14And I just sort of, of course, it doesn't stop there. I've tried and failed to change the electoral system, House of Lords, the party funding system. Nick, I'm going to interrupt because you asked me the question the conservatives got 23.7 percent of the vote and 6 million 827 000 it's almost identical it's almost identical to what the lib dem's got in exactly and we got 57 seats and by the way it's a it's a i know we might talk about those it's actually tribute to there's huge tributes to to ed davy and the lib dems i mean boy do they they've learned how to fight this election yeah well yeah because they they got what almost half that 13 percent of them something like that and they get 72.

30:50So anyway, we'll no doubt talk about that later. It means you have to tie yourself up into absurd contortions. But of course, I went into that parliament, not only sort of culturally ill-disposed to the place, but also thinking, what is this? It's like I kind of, you know, I've always felt much more comfortable when I was out of Westminster trying to make my case. And of course, there's also, and you guys are way closer to this than I am, I think now, but this fetid, weird love-hate relationship between the political elite and the media elite in this country it's so destructive it's so and i was bad at it i was i was no good at it i really but that being said that being said nick one of the big breakthrough moments for you were the tv debates yes where you went from kind of almost nowhere with a lot of people to suddenly i agree with nick yeah yeah clegmania all that stuff and that is what got you into government exactly because i finally had a stage which wasn't dependent on how i how i appeared in the house of commons or which newspaper editor i was talking about because i can make my case directly yeah and it was like a sort of breath of fresh air but but you're right that was a very very consequential moment and i was clearly very lucky brown was knackered tarnished sort of sort of growling around the place david cameron had a slightly sort of slightly sort of inauthentic sort of feel even at that at that point and then there was just desperate longing for something different just on that so as you know i was with gordon for those five days when between the vote and you finally go into into government with with cameron uh i can remember one of the phone calls he made to you where he was sort of i don't remember this but he's saying you basically made your mind up you've made your mind up you're going with the tories and you say no no i'm talking to you both so just talk me through that process those five days what were the was the balance that you were weighing up in your mind so and i said this to gordon and i'm not sure if i said that can't say i said it to him over and over again the arithmetic was unambiguous and and i and i got really frustrated why did it take five days what to assemble a government i'm heaven's sake in most of the most other countries but you were basically were you sort of no because of gordon's insistence and this is i have to say if i'm if i'm if any if a hint of frustration comes to my voice is i sometimes get asked by people why did you choose the conservatives over labor there was no majority of labor i think labor and the liberal democrats amounted to i can't remember was it 312 yeah no it was 313 i think it was way But I remember literally at one point he started writing on a piece of paper with his black felt tip pen.

33:09I think he and I were just on our own in his office at the back of the House of Commons. And I almost put my hand on his arm and said, Gordon, you just like put it away. The sums do not add up. So what I had said before the election, publicly and privately, what I said immediately after the election, publicly and privately, was it seemed to me as a basic democratic principle that if no one wins a majority, the party with the most votes and the most seats has in that situation a sort of obvious... So why were you talking to Labour? Because I kept being told two things, A, by Gordon and maybe not you, but by people like Paddy and Ming and Vince and everyone saying, oh, Labour have got some Labour.

33:46And then I, because remember, I was a Lib Dem leader. And if you're a Lib Dem leader, you can't do anything without talking to some committee, some group, you know, we had late night meetings. Paddy was adamant that something could be done with Labour. Yes, Paddy was adamant. And I kept saying to them, I don't see it, but if you want, and they pretty well instructed me, and I couldn't have been more open. I said, I don't understand the maths. You know, at the end of the day in Parliament, the maths has to add up. But I went and dutifully did that, and then Gordon put his case to me about this rainbow coalition of a green here, applied Cymru person.

34:18I kept saying, I don't see it. So for me, it was always very clear in my mind, the options for the Lib Dems were either to enter into some arrangement with the Conservatives and then a whole debate about what arrangement should have been, should have been full blown coalition or confidence to supply and so on, or no entry into any arrangement with the Conservatives. And therefore, there would have been another election within four, five, six months, which, by the way, I remember Tim Farron saying to me, the one thing we have to avoid as a party more than anything else is another election within a few months because we're going to get completely crushed underfoot.

34:50So, you know, that was the choice that I felt that I felt that I was doing what I was being asked to do in my parliamentary party by very senior colleagues and dear friends of my life. Paddy, please speak to the Labour. There might be something you can confect here. We went through all of that. Can I just slow it down a bit for younger listeners and people who weren't totally on top of this? Aren't they lucky? Yeah, I have another election. So to remind people, there are 650 seats in parliament, so you need to cross 325 to get a majority. And in 2010, after Labour had been in for 13 years, the Conservatives won 306 seats, Labour won 258, and you, the Lib Dems, won 57.

35:31So the point you're making is that if you'd added the Lib Dems to Labour, you still wouldn't have had a majority. So you chose eventually at the end of this process to enter into a coalition with the Conservatives. David Cameron became Prime Minister. You became the Deputy Prime Minister and everything follows from there. Apologies for the interruption. Very good context. As you haul me back to my past, I'm no doubt immediately lurching into details which others thankfully don't remember quite as vividly as I do. But to the point about those five days, I think there are two things which you talked earlier, Alice, about myths.

36:04I mean, politics is storytelling. And victors tell their stories. And what I discovered is, unfortunately, when you're a loser, you lose control of your story. But one of the myths that has been, I think, rather deliberate and somewhat cynically propagated by Ed Balls, Gordon Brown and others is that somehow they were diddled out of some deal by the perfidy of the Lib Dems. And it's like, I never understood this. Like, they couldn't, the mass was there. And I was never, and then here's the other thing. And then they say, oh, but you carried on talking to us to use it as leverage against the Tories.

36:34Damn right I did. That's my job. My job didn't look out for the Labour Party, the Tory party. It was to get the best deal I could for the Lib Dems. So that is a fact. You were using Labour to get the best deal. But wouldn't you? So, and particularly on electoral reform. No, but I cannot believe that, I cannot believe that seasoned politicians like Ed Balls and Gordon Brown go, oh, shock horror. He's using leverage to get the best for his party. That's my bloody job. By the way, they knew at the time, because Gordon kept saying, all he's doing is using us to get more out of the Tories. But of course the bloody one was.

37:02That's my job. Can I interrupt for a second? Okay, so the reason why, again, for listeners, that this is really important and ultimately really controversial is that Nick Clegg comes in, he becomes the deputy prime minister, he creates this coalition. And that then sets up a dynamic where in 2015, five years later in the next election, the conservatives win a majority and the Lib Dems are brutally punished. So they go down from 57 seats to some, what was it, eight seats or something. And the reason why this whole thing gets controversial is that, And of course, people on the left say that the Lib Dems enabled this horrible Tory government, enabled austerity, enabled the introduction of tuition fees.

37:43And therefore, the background to the whole this is that Nick Clegg is about to explain to us why he did it. He's also going to explain why he moderated the Conservatives, and they could have been much worse if he wasn't there in coalition. But the reason for all this chant is that the Lib Dems were ultimately, whether through their own fault or not, came out of it in the next election in a very damaged position. Yeah, no, no. Well, I don't think I need to add anything. That's a very good summary of a half a decade's evolution in British politics. And a very interesting evolution, because with the distance of time, it was a very unusual experiment.

38:18Because what I was, actually, I remember shortly after the 2015 election, Miriam and I had dinner with Tony Blair and Shreebler. And I remember Tony in this very pithy way that he always summarizes these things. He says, Nick, you were just trying to do a politics that just doesn't work in this system. And I think that's and some. I think I tried to do way too many things at once, which just couldn't fit into the environment, not only of the way the system works and Westminster works, but also just the evolution of the country at the time. Remember, the 2010 election was entirely dominated by two crises, a crisis in politics because of the MPs expenses scandals, absolute blind public fury.

38:58What they felt was a venal class of basically corrupt MPs fleecing taxpayers by spending money. And secondly, the greatest economic calamity to have hit this country even greater than Brexit since the war, which was the 2008 financial crisis. I mean, people, I think, already forget how important 2008 is to the modern history of this country. It was an absolute catastrophe. Isn't that partly because Labour doesn't want really to talk about it, because it's very important to their narrative that all the cuts were unnecessary? Correct. So, no, no, no. Well, we'll get on to that. And Alistair and I have had several dress rehearsals of this argument about fiscal policy over several glasses of wine.

39:41But well, on my part, at least in the past, we could do it again. But I strongly agree with you, Roy. I think if you look objectively at the economic or the political economy of this country over the last 15 years or so, there are two events which stand out, which are by far the most important for the welfare and the standing of this country is the 2008, which is the greatest economic catastrophe that has hit this country. I mean, the economy plummeted by 6 % in 12 months. And then there's 2016 Brexit, which, by the way, is estimated to hit the economy by 4 % over 15 years. That just gives you a sense of the enormity.

40:15When I came into government, I remember being told by a sort of unsmiling Treasury official, Deputy Prime Minister, you do realise that the toxic liabilities of the British banking system are five times the size of the whole British economy. But can I just, because Rory's point is a fundamental one about storytelling. The story that we've seen in this election is fundamentally false from all sides. Because Labour says everything went wrong since these dastardly conservatives with their sort of useful idiots, the Lib Dems at the side, started having to... Osterity. Well, we'll come to that in a minute, from 2010.

40:48Conservatives don't want to admit that everything went pear-shaped after they screwed things up in 2015, 2016. Because remember what the coalition government did, and it's my failure, entirely my failure, that I wasn't able to tell this story. What we did was remarkable. We turned an economy which had been hit harder by 2008 than any other mature democracy in the world, where unemployment had shot up into one which was the fastest growing G7 economy, sustainably, 3 % or thereabouts in 2013, 14, 15, with the highest rate of employment, with more women in employment than ever before. earnings and productivity was a bit of a harder thing actually earnings finally started i remember because i'm i was obsessed by this because i think how people feel is often determined by the relationship of how quickly their earnings rise compared to prices in the shops and earnings finally started recovering after the 2008 crash in 2014-15 and then completely went flipped into reverse again in 2016 so we've got this whole myth making where everyone's saying it's all ground zero is 2010.

41:47No, ground zero is 2008 and then 2016. And until people are more honest about this, I think we will keep having a warped debate about how to actually foster the growth that Keir Starmer quite rightly says he wants. Well, listen, we're not going to disagree about Brexit, total catastrophe, and we'll come on to that later. But I think you got used by the Tories as to develop this argument about austerity. I don't believe if you had been Prime Minister, as opposed to Deputy Prime Minister in a coalition, and I understand why you became part of the coalition. I've got no problem with that at all. I disagreed with Charles Kennedy when he, it was one of the few things we disagreed about when he refused to back the coalition.

42:20I think you had no choice on that. But I think you got used in defining the storytelling of that period as Labour screwed the economy, we have to make massive cuts. And the first part of that story was not true. It was a very, very partial truth. Well, I would agree with you, Alistair, for one simple thing. It was Alistair Darling, not me, not George Osborne, not David Cameron, not Danny Alexander, on who said, I remember it vividly, in March, you can look it up, March 2010, before the election, Alistair Darling said there would have to be cuts. He didn't just say cuts. He said there should be harder and tougher than anything under Margaret Thatcher.

42:55And then to prove the point, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, and this is terrifically important in my view, passed a law, literally legislation, in the House of Commons, which by law would have obliged the Labour government, if they'd won in 2010, to reduce the deficit in half by the end of the Parliament. We ended up in the coalition, because of me, by the way, because I stopped George Osborne, David Cameron cutting further and faster than I wanted them to, we actually ended up reducing the deficit more slowly, so halving it over five years, rather than the four years as prescribed. So I think one of the great, I'll come to it in a minute, I think there are totally legitimate debates, and I'm very happy to accept criticism about how the cuts were done, the distribution between tax and spend and so on.

43:36The one thing I can tell you, though, it's a complete nonsense that you can somehow reduce that deficit in half over four years by just taxing the rich. Austerity for Cameron Osborne became almost like a political virility. And you got sucked up in that. You became their spokesman. You legitimized that. I think what is absolutely true is at the very beginning of the coalition, there were two things which I think worked rather well symmetrically, which was of the two crises, which was the economic crisis of 2008 and the political crisis of the MPs' expenses. And right at the beginning of the coalition, I wanted to be very much, of course, identified amongst other things with, yes, helping to recover the economy, but very much using the anger around the MPs' expenses scandals to really try and introduce far-reaching liberal reform of our political system.

44:22What is absolutely true, you're quite right, is the moment that first budget was announced in October, I think it was, 2015, the narrative became almost entirely about the economy rather than about political reform and of course I failed to change the electoral system get elections into the House of Lords and so on so forth but my point to you Alistair is I would concede to the candidly almost incessant criticisms of the left over the last 15 years much more readily if I believed that if Labour had gone into power somehow they would have been able to wave a magic wand there was no austerity It is the biggest myth in modern British politics.

44:57You cannot come into, as we did, with a collapse in the economy of 6%, a dramatic increase in public spending, which happened very, very late on in Labour, in the last 18 months or so, with a legal commitment to halve the deficit even more quickly than the coalition did, and somehow do that without eliciting howls of pain from the public sector. It is a fundamental, and I think it's one of the reasons why Rachel Reeves is going to have quite a job leading the Labour Party, who've sort of been fed on this mythology about austerity over the last 15 years. The mythology is also dangerous because, you know, I tried to say when we were interviewing Rachel Reeves on leading that Gordon Brown had very dramatically increased spending.

45:37And that was one of the reasons why they were making a lot of progress on healthcare. But that in those last 18 months, spending had gone up very, very dramatically, which left them very exposed. And she's absolutely denying - But partly because of the financial crisis. Right, absolutely. But the point was that that was a gamble to massively increase spending, assuming that there wasn't going to be a financial crisis. I mean, this is where we get into this question around fixing the roof while the sun's shining. So, Labour made a decision to radically increase spending, basically assuming that the British economy would continue to grow at the rates at which it had grown up to 2008.

46:08When it didn't, the government was spending so much that it inherited a big, big problem. Reducing that deficit became very problematic. So, So in saying, look, the Tories spent much less on health than Labour, it's true. But Labour was spending much more on health on a very optimistic assumption of future revenue. But also very late on. I mean, if you look, and look, I cannot tell you enough. I mean, obviously from the obscurity of opposition and the backbenches and so on and so forth. But I was violently opposed to George Osborne's, what was it, three botched budgets that he introduced immediately after we were evicted from Danch.

46:44The only shambles. No, the Omni-Shap was like it was 2012. But the point is, but if you just look at the five-year period for which I am rightly held responsible, amongst others, the public spending as a proportion of GDP at the end of these so-called ferocious, ideological, morally unacceptable cuts was almost exactly, in fact, it was higher than public spending under most of the years of labor in the previous... But other governments did make different choices. No, no, no. Hang on. They did. And they cut much deeper. So across your... And I think it's one of the things that... and you should get, have you had Osborne on this?

47:17Yeah, we did, yeah. Okay, I'm never sure whether this has been deliberate in Osborne or not, but actually what Osborne did, partly because he was restrained by me in government, he talked a ferocious game of public spending. It was a political strategy. But of course it was partly. By the way, in the same way that Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer are now saying, it's a disaster, it isn't, by the way, it is not nearly as much of a disaster as they're saying. Interest rates are coming down, unemployment is low. That's for part two. Oh, I was saying part two, sorry, I'm not allowed to say that. But on this point, Alistair, I think it's very important to remember that on the day that the election took place in 2010, I think two or three days before it is my memory, there was the first major international bailout of Greece.

47:58On the weekend after the 2010 election, there were riots on the streets, burning cars. You could see it on your television screens. Alistair Darling, as the sort of stand-in, if you like, Chancellor, was flying to an emergency summit. There was a real feeling that Britain was teetering on the precipice. And by the way, we were. We had the most oversized banking system, which had blown up in our face just a few months earlier. One domino was falling after the next in Europe. And to your point, other European countries cut their public services way deeper than we did, way deeper. We slowed the increase in public spending on health.

48:34We slowed the increase in public spending on schools. We didn't net cut it, cut those. We did in other areas, and I think there are absolutely legitimate debates about what happened in justice and prisons and probation and local government. Absolutely. And if I was prime minister, I would have taken different sort of departmental choices. But the fundamental macroeconomics is that actually by ironically, given all the sort of excoriation of austerity in these rather moralizing tones from the left over the last decade and a half, people forget that the rest of Europe was suffering way, way worse, even though their banking systems were smaller and less disfigured.

49:09I mean, obviously, I violently agree with you. And I also agree with you. Actually, should we stop the podcast at this stage? It doesn't mean you can't vote before. Exactly. Reduce spending. But it does say something very interesting about modern politics that you and I have completely lost the public debate on this, that the dominant assumption is that 2010 to 2015 was this incredibly damaging period of austerity that was completely unnecessary, and that there was no reason to cut at all, and that was totally different choices available, and that Britain did it much harder than anyone else. I don't say it was unnecessary.

49:40What I object to is the fact that it was a political strategy run by Cameron Osborne, because political strategy is frankly all they did. Alistair is accusing politicians of, dare I say, being politicians. Of having a strategy. How dare politicians be politicians. The genius political strategy, in a sense, is from the other side that the left has managed to characterise that five years as being completely economically irresponsible and unnecessary. I mean, obviously, we got absolutely hammered in 2015. So let's be said the better, perhaps. But to your point, Rory, whilst I think it is definitely the dominant, clearly the dominant narrative, if you read the pages of The Guardian and so on and so forth, I don't think you can claim that it was the dominant narrative in the country for the one following reason.

50:22What did the British people do in 2015 and 2000? They voted for the Tories again. So if this narrative of, oh, my gosh, you know, these vile people have inflicted such terrible self-harm, surely the British people would have booted them out the first opportunity in 2015. Instead of which, Nick, you got it. I got it. You allowed yourself to be used by them. Well, yes, of course. That's your view. But also, remember, again, memories are short. In 2015, something happened that everyone's already forgotten about. in scotland labor the lib dems and the tories were all all of them whether you were in the coalition or out reduced to one mp each there was an absolute bloodbath in scotland and the dominant motif in the final stage because i felt it oh i felt it oh my god did i feel it i can remember like it was yesterday the thing that really shifted votes away from the lib dems in the final stages of the 2015 election to such a devastating effect yes of course coalition clearly if you were if If you'd come from the left of the Labour Party, like a lot of people had because of Iraq and all the rest of it, and joined the Lib Dems and thought that the Lib Dems were a left-wing alternative to Labour, and then suddenly you had this liberal Clegg bloke who was saying...

51:32Tuition fees. Well, of course, tuition fees, tuition fees, does a lot of damage and so on. Absolutely. And I don't want to... So what were you going to say is the big one? No. The biggest thing was the Tories and the Tory press kept running this fantastically effective thing that Ed Miliband was going to win and was going to be in the pocket of Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmon. And we could see it on the doorstep. People say, oh, no, no, no, we can't take the risk of voting for the Lid Dems because that might allow this. And they had real doubts about Ed Miliband and they had particular doubts about Ed Miliband dancing to the tune of the Scottish Nationalists.

52:01That was actually the thing that was the dominant thing as campaigners that we saw on the door. I'm not in any way obscuring the fact my own responsibilities, failings, all the rest of it, tuition fees and coalition austerity played a role. I think in the retelling of it, because we keep talking about storytelling, actually it's been almost somewhat exaggerated compared to some of the other factors that were at play in 2015. Finally, before we end this first episode, how would you define your relationship then and now with Cameron and Osborne? I don't have much of a relationship with them now.

52:32So there are no friendships that emerged from that period? No. And look, clearly, again, I thought it was important. And lots of people, of course, roundly criticized me with the benefit of hindsight. I thought it was terribly important, given where the country was in 2010. In other words, we had this near-death experience in the economy. I thought it was very important. And I thought, gosh, we're creating something which I believed in, which was coalition politics based on give and take and compromise. I thought it was on your face and we're going to try and fix things. We're going to do this together.

53:07We're going to put country before party. So we did this Rose Garden press conference, which as ever, you know, pictures speak a thousand times more than words. That became the kind of, you know, people thought it was a sort of bromance. It was a bonhomie of it, sort of. It was never, it was my intention that if we were going to do something new, like a coalition government, you needed to mean it. You needed to be sort of committed to it. Perhaps with hindsight, it would be better if I'd stood there sort of grumpily, sort of, well, I'm here, but I don't really want to be here. Don't like this bloke at all.

53:37But you'd be able to advise me much better than now, Alistair. But I think it led to the belief that the sort of bonhomie or the kind of sense of relief and positivity of that press conference was therefore sort of leading to some sort of chummy arrangement. It was never like that. No, I was super, as was Cameron. I think we were civilised. We were civilised people. He's a polite person. I'm relatively polite. I try and listen to him. I don't tend to fly off the handle maybe occasionally, but I try and conduct myself and also I knew that this was a question of give and take. We both knew the maths.

54:05He couldn't get anything done in Parliament without my support. I couldn't get anything vice versa. So we had a lock on each other's sort of preferences. He was quite a supple political operator, but he was always pretty hard-headed. And Osborne? Osborne, in a sense, is more... Miriam didn't like Osborne, did she? Not hugely. Well, I think Miriam had a slightly more negative summary judgment on the whole thing. But no, Osborne was, and I think remains an intriguing character. He's oddly enough, more interested in politics than Cameron, perhaps more versatile on policy substance than Cameron, an absolute inveterate sort of knife fighter in the kind of battles in Whitehall.

54:48But what I always was impressed by Osborne, he has a, and I'm not sure if you've found this in your discussion, he has an unusual ability to understand politics from your opponent's point of view. And it's quite a rare gift in politics. Most people in politics are so puffed up with their own sense of sort of justification of their side. He has this rather interesting ability. And he was rather clever in the coalition saying, you want this and I want this. Can we do this together? In that sense, he was quite an inveterate dealmaker, which is useful in a coalition. Nick, just a final one on that.

55:20One of the things that struck me as a new MP coming in in 2010, just beginning the coalition, is I felt there were a number of occasions where I was hoping that you would be reaching out to me and other people like me who were on the left of the Conservative Party, and you never did it. You probably could have won us over on things like the alternative vote. You might even have been able to bring us over on House of Lords reform. And I was very struck by the fact that whenever I approached you or tried to talk to you, you were rather sort of stiff and standoffish. And you missed a huge opportunity there.

55:52I think there were dozens of us that were very sympathetic towards the Lib Dems, the coalition, and probably preferred your vision of things to Cameron Osborne's that would have been happy to work with you, get behind you. But I think oddly, contrary to your vision of the Rose Garden, you remained much more partisan than maybe you acknowledge. You weren't very interested in talking to young left-wing conservatives. Yeah, I think that's very fair, Rory. I'm sorry. I'm sorry if I was aloof or standoffish, and that's very rude, and forgive me. And I think you're right about the politics of it. I think it was such a struggle.

56:25I cannot exaggerate to you what a struggle it was to A, lead a party that had never been in government before, to suddenly becoming a party of sort of perennial opposition to being a party of government, and then obviously being absolutely kind of hammered. So you're kind of on life support system. And then at the same time, trying to keep my head above water, my own constituency, keep this coalition going, having a young family. I mean, I was just like, just holding on my sort of fingertips, but you're quite right with time. And I think this happened to both Cameron and me. We both became pulled towards our own parties more.

57:00You know, he became, unfortunately, in my view, it was a, I think it was a devastating sort of error on his part to become ever more obsessed about what the right wing of his party thought and what the Daily Mail thought, the Daily Telegraph thought and so on and i of course became increasingly preoccupied with just trying to keep this sort of beleaguered band of lib dems on board for this this this undertaking so i think you're quite right that was my focus and it became it yeah i've definitely i think you're right rory if i'd thought about it no doubt with a bit more sleep and a bit more strategic at nows reach it i remember once having a dinner oh there was um amber rudd nick bowls maybe yeah maybe if you and i think i'd been invited to it.

57:44And I remember, I honestly can't remember who was there, but I do remember one moment where they said, please, can you just do better because we need a higher Lib Dem vote in our constituencies so that we as conservatives could win. And I started going, I'm not sure if that's my top priority at the moment. But I think your strategic point is right, Rory. And it's probably one of the many things that I fail to do properly. Well, listen, that's all we've got time for in today's episode. We're going to be back next Monday to talk about what happened after the 2015 election. You go from DPM to ex-MP in pretty sharp order.

58:18We want to talk about Brexit and we want to talk about your new life with Facebook, aka now Meta. Episode is available right now to members of The Rest is Politics Plus. Sign up by going to therestispolitics.com. Hear it straight away. If not, we'll see you next week. Bye for now.

58:37Thank you.