161. Question Time: Rebuilding the Tory brand, Macron’s successor, and the militarisation of Mexico

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0:49Welcome to the Restus Politics Question Time with me, Alistair Campbell. And me Rory Stewart. I love this question. And I don't quite know what I'm going to say in Ancetus. I'm going to just bans it on you. Rowan Wilkinson. The role of ego in political decision -making has recently been clear to see with the rise of populism, politicians like Trump and Johnson. One, did you have any personal checks or balances you would put on yourself to make sure you were making decisions based on what was right for the great or good and not your own ego? Two, were you always able to get out of the way of yourselves or are there examples of when in retrospect you didn't?

1:27I think it's a really good question. I think it's one of the things that makes politics so dangerous that it's horrible. I mean, it's very damaging, I think, particularly modern politics that the politics of 24 hour campaigning, the permanent campaign, social media, is very damaging for your mind, your body, your soul. And it does very weird things to your ego. Because you are in a weird situation where on the one hand you are absolutely the center of attention. One of the things that surprised me, I'll be becoming a politician, is just how much time newspapers and television devoted to politics.

2:01Given that many of my voters weren't very interested in politics, I was rather surprised how much time newspapers and television did on it. And you are in this very insecure situation where you oscillate between sometimes being treated with incredible deference, put in a ministerial car, put in a sort of enormous office. My ministerial offices were about 10 times the size of anyone's else's office. And people bring in cappuccino's view and calling you minister and bringing briefing packs on airplanes, going from that to then getting on the tube and people coming up and screaming in your face and calling you every kind of word under the sun and issuing threats on Twitter.

2:38So it produces a very odd lurch between politicians sometimes feeling all powerful and a lot of the time feeling completely incapable of doing anything totally powerless. And I think you need very, very unusual people who can survive that. And my experience was I wasn't very good at getting that right. And probably 90 % of my colleagues in the House of Commons, I felt were really damaged by the profession. It's not so healthy thing to do. It's a bit like, I don't know, working cleaning up Chernobyl, it's something that may need to be done for the public good, but it's not very good for your health.

3:13Oh Lord, that's very negative. I think the key in answer to question one, did you have any personal checks or balances? I think the key to those are the people that you put around you. And I actually think we were in the Blair era pretty good at that. I think Tony Blair was very good at surrounding himself with people who were not yes people. We always challenged him. We always recognised that he was a formidable political talent, that he was the boss and all that. But there were quite a few of us who would all, he saw our job as the challenge him. And I think I did the same thing within my own team.

3:45And also I don't know, but I get the sense with you and and your wife, Shashana, I always did feel that Fiona was an incredibly, and the kids when they grew up were an incredibly important sort of leveler. You know, you just don't get above your own station and call you out. You have to have people who call you out when they think that thing is happening because the truth is you do need a big ego. You know, you have to believe that people really care what you think and what you say otherwise you're not going to go out and think and say it. Yeah. And I think the great weakness of Boris Johnson, the striking difference from Theresa made of Boris Johnson is she went from a cabinet of some pretty powerful outspoken people who challenged her strongly in the cabinet room.

4:25And Boris Johnson very much with people like Dean Doris was bringing in his own very marginal fan club, which he used to make humiliating jokes about all the time. He, you know, he make open jokes to people about that. His supporter base was a pretty peculiar group of Johnson worshipers, which I think stopped him getting a lot of these calls right. I mean, I think it's what tempted him down to develop a lot of the worst aspects of his personality. He did better, I think, as London Mayor partly because he had a guy called Simon who says chief of staff who was much better at standing up to him. And I think when politicians lose that, I mean, you can see that with Trump, that anybody who stood up to him was immediately swept aside.

5:04And with Mrs. Thatcher, I think one of the ways in which things began to get badly wrong after seven or eight years is she lost her ability to listen to challenge. People haven't listened to the John Major leading podcast. He's really interesting on the way in which she took or didn't take challenge. Now, we don't talk enough about Mexico. Santa has asked this question. What do you think of Amlou? That's President Obrador. What do you think of Amlou's increasingly close relationship with the Mexican military? Is it a rare good example of politics and the armed forces working together up to a point, Lord copper?

5:37Do you want to take that one on? Then I'll come in. I think first thing to bear in mind is Mexico, very unusual in Latin America because it's one of the very, very few countries in Latin America where the military is traditionally being quite weak and there haven't been any threats in military coup. Look at a map of Latin America. Most of the land mass was at one time or another ruled by military governments and that wasn't true in Mexico. But over the last few years, he's using them for more and more. He's using them to run airports. He's using to build train lines. They now control the whole customs of the country.

6:09He's bought the national police under the military. He started defending some pretty peculiar senior generals and defense ministers against drug smuggling scandals, corruption scandals. All of this coming from somebody who was famous, he's sort of from the political left, from the populist political left, and who started his career being very skeptical about the military. What's your sense of what's going on? Well, in 2019, Obrador actually was campaigning on a pledge to get rid of the army. And now, as you say, they're absolutely... If you fly into the main airport in Mexico, Mexico City, you will see uniformed Marines who are in charge of immigration customs, looking after the security in the terminal, and they're doing that right across the civilian airport network.

6:58They're running the ports, two new train lines, as you say, and the policing has been militarized. So the National Guard Force, which is over 100 ,000 officers, which replaced the federal police, they've now been moved under the defense ministry by presidential decree. The Supreme Court, we've heard a lot about Supreme Court recently, they decided that move was unconstitutional, but we're into this kind of, you know, back to the Trumpian theme of the age of impunity. The government has yet to act on that. And of course, what Summer worried about is that Obrador's not going to be there forever.

7:34He obviously sees political mileage in, you know, it's a bit about muscling the myth about the train running on time. Apparently security is better at the airport. There is less corruption, etc, etc, etc. But what it leads to is a strength and military, as you say, in a part of the world where once the military gets stronger and stronger, they do tend to use political power. The other fear that people have is whether this then goes into other areas of the national life. So for example, he's been there for six years, and in that time there have been 155 ,000 murders. It's unbelievable. And 43 ,000 disappearances, a lot of it related to drugs.

8:15Disappearances, I guess, will also likely many of them to be murders too. I mean, it's absolutely beyond imagining to live in a country where nearly 200 ,000 people have been murdered or disappeared during, totally, totally staggering. And it's sort of unimaginable in some way, Britain, where you're looking at numbers and the hundreds rather than the numbers and hundreds of thousands. One thing I suppose, which we often get questions on, is the general question of where you bring in the military or where you don't. So you had experience to this, I guess, during foot and mouth. What is it that tempts governments when you have a civilian emergency, like foot and mouth, and I'm to do with anybody invading it, so a bunch of livestock getting sick.

8:55What tempts people to bring in the military to fix things? Their reputation, and even though, as you say in Mexico, defense spending has been historically very, very low. And yet, when there have been civilian crises, such as natural disasters and so forward, the military have come in and done a pretty good job. So the reputation is part of it. You know, we've talked about the foot and mouth thing before. It was just the system was breaking. The system wasn't capable of addressing the scale of the crisis. And it was only when, I remember that guy Bertwurst or when he came in, that was when we started to get a grip of it.

9:26So I think it's not feeling the military. That's what the military do. But I think that's very different in a system like ours than the system like Mexico, where it does appear now to be used for pretty clear political effort. In Britain, they're very, very clear guidelines. We've of course, when I was flooding Minister, brought in the military to help with the floods, Cumbria Yorkshire 2015, 2016. And there, I think it was a reminder of the fact that the civil service normal civilian government doesn't have sort of standing people in reserve. Everybody's already working at their desks. You don't have any slack capacity.

9:59What the military provides you with is thousands of people who can be deployed to come in and sort stuff out. Well, though, as Ben Wallace said when he was announcing his plans to step down and he had a little dig at Swallow Brava, man, I think you've got to be very, very careful because his arm military gets smaller, which I'm afraid it has, then there's less slack. And I think there is a danger that governments think, oh, we've got to crisis. Let's bring in the military. Now, as you say, we did it from time to time. We did it with the fuel protests. We did it with the foot mouth. As you say, the military were very involved in security around the Olympics and all those sorts of things where you bring them in.

10:38But I think you've got to be very, very careful. And what you see in Mexico is almost like they're becoming like an enterprise. What's fascinating is that I think it is amazing what happens when they begin to take over and we've seen the historically Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, how quickly militaries can get involved in running businesses, how corruption takes over and how often actually they turn out to be quite bad at running countries. They're very good at responding to the emergency. So they think we can come and clean things out and run the country well and it turns out often that they're not all fully good at that.

11:07Right. Another question for you. Alan Salazar, can you give us an update on political conditions in France and macro in particular? And I believe judging by your relaxed look, you may be actually in France as we speak. We current poll of polls on macro 65 % disapprove, 32 % approve. Okay. So that's not good. Just to understand that I never understand these polls and net approval ratings in this set and the other. And how does one know what's good and what's bad with these things? What would it be a good figure? A good figure for a French face pretty rare for the French that they get above 40, 50%.

11:46Got you. Since Macron was realyated, he's never been above 40%. He's been closer couple of times but he's actually on the up. The lowest point was during the whole sort of pension reform thing. He was down as low as 27 % on the poll of polls. So he's now up to 32. If you look at the national party polls and these are always a bit silly because you know the question is if there was an election tomorrow, of course, there isn't. But at the moment, looking at trends, the left mellown's Sean, he's doing pretty well. They're up at 25%. Le Penz lot, the RN, they're on 24 % just below. And Macron's party is on 22.

12:25And then Leroy Poublier, the sort of Tory party that down 11, then you down to the rag bag down below. And again, that trend now suggests Macron's slightly on the up. His party is on the down. They've gone from 26 back in November down to 22. And the reason that matters is that he's not allowed to run again. Exactly. What does this mean? Elastop for the forthcoming election? And when is it? Well, you're not going to have a election for some time. But before that, you're going to have European elections which are pretty important in the French context. In fact, Macron did a big interview at the weekend.

12:58I thought it was quite interesting. He made his assessment of his opponents' views on Europe a big part of what was clearly, I think, the beginnings of the contours of that campaign. He basically was saying that you can't trust Le Pen on Europe. She used to be in favour of taking a Zaire now. She's not, you can't trust mellown's Sean on Europe because nobody really knows what he stands on it. But I think that there's something very strange going on in French politics at the moment. If you look at the facts of France, got GDP growth that's going faster than either the UK or Germany, got unemployment lower than it's been 15 years.

13:35But he is still struggling to connect. And it's this perception of arrogance has really kind of stuck through. But the problem for him politically is that in a way he's been a victim of his own success, his rise was such a sort of phenomenal thing. That he completely destroyed the old left -right party system. And the mainstream left and mainstream right parties haven't really recovered. So what he's finding himself, he's up against these extremes without any sense of where the succession plan is going to come from. And I think the Obama, for example, his legacy was tainted by the fact that Trump followed him.

14:11And I think Macron really worries that his legacy gets tainted if Le Pen follows him. Now I still think it's not probable, but it's more possible than it was last time. And the other massive problem he's got is that because he lost his party lost the majority in the assembly at last assembly elections, if you remember famously how to use this 49 .3 article of the constitution to get stuff through, which essentially is basically saying the government can pass a bill without a vote, which is not very democratic. He may have to use that again and again and again. And whether that sort of further weakens him, I think it's very, very hard to call long way to go, but I think that French politics is really going to be worth watching in the next period.

14:58So I think let's take a quick break.

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16:45Right, Roy. This is definitely one for you in McCulloch. People always say be true to brand values, but I struggle to understand the brand values of the conservatives compared to the clarity of previous years. What is today's conservative brand than what are they stand for? Well, that's a hugely important question. It's not the brand that I cared about when I was conservative. For me, being a conservative, the brand was about supposed to be people disagree, but supposed to be about fiscal prudence being careful with money. It was supposed to be about respect for tradition. It was supposed to be about a cautious incremental approach if it ain't broke.

17:21Don't fix it. For me, also respect for landscape, history, traditions, the military, the monarchy, all this sort of stuff was bound into the conservative brand. So here's one for you. If in the very unlikely event that I was actually doing this podcast with Suella Bravenman, not with you, what would her answer be to that question about what the brand is? So I think she'd say that she's on the side of small business people, low taxes, smaller state, getting on your bike, reducing the amount of immigration coming into the United Kingdom, being hard -headed and practical about money and costs on families, I guess would be her pitch.

18:01Do you think their values are just sort of political postures? No, I think they are values. I mean, I think there is a voter group. I mean, famously, a lot of the people who voted for Mrs. Thatcher voted for her because they felt that she was going to cut their taxes. It's going to be smaller government and it was going to give more opportunities for them to make money by their council houses, etc. And then I guess people who voted for Boris Johnson, Suella Bravenman in 2019, particularly Red War voters, like the idea of sovereignty, control over immigration, getting rid of red tape, challenging the elites and Westminster.

18:37So I think that there's a constituency for it. All the things that they haven't been able to do. Did you see the footage of the first arrivals onto the barge at Portland? No, tell us about this. I mean, I thought it was pretty horrible. And I'd love to know what she actually would think as she watched it, whether she'd actually think this is a moment of triumph because there we are live across all the channels, these bedrackled people walking up the steps onto this floating barge and there to be incarcerated God knows when, you know, when actually surely what they need to be doing is investing in sorting out the backlogs and actually getting a system that works.

19:14So I just think there's a kind of performative cruelty to her that I don't really like and I certainly don't understand it. Here's what a few Colin Jeffree. Do we need a Citizens Assembly for renewables? Listening to the discussions surrounding a need for electric grid infrastructure to support the transfer to and connection of renewable power sources, the issue of nimbias and quickly resets head. Is this not sort of a issue where the use for Citizens Assembly would be very useful to inform policy? Why do governments not rely on this option more to depoliticize issues and find consensus across parties and communities?

19:43So I'm a huge huge supporter of the Citizens Assembly. It's just quickly to remind people this is where you get a randomly selected group of people meant to represent different demographic groups across the country like a jury like, you know, 12 randomly select people on a jury in this case might be 300 people sit them down for two, three days with an expert and the experts brief them and they get into the details when I see them they make a recommendation and it worked very very well in Ireland as a way of resolving abortion issues. I think it could have been very powerful in finding a middle way towards a soft Brexit if we'd been brave enough to do it in Britain and I think it's a very good thing to do on renewables because as people who listen to yesterday's podcast will have picked up we're in a world in which you have these two strange views.

20:27One of them is that it's easy to get to net zero and we don't need to worry too much about the politics. I agree there are very few people who think that but there are people who seem to suggest that and then there are people who suggest that the end of the world is going to come and of course what the Citizens Assembly I hope would reach is a compromised position which says yeah it's tough but it's eminently doable. It's not as expensive as people think and these are the steps we need to take. So any views from you on Citizens Assembly? Well the other one that's happening I think still going on here in France is the Citizens Assembly on Assistant Suicide and interestingly I mentioned the interview that Macron did with Figaro.

21:02He announced what he called he loves these big things. He announced a grand scale political initiative and I wonder whether this is going to be more Citizens Assembly because he said he wanted to work more closely with those who wanted to move forward in issues like climate change, public services, security progress and immigration. There might be that he's just trying to sort of you know reach out to different parts of the parliamentary system but I wonder whether on some of these issues where he's going to have real difficulty for example he is bringing forward an immigration bill and the right are already up in arms about it because he wants to give an automatic leave to stay to illegal immigrants who are working in sectors that are hit by labor shortages which of course the right don't like.

21:40So whether actually he's going to try and you know bring the public into that I think it would be a good idea and I wish that we use them more. Now Michael Freeman what do Rory and Alice think about Canada's new bill C18 due to take effect 180 days after June the 22nd and how it could affect tech news and politics worldwide. But you across this one they're telling us that Canada has got this bill called C18 and it became law in June and essentially it is saying that tech companies have got to compensate those media organizations whose product whose content they use and this is aimed directly at Google and Meta and Google and Meta is very interesting if you Google the issue Rory which you're probably doing right now.

22:22Don't be put off by the fact that the first sort of 20 things you'll see will be Google's own reaction to it and why Google hate this. This is an argument that's been going back for years about how Google and Meta they just use all this stuff that local papers, regional papers, local television, you and I they just will take stuff and put it onto their platforms and this bill this law now is going to make it impossible for them to do that without paying something to the people whose content they're using and as a reaction Google say they're just not going to be putting Canadian stuff on there.

22:56Huge issues isn't it because these companies are making tens of billions, literally tens of billions of dollars profits every year and many people would suggest they're doing it basically by stealing our stuff, they're stealing our data or they're stealing our news or they're stealing content produced by other people and then making enormous amounts of money repackaging without paying the content producers but obviously that's their entire business model so if we were to get rid of that in the way that C18 is trying to do it is an existential threat to the profitability of Google and Meta and to the whole way in which the internet basically works which is generally open source and in fact the entire way that chat GBT and AI systems work which is them being able to access this stuff for free.