122. Question Time: Leaking Liz Truss, the funniest person in politics, and ‘Killing Thatcher’

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0:50So, welcome to another episode of the RESTISPOLITIES question time with me, asked Campbell and with me Rory Stewart and we're here in Belfast but I wanted to start with one question so what do you make of the current crisis before the CBI? What does it say about corporate Britain? Is there a better way for the business community to be represented and have their voices heard and Westminster and Whitehall? Is that a question about Tony Danker's support of Labour or has he done something else? Oh, this is just the classic Tory party, negative campaign, sort of sinister smeary that you build. No, I think I'm sure this is about the allegations against Tony Jankin head of the CBI that are let him departing his post.

1:33So I'm guessing that's quite serious. And then whether there is something deeper about the culture there or not, I don't know. I'm a very, very close friend of his predecessor, Carolyn Fairburn. Oh, I think she's great. And she was one of the few people who was prepared to make really constructive detailed proposals on a soft Brexit, which I thought was absolutely vital. And businesses failure to do that, and I really think business did fail to do that. I kept saying you guys have got so much riding on Brexit. You've got untold resources. You could be spending millions, funding think tanks and campaigns to come up with a really constructive proposal on a good compromise customs union Brexit and none of them did it.

2:17They either privately backed second referendum remain or they just kept quiet and that was terrible I felt for someone like me trying to campaign for something more like a customs union Brexit that there were no voices out there really producing the papers by the ERG had them. They had Brady arrangements and multi house compromises and sangera agreements and all these weird things that we've now unfortunately forgotten being produced a lot of them by Tuft and Street think tanks. But Karen and Fairbone was one of the few people prepared to engage in trying to produce concrete details on what a better Brexit deal would look like.

2:56But even she didn't actually produce what we wanted, which was the 500 page chapter in verse campaign, which would allow us to go to the Guardian and the Times and others saying, this is what it looks like. You can get the end piece behind it. I'm very pleased that you fell into my little jab there of turning a question that you were pushing to me, trying to suggest that anybody who supported the Labour Party was involved in some sort of terrible sex scandal into a discussion of how grubbillion by very good friend Carolyn, Carolyn Fairbettis. Thank you very much for that, Rory. Now, moving on, Alison Golding is Rishi Sunak really any better than Trustle or Johnson?

3:31The scale of government financial losses during his watch as Chancellor and PM has faded to stop utility profits going abroad rather than to the UK infrastructure and he's deliberately leaving the NHS to rot all say not to me. Tellynaur could Rory explain why he is a fan of Rishi Sunak. I applaud his efforts on Northern Ireland and the U -relations but can never be a fan of anyone who enables and reinforces the braverman on asylum seekers, brackets, Rory is correct all Labour's attack ads. So we can park that. We've talked a lot about that last week. But fair question, isn't it? I mean, he's not.

4:03He's not just a Labour. I think the first question is a good question. And obviously, people who are strongly Labour are going to be against Rishi's Unack. And absolutely, I do agree that I find Swelab Ruffman's stuff around boats and asylum and Rwanda deeply, deeply uncomfortable. And one of the things that has made me uncomfortable with Rishi's Unack is the fact that Swelab Ruffman in his home secretary, I hope he's now going to move to get rid of her as he becomes more confident in his position. And I think that's something that people should judge him on. And then that, hold on. So you said on the main podcast that you, you think that might happen?

4:36Is that, is that wishful thinking? Well, it's to do with, and this is this is something we've talked about a lot. And we talk particularly about here in Northern Ireland, which is how much you can say no to your party and confront your party. And that's the genius of politics, isn't it? Because you You can be like Boris Johnson just feeding the very worst instincts of your party all the time, or you can be, I'm afraid to be honest, Syed Theresa May, ending up very isolated from your party, not really bringing them with you. And it's very difficult to judge from the outside how tough you could be, but I think and this is something I can give you credit for.

5:12You've been pushing Rishi Sienaac on being tough for a more confrontational towards Boris Johnson on this track, and I think we'd like to see it with Swara Bravan. On the plus side very quickly, I'm very struck by the fact that ministers, I admire and cabinet ministers too Just say to me consistently he is the first grown -up prime minister They've seen in a long time and what they're talking about there is number 10 is run much much more professionally and sortfully He really masters his briefs But he's not strangely like Gordon Brown and some people would have accused Theresa May of this somebody who musts his briefs but doesn't delegate.

5:48He's somebody who musts his briefs and seems to be able to allow people to get on with their job. First time we've had a prime minister I think that I've felt for a long time where the people who work with him closely really admire him. But he is, I guess in the end, still quite private, quite introverted. And he's still very much a conservative, you know, more on the right conservative party than I was. A brexeter, more comfortable leaning in on the immigration boats thing that I would have been doing, but I think a huge improvement on those trusts and boroughs shots. Now we've got a very good question here which I think could be an absolutely brilliant idea from somebody with a brilliant name as well.

6:24Laurie the anti -growth collater. I think this is a point about list trusts. Could we get a one -off special podcast where Shoshana and Fiona discuss the Rory and Anastah? But I mean do you think they want to do that? I think Fiona would love it. Really? And do you think anyone wants to listen to that? I think they might. If you guys have quite a few officers to write books about the hell of living with me. Okay, well we could pick the app. I mean, they're best definitely more interesting than us. I think we have to accept that probably the podcast and the future would be done by them as soon as people hear them.

6:55There's a bad idea because it would put us out of a job. I think so. Okay, so Laurie is an awful thing. Go back to your little fantasies about LISTRUS and the ad -t -gro. I think it's quite threatening. I think they're both considerably more appealing personalities than we are, but we could try it. Paddy, who would be the presumptive Democrat nominee if not Biden, Coma, Alistair? I just don't know. I mean, people talk about Gavin Houston, but I just don't know. I think that I think that I think people got it used to it, Biden's going to go, Biden's going to run for it. And I can see people, Rory is shaking his head and looking rather along.

7:31I think he's going to go for it. And I don't think it's, as you said before, there are people in the Democrats who'd think, oh God, no, please, no, it's too old. But at the same time, I think if Trump does get an nomination, I think Biden might be the guy to beat him. It's a big decision. It's a huge decision. I can imagine how stupid we'd feel if Trump defeated Biden and how we'd all be beating ourselves up. That's true. Let's ask you, ask yourself this, when he was in Ireland, did he look like a guy who was on a victory lap of departure? He didn't to me. It looked like a guy who was starting out and you can't bat.

8:05So I think I think it's gonna be Joe and I hope to God he wins. Now Rory I'm going to ask you this one. Yeah James Thomas Rory knowing what you know now if you had your time again would you vote for the chaos of Ed Miliband in 2015? Ed Miliband no, I would vote for David Miliband possibly I would not vote for Ed Miliband Marty, who was the funniest person you met in politics? I'll tell you what popped into my head straight away with that question was Tony Banks. Do you remember Tony Banks? Yeah, two of them who's on Love Tony Banks. He was a massive, massive Chelsea fan. That's not something I loved about him, but he was the MP for West Ham.

8:43And he never pretended to be Eddie. He used to walk around his West Ham constituency with a Chelsea scarf. Some people get on their heads, Kate, and what are my favourite memories of Tony? And here's a shout out for a Tory by the way. At Tony Banks, his funeral, David Meller made one of the best funeral relations I've ever heard. A man for Chelsea's sport, but you're telling me did not wear a Chelsea strip in bed. I don't want to talk about conservative MPs in bed, but I think it's well recognized that that story about David Mellor wearing a Chelsea shirt in bed while having sex with somebody called Antonia Dessantia.

9:21I think her name was. Who was the girlfriend of the Englishmanager? No? We talking about. Is that not? It wasn't Sven's girlfriend, no. No, you're talking about. You took about Nancy the Lollio. They listened to me on the same note. I mean, this is staying in. This is staying in.

9:42So I have a vague memory of scandals about Sven and Ben. I'm sure about Daniel and Ben. But they weren't the same scandal. I would talk about scandals involving Sven. If I hear a little confession for you, Roy, his most famous scandal was an affair with Ulrika Johnson, and Sweden, spends a suite, and I introduce them. Oh my goodness. At, it gets worse. At a party for Richard Desmond's birthday. This is the sort of thing I had to go to in the olden days. And Fiona was giving me a very, very big audience. Can we just remind listeners, Richard Desmond a made his name as a publisher of porn, right?

10:17He actually owns a copyright, it's on my work. That's right. And then went on, now owns the date expression. I sold them now, I think. but he's basically a media guy and he had this birthday party and I was talking to Ulrika and Fiona was giving me a bit of BDI. And also he brought down Robert Generick, didn't he? He was the guy who sat next to Robert Generick to get a planning commission for a building. I mean, did he? Generick, I think, in the end resigned because of his heat. Yeah, Desmond had paid money sat next to him at a venue. This is going so far from Tony Bones. Tony, RIP, we're going to come back to you eventually.

10:49Of course it was. It was a joke. If you got a joke from teni bags. Wait a minute. So I said to Alrica, I saw Sven arrive and I said, have you met the other famous sweet and London? And I introduced them and a few years later it was full of the front pages of under bloody affair. Was that that was the sun again? Think it might be in the mirror back home. And phone tapping? No. Well around that period, very good point, very, very, very good point, very good point. Anyway, so David Mellermay this fantastic speech about Tony Banks, which is interesting if you think about it. David Meadow was a Tory MP and he was invited to do one of the main speeches.

11:26I think Margaret Beckett spoke and possibly said he can't. I can't remember, but anyway, but David Meadow made an absolutely brilliant speech. But my favourite memory of Tony Banks was at a Labour Party conference where we were working on Tony Blair's speech for the conference and I got a message on this and back in the days of pages and I got a message saying that Tony Banks had caused this terrible stir because Tony Banks had done this speech where he said Labour would definitely go to the election because William Hague was the Tory leader at the time. He said nobody's ever going to elect a fetus as Prime Minister when he was truly horrible on one level.

12:05But when we sort of, Tony said Tony, what the hell is this? And he's, oh, Guy, you know, I just got a bit carried away. What are we going to get bonnet? So I'm going to get followed. So the thing is he was, he just one of those guys, you couldn't block him because he was so funny. So that's my, who's your funniest MP? Actually, I thought Labour MPs were generally funny. Well, they're generally better people. Well, funny, I have a son. What do you make a leak politics, Alexander K? This week again has been all about a new wave of leaks. What do you make of leak politics and how the unintentional or apparently unintentional leaks impact modern politics?

12:41Well, this of course relates to this American stuff, which does seem amazing. I think we're on Discord, aren't we? You can get on to Discord to talk about the rest of this politics. So this guy has got access to stuff relating to some pretty sensitive material. And he's discussing with his mates on Discord and he's now being detained. And so whether it's part of some sophisticated intelligence operation against Americans, It's not, I don't know. So it's being described as a leak, but I think when people think of what we mean by leaks, I think the word gets used way too much. A leak to me is when you're in possession of usually a paper or a piece of information which you should not necessarily be going into the public domain, you put it into the public domain, fear -owned political purposes.

13:30Yeah, and often, I mean, that was something that comes across in your diary, it's just that suspicions that Damien McBride and Gordon Brown were leaking things to the press to try to bolster Gordon Brown's position against Tony Blair. Yeah, but that, but sometimes what the press would sometimes do is have a conversation with a guy at a pub who sort of shrugs a shoulder or raises an eyebrow in a different sort of way or says a few sort of choice words and that becomes viewed as, you know, leaking, breaching against when sometimes it's just journey's kind of hoovering up information. I think when...

14:01So you also see, I mean, also I felt this for my colleagues that it's clearly a basic bit of self -promotion. One of the reasons that Liz Truss made it to be very briefly primedster is she was very well known along with Gavin Williamson and others for being one of the first to come out of Cabinet, which is meant to be confidential internal conversations. I'm talking to the media. I am from journalists who they used to get messages during the Cabinet who were saying what. And it was a very odd practice because it was something that somebody like me or David gawk who were more boring cabinet ministers didn't do.

14:31But it was clearly an absolute necessity for the political career, certain kinds of people. I remember when journalists used to take me out as a young politician, how disappointed they'd get if I didn't say anything interesting. And how those people who did say interesting things pretty pittell, let's trust, found their careers, rocketing up because the media developed them and convinced the Prime Minister's the day that these were the great media stars. So there's this sort of slightly strange relationship to it. I would say that one of the reasons that Michael Gova's been such a survivor within Conservative party politics is he's very good at making sure the press reflects him in a reasonable light.

15:10I mean Fiona, my Fiona has a sort of running joke about, you know, whenever she's a story about Michael Gova and the Times or the Sunday Times, basically there's one of them just put his byline on it, you know, the Prime Minister's thinking of to ask you, Michael, go to take over X problem, Y problem, some amazing observation, Michael, make it happen. Did you have ministers who try to do that to turn you there and go and run? So yeah, oh yeah, I don't think, I think by and large, we run a pretty tight ship. But if you read an article saying Prime Minister of thinking of appointing X or Y to run this, your suspicion would have been that that minister was briefing out and trying to get their name in the press.

15:44Or somebody else is doing it so that they'd hope that you'd think that. So in the end, there's best to just ignore it. Unless it becomes a problem. Does it, I mean, how does it work? Can it sometimes help an MP to get stories out? That sort of, does it backfire and just make everyone a number 10 think you're a dick? I think if somebody overdose it, one of Tony's strengths, I think, is a leader. He wanted other big figures around. He wanted people to kind of have a profile and get noticed for the right reasons. But I think if people start to do what I kind of, the puff -piece stuff, I think we find that pretty tiresome.

16:18Look, there's no doubt particularly in the modern age, getting noticed, having a profile. So you said recently, for example, we were asked to show, you know, who do you think on the labour side should be, if not Keir Starmer would be leader and you said Peter Kyle, who's here at the moment because he's the shadow of the secretary of state, no none. Now I think Peter's terrific, but Peter doesn't have a big profile. You need a big profile to be viewed as and therefore to be one of the big beasts. And so interestingly, people like Jess Phillips or Stella Kreese who've had more social media exposure can end up in a stronger position than Peter Carr.

16:55Although Peter is in the shadow cabinet. So that says to me that, you know, so sometimes it can go, it can go either way. And ultimately these are, we still operate in the system. There's a second version of the Green Dust. I remember this, they were David Gork. Because I thought he would have made a brilliant, brilliant Prime Minister. And yet the only response I got out of colleagues when I was trying to canvas for him, when Theresa May was stepping down, was he just doesn't have enough for public profile. You know, nobody's heard of him. But it goes about, this goes about to our argument about the ads is that in our media world, I'm afraid.

17:27You either get noticed because you are, people recognize a sort of supreme talent. I would put Tony and Gordon in that category. Johnson got noticed because he built very carefully built his own profile up. He did it under the age of 11. He was a celebrity politician. And then obviously soon now, he's incredibly high profile because he's become the prime minister. So I would argue that it's possible to make the case that Rishi Sunak's elevation to become prime minister actually goes against some of that stuff and I think that's a good thing. But I think I can see why something like David Gork because he didn't call scandals, he didn't say stupid things, they had people talking about him on the phones, he didn't polarise, he didn't go out there and try to kind of, you know, say, look at me, he tried to be a serious bloke doing a serious job and I think that there is a part of our politics that doesn't take those people seriously enough.

18:14All right, loads more questions to come. Take a quick break.

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20:02Australian Referendum. Here in Australia are Labour primates and planning to hold a referendum to change the constitution and in it acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Conservative Party back the NOVO and as such I can't see it getting up as a double majority is required. What will be the damage to our reputation if the NO gets up? So I think Frank is more on the lab side on this and then Helen will be interested to hear you'll view on the upcoming referendum in Australia to amend our constitution to give First Nations people and Torres Strait Islanders a formal voice department.

20:33There's a vigorous debate in Australia about this proposed change to our constitution, among both Indigenous and non -Indigenous Australians. Any thoughts? Well, as you know, I'm a regular subscriber to the conversation, and because of that, I've always been sent, even though I've never asked for it, but I really enjoy it, I get sent the conversation Australian version, and this week, I didn't know this was going So we are. This week I listened as I was walking here yesterday to a podcast on the conversation with somebody called Michel Grattan, GRA double TAN, who was interviewing a well -known indigenous campaigner and writer about this issue.

21:15And I found it, I think I sent you a message saying that if this might be interesting one for discussion, but it's a very difficult debate to get your head around, because it Strikes me, all that it seems to be is that Albanese is trying to say we need to put into our Constitution something that gives proper recognition to the voice of the indigenous population, which seems so blinding in the obvious what's wrong with that. But as often happens in referendums people are sort of taking it to other places and developing arguments that look kind of slightly Off to one side on the question about what damage it does.

21:48I think it would be quite damaged into their reputation But presumably constitutionally or I suppose philosophically, the challenge is that generally liberal democracies are very, very blind. Their fundamental theory is total equality, one person, one vote, no special treatment. And so we're always dealing with this tension between majority representation and protection of minority rights and the question of how much you can lean into minority rights. in this case on the basis of ethnicity and history. And to what extent special treatment is the correct way to think about discrimination and injustice or not?

22:25Well, I think something we should dig into and come back to because I was fascinated, listening to the conversation, but at the end of it, I was slightly left thinking, I can't understand why this is proving to be such a contentious issue. So it's one that maybe we should come back to a bit more research. What small wins have you had recently? This is from Dom Fertado. Life these days says Dom is made up of small wins. For me, a small win is covering the daily hate mail in the news agents with other newspapers to inconvenience the little Englanders desperate for their daily head of small boatry.